Special Delivery! – Interstellar Rift development update 022

So after the holidays we’re back on our regular 2 week schedule and this time we’re adding a new cargo teleporter. We’re also returning the ability to export and share ships with other players outside of the game.

The new cargo teleporter allows players to teleport up to eight cargo crates at a time to any cargo pad, fuel tank or other cargo teleporter. Simply place your cargo crates onto the teleport pad then select where you want them to go from the interface. If you have hydrogen containers on the teleport pad you’ll also have the ability to teleport them straight into a hydrogen tank and thus refuel that ship. Like all teleporters there are currently no restrictions on which ships you can teleport your cargo to. Eventually a system will be put in place where you’ll need to be granted permission in order to teleport to ships which you do not own.

We’ve also taken this opportunity to enhance the teleportation effects. Although since our particle system is not yet operational the effects are somewhat limited but they should communicate what just happened a little more clearly.

Another feature we’ve re-added is the ability to export a ship you’ve designed to a file. This file will be saved on your hard drive and can be sent, downloaded and/or traded to anyone you want. To do this, simply open the ship editor, load a ship then go to the save menu and click export.

To import, go to the load menu in the ship editor and click the import button. Open the file you wish to import and save it like a regular ship afterwards.

Fuel tanks will no longer require hydrogen to construct. However this also means that they will now spawn empty. To fuel your ship you will need to teleport fuel onboard using a cargo teleporter or have fuel containers in your inventory which you can dump into the fuel tank manually. We recommend to have a few solar panels installed on your ship just in case.

We hope you enjoy this new update and let us know what you think on Twitter, Facebook or on our Forums.

New Construction Options – Interstellar Rift development update 021

We hope everyone has had a wonderful christmas and a fun and safe new year’s eve. Now that the holidays are behind us, It’s time to get back to our regular bi-weekly update schedule.

starting today we’re adding the second part of the ship production pipeline. As of today asteroids will no longer contain iron or hydrogen etc. They will instead contain iron ore, copper ore and water. These base resources now need to be fed into the new refinery and converted into building materials. You can insert the raw material into the refineries hopper in a similar manner to storing the resources in the vault. Once resources are placed in the hopper, the middle screen of the refinery will now display what materials you can refine with whatever is in the hopper. When you’ve selected what you want to refine, the refinery will start producing that material until the input hopper is empty or the output conveyor belt is full. When the resource you refined is done simply grab it off the conveyor belt and you can store it on a cargo pad or in the vault.

Also you may notice that the back of the refinery has five ports. These are meant for future refinery upgrade modules that can be attached to it. The current plan is to allow players to choose either more refinery slots or to refine more advanced materials. Expect to see more info about this when we get closer to implementing it.

In order to let players get familiar with the process, a set of public use refineries have been placed on the mining station.

Expect many more resources and build materials to be added to the game in the coming weeks and months.

Our second big feature of 2015 is the redesign of the ship connection editor. Over the past few months we’ve noticed that many people built ships and simply forgot or didn’t understand how to connect the power systems. So in order to make the system more easy to use we’ve changed it so power is now distributed through groups. When you first build your ship every device is connected under a single power group this ensures that even if you don’t want to use the power connection editor your ship systems will still receive power if you have a power source and a fuel tank onboard. Later down the line when we implement combat, players can create multiple groups so that when power cores are knocked out other systems that are grouped under different power groups will still remain operational.

We hope you’ll enjoy the new crafting system and let us know what you think. If you want to follow us for more info check out our Facebook, Twitter or engage with us on the Forums.

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