Kezzle

BP - Blueprint that lets you quickly deploy an arrangement of voxels and elements that you have in your possession. AKA "Bloop".

Wait, what? There are mineable ores on the Sanc moon? When did they spawn?!

Yeah, DU runs on a geographically distributed mesh of servers, not one roomful of rackmount.

Nobody knows any more. It used to be that an open beta was for finding bugs in an essentially feature-complete game, the kind of bugs that only show up when lots of people are playing on lots of different hardware configurations. During a beta, polishing and improvement of existing features would continue, and maybe one or two small bonus features would get added, but nothing fundamental would change, because change adds bugs, and the beta was there to try and eliminate those before "launch". Nowadays, it can be anything from a fund-raising exercise to a charged test of an Alpha build by any other name. This game is not the only culprit in "stretching" the definition.

You are not a pirate. Not yet. You want to be a pirate, and to your credit, are putting in the work necessary. Even to the point of helping create the economy which is necessary for pirates to exist and prey upon. This game is not about just jumping into roles that are established in a flourishing (by artifical means) economy and society. The big tagline for this game from the beginning has been about "building a civilisation". We are still at the "from scratch" stage. Mostly. The building civilisation part has to be there for everyone, since if it's completely avoidable for anyone, it effectively doesn't exist, and, as I've said, it's one of the core concepts of the game.

Make sure to read the warning dialog that pops up, though. It will save frustration... I'd quote it but I can't remember all the things it said, so won't, in case, dear reader, you decide I've told you enough when I haven't...

Once you've got some mining skills, the size of all the digging tools can be adjusted with Ctrl-mousewheel. They're all (mining, Detecing and Scanning) separate and will reset to smallest when you relog. If you want to keep using your tunnels, don't make crossroads, because it's easy to miss a side passage when you're jetpacking along a tunnel. If you make a dogleg or a small chamber, your navigation is easier. Similarly, if you're going down, don't do it in the middle of a tunnel, dig a scoop or two out to one side and go down from there. This isn't so important for T1s because you'll just be riddling the near surface with tunnels that go from deposit-to-deposit, but once you're mining deep, you won't want to excavate a second mile-deep shaft without good reason, so keeping your workings navigable and organised will save time when you come back. Mining into a linked container is Big and Clever: link the container from the RMB context-sensitive menu, and make that your active container using Ctrl-I. Once you're going for deeper ore, you'll want Talents that increas your linked container range. If you've been mining "ad hoc" underground into a container, the fastest way out once the container is full might actually be a new tunnel, rather than trying to retrace your steps through your galleries and connecting tunnels and exploratory excavations. You might want a destination waypoint to aim at so you come out somewhere near your transport/base.

They're in the same building as the market terminals. There are voxel-built numbers in the walls and floor of an open-fronted room. IIRC, looking towards the tutorial plaza, they're on the left, at the plaza end of the passageway.

I read somewhere that "it isn't" (done, that is). They seem to have neglected to provide this function in this week's revamp of the website. It's a pretty egregious oversight. I gather they are "working on it".

If you're not happy about paying to participate in a beta, why would you, y'know, pay to participate in a beta? At least part of the function of the beta sub is to make sure the place isn't flooded with people who a) expect a finished game - it's not an unreasonable expectation that you would read about the current state of the game if you're blowing 20 bucks on it b) pop in, litter the place with never-to-be-visited-again bases and constructs then leave forever after a few days. People have been paying to test this game for years. The bar just got lower, is all (20 bucks not 60). There is no standard definition of what beta means any more in the game world. Or Alpha. Or "release" for that matter. The old definitions are gone forever, and nowadays you have to do research to find out the true state of a game. I attribute this to the evolution of crowdfunding models where the investors want access to the product *way* earlier than any studio-produced game would be allowed out into the world in any form. Development cycles for games like this have become extended because small development houses can now aspire to produce things that would have needed massive studios to even begin, in the "old days". Me, I've had one single CTD in the entire week I've been in-game that wasn't network-related. There are bundles of other bugs, sure. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have called it a beta release; the game's not even feature-complete (no Avatar-to-Avatar run-and-gun is probably the biggest feature that you couldn't call a refinement of something that's present in some limited bare-bones/embryonic form). I'd have moved from the "closed alpha" that the backers supported, to an "open alpha" stage. But I'm old-fashioned and still have memories of the time when Beta meant something.

If you're sure you actually got "issued" with your STU out of the dispenser, and it's not in your inventory, and you didn't lose it in a forced-respawn, it looks like you may have successfully placed it... Particularly since you say you were "denied" the second time... what happened the *first* time? Is it at all possible that it did deploy, and something about that wasn't obvious/glitched so you thought it didn't? You could go back up to the Observatory and check that you've "got all you're allowed" out of the dispenser of STUs, to make double-sure. If you're sure there's nothing more you can check, you can submit a support request by going to the Help menu on the DU main page, selecting Support (goes to the page with links to FAQs and "Recommended Articles", and in the black bar at the top, towards the right there is a button for "Submit a Request". There is, predictably, a notification that they have a lot of support requests to handle at the moment... Hope that helps.

