Starmourn, welcome to the Industrial Revolution.

Today we launch the economy, and Starmourn, into a new era. We now have an extremely flexible system in place to allow players and organizations to construct, administer, specialize, and upgrade their own structures in the stars. The first two structures: Refineries and Autofactories.

At the same time, we launch Offices, a feature-rich system transforming manufacturing gameplay in Starmourn from a series of constant chores into a game of automation and supply chain management.

There is way too much ground to cover in a single announce post. Instead, consult the following help files which have been added or modified: HELP STRUCTURES, HELP OFFICES, HELP MANUFACTURING, HELP REFINERIES, and HELP AUTOFACTORIES.

Along with the above, there have been a large number of changes to manufacturing recipes. I invite you to browse AUTOFACTORY TYPES to browse the recipe changes for yourself. Note that there have been some further modifications to the recipes shared in the recent devblog, in particular as relates to batch sizes and slight input material tweaks. The "sensible" among you are already aware of these changes.

We have also gained 8 new commodities involved in Structure construction and maintenance. 5 of them are advanced intermediate commodities: Modular Panels (Nonmetals), Modular power cores (QPCS), Modular Frames (Alloys), Automation Machinery (Bots), and AI Cores (Processors). 2 of them are the Structure Cores that you will need in order to construct structures: Refinery Cores and Autofactory Cores (both of the new 'Structures' Autofactory category). The last commodity is the Structural Repairkit (Repair) used for structure maintenance.

We have gained a total of 4 new Autofactory categories. Lenses, projectiles, and electronic warfare commodities added recently were always destined to get their own autofactory categories, pending this rework. Thus our new autofactory categories are: Lenses, Projectiles, EWAR, and Structures. ALL of these new autofactory categories have exactly 1 Economy in the Sector where they can receive a production bonus, including 2 new economies which previously had no bonuses. I invite you to explore the Sector yourself to find them.

We have also added NPC autofactories and refineries to the game. You can browse them through the STRUCTURE, REFINERY, and AUTOFACTORY commands.

Now, let's cover some related changes:

- MANUFACTURING syntax including masteries and specializations have been disabled. It's unlikely we'll do anything again with these, but in case we do, your current Mastery progress will be remembered under the hood.

- The Mining specialization bonus yielding additional commodities has been rolled into a buff of the Efficient Crushers/Compressors shipmods.

- The speed penalty when turning around with an asteroid has been deleted, and the reduced scoops movement penalty has been drastically reduced for everyone.

- RANKINGS MANUFACTURING is going down for awhile until things stabilize. These rankings were never an accurate reflection of who was involved in manufacturing and became extremely inaccurate when Specializations were added. As such, when they return, they will probably be reset. We will also probably separate it into two or three rankings, one for MINING and one or two for refining and autofactory usage.

- There were a couple of small changes to economies involving some swap-outs of commodities receiving a bonus.

- Production Tax is no longer sourced from Economies, it is sourced from Subsector. ECONOMY STATUS thus no longer has a Production Tax listed. Structures list their production tax instead.

- Personal Market Orders (PMOs) are disabled for now. The economy needs time to adjust. PMOs will likely return after about a month's time or when I am confident enough in the commodity usage data coming in. When they do, the orders you receive will not be based on specialization, but likely will be based on whatever activities you happen to be engaging in at the moment. Nothing is set in stone, though. We will be monitoring the economy and address the matter of cashflow as needed.

- Lenses now hold 400 charges, down from 1000. They were simply way too efficient in their consumption rate. We will be monitoring consumption rates or ship consumables more closely over the next while, so expect more changes to ammo figures and other matters related to commodity consumption.

- Notorious Pirates are no longer Open PK when piloting industrial vessels, Freighters and Superhaulers, and no longer show up when a Warden attempts to locate them via PIRACY LOCATE. Additionally, PIRACY LOCATE now notifies the pirate when they have been located, by whom, and the Warden who attempted the locate will be Open PK to the located Pirate for 1 hour.

- You can now <FACTION|CLAN|DYNASTY> STORAGE <DEPOSIT|WITHDRAW> ALL [cargo|cargotype] like you can with CARGO STORE/LOAD.

