Ohm is Futile

Maybe Koonschi will make this mod-friendly in the foreseeable future, but given all the changes that ships and ship design may still undergo, I doubt he will personally work on this soon, as that would mean reworking the AI and ship generation algorithms after every significant change which would be rather counterproductive at this stage of development I would guess. Mod support for the AI would be nice, though, as I'm sure there some code-literate people out there more than willing to create something usable and fun for us to play with while Koonschi focuses on implementing/fleshing out all the features.

Confirming you should be fine. Also, not sure that multiplayer would actually be beneficial to the performances of the game, especially depending on whether you play the beta branch or the stable one. The Beta branch features new code that should make the game run better, which includes single player which is not yet in the stable branch. This also means that stable branch servers are going to become laggy with much less traffic/action going on compared to the beta one. Anyways, my setup is quite different, but a single player game ran very nicely even prior to the new beta branch, so you really should be fine.

Collisions ignore shields, this is intended. Also, yeah, in a sense you have to be more careful of collisions if your whole ship is covered in an integrity field because the damage won't just break off the blocks involved in the "accident". That said, unless you have a lot of weak pointy bits shooting off the sides of your ship, I can't picture many cases where not having the integrity field would actually save you. Impacts are high damage and I don't think the game slows you down much until either the "new profile" of your post-collision ship can now pass by the obstacle or you went through enough blocks and still live. You do get thrown off pretty insanely, though, which is realistic if we pretend the materials your ship is made of are strong enough to not simply spontaneously fly off in every directions.

Not really the right place for this, but the answer normally is: C:\Users\"YOUR USERNAME"\AppData\Roaming\Avorion\ships Replace "YOUR USERNAME" by your windows' username. Yeah I know, it's not the game's folder you access from Steam, it is confusing.

...aaaaand that's why I opted for NVidia when I changed my gaming computer last summer. Sad to say this, as AMD cards have a lot of bang for the bucks on paper, but they also tend to be less well supported and thus come with more frequent craches and/or glitches. This tends to be universally true and not limited to Avorion. 1. Agreed, but until a lot of upcoming features come into the game, the game's ship generation won't be updated (or at least it shouldn't be updated much). So, as you've pointed out, in the new beta branch there is workshop support. Prior to that, you can head over to the creations subforum and download blueprints manually, it's actually not that complicated. 2. I can't speak from experience since I've been putting avorion off and haven't really messed with singleplayer yet, but Koonschi did say that the code was reworked a fair bit to improve performance, especially since the number of simulated sectors was increased in the beta branch. So yeah, the stable branch is likely to be much, much more demanding.

No. Different blocks, different purposes.

For a starter ship, you can actually get a fairly significant amount of power by making a big stack of thin iron solar panels.

Most weapons that use energy use increasingly more if you fire for long periods without rest. Rest period depends on how crazy you went with your burst. Bit of a strange mechanic, but it's essentially a balancing factor like overheat in my opinion.

If it doesn't have an accuracy of 100, then it's not perfectly accurate. It has indeed been my experience that lightning turrets miss quite a lot or at least deviate from the reticle a fair bit.

Better performance for technological blocks, such as shields, generators, hyperspace cores, computers and such. It also has more HP, depends what you're trying to achieve with your ship design.

Is that a challenge? ::) Jokes aside, I'm thrilled!

Forums are much less active since Uni/College/school rush has passed, recent lack of updates and the fact that most English YouTubers have moved on at the moment. With that said: - wrecks: hard to find unless you remember being near something noticeable. - crew pay: as you said, you probably know the answer to this one, as it is in a tab of one of the menus. Not exactly that hard to find, although I will concede it's not exactly under bright neon lights. - Why you blew up? Well, you probably took more damage than your ship can take. Not sure what you expected there.

^ Pretty much what he said, yeah. Not sure how the game distributes the damage from blocks under an IG field, though. We know it's not pooling the HP of the blocks the IG covers anymore, but it may be spreading the damage across the ship, or it may be drawing upon an abstract variable based off the ship's total HP, which would mean the damage goes "nowhere" until your ship dies or the block reaches damage levels over 10 times its base HP.

Huh? You can cover thrusters if you want, doesn't affect functionality. So no, no point in reworking thrusters, just put tiny slices on the outer hull where you want them aesthetically speaking, and hide the more functional ones. Also, you can improve movement on a specific axis using gyros. It really shouldn't be that hard, regardless of the shape. (well, not totally irrelevant to the shape, but unless you have something extreme, it shouldn't be a problem)

Sorry, my German is pretty rusty, but from what I understand (with Google translate's help) I have to ask... you do realize this is early access? Like, alpha? Right? Anyways, otherwise I kind of agree, although the trading sort of works. Of course, the game needs at least a few more features before it stands up to something finished like the X series.

I really doubt that would work. One is that Avorion has a limited amount of resources available. Two is that standard factions do not "respawn". I suppose you could say that pirates and Xsotan are an infinite source of minerals, but that's about it. Also, EVE may be the most popular single server MMO game out there, but that is probably because it's one of the few. That does not mean it's anywhere near the most popular game of its genre or anything. That said, nothing's stopping you from trying to build a powerful server and hosting over a hundred players at a time. Could be interesting.

