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[RainmanUSMC]

So the rift engine thing appears to provide since it moved one of my planets to an entirely different system

[DownTheDrain]

Uhm, I think I might have broken one of my planets. I tried to teleport it closer to one of my other colonies and now it is lost in hyperspace.

Industrial Evolution has a planetary teleport?!

Yeah, the rift generator or whatever it's called.
It's one of those rebuildable industrial ruins thingies, though apparently a very rare one. Found it once and activated it without knowing what I was doing.

[JAL28]

It also causes a somewhat visual glitch by cloning the system the planet was in before teleport about 3 times. It mostly manifests in the star(s) becoming a lot brighter on the sector map screen/the associated gravity wells becoming obnoxiously bright,  as well as multiple gravity wells in different locations leading to the same Star.

[Uhlang]

About a derelict industry

I noticed that, while installing a built-in logistics hullmod, the Hull Deconstructor strongly favors Efficiency Overhaul for combat ships, and Militarized Subsystems for civilian ships.
Efficiency Overhaul on combat ships is fine, if a little unremarkable, but Militarized Subsystems on civilian ships is an actual negative for those who minmax the fleet composition around their character skills, since it makes the freighters and tankers count as combat ships.
It's good that the Deconstructor tries to integrate fitting hullmods, and I imagine there's many people who appreciate free Militarized Subsystems, but I'd like most of my civilian ships to remain civilian and generally feel like this system is supposed to be more... random? Like a gacha into which you throw ships over and over until you get the perfect extra hullmod configuration. The Hull Forge does that rather well already, but the Deconstructor... you can actually use it knowing that you'll get Efficiency Overhaul or Militarized Subsystems, which doesn't seem like it was intended.

EDIT: It just hit me that Hull Forges can add any hullmod, logistic or otherwise, and that I may have misattributed the constant addition of Militarized Subsystems to the Deconstructor when it was actually the Forge. I'm gonna have to experiment some more.

[close]

[Szasz]

Great to spice things up, I really liked the Engineering Hub, but some features are nonsensical to me, like:
 - A new type of cargo to clutter your inventory (ship components),
 - Salvage Yards and Refining overshadow each others output and the Centralization Bureau does not help that, but in cases Salvage Yards outperform Refining:
 - Salvage Yards is always in deficit of Heavy Machinery reducing productivity due to the global supply cap of 10 and neither of the AI cores address that,
 - Courier Port is somewhat dysfunctional taking more than a year to transfer cargo to the adjacent moon while killing FPS and the fleet spawned seemed insufficient in my case (we're looking at 5000 cargo capacity tops for 334599 items, see attachment)
  + they went on patrols as far as the fringe jump point autonomously to intercept inspection fleet while loading cargo, losing 324000 items, you read it right
  + it costed 1.5 mil credit, 5.5 mil with insurance
  + UI to go through it is unergonomic, Jaghaimo's storage consolidation contracts are much more elegant for example
  + I reloaded a save and did the whole transfer manually in 1/5 game day for about 20 supplies under one real time minute
 - Hypertransmitter Relay item needs to be installed in a Military Base or High Command to provide a system wide benefit that forgoes the need of a Military Base in order to build Relays, yes, you heard me, it seems you need a Military Base either way, what the heck?
 - Cannot give the order to cleanse the subpopulation without building a costly Senate first, so no house cleaning in the first 60-240 day or so (depending on building priority) but military presence is required anyway
 - Restoration Docks can't repair all D-mods, so was a definite bummer for me
 - Military Relays that require military buildings on other planets don't function as a Patrol HQ (that has no requirement btw) contrary to description as they do not provide the stability bonus => Patrol HQ>Military Relay
 - Installing items function for structures that has none compatible
 - Never see the use of edicts other than wartime lockdown, gains are either marginal while drawbacks impact (every other) colony heavily or problem can be easily solved some other way (rearranging industries for example instead of Single Child Policy that stops colony growth)

As a tooltip says, none of the features are useless, but that doesn't mean they aren't dysfunctional. Since colonies are flawed either way, I'll probably play without the mod next run if that happens.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Yunru]

- Hypertransmitter Relay item needs to be installed in a Military Base or High Command to provide a system wide benefit that forgoes the need of a Military Base in order to build Relays, yes, you heard me, it seems you need a Military Base either way, what the heck?

Correction (because I too made this mistake): It provides a sector-wide benefit.

[SirHartley]

Updated to (not a new save) the new IE version. OW and HI still not working together for the CB bonus.

Edit: I refreshed all the industries involved and its still not working

***. Well, it was worth a try - I'll fix that for the next update, then, maybe, probably.

Uhm, I think I might have broken one of my planets. I tried to teleport it closer to one of my other colonies and now it is lost in hyperspace.

