Alpha 5.4.8 is live. Bulla Autumnalis opens today.
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Bulla Augusti closed this morning. Bulla Autumnalis opens in half an hour.
If you have been away, this is the hour to come back. Expeditions are easier to win from the first day than from the third week, and this one is built around finding things in the ground rather than shooting at them.
Bulla Augusti — final standings
A month of building, forging and expanding. The final table:
- 🥇 Garkbit — 11,342 pts
- 🥈 Pink Nyanko — 5,719 pts
- 🥉 snowpepsi — 4,705 pts
- TerPen — 4,531 pts
Congratulations to all four, and thank you to everyone who flew it.
Bulla Autumnalis — opens today
September is harvest season, and this expedition is about what comes out of the ground: scanning, prospecting and mining.
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Getting good with the new planetary probes is what will decide it. Probe duration and power now depend on your pilot and your bonuses, and the ground you send them across decides how far they reach.
Two new premium rewards — and you do not need the Pass to get them
This is the part we changed deliberately. Both new premium rewards can be earned by playing.
🚢 Prospero Messoria — the best miner in the game right now. Larger cargo than the standard Prospero, a substantial mining bonus, and better speed, armour and shields. You can go and look at the full stats today in the Grottaglie Shipyard, under premium ships.
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> Reach Gