krateria

Greetings, Noveans!
 
This is NQ-Ligo again.
 
We’ve heard your questions on script compatibility since announcing the Lua changes coming in update 1.4. I’m writing to share more information to enable you to better prepare for the update.
 
There's only one change that we haven't been able to make compatible with existing scripts. For everything else, a compatibility layer has been added, there is no need to worry about that!
 
The "breaking" change is the Boolean type fix. For a long time, functions that were supposed to return a Boolean, such as unit.isRemoteControlled, returned an integer (0 or 1). It took a while to correct, but from now on, these functions will return a Boolean (true or false). However, functions requiring a Boolean argument will continue to support integers in addition to Booleans.
 
To assist you, here's an exhaustive list of EXISTING functions that currently return an integer and will now return a Boolean:
 
unit.hasDRM
unit.isRemoteControlled
unit.isMouseControlActivated
unit.isMouseDirectControlActivated
unit.isMouseVirtualJoystickActivated
unit.isAnyLandingGearDeployed
unit.isAnyHeadlightSwitchedOn
databank.hasKey
databank.clearValue
transponder.isActive
transponder.setTags
shield.getState
shield.setResistances
shield.inLockdown
shield.isActive
shield.startVenting
shield.stopVenting
shield.isVenting
shield.setLockdownExitTime
door.isOpen
forcefield.isDeployed
forcefield.setMaxLength
landingGear.isDeployed
light.isActive
light.isBlinking
weapon.isOutOfAmmo
adjustor.isActive
adjustor.setTags
adjustor.isIgnoringTags
brake.isActive
brake.setTags
brake.isIgnoringTags
airfoil.isStalled
airfoil.setTags
airfoil.isIgnoringTags
engine.isActive
engine.isTorqueEnabled
engine.isOutOfFuel
engine.hasFunctionalFuelTank
engine.setTags
engine.isIgnoringTags
antiGravityGenerator.isActive
receiver.hasChannel
receiver.setChannelList
core.isEngineIgnoringTagsById
core.deleteSticker
core.moveSticker
screen.isActive
screen.getMouseState
gyro.isActive
laserDetector.isHit
laserEmitter.isActive
manualButton.isDown
manualSwitch.isActive
manualSwitch.isDown
radar.setSortMethod
radar.isConstructIdentified
radar.isConstructAbandoned
radar.hasMatchingTransponder
construct.isWarping
construct.isInPvPZone
construct.isPlayerBoarded
construct.isPlayerBoardedInVRStation
construct.isConstructDocked
construct.setDockingMode
construct.dock
construct.undock
construct.forceDeboard
construct.forceUndock
construct.forceInterruptVRSession
player.isSeated
player.isParentedTo
player.isSprinting
player.isJetpackOn
player.isHeadlightOn
player.isFrozen
player.hasDRMAutorization
system.destroyWidgetPanel
system.destroyWidget
system.destroyData
system.updateData
system.addDataToWidget
system.removeDataFromWidget
system.isFirstPerson
system.isViewLocked
system.isPlayingSound
 
As for other changes, such as the JSON library change, we've made sure to maintain compatibility with your existing scripts, either by making added arguments optional (thanks to the implementation of the nil type in our API), or by adding derivations. However, in the future, I recommend including the "json.lua" library instead of "dkjson.lua" to avoid using the compatibility layer if you want to optimize your script.
 
As with every update, we'll also be pushing an updated Lua API mockup on the game's official GitHub.
 
We hope this helps you better prepare for the upcoming Lua changes in update 1.4! Happy coding, Noveans!
 
NQ-Ligo

Greetings, Noveans!
 
Every gamer is unique, each boasting their own preferred playstyle, control setup, and comfort zones. Your game controls should reflect this individuality. That's why our Input Remapping Upgrades, coming soon in Update 1.4, are designed to give you more control - literally and figuratively.
 
Dual Universe hosts numerous controls, many of which have been hidden from players. Our Input Remapping Upgrades will vastly expand the game's control settings, making these hidden controls visible and customizable. You can rebind them to your preferred keys… including those on gamepads and joysticks! Both systems are now correctly supported. For instance, you can bind specific controls to the axis turn of a joystick.
 
In addition, we've introduced many new controls, allowing you to personalize your settings with intricate detail. If you’re a player who enjoys crafting your control schemes, you’ll find these new options on our control settings page.
 
This is just the beginning, Noveans. We’re already working on introducing more features to Input Remapping in the future, such as the ability to import and export control profiles to the server, allowing for seamless importing into applications like GeForce Now. We also aim for more direct Lua integration in future versions.
 
These changes are designed to empower you and make Dual Universe more accessible by supporting gamepads, joysticks, and more. Whether you plan to intricately craft your control schemes or simply enjoy flying across Helios with a HOTAS system, we hope you’ll have a great time with the Input Remapping Upgrades in Update 1.4.
 
The Novaquark Team
 

Greetings Noveans!
 
February is here and love is in the air! 
We think it is a great time to show our love for our players by offering the chance to get some free goodies with the “Luv Me DU” event.

“Luv Me DU” Event Details:
 
Stop on by and get your free gifts from the “Luv ME DU” Event dispenser, which is located in the center of the Alioth Exchange, in front of the Red Hall, here:
 
::pos{0,2,24.3790,99.3714,123.9987}
 
The “Luv ME DU” dispenser will be available until Monday February 20th 2023 @ 18:00 UTC.
 
Along with the free loot, there will be the makings of your very own Luv ME DU Decoration construct.
 
We would really LUV to see your best screenshots, of you and your Luv Me DU construct, in your favorite location or interesting situation.

You can share your screenshots here in this thread, or send them along to the Community Spotlight.

We want to send our appreciation out to our players, and thank you all for being part of Dual Universe!
 

Dear Noveans,
 
Update 1.3 is on its way! As we finalize the Maintenance Unit and prepare for its public test session (more on that below), we are excited to share the details of update 1.3 with all of you.

We also want to thank you for your patience as we work towards bringing you a new PvE system in Dual Universe. Our development team is working hard to create an exciting and enjoyable feature that provides the best gaming experience for everyone. We are prioritizing PvE and are working to bring it to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, you can still look forward to other new features (like the ones below), with more details coming on our Social Media and teaser livestreams on Twitch.

With that, let’s look at update 1.3!
 
THE MAINTENANCE UNIT

We’re replacing Repair Units with Maintenance Units, giving players more flexibility in maintaining their constructs by allowing repair and disassembly.

Repair:
You can choose to repair damaged elements, honeycomb, or both Use scrap to repair damaged elements or replace them Choose what happens to extra elements: If damaged elements are not part of the original snapshot, they can either be recycled or repaired with scrap and recovered. They will be recovered if they are undamaged but not part of the original construct snapshot. Destroyed extra elements (those with no remaining repair counts) will be recycled.  
Repairing honeycomb structures requires the exact amount of honeycomb missing, and elements still need the same amount of scrap to fix.

Disassembly:
You can remove all honeycomb and elements on a construct, including the core. The maintenance unit will use its linked container to retrieve all items instead of using it to repair. Damaged elements can be repaired with scrap before recovery or recycled. Destroyed elements (those with no remaining repairs) will always be recycled.  

 
THE CONSTRUCT SCHEMATIC CONTAINER

Following popular demand by our community members who grew tired of manually inserting schematics into industries, we’ve now added the option to designate a single container on a construct to act as the schematic provider for all industry units on the construct.
This feature is accessible by simply right-clicking on a container and selecting “Set as schematic container” from the context menu.
 
UEF SHOP EXPANSION

Looking to buy ships from Aphelia? We’ve grown the UEF shop with new floors and a Blueprint Basement that sells copies of all outposts and speeders. Before launch, we ran the ‘Build Your Legacy’ contest, giving DU builders a chance to be woven into the game by building speeders and outposts for new players. We’ve added the winners to our First Time User Experience and into the Blueprint Basement of UEF stores. We’ve also added four bonus speeders and an extra outpost!
 

 
INTRODUCING EASYANTICHEAT (EAC)

Accessing and manipulating game files is critical to many disreputable players who want to cheat by automating actions or gaining hidden data, for example. To combat this, we shortlisted EQU8 and EasyAntiCheat (EAC) when implementing our original solution for Dual Universe. With the sale of EQU8 to 1047 Games and the closure of their service to third-party customers, we will switch to EAC.
We want to thank EQU8 for their amazing service and responsive support and are excited to transition into EAC. The only change that should be visible to our players is seeing EAC instead of EQU8 as the anti-cheat system in Dual Universe.
 
