Patch will be released at 11pm US-East on January 27th

This patch is pretty big so we're expecting downtime of roughly 3 hours.

* Changed the on-board item dropping code for when an enemy is destroyed. The chance for an item to drop used to be mainly based on either surgical or how exactly you could kill and enemy, with overkill preventing drops. We want to start eliminating self-destructors on mid-high level ships to make the game more interesting, but not flood the market, so the chance for items to drop off of destroyed ships will now be inversely proportional to the square of the tech level of the item for non-surgical kills and inversely proportional with the tech level for surgical kills. The chance is further modified by piracy and will be half as much for equipped items and half as much again for weapons, and double for commodities.

* Hitting 'z' after not hitting 'z' within the last 3 seconds will now start with the "closest" target rather than the next in the galaxy list, where "closest" is a combination of distance and the direction you are pointing. So if you want to switch targets and already have a ship targeted, most of the time, you can just point at what you want to target and hit 'z' once. Hitting 'z' multiple times will cycle through targets as it used to do.

Additions:
* Added glow map to Poseidon Wave, Hephaestus Machine +
* Added glow map to the Wyrm ship
* Added commod and mission to the christmas letter contest rewards (Requires manual addition, so it might not be live immediately after the server comes back up)
* Added bulk traders for sale in Infernal Tempest in case someone wants to buy one to shuffle around space when they are finishing the mission there.
* Added a border for the arrow in the target window
* Added Heavy Hephaestus Coppersmith Shield Blueprint to Heph drops
* Added mission reset timer (daily mission support)
* New ship: Poseidon Crown (a contest prize reward)
* New ship: Ultimate Doomsday Machine (a contest prize reward)
* New DT+ texture by Biggee
* New textures for Izers
* Gave Hives a new tractor which they unequip/equip with their weapon and fighter bay. (unequip/equipping might not come into effect until next universe)
* Olympians now have a set team flag

Changes:
* Rebalanced Hermes Caduceus line of weapons and the Narhwal Horn
* Tweaked the laser particles.
* Improved formatting on the Infernal Tempest missions
* Re-sized a bunch of ship textures to be more reasonable
* Tweaked position on the Horn of the Undead (Baby) Narhwal to look a little better
* Limited Psionic Flares to Graveyard
* Changed the color of pain pop up numbers to be red instead of green
* Made Transformed Very Dark Matter and Transformed Impossibly Dark Matter neurobound, and made the missions to get them repeatable
* Marked Serengeti as a premium-only galaxy
* Fixed the bug allowing f2p's into Perilous space. (For now, we'll still allow them in most of it so they don't get stuck, but mark the gals as semi-premium so they can't fire.)
* Fixed the bug that allowed f2p's to fire in Wild Space
* Added messages for f2p's when they enter semi-premium space and when they exit semi-premium space so that they know if their weapons are active or not.
* Removed the DS+ Animation
* Enigma graphics update
* Extended Half-life of Nexus Solo's Mission Item to prevent instant decay

Fixes:
* Fixed sleepy code for the multicpu architecture
* Whitescreen final fix
* Hopefully fixed the slave docking bug
* Linked up Kidd's ship model
* Fixed type for Berserker Class augmenter missions
* Fixed several Olympus ship issues, and linked up the Hermes ship models/textures.
* Fixed a source of server lag on live.
* Fixed the legacy particles system culling (weapons and suns particles should render correctly now)
* Fixed a client crash
* Fixed another new bug related to energy consumption.
* Fixed an energy bank related issue, that caused it to be reset to 0.
* Fixed misspelling in Sleighstream description
* Fixed misspelling in Beta Antares Paxian explorer mission
* Fixed a mission giver portrait in one of the Nexus Volcom missions
* Fixed some issues that didn't allow missions to end in instances or mission explore goals to work with instanced galaxies.
* Fixed a bug that was preventing certain mission indicators to show up inside instances and over a wormhole leading to an instance
* Fixed a bug with super items that use weapons that have parasites where they were ignoring the parasite when calculating the total damage. Super items with parasite injecting weapons have had their damage adjusted downwards to balance them as they are intended.
* Fixed a few server crashes related to particles.
* Minor Fix to Poseidon wormhole to give it visage
* Minor Fix to Heph's drop tables - Heavy Shield & Buckler BPs were broken
* Minor fix to Hyperion Wreckage to animate it
* Fixed Paxian Mythos Blueprint to require Paxian Medallions instead of Ancient Pax Medals
* Fixed the bug where damage numbers on your target were appearing over your own ship instead of the target ship
* Fix for Glue Gun, Glue Sprayer, Hot Glue Gun, Hot Glue Sprayer requiring (now discontinued) gear glue. New commodities Sticky, Gloopy & Gunky Organic webbing required; small rise in credit cost to off-set price reduction. NOTE: Players with existing BPs will find that they still list old requirements, however when installed they will use new listings!
* Fixed graphical error in UZ: Crater Highlands where background was cutting out at Emperor's entry warp
* Fixed Infernal Tempest Diablo AI dropping Neurokeys in last level
* Fixed Blue Outpost Police Ambush ~ should be less harsh for low levels
* Fix for the chained missions behind automatically started even if its not in the same station.
* Fixed locations of the Zebra and Giant Space Alien ambush spawners in Ngorongoro Crater.
* Handel's Cove AI fix

Discussion of this patch here: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=50147

* New ship: Ancient Monster Scout
* Added glow map to Ancient Scoutship

Additional notes to the posted change log.

Infernal Tempest

• Does not have a bulk trader for sale because we cannot currently allow sale of ships in instances.
• I've packaged Infernal Battery rewards into a crate so new players can easily finish the mission chain as the item was often too large for many. No need to buy a ship just to continue to the next mission anymore.
• I also created clone of Solar Collection Drones for "AI Use" in Infernal Tempest only, they have been greatly nerfed back to pretty much what they used to be so players can destroy them and continue the mission chain.
• Various minor tweaks to the graphics in Infernal Tempest.
• Solar Radiation now drops off of the Solar Collection Stations around Inferno.

Infernal Darkness

• Converted to C2, further graphic additions in the near future.
• Opened for players again.
• BlueDwarfs AI & Mission enhancements.

- Small client patch Jan 30 -
* Fix for a dozen of dmpfile producing crashes
* Fix for the client lag introduced with the Jan 27 patch.