So the rift engine thing appears to provide since it moved one of my planets to an entirely different system

So, did it vanish or move somewhere you didn't expect? First one can happen if you transverse jump out of the system while the animation is running - haven't found a fix for that yet, no idea why it happens.

About a derelict industry

I noticed that, while installing a built-in logistics hullmod, the Hull Deconstructor strongly favors Efficiency Overhaul for combat ships, and Militarized Subsystems for civilian ships.
Efficiency Overhaul on combat ships is fine, if a little unremarkable, but Militarized Subsystems on civilian ships is an actual negative for those who minmax the fleet composition around their character skills, since it makes the freighters and tankers count as combat ships.
It's good that the Deconstructor tries to integrate fitting hullmods, and I imagine there's many people who appreciate free Militarized Subsystems, but I'd like most of my civilian ships to remain civilian and generally feel like this system is supposed to be more... random? Like a gacha into which you throw ships over and over until you get the perfect extra hullmod configuration. The Hull Forge does that rather well already, but the Deconstructor... you can actually use it knowing that you'll get Efficiency Overhaul or Militarized Subsystems, which doesn't seem like it was intended.

EDIT: It just hit me that Hull Forges can add any hullmod, logistic or otherwise, and that I may have misattributed the constant addition of Militarized Subsystems to the Deconstructor when it was actually the Forge. I'm gonna have to experiment some more.

[close]

Spoiler

The hull deconstructor applies the logistics hullmod like MilSubs, the forge applies 2 normal hull mods. Neither, as you correctly found, is random - the Decon and the Forge both try to fit hullmods that are useful to the ship. I can't really account for player intention when doing that since everyone plays the game in a different way, and I can't predict what the player wants to do. If you want no milSubs built in, consider using another AI core on the Deconstructor.

[close]

Feedback

First off, thank you for taking the time and writing your feedback here! I appreciate it a lot.
I think you might have missed a few things that are not immediately obvious, so I'd like to clarify my intentions:

some features are nonsensical to me, like:
 - A new type of cargo to clutter your inventory (ship components),
Ship Components have two primary uses - they can be traded in for cheap construction (with your own blueprints) at a salvage yard and they reduce planetary ship quality when a deficit appears and can thus be used to soften up enemy planets for invasion by intercepting shipments. Components have more actual use than most vanilla commodities (metal, drugs, transplutonics, all ore, organics...), however, I understand that this might not be immediately obvious.
 - Salvage Yards and Refining overshadow each others output and the Centralization Bureau does not help that, but in cases Salvage Yards outperform Refining:
 - Salvage Yards is always in deficit of Heavy Machinery reducing productivity due to the global supply cap of 10 and neither of the AI cores address that,
it's intended as a sidegrade, yes. Refining will beat SY in consistent money output, it's the "safe" way to go, and scales with colony size, which the yards don't. It should overshadow them sometimes, but not always. I'll take another look at the metal output, thank you.

It also only has a deficit if you don't produce enough machinery
Output is actually capped with colony size, it could be higher than 10 (I think).

 - Courier Port is somewhat dysfunctional taking more than a year to transfer cargo to the adjacent moon while killing FPS and the fleet spawned seemed insufficient in my case (we're looking at 5000 cargo capacity tops for 334599 items, see attachment)
  + they went on patrols as far as the fringe jump point autonomously to intercept inspection fleet while loading cargo, losing 324000 items, you read it right
  + it costed 1.5 mil credit, 5.5 mil with insurance
Yup, port's the weakest part of the mod stability wise, I'm working on improving it but it is very complicated.

  + UI to go through it is unergonomic, Jaghaimo's storage consolidation contracts are much more elegant for example
Jaghaimo is an actual developer with an education and years of experience, who coded the best modded UI starsector has seen to date (I learned to code from no experience for this mod, legit the first thing I ever programmed was the variable assembler). His UI is also based on methods only available in the "Intel" window, while mine runs on the "Dialogue" methods. I can't use Intel methods and am not a good enough programmer to make it any better, and it sucks, but that's life.
  + I reloaded a save and did the whole transfer manually in 1/5 game day for about 20 supplies under one real time minute
Sorry for that! The latest update at least fixed the infinite loading times, it's now capped at 7 days iirc.

