Here's the skinny on what's been happening behind the scenes at Star Sonata.

I'm sure you all saw that we released our external chat client. Congrats to Pip and Jon for doing good work on that. Now you can all keep an eye on SS while at work or school while you're supposed to be doing something else. =)

The rest of us have been working on things for the big rebalance plus some other miscellany.

HAL has finished the new code for scooping and deploying drones, where each drone remembers how much shields it has and charges at a fixed rate while in item-form. He has also added a 10-second window to debris, where only the person who did the most damage to the enemy it came from or people on their team/squad can scoop the debris. After that 10 seconds, the loot is open for anyone, just like before. This week, he's going to start on the new aug math and changes to the DM skills.

I finished the new parasite code, which ended up being a bit more elaborate than I originally intended. The parasites all now have half-lives, which act as a check against reproducing parasites and also allow parasites to act more like "Damage over Time" (DoT) effects.

Parasites tend to have a lot more HP's now, and exterminators are also stronger, but exterminators are limited to one equipped at a time, so that even with a decent exterminator, you will still take damage from parasites.

Parasites stack, but there is a separate stack kept for each person who has injected you with parasites in order to keep the hate generated as they damage you separated out.

There are now 3 categories of parasites: organic, fire, and nanite. Organic tend to do a mix of DoT and debuffs and some of them reproduce; fires will be started by all fire weapons and be exclusively DoT; nanites tend to be mainly debuffs with negative aug stats. Exterminators generally work only against one type of parasite. You'll need a fire extinguisher type exterminator to put out fires, etc. You can hot switch exterminators without being docked, so you may want to carry around a few variants to switch between based on what you're up against. Base-only exterminators work against all types.

Also, I've added the concept of unique parasites. There will never stack and you can never get more than one of these per shooter in a ship or base. Shooting additional unique parasites at a target will only refresh the health of it. These will allow us to make extra powerful parasites, but since it is limited to just one, it can't be too OP. Some examples of this are slightly different "heal over time" parasites that shield monkeys and engineers are getting, where the ShM version also increases your shield and the engineer version helps give you more energy. These buffs are implemented with aug stats, so can stack if you have multiple healers/engineers in your squad.

Lastly, there is a new line of anti-base parasites. These do very little dps, but they last for a half an hour, so if you can survive the bases damage and really load the base up with these over 15-20 minutes, the combined dps gets to be huge. These won't let anyone swoop in and insta-kill bases, but it should allow for much more powerful sieges that are not stalemates.

Matty has coded the new overloaders stacking and exploding rather than the weapons code, and I have made a new balance sheet and formulas for OL's and redone most of their stats. They are looking pretty good. Content Collider is making some new DG drop OL's that come in crates of 100 and have 1% failure rate, so they will give you a temporary boost in dps, but will eventually all get used up.

All of this will be on test for some time before it ever show up on live.

good job i like the scooping loot shizzle =)

So slave users are getting screwed over once again cause I bet 100% they will have no clue how to swap exterminators, use overloader crates or anything like that...

All nice stuff, but I'm glad my gunner is almost done.

Will you be able to manually toss parasites overboard?

I think that bug was fixed awhile ago, but feel free to check it out.

Are the overloader stables still going to be the same?

Stable overloaders will not blow up but Im guessing they will get a little nerf.

What about things like zebra weapon overloaders and why would stables need a nerf? Also what about the weapons in the reavers and the stingers are those going to get a beef to compensate?

Overloaders are still being worked on, nothing is certain right now. We will post when we know more.

Intresting, almost want to start playing again.

But Q got a point. Parasites would be totally broken if slaves have no defense against them. You better fix that before putting them into the game.

Until then, it's totally OP.

what about exterminators we still going to be able to stack them?

I just wondering because useing only 1 kinda going to suck as you need at least 4 just to fight off jelly spit when fighting jellys.

Did you even read what Jeff wrote or just see the "1 exterminator", latch onto that point then ignore the rest?

Tell you the truth I didn't read it at all!
It be to long!

In future dont comment and ask questions that may be in the text that you have neglected to read then.

Because you wont be seeing any +100% damage overloaders anymore. So if the best ones that blow up only has +50-60% damage we cant have a stable one with +40% damage or more since no one would ever bother using those that blow up then.

Im not involved in making the new stats though so I cant say exactly how it's going to be. We'll see when it's ready.