The Storm Update: Solar Storm & New Suit

Storm System Changes

For a few years storms have been an important part of Stationeers, creating challenges for players to plan and build around. In this update we’ve overhauled their visuals and resolved a number of long-standing issues. A lot of the aspects of Stationeer's storms were hardcoded to be a certain way, and we needed to do some refactoring work to increase their performance, and create a system we could start using for multiple storms. This is only the start of storm related content we can now do, so in the future expect to see more storms roll in.

New Storm Visualizations

The old storm effects relied on thousands of particles, which was expensive, visually inconsistent, and often leaked through walls. We’ve replaced this with a new volumetric system that’s cheaper to render and produces a better result. Storms now integrate more naturally with the terrain, and we’ve fixed problems where storm effects would incorrectly appear in areas like the interior of your base. Overall, storms are now more consistent, better looking, and less costly to simulate.

Solar Storm

We’ve added a new type of weather event to the Moon: the Solar Storm. During a solar storm, the sun becomes significantly brighter and the world heats up rapidly. Solar heating inside bases and EVA suits increases substantially, and Stationeers outside will burn through oxygen faster as their suit’s emergency cooling system works overtime.

Hiding in shadow or wearing the new HARM suit are your best options if you need to leave the base during a solar storm. Plants and solar panels benefit from the increased solar output, but keep an eye out for blown cables.

HARM Suit

The HARM suit is a heavy, water-cooled protective suit designed for harsh environments. Normal movement speed is reduced to 60%, but while wearing it you’ll experience no movement penalties during storms. It’s also tougher than other suits, taking less damage from impacts and significantly less damage from lava.

The HARM suit introduces new suit mechanics: it uses water cooling for superior thermal performance and provides strong protection during both storms and solar storms. However, it comes with trade-offs. You can’t wear a jetpack, and the reduced movement speed makes it restrictive. Even so, the protection it provides makes it a valuable option in challenging conditions.

Solar Panel Re-balance

Solar panel outputs are now uncapped. Panels will over-produce on worlds with higher solar irradiance. This provides a small power increase on the Moon and a much larger one on Venus. Vulcan’s highly elliptical orbit means solar panels will now generate significantly more power as the planet approaches its orbital perigee.

Suit Storage

We’ve added two new suit storage options. They’re functionally identical to the existing storage but provide more visual variety for your bases and airlocks. A great way to store and organize your new HARM suit.

Portuguese Localization

A massive thanks to Marcelo for submitting updated Brazilian Portuguese localization files!

Recent Community Standouts

We wanted to highlight some of the excellent videos being created for Stationeers. Internally we’ve been enjoying a lot of it, and here are a couple of creators we regularly follow:

God, creator of the universe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa8mdiuOsqg

Cows are evil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvS-QGaFd0Q

Go check them out and support your favourite Stationeers content creators. Thanks to everyone who streams and makes videos about the game.

Update Wallpaper

Your support makes these updates possible

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/2624/Stationeers_Complete_the_Set/

