Prerelease 0.14 is now out of beta, and here on the forums! Please note that this update requires a save that isn't already running Secrets of the Frontier - this goes even for the beta versions. If you're running SotF, you can't update until you start anew. Sorry, I try not to do this too often.
The update is, well, pretty huge. You can read the whole changelog below. The Dustkeeper Contingency has many new bits of content sprinkled into the Sector, with their secretive veil pulled ever-further back. Make new AI friends. Rip Pathers to bloody chunks. Save humanity. They've even got two new flagship capitals courtesy of Selkie.
Spoiler
VERSION 0.14
NOTICE: Requires a new save or one not already running Secrets of the Frontier (including if you are running the beta release of this update!!!)
- Updated for Starsector 0.97a
- Added a new main-menu mission, "Die By The Sword", featuring Ardent-Annex-Seraph
- Added a new quest, "Hope for Hallowhall"
- Earn the trust of the holdouts at Mia's Star and their seraphic leader
- Added a new quest/encounter, "A Lost Thread"
- Make a silent friend
- Added new content to the "Legacy of Hypnos" encounter
- Find traces of the truth behind their legacy
- Added a new encounter during The Usurpers, "Interweaving"
- Macario's not the only spider on Sindria...
- Added a new encounter after trying to use Courser Protocol while hostile to the Dustkeepers
- Meet a wintry hunter on tense terms and make amends or be devoured
- Added Respite-class drone battlecruiser - a brutal temporally-enhanced mallet
- Added Anamnesis-class drone dreadnought - an unyielding drone-slinging aegis
- They feature a unique Cyberwarfare Suite hullmod, and are only used as Dustkeeper flagships in larger fleets
- Cyberwarfare Suite: reduces Cyberwarfare Protocols intrusion cooldown by 25% and penetrates 30% of defender's ECM and ECCM bonuses
- Repose-class: added to Dustkeeper flagship lineup, added Cyberwarfare Suite, small sprite improvements
- Banshee's Lost Thread: replaced 'ODS Death is a Bird Flying' with the ODS Songless, a unique Memoir-class light destroyer, which also has a Cyberwarfare Suite, fix generic name being applied to ship on start, now grants some Dustkeeper reputation from start
- When playing Banshee's Lost Thread, you can now choose a skill to replace with Automated Ships if you reassign your skills into a build that doesn't have it
- Nightingale: replaced Combat Endurance with Missile Specialization in default skill loadout, is now Steady rather than Aggressive
- "The Haunted" can now be played in the form of a Nexerelin background
- New interaction at Killa shrine ossuary (includes option to make The Haunted even harder)
CYBERWARFARE PROTOCOLS (and Jubilant Tech-Siren)
- Fighter hack effect reworked to just overload and flameout the wing's fighters, reduced cooldown to 20s
- Now always succeeds except versus Omega (was: 65% chance, increased or decreased based on attacker/defender ECM ratings)
- Effectiveness of disruption is multiplied by attacker ECM rating and divided by defender ECM rating
- More effectiveness = longer weapon/engine/system disables and longer overloads
- Effectiveness is capped between 35% and 200% effectiveness
- Base ECM rating is now 10
- I.E. 12 score versus 8 score: 12 / 8 = 1.5 = 150% effectiveness
- Nerfed all hacks' base strength by ~25%
- Hack range reduced (1200 > 900) but now scales with bonuses to energy weapon range
- Cyberwarfare cooldown is now indicated by a pair of cooldown bars next to the ship, rather than the range indicator's opacity
- Added a unique skill icon
- Rays/text floaties are now Technology blue
- Omega ICE now counters intrusions with a backlash that overloads for 1s (officers still learn this is a bad idea and won't do it again)
- Clarity for integration with Tahlan Shipworks: if player possesses a ship with Daemonic Heart hullmod, Cyberwarfare Protocols notes that it mitigates Hel Scaith remote override attempts against those ships (this effect was implemented a while ago on Tahlan's side - this is just for clarity)
ADAPTIVE NANITE SWARM (aka "Felcesis")
- Increased guilt buildup from satbombing larger planets (now: 1 for size 3, 2 for size 4-5, 3 for size 6-7, 4 for size 8+)
- Certain vanilla decisions now slightly affect guilt: taking the alpha core, waving (or not) at Alviss, giving the planetkiller to the Path or the Knights of Ludd (sum total of these decisions does not reach the invasion threshold without satbombing, selling Sierra or doing the Killa interaction, and inversely can't save the Haunted from being hunted)
- No longer invades during pursuit battles
- No longer infests enemy ships if they have less than half the fleet point cost of the most powerful enemy ship
- The nanite swarm now has a more consistent color scheme of dark blue
- OPTIONAL FOR NOW: Now spawns with a "support" trait in large battles (enemy fleet has at least 250 deployment points worth of ships)
- Support traits have more wide-reaching (often global) effects that scale better with player/enemy fleet size
- Elegy of Opis: renamed to "Hatred Beyond Death" (a future update will add 'Elegy of Opis' as a support trait)
- Hatred Beyond Death: many fixes, cleanups and visual upgrades to "Spite" death-explosion
- Dear Dotty: severely nerfed Dotty's firepower, range and survivability
- Hellhide of Hades: Renamed to "Hellion's Hellhide"
- Hellion's Hellhide: added a bar visual for skinshield integrity, skinshield recharge time reduced (20s from empty to 15s), skinshield recharge now respects time dilation, now creates a distortion effect when skinshield overloads, has EMP arc visual while overloaded, changed popups when used by nanite swarm "skinshield" > "hellhide")
- Jubilant Tech-Siren: now gives 2/2/3/4 ECM to piloted ship, now weighted slightly more as a general pick than an anti-carrier pick
- Wispering Grovetender: now somewhat favored versus carrier-heavy fleets
- Pushed out FP threshold where Fel spawns in a weaker form (50 > 60)
- Added settings.json entry for when "guilt madness" causes the Adaptive Nanite Swarm to be perceived as Felcesis (default: 7)
NEW ADAPTIVE NANITE TRAITS:
- HYBRID: A Trickster's Calling - periodically steals missile ammo from enemy ships, emergency phase when reaching half hull
- DEFENSIVE: Mantle of Thorns - incoming shield damage is reflected as EMP arcs and builds up charge to an EMP discharge
- DEFENSIVE: In Sacrifice, Meaning - at high flux, transfer a large amount of flux to a nearby ally
- SUPPORT: Hands of the Drowned - a gravitic minefield assails the player's fleet. Mines add a scaling 10% of soft flux on hit, and pull anything hit towards them
- SUPPORT: The Perfect Storm - on a 30s repeating timer, ALL player ships/fighters overload or have existing overload extended if they're not venting or phased
- SUPPORT: reality_breaker - if not destroyed within 6 minutes, crashes the game (only appears if player saved within the last 15 minutes)
- Leviathan's Bane: added cooldown bar, increased Hidecracker hard flux on hit (15% capacity > 20% capacity), hits on shields now instantly overload frigates for 4s and destroyers for 1s, incoming cryoharpoon now causes ships to back off and phase ships to avoid unphasing, added icons to relevant UI statuses and reloading status notes if prey is nearby (triggering the accelerated reload)
- Fleet commanders in main-menu missions now properly apply their fleet-wide skills (e.g Affix-Haven, Feros)
- Dawn and Dust: added unique Affix-Haven chatter, buffed enemy officers
- Good Hunting: now has a new objectives/tips list if best-score is above 0, mission now fails if ISS Once in a Lullaby is destroyed
- Good Hunting: new Warhorn portrait by Quacken
SIERRA
- Made a(nother) pass over some of Sierra's dialogue and chatter to re-align her character away from excitable naivety and towards phlegmatic music witchery (expect her dialogue to generally be calmer, slightly wiser and with more splashes of witchcraft - and fewer exclamation marks!!!!!!)