- The Workflow Automator artifact has been deactivated and placed into refund mode, meaning you can trade it in for its full value. With remote manufacturing so deeply worked into this new update and offices and so on, this artifact simply needed to be deprecated.

- The tiered refining_speed artifacts are now called structure_speed and require linking. For org structures, anyone in the org can link to them. Only the highest speed bonus is used, these artifacts do not stack multiple times on the same structure.

- New artifacts are: personal_structlog (Personal Structure Logs with a 30 day history, see HELP STRUCTURES) and two stacking artis for offices, office_cap and office_task_cap (see HELP OFFICES).

- Help Wanted posters do not influence speeds of new refineries and autofactories.

- There is no longer any functionality to stop a manufacturing job in progress. This was not forgotten, it was a deliberate design choice, at least for now.

- There is no longer any functionality to MOVE a queued job from one refinery to another. That is what cargo contracts are for!

- Note that manufacturing jobs use escrows now so that only a single entry is made per job in your personal/organizational marks logs. Marks are paid up front. To make this possible, the Escrow system was expanded to allow organizations to be the owner or beneficiary of an escrow.

- We now have 4 additional powers for orgs, and a 5th additional power for factions. These are: structlog (read/write org structure logs), structures (manage org structures), manufacturing (manage org refining/autofactory jobs), offices (manage org offices), and for factions, economy (high-level economic administration). For Scatterhome, Accountants have been given all of these, Paperpushers have Manufacturing and Offices, and Spacemarshals have Structures, Structlogs, and Manufacturing. If you'd like to make any modifications to these, please hold referendums and get in touch.


The way that commodities receive valuation under the hood has been completely overhauled, and commodities are generally valued higher now (though, not in all cases). As such, everything from shipforge prices, pirate factory drops, cargo ship loot, cargo contract insurance premiums and payouts, and anything that plugs into commodity valuation, will have changed. Since some prices might come as a bit of a shock, I want to explain how valuation works.

Valuation is based on what is, to us, the ideal base value for a single unrefined good based on the time investment required for space mining relative to the time:marks ratios for other game activities, taking the total number of unrefined inputs used in the complete manufacturing line for a single unit of a commodity before Production and Efficiency bonuses, including batch sizes and any cycle fees (including for any/all intermediates), assuming a marks per cycle fee of 1.00, a Production Tax of 10%, and a value for unrefined goods equal to 50 marks.

Players will handily be able to manufacture things more cheaply, and it is hoped that miners will be able to be paid appropriately for their time by other players due to the introduction of a higher ceiling. But if we do not get there in an entirely player-driven manner, we will attempt alternative approaches to keep cash flowing through the economy, as discussed in the recent devblog.


Now, the usual disclaimer: This update contains a (for me) unprecedented amount of new and modified code, some of which will certainly be buggy. While we've done our best to polish things up for release and root out bugs, some details are likely to have been missed and you will probably encounter some frustrating bugs as you explore the new system. File a BUG report and we will get to it as quickly as we can. If you've found something particularly egregious or an exploit vulnerability, submit an ISSUE.

Over the next while, I'll be spending my time catching up on housekeeping, bug fixes, QoL, and so on. I'll also probably be taking some time to iterate on all the recent releases from modding up till today's update, and tightening up some aspects of ground and space combat so that all your toys are fun and balanced when we get going on the Factional Conflict Rework. Work has already begun on it, but there's no telling right now how long it will take.

And finally, a shameless plug: We receive nothing close to a living wage to work on the game and are instead motivated by our passion for Starmourn. If you like the work we do and have the means, please consider an Elite Membership. To sweeten the Membership deal, we have added a new selectable stacking passive Bonus aside from the +5% per subbed month experience bonus. You can now choose to set your bonus to a +2% bonus per month crush/compressed comm bonus, to a max of +10% at 5 months. MEMBERSHIP BONUS LIST will show your options, and MEMBERSHIP BONUS COMMS will set you up on the new bonus (MEMBERSHIP BONUS XP to switch back to the old one). For the remainder of the month of May, as a promotion, we are doubling this bonus to 4% per subbed month to a max of +20%.


The board is set. Take to the stars, and claim what is yours.

Regards,

Neritus & the Team