The random assignment system seems to be working great so far, but the items that you can get with the token rewards are currently a bit lacking. Our newest patch brings the long-awaited upgrades to the token shop, otherwise known as Syndicate Supplies.

We supply the love

New additions to the token shop

So first things first, T2+ and T4+ modules will be directly available in the shop for a relatively high combined token and NIC cost. The NIC cost is a new addition to the shop, just like the minimum relation limit you must have to purchase an item.

Balancing the prices is not easy, since we still need to keep the normal way of acquiring these modules through looting a viable option, but still not make them so high that it would feel like an endless assignment grind to get them. We’re of course open to feedback here.

Oh, black bots you say? Yep, those are in as well. Don’t expect them to be cheap though.

As previously announced, in order to minimize the impact of the current stocks of faction tokens in the game (which were sometimes acquired using certain shortcuts in the past...), we’ll apply a one-time 10x inflation of both the token shop prices and the assignment token rewards. So you still have a little time until the patch tomorrow to buy some ammo or TAPs for the current prices.

I’m feeling lucky

Another new and hopefully interesting addition to the token shop will be the requisition slips. To quote their ingame description:

"From time to time the Syndicate does a sweep of its vast storages and hands out excess items to their hard-working Agents.

By purchasing and activating a requisition slip you can claim one of those items. The catch is that they don't really have an exact listing of their inventory, so what you get in the end can be a bit... random."

Requisition slips

We have requisition slips representing each faction’s technology: Pelistal, Nuimqol, Thelodica, Industrial, and Common. These correspond to the technology pages in the research facility, so you can refer to those if you would like to know what modules you can get from a slip.

Furthermore, each faction has 3 quality levels, making up a total of 15 different slips:

  • Bronze: includes T1, T2, and T3 modules
  • Silver: includes T2, T2+, and T3 modules
  • Gold: includes T3, T4, and T4+ modules

Bug me not

Last but not least, the patch will also include quite a few fixes: corrected token reward amounts for assignments, the missing notification about new assignments, various bug fixes when equipping your robot at a field terminal, some robots not occupying any space in containers, the item not found errors when reverse engineering from a container, the broken public chat channel blocking... just to name a few.

We're also fixing various gamma issues with emergency timers, energy levels, etc. being screwed up during a server restart, which basically had a common cause. Since the fix will be only applied after the server shuts down, do note that these issues might happen again, but hopefully for the last time.

Patch 3.7.3 will be deployed on Monday, February 1st, starting at 15:00 CET/server time (14:00 UTC).

So shortly after setting up our roadmap for the remainder of this year, we dived right into its development. Well, right after figuring out what to do first (with your help), putting out some server fires (not literally, don’t worry) and trying to not die in the summer heatwave (managed). Anyway, here’s what we have in store for you in our upcoming patch.

Beta 1 reworks

After the rework of Alpha 2 islands, Beta 1s are next in line to receive the teleport and highway network treatment, and of course the new assignments and field terminals. Those of you who follow the relevant testing topic have already seen the new network proposals, and provided some useful feedback too (thanks!).

So here are the before/after maps for Hokkogaros, Domhalarn, and Norhoop. These will soon hit the test server (with a few smaller changes based on your feedback) and be part of our next patch.

Hokkogaros teleport/highway reworks
Domhalarn teleport/highway reworks
Norhoop teleport/highway reworks

Distress beacon changes

In the last patch we have temporarily disabled the deployment of distress beacons, in order to allow us to finally remove some much hated mechanics that have been implemented a long time ago to battle the unwanted tricks players could do with beacons.

Distress beacons will be re-enabled in our upcoming patch, although with some significant changes:

Teleport anomaly
  • New teleport anomalies will start spawning on all zones, which are a side effect of enemy teleport activity. You will only be able to deploy distress beacons in the close vicinity of these, which will basically “hijack” enemy teleport jumps and pull them out at your location.
  • Once a beacon is activated, the anomaly will despawn and enemy NPCs will start spawning like before. So one anomaly, one beacon.
  • Teleport anomalies will have 3 levels, which will limit the type of beacons that you can use with them. Level 1 beacons can be used anywhere, level 2 only on beta and gamma, and level 3 will be gamma only.
  • Levels are the equivalent of stripes that we’ve had so far too on the icons. Beacon names and icons have been already updated to be more straightforward, so you don’t have to wonder anymore whether “platoon” or “commando” is the higher one.
  • Teleport anomalies will also emit significant interference (on beta and gamma), so it will also affect PvP a bit. They are destroyable though.
  • The multiple activators requirement will be removed, all beacons can be activated solo.
  • The volume of distress beacons will be reduced from 1 to 0.1 U.
Updated distress beacons

Reworked artifact scanning

Another mechanic that we wanted to give priority to is artifact scanning, mostly due to the relatively high amount of help requests and reports about players getting stuck with it or not really understanding how it worked.

