0.518.17 - Element of Surprise

Antonoff-Titan AT-K225 hits the market
Made in collaboration with Titan Heavy Industries and Antonoff, AT-K225 general cargo carrier features a modular design capable of adopting a wide range of cargo requirements. The processed cargo storage relies on dedicated THI docking bays to host up to 6 compatible autonomous containers to increase ships' cargo capacity. A stock variant comes with a standard THI Cargo Containers pre-installed.

New sensor data protocol
Improvements in compression and predictive error-correction algorithms lead to development of an improved sensor data protocol, boasting over an 80% increase in bandwidth accompanied by vastly improved error resistance. On-board computers featuring new protocols are expected to hit the commercial market this year.

Elon Intersteallar Recall
Elon Interstellar issued a limited recall on its Model E excavation ship. The newly discovered flaw in the signature excavator/cargo bay combo caused actuators to misfire under high stress and rapidly open the cargo bay, leading to both dangerous shifts in the ship's centre of mass and direct damage to the craft. Both the actuators and any damaged cargo bay doors will be replaced free of charge.

Maintenance Logs
- Antonoff-Titan AT-K225 is now available for purchase.
- The new AT-K225 Head-Up Display can now be retrofitted to ships.
- Obonto habitats will now dock ships further away, making docking easier and allowing them to dock bigger ships.
- Adjusted performance settings for asteroids spawning, which could stop all ice generation if enough ships and drones were on screen.
- New proximity buffer tuning setting for MLF Haul drones control how close to your ship drones can keep ore.
- Music changes were subject to performance throttling, making music changes inconsistent across machines.
- Improved performance of graphical displays on all Head-Up Displays.
- Improved performance of physics/collision computations.
- Improved performance of charts in Tuning and Hardware menus and on Head-Up Displays that use them.
- Greatly improved performance of thruster physics simulations, which is most noticeable when multiple ships or a drone swarm approaches your position.
- Fixed a physics model bug that caused the Elon Interstellar Model E excavator to jerk open on some occasions, which could damage your ship.
- Added missing mipmaps on EIME excavator sprites, which makes them look better at distance.
- Having multiple mining companions mounted on your ship will not cause the camera at Enceladus Prime to zoom out further out.
- Excavator opened with a double-tap action will now stay open when you enter the OMS menu.
- Changed how AI and your pilots perceive the shape of the Phage Class stations, which used to freak out pilots and AI when they got near them.
- Haul drones will now release any target that entered a cargo hold immediately.
- Pirates that really hate you, but ask for a truce themselves due to circumstances won’t open fire on you once you close the comms window.
- You could fix some of your hardware in-flight when you adjusted jury-rig settings and caused damage again.
- Hitting something massive with an Elon Interstellar Model E excavator will not bounce you aside so much anymore.
- Shader animations running on GPU (like the ringstorm discharge or HUD elements on Eagle Prospector) will now respect pause mode and time dilation.
- Racing autopilot course predictions on big ships like Cothon-212 or AT-K225 were not accurate.
- Cradled equipment like mining companions and cargo containers could collide with your ship hull when spawning, which misaligned them when you examined the ship or started a dive.
- When you pick a new astrogation destination while the trajectory countdown is in progress, the counter will reset now.
- Crew after performing EVA could get stuck visually to the ship they flew from.
- New achievements.
- Updated translations.

PROLOGUE 1.15.7 (June 8th 2022)
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- Fixed : Special attack (attacks would often miss because enemies were thrown after a few hits but they shouldn't)

1.0.2 (11 June 2022)
- By accident, high quality setting had increased resolution scaling. This was changed back to a scale of 1. Your performance should increase... a lot.
- Vsync enabled (may add a toggle button on a later patch)

1.0.3 (11 June 2022)
- Fullscreen toggle is now hidden on the Steam Deck.
- Fixed issue where the Hint System would show invalid moves for the Push Tool when playing on gamepad / Steam Deck.

1.0.4 (11 June 2022)
- Fixed issue where it's impossible to reach some options on Steam Deck.

1.0.5 (12 June 2022)
- Level #108 was impossible to solve, it is now!

