Back from holidays! Storage changes revisited

Hello everyone,

And thank you for all the (unexpectedly many) comments on the upcoming storage changes! Seeing how the planned changes prompted an even bigger wave of responses than we knew to anticipate, we wanted to kick off our autumn season at work by taking a second look at this topic.

As we wrote in June, we were looking to get feedback and critique from you over the summer to see if the changes we had planned still needed refining before their public release, so we’ve been reading the comments eagerly since then. We’ve made some further adjustments to the planned storage changes, so let’s take a peek at what the storage system now looks like.

Stacking and storage containers

Your feedback brought up many different uses for the storage containers besides simply increasing storage space – for example, using them for organization, or to help in mining missions and looting wrecks. So, rather than remove storage containers entirely, as we first planned, we will instead limit their placement inside cabinets: we’re adding an extra row inside cabinets for storage containers. Storage containers can only be placed on this row; otherwise they cannot be placed inside cabinets. This allows you to keep using them in all the creative ways you’ve come up with but limits their usefulness as total storage space boosters.

As previously, stack sizes of most stackable items stored in cabinets increase to 32 (from the current 8), and an extra row of regular storage slots is added to cabinets to create more room inside. In addition, cabinets will get handy new buttons for merging all incomplete stacks and sorting all items alphabetically. 

Finally, we’re making one more change to how stacking works: Oxygen, welding fuel and oxygenite tanks gain increased capacity so a single tank lasts longer, but they will no longer stack inside character inventories. The longer duration means you won’t have to swap tanks constantly anymore, which should make exploration and sub maintenance a bit more fun, while the loss of stacking means you will need to plan for EVA missions a bit more than before: previously, it’s been possible to carry a practically infinite supply of O2 on your person, which we feel removes an important part of the challenge of going outside the sub.

What else is new, and when is it coming?

We’re still working on a couple of other things intended for this same update, so it’s going to be a while longer in the oven. We’re currently hoping to release this [codename: traitor update] in mid-October. As the working title suggests, the traitor overhaul will be the real meat of the update, but there are other additions as well. As for right now, much of the upcoming update is already playable in the Unstable test version. Look here for instructions for how to access it, and dive in for…

• The latest iteration of the storage changes.
• Newly polished Berilia and R-29 subs. Kudos to UberPendragon and WJohnston for submitting their Berilia reworks, which we used as the basis for our work on this sub!
• Circuit boxes, a new feature of the electrical system that allows you to create complex wiring more easily and compactly: instead of adding multiple individual components into the sub’s walls, you will be able to configure your wirework inside a single item, the circuit box.
• Improvements to alien ruins. We’re adding stronger progression, so ruins you encounter later in the game are larger and more complex than the ones seen earlier on.
• Smaller improvements to things like alien artifact handling, new animations for using devices on board the sub, and ammo indicator lights for all turrets.
• The bulk of the overhauled traitor system.

Stay tuned, and let us know what you think!