 - Hypertransmitter Relay item needs to be installed in a Military Base or High Command to provide a system wide benefit that forgoes the need of a Military Base in order to build Relays, yes, you heard me, it seems you need a Military Base either way, what the heck?
See Yunrus comment, it lifts the restriction for the entire sector, so you need only one military base anywhere
 - Cannot give the order to cleanse the subpopulation without building a costly Senate first, so no house cleaning in the first 60-240 day or so (depending on building priority) but military presence is required anyway
Correct! Removing Deciv. Subpop is supposed to be hard, we are talking about eradicating a huge amount of disorganized people that live hidden in the nooks and crannies of an entire planet and do guerilla warfare. America tried to do that with the viet cong in a single country, and got their ass handed to them. Imagine Vietnam, the planet!

 - Restoration Docks can't repair all D-mods, so was a definite bummer for me
You might have been on an old version (pre 2.2.g), there was a problem with Starpocalypse, which added a D-mod after the docks repaired them all. The newest version repairs everything except for scripted D-Mods.

 - Military Relays that require military buildings on other planets don't function as a Patrol HQ (that has no requirement btw) contrary to description as they do not provide the stability bonus => Patrol HQ>Military Relay
Funny enough, I was just told yesterday that the relays are OP as *** because they completely invalidate patrol HQs. They only spawn patrols when there is no other military building on the planet, maybe you misinterpreted that? They are actually slightly better than HQs at that, but worse than military bases. They also give the fleet size transfer/buff, which is a very definite advantage over HQs.

 - Installing items function for structures that has none compatible
All buildings that have the option to install an item, also have an item that can be installed - you might just have not found it

 - Never see the use of edicts other than wartime lockdown, gains are either marginal while drawbacks impact (every other) colony heavily or problem can be easily solved some other way (rearranging industries for example instead of Single Child Policy that stops colony growth)
Every time someone tells me the edicts are useless, they list another one as the "only good one" - they are all niche, but all have their use case. It might just not have fit your play style! Single Child Policy was actually created because someone requested that feature.

Which really brings me to the gist of it - This mod is a giant amount of different things.
The list of features is so long, there is bound to be stuff that some people like, and others dislike. Depending on your playstyle, you may really like the reverse engineering, and really hate the salvage yards - but I have also gotten feedback that reverse engineering is completely useless and the only thing worth it are the yards.

Colonies are still flawed, yes, but I have high hopes that Alex might someday give them a proper purpose -  I have yet to be disappointed by his work (except for commerce, *** commerce).
Until that happens, I hope the mod at least improved your gameplay experience, if only by adding to exploration.

[Szasz]

Uhm, I think I might have broken one of my planets. I tried to teleport it closer to one of my other colonies and now it is lost in hyperspace.

So the rift engine thing appears to provide since it moved one of my planets to an entirely different system

So, did it vanish or move somewhere you didn't expect? First one can happen if you transverse jump out of the system while the animation is running - haven't found a fix for that yet, no idea why it happens.

The animation is too cool to skip it with transverse jumping. However the remaining nascent gravity well in hyperspace is weird, the player can transverse jump through that to empty space - since the planet is long gone.
Is it safe to rift jump a lot? I was afraid that it creates too many new entities in the save file.

About a derelict industry

I noticed that, while installing a built-in logistics hullmod, the Hull Deconstructor strongly favors Efficiency Overhaul for combat ships, and Militarized Subsystems for civilian ships.
Efficiency Overhaul on combat ships is fine, if a little unremarkable, but Militarized Subsystems on civilian ships is an actual negative for those who minmax the fleet composition around their character skills, since it makes the freighters and tankers count as combat ships.
It's good that the Deconstructor tries to integrate fitting hullmods, and I imagine there's many people who appreciate free Militarized Subsystems, but I'd like most of my civilian ships to remain civilian and generally feel like this system is supposed to be more... random? Like a gacha into which you throw ships over and over until you get the perfect extra hullmod configuration. The Hull Forge does that rather well already, but the Deconstructor... you can actually use it knowing that you'll get Efficiency Overhaul or Militarized Subsystems, which doesn't seem like it was intended.

EDIT: It just hit me that Hull Forges can add any hullmod, logistic or otherwise, and that I may have misattributed the constant addition of Militarized Subsystems to the Deconstructor when it was actually the Forge. I'm gonna have to experiment some more.

[close]

Spoiler

The hull deconstructor applies the logistics hullmod like MilSubs, the forge applies 2 normal hull mods. Neither, as you correctly found, is random - the Decon and the Forge both try to fit hullmods that are useful to the ship. I can't really account for player intention when doing that since everyone plays the game in a different way, and I can't predict what the player wants to do. If you want no milSubs built in, consider using another AI core on the Deconstructor.

[close]

Well, maybe you could do that by taking currently installed hullmods into account on a ship set to deconstruct.

Feedback

First off, thank you for taking the time and writing your feedback here! I appreciate it a lot.