UPCOMING PTS SESSION

Many of you have requested a PTS testing session, and our goal is to open the PTS to the public between Friday, February 10th, at 10:00 UTC and Monday, February 13th, at 10:00 UTC.
The PTS will allow you to test all features of Update 1.3 and help us with information and feedback on the PTS Forum thread to tune the features.
Your involvement has been invaluable in helping us shape the future of Dual Universe. As we progress with development, we want to thank you for your continued support and engagement and invite you to share your feedback. We’re working hard to give you all an enjoyable and immersive gaming experience and look forward to introducing more upcoming features.

Thanks for playing, Noveans!

Hello, everyone! I'm Mark van den Heuvel, known to many of you as NQ-Deckard, a member of the Production team here at Novaquark.
 
First, to those of you who celebrated your new year recently, I wish you a wonderful new year, and I look forward to seeing all of your creations in-game. As we step into 2023, I want to bring you all up to speed on where we're at with Dual Universe and where we are going.
 
After our launch last September, we have all worked hard to squash remaining bugs and improve balancing. We also delivered the promised digital Kickstarter rewards to our backers.
 
As is always the case with Dual Universe, work does create itself in front of us, and we have a great deal to work on and improve. One of our current central goals is to enhance the gameplay experience and catch up with some features and quality-of-life improvements, particularly some of those requested by our community.
 
Let me walk you through some of what we have planned for you both soon and further down the road.
 
Planets

We’ve recently released a new version of Talemai, and we’re continuing work on the others. After reviewing our progress, we've decided to take extra time to make the new planets truly feel different with new art, new terrain, and more exciting features. This means they are coming at a slower pace and possibly in a different order than we had envisioned. Expect new teasers, concept art, and images from us soon™!

Combat Missions

We had decided early in the life of Dual Universe not to focus on a PvE combat system, given other priorities. With all of the feedback we’ve received since the beginning of the game, PvE combat has consistently remained a highly requested feature from our community. We always try to listen to your feedback, and I’m happy to announce that we have begun work on implementing the first iteration of a PvE combat system into the game!
We’re planning the first version to be a PvE mission system that takes players into combat in their ships. The missions will scale in size to allow all players (solo or part of a larger group) to participate.
 
We’re very excited about the PvE combat feature. It will add more engaging gameplay for all Noveans and allow players to try out the rigors of space combat before heading out to battle with other players in Dual Universe PvP.
 
We are still in the early development of this feature, and it will take time, but we are already looking forward to seeing you all trying it in future PTS sessions. Your feedback will be instrumental in our developing PvE combat in Dual Universe.

PvP Improvements

Following a recent and very successful round table discussion with members of our PvP community, we are reviewing all the feedback gathered and our own data to determine what changes we will make. We are considering increasing the importance and/or requirement of having voxel armor onboard successful PvP ship designs, finding ways to encourage multi-crew ship setups, and potentially restricting the ability to remove cargo while in combat. Stay tuned for more exciting developments on PvP.

Contest Winner Constructs

Before launch, we ran the Build Your Legacy Contest for players to design starting outposts and speeders, with the winning entries being added to Dual Universe. We are currently working to make the constructs that the contest winners submitted available as options to select during the first start of the game, and we are also looking to make these available for purchase in the UEF shop. The contest entries were original and impressive. I want to congratulate all of you who took part. 

Maintenance Unit

A complete rework of the repair unit was planned for the 1.2 release just before the holidays. The feature still needed more work, and we decided to delay its release with plans to include it in the upcoming 1.3 update. When finished, the repair unit will be replaced with the maintenance unit, which can repair constructs with scrap and disassemble constructs. However, construct disassembly is the feature that still requires the most work, and we are determining if the feature will make it into the 1.3 release. When added, this feature will remove the pain of finding that one last bit of voxel in a construct and make redesigning builds easier, with the Maintenance Unit taking down constructs for you.

