PAT21 Dynamic

The twenty-first update patch for the pre-alpha testing phase of Raph Koster’s new MMORPG Stars Reach has dropped last Saturday. And it both is and isn’t a big update this time. It is big in that we are seeing largely improved performance and tons and tons of bugfixes and a full wipe of all buildings and player characters as well - but it is also not big insofar, as some of the performance gains stem from the deletion of buildings, and have not been a lot of changes that actually affect gameplay. Thus, from a testers point of view, it plays very similar to the previous patch - just with smoother framerates.

Even the big headline topic - the dynamic wormholes - is not actually that big. We had wild planets before. Those would differ from regular planets in that they would be reachable through an unstable wormhole instead of a portal, and would only be around temporarily. Previously that meant they’d only be available for one single test window - which might be as short as just a few hours. But as the length of test windows has been increasing into the 100+ hour territory, these wild Planets could be around for several days. That’s now no longer the case - the wormhole now only opens for an hour or two at a time (with some random variation), and the planet it leads to is being newly generated once a day. So the same planet does still become available multiple times for now - but eventually the plan is, that a wild planet truly only shows up once, and that’s it. So, if there are any nice harvestable materials to be found there - you better be quick about finding and harvesting them.

Wormhole indicater shows green - plenty of time left!

Apart from that, there also were a few other changes:

• Skill training has now to be done on a terminal in the TPL station, and it does cost a few Klaatus (the ingame currency) to do so.
• The tailings you have to regularly dump out of your mining tool are now a lot more flowy/liquidy and convert into fertile soil faster, leaving far less of a mark on the landscape.
• Meteors no longer cover everything in pimples made of valuable metals. They are more rare to appear now, bigger, penetrate the ground, and deposit their payload below the surface. My own excavations show, that you are most likely to find the newly deposited metal all the way down at bedrock - which is probably not how it was intended.
• Mission Terminals have been improved.
• Lots of more plants have been replaced with their new models - in preparation for the new shaders, which not only promise to bring a massive visual uplift to the game, but also a lot better render performance. Check out PAT18 for some screengrabs of a developer stream that showed off what those shaders are going to look like.
• Ton of smaller changes, fixes & improvements.

And that’s basically all the new stuff for this update. Thanks for reading, and see you next time! Just kidding, I got some more thoughts for you - read on, if you’re interest in my personal play experience over the first weekend of this new patch.

The skill training terminal

Creating a Character

Since there had been a wipe - I had to start by creating a new character. The character creation and tutorial area saw a few textual improvements, but I just quickly rushed through it all, like I’ve been doing with multiple characters before. There is now an option that allows you actually skip the tutorial on your second and later characters - which I haven’t tried yet, but testers report that this will also skip the part where you pick your starter package. Starting without a starter pack is not really useful, so neither is the skip option. But on the very first character, you can’t skip it anyway.

Same procedure as every wipe.

If you’d like to see the character creation and tutorial in more detail - I have documented that in detail, including step-by-step screenshots - in PAT19 - Brave New Worlds. Other than the texts, the only thing that has changed since then, is the contents of the starter packages - but the overall experience is still mostly the same. Therefore I’m not going to repeat writing about it here. I just rushed through it as quickly as I could, and when it came to pick a starter package, I went with “Diligent Crafter”. But I didn’t pick that package right away - but instead went through all the others first. That’s a bit of a cheat or exploit, because when you select a package, you get some skill unlocks, your starter items and some recipes. When you then switch to another, your skills are reset, the items swapped out for your new set - but the recipes stay. Therefore you can “illegaly” start with a few extra crafting recipes by activating all the starter packages. That’s been reported and is known to the devs, but they haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet. The advantage you get that way is pretty small - but I was able to make good use of having the OmniBlaster recipe available to me, without needing to unlock weapon-smith first.

Cheaty cheater!

There still are no skill limits in the game, so every character can still do everything and learn all the skills - but if you do intend to do everything, you need all the different job-tools. Starting as a crafter does allow you to quickly make those tools, and thus the crafter still feels like the best starting option to me. But if you are playing in a guild - like I am - you don’t have to do everything. In fact, we do have plenty of guild members who get their tools from a handful of crafters like me, and thus start the game with a different starter package - one that’s more aligned with their own, individual preferences. Combatants have become more valuable, as some of the more important tools now require some creature loot to be crafted. Rangers get the best access to wood, which is crucial now as well, and harvesting/farming seems to have turned into the sole source of anti-matter and anti-gravium that’s needed to craft a Grav-Mesh and some combat shields. So there is a real benefit to having a group of players work together, and pick different starting options each.

First Steps

Since training skills does cost (small amounts of) money now, I started by running a few missions. The mission terminal now allows you to show missions filtered by planet - and each planet now has as many missions to choose from as the terminal previously had in total. That makes it a lot easier to get one of each type of mission you are able to do, and all of them on the same planet. The missions themselves are still pretty barebones and not super interesting - but that’s supposed to change in the future. Some people geniunely like that playstyle and enjoy the slight grind of running somewhat repetitive missions - but I personally find it a bit boring. That’s why I like to alway combine doing missions with some other activity.

The improved mission board

In this case, my goal was to go through each of the three main planets, run around and use all my available tools (the terraformer for mining, the harvester for getting plant materials and the pathfinder for scanning survey points) to get a bunch of discovery XP. You do get a nice little XP bonus, the first time you discover a new material, plant or creature - and across three planets, these bonuses do add up. I didn’t go straight for my missions and scanned/harvested/dug out only those - but instead took a casual loop around the entire planet, trying to get my grubby little fingers onto everything I could easily get to. That turned out to be a very nice way to start a new character, as it left me with a bunch of different profession XP in botany, mineralogy and ranger - and more than enough money to spend those XP on my first skill unlocks.

Tasty discovery XP

This proved an imho quite enjoyable way to get started, and felt a lot less grindy than just gathering a ton of Breccia to turn into oil and plastic (or sand to turn into glass). And the somewhat simplistic missions didn’t feel boring either, since I was just completing them on the side, as I was going through each planet anyway. I would continue doing just that: Everytime I went to visit a planet, for whatever reaons, I’d pick up all the missions I could get for that planet. I’d then go do whatever I wanted to do, and maybe finish some missions on the side, but I never went out of my way to do so. Missions I didn’t finish while down on the planet, I’d just abandon and replace with other ones. This way I was able to always make a little money on the side - and it was easily enough to finance all my skill training, since that really wasn’t very expensive at all. Buying a homestead though - that still requires a little bit of extra money making.

Just enjoying myself, while discovering the wild planet

The Grind

Yes, I still had to turn a bunch of breccia into oil and plastic, in order to get my first crafting XP. There’s no discovery XP to get you started with crafting, and actually crafting something requires to first unlock the recipes with crafting XP that you can basically only get through refining. Some testers (developers even) seem to prefer crafting title select items (one of the very few actual crafts you can do right at the start), as those need only 5 metal to make - but they are also useless and do swamp your inventory. I still prefer going the breccia->oil->plastic and/or sand->silica->glass route. I feel that being able to get two subsequent refining steps out of the same material, does offset the higher material costs. And with that recipe-unlock-trick I mentioned earlier - you totally can do both refining steps right from the start.

Far less grind than last time

Overall, this part felt a LOT less grindy than it used to be last patch. And the reason for that is the increased batch sizes for refining these materials. You are now making 50 or 100 of these in one single craft - and that speeds up the process significantly. On top of that, the crafting process itself does no longer lag. Last patch, you’d have to wait a while after refining 100 materials at once, as the actual process seemed to happen one-by-one then. Now you just do all 100 in one fell swoop, without the extra delay. The batch crafting still seems to cause some server lag though. Like, whenever something is crafting, everyone else nearby will experience some light rubberbanding, that can get more severe if there’s a bunch of people all crafting simultaneously. Seems that the crafting lag isn’t entirely gone yet - it’s just manifests a bit differently now. Overall things are a lot smoother now though.

Almost exactly two hours into the test: gifting away the first Xyloslicer

It really didn’t take me long this time, to be able to unlock the first tool recipes and start crafting actual tools.

Crafting some Tools

Up until very recently, all (preliminary) crafting recipes where very simple: Bunch of raw materials go in, final item comes out. This is slowly starting to change, as a mid-patch update during the previous test cycle added the first intermediate components. You can no longer make a Terraformer from just some metals, sticks and stones - you have to craft several parts first, and then combine those into the Harvester. This does complicate and slow down things significantly. I was easily able to craft some tools (like for example a few Xyloslicers) that still follow the old recipes during my first evening of playing. But then I went to bed, and when I returned on Sunday morning, it still took me a while to finally make my first Terraformer (which still were rare at that point - as not many other players had yet made some either.)

There also are advantages to the extra steps though. With many of the intermediate recipes having 2 material inputs only, you do get a lot more chances to optimize PQRV values. And 2-material-input recipes are especially useful for that, as they basically take the best of each. This makes it a lot easier to get final PQRV values close to the best values you got available on your materials. That being said, I did not care about PQRV at all. Matter of fact is, that the starter items are pretty bad, at PQRV 250, 250, 250, 250. You do want better tools as soon as possible, and even if you craft tools from completely random materials, you will end up with values in the 500 to 700 range. And those tools are “good enough”. Trying to actually get the best values you can, will take a lot more time and effort - and give you values in the 650 to 800 range. That means, the step up from starter items to random value items is huge - the step up from there to “best” items not so much. To understand how those PQRV values work, check out what I wrote about those in PAT20.

Need some wood

But that did bring another thought to my mind. Right now, crafting a Terraformer requires 1 Stock, 1 Barrel, 2 Power Cells and 8 Focussing Lenses. And those components now need a wider range of different input materials as well - including woods, animal loot, gems, gases, etc. That means it’s quite a bit harder to create initially than for example a Xyloslicer, which still can be made from just some metals and gases and gemstones or whatever. Eventually the Xyloslicer will be switched over to using intermediate components as well. And maybe at some point, these components are going to need further sub-components. And at the high end, I absolutely do want that depth and complexity - and the ability as a crafter, to tweak the ingredients and recipes at each step along the way, to optimize the result. But as a newbie who’s just trying to craft their first tool ever - no matter what quality, it might be cool to have the simpler version of just throwing together a few raw materials available as well. Like, you can craft a Terraformer using just metals and gases and gemstones - instead of stock, barrel, power cells and focussing lenses - but then you do loose out on those extra steps to optimize PQRV values. So you will end up with a lower quality product. If you want to make the best quality - you have to go the complicated route. But as a newbie, you can make an actually tool early on. A tool that - while not very good - still is usable, and if actually used, would give you those nice usage XP.

I mentioned that in voice chat - and a developer discouraged me from having or expressing thoughts like that. Because it’s still way too early to be balancing the game, and the developers already do have tons of different ideas and design documents and opinions on how to tackle these things - that I can’t know about. To that I’d like to respond: Don’t be a killjoy, and get more sleep man! You be grumpy when tired ;-)

Need some sand

It definitely is correct that it’s way to early to balance the game - but I don’t believe it’s too early to think about what levers and mechanics could be provided to later facilitate balancing. Apart from that, I can’t really stop my brain from producing thoughts anyway. And if you don’t want to hear my feedback… you don’t have to read this. Just close your browser tab, and ignore it. I still think that having “tiered” recipes like that - both simpler and more complex versions for making the same result item - would be a neat way to ease in players at the start. Especially if those simpler, earlier recipes require less interdependency. Start simple - get players feel comfortable and learn the basics with some training wheels - then ramp things up. Slowly at first - near exponentially later. That approach imho beats any “tutorial” or “new player experience” I’ve ever seen. And I don’t mean to make any demands here, or throw any shade on other ideas that I don’t even now about. I’m just sharing my thoughts.

Building a Garden

Once I had a few tools made and distributed to guild members - my next step was to set down a homestead and start my build. My plan for this was very simple - just a bench under a tree. After previously building a Maze for players to run across 4 homesteads and five floors - I enjoyed doing something less work intense this time around. The maze was well received, and a few people were impressed with the level of challenge it offered - as they did get turned around repeatedly and lost orientation. But there also were a few camera issues in the tight hallways. Two meters wide by 3 meters high wasn’t really big enough, as things were. Camera has supposedly been improved with this update - but I didn’t get around to test that yet.

