Ostranauts

AI Emergency & Airlock Handling, Plots, Combat and Wounds, and Other Fixes

Hey Folks!

Update v1.0.0.12 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix to 1.0, which includes some fixes for AI, plots, combat, wounds, and other issues.

Saves from v1.0.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

Note: 📢 indicates changes inspired by community feedback!

• Using ranged attacks will no longer hit items the shooter is dragging or equipping.
• 📢 Wounds on the inventory paperdoll now have tooltips with more wound information.
• The Ceres plot "prove your loyalty" stage will now advance more reliably for players who mostly proved it through privateering.
• NPCs shot by the player's ship will no longer blame OKLG for the damage.
• NPCs should no longer rush outside without helmets to fight or flee fires.
• Firefighting NPCs should continue on to subsequent fires sooner after finishing the first.
• Maintenance personnel should now remotely extinguish fires better in hard-to-reach places.
• NPCs will now also consider toxicity of atmosphere when deciding if an airlock is safe to open.
• NPCs with air issues wearing working EVA suits will now attempt to don helmets before fleeing.
• Players can no longer use the inventory UI to pluck drones from the world and deposit them in the trash.
• The Babak and Babak Refit ships no longer spawn with predefined zones that can interfere with player zones.
• Endlessly-daydreaming NPCs should no longer spawn in OKLG at the beginning of the game.
• NPCs born on Detroit can no longer become multiple hundreds of years old.
• The 5.8mm Combat Rifle will no longer leave a stuck ranged attack option on characters when unequipped.
• PDA faction UI now has better badge positioning for extremely low ratings.

We've had some occasional reports of players shooting their own clothes off in the past, but were never able to reproduce it reliably. Recently, however, one of our players noticed an easy-to-reproduce case when they were dragging a dolly, then turned to fight a pursuer. The shot would hit the dolly before moving on, which is of course not what they intended!

This helped us to find the source of the error, and better protect player-equipped and dragged items from their owner's attacks.

We also had another player lament the fact they didn't know how bad certain wounds are, having to rely solely on visual indicators and sprite details. So we hooked-up the wounds and pain bolt icons to our tooltip system, and exposed a bevy of wound data to help diagnose and treat those wounds.

Another player noticed that, despite having a very high loyalty rating with some factions, they could not advance past the "prove your loyalty" stage of the Ceres plot. And this turned out to be an compound error in faction standings.

The first part was that the UI calculated standings by using a wider range of data than the plot system, resulting in seeing one value, but being judged by a smaller one. This has been adjusted so both are the more generous case.

The second part was the way ship combat affects factions, which determined faction changes based on the shooter's first faction. In most cases, this is the nation-state, which is fine. But in the player's case, it was assigning OKLG as the attacker, instead of specifically the player. And the result is that players were racking-up kills for OKLG in the world's eyes. This, too, has been fixed, so that future attacks go to the right parties.

Another batch of changes centered around the way AIs deal with emergencies and airlocks. We had originally given AIs the "emergency override" permissions when seeking breathable air, which allows them to go wherever they want without restrictions to find safety. This makes sense in such life or death situations.

But we also gave it in cases where they were fighting fires, and that produced way too much chaos. (Including running outside without a helmet to fight fires around station exteriors.)

We've rescinded that emergency permission again, so it's back to purely survival breathing cases. And further shored-up the civilian and maintenance engineer firefighting to be a bit better controlled and reliable.

As part of this, we were also able to find a few places to improve AI airlock and helmet handling. First, we noticed AIs could open airlocks with similar pressures on both sides, even if one side was toxic and the other wasn't. We've added consideration for this danger quality difference in addition to overall pressure difference when considering airlock opening.

Secondly, we were able to make AIs in EVA suits more reliably don their helmets in cases where the air was dangerous, instead of running away as a first resort.

Finally, there are a handful of other miscellaneous bug fixes we were able to fix along the way last week.

Still more fixes and changes coming. And we'll be continuing with fixing bugs and pain points as our priority for now.

As always, thank you for playing, and for your help in making Ostranauts more fun for all!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC

Read the original announcement on Steam →

Imported from Ostranauts on Steam. Steam genres: Indie, RPG, Simulation.