I’m continuing to make slow but steady progress on Beyond the Chiron Gate. Here’s what I’ve added this month.
Scanner upgrades
Your ship now starts with only basic scanners, which can’t tell you much about a planet before you travel to it:
You can’t determine a planet’s atmosphere, gravity, surface composition, etc. without travelling to it, expending fuel and potentially suffering a random event. Once you’ve visited a planet and discovered its traits, the traits become visible in the system view.
Even without scanners, you can guess that planets in the middle of the list are more likely to be temperate, because planets go from hot to cold as you get further from the star. You also know that temperate rocky planets are the ones most likely to have life. So it’s guesswork, but it’s educated guesswork.
Back at Chiron Base, you can buy scanner upgrades by spending data. The interface for doing so is currently super rough, but you get the idea:
All the ones I’ve added so far cost Planetary Science data, but I’m going to add things like Life Signs scanners which cost Biology data, and so forth.
The idea is that the new scanner upgrades will combine with the new discovery system (added last month) to shape your progression through the game. At the start, you can’t tell much about a planet before you visit it, but most planets will have something you haven’t seen yet. Later on, you’ll have made most of the discoveries you can make on lifeless rocky planets, but you’ll have upgraded your scanners so you can head straight for the planets most likely to have life and civilisations.
Interplanetary civilisations
Alien civilisations can now leave traces on other planets besides their homeworld. If the game generates a civilisation that’s developed interplanetary travel, it then goes through all the planets in the system and has a chance to add a civ meddling trait to each one. As with all traits, when you explore the trait you’ll find out what’s behind it, in this case alien machines.
This kind of meddling clues you in to the fact that there’s probably an interplanetary civilisation somewhere in the system, so you can go looking for it. (That one shouldn’t really spawn on a gas giant, I’ll make the spawning code more sensible eventually.)
Archaeology events
That civilisation you find might not be around any more, however…
Just as last month I added random events that trigger when making contact with a living civilisation, this month I’ve added archaeology events that trigger when studying an extinct one.
Visible success chance
Another thing you can see in the above screenshot is that any option involving a crew member skill check now shows the success chance, so you can make more informed choices.
Status effects
Some event outcomes can now add status effect traits to crew members. For example, desecrating the aliens’ bodies in the mausoleum won’t lead to alien ghosts coming back to haunt you (not in a hard sci-fi game), but it might lead to one of your crew members becoming depressed due to the guilt.
A status effect like this sticks around until another event removes it, and has an effect on the crew member’s success chance in skill checks. The crew view shows these effects:
These traits are taken into account when options show your success chance at something.
That’s it for this month. Thank you all for your support, and I hope you’re all doing OK in Covid-19 lockdown.