Whee, you're so appreciative! And thanks for patiently explaining every single mechanic related to the mod, I wish my short-sightedness was the problem in every case.

Ship Components have two primary uses - they can be traded in for cheap construction (with your own blueprints) at a salvage yard and they reduce planetary ship quality when a deficit appears and can thus be used to soften up enemy planets for invasion by intercepting shipments. Components have more actual use than most vanilla commodities (metal, drugs, transplutonics, all ore, organics...), however, I understand that this might not be immediately obvious.

The issue I got with Ship Components is the same as with Metals. I always ended up jettisoning them during explorations cause they overflow cargo capacity so hard.
I imagined that Salvage Yards might be useful when running a colony without Heavy Industry but as it turned out it penalizes your fleet quality if not built alongside a heavy industry so I ended up not doing that in the run. I tried, however building ships with it but the old 0 credit base capacity certainly impacted the experience and sacrificing ships did not extend it enough to be worthwhile and somehow I missed Ship Components altogether since I always jettisoned or put them into storage. Now I revisited this feature and it seems cool except cost/d-mod prediction appears to be slow to react and the first slider of ship components doesn't seem to do anything, the second is fine.

it's intended as a sidegrade, yes. Refining will beat SY in consistent money output, it's the "safe" way to go, and scales with colony size, which the yards don't. It should overshadow them sometimes, but not always. I'll take another look at the metal output, thank you.

It also only has a deficit if you don't produce enough machinery
Output is actually capped with colony size, it could be higher than 10 (I think).

In my experience Salvage Yards outperformed Refining most of the time. I constantly had 550+ salvage points (no ai core) that either come from weapon disassembly or battles in the system. By the way it can't go through Vulcan Cannons and Light Machine Guns fast enough to empty my storage.
I cannot show you a legit screenshot about production values right now, since I let these colonies grow past size 6 which isn't legit anymore, but it was like this with no ai core and a lot of salvage points as long as I can remember:
SY outputs 14 Metals, requires 12 Heavy Machinery.
Heavy Industry/Orbital Works on a colony outputs  size-2 + nanoforge_bonus + ai_core_bonus + Industrial_Planning_bonus  Heavy Machinery, that's 9 tops in player hands so we default back to Chicomoztoc (10) which is still not enough.

Yup, port's the weakest part of the mod stability wise, I'm working on improving it but it is very complicated.

I see. Yes, I imagine it could be complicated.

Jaghaimo is an actual developer with an education and years of experience, who coded the best modded UI starsector has seen to date (I learned to code from no experience for this mod, legit the first thing I ever programmed was the variable assembler). His UI is also based on methods only available in the "Intel" window, while mine runs on the "Dialogue" methods. I can't use Intel methods and am not a good enough programmer to make it any better, and it sucks, but that's life.

No need for excuses, I get it. To be fair I wouldn't ever ever touch java for the sake of Starsector modding. Probably.

  + I reloaded a save and did the whole transfer manually in 1/5 game day for about 20 supplies under one real time minute
Sorry for that! The latest update at least fixed the infinite loading times, it's now capped at 7 days iirc.

No harm done, I just missed the warning sign. Good to know there's a cap now.

See Yunrus comment, it lifts the restriction for the entire sector, so you need only one military base anywhere

Can't blame me, every description revolving around Hypertransmitter Relay mentions "system". Did you mean "sector" instead? I checked the feature of fleet size extension, that works only within the star system as correctly stated.

Correct! Removing Deciv. Subpop is supposed to be hard, we are talking about eradicating a huge amount of disorganized people that live hidden in the nooks and crannies of an entire planet and do guerilla warfare. America tried to do that with the viet cong in a single country, and got their ass handed to them. Imagine Vietnam, the planet!

Alright, that makes perfect sense. I'll admit, I'm biased by boggled's Military Policy Headquarters. Its simplicity and carefree nature held me captive. I have a grudge with functions that require visiting the planet with my precious fleet.

You might have been on an old version (pre 2.2.g), there was a problem with Starpocalypse, which added a D-mod after the docks repaired them all. The newest version repairs everything except for scripted D-Mods.

I indeed used 2.2.f. And to be exact Restoration Docks was (and is still) not willing to repair Ill-advised Modifications for me from Pather ships and the damaged Virtuous class from Diable Avionics (which now that you mention it, seemed custom scripted).

Funny enough, I was just told yesterday that the relays are OP as *** because they completely invalidate patrol HQs. They only spawn patrols when there is no other military building on the planet, maybe you misinterpreted that? They are actually slightly better than HQs at that, but worse than military bases. They also give the fleet size transfer/buff, which is a very definite advantage over HQs.