1.0.6 (13 June 2022)
- Changed level selector icon, should be clearer what it is.
- Level unlock popup (+1, +2 puzzles) will make the level selector button blink more, so players will notice it more.
- Default hotkey for hints is now F (H also works) instead of TAB, so the game will not give a hint when ALT+TAB'bing on Steam. Hint popup will appear once with the new keybind for existing players to inform you of the change.
- Level selector tutorial popup will appear even if you don't use hints. New players will see it at level 4 and existing players will see it once on the start of a level, if they never seen the popup yet.
- Reminder popups for using hints and for level skips are shorter, will appear after a longer time and will stop appearing after seeing them 3 times each.
- Lowered hint cooldown.
- Made one of the starting level easier. I will add more easy levels in the first content update.

1.0.7 (13 June 2022)
- Added screen resolution slider in options
- Added gamepad vibration slider in options
- Added decoration details slider in options (seperated from quality settings)
- Changed quality button to a quality slider
- Game mutes when it is in the background/unfocused

1.0.8 (13 June 2022)
- Fixed accidental regression that broke level #60.

5.018 Easier Reconnection
(Released June 13th, 2022)

* Fixed the additional win conditions showing up in games where they were not enabled.
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting.

* Fixed another bug with objectives that might've been around for longer, where the objective to locate AI Overlords didn't actually show or showed the wrong way.
** This seems to date back to August of 2021, actually.

* Updated the game to no longer block players from connecting under a given name if the host still thinks that the client is connected. It now just assigns that player name to the newly-connecting player.
** This is more vulnerable to griefing, because it would allow two players with the same name to keep trying to join and knock one another out of the game. But that's not the audience that AIW2 has, anyway.
** The vastly more common case is that someone disconnected from the host but the host just has not realized it yet. Having the next connection request that comes in with the same name say "close out the old one, load the new one" makes it far quicker for clients to reconnect.
** Thanks to a variety of players for reporting these issues over the last while, but Ushgarak, Pybro, and Toren_S for the most recent reports.

* Fixed a really complex issue with the long-range-planning threads that could see a couple of them potentially running at the same time when they should not have (this is not for certain), and which definitely could see some of them not running at all at other times (this is certain).
** The latter case was most easily triggered by changing mods or dlc around and then playing the game after that without first restarting the game. This was manifesting as "a bunch of inactive threads" warning.
** Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for the report and steps to repro, and to Spaz and Dismiss for also reporting.

* Put in protection against some issues that could happen in certain post-reload-xml situations, most notably on the nanocaust. But the fixes themselves are very generalized.

* Fixed an exception in the prototype entity tooltip when looking at a just created centerpiece.
** Thanks to Dismiss for reporting.

* The experimental tooltip how has the settings and the ability to format correctly when using icons or text at all detail levels.
** This means that you can now have short tooltips with text - or full tooltips without. All combinations are possible independent of each other.

* Make sure that threat against players, when sent on a raid, isn't turned into threat against a minor faction.
** Thanks to Tom Prince for fixing!

* Only consider BehaviorRelatedFactionIndex when determining if a entity is "NOT AFTER YOU" when it belongs to the AI Sentinals.
** Other faction don't look at that field on entities, so this reflects how the unit will behave.
** Thanks to Tom Prince for fixing!

* Allow threat that is going back to sleep to use allied guardposts or command stations.
** Thanks to Tom Prince for updating!

* Add a new `metal_cost_multiplier_for_scrapping` attribute for entities.
** This can be used to prevent getting free metal from scrapping ships that did not originally cost metal.
** Thanks to Tom Prince for adding!

* Add a tooltip that shows the amount that will be refunded when scrapping.
** Thanks to Tom Prince for adding!

* Make the non-agitated Neinzul Wild Hives and Hive Workers have 0 strength.
** This should make various faction AIs behavor more reasonably on planets with them.
** Thanks to Tom Prince for updating!

* Use the unit's fireteam specification for determining if a unit counts as threat against humans.
** This is instead of the fireteam's specification. This prevents hunter that is targeting a minor faction switching state as fireteams disband and then reform.
** Thanks to Tom Prince for fixing!

