Steam 'Early Access' users will receive this update today, Wednesday January 17th, 2018.

This update is a followup to the Research Update! The team took some much needed time off for the holidays and were going to hold off on updating till February, but decided to keep to the "update every month" schedule to spend time fixing some bigger crash bugs and add another feature to the Research system!

Updates

You can find these updates in 0.5.1.0, the current build of the game.

Research System now uses Multi-Phase rates
This release we've made a big update to the research system that debuted in our last update. Now every research subject contains multiple phases with different Byte values. Some items have their most valuable phase early, some much later, and some in between. So if you really want to maximize your research operations, you have lots of new decisions to make about what to research, when, and for how long. To help you make these decisions and figure out how much you want to min-max as a player, the Control Panel on the Research Chamber now shows a timeline of all the current item's phases.

If your current research subject has moved into a lower-rate phase, and want to replace it something that's higher value, you can stop the current research operation and and load in the new subject right away. But be careful, stopping a research operation early means sacrificing any uncollected points! So don't be reckless, okay?


Update to the lighting system has been implemented
In this patch we included an overhaul to the lighting system. The main goal was to get the game running using the ACES tone mapper, so we could then get the game running in HDR in a future update. That meant spending lots of time recreating the look of Astroneer in a completely new system. We aren't completely done tweaking this, but overall this approach is a huge step in the right direction.

If you want to see the other stuff that happened this month, check out our vlogs for weekly insight to what the team is doing. The most recent one shows off the new Basebuilding system:
https://youtu.be/W78XPyYHneo

FIXES

BUGS

• [AS-1522] - Fixed a number of issues that were causing save files to be deleted when the game crashed or the application was closed. In the most common case, this occurred when very large saves took enough time to write out that the user had time to close the window before the file finished.
• [AS-1958] - Fixed an issue causing inconsistent playback of Gas Hazard audio
• [AS-2097] - Fixed a minor issue where the Astroneer could still walk around when scrolling through the pages of the Help screen.
• [AS-2104] - Fixed an annoying Multiplayer bug which prevented the Client player from exiting a flipped vehicle in Multiplayer games.
• [AS-2113] - By adjusting a few things in the engineering team’s favorite part of the code, local wind effects should now only spawn for the relevant player rather than all players in a Multiplayer game.
• [AS-2158] - Fixed a bug where the Research platform remained in the "completed" state if it lost power while in that state.
• [AS-2172] - Base platforms no longer have "ghost" slots on the front that store only Compound. Goodbye, secret Compound storage.

CRASHES
With automated crash reporting coming online last month, during this release cycle we focused on fixing some of our most common crashes. There are a dozen or so more, but are pretty technical so I tried to summarize them here.

• [AS-2148] - Fixed a crash that occurred when entering the pause menu
• [AS-2150] - Fixed a crash that occurred while printing an item
• [AS-2153] - Fixed a crash that occurred while opening your backpack in certain situations
• [AS-2155] - Fixed a crash that occurred while loading a save game

ROADMAP HIGHLIGHT

We just completed a comprehensive overhaul to the roadmap! Now you can see projected time frames for upcoming content, as well as our ideas for free post launch content. The following major features are continuing during development, but are not included in this release.

Dedicated Servers
We currently have a dedicated server running with a third party that we can connect to. There are plenty of bugs still yet to deal with, but we are getting closer and closer to public launch.

Basebuilding
We have already completed a couple of playtests, but this is feeling really great right now. If you watched the above vlog, you can catch some glimpses of basebuilding in action, but here is an image that Spencer made during one of our recent playtests that sums up a lot:



(none of the above art is final*)

Research - Implemented & In Progress

We just keep going! This update As with all of the new systems we are shipping, these are just base implementations that we will now work on expanding. Multi Phase items are now in, and the next steps include working on items that instantly grant you research points, and unlockable blueprints that can only be found out in the world and never be unlocked via the catalog. Expect this to keep getting more content for our next few updates.

Terrain 2.0, Weather, and Hazards

This is still in a similar place as last update. Zabir is working hard on ironing out some of the last authoring tools that the art team will use to create planets, biomes, and weather. The next step here will be generating one of the existing playable planets with the new system for testing!

Also, the first versions of aggressive flora were shown off in the last vlog. We are now working on making variations that utilize some of the cool behaviors Andrew created.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for details of our next update, which will probably be our biggest one to date!

-joe