Joystick Support

Dual Universe already has a basic system to connect joysticks to the game. However, these were never cohesively connected with the Lua system. We will change that, allowing players to map analog and button inputs from Joysticks, Throttles, Pedals, and even simple Gamepads into Dual Universe. This will significantly improve the flying experience for non-Lua developing players and open new doors for Lua developers through projects such as Lua arcade games, custom flight control systems, and other nifty things our community creates.

Default Lua Configuration Rework

Once we’ve added Joystick support, we will redesign the default Lua scripts we give to players. Our community has long requested this update, and we want to ensure we deliver it. We will add a full suite of features and improvements. This means new Lua flight control systems, the ability to toggle widgets on and off without requiring Lua code, and integrating several systems not fully encapsulated in current control scripts, such as Anti-Gravity Generators.

Fuel Intake Changes

This has been a popular demand by our players, and we are looking into options to allow players to refuel tanks from another element. Currently, we plan to make a  'Fuel Intake' able to act as a proxy for a single fuel tank. This feature is still on the drawing board and may change as we dive deeper into it.
 
-------------------------------------------

As always, thank you for reading this short overview of some of what’s coming up. I hope you have a clearer picture of the direction we're taking Dual Universe in, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the forums. Have a wonderful day.
- Mark (NQ-Deckard)
 

Well, experienced that..from the other side. And you're right.. it's easy enough to 'dodge a gank' by just tapping or stay max 30 mins..and that's the exact reason why this gameplay was bad. There was no risk..you exactly knew whats coming.
What we will get now is real risk vs reward..where you might risk to stay longer..with the increasing risk of encounter a random patrol.

But i understand why you're pissed...you're used to a broken game mechanic that allowed pvpers to gank and controll 99% of pvp space resources from a gui list, and i assume you liked that a lot.
It can hurt getting something taken away..get over it and see it as what it is, a fix to improve the game..even if it comes very late

Greetings Noveans,
 
As many of you may have noticed, there have been no Market Bot buy orders available recently. We wanted to give you an update about this topic. 
 
The Market bots were initially designed to help kickstart the Helios economy for the launch of Dual Universe. It gave all Noveans a chance at earning more quanta at the beginning, in order to jumpstart the global in-game economy.
 
We have been closely watching the amount of quanta obtained selling to the Market Bots and we have determined that Market Bots are no longer needed and this ability has now been turned off, which means that players will no longer be able to sell to Market Bots.
 
A note from NQ-Entropy:
 
Just to establish some background, before Market Bots started running out, the T1 ore buy orders were the first quanta faucet in the game economy, with missions coming in second. Another point of note is that since the start of the game the total amount of quanta in the game has never stopped climbing. It was honestly a scary level of inflation for the early state of the game.

One of the reasons we had mentioned when we did the release wipe is that the economy was in trouble and the state and health of the economy is something we are paying especially close attention to after wipe. While we didn't communicate on this, and perhaps we should have, is that we knew we needed bot buy orders on launch, but we were unsure as to if and when we were going to refresh them. We know that there was some confusion about this and we do sincerely apologize for any miscommunication. However, it has become apparent that keeping bot orders refreshed would not be a good thing for the economy, and ultimately the game at large.

So let's talk about the game itself, there's a couple of things I want to mention. The realities of a game with a pseudo-economy and a real market is that we are in a basic version of supply and demand. If the supply for a resource is too high, the cost will fall. Unfortunately, it was too idealistic to think that everyone could free-farm a T1 ore territory cluster and make guaranteed (and quite high) profit. On average ore buy orders were seeding 3 to 4 times as much quanta as was being sinked by territory taxes.

The second thing I’d like to mention is that for most players there is no requirement for your territories to always be online. HQ territories still allow you to build and run industries. The only thing onlining a territory does is activate mining units and if it is unprofitable to do so, you may choose to offline/HQ your territories.

Territories and mining units were never meant as a means to print infinite money, sustainably, with no risk and limited effort. The tradeoff you are making when activating a territory and running mining units is paying tax for access to resources. What you do with those resources, and what is possible with those resources is up to you, and to an extent, the state of the game and its economy. It may be that it's a good time to make a profit on the market, but it may also be that you just need extra resources for honeycomb, scrap, or materials to run industries and make items you need.

