I posted some new missions. Three of them, just now, available in Capitol stations only. I'll be working to get a few more out this weekend. Please let me know if you run into any problems in the missions. Thanks.

One can hope a player made mission or two gets in >_> <_<

Those Orun Processor Cores are weird. For the first mission, they seemed to appear very frequently. However, for the second mission, I got 3 cores, then killed another 40 or so bots without another core. I finally got some from some bots in a fresh sector. Still, mildly irking.

Read. The. Mission.

There's actually a method to the drop rate madness.

Sort of. I tried to put as much info into the mission about how they drop, but it's still kind of bizarre. Our whole bot-dropping system is a mess, especially with bots that mine.. as soon as they "think" about mining they blow away their inventory. And then once they start mining, instead of the 50% chance of dropping an Orun Core, it's closer to 1 in (1 + number of possible mineral types). The mission was originally supposed to be more newbie-ish and like "go get 20 orun processors", but now it's kind of hard. Anyway, it's something, until we make the drops work more predictably. And make bot-mining not stupid.

So anyway, bots who have been mining for awhile have a higher chance of dropping a core than bots who recently started (or are about to start). However, bots who are not mining at all (and haven't "thought" about it) have the best drop rate possibility, but it's difficult to find those, unless you see some escorting a Transport. The longer a sector has been running, the greater the chance of finding processor drops, in theory, since they'll have been mining longer. But it took me over an hour to get five last night, it's kind of frustrating I agree.

That's a pretty interesting way of doing bot-drops, actually... now if only we could temporarily "zero" our cargo holds when pirates were after us and then "un-zero" them when we've escaped... <_<

Well, it's mostly all because of the dumb way that bot-mining was hacked into place. Fixing that is pretty high on our priority list, for a variety of reasons.

Interestingly, I had several mining Oruns drop 3 or 4 cus of Orun Processor. Bug?

Not really. Unless you consider the entire system a "bug", which it kind of is. The given probability is increased based on how long they've been mining, but there's no drop-limit. I had a couple of them drop 2 processors each in testing.

Right now, my control over drops is somewhat limited, so.. I'll be addressing these kinds of problems once we improve that system.

I am having trouble with the new tutorials. The flight level 1 tells me to launch so I launch, then it tells me about s, w and m keys and them tells me to launch again. I'm already in space so I can't launch again.

Wait, really? Hmmm. That may be because of some bug fixing we did recently. I'll test it tonight, but if I can't reproduce it, can you show Ray exactly how you're getting it to do that? Also, what faction were you at the time? There's 3 different missions, so one might have a problem not present in the others.

I can't seem to reproduce the problem, so if you can explain it to ray, that'd be cool.

Also: FYI, I just put a new mining mission into production. There'll probably be more tomorrow.

To call the new mining mission buggy would be an understatement. Take, mine, return with 6cu of specified ore (mission called for 5cu). No response. However, I can't abort because the faction (a real bitch to gain) says "don't you dare abort this rush job." A fix would be appreciated, so I can take missions that work.

You won't lose faction on it, I aborted one last night, nothing happened.

Nice.

Yeah, it doesn't hurt faction. It technically decrements an accomplishment counter, which currently has.. no purpose at all, so.. no biggie. Anyway, that's strange. I just tested it last night and it worked. Are you sure you got Premium Ferric and not just Ferric?

Oh. Crap. I'll bet Andy didn't put his updated mission code into production last night.

I'll yank the mission for now, until he does that. Argh. Sorry.

I really respect someone who can admit they made a mistake.

So, I just took Incarnate's new mission tree, kinda fun except the third mission is broken. It told me to go to some random sector and fly around for a while recording data, then it said something like "Okay, that's good for now. The route to the next sector has been plotted for you." It never told me what the next sector was in the chat (bad, confusing), and it never actually, ya know, plotted the route.

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It worked fine the second time I took the mission, though. Fluke?
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Hmm. Weird. I'll add the next-sector to the mission log, just in case.