Greetings, Space Travelers!
We are excited to announce the release of the Ship Combat major update! Let's take a look at the noteworthy changes it brings.
A day in the life
At last, the Stardeus Universe won't feel as lonely anymore. You will encounter NPC spaceships that are busy going about their own adventure. You will be able to interact the same way they interact with each other. As a player, you won't get any special treatment. While there will be some scripted story events involving NPC ships, most interactions will happen organically.
Live and Let die
Ship to ship combat was the most requested feature of all time, and it's finally here! All ships (including space stations) can be attacked. Ships will also be able to attack each other and YOU! It's even possible to fight more than one opponent at once!
Ship combat is inspired by two legendary games - Starsector and FTL. If you've played those, the combat will feel familiar.
Several new ship devices were added to make combat possible:
- 5 types of weapons (Ballistic, Laser, Missile, Plasma, and Point Defense)
- Shield Emitters replace Quantum Barriers and protect the entire ship regardless of placement
- Flux Capacitors will
charge your DeLoreanincrease the amount of damage your shields can absorb before overloading
Please, take the Ship Combat tutorial to learn all the new mechanics and complete the new "Make Ship Combat Ready" quest to arm yourself acordingly.
Defeating a ship turns it into a Derelict that you can approach and salvage. The destroyed ship’s surviving loadout may appear as loot.
Ship Interactions
Several types of interactions can happen between ships - either between you and NPCs, or between NPCs themselves:
- Hail: Any ship can hail another to initiate a chat and trigger interactions
- Attack: A ship can attack another or join an ongoing battle
- Give Gift: A ship may offer gifts to improve faction relations
- Ask Fuel: A low-fuel ship can request fuel, affecting relationships
- Trade: Some ships are open to exchanging goods
- Extortion: Pirates may demand ransom under threat of combat
- Follow: A ship may tail another out of curiosity or with later intent
- Avoid: Threatened ships try to escape and hyperjump away
- Ignore: Ships may ignore you, which can be a relief when it’s pirates
- Surrender: Only in combat, and not guaranteed to work
- Insult: Throw insults and see what happens
Return Beacons
Found a resource rich sector you'd love to revisit? Drop a Return Beacon and make it one hyperjump away! This fast travel system is so good it should probably be illegal.
Warp Drives
Two new engine types make exploration easier. The Warp Drive lets you jump anywhere in your current region. The late-game Alien Warp Drive lets you warp to any region, regardless of distance. Forget hyperlane restrictions.
UI Enhancements
The UI continues to improve. v0.13 introduces locking tooltips and clickable text links to codex entries or object locations. If it's underlined, you can click it.
As always, there's soo much more.
You can read the full changelog below.
And, until next time; be safe out there, space cowboy.
The Changelog
v0.13.0 (2025.05.07)
- Populate the universe with NPC ships of other factions
- Add Ship to Ship Combat
- Add various interactions between ships (NPC <-> Player and NPC <-> NPC)
- Add tutorial: Ship Combat
- Add Quest: Make Ship Combat Ready
- Add Ship Weapon: Shredder Cannon (Ballistic type)
- Add Ship Weapon: Heavy Laser (Laser type)
- Add Ship Weapon: Rocket Pod (Missile type)
- Add Ship Weapon: Gauss Striker (Plasma type)
- Add Ship Weapon: Interceptor Turret (Point Defense type)
- Add Shield Emitter device for ship shields
- Add Flux Capacitor device that increases ship flux capacity
- Make ship weapons attack meteoroids, asteroids and breach capsule
- Make ship shields defend from micro meteoroids
- Turn Space Stations into Ship type for them to have ship to ship interactions
- Add Space Story Event: Pirate Ship Attack
- Add space story event: Pirate Ship Extortion
- Add Space Story Event: Law Enforcement Raid
- Add Space Story Event: Ship Duel
- Add Space Story Event: Ship asking for fuel
- Deep Scan will run passively and automatically all the time when available
- Communicator will require an operator for communicating with other ships
- Add Winch Range Upgrade that allows reeling in derelicts from any distance
- Add "Find Resource" suggestion that point out scanning research and functionality
- Add Return Beacon device, research and Starmap UI for fast-travel to visited locations
- Destroying a Void Ripper will warp the ship to a random location in the universe
- Destroying a Void Ripper will spawn 3 Dark Matter
- Change faction attitude for the victim against the attacker after victim is defeated
- Change faction attitude for observer NPC ships when a ship is defeated
- Add Warp Drive research (Tier 4)
- Add Local Warp Drive that can jump to any sector within the region
- Add Alien Warp Drive research (Tier 6)
- Add Horizon Warp Drive that can jump to any distant region
- Add Notes overlay with a scratchpad for taking in-game notes
- Add two types of wooden floor tiles
- Mining an owned resource deposit will make owner's ships in the sector attack the player
- Space Port will spawn ships to attack the player if there is a need and no ships are around
- Add Storage Capsule loot types: Mini Core, Obey Chip
- Allow toggling Nanobots compatible job types in Job Matrix UI
- Add Firewall Chip implant that prevents Hacking and adds Energy Resistance
- Make Crawler Goo craftable
- Trap Floors will automatically destroy Eggs when they are placed above them
- Add "Crawler Combat Alert" toggle in Current Game Settings to ignore crawler combat when farming them
- Going through a Black Hole will discharge only one Void Ripper
- Going through a Black Hole will deal some structural damage to the Void Ripper
- Limit max deep scans per location to 3
- Move Extended Scanning to Tier 4 before Telescope
- Make scanning strength increase linearly (used to be square root)
- Limit maximum scanning strength to 10
- Hyperjump drives will have to charge up before use when in ship to ship combat
- Radar will not be required to reveal resource deposits when entering a sector
- Gold and Platinum will be easier to find
- Deep Scan will allow finding more rare materials in easier difficulty sectors