The new artifact scanning breaks away from the triangulation method, and is much more similar to directional geoscanning:

New artifact scanning

As you can see on the screenshot, the scanner provides a list of the artifacts in range like before, but additionally to the range it also gives you a bearing indicator which will guide you to the scanned location. Note that I wrote “scanned location”, since the results can have a significant deviation, depending on your distance from the actual artifact and the accuracy rating of your equipment.

In practice this mechanic still requires multiple scans to narrow down the exact location (unless the random gods really love you), but it should be much more straightforward and intuitive than the old one.

Both the new distress beacon mechanic and the new artifact scanning method will hit the test server in a few days, so you'll be able to get a feel for them soon.

Terminal facility balancing

This is also coming in our next patch, involving some number juggling around terminal and outpost facility efficiency points. Currently there is not enough difference between Alpha and Beta facilities to warrant serious Beta-based facility usage in light of the much higher risk, so we’d like to balance this out a bit. (relevant forum discussion can be found here)

Here is how the new facility points will look like:

Alpha 1 main terminals:

  • All 0 (no change)

Alpha 1 outposts:

  • Current: 0 / 50 (higher on selected facilities)
  • New: 0 / 25

Alpha 2 main terminals:

  • Current: All 50
  • New: 25 / 50

Beta main terminals:

  • Current: All 50
  • New: 50 / 100

Beta outposts:

As you know the facilities here can be manually upgraded 3 times each, using a maximum of 10 points at the highest stability (1 point per 10 stability).

  • Currently the levels are: 0 - 50 - 100 - 125
  • This would be changed to: 50 - 100 - 125 - 150

(Meaning even if you don't spend any upgrade points, all the outpost facilities are at 50)

We’re also working on a facility downgrade option for Beta outposts, so you won’t have to destabilize your own outpost if you want to change around your facility points.

And last but not least, we’ll boost the relation factor in facility efficiencies. With the rebalanced relation progression in assignments, its current influence feels like not enough gain for all the fuss, so we’ll more or less bring it in line with the facility and extension factors.

Closing

So all the above mentioned stuff is coming in our new patch, which is currently slated for around early/mid October.

Our internal robot template editor

I’ll leave you with a picture of our freshly updated internal tool, which we’re using to create robot templates by mixing around their body parts. (You don’t want to know how the old one looked, it didn’t even have a 3D preview.) This is in preparation for the new Syndicate robots mentioned in the roadmap blog, and it really speeds up figuring out the good/useful combinations.

We’d also like to put this this tool into the test client so you can play around with it and show us your ideas, possibly even create a contest around this.

Friends, it is time to prepare for our annual ritual, during which our wallets gain sentience, slink out of our closely guarded pockets and offer themselves as monetary sacrifice to the great lords of Bellevue in hopes of a plentiful digital Summer wherein we may joyfully reap the crops of electronic entertainment while overdosing on caffeinated drinks and dubstep.

Yes, it is our favorite vaporous vacation vendition, the Steam Summer Sale and this time we offer you a whopping 50% off on Perpetuum and all in-game items starting from June 11 to 22, both on Steam and on our website; a great opportunity to buy several copies of the game and thousands of credits to various members of your family, your pets, your dentist, your high school crush, your lawyer, your probation officer and Dave the Guy from Grocery Store on The Corner.

Perpetuum 3.6 release

One of the new field terminals

It's been a long and bumpy road, but we're finally there. Our truly random assignment system aka. Assignment system revamp Stage 2 will hit the live server on Monday the 15th of June, along with a healthy number of general updates and fixes.

Public testing of the patch has been going on for almost 2 weeks already, and those of you who have been following development saw almost daily updates and fixes. I'd like to take the opportunity here to thank everyone who participated in the testing - your feedback and bug reports helped us a lot in speeding up development, and certainly made this a better patch.

Testing will not stop though, since in this first patch we're only releasing the new assignment system for the three Alpha 1 islands: New Virginia, Attalica, and Daoden. As soon as we finish reworking the other islands, you'll be able to see and test them first on the test server.

The order of release will be Alpha 1 islands (in Monday's patch), then Alpha 2s, Beta 1s, and finally Beta 2s, the latter ones receiving assignments for the first time ever.

The testing forum topic can be found here, the first post of which also serves as preliminary patch notes.

We hope to welcome a bunch of new players during the weekend, and some of us devs will probably pop in to general chat too, so see you there!

The October status report brought a general preview about an incoming balance package that affects almost all robots in the game.

After some public testing, forum feedback, collecting tears, and more number juggling, we now present you the final details.

The main goals of this balancing package are:

  • Boost light and assault robots considerably.
  • More diverse robot bonuses, but they generally provide less value increase. This also lessens the gap between high-level veteran players and less fortunate newbies.
  • Push robots more towards their intended roles.

Colorful spreadsheets coming up.

We're also introducing 3 new extensions under the Robot control category:

  • Combat robot specialist - Required extension for all combat robots, and controls the combat role bonuses.
  • Industrial robot specialist - Required extension for all industrial robots, and controls the industrial role bonuses.
  • Hi-tech robot specialist - Required extension for all Mk2 robots, and controls the special Mk2 bonuses.

The combat and industrial robot specialist extensions are becoming starter extensions, thus every existing character will receive these two on level 1 during the patch.

Additional notes

  • The effect of the mass gain of light robots may not be clear for everyone: increased base mass for robots lessens the speed reduction effect of equipped modules.
  • We cleaned up some parameters of prototype robots, this means either slight increases or reductions. Compared to normal robots, light/assault prototypes now have +5 CPU/reactor and +10 sensor strength, while mechs/heavy mechs have +10 CPU/reactor/sensor strength.
  • Mk2 robots retain their special extra bonuses (so they still have one additional bonus compared to standard bots), but these are now controlled by a new extension.
  • The Baphomet loses its lone missile slot, as a consequence we'll remove all modules and ammo from this slot in all existing Baphomets and place them back into the same storage during the patch.
  • Although the Waspish gains a second small/medium mixed missile slot to bring it in line with the other two assaults, to make it look badass these have to be on its sides. So instead the top/back slot will lose the medium fitting and as such we'll also remove any equipped module from this slot during the patch.
  • Do note that assaults received a considerable reactor boost to make room for those medium modules.

The patch itself will be deployed to the live server today at 14:00 CET/server time. We'll be also performing some server and database maintenance, so the estimated downtime will be about 2 hours.

ps. This isn't the monthly report, that's still coming.

Phew. Busy week. The upcoming patch will feature a bunch of changes, we thought it best to summarize them in a blog post.

I.C.E.

I.C.E.

This is the big one. The Integration Cycle Extender is an ingame, tradeable, consumable item that grants 30 days of game time to the account that it's consumed on. Players will be able to purchase ICE items from the Perpetuum website and sell them in-game to other players. This essentially gives players the option to play Perpetuum for free by acquiring game-time from others in the game.

Relating to this is a minor convenience change in the store we're currently still working on: soon you'll be able to automatically redeem your codes instead of getting them in email and having to fish them out from the spam-folder.

Character creation

With the influx of new people from Steam Greenlight we decided to spend some time polishing some aspects of Perpetuum that are first experienced by players. The most apparent of these changes is the way we're changing character creation.

Character preset selection

We want to avoid new players getting swamped with all the intricacies of the current system - we did some research into the most common character types, and created a character template selection screen for quick access to these. The old version of the character creator is moving to the "advanced" menu on this screen.

Amazon Kickstarter

Some of you know about the Amazon exclusive kickstarter campaign we're currently doing. The point was raised that the EP bonus granted by the kickstarter being only available to new accounts is unfair (not to mention the lack of an announcement and the fact that this Amazon offer is US only), so we're changing things around a bit concerning this to fix the level playingfield.

The 20,000 EP that's currently granted by the Kickstarter will from now on be granted to all accounts upon first subscription, regardless where the time-code came from.

All accounts that haven't participated in the Kickstarter will retroactively get this 20,000 EP during the patch as well. Just to be perfectly clear, this means that no EP will be removed from any account, and all those who have a non-trial account and haven't redeemed a kickstarter code will get 20,000 EP. The exclusive items granted by the Kickstarter are not affected by this.

Missing extension indicators

Smaller changes

We're adding detailed notifications to the equip window to let players know if they don't have the required extensions for an item they have equipped.

All NPCs on Alpha 1 islands will all change to non aggressive by default. This is to make sure new players don't get overwhelmed at once or during the tutorial. Affected missions will change accordingly.

Steam Greenlight

As we wrote in the last blog post, Valve has introduced the Greenlight feature to Steam about two weeks ago. This Tuesday the first 10 games have been greenlit with more coming "soon". This is very good news, as Perpetuum has been in the top 15 for more than a week now.

Steam Greenlight
We'd like to offer congratulations to the dev teams of the first 10 games to get in, and thank everyone who voted for us.

We're giving away a one year game code on our Greenlight page upon every 5% we reach, and will be giving away the remaining in a single burst if we get greenlit. So go and vote if you haven't already!