Change Log 0.2.5954.26176

• Fixed Error spam from Solar Storm due to weather fade in effect not accounting for solar storm data.
• Fixed Solar Storm visual effect not always being applied correctly.
• Updated Portuguese Brazilian localization (Thank you Marcelo!)
• Added Localised Font components to DeepMiner and GPS Cartridge text fields.
• Fixed Storm effect fadeIn/fadeout throws errors on Clients
• Fixed Interior storm sound not playing.
• Fixed Solar Storm light was being applied twice.
• Fixed Storm sounds were playing during Solar Storm.
• Fixed compile error from reference to removed weather settings method.
• Updated HARM suit interior mesh and prefab for new visor opening animation.
• Added two new Suit Storage variants: Suit Storage Frame and Suit Storage Locker
• Missing meta file change for storm audio.
• Tweaked mars dust storm colors to be a little lighter.
• Removed some duplicated lighting code for the storm effect.
• Made storm effect fade in and out rather than suddenly appearing.
• Updated Storm sheltered audio clip.
• Moved shared storm effect material setting code into helper class.
• Updated Stationpedia page for HarmSuit.
• Added a number of un-localized GameStrings to english.xml
• Fixed HARMSuit had worse thermal Radiation performance than HardSuit.
• Reverted the changes to tooltip opacity as they were causing issues with empty tooltips
• Fixed storm distance thickening effect not starting from actual start point of the march.
• Updated storm effect parameters for mars.
• Updated how storm effects are colored. Added a distance falloff so we can thicken the storm up over distance as desired. Added the ability to use the noise as a mask for a secondary color such as ember particles on vulcan. Moved a lot of common functionality into the helper cginc file. Updated colors for vulcan and europa.
• Re-enabled storm audio it is now hooked into the new storm rendering system.
• Added Storm direction can come from any direction and is not limited to cardinal directions.
• Moved shared marching code into helper for storm shaders. Removed old storm shaders that were using generated noise.
• Fixed Minable ores were not being generated around aimee. This meant that when the aimee was not able to explore for ores and aimees near un-modified ore viens after loading a save would not see them.
• Removed unused normal calulation from storm card mesh shader.
• Fixed. When storm stopped when player was outside the wind audio would continue playing (beta).
• Removed half res storm rendering on screen space effect as the new approach is performant enough to render at native resolution.
• Clean-up of storm shader code, which appears to have solved several visual issues.
• Moved ReconstuctWorldRay function into the storm helper cginc.
• Fixed default value for storm card normal offset being too high making storm cards clip into the room.
• Removed some unused code from the old storm effect shader.
• Fixed outline effects showing up on the storm camera. Added camera check to OnRenderObject to skip if the current camera is the storm card camera.
• Improved blending between noise sample slices in weather effect shader;
• Added Higher res noise 3dtexture
• Moved storm card normal offset into the vert shader so we can have differnt offests for the depth only cards and the actual storm cards shown on the main camera. This removes some gaps around the edges of cards when the storm is being clipped to a room.
• Added emissive sparks effect to Vulcan Ash storm.
• Fixed outdoor storms going appearing inside rooms. Added back in the secondary camera for storm cards and are now clipping the storm marching to the back faces of the storm cards.
• Reauthored Storm effect 3d texture to leave the blue channel free to do a third type of noise.
• Fixed Storm Effect mesh in incorrect place in render queue (move to transparent-1)
• Optimised Storm effect. It now uses a 3D noise texture instead of calculating the noise procedurally on the GPU. Different levels are baked into the red green and blue channels, which allows for a single texture lookup to handle several different layers. This reduces the time taken to render the effect from 8ms to 0.5ms.
• Changed Storm screen-space shader to run at half resolution.
• Tweaked Mars storm values to look Ok with 12 raymarch steps.
• Thickened up mars storm effect.
• Fixed the StructureComputerUpright prefab so that inserted datadisks no longer have the wrong orientation.
• Fixed a small typo in the ScriptHelpWindow where the word "charactwers" has been changed to "characters".
• Fixed storm cards not being created for some doors and shutters.
• Removed item basic suit shoulder pad
• Fixed Tooltip so that it now respects the Tooltip opacity setting. previously it would only respect it if the setting was changed while the player was hovering over something, then would revert back to an opacity of 1 when the player looked away and then looked back at the object.
• Slightly reduced the storm card offset distance to minimize gaps as much as possible.
• Fixed partially built frames showing storms inside them. Now partially built frames will exclude storms.
• Added Storm lighting now uses 8 closest lights.
• Added Shader settings for Venus, Mars and Vulcan storms.
• Reduced Number of sample steps in storm shader to improve performance.
• Removed All references to old storm effect system and removed StormLocal script from Brain prefab.
• Added XML data classes for new storm effect.
• Added New storm effect material settings are now authorable inside weather.xml.
• Added Switching between screen-space and world space variants of storm effect when inside room and outside room.
• Fixed Items would sometimes get blown in the wrong direction during a storm.
• Removed storm audio. It will need to be replaced with a new system.
• Fixed storm cards showing over windows on outer grids. Pushed the storm cards out slightly. This can leave a small gap on some corners which will be addressed in a future fix.
• Tweaked spotlight lighting anisotropy on storm effect mesh to match headlamp lighting cone size.
• Fixed brutal spawn data so that the minimum supplies crate would be closer to the lander and easier to find when you spawn on Mars, Lunar, Europa, MimasHerschel and Venus on Brutal difficulty.
