Hi all!

We hope you enjoyed the Backers-only Pre-Alpha Early Access Trial Demo verion of Colonization. Unfortunately since none of you seem able to figure out how to correctly operate a Colony Hub, we will have to pull Colonization for now! On an unrelated note, hope you had a happy April Fool's Day!

Also just a quick note of one omission from the previous post, there is a new artifact available: station_return. Link this artifact to a station and you can STATION RETURN to return there, just like ship_return and other similar ones. You can have multiple artifacts linked to different stations all on separate cooldowns.


Now then. Last year in July we held a referendum to help us determine our development priority as we went through all the modding tradeskills. Since finishing the last part of that, Shipmodding, we've been piling on more and more space and economy content including a MARKET overhaul, improved ship AI, Electronic Warfare, and, of course, Space Trucking.

There is no shortage of work to do, but we have two existing systems in mind as our next priorities that are overdue for a fresh look: 1) Refineries and Autofactories and 2) Cosmpiercers, caches, crystals, and vouchers.

As such, we have launched a new REFERENDUM! The winning result will become our next development priority, and the runner-up will be dealt with afterwards. To help you make up your mind, here is a short teaser of the planned reworks:

Refineries and Autofactories: Since Day 1 players have rightly felt underwhelmed by these. They aren't particularly satisfying to own and clunky to use, and are a main contributor to painful bottlenecks in Starmourn's player economy. We have cargo ships now to handle the flow of goods, and a fresh market interface to handle the end-stage of manufacturing. For the next generation of Starmourn content, we'll need refineries and autofactories that are equipped to scale the economy for truly massive industrial undertakings, and owning a refinery or autofactory should be fun and profitable in its own right.

Cosmpiercers, caches, crystals, and vouchers: Cosmpiercers have gone through many iterations, and each iteration has brought us closer and closer to an engaging factional contribution and conflict system which unites hacking, captaincy, PvE, and PvP together. We have a long laundry list of things to address to improve all aspects of the system, and, in particular, vouchers, energy generation, and crystals will receive a fresh rework. We also have some additions to make, including daily and weekly non-PvP activities to contribute energy and/or crystal charge, a more free-form voucher allotment system to ensure everyone's factional contributions can be mechanically rewarded, and a new form of conflict hacking designed specifically for Hacker vs Hacker.

Now you've read the teasers, so go cast your vote now in REFERENDUM 277!

Regards,
Neritus