- Deep Scan speed will depend on sector difficulty
- Deep Scan will run much faster for subsequent scans (still limited to max 3)
- Magnetic storm will increase dust accumulation and particle collector output by 2x
- Connector Malfunction story event will only happen on Impossible difficulty
- Increase electric devices per 1Thz CPU from 20 to 25 and make the value tunable
- Most electronic components will be destroyed if a device containing them gets destroyed
- Part Storage will be unlocked with Assembly Hub, not Disassembler
- Reduce frequency of Cooking Incident and Cleaning Incident story events
- Repairing a damaged device will never take less than 15 minutes of game time
- Slow down meteoroids by 25-50% when they are part of a larger shower
- Make meteoroids move 5x faster
- Reduce Coffee Tree water consumption by 2x
- Unlock Radar as part of basic tech
- Refinery, Fabricator, Grinder, Flux Capacitor and Warp Drives will generate heat while operating
- Destroying a Breach Capsule with ship weapons will spawn the wounded raiders
- Allow deploying AutoDrill Rigs to deposits without depth
- Reduce amount of Glass provided at the beginning of Wrecked and Leaving Earth scenarios
- Resources found via Deep Scan in an owned sector will have 50% chance of being owned
- Mining a deposit belonging to another faction will have more diverse consequences (breach capsules + ship attacks)
- Adjust incoming breach capsule speeds
- Reorganize Space Travel research tree
- Selling ship sections will be more profitable
- Biological beings with Obey Chip will be prone to Hacking
- Don't spawn living grounded raiders when breach capsule is destroyed in space
- Adjust outcomes of Hacked event
- Battery Overload event won't happen for bots that are docked, charging or undergoing repairs
- Suggest disabling crawler combat alerts when choosing to clone crawler or egg once per session
- Add "Load Game" menu item to Pause Panel
- Display a warning if no worker is capable of certain task type
- Make research tree paths clickable in tooltips and UI
- Warn if Trade Portal is not available when trying to trade with a hailed ship
- Add link to Trade Portal codex entry in "Trade portal not available" messages
- Add clickable links to space objects when tooltips or popup mention them
- Display class points cost in codex entries of all ship devices
- Shift-clicking devices while a connector is selected will ignore click-drags
- Improve crafting device context menu popup behavior
- Warn about building too many scanners
- Show Scan Strength in Radar / System Scanner codex entries
- Change order of scenario configuration screens to allow modifiers to get configured before space map
- Show Black Hole information when hovering Regions and Sectors in the Starmap
- Make some space object names in tooltips clickable (will focus on the object in the starmap)
- Improve UI panel focus on click behavior
- List incompatible Brains / Cores in Replicator / ML Booth
- Show warning tooltip when trying to load incompatible item into Replicator / ML Booth
- Add more details to Needs stat tooltips
- Add links to entities in entity / being task tooltips
- Mental health effects will track the location of the event
- Show hand cursor when hovering clickable items
- Remove text highlights when hovering clickable text links in favor of hand cursor
- Improve storable being component UI
- Improve disposable component UI
- List sections that will be abandoned when doing a hyperjump
- Display links to objects when hovering clickable texts anywhere in the UI
- Improve camera auto move speed / smoothness when focusing on distant objects
- Enhance Available Tasks UI with better tooltips
- Split Structure category into Floors, Walls and Doors in Build Menu
- Don't show more than 3 tasks in the tooltip when hovering a location with multiple tasks
- Don't show more than 10 items in the tooltip when hovering a location with multiple objects
- Improve Codex > Factions UI to show relationships between NPC factions
- Add "Eject All" button to all storages
- Upgrade Unity to 6000.0.48f1
- Loud sounds (explosions, ship weapons) will affect music volume
- Add more checks and diagnostics for validating mod upload issues
- Add mod_debug prepare <modId> and mod_debug upload_prepared <modId> console commands
- Fix race condition that would prevent mods from uploading on lower latency network connections
- Remove Quantum Barrier device and related research
- Remove Directional Turret device and related research
- Remove Security Controls device and related research
- Remove Security overlay
- Fix workers would try hauling objects to storage when storage was full
- Fix workers would try hauling dead bodies to surgery / assembly hub while hub was occupied
- Fix beings would take deadly unsafe paths if the destination was safer (usually warmer) than the start
- Fix unlocking last research item would not hide the "Research available" notification
- Fix unloading research would visually corrupt the unloaded research UI element
- Fix Mining Orders popup could change the orders of the wrong expedition when multiple expeditions were configured
- Fix space effects would not reset state between different game sessions, causing bugs on save / load
- Fix changing equipment would not immediately update DPS values in Combat Controls UI
- Fix enemy combat units could get stuck in outer areas without entrance to the rest of the ship
- Fix enemies would try to break in through doors that lead to nowhere interesting
- Fix workers could get stuck for 2 in-game hours waiting for path evaluation when there was no path
- Fix pressing R would not rotate a tile blueprint if the mouse was moving
- Fix mass-ordering installing upgrades would not create an upgrade task for devices that had another task pending (e.g. reactor refill)
- Fix Xenodetectors would be scanning even when switched off
- Fix grounded beings with "Fight" combat reaction would keep dropping their work if there were unreachable enemy units
Follow the Development
- Official Website: https://stardeusgame.com
- Join Stardeus Discord
- /r/stardeus on Reddit
- @StardeusGame on Twitter
- @dev_spajus on Twitter
- @KodoLinija on YouTube (devlogs)
- dev_spajus on Twitch (live development streams)
Get Stardeus
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1380910/Stardeus/