Everybody's Ugly, Poofing Items, and Other Fixes

Update v0.15.0.19 is now available on Steam, and your clients should be updating shortly.

This is a hotfix update to our "Fire in the Hold" update, which addresses some repeated random values, disappearing items, and other issues.

Saves from v0.15.0.0 and later should work. Note that if you were experiencing issues in the older save, this patch may fix some, but others may persist depending on the cause.

Steam post image

• Game universe will no longer have only ugly people. (Or in alternate universes, all beautiful.)

• Loose and carried items will no longer disappear suddenly for no reason, leaving only trash.

• LA Aerostat should no longer rotate and duplicate itself periodically.

• Player ship should no longer disappear when an NPC ship undocks from it.

• Several null reference fixes in the NAV station UI and tutorial.

The first issue turns out to be a pretty major bug, though insidiously tricky to notice. Kudos to our eagle-eyes players on Discord for noticing something odd about their game: everyone they met was marked as ugly! Or not. In some games, everyone was beautiful!

It turns out there was a bug in our random loot generator that was caching values. Any time there was a < 100% chance of something, the loot generator would work normally until that chance passed, then it would always pass. This meant that in cases where a random "this or that" list occurred, the first successful outcome would always be the outcome later, until the game shut down and restarted.

The implications here are pretty wide. Some save games are filled with ugly people. Some all beautiful. In some worlds, all people are smokers, or shy, or born leaders. What's more, this applies to all other random loot tables, as well. Items, ship types, random events... it's going to be interesting detangling the affected game world issues to know what is a bug caused by this vs. other issues!

A second, somewhat less insidious, bug involved disappearing items. Ostranauts has a random event generator that fires occasionally, and one of the outcomes is "random part failure."

It's designed to search your ship for a part near failing, and nudge it over the edge to spice things up.

Unfortunately, the filter it used was too wide, and it could include loose items, items carried (even worn!) by the player, and items that have no defined damaged state. It's that last case that helped us find this bug. Reactor canisters would just "poof" suddenly, leaving only trash behind. No sign of a cause.

We've patched this system to limit it to installed parts on the ship (barring reactor canisters), so it should only be things like lights, thrusters, walls, and other items. And even then, only those in dire need of repair.

Another bug involved a bad rotation calculation that resulted in the LA Aerostat duplicating its map, like a giant clone stamp tool. Another bug which undocked NPCs incorrectly from the player, taking their ship with them.

And a handful of other, less interesting null fixes.

As always, there's plenty more for us to fix, change, and add! And we'll be continuing in roughly that order. In the meantime, let us know if this patch helps you out, as well as if it reveals new problems!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC