published on April 13, 2026 in devlog
In this week's devlog Michi gives an update on the new post-tutorial contract series and is happy to report that the servers are stable again.
Michi (molp)
In the last devlog #525 I mentioned that I want to tackle a stability issue that was introduced with the deployment of the influence report. I am happy to announce that the servers are stable again! No more nightly restarts of individual servers or the whole cluster. I now stagger the influence transfers over half an hour. First are the companies, transferring their influence to the planets, then the planets to their respective systems, and once in a while the systems transfer influence to the factions. Now that this issue is resolved, I can finally concentrate on other things.
As you might recall from devlog #524 we are investing some design and development time into the new player experience. I am now working on the post-tutorial contract series, here is what I wrote in #524:
The post-tutorial contract series continues where the existing introductory contracts from the faction officials end. The goal is to guide the player to establish a second base. We want to achieve that by offering contracts that dive a bit deeper into the game mechanics that are relevant during early game: building construction, fulfilling faction contracts, ...
The first contract in the series reminds the player that they should keep scaling up their base. It looks like this right now:
The contract will be immediately available after the trade tutorial and the accompanying contract have been fulfilled. The following contract is all about faction contract offers, and it'll require fulfilling three of these offered contracts. This means that the faction contract offers will, starting with this contract, now be received in parallel to the post-tutorial contracts. Before the post-tutorial contracts, the factions started sending offers as soon as the last introductory contract was fulfilled. Implementing this required a bit of work, as this parallelism wasn't supposed to happen in the original implementation.
I implemented a cut-off time as well: companies that have been founded before the cut-off time will not receive the new post-tutorial contracts. The cut-off time will essentially be the release date of the new contracts.
All in all, there are seven post-tutorial contracts, and with the initial setup out of the way, I hope that the implementation of the rest will go quicker.
As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!