If it is the case that the supply exceeds the demand, and as a result of that, prices sink, then it may be that the best solution for you is simply to go buy those cheap ressources at the market and take advantage of the surplus of resources. The more people do this, then demand should rise, and so will the cost, until we find some sort of equilibrium.
 
Adding another thing: Ultimately one of the main things that matter in all of this is fundamentally balancing our supply versus our demand. When it comes to T1 ore, the barrier to entry is incredibly low, even a starter character can have a basic mining unit setup over a couple territories in a few days. The question is, how many people as a rough percentage of the player-base are needed to supply the game with the resources that all players require? We fundamentally don't expect all players to need or want to gather resources, that's why markets exist. The real question is if that number is too high and too low. The issue that we are seeing now I believe is that while bots were still active, mining units were a good form of income for everyone, because the prices were artificially pumped up. That will not be the case anymore and we will have to find some form of equilibrium between people willing to farm resources and people who ultimately would prefer to buy them at a competitive price. For those staying in the MU field, as with any competitive endeavor, it will come down to organization, talents and preparation to stay competitive if you truly wish to make good profit selling ore from MU.
 
The counter-balance is that if resources were ever too expensive and demand was higher than supply, either due to some sort of market interdiction, or other similar phenomenon, anyone is free to pay for a couple territories to start flowing resources into the economy to rebalance the supply and demand or to acquire resources at a “cheaper” price. 

It could be that it requires too few people to supply the game with the resources it needs, and in that case, we have levers we can ultimately use to change the balancing of the game and make the demand higher, such as making crafting more resource demanding, or introducing more element sinks.

Finally, a note on buy and sell orders. We understand that without infinite buy orders the market feels less fluid. This is the reality of the size of our economy at this point in time. People will have to get more used to utilizing buy and sell orders as opposed to instant buy and sell. Don't get tricked by players putting up low buy orders, put up a sell order at a fair price and people will buy it. Make no mistake, people out there need ore, and are willing to pay for it.

We understand many of you enjoyed using the Market Bot orders, but ultimately this amount of quanta flowing into the economy could not last. We will be continuing to monitor the in-game economy very closely.

Rebuilding Helios will be easier with our enhanced Blueprint Deployment Tools.
 
bptoolv3.mp4  
You can omit any element, swap missing honeycomb, and soon after launch, snap blueprints to deployed cores.
 
What will you build first, Novean?

The Dual Universe egg hunt has begun Noveans! 
 
From Saturday, April 16th to Monday, April 25th, please join us for An Egg-cellent Adventure!
 
All around Alioth you will randomly find colored eggs on the ground as well as some other in plain sight places. Some of them you may find often (common), some of them might be a rare find or if your egg detecting skills meet the challenge, you may find a special Novaquark staff egg! All eggs contain gifts from the Novaquark team, so do not forget to smash them open to see what’s inside!
 
There have been several players who have already found some eggs, so you’re going to need to be quick, lucky, as well as very observant!  
 
There’s more! This Egg-tastic celebration is also a competition. Each egg is worth a certain amount of point(s), which means the rarer the egg, the more points you will get. Colors include white eggs (most common), green, yellow, blue, red and the very special Novaquark staff egg which is the most valuable of them all!
 
Once you find an egg, there will be a special code inside (read carefully!). Copy the code and enter it into this simple form that is linked inside the egg and register your code to start accumulating points!

 
Helpful Hint: Start your search by looking around the Point of Interests (POIs) around Alioth.  
 
Good luck Noveans, be egg-cellent to each other. 

The Dual Universe Demeter update is fast-approaching. In addition to the geometry reset and the introduction of mining units, Territory Upkeep will also be part of the package. 
 
Territory upkeep presents two benefits from a design standpoint: it should help prevent infinite land grabbing by introducing a constant financial constraint to massive land owners as well as provide a resource sink to help keep the economy in check. 
 
We looked at different options to bring some form of balance in the control of territories. For example, the current setup for organizations, that allows infinite nested organizations, ruled out a progressive tax system, as nested organizations with one territory each can be created to only benefit from the lowest tax level. 

