v1.20 EXPERIMENTAL II

Welcome, Galactic Survivalist!

Phase 2 of our v1.20 pre-experimental testing is now live! Building directly on our initial Creative Instance (“Virtual Workshop”) release, this update introduces Quality-of-Life inventory preservation when entering instances, new portable base-building portals,additional lighting rendering system, and extensive scenario updates across Invaders vs. Defenders (IvD).

Check out the full technical updates and bug fixes below!

Virtual Workshop & Creative Instances

• Inventory Restoration: You no longer need to manually drop your inventory before entering a workshop instance! Your toolbar, inventory, and armor are automatically saved upon entering and restored when returning to the game world.

  • Note: Entering/leaving through the Transfer Instance will not restore items brought into it—what you take into the Transfer Instance will still be cleared for safety.

• Player Base Tech Portal: Players can now place a personal Survival-Creative portal on their base to access creative instances directly.

• Instance Management & PDA: Added an F1 PDA guide explaining how Virtual Workshops work and how to manage running instances. Included a starter readable item for all starter playfields.

• Instance Rule Enforcements & Fixes:

  • Admin and NPC faction structures inside Creative Instances can no longer be edited.

  • Added MaxStructureCount and MaxClassSize constraints to instances.

  • Fixed death item dupe/loss exploits and player stats/status resets upon existing instances.

  • ClearInstanceTicket via dialogue now properly resets instance slots per faction.

  • Updated Workshop and Waiting Area POI layouts and fixed instance POI placement consistency.

How to test: 

• Start a  new game with the Testing Grounds scenario. Build a base and craft the “Virtual Workshop” device in a constructor. Place it on your base (make sure the base is powered). 

• Start into the Invader vs. Defenders scenario walk outside the starting building and you find closeby the portal hubs that will teleport you to the Galactic Trading Station. Here you find portals that lead into the Creative Mode Instances

Structure Lighting System 

A new option for lighting in game was added, the system introduces precomputed 3D light volumes for structures such as bases, POIs, and ships (excluding terrain).

• It ensures closed rooms get genuinely dark, sunlight no longer bleeds through solid walls and ceilings at noon.

• Light enters organically through openings (like windows or open doors) and fades toward the back of a room.

• Light blocks and torches fill rooms with light while being properly blocked by solid walls and floors.

• Performance Benefit: Active baked lamps and torches turn off their individual realtime Unity lights, meaning having multiple lamps no longer costs individual realtime shadows and performance hits.

• No real time shadows produced from the player, NPC’s or blocks placed in a structure.

You can use several console commands (requiring moderator or GameMaster permissions while standing on or inside a structure) to inspect and troubleshoot the lighting:

• struct staticlight: Displays the current state of the light (ON/OFF, whether a volume is baked, and if it is globally disabled).

• struct staticlight false / true: Manually turns the baked light off or on for the specific structure.

• struct property-set StructureLight false: Directly writes the lighting state as a structure property.

• struct lightdebug true / false: Toggles extra structure light debugging lines within the F9 debug panel.

Invaders vs. Defenders (IvD)

• Enabled StoreInventoryOnEnter: True and StructureLight across IvD playfields.

• Relocated Event Sector into the nebula.

• Added Portal POIs on starting planets for quick travel to the Galactic Trading Station (GTS) for CM.

• Added Arkenian trading POIs (Ark, Pol, ARC factions) to DesertBurnt, BarrenMetal, and LavaNascent.

• Updated Instance Control Dialogues and migrated instance parameters to InstancePerFaction.

• Set dialogue and trading devices on specific POIs to non-interactable where appropriate.

• Fixed missing faction alignment on the GTS.

Guided Tutorial & Testing Grounds

• Guided Tutorial: Fixed CoQ/exception crash at startup and re-based core config files on the latest default versions.

• POIs: Replaced/removed problematic blast doors (Credit: Stellar_Titan).

• Hecken Playfields: Corrected trader assignment on Adv. Component Factory and adjusted Shipyard orbit distance away from the atmospheric boundary.

• Tech Tree: Fixed Drone Bay spawner unlocking improperly from Cargo parent node.

• Fixed blueprint loading/spawning errors for SVN format 33 (ignores unknown TE/core data instead of throwing exceptions).

• Fixed an issue where the IvD Event System failed to initialize on playfield load.

• Added console command blockvoxels and added safety toggles for cyclic memory logging.