1.1 Update: The Convenience Update

Introducing the first major content update for Star Rift Saga. This update features a variety of features aimed at improving the overall gameplay experience, as well as addressing some requests for features. Most of these changes are aimed at generally speeding things up by cutting down on travel time and just making things more convenient.

Plus like any good content update, there are new skill chips to play with, new toys are always fun.

New Features

Healbots

You could heal before by going back to the outpost and using items to heal the rest, this just saves some time. Reaching a translocator room should feel like a relief. Previously, you could go back to the lab and talk to May to get healed to 50% of your max HP, and when you rescued them you could talk to the Nurse and Doctor to heal to a greater percentage. The healbot speeds that process up a bit by not requiring you to go back to the outpost at all.

-Healbots have been added to every translocator room. These bots will automatically heal you to a percentage of your max HP based on the people you have rescued.

-You can pay G to heal the remaining HP. The price is scaled so that it's slightly cheaper than buying and using items to get the same effect, but you can't take it with you.

-You can interact with the healbot to disable the automatic healing, which is useful if you have a build that relies on keeping your HP low.

Chip Loadouts

You can now experiment, or set up for a specific challenge.

-You can now save and load 5 skill chip loadouts. To get started, press the pause (start/enter) button while on the skill grid. Press up and down to select a loadout. Your current loadout up until this point is number 1.

-You can now remove all skill chips at once. Hold the action button while selecting a loadout. This is something that I didn't want to include until the ability to change loadouts was in the game.

-The Skill Grid UI has been adjusted.

Item Shop Grouping

Star Rift Saga's menuing for the shop was clearly not built with the number of items (around 50) that the game ended up having. This lets you compact the long list for easier navigation once you have more than 10 or so items added to the shop. (In the screenshot here it has been enabled earlier to show off what it looks like when a group has two items in it.)

-The item shop can now have its items grouped by pressing the item buttons while shopping. Similar items will be grouped, and then you can select a group to select the individual item you want. This becomes available once you have enough total items in the shop's inventory.

Translocator Targets

Just general improvements to fast travel to get you around a little faster.

-Translocators can now be used to move from one translocator to another by selecting a different target.

-The translocator in the lab will now automatically open the interface to select a target if you interact with it instead of requiring you to use the nearby computer.

-New audio attached to teleporting.

-Translocator map now shows a name for the selected location's region.

Map Markers

-You can now select a tile in the map to add a marker. Tap again to change the marker, or select it later to remove it.

Controls

Due to the increased menu functionality potentially overlapping with menu controls, menu buttons are now bound to jump and action, with the ability to change the menu type on a keyboard/gamepad basis. This means that select and back can only be bound to the same buttons as other actions, but avoids potential for overlap. The control UI has been updated to reflect this. It should only affect really custom control schemes, and only in terms of menuing.

New Skill Chips

8 new chips have been added. This brings the total number of skill chips to 158. There is an achievement for getting 150 skill chips, which is now slightly easier since it does not require all of the skill chips, which is the intent.

Here's the list, don't read if you want to find them for yourself.

-Plasma Last Shot

-Air Tailwind

-Ice Hardpack

-Storm Ball Lightning

-Omni-Reload

-Dexterity L

-Critical Shieldsteal

-Last Bite

Skill Chip Tuning

Small adjustments.

-Storm First Strike rarity: Rare -> Uncommon. With a new skill chip in the Storm typing and a lot of them at rare, this one felt the least rare of the bunch, so it's been made slightly more common.

-Ice Cold Hearted: Chip Limit 3 -> 1. Adjusted the heal from 0-30% to 25-50%. This chip now heals you a bit regardless of the total freeze amount and scales to a higher number. It also can only have one equipped, but that one chip is now more potent. Existing saves that have multiple equipped should have them disappear on load, and the effect isn't multiplied either way.

Capsulopods

-Capsulopods now change the transparency of the chip cases inside if you don't have enough scrap to use them.

-The cost of crafting is now displayed above each capsulopod when you get close. The color changes if you don't have enough scrap.

-Chip colors have been corrected when selecting a chip to craft from a capsulopod.

Other Small Fixes

-Additional sound effects added to lifesteal effect.

-Fixed some shop inconsistency in the black market.

-Some added sound effects.

-Compressed some sound effects that weren't before. This means that the total install size actually went down despite this update adding new content.

-Some text fixes.

With this update in the books and getting in some features that I wanted to include from the start, I will soon be moving to starting on my next game in earnest. That does not mean the end of content for Star Rift Saga as I have some more things that I'd like to add, but I can't say when it will be coming.

I hope you continue to enjoy Star Rift Saga!