published on May 05, 2025 in devlog
Michi finalizes the upcoming balancing release and talks about providing fuel to the gateways.
Michi (molp)
This week I prepared the upcoming balancing release that we are planning to release on May 6th. If you haven't heard about it yet, it contains changes to the market makers, adjustments to how planetary populations work and some minor recipe changes. The balancing release started on the initiative of two players, lowstrife and Archiel, who looked into the market makers and population simulation and suggested the respective changes. We’re happy to be able to deploy these changes now, thank you!
I also had some time to work on the upcoming gateway feature. The upkeep mechanism that I talked about in the last few devlogs is pretty much done. So, I moved on to the next topic: gateway fuel. Every outgoing jump will require a certain amount of fuel. Gateway will use vortex fuel, a new type of fuel. Similarly to the upkeep, a gateway will have to be provided with enough fuel to make the jumps happen. If a gateway runs out of fuel, no more outgoing jumps will be possible.
Since the amount of required fuel per time interval is not fixed, but rather depends on the number of jumps performed, we need a slightly different system to provide it than with the fixed weekly upkeep. We’re still discussing the options. One of them is to allow the government to appoint one or more fuel contractors via a motion. The motion results in a contract that has pairs of fuel delivery and payment conditions each valid for a week. In the case of a gateway with a stable traffic pattern, that would allow the government to provision the gateway for weeks with a single motion/contract.
To get a feel for the feature, I mocked a simple GTWT (gateway traffic) command with some stats that might be interesting for gateway operators, but also for customers planning to use it in their flights. The GTW command is on the left, GTWT on the right:
As usual at the beginning of each month, here is the new monthly economic report! We added graphs for fuels and consumable bundles
Click the image for the full report
As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!