The AI Update!

Major features:

AI Starships:

• 5 new factions of AI starships have appeared!

• Exploration and Cargo Vessels
• Mining Guild Branches
• Roaming bands of pirates
• Each system's defense forces [privateers]
• Dangerous Tsaii warriors.

• Each system will receive random spawns

• AI Ships will spawn similar to the way Minecraft handles mob spawning. While in space, AI ships will appear 1000-4000 blocks away from the player, depending on their difficulty.
• Each system has a chance of spawning ships, but in the more dangerous systems [Trench, Horizon, AU-0821] you are more likely to encounter them.
• Players with new player protection will not trigger difficult spawns.

Lag Improvements

• Much work has gone into testing fixes and optimizations for lag. There should be a significant improvement as compared to several months prior

• Minor Features

  • Custom blocks and ore items have received a back end rewrite, courtesy of @Kwazedilla. These changes will help improve our ability to maintain their code, fix bugs, and add more in the future.
    • To maintain parity with vanilla updates, raw variants of ores have been added.
    • A new subcommand of /convert has been added to convert these. For large quantities, feel free to open a ⁠support ot ticket for staff assistance.
  
  
  • Logout Safety for Starships
    • If you are disconnected / log out while piloting, upon login you will be teleported back in, and restored to piloting.
  
  
  • Dynmap Improvements
    • Dynmap will now show descriptions of planets, info on territories, settlements and nations, and starship info.
  
  
  • Reformatted Commands
    • Several commands have been rebuilt using a new system I am developing to reduce formatting problems, and make it easier to introduce new features. /listships is one example of this.
    • More commands will be updated over time
  
  
  • Mining Laser changes
    • Warships above 3950 blocks can now support a tier 1 mining laser to aid in salvaging wrecks. This should not be a significant enough advantage to displace the role of peaceful vessels in mining.
  
  
  • Planet Orbiting
    • Planet orbiting has once again been enabled due to finding the root cause of the issues surrounding it.

  Back-end changes

  • Configuration changes
    • There has been a significant rework of starship balancing to allow weapons to differ between ship classes. This should help improve balancing and introduce more variety to combat.
  
  
  • Significant Starship Control Rewrites
    • The system the server uses to control starship control input has been rewritten. I have thoroughly checked for bugs in my testing, but I can’t see everything. If any made their way through, be sure to open a bug report in ⁠support so they may be squashed.
  
  
  • Unpiloted Ships Rework
    • The way unpiloted ships works has been changed. Sunk unpiloted ships will give rewards.
  
  
  • Reworked Starship Damager Tracker
    • The system starships use to track damagers has been rewritten. Assists should be properly counted now, and more types of damage will be recorded as damagers