Huh. I'm aware how the structure is intended to work and I'm happy to disagree. If some market is providing substantial fleet size for a Relay to benefit from, then all I need on the planet is stability, since defense is probably already taken care of and I ended up shutting down every Military Relay in favor of a PHQ. Can think of one exception off the top off my head, though: markets are too far away in the system to reliably cover each other with fleets, so ye, there's probably a place for this after all.

All buildings that have the option to install an item, also have an item that can be installed - you might just have not found it

Yep, that's on me. This mess 0.95 brought with special items means some items are never found during a playthrough.

- Never see the use of edicts other than wartime lockdown, gains are either marginal while drawbacks impact (every other) colony heavily or problem can be easily solved some other way (rearranging industries for example instead of Single Child Policy that stops colony growth)
Every time someone tells me the edicts are useless, they list another one as the "only good one" - they are all niche, but all have their use case. It might just not have fit your play style! Single Child Policy was actually created because someone requested that feature.

Forced relocation is especially cool to "feed" other markets with the use of a terran planet, Hard Deadlines for a Derelict Contingent run, Exact Clearences for good ships early on, etc., but the question is, are they worth the time, like Commerce 2.0, 10ish percent accessibilty bonus at the expanse of 7% penalty for every other colony? They aren't exactly gamechangers.
I wouldn't go as far as calling them useless, but can you imagine a scenario for every one of them to be worth bothering with? If yes, I can live with that.

Which really brings me to the gist of it - This mod is a giant amount of different things.
The list of features is so long, there is bound to be stuff that some people like, and others dislike. Depending on your playstyle, you may really like the reverse engineering, and really hate the salvage yards - but I have also gotten feedback that reverse engineering is completely useless and the only thing worth it are the yards.

Imagine that! Reverse engineering felt particularly refreshing since the only reliable method of reproducing technology without your mod is the dullness of never-ending raids. I wish it worked for weapons as well.
It's also a great way to play Pokémoncompletionist on an UGNP powered black box and then Engineering Hub really does have an impact.

Colonies are still flawed, yes, but I have high hopes that Alex might someday give them a proper purpose -  I have yet to be disappointed by his work (except for commerce, *** commerce).
Until that happens, I hope the mod at least improved your gameplay experience, if only by adding to exploration.

Yeah, lol, **** commerce. :
Oh, absolutely! It was my best colony experience since Terraforming and Station Construction. Its easy to use, seemed bug-free, descriptions are clear as day and what structures offer are quite cool and is the best option to expand colony related content in 0.95 in my opinion.
I hope that one day the plethora of features offered by this are not hold back by the vanilla limitation of 12 structures per colony.

ps. Lemme bash on VPC related stuff. Commodity Forge, maybe even Manufactory isn't taken into account by Centralization Bureau for dedicated industries, so their sole use is to output desired stuff into stockpiles/storage in a game where money is not an issue and that leaves me confused.
If VPC drops lower the chance of getting actual useful stuff then I'm unhappy.

Hypertransmitter Relay description might be an exception. It says it can improve a Comm Relay but I wasn't able to do that. Maybe it's meant for the Interstellar Relay planetary structure?

By the way Officer respec or even controlled training would be cool in Academy.

[SirHartley]

Is it safe to rift jump a lot? I was afraid that it creates too many new entities in the save file.

I think it is, but I have no proof. The gravity wells are intentional, they serve as anchor for any orbiting entities that are left over after the jump. You might see a slight impact if you jump a hundred times, but the few new entites a jump creates should not cause issues.

Well, maybe you could do that by taking currently installed hullmods into account on a ship set to deconstruct.

It does! It also checks what builds you have, what similar ships have, what you saved, what autofit does, what is currently in your fleet...
I tried to have it pick stuff that you can actually use, as it is very hard to get going and should therefore reward accordingly.

Whee, you're so appreciative! And thanks for patiently explaining every single mechanic related to the mod, I wish my short-sightedness was the problem in every case.

Having someone think, and take the time to write about their experience is the highest praise I can get, and I am very thankful for this. Also, I do not think you are short sighted at all - one of the big challenges during mod development is that the tooltip boxes are small and transferring information is hard, so people can't get the full picture, even if they try.

The issue I got with Ship Components is the same as with Metals. I always ended up jettisoning them during explorations cause they overflow cargo capacity so hard.
I imagined that Salvage Yards might be useful when running a colony without Heavy Industry but as it turned out it penalizes your fleet quality if not built alongside a heavy industry so I ended up not doing that in the run. I tried, however building ships with it but the old 0 credit base capacity certainly impacted the experience and sacrificing ships did not extend it enough to be worthwhile and somehow I missed Ship Components altogether since I always jettisoned or put them into storage. Now I revisited this feature and it seems cool except cost/d-mod prediction appears to be slow to react and the first slider of ship components doesn't seem to do anything, the second is fine.