- Sierra now calls you "kindred" once she learns you both hear the Music
- Sierra is now less forgiving of satbombing: 1 second chance for satbombing a size 3, immediately leaves if you do it to a size 4 or larger
- New conversations/thoughts: "Used Gate", "Moths", "Mudskipper Spinout"
- Added Dragonfire to list of possible favorite torpedoes
- Sierra now gets excited when she successfully lands a direct hit with a missile of base damage 1000 or higher (i.e Reaper, Hammer, Atropos)... or apologizes if she friendly fires with one
- Vow: increased supply/deployment costs (26 > 32)
- Can no longer install Neural Interface on Sierra's ships (sorry)
- Sierra's reflexive blast doors now also negate all crew losses on her ships
- Concord augments no longer appear in the refit screen for non-Concord ships
- Added info on changing Sierra's personality/ship to her officer tooltip
- A Promise: reimplemented ship graveyard around ODS Dusklight, made disabled frigate spawn in more convenient places (around planets or stars), reduced Dustkeeper reputation reward (65 > 35)
- A Memory: Tempest captain now has a fixed set of suitable skills
- Wayward Star: added a few unique officer chatter convos on combat start, gave Eidolon a custom chatter personality for if enemy combat chatter is enabled, fix The Music continuing to haunt the player after the battle
- Wayward Star: rewrote some of the Wispmother interaction dialogue so it's clearer that it's never recoverable
- Sierra (and Project SIREN) now have a selection of relevant admiral skills
- Sierra's level-up moments are now capped to whatever level they would normally bring her to
- Added quips when swapping into the old Brilliant version of the Vow from Dawn and Dust (if cheated in)
- Random Assortment of Things crossover: SotF now provides a swap-in line for the Raphael (check it out if you haven't already - a new Sierra destroyer?!)
DUSTKEEPERS
- Added a new, separate Dustkeeper Burnouts faction for rogue fleets, such as Barrow or Dustkeeper burnout bounties, who are hostile to everyone (including Dustkeepers)
- Increased the number of opportunities to ask about the topics of Dustkeepers and about burnouts - learning about either one adds that faction to the intel screen
- Added Dustkeeper Hatred: the faction whose mission is to preserve life in the Sector now REALLY hates it when you satbomb a size 4+ planet, and become permanently vengeful
- Dustkeeper warminds can now betray the player during combat under specific circumstances (must have triggered Dustkeeper hatred, must be in a favorable position to do so)
- Courser Protocol escort fleet can no longer choose to join neither side of a battle if Dustkeepers are not sufficiently hostile to the enemy fleet
- Degraded Instance Chip: renamed item to "Barrow's Instance Chip (Degraded)" and rewrote description to make its purpose somewhat clearer
- Derelict Contingent now causes Barrow's automated ship multiplier to be reduced by 0.25x per dmod (up to 4) to encourage Repose use over the Sentinelslaught
- Barrow now starts with Combat Endurance rather than Gunnery Implants (including when fought)
- The Rust Crows: For clarity, Barrow (D) and his Dustkeeper oldguards now have the same personal version of Derelict Contingent that playerfleet-Barrow later has (Barrow previously had a fleet-wide version), added 100% gamma cores to compensate for the drones no longer having DC
- Barrow starting relations once restored now Favorable (was Suspicious)
- NPC Dustkeeper oldguards in normal Dustkeeper fleets are now level 8 and have Derelict Contingent, like Barrow, spawning in highly-dmodded ships
- Defender (PROX) & Bastillon (PROX) now have less atrocious weapon arcs than their unupgraded versions
- Renamed Proxy derelict package names (e.g "Assault Package" > "Proxy Assault Package")
- Fixed Proxy packages adding their armor bonus for DR calculation as a percentage and not flat (was: 25% bonus, now flat 50)
- Proxy Assault Package: now grants Damage Control's elite effect (can repair still-functional weapons and engines even if they're taking damage)
