Hey, Crew!

This week, I spent a lot of time rummaging around in the nerdy underbelly of the procedural generation engines I built for Starscan. We saw some unusual behavior and grammar, and some general things that just… felt wrong. So, I wanted to tackle these problems before I dove into expanding the procgen features or building fancy new things to explore.

This weekend, in addition to hanging out in The Voltur Nest Discord, I’ll be planning out the next major update and creating weekly milestones to get me there.

Here’s what’s in this update:

• Now tracking play duration - I added a new player stat to keep track of how long it takes you to win or lose. Kind of like keeping track of turns in NetHack.
• Sector Generation - Made some improvements in the world building procgen code to fix an edge case that was causing starting systems to look a little too similar.
• A/An Grammar Fix - Artifact generation now uses the correct “a” or “an” when discussing an artifact.
• Scan Interference Warning - When you encounter a planet with abnormally difficult surface scans, a the map data will give you hint text.
• Incorrect Scan Reporting Colors - The color coding was wrong when we were telling you what your scan % was when entering a system. Now it’s correct.
• Scan Detection Probability Fix - The probability distribution for scan detection was flat and it felt bad. So now it should feel much better. And when it doesn’t, it should tell you why (see above)
• Intro Mission Text - Mission goals and objectives are much more obvious in the intro text. It was kind of easy to lose it in the wall of text.

As always, your feedback has helped me make this game better and I’m eternally grateful for that.

-Voltur