Remote control: isn't that a bit of a luxury? I've not been on the market, since I've only had the time to do some mining, but isn't there anything on there at all? A week in, even solo players bootstrapping themselves out of their pockets full of rocks should be starting to think "maybe I could sell a spare one of [whatever] and get [this other thing] off someone else a bit quicker than making it myself" . Is the market really totally devoid of sell orders? That would be a bad sign.

Sorta. You have to build the things your nanoconstructor (aka "in your pockets") that you can, and *they* can build the things you need to build the things you need. It's a classic "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" arrangement, the same as you need to build a small constructor in your suit constructor, then a medium constructor in the small constructor, than a large in the medium, in Empyrion.

The NDA will, if all continues going to plan, be lifted on the 27th, so we can't help with more info than what's already out there from official sources, I'm afraid.

The servers were definitely up when you posted that question, so you should have been, given you're an Alpha tester. If you're still stuck, I'd raise a ticket with support or search for that error message in the NDA forums.

Yeah, beta keys are "extras" for you to pass out to whomever you wish. You already have access to the entirety of beta for yourself, as an alpha backer. I've seen nothing yet that suggests the beta keys are available for us to distribute; the web site is being updated, and when that comes on line we should have access to the tools to spread the good news. Yes, I know the OP probably already spent the weekend selling T5s to the bots and then diving into the massive pools of quanta, but if someone searches they might find this and have a bit more precise an idea what beta keys are for; I know I struggled to find that info before I subbed.

Another approach would be to let the defender set the time for the battle (within a certain timeframe of the initial attack, of course).

It also beggars belief that you have to be able to spawn an element before you can produce the design of a construct that element is going into. Have they no CAD, in the Dual Universe. Restrict it to "within the client". Restrict it to "logged in and in-world" (I see no advantage, personally to having it stand alone from the DU world, but permit people to throw components together before they've acually built them. Please?

Yeah. It should be possible to download and install the game using a beta key, befrore B-day, with the last lock falling away when the beta actually opens.

Lots of Orgs will want Antipodean members even if they're not based Down Under, just for the additional timezones of coverage, I know the org I ran with during the stress test has people from all over as members. And peoples' sleep patterns are so varied, there seemed to be someone to talk to most of the time!

It's an Alpha. It's really important that you check what the term Alpha means to the company that's running it, since it's a verrrrry moveable feast, it seems. Some have the servers up all the time but constantly reset them, some have windows of open and closed servers, some are pretty much free-play. If you're not happy with service interruptions, though, you shouldn't even be looking at Alpha, and possibly even Beta games as anything other than a pre-order; getting any "worthwhile" play time during these stages is *gravy*. I pledged this week, having finally got my head around what the packages offer, and even if you get zero play time in Alpha, the €60 package is excellent value for money, giving you and one other free access to beta (which if normal development extension applies isn't going to end before this time next year at the very earliest) and then (possibly, based on their statements in the business model announcement back in July) 6 months of the release game.

Great. Thanks very much!

I am a little puzzled about the beta keys which come with backer packs. Are they just "permission to invite someone to the beta"? Or do they come with playtime (a month? the whole of Beta?) attached? Is the beta not going to be "open to all"? FWIW, the FAQ from 6 July 2020 https://www.dualthegame.com/en/news/2020/07/06/dual-universe-faq-beta-release-pricing-strategy-and-more/ suggests that the value of the DACs associated with a pack will be based on the originally-assumed monthly sub of $15, so a DAC could plausibly be assumed to be worth a couple of months subscription once the game is released. If what I gather about the dev team and their objectives, I'd estimate that 6 months is a minimum for beta to last.

Griefing is emphatically not just 'attacking', it's "attacking with no in-game reason". The only thing anyone gets out of griefing is the sad lols of people who think raining on other people's parades is funny. Fortunately, such arbitrary harrassment isn't going to be practicable as a base play style in a universe where everything has to be dug out of the ground by a player, if that's the way the game turns out, and I get the impression that's pretty much the end goal. Griefing takes resources: fuel, ammo, repairs (hopefully, when people make efforts, however ineffective, to protect themselves). It will take a special kind of griefer to undertake that kind of hassle to maintain their yucks factor. Add in that there will be effective orgs who'll happily squelch such operators, and I don't anticipate that true griefing will be much of a problem. General harrassment is another matter though. Extortion, displacement, outright conquest, those will all be among the reasons to engage in harrassing tactics. But they will be *directed* at a goal in game, and part of the PVP dynamic.