Hello! this last week we’ve been busy working on a number of things, including (but not limited to):

• Better NPC Pathfinding!

Tccoxon has been busy working on making NPCs smarter, including improving their pathfinding. Here’s a shot of the testing room! The test chimps are tasked with working their way towards the banana statues.

• Planet Bookmarks!

Yes, you’ve been requesting it since the dawn of time – and now it’s nearly here! put those notebooks away, because you’ll soon be able to keep track of all those planets you discover right inside the game!

• Remote Teleporters

Little bit of a work in progress at the moment, but we’ll have remote teleporters in an upcoming update! As they are work in progress, right now they have basic functionality – But  when you get your hands on them you’ll be able to travel from one teleporter to another, even if they’re on different planets!

• More improvements to combat!

Your melee swings will now be near-instantaneous (0.05 seconds). There’s also better visuals for hitting an enemy, including blood effects!

• Pets!

We’re putting some more time into pets. The idea is you’ll begin with a pet on your ship whenever you start a new game. They actually have some interesting AI behind them!

Pets will investigate, get hungry, sleepy, playful etc. In these examples you can see the pet investigating food that the player has left for it. The pet decides that it really likes fish! and begs the player for more.

• Also!…

Armagon has been working on the economy side of things. As a precursor to implementing trading, merchants etc, he’s been busy with balancing the pixel costs of items – and adding a bit of sense to them

Kyren has been looking further into the server side some more!

That’s all for now, until next time!

As many of you have already noticed, the changes from our February 12 unstable update have now been pushed to stable. We made a couple of changes to the way that servers configure user accounts, and since several users have asked about it, here’s a brief explanation.

Your server’s starbound.config file should now have an empty serverUsers entry. This is where you will add player and administrator accounts. Here’s an example configuration:

  "serverUsers" : {
    "fred" : {
      "admin" : true,
      "password" : "hunter2"
    },
    "george" : {
      "admin" : false,
      "password" : "swordfish"
    }
  },
  "allowAnonymousConnections" : false,
  "allowAdminCommands" : true,
  "allowAdminCommandsFromAnyone" : false,
  "bannedIPs" : [  ],
  "bannedUuids" : [  ],

Note that both admin and non-admin user accounts are configured here, and all of these accounts require a user name (entered on the join server dialog in game). Multiple users can log into the same account, so if you want a simple server password, you can create an account named e.g. ‘guest’ with the shared non-admin password.

In order to enforce login for all users, you’ll also need to set allowAnonymousConnections to false in your server’s starbound.config. If allowAnonymousConnections is true (as it is by default) then any user can connect to the server without providing a user name or password. Admins will, of course, still need to log in if those privileges are restricted by the allowAdminCommandsFromAnyone setting.

We’ve also fixed the banlist functionality, so users can be banned by UUID or by IP. If you want to unban a user who has been permanently banned, you’ll need to manually remove them from the listing in the file and restart the server (for now).

Hope this clears up some confusion about the new system!