Cosmoteer release candidate 0.28.1 is now available for testing! (To play this release candidate, you must opt in to test it. Please see this post for info on how to test release candidates.)

This release candidate has a lot of quality-of-life improvements, some balance changes, improvements to ship collision avoidance, and a handful of bug fixes.

We're still working hard at a bunch of upcoming improvements as part of Career 2.0, but we wanted to get these improvements out to everyone sooner rather than later.

Thanks for testing!

RC1:

• Built-In Ships: [list]
• Added 4 new Monolith combat ships: Ambassador, Averter, Middleman, and Praefectus.
• Added 7 new Cabal combat ships: Alcor, Atria, Chasing Wind, Decrux, Lazurite Tear, Menkalinan, and Zaurak.
• Added 3 new Cabal trade stations: Small Cabal Trade Station III, Med Cabal Trade Station III, and Large Cabal Trade Station III.
• Added 5 new Imperium combat ships: Ani, Dromiceius, Sulla, Swallowtail, and Tinamou.
• Added 1 new Imperium trade ship: Penguin.
• Added 3 new Imperium arms depots: Tiny Imperium Arms Depot II, Small Imperium Arms Depot II, and Med Imperium Arms Depot II.
• Added 3 new Fringe combat ships: Clytemnestra, Kenesary, and Quicksilver Scout.
• Miscellaneous updates to many other existing ships and stations.

Balance:

• Small Thrusters (all variants) now have a small dynamo that generates power very slowly. This allows Small Thrusters to operate while disconnected from crew/power sources, but the rate of power generation isn't enough to perpetually sustain the thruster.
• Increased the 1x3 Armor Wedge's penetration resistance from 2 to 4.
• Increased EMP Missile's launch cooldown from 2 to 4 seconds.
• Mines are now much more visible and clearly show their detonation trigger range.

Ship A.I.:

• Improved collision avoidance when avoiding moving ships/objects.
• Improved collision avoidance when avoiding multiple ships/objects simultaneously.
• Improved collision avoidance when trying to move away from very close ships/objects.
• Improved collision avoidance of ships in a formation.
• Ship formations should now do a better job of navigating around suns and storms.
• A.I. ships will no longer deliberately target roof lights or headlights.

Career:

• Repairing damaged parts was much more expensive than was intended. Repair cost (steel/coils only) has been reduced from 57.5% of base cost to the intended 7.5%.
• It was unintentionally often cheaper to fully deconstruct and rebuild a part than it was to repair it. This has been fixed.
• Defense platforms will no longer surrender to players.
• Stations will no longer hail the player from outside the player's sensor range, because that was confusing.
• Fires will no longer be regarded by the A.I. as breaking a surrender truce.

User Interface:

• Enemies will no longer automatically slow or pause the game speed when spotted if they had previously been spotted within the past minute.
• When a weapon's target goes out of sight range, it will now be automatically re-targeted when coming back into sight range. (Unless in the meantime the target is changed by the player.)
• Small thrusters now display a yellow warning instead of red error when they don't have door, crew, or power access. (Because they no longer strictly require power.)
• The U.I. Scaling setting will now be remembered per resolution or window size.
• Except for Creative Mode, "lost ships" will now only be saved for ships that the player actually controls.
• Added tooltips to the Resource Desired & Limits dialog that explain the functionality of the "Desired" and "Limit" numbers.
• Updated the Large Shield Generator's description to make it clearer what it can and can't be projected through.
• Crew distance warning icons can now be "clicked through".

Multiplayer:

• Reduced the amount of clouds and storms that will appear when using "Varied (Sparse)", "Varied (Dense)", "Ion Storms (Sparse)", and "Ion Storms (Dense)".
• If a player joins, leaves, or changes teams, the players in the game will no longer be automatically changed to "not ready".

Performance:

• Updated to Microsoft .NET 9.0. This may slightly improve overall performance. Please let us know if you have any compatibility issues running Cosmoteer.
• Texture and shader caching can now be disabled with the --no-cache launch argument.

Bug fixes:

• Crash when loading a multiplayer save in single-player and then trying to transfer money to another player.
• Very rare crash caused by crew being automatically unassigned from certain jobs.
• Multiplayer desyncs caused by transferring resources to a ship with no crew.
• Nuke explosions could occasionally "phase" into the ships that they hit.
• In multiplayer, engaging an inter-system hyper-jump while another player is on the galaxy map would prevent the jump from happening and could ultimately lead to a crash.
• In Creative Mode, it was unintentionally possible to tell a junk ship to salvage itself, which would then crash.
• A.I. ships would sometimes spawn inside storms due to a pathfinding bug.
• Ships could sometimes erroneously try to avoid collisions with objects that were farther away than their destination.
• A.I. ships that had surrendered to the player were sometimes not exit the star system as intended.
• When thrusters were attached to Engine Rooms, they were not correctly lighting up as possible power supply chain targets in the resource management screen.
• The wrong ship name would be displayed when an ally was hailed by the A.I.
• The names of ships and stations in the Comms list would sometimes appear smaller than intended.
• Using the "Transfer Excess Resources" options would work but then make it impossible to reset or make any further changes to the amount of resources to transfer.

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