OFFLINE, ONLINE AND TAXES
For now, the cost of claiming a territory will be at a fixed price of 500,000 quanta. After the Demeter deployment, the territory will be free from taxes for three days, which is the equivalent of having a tax break for the first week. 
 

 
Accessing the Territory interface through the Wallet menu will show you a list of your territories and their stored funds. Here is where you will add quanta to the balance for any of your territories. Taxes will automatically be withdrawn from this balance at a rate of 1,000,000 quanta per week. Each territory can hold up to 13 weeks of quanta.
 
Territories with unpaid taxes will go offline. Once funds have been added, you will be able to activate the territory once again and it will come back online, allowing mining and industry processes to be restarted. If the territory was online before the tax was successfully withdrawn, industry and mining will simply continue to run.
 
In the event that the territory successfully pays its tax, and the balance is reduced below the point that the next taxation cycle will have insufficient funds, a notification will be sent to the owner or the legates of the organization that owns the territory.
 
If the territory does not have enough quanta to cover the week, the territory will go offline and cease all mining and industry operations and a reminder notification will be sent to the territory owner or legates of the organization that owns the territory. During this period, the affected territory will not contribute to the adjacency bonus of the mining units.
 
If a territory remains offline for two consecutive tax cycles (two weeks in total), the ownership to the territory is lost and it becomes abandoned, unless that territory is flagged as a headquarters from the territory interface.

HEADQUARTERS
Each player will be able to assign five territories as their headquarters. These territories do not lose ownership when offline and remain in the players' ownership even if taxes are unpaid for longer than the two week grace period. This feature is only available to player-owned, not organization-owned, territories. We will monitor how this develops; in the future, these territories may be subject to the loss of their headquarters state if the account in question is unsubscribed; however this will not be the case in Demeter. 

TERRITORY EXCHANGE
To allow for the transfer of territory ownership to another player or organization, a territory can now be tokenized. By simply right-clicking on the territory unit, a token can be generated similar to the way constructs can be tokenized. Once tokenized, the territory will be frozen, preventing the deployment of new static constructs and terraforming operations. Mining and industry units placed on the territory will continue working as intended so long as the upkeep taxes are paid. 
 

 
The token itself will contain information about the territory and the static constructs deployed on it. Although it can be used to take ownership of that territory, this does not grant ownership of the static constructs on it. The quanta balance of that territory will transfer with the territory to the new owner.
 

 
If the token expires, it disappears and the territory will be unfrozen and remain in the token creator's ownership.

REQUISITIONING CONSTRUCTS
While territories can be lost by remaining offline due to unpaid taxes or they can be traded to other entities, static constructs may still be present on those territories.
 
The new owner of a territory can requisition any static construct present on his territory. Requisitioning will start a two-week window where the new territory owner must allow access to the static construct for the former owner and where the former owner of the static construct is able to remove that static construct by dismantling and removing it from the territory. If the static construct is still present after two weeks, its ownership will automatically be transferred to the new owner of the territory. Constructs on abandoned territories that haven’t been claimed by a new owner can’t be requisitioned though. 

STARTING WITH DEMETER…
We understand that players will need some time to adjust to the new Territory Upkeep system. In order to allow time to prepare, the first tax payments will be subtracted from the territories two weeks after the Demeter release date. Once the update is live, we will announce the exact date and time the first tax cycle will begin. 
 
CAVEATS AND COMMENTS
As with most new systems, many things are subject to change, including UI, naming conventions, tax rates, etc. Your feedback has already made a difference as the system was being developed, and we’ll continue to look at our players’ input to see what further adjustments need to be made. Share your thoughts in this forum thread. 
 

what we need to have the complete fun in the game
1, First part finish Missionsystem
2. Second Part : Avatar against Avatar on Planets
3. Second Part: Planetary War
4. Third Part: NPC Fights on Planet and in Space
then the future of DU is great!
and very important! A clear announcement of what is being worked on at the moment or how Avatar is planned against Avatar or the other points.
 

In that regard, I think npcs should only spawn in more controlled areas. 
 
Something like elite dangerous odissey. 
 
I agree with you that it would be impossible to program an decent IA in a totally dynamic env, unless you integrate some gpt3 into it. 

No man's sky did it with a 15 people team. 
I'm pretty sure that this is not the only problem. 
 
