The "Microcosm" update brings a community-requested feature along with various tweaks.
- Added Minor Resource Zones. These small pockets of stars host rare resources just like their larger cousins, making more areas of the galaxy valuable to control. Minor Zones and indicated on your galaxy map by smaller circles around their principal star.
- Vapor Siphons and Magmatic Extractors now require 2k Factory Enhancers per resource per second. This change is made so that fully-capable extractor stations are no longer "free" throwaway assets throughout all gameplay levels, and have a tangible cost associated with them.
- Changed Astrometric Scanner information display to show resources available per hour rather than per second
- Adjusted Astrometric Scanner hotbar tool to use the correct chamber icon
- Improved some zone and system flavour text in Astrometric Scanner
- Internally reorganized zone generation systems.
(Unfortunately, the restructuring and internal changes to add minor zones also change how RRS's RNG system works, meaning that the "Microcosm" update reshuffles the location of existing resource sources in the galaxy. This should be the last time this has to happen for a long time.)
- Added configurable limit for the maximum number of stars in a zone
- Added Y-axis limits to the zone generation star gathering routine. Zones will no longer be full columns in the vertical axis, but rather different parts of a zone have height limits. This improves the shape and size of the new mini-zones as well as provides forwards compatibility with things such as galaxy shape mods.
- Resource zones now encompass void systems as well as stars. No zone type includes actual resources in voids (yet), but this makes map navigation easier and paves the way for future features...
As always, thank you all for playing with - and putting up with all the changes in - Resources ReSourced. It's been a bit of a rough ride, but there probably won't be any more major zone-shifting changes for the foreseeable future.
Instead, be on the lookout for interesting new features coming to resource zones near you, soon(tm). I need to focus my efforts on the Bastion Initiative and other projects for now, but there is much work yet to be done making the RRS galaxy a more varied and interesting place to play StarMade.