The Presence release will be released not earlier than March 12th. Please note that this is a pretty ambitious release date, so chances are we will have to delay it.
General Notes
Presence will bring the long awaited shipping contracts. You will be able to post local market ads to find other players willing to transport your goods for a financial compensation. There is also a new planetary project, warehouses, that allows to rent a storage unit without the need to found a base on that planet.
If your APEX console is stuck in a loading state after the update, please make sure to refresh it once after the update to ensure you got the latest version.
New features
Local market shipping ads
Shipping ads are a new type of local market ad that is available at any LM
They allow to define a shipping contract for a commodity between two locations. One these must be the location of the LM
Planetary project: Warehouse
After the planetary project warehouse is finished a new command WAR will be available. With it you will be able to rent storage units on that planet without having a base there. The storage unit behaves just like the storage of a base, so no more pickup contracts for comex orders and sending ships to collect your LM purchase before the deadline hits.
Warehouses have a weekly rental fee that is being set and collected by the local government.
Mushrooms
You can now produce Mushrooms (MUS) in the Hydroponics Farm (HYF).
(Special thanks to Rubicate, who used the “Design a Commodity” APEX PRO license perk!)
There are now 3 new recipes for Rations (RAT) including MUS.
Changes
The inventory command INV has been updated and INVP is obsolete now. You can replace old INVP tiles in your screens by clicking “open” in the INV command and add that to your screen.
Currently on the test server MCG is no longer required for anything built on starter planets like Montem. Is that a change that will be going live as well?
It looks like the screens aren’t saving the new inventories. Every time I refresh the game page, they’re returning to the old and unavailable INVP windows
Other players have reported this issue as well. If nothing else helps remove the tile (not just the content), create it again. Open the new INV, select the inventory of choice and open it. Use that buffer and attach it to the newly created tile.
Oh, that worked, thanks. Still not sure why not keep the older command, since this one is almost impossible to just write from head on a new buffer (the inventory id is not intuitive), but I guess you guys have your reasons.
Please avoid removing useful commands and replacing them with obtuse commands bordering on useless.
The base IDs are cryptic and arbitrary strings, something well-known to be difficult for humans to remember.
Commands are intended to provide a keyboard shortcut from using the mouse, or at least that is what the tutorials taught me. If I cannot type in the command, it is no longer a shortcut. I cannot remember 10f3da05, and so now cannot use the INV command as a tile shortcut.
Please shield me from all universal IDs, everywhere. I do not want to identify my base among all bases in the universe. I want to identify it only among my own bases. If I might have multiple bases on a planet in the future, I will be happy to number them, allowing, for example, a command of INV XT-699c-2 for my second base on Montem.
I hope these comments will help your future releases! Excited to check out the cargo contracts for now.
Some feedback on the structure of the timings of the different steps of the shipping orders.
I dislike the hauler receives double the delivery time to actually deliver. I set a delivery time of 3 days, even if a partner immediately accepts and I immediately provision… they actually have 6 days to deliver without breach.
Until they pick up the cargo, I have a big fuzzy range of time in which I should expect my goods.
But I can’t realistically reduce the delivery time to 1 day, because many hauls are not reasonably only 1 day, and they do have to perform the actual haul in the delivery time. Even 2 days is a little tight, tho doable. Of course, if they dally before picking up, we’re back to 4 days.
I think the best solution is to have the delivery time apply to both the hauler’s steps. If delivery time is 5 days, it is 5 days to get the cargo AND deliver it. So both hauler steps would depend on step #1, the shipper provisioning.
This will not fix the issue, as the hauler still has full discretion on when to accept provision, and the actual delivery clock does not start until then. So, I still have to accept delivery up to 2x the specified delivery days.
And worse, I likely have to pay before they deliver.
Yes you are right, the contract still can take up double the time you specified when setting up the ad. But the intention of auto-provision is another. To make the length of the shipping contract more predictable we would need to add a separate deadline for the pickup and provision conditions as well.
I think the idea you and I discussed a month ago is quite workable as well: the “delivery time” applies first to the shipper provisioning, and that then starts an equal length timer on all of:
Payment
Hauler picking up cargo
Hauler delivering cargo
I am very much in favor of more detailed contract control, however. If implementing that is happening next anyway, even better.
