Posted September 12, 2018 by jwiggs
Tech has finally gotten the attention it deserves. Now with tech, you can insert them into modules. Most of the tech only affects the blocks they are placed inside of, which adds a whole new level of customisation to your weapons. Tech is also now a regular drop from all enemies, and will appear in the same section as loot. If that wasn't enough, you can also forge tech with other items as well as buy tech from the shop.
Since tech will need to be placed inside modules, you are going to probably want to know how the new tech placement system works. If you go over to the tech tab, island blocks without any tech slots will be more transparent. Once you go over and select a tech, only the places where the tech can go will be highlighted. Certain tech can only go on certain modules. If you have a tech selected, you can go over to the editor and click the desired module to place it in. This will bring up a new tech bar at the bottom where you can manually insert each tech into different slots.
That whole process seems to take a while, so there are some helpful shortcuts to speed thing up. Using space+click even when not in the tech tab will automatically select that module to place tech inside. In the inventory, instead of having to click on a tech and place it inside the slot, you can shift + left click the tech to instantly send it into the first available slot in the module. You can also use shift + right click on any tech to remove all the tech from the selected module. Finally, if you have a module selected, only the tech that can be placed will appear in your inventory to avoid confusion.
As mentioned earlier, most of the tech will only affect the module it is placed in, with the exception of the quantum cat, and weapon targeting system. These tech increase your overall dodge and crit chances respectively.
If you want to hold more global tech, we have a new module called the augmentator. These can hold the island wide tech as well as some other tech that can go in any module, like the reinforcements which increase the health of the block by a certain percentage.
Overall, I think the tech will be a great way to customise your weapons further. Try putting different techs in different places to come up with some interesting combinations.
That's right. Dodge and crit have both been given a small rework. Dodging felt pretty awful and random most of the time, and sometimes you would get large enemies who would seem to dodge a lot for no apparent reason. Crits felt underwhelming, and mostly used because why not.
For dodging, I have split the dodge chance into two variables, the maximum dodge chance and the actual dodge chance. The maximum dodge chance is increased by all your tech and your floatrons. The actual dodge chance is only a percentage of your maximum dodge chance and is determined by how much extra thrust you have. If you have 2x the thrust than mass, you will get your full maximum dodge chance. Anything less and you will start to see your actual dodge chance drop to zero, where zero dodge chance means you are very close to being an overweight island.
Crits have also gotten a rework. Your warp core will give you a standard base crit rate of 40%. Each weapon you place will decrease the crit chance instead of increasing the crit chance. Some weapons will decrease it more than others. This makes small and compact island more powerful, since they will usually crit more. The total crit chance can also be increased by placing the respective tech into your core or augmentators. Certain tech will also increase the crit chance for that weapon only. This will not affect your overall crit chance but will directly be applied to the weapon itself and added to the firepower calculations.
Due to the nature of the new tech, I had to completely redo the enemy generation. Enemies are now generated smarter. Enemies will also fight smarter and will be generally more accurate and try to destroy themselves less. The also tend to chase the player more and be more aggressive, making them a little bit harder to combat.
Here is a full rundown on how enemies are now generated:
Shields have always been in a tight spot. While being good, they have have either been too good, or just plain annoying sometimes. Thats why I also took time to take a look at shields and make some mechanics to put them in a better place.
Firstly, shields now can overload. Overloading happens when you have no shields to protect your island. The amount of time spent overloading is based on the number of shields you have. After the shields are finished overloading, they will come back up online. Shields still charge while overloading, they are just not projected out onto the island and thus do not block any damage. If a shield comes back online with no shields charged up, it will automatically receive one shield. This can actually reduce the base cooldown time for a single shield.
The shield overloading gives players a chance to get some uninterrupted shots onto the enemy island after taking down all their shields.
In addition, energy weapons no longer damage shields and will actually get absorbed by the shield. Laser, plasma and beam weapons all fall into this category.
There really is a lot here. Brace yourself.
There were a ton of them. I just didn't write them all down as I was fixing them. But heres the notable ones that I did fix.
There are a lot of changes in this update. Hopefully it was worth the two and a half week wait for this. I certainly hope you enjoy all of the new content and stuff in this new update.