Cosmoteer release candidate 0.26.2 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 adds a new larger Crew Barracks, and it also replaces the Resource Collector with a new better-and-more-versatile Manipulator Beam. Plus it's got a ton of other balances changes, tweaks, and bug fixes.

Thanks for testing!

RC1:

• New Ship Parts: [list]
• Added a Crew Barracks, a new 3x4 crew room than has beds for up to 24 crew.
• Replaced the Resource Collector with the Manipulator Beam Emitter. It can still collect resources but now has 16 beams (4 per crew operating it) and can also boost friendly flying crew as they do tasks such as construction and trading. All saved ships and games with Resource Collectors will be automatically upgraded to Manipulator Beam Emitters.

Built-In Ships:

• Added 4 new Monolith combat ships: Glaive, Sovnya, Validator, and Verificator.
• Added 6 new Cabal combat ships: Elagabalus, Gaze, Glare, Grus, Jabbaj, and Sadalmelik.
• Added 5 new Cabal trade ships: Ascetic, Pilgrim, Seeker, Supplicant, and Trinity.
• Added a new Tiny Cabal Arms Depot II.
• Added 3 new Fringe combat ships: Bomb Anchor, Master of None, and Shin Hanabi.
• Miscellaneous other updates to many existing ships.

Career Mode:

• Some star system will now have binary (two smaller) suns instead of one larger sun.
• Defense platforms will no longer spawn around stations that are under attack.

Balance:

• Doubled the speed at which crew salvage junk and deconstruct their own ships, which is then doubled again when salvaging/deconstructing armor.
• Cockpits, Small Hyperdrives, and Large Thrusters now require coils instead of hypercoils to construct. (The total credit cost of each is unchanged.)
• Small Laser Blaster:
[list]
• Increased damage from 400 to 600.
• Increased shot speed from 320 to 340.

Heavy Laser Blaster:

• Increased damage from 900 to 1200.
• Increased shot speed from 240 to 300.

Mining Laser:

• Reduced rotation speed from 30 to 20, but it can now rotate while firing.
• Reduced power usage per second from 600 to 300.
• Increased damage vs ship junk from 1200/sec to 9600/sec.
• Reduced damage vs enemies from 1200/sec to 600/sec.

Chaingun:

• Reduced open/close time from 1.2 to 0.6 seconds.

Modular Rocket Thruster:

• Reduced base ramp-up time from 6 to 4 seconds.
• Reduced power consumption by 25%.
• Reduced the Extender cost from 7500 to 6000.

Nuclear Missile Factory:

• Reduced cost from 30,000 to 25,000.
• Reduced power usage per full missile from 6 to 4.
• Increased power capacity from 4 to 6.
• Increased production speed by 50%.

Explosive Charge:

• Reduced cost from 1000 to 600.

[/list]

User Interface:

• The "Repair All" button is now available even if the player doesn't have enough resources. Clicking it will cause crew to repair as much as possible.
• Valid and invalid door locations are now much more obvious adding parts to ships.
• The game will no longer auto-save while paused if no user inputs have been given.
• In the load/save game dialog, saved games where the player is in debt will now show their negative credit amount in red.
• Hiding a news alert on the title screen will no longer prompt to confirm.
• Added hotkeys to increase and decrease the U.I. Scaling.
• Clarified the Power Capacitor's description to make it clear that crew still have to deliver the power.
• Disabling tutorials will now automatically activate/deactivate any settings that would have been automatically changed when viewing the now-disabled tutorials.

Ship A.I.:

• A.I. ships will now put more priority on attacking closer targets instead of powerful targets.
• If one A.I. ship is already targeting a ship, other A.I.s will now be less likely to target it instead of something else.

Graphics:

• Projectile trails for Railguns and missiles will now render regardless of zoom level for better visibility.
• Tweaked Chaingun loaded bullet sprites to more accurately convey whether bullets are loaded into the Chaingun.
• The Chaingun Magazine now appears to have the correct number of bullet loading holes.
• Factory animations will now speed up when the factory is buffed.

Tech:

• Upgraded to the Microsoft .NET 8 runtime. This may slightly increase performance. If you're playing on Steam Deck or Linux and can no longer play because of this change, please make sure you're using the latest "experimental" Proton.
• Cosmoteer will no longer run on DX9-era GPUs. This probably won't impact anyone since those are EXTREMELY old GPUs, but please let us know if this causes problems for you.

Bug Fixes:

• Crash when using certain combinations of screen/window resolutions and U.I. scaling settings.
• Crash if for some reason the size of the game window's render area becomes zero. (May happen when dragging the window between monitors or when disconnecting a monitor.)
• Rare crashes caused by the the crew O2 warning icons appearing or disappearing.
• Ships traveling at very low speeds could "jitter", often as they approached their intended destination.
• The dotted boxes around crew quarters in the crew U.I. were not displaying properly.
• In some circumstances, Engine Rooms could fail to deliver batteries to connected thrusters.
• Ion Beam Prisms weren't retargeting as quickly as was intended.
• Modular Rocket Thrusters with 30 or more extenders were not using as much power as was intended.
• In some cases, ships weren't properly blocking Large Shield arcs on other ships.
• A money duplication exploit triggered by jumping to a different star system and back.
• Resources pre-purchased from stations for construction weren't being properly marked as available again if the pre=purchase was canceled due to flying away.
• A station that was destroyed could still sometimes retain a "claim" to nearby resources that it was trying to use to repair itself, making those resources impossible to collect.
• Loading a saved game with partially-constructed parts would show those parts with glowing blue elements until the game was unpaused.
• Thrusters and other visual effects could appear to flicker when at the edge of the player's sight range.
• It was unintentionally possible to drag-and-drop ship files into the Built-In Ships section of the ship library.

Modding:

• Career mode now supports different randomly-chosen "sector types" for each star system which can be used to change how objects are spawned within each type. They can also dictate which background styles will be used.
• The 'Doodads' spawner's ScaleFactor parameter can now be a random range.
• The spawner 'Conditions' blocks now support 'OnlySectorTypes' and 'ExcludeSectorTypes'.
• Added a WholeShipBuffProvider which provides a buff to the part's entire ship.
• Added a 'Repeating' hit effect that repeats a set of sub-hit-effects a certain number of times with an interval between them. Can also spawn media effects for every repeat.
• Fixes to InlineResourceConverter bugs that were causing it to incorrectly convert resources in some situations.
• Fixed freezes and/or low FPS that could occur when salvaging if parts didn't have any colliders overlapping the center of the part.
• When running in Developer Mode, changes to shaders, wav files, and non-ship textures will be automatically reloaded without have to reload the whole game.

[/list]