First off, the 0 budget is a bug that was fixed in 2.2.g, sorry for that. D-mod prediction is slow cause it's a hack . The first slider reduces the cost of what you want to build by sacrificing components (at x1,2 efficiency), it only does something after you selected a ship to build.

The salvage yards are intended to be used before you have a colony - there are a few independent ones around (check the FAQ; there's one on Agreus and a few others), and you can build ships from your own blueprints at a reduced cost there. That's also what the parts are for - you get them from combat and can use them to build cheap ships without a colony mid-game.

I can certainly see how, without knowing that, you might see them as bloat and throw them out!

In my experience Salvage Yards outperformed Refining most of the time. [...]

I'll take another look and maybe run machinery demand and metal output along a logarithmic function, thank you for the in-depth analysis.

Can't blame me, every description revolving around Hypertransmitter Relay mentions "system". Did you mean "sector" instead? I checked the feature of fleet size extension, that works only within the star system as correctly stated.

I whipped up two new descriptions for the Relay Hypertransmitter, which do you think is better?
"In a Military Base / High Command: Allows the construction of Relays without a military base in the star system, anywhere in the sector."
Alternative:
"In a Military Base / High Command: removes the "Military Base" construction requirement for Relays in the entire sector."

Alright, that makes perfect sense. I'll admit, I'm biased by boggled's Military Policy Headquarters. Its simplicity and carefree nature held me captive. I have a grudge with functions that require visiting the planet with my precious fleet.

Absolutely understandable! I haven't found a way to do remote edict management yet, it'd be a bit of a headache to bring up that menu. Boggled likes to do things a bit easier than me, which is fine too!

I indeed used 2.2.f. And to be exact Restoration Docks was (and is still) not willing to repair Ill-advised Modifications for me from Pather ships and the damaged Virtuous class from Diable Avionics (which now that you mention it, seemed custom scripted)

Yup, those are scripted.

Huh. I'm aware how the structure is intended to work and I'm happy to disagree. If some market is providing substantial fleet size for a Relay to benefit from, then all I need on the planet is stability, since defense is probably already taken care of and I ended up shutting down every Military Relay in favor of a PHQ. Can think of one exception off the top off my head, though: markets are too far away in the system to reliably cover each other with fleets, so ye, there's probably a place for this after all.

Invasions, inspections and pirate activity calculate according to the present fleets, their size ect. in the system for autoresolve when the player is not home. Increasing defences on all planets will result in fewer successful raids due to how starsector abstracts systems.

Interstellar relays with a relay hypertransmitter can properly defend a lonely colony in a far off system without wasting an industry slot if you have a fortified planet anywhere in the sector - that was how I intended them.

Imagine that! Reverse engineering felt particularly refreshing since the only reliable method of reproducing technology without your mod is the dullness of never-ending raids. I wish it worked for weapons as well.
It's also a great way to play Pokémoncompletionist on an UGNP powered black box and then Engineering Hub really does have an impact.

Hah! Happy to hear it did good for you.
Regarding weapons: I could do that, easily, even - it is an intentional design choice. Starsector, at its core, lives from combat. In my opinion (!), all content should somehow drive the player into combat, support them in it, or otherwise supplement it - but never replace it.

If I did RE for weapons it would have to require large amounts of weapons to finish research, which wouldn't be fun. If it took too few, you might have very little incentive to go beat Diable over the head for that fourth Opfer too fast, or you might no longer want to scour the markets, potentially running into quests or conflict.

I hope that one day the plethora of features offered by this are not hold back by the vanilla limitation of 12 structures per colony.

Oh boy, I have something for you: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=20986.0

ps. Lemme bash on VPC related stuff. Commodity Forge, maybe even Manufactory isn't taken into account by Centralization Bureau for dedicated industries, so their sole use is to output desired stuff into stockpiles/storage in a game where money is not an issue and that leaves me confused.
If VPC drops lower the chance of getting actual useful stuff then I'm unhappy.

They are intended to reduce the amount of supplies/fuel/marines/weapons you have to buy as that is tedious and I didn't like it. The other chips are mostly flavour.
VPCs have their own drop group. They slightly impact drop chances for other stuff (by ~1%, if I remember right), but that is offset by the salvage events that give you more stuff, so you come out equal.

Manufactory should now be properly taken into account for the Bureau, that was a bug.