There are empty sectors in this game. There's a lot of them actually. So yes, chances are that if you zoom out and see nothing, it really is empty. You can usually tell before entering a system. If there's a green or yellow blinking light over a sector, it shouldn't be empty. Note that yellow blips only appear when you have a system that mentions it shows mass sectors on the map equipped. As for discovering objects, a high level (exotic?) C43 object detector will highlight anything valuable in the system for you regardless of the distance. Lower-level ones will have range restrictions, however.

I've read some of the crying on the forums. I wouldn't sweat it too much. Space Engineers updates every week and people keep saying "oh, another update with little to no content." There's a balance between just throwing everything at players as soon as it gets done and waiting for what seems ages for a new update. Sure, it's not the best for hype to wait months at a time, but then again, if the game changes significantly over and over every couple of weeks, then ships become obsolete nearly as fast, campaigns get restarted and so on and eventually the result is similar: people stop playing and take breaks because they don't feel they're getting anything done before they always have to start over. Personally, I'm thrilled about the update and I don't mind how long it takes, you're doing a good job of putting very playable stuff out there so I'm happy to have some stability to experiment between big patches. Looking forward to changes to combat, that's my opinion, but I think it's one of the major concerns at the moment. There's no variation to combat AIs and ship "style" and loadout, so the game gets bogged down to always doing the same thing, except with better materials. That gets boring. I'd really to see some new AIs and ship-generation algorithms so that combat becomes more dynamic. Anyways, thumbs up for the Alliance update! Keep up the good work! :)

Early on, selling asteroids. Later on, selling whatever I will never need and trading. Trading is very hit or miss in this game. The way I keep it from being boring is that I take a decent trade module (rares or better are the most useful, uncommon and lower are almost useless) and just go exploring. I open the trade tab every couple of jumps and look for profitable opportunities. If there's nothing, I move on while fighting, salvaging and mining my way through what I encounter. Some trade resources are quite horrible and others are absolutely broken in how profitable they can be, how common they are is all up to the RNG.

The whole improvement thing does take time. I kinda felt like I was in the wrong neighbourhood when I first saw Avitus' Talos dreadnought, but then it helps to tell yourself "Eh, I'll get there... eventually." Also, "meheheh, loog at deez skrubz and dere pour spehsheps, imma be de neu spahs-genghis-kaaahn-fukt-vader-fugd-stiv-jubs" Right now, I can spend anywhere from 4 hours to 3 days on a single ship, depending on the arbitrary bar and other criteria my brain decides to set because that piece of meat is an asshole but has my consciousness hostage. But in most cases, it will involve a lot of stealing inspiration from other designs, cocaine coffee, mindless, frustration induced rage patience and lack of human contact "I'm in the 'art zone', LEAVE ME ALONE WHILE I ART!!! D:<". (But personally, my weakness is creating replicas.) Also, I wrote a post somewhere whilst cringing at the fact that I had to write something informative about tips on designing ships, then posted it to the user guides section, iirc, after Fox suggested I do that. Maybe check that out if you haven't. It's kinda funny that you would redirect me towards such a link given I've practically made a YouTube version of that (well, of my own tips anyways). No, it's just that I tend to be aesthetically impaired. I can make great ships functionally-speaking (although you somehow seem to manage to get even more oomph out of them than I do, but anyways) and they don't look like cereal boxes, borg cubes or something a 4-year-old kid would put together using 10 pieces of lego... but they sure as hell don't look that good. Then again, I don't think I ever spent more than like 8 hours on a single ship, and usually much less than that. @Fox Indeed!

Damn, I remembered your stuff being nice, but I hadn't checked in a while. I wanted to make a return to ship designing, but your stuff is just so disgustingly perfect that now I wanna crawl right back to my happy place you maniac! (nice job)

Thanks a lot for this this. It's very nice of you to bother telling us the details of what's going on "backstage". It's also great that you care about preserving existing saves and ships given this is early access. Most of all, I appreciate the fact that you're working on optimizing features before releasing them given how tempting it might be to just keep pushing out stuff to keep the hype train going and quiet down the "we need more content" crowd. It relieves me, too, because that means I got time to do things before everything changes, so whatever I do now doesn't feel like it will go to waste (especially since I've got limited time). Anyways, I'm thrilled about what's coming, but I can wait. Keep doing what you're doing, you're probably my favourite game dev right now, one of the few projects that I've seen the potential for that doesn't feel like it will get ruined for all the worst reasons. <3

Thanks! Yeah, the ctrl-V thing was confusing, but yeah, I'm glad I didn't spend 5 minutes figuring it out. The 0.05 thing, well, matter of taste, sure, but I can assure you (because I didn't take my own advice in the past) that if you build core blocks out of 0.05 blocks (and place blocks that do have sizes ending in #.#5) then you are very much exposed to things not lining up since the grid cannot account for the #.#25 that it adds on both sides of the axis. For details, go right ahead, don't have to line up flavor blocks.

That sounds like something I would do. :P

Hello everyone, so I recorded my own personal advice and building tips. It's now available to anyone here: I may not produce some of the best looking ships on these forums, but that's likely due to my sense of aesthetics rather than my techniques. Hopefully, this information will help everyone who is interest in making their own ships in Avorion do so with the least amount of frustration and time investment.