• Added variant of storm shader to be applied directly to storm card mesh. This removes the need for another camera. Have removed the storm card camera for now but left the screen space shader in incase we want to use it later.
• Polish Pass on Storm Screen space lighting.
• Added Support for spotlights in storm shader
• Fixed nullref when setting material property on storm effect (beta only).
• Updated indoor storm effect to use a different noise function with significantly less artifacting. Set some default material values for a good staring point for a europa storm.
• Added Rudimentary lighting effect to screen-space weather shader. The 8 lights closest to the camera are sampled to light the storm effect.
• Fixed a bug with indoor storm effect where artefacts could appear on nearby geometry. Removed a few unnecessary parameters. Marching radius is smaller now but effect looks much better and thicker.
• Updated indoor storm effect to take ambient light into consideration. Also allowed for more dense clouds.
• Fixed a rounding issue that could happen when wearing the HARM suit and standing on a frame. The Harm suit would try to sample the atmosphere below the player causing a divide/0 error in the suit convection code and creating run-away heating.
• Further balance work on HARM suit atmospheric values for liquid cooling function.
• Added a few tweaks to the indoor storm effect for better control of light absorbtion.
• Turned off the indoor storm effect by default.
• Fixed DevicePipeMounted from having unusual rotations under certain circumstances when mounting on vertical pipes. This was caused by the forward axis vector in the transform being treated differently to the up and right axis vectors, and the resulting rotation being incorrect.
• Refactored lava damage to move the damage behaviour into virtual functions in individual classes. this allows more more clearly defined edge case behaviour.
• Changed HARMSuit and helmet to be much more resistant to Lava damage.
• Fixed when player is in a suit & helmet. Internal items and glasses etc will take no damage from lava until suit is destroyed.
• Fixed Solar Storm Localisation error in new world screen.
• Fixed storm card mesh gameobject position was offset incorectly.
• Added first pass on indoor storm effects. Storm card meshes will be generated around exterior walls/windows from which a screenspace storm effect will start.
• Updated the cost for the ItemKitVendingMachine: All costs are halved. Large vending machine requires two kits while the small vending machine requires one. Kits now stack to five.
• Fixed harmSuit helmet not spawnable.
• Removed duplicate harm-suit helmet prefab
• Fixed Blocking area of medium radiators. All variants now only occupy the space defined by the object itself. (previously they would occupy all adjacent small grids as well.
• Removed Hard-Cap on SolarPanel panel output. Solar Panels will now over-produce power on worlds with higher solar irradiance. This change effects the maximum solar output of panels on the following worlds: Moon 750W, Venus 1.15KW, Vulcan 500W-to-1.2KW (Vulcan's highly elliptical orbit means solar irradiance fluctuates greatly throughout the year). Output of solar panels on other worlds are un-changed.
• Changed Solar Storm now increases output of solar panels by roughly 4x.
• Added new Stationpedia values for HARMSuit. The harm suit uses a new system for determining heating/cooling. Expressed are the operational range and the safe range. Inside the Operational range of external temperatures the suit is able to hold a steady temperature with minimal cooling. Inside the safe range the suit will be able to maintain temperature via the inbuilt AC. The suit is not guaranteed to operate correctly outside the safe temperature range.
• Fixed Canisters hidden in slots could still receive heating from the world atmosphere in some cases.
• Added Solar Heating Factor to Stationpedia (this expresses how quickly the sun will heat up the internal atmosphere of an object.
• Fixed HARMSuit page not displaying in Stationpedia.
• Tweaked HARMSuit Thermal balance values.
• Added HARM Suit. New super heavy suit with a much greater damage resistance and higher thermal performance. The HARMSuit is cooled via a liquid canister. It is effectively immune from the increased solar heating of solar storms. Due to its weight a jetpack cannot be used while wearing a HARMSuit, however a Hard backpack or mining backpack are still able to be worn.
• Improved Liquid canister tool-tip to show a little more precision in its fullness tool-tip.
• Added recipe for HARMSuit and HARMSuit Helmet to Tier2 tool printer.
• Fixed build error.
• Added back several accidentally removed poi's from europa that were present on the map view but could not be discovered.
• Fixed missing scene commit from rev26073
• Fixed bug where waypoints would get registered twice from their OnRegistered function.
• Fixed bug where building a single waypoint and trying to set the next waypoint could crash the game. Have set max iterations when looping over waypoints.
• Fixed spelling error on save list items days 'past' should be 'passed'.
• Added Prototype Solar Storm weather event. It can be triggered using the command "Storm Start SolarStorm". Atmosphere cells and atmospheric containers exposed to the solar storm will experience greatly increased solar heating, solar panels will experience increased power output.
• Fixed suits were not being effected by solar heating due to them being technically hidden in their slot.
• Fixed console screens turning off when they are on the floor and the player is nearby. Have moved the player-in-range bounds slightly further back behind the console.
• Fixed issue where having non .save files in your autosave or quicksave folder would cause saving to get stuck. Non .save files will now be ignored, however it is recommended to keep these folders for .save files only.
• Fixed loading game with bad save data could get stuck on black screen. Some deserialization failures would return instead of throwing an error to be caught in the outer loadgame task. Have changed these returns to throw. Now, if load fails in this way, user should be returned to the title screen.
• Fixed error in Russian language localization with wrong number of arguments