Hypertransmitter Relay description might be an exception. It says it can improve a Comm Relay but I wasn't able to do that. Maybe it's meant for the Interstellar Relay planetary structure?

It is! I updated the item description to clarify.

By the way Officer respec or even controlled training would be cool in Academy.

Well, I still have an item that is not implemented for the Academy, stay tuned

[Farya]

Nexelerin has it's own menu called on Z press. Maybe something like that? You call a menu and it shows a list of planets that have courier office/senate built to select the one you need.

[Szasz]

Is it safe to rift jump a lot? I was afraid that it creates too many new entities in the save file.

I think it is, but I have no proof. The gravity wells are intentional, they serve as anchor for any orbiting entities that are left over after the jump. You might see a slight impact if you jump a hundred times, but the few new entites a jump creates should not cause issues.

All right. Endless random jumping it is. I still wish there was a way to jump with the planet or the born jump hole would let us follow the planet instead of prosaically spit us out into hyperspace.

Well, maybe you could do that by taking currently installed hullmods into account on a ship set to deconstruct.

It does! It also checks what builds you have, what similar ships have, what you saved, what autofit does, what is currently in your fleet...
I tried to have it pick stuff that you can actually use, as it is very hard to get going and should therefore reward accordingly.

Hey, that's clever.

Whee, you're so appreciative! And thanks for patiently explaining every single mechanic related to the mod, I wish my short-sightedness was the problem in every case.

Having someone think, and take the time to write about their experience is the highest praise I can get, and I am very thankful for this.

Of course not. Creating a likable mod is one thing but being mature in communication as part of marketing is another. Job well done on both fronts *pat* *pat* and you seem like a good fella.
Considering this isn't a paid project, the level of patience you present cannot be expected from random people.

one of the big challenges during mod development is that the tooltip boxes are small and transferring information is hard, so people can't get the full picture, even if they try.

Can't disagree, there's a whole profession built around bridging the gap between developers and subject matter experts (basically laypersons but we can't call customers that).

The issue I got with Ship Components is the same as with Metals. I always ended up jettisoning them during explorations cause they overflow cargo capacity so hard.
I imagined that Salvage Yards might be useful when running a colony without Heavy Industry but as it turned out it penalizes your fleet quality if not built alongside a heavy industry so I ended up not doing that in the run. I tried, however building ships with it but the old 0 credit base capacity certainly impacted the experience and sacrificing ships did not extend it enough to be worthwhile and somehow I missed Ship Components altogether since I always jettisoned or put them into storage. Now I revisited this feature and it seems cool except cost/d-mod prediction appears to be slow to react and the first slider of ship components doesn't seem to do anything, the second is fine.

First off, the 0 budget is a bug that was fixed in 2.2.g, sorry for that. D-mod prediction is slow cause it's a hack . The first slider reduces the cost of what you want to build by sacrificing components (at x1,2 efficiency), it only does something after you selected a ship to build.

The salvage yards are intended to be used before you have a colony - there are a few independent ones around (check the FAQ; there's one on Agreus and a few others), and you can build ships from your own blueprints at a reduced cost there. That's also what the parts are for - you get them from combat and can use them to build cheap ships without a colony mid-game.

I can certainly see how, without knowing that, you might see them as bloat and throw them out!

Following that logic Ship Components inevitably turn out as bloat late game.

Why are there two sliders for ship components? The second properly reduces the building cost of the selected ship down to 63k (was an Apogee in this case). The first as I said before doesn't seem to do anything, cost remained 126k on any setting.

In my experience Salvage Yards outperformed Refining most of the time. [...]

I'll take another look and maybe run machinery demand and metal output along a logarithmic function, thank you for the in-depth analysis.

Somewhat annoying but not unreal. Salvage Yards can create tremendous amounts of profit until Heavy Machinery stockpiles last.

Can't blame me, every description revolving around Hypertransmitter Relay mentions "system". Did you mean "sector" instead? I checked the feature of fleet size extension, that works only within the star system as correctly stated.

I whipped up two new descriptions for the Relay Hypertransmitter, which do you think is better?
"In a Military Base / High Command: Allows the construction of Relays without a military base in the star system, anywhere in the sector."
Alternative:
"In a Military Base / High Command: removes the "Military Base" construction requirement for Relays in the entire sector."

Second is better, because it is simple and clean. First one tries to overexplain things and overexplaining is often the perfect recipe for ambiguity.

Alright, that makes perfect sense. I'll admit, I'm biased by boggled's Military Policy Headquarters. Its simplicity and carefree nature held me captive. I have a grudge with functions that require visiting the planet with my precious fleet.

