What’s That Shining On The Horizon? Devblog Updates!

For Starmourn and beyond! A small update on what’s going on behind the curtain –

New Tutorial Status

Work is progressing nicely with #NewTutorial, and I really look forward to unveiling it to you all sometime this month!

Prep work on the new tutorial began quite a while ago over lengthy discussions with current players and recent newbies to better understand what new players truly needed to know before taking their first steps on Omni Station.

The goal of the new tutorial is to cover many lessons in a brief span, hopefully taking a new player an average of 10 minutes to complete.

In completing the tutorial, new players will:

• Learn how to engage with the world
• Be prompted with the chance to develop a roleplay-based backstory
• Gain an understanding of unique functional systems including wetwiring, cloning, marks and purchasing, etc.
• Have the opportunity to learn about history, racial lore, tradeskills, and more
• Learn and practice the basic attack and healing abilities of up to all five classes
• Equip/Wear their first pieces of armor and weaponry (plus a mod if they explore a bit)
• Get the chance to preview larger systems such as performance and modding
• Pet a gorepup!

The new tutorial also includes a robust NPC generator including NPCs of all races operating with unique interactions based on a variety of personalities, descriptions, and dialog cues. Through this, each player experience within the tutorial city will be unique, though of course it’ll follow the same general course.

Those of you who participated in the Round Table talk a few months ago may recall me mentioning a future installation: The Academy. This will be an NPC-run continuation of the new player experience, serving as a location for returning players to pick up gear and get re-oriented, as well as serving as a place for players to learn advanced skills such as hacking, space flight/combat/mining, additional combat kill paths, etc.

The Academy is going to be a long-term project and will not be released at the same time as the Tutorial – I’ll be taking some time to do some worldbuilding in between and monitor how the new tutorial land is being received before building this out.

The Main Quest with Cassandra will be temporarily put on hold once the New Tutorial comes out, pending a decision about where to plug it back in. It will be back, though! We love Cass and co too much to ever let them go.

Website Updates

Class Skills Page

Thank you Garryn for creating a live-updating class skills page!! Players can use this to learn about class skills outside of the game, including actual skill information and lesson costs.

Check it out: https://www.starmourn.com/game/skills

Archaeology Records

Coming soon! I’d like to start building out an Archaeology Database of RP records since y’all have been so powerful about exploring those wildernesses with your teams to recover ancient specimens and artifacts. If you have a research session you’d like registered on the website, please send me a Pastebin file or log of the research on Discord or as an in-game message.

Make sure everyone involved in the research is on board with it being shared!

Events & Worldbuilding

Secret Event & Zone

Marra is hard at work planning an absolutely STELLAR event for y’all in game, including an expansive new hunting zone full of unique quests and intrigue. I really can’t give any more information and risk spoiling it, but you should all be VERY excited.

Hyndoh Prison

Serpentine lower body undulating, a Rags-affiliated Selassian prisoner moves west.

A place of treachery and scandal, the prison warden is working on making its halls accessible to the Sector’s bravest spacers. Stay tuned for more details after the New Tutorial’s release.

Newbie Questing

Based on some additional feedback from new players, we’re looking to expand on low-level area quest opportunities. We’re most interested in quests that build out game lore, including food quests to learn about cultural meals, unique hunting quests, infiltrating organizations, etc.

We’ve got a few spoons in the pot on this development, but we welcome all players to come up with ideas as well! If you’ve got a thought about building out a newbie area, feel free to shoot me a message on Discord or in game.

We’ve been hard at work behind the scenes and look forward to sharing more content with you in the days, months, and years to come here in the Starmourn Sector. <3

Starry-eyed and thriving,

Your Starmourn Admin Team