The maze I’d built before the wipe

Another reason to go simple is the new limitations that were added this update. One of the main sources of lag during the last test cycle, were huge player builds made from tens of thousands of parts and - even more aggravatingly - thousands of lights. In order to make the building wipe not only a very temporary relief, each homestead is now limited to having only 30 lights, and a maximum of a few hundred parts. That being said - I used all the 30 lights, and barely any parts at all, as I only built an fence, and most of that is instaformer blocks, not fabricator parts.

Fast growing a tree is a lot faster and more enjoyable, if you got some help

As for the tree in the center of my build, I originally wanted one of those crystal-leaved Banyan trees, that I mentioned during the last two posts on the test. But I wasn’t able to find one of these yet. All variations of Banyan trees I did come across so far, had green leaves. I don’t really know, if those crystal looking white-blueish leaves were ever intended. Could possibly also have been some sort of texture or shading bug. Since I wasn’t able to get the tree I wanted, I looked for another impressive large tree, and went with an oak. I later discovered that there’s now also a glowy variant of willow trees, which do look pretty nice as well. Not sure if should swap out the oak - it did grow pretty nice and tall, and I don’t think I can control what version of willow I would be getting, when planting one.

The completed build

The most fiddly and difficult part of the build turned out to be the soil. The new “slurry” that comes out of the hopper of terraformers does make it a lot easier to create a nice and smooth surface - but the CASIM materials still do not interface nicely with the instaformer blocks I placed around the perimeter as a wall fence. What I ended up doing, was to completely overfill the instaformer shape I made - let it settle - and delete the top of it, using the instaformer. That left me with a pretty flat and level surface, that quickly turned into chalky soil - the predominant soil type of the biome I built in. It didn’t start growing any grass though. According to what I heard, it would have to touch existing grass, to allow that to spread over. I tried doing that, but it was fiddly and didn’t work well - so I figured out another solution. While the conversion of slurry to soil does have this nearby-grass-mechanic… the chronophaser does not. I lithified the chalky soil into chalk - only to then erode it back to chalky soil once more. But this time, the conversion did spawn grass and the soil did turn green on top. Mission accomplished!

Future Plans

The next thing I want to try, is to make some tools that are actually more optimized for good PQRV. There is a calculator, created by G.U.N.C., which is pretty helpful for figuring out what materials you need, to get the stats you want. (Disclaimer: I’m a member of G.U.N.C.). I spent a few hours over the weekend, to collect PQRV values for all sorts of materials from different planets, to help feed the database - but there are other members a lot more diligently doing that, than I am. After a few bugs have been ironed out, this tool is now really helpful and gives great results.

An uninvited visitor

A really good terraformer is the tool I want the most - but having a better harvester and xyloslicer would be nice as well. The amount of effect these PQRV values have on the resulting tools still does vary quite a bit. It’s still very early days for all of that - and some things (like for example the GravMesh) don’t use PQRV yet at all, and some other tools only use “V” for battery efficiency, but nothing else. But on the terraformer, all four values are used, and I really want at least three of those to be high. First and foremost (Q)uality which increases mining speed, followed by (P)otential which increases hopper size and finally (V)ersatility that increases both battery size and recharge speed. I don’t care much about (R)esilience which affects scanning - as the material scanner is “good enough” even on the 250-value starter tool.

And since there are plans in place to give away such items to other players as rewards, or sell them for Klaatus - I’ll have to be prepared to potentially craft larger numbers of these. Therefore resource availability is going to play a huge factor as well. Can’t rely on materials from old wild planets that are no longer accessible. And if I do rely on something from a new wild planet, I have to make sure to get a nice amount of that, while the wormhole is open. The goal here is, to really try and start testing the first few economy features that are now available in the game.

Glowy willow tree - pretty nice, but not quite as beautiful as the crystal banyan

The developers do have plans to add more trade features soon-ish:

Once we have a market we can start doing some of that. Having a central market will change a lot. That’s why we are prioritizing it over more mission work even though more mission stuff (esp for onboarding) is pretty important.

The market we are doing first is most like a first cut of player vendors in some ways, than hm the eventual intended planet market, but we will have just the one to start, in the starbase. That should help kickstart economy stuff more. (Raph Koster, 9 September 2025, on Discord)

…and I absolutely can’t wait for that! Maybe I’ll be writing about the market in the next post already - see you then!