* When determining if an oribiter counts as mobile strength, consider it's parents recursively.
** Thanks to Tom Prince for updating!

* Simplify the code for several hack whose response is from the AI.
** Thanks to Tom Prince for updating!

* For AI factions with Hunter sub-factions that don't use fireteams[1], don't assign minor-faction waves to Hunter.
** This causes waves to just turn into random defensive units.
** [1] This is currently only defensive style hunter.
** Thanks to Tom Prince for fixing!

* Only despawn Extragalactic War hunter units that are "NOT AFTER YOU" periodically.
** The current logic decides to despawn based on faction power-level, which is only appropriate for Extragalactic War units. This was causing hunter spawned as waves against minor factions to despawn when they were on a planet with no hostiles for too long.
** It would likely make sense to have a way for other hunter targeting minor faction to also despawn, but that requires some more complex logic.
** Thanks to Tom Prince for updating!

Balance

* So as it turns out there was a very interesting find by Lampshade on the official Discord that puts a entire can of cheese wiz to shame. Namely that scrapping temporary units from Viral Shredders was giving metal. Unfortunately this rabbit hole goes deep and as such corrective attributes had to be assigned though-out the entire roster of player accessible ships from the base game and all DLC. This hits dozens of entries since it applies to a variety of units produced on death, via build points, via drone guns, and automatically spawning wards for units like the DLC3 destroyers and thus took a while to correct across all relevant files. Hydra property secondary units reduced to consolation prize level of 10% refund. Actually built for free units now salvage for nothing. Shout out to Tom for the quick implementation of the new attribute used in the fix.
** Base game units affected: 6
*** Ambush carrier raptor drone, mini cluster bomb, Hydra heads for the Vanguard, Stingray, Parasite, and Warbird Frigate
** DLC 1 units affected: 6
*** Tesla Torpedo, Deathgrip Tackle Drone, Viral Shredder Copy, Makeshift drones, Automated Construction Bot & mini version.
** DLC 2 units affected: 11
*** Drone hangar versions of the V-Wing, Bomber, Gangsaw, and Shrike Interceptor, Phantasmal Decoy of the Phantasmal Host, Trailblazer Barge, Ambush Drone, Reclamation Drone, Mosquito Drone, Frag Mine sub-unit of Fragmenting Minefield, the drone-gun version of the Proximity Minefield deployed by the minelayer frigate.
** DLC 3 units affected: 14
*** Animated Katana, Blade Drone, the destroyer wards the Falcon Ward, Kinetic Ward, Interceptor Ward, Vise Ward, Siren Ward, Explosive Ward, Fusion Ward, Flare Ward, Tesla Ward, and Eyestalk Ward, Embrasure Ward sub-unit of the FRS Shield Ward, Neinzul Locust of the Neinzul Ward.

Mod Updates

* Update to More System Defenders v1.32
** Added attribute to prevent metal farming off of freely created entities. Several drone-gun ships and the Viper Corvettes were impacted by this base game issue.
** Additionally increased the tech upgrade costs for minefields and station-keeping entities while the mod is active. In the case of minefields the back-loaded upgrade costs were shifted forward and total cost only increased by 150 points.
** Station-keeping gets more significant cost increases and is an additional 2000 total science to buy out all ranks. Early ranks are significantly more expensive due to handing the player additional ships like Escort Carriers and Artillery Destroyers from game start in addition to the additional units that can be added via hacks.

1.1.0 (14 June 2022) | Difficulty Update
- 10 new easy levels for beginner players that explain the game mechanics better. Trivial for puzzle enjoyers, but very needed for casual players. Now there are 160 levels in total.
- Simplified a few starting levels based on observations of how players play them on Twitch and YouTube. Don't worry, hard puzzles remain untouched.
- Changed the level order a lot, there are more easier levels first and the harder one got pushed to the later stage of the game. This doesn't change the overall difficulty of them game, just eases the player into it better. Levels from 1 to 60 should be more approachable now.
- Fixed minor visual error in one of the level switch animation
- Removed decorations on a few levels that obstructed the view too much
- Fixed bug, where the game wouldn't switch to skipped levels after finishing the last level
- Fixed bug, where the interface would hide too late in the level switch animation