No man's sky has dynamic voxel based planets and npc/creatures. 
 
 

Hey there, Noveans!

As we ramp up for the next Dual Universe update, we wanted to begin sharing information about some of the interesting new features you can look forward to with the arrival of 0.24.
 
One of the key highlights of 0.24 is the Mission system, affording the movers and shakers an opportunity to, well, move and shake their way to a wealthier DU lifestyle. And who doesn’t love the delicious sound of quanta cascading in their coffers? ?
 
OUR MISSION

In listening to player feedback, we know that players have been looking for more ways to make money. The Mission system will provide those opportunities in a number of ways that suits a wide swath of playstyles and experience.
 
The intent of Mission system is to:
 
Offer new ways for players, especially new players, to make money. Allow merchants to focus on creating goods rather than spending time traveling to markets to sell their wares. Give those who enjoy traveling more than making things a lucrative reason to take to those beautiful, wide-open skies. Create more traffic in space, hence more opportunities for pirates. Help organizations to coordinate internal work.
  The long-term goal is to enrich the Mission system with more mission types, starting with “taxi” missions, SoS, and later adding PvP and various other “formalizable” activities. For now, we’re introducing the Mission system with transport-type hauling missions.

It all starts with the Mission Panel, a dedicated dashboard tab for job and hauling missions. It is equivalent to other dashboard tabs such as the organization dashboard tab. Within the Mission Panel, you’ll find the "Job Forum" section and the "Hauling" section. Each of these contains a similar page: a home page, a search page, a creation modal, etc.

THE JOB FORUM

The Job Forum allows players to create jobs with various specifications. (Please note that the UI for the Mission system is still in progress. The images below are samples of what it will look like.)


 
The upper part of the interface lists “Aphelia” jobs, which are created by Novaquark to provide information about game events, like discovering new wreck ships, etc.
Players can inspect job details in a dedicated window and engage in a conversation with the job issuer in a mini-chat integrated to the mission.


 
You will also find Aphelia (NPC) missions that will provide new ways of making money. And, lastly, issuers can limit their missions to fellow org members only as a way to keep transactions and missions in-house.

HAULING MISSIONS

These come with formal guarantees on the rewards, collaterals, time, etc. It is tightly-coupled with the possibility to create sell orders so that you can express your intention to sell a good on a distant market and simultaneously create a transport mission to arrange transport of the goods to the said market.
The definition of a hauling mission includes:
 
Start/end point + indication if this is in PvP zone or not. Collateral (lost by the mission responder if the mission is not completed). Time limit. Reward.
The game enforces these, picking the rewards and putting collateral in escrow when the mission is created. The content of the mission is to be retrieved either from a “mission container” (a new type of container dedicated to hauling missions, think of it as a mailbox) or from a market container. It is then stored as a package with the content hidden for the mission responder. (Opening the package voids the mission and the collateral is paid.) The package can be retrieved or delivered by interacting directly with the associated container (via context-menu entries) or within a 2km range by using the controls on the interface.

Failing a mission can occur if:
 
The responder does not deliver within the given time frame (including if the package is destroyed). The package is opened by either the responder or someone else (i.e. pirates). The destruction of the destination container does not fail the mission. Instead, the mission responder can keep the package and open it without penalty; however, this means the mission cannot be completed anymore.
  CAVEAT EMPTOR

What is important to remember is that negotiations about rewards, or even the job description and purpose, are entirely declarative and non-binding. It is there as a statement, made clear with various warnings and “Are you sure?” windows.
 
There’s often an element of danger involved when doing business. For some, the lure of pulling one over on an unsuspecting stranger has an even larger allure than the money to be made. Sure, you can scam sweet, trusting little lambs for a time, but eventually you’ll be the one to pay the price. Both the Job Forum and the Mission system have the possibility to rate the interaction for the issuer and the responder. Scores between 0 and 5 are attached to players as responders or issuers of missions (both formal and jobs), which will help to identify and potentially weed out scammers.
 
YOUR FIRST MISSION STARTS HERE

Your mission now, should you choose to accept it, is to head over to this section of the forums to share your thoughts about this devblog. Which do you anticipate doing the most: creating missions, doing missions, or pirating missions?