Short one, what I’ve been up to lately:

Made AI actually perform events and gave it a proper action cost system, includes things like spawning items into the ship locker and upgrading ships.  Involved pretty significant re-work of ship upgrades tracking.

With metadept, made more changes to the way biomes and spawn profiles are paired, and more info can go into the spawn profile on the biome, going to be used for things like tying specific color palettes to monsters within a biome.

Fixed interface bugs with the cockpit and E key and input priority handling

Fixed bug with current versioning upgrade scripts (still broken for stable -> nightly, lots more work to do)

Fixed fuel, after I (purposefully) broke it making the ship upgrades work with the AI.

STARTED work on a new system for essential items like the beamaxe.  Rather than having the beamaxe be an item that can’t be thrown away, there will be several essential slots below the L and R slots that hold the beamaxe, paint tool, and wire tool.  They will act like slots in the action bar, but are less like items and more like permanent player upgrades.  Also, we’ve gotten rid of the system that applied status effects for items sitting in the inventory.

Also lots more boring stuff with the spawner and fixing other internal issues and bugs (or so my git log tells me).

GeorgeV here yet again and posting from the office.
Today I worked on finishing up another boss that you should eventually see in Starbound. It’s currently nameless but is an enemy that digs through the dirt and attacks you from it. Better dig it out so you can attack effectively!

Kyren and I have been working on debugging and configuring the new monster spawning system, and I’m happy to say that it’s starting to behave quite nicely. The biggest change from the previous system is that the set of monster ‘families’ that will spawn in an area are now specific to each biome. This gives the biomes a much more unique feel and is important groundwork for some planned features such as making monster palettes match their biome, and giving them immunity to poison or lava when they’re spawned in a biome containing those liquids.

The other major change is that the target density of each monster family can now be individually adjusted, so we have much better control of which monsters are common and which are rare. This is particularly important for monsters like birds that can be annoying if they appear too frequently. There are a few other changes we’re considering, but the basic implementation is now configured, so naturally occurring monsters are back in the nightly. Which is nice, because I was starting to feel a bit lonely out there in space.

Hey there, little bird. It’s good to see you.