VO 1.8.497 includes:- Attacking and defense distance of Unaligned Pirate defenders now varies more randomly.- Unaligned pirate trident now comes back between 4 and 12 hours after being defeated.- Access Key names can only contain letters, numbers, and spaces. Leading and trailing spaces are removed.- List of items desired by a station are now determined by maximum profit.- Framerate limiter is not used when VSync is enabled on Windows.Earlier this week in 1.8.496:- Improved game stability with MacOS X 10.15 CatalinaA number of updates this week. The OS X patch should alleviate problems with the 10.15 update, but if anyone runs into other new problems on the Mac, please let us know via the Bugs forum or (if necessary for privacy) a Support Ticket.We've made some tweaks to the Unaligned Pirates, based on Suggestions Forum player feedback, hopefully you enjoy them. Further (respectful) feedback, based on testing, would be welcome. The Pirates are a system in which we can experiment with NPC behaviour, without risking breaking other large areas of the game, so we're much more willing to try "new things" there.The Items desired by the station is now based around maximum profit, which means it excludes items where we cannot calculate profit, like items the station may "want" but are inherently "drops", and the like. We will continue to evolve this, but for now it should at least solve the issue of people arriving to sell things on the "High Demand" list, and finding they didn't make a profit.That's all for now. Have a great weekened, everyone!

VO 1.8.495 includes:- New experimental unaligned pirates show up in Latos on Saturdays around Noon Central (5-6pm in Europe). They are more likely to drop high-value capship parts, although it's still a rare occurance. They are independent of the other unaligned pirates.- Fixed issue where swapping Aim and Throttle input regions on mobile didn't get applied immediately.- Owners of User Access Keys no longer see other owners of the key unless you also own the Owner Key.- The Keychain.list command is rate limited to one query at a time. Subsequent querys are queued up until the current query finishes. This may affect the speed of plugins that query all keys in a keychain in rapid succession.We've spent a lot of time on server maintenance, over the last few weeks, but it's been paying off very well. Practically every single server and aspect of our infrastructure has been migrated, upgraded, and otherwise re-done. Some things have been made anywhere from 2x to 100x as fast, or more robust, or easier to maintain, or better monitored. This was much-needed maintenance, and puts the game in a much better place moving forward.It may not sound like the most relevant thing to gameplay, but it directly bears on our plans. For instance, it's difficult for us to make major changes to large-scale gameplay (say, economics or mjoar nation-level AI) without effective analytics on the results, and our analytics system was aged and not really up to the task, so that needed a serious upgrade.Similarly, we've been doing capacity tests on how well NPCs can scale on a given (single) CPU of the server back-end cluster, which clarifies for us exactly how far we can try to "push" things in a Universe Redux and other gameplay updates that directly impact on the number and distribution of NPCs.Last night's addition of some new Pirates was a quick thing to hopefully a little content that people might gather around on Saturday afternoons (or evenings, European time), as people had been asking for more Unaligned-Pirate related content. We do have a lot more complex plans for the Pirates, but we only had a small window to try and add something new.As always, thanks for your patience and support everyone, and have a great weekend!

The game will be going down this evening, 10/9, for a period of database maintenance and upgrades.The maintenance window will begin at 9pm Central, and end at 1am Central. Within that time, the game should only be offline for less than an hour. If all goes well, perhaps as little as half an hour. Any outage should be during the scheduled window.The upgrades will make the database perform better, be more robust against issues, and be easier for us to maintain. It will also be able to support a larger concurrent player count.Thanks for your patience and support, as always.