Absolutely understandable! I haven't found a way to do remote edict management yet, it'd be a bit of a headache to bring up that menu. Boggled likes to do things a bit easier than me, which is fine too!

I hardly think that is your fault, the game errantly forces the image of schlimazel underlings on the player where you literally have to drag a nanoforge to its final location by your bare hands or show up personally for plugging in an AI core because technicians working under you cannot do these themselves. I mean this is the hardcoded system you need to circumvent.

Invasions, inspections and pirate activity calculate according to the present fleets, their size ect. in the system for autoresolve when the player is not home. Increasing defences on all planets will result in fewer successful raids due to how starsector abstracts systems.

Interstellar relays with a relay hypertransmitter can properly defend a lonely colony in a far off system without wasting an industry slot if you have a fortified planet anywhere in the sector - that was how I intended them.

Hold on. Hypertransmitter works sector wide. That of course changes everything. Well, almost, I still build Patrol HQs in the same star system.

(reverse engineering) Regarding weapons: I could do that, easily, even - it is an intentional design choice. Starsector, at its core, lives from combat. In my opinion (!), all content should somehow drive the player into combat, support them in it, or otherwise supplement it - but never replace it.

If I did RE for weapons it would have to require large amounts of weapons to finish research, which wouldn't be fun. If it took too few, you might have very little incentive to go beat Diable over the head for that fourth Opfer too fast, or you might no longer want to scour the markets, potentially running into quests or conflict.

I see Engineering Hub differently then you. It could be the saving grace for one of a kind equipment (like a high value bounty ship or anything from Superweapon Arsenal) by taking insanely long to reverse engineer but only requiring a single (maybe two) specimen to experience. Or maybe on those runs where you can't find more Plasma Cannons for the rest of the Apogees until it becomes irrelevant.

I hope that one day the plethora of features offered by this are not hold back by the vanilla limitation of 12 structures per colony.

Oh boy, I have something for you: https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=20986.0

The page feedback via market condition is really clever. You're good at tossing information at the user in a limited environment!

By the way Officer respec or even controlled training would be cool in Academy.

Well, I still have an item that is not implemented for the Academy, stay tuned

Sounds awesome, can't wait!

Rest is clear and thanks for the changes.

Please help me with an issue that arose recently. To avoid incompatibility between Salvage Yards and Refining I moved Salvage Yards from the industrial moon to its hosting planet (by shutting down SY, rebuilding it on the planet along with a Heavy Industry) and quality bonuses are somehow void now. Fleets spawn with 4+ D-mods and custom production spits out junks. Reinstalling the nanoforge did not do squat and I have no idea how to fix this.

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[Codyrex123]

After some very helpful people explained the purpose of the Relay Hypertransmitter, I can't shake that the description for its effects is pretty uninformative for actually how useful it is.

What I've gathered is that its placed in a Military Base or High Command and from there on, anywhere in the sector with a colony you control you can build a Military Relay without the need of a Military Base in the system that colony is in.

But its tooltip while being placed in a Military Base or High Command doesn't convey this very well and I suggest trying something more like 'Allows Military Relays to be built in systems across the sector that do not have Military Bases constructed'

[RainmanUSMC]

It straight vanished, shows a location of unknown when you look at the planets menu.

[renegade_sock]

Hi,

Thanks for making such an awesome mod. I'm amazed you did this all without any programming experience. I've been considering getting into starsector modding but it looks very intimidating and the first tutorial I found for it was quite dated.

I was wondering if you've heard anybody else complain about rift generators only appearing on really bad planets? I don't know if it's a bug in the code but I've seen numerous rift generators but they're always on incredibly bad planets. Maybe I'm just unlucky?

[Szasz]

Hi,

Thanks for making such an awesome mod. I'm amazed you did this all without any programming experience. I've been considering getting into starsector modding but it looks very intimidating and the first tutorial I found for it was quite dated.

I was wondering if you've heard anybody else complain about rift generators only appearing on really bad planets? I don't know if it's a bug in the code but I've seen numerous rift generators but they're always on incredibly bad planets. Maybe I'm just unlucky?

Yes, I had an impression that you're quite unlucky so I checked my playthrough - my first time with this mod. Either that or you have a different definition of really bad than me.
Kharon was the first world I stumbled upon with nonsensical scan results that happened to be the rift generator when I colonized it out of curiosity. With just two jumps it ended up in my "main" star system and I left it there since it was okay enough to become the self sustaining location choice of where the senate could be outsourced.

Beside that there's a desert world with the same 125% hazard rating, a 175% barren, a 200% barren-bombarded, a 225% barren and that's it, no other planet has it in the entire sector.