- Proxy Escort Package (for Defender, Bastillon, Keeper): increase PD range boost (75 > 100), PD damage bonus (25% > 35%)
- Picket (PROX): increased hull and armor bonuses (15% & 12% > 25% & 20%), now properly begins sacrifice sequence at max flux, fixed explosion hitting multiple times
- Added "Proxy Control Node" battle objective (acts like Hyperwave Transmitter but with Dustkeeper Proxy drones), spawns in Hypnos system/Mia's Star
- Burnout bounty fleets now have normal (well, "normal") DK fleet names ("Rogue Splinter" > "Scrutiny's Shard" or "Mythic's Neutron Wyrms")
- Non-burnout Dustkeepers no longer use phase ships (if added by mods such as Torchships)
- Slightly increased contrast on all portraits of AI characters
- Instance chips now display a number of stars to indicate their level (1 star for sliver, 2 for echo, 3 for annex)
- Increased the default delay after officer convo lines (1s per 20 characters > 1s + 1s per 20 characters)
- Certain decisions now raise the player's hidden ethos scores
- Added LunaLib support: most of SotF's settings.json entries will be replaced by the ingame settings menu (in particular, settings for the guilt mechanic)
- Added officer convo: "Barrow Daemon" (crossover with Tahlan Shipworks)
- sotf_findsecret command: new argument "athena" (finds Athena wreck, may be useful for random sector)
- NPC Dustkeeper warminds now have unique Combat Chatter personalities (3 personalities: "Faithful", "Hunter", "Oldguard")
- Removed crashcode for Starpocalypse's Stingy Recovery setting, as this issue was fixed with Starpocalypse Revengeance 3.0.1
- Added to list of "guilt-free" factions: Hivers (from Hivers), Enigma (from LOST_SECTOR)
- More Military Missions: blacklisted all factions except Dustkeeper Burnouts from defense mission (for lore reasons and to not clog the faction list)
- Fixed A Promise failing to begin if there are no independent colonies
- Fixed a few cases of "years" rather than "cycles"
- Fixed text and performance issues during A Memory in Nexerelin's random sector
- Fixed incorrect concord augment quote colors
- Fixed "retreat" chatter lines being written for the wrong context (was: ship is retreating. now: fleet is retreating)
TACTICAL EXPANSION
- Battle creation plugin updated to include support for the Abyss
- Removed adjustments to battlespace size based off hyperspace presence and nearby planet presence
- Battles with 4 or less objectives are now smaller, more akin to vanilla
- Escape battles are now always fought in a 18k-unit square, like in vanilla
- Battlespace generation will prioritise placing SoTF objectives in the middle of the two fleets (but, like, for real, this time)
- Battle creation is now seeded - the battlescape will always be identical when fighting the same fleet with the same number of ships (no save scumming)
- Objective spawn thresholds based off deployment points pre-modifiers, not post-modifiers (so, e.g, Derelict Operations DP reduction does not reduce objective counts)
- Emplacements are now outright incapable of capturing their own objective (thank you, new Electronic Warfare effect!)
- Emplacements now spawn slightly closer to their parent objective (was: 750-850, now 500-650)
- Emplacements now self-destruct if the side that owns them is in full retreat
- Hyperwave Transmitter/Network Hub now immediately degrade all drones to 10% CR and cease spawning new waves while their owner's fleet is in full retreat
- Reinforcement droneships now spawn at 70% CR (was: 50%)
- Reduced spawn weighting of Fractal Beacons in hypershunt systems (1 > 0.5)
- Fixed emplacements/siegeworks being twice as common compared to other objectives in the battle size band where both emplacements and siegeworks can spawn (now, both spawn at half frequency)
- Fixed emplacements/siegeworks spawning in hyperspace
- Fixed siegeworks' extra radius padding being ignored
- Knights of Ludd mod crossover: added 3 new reinforcer types for each of KoL's secret factions, and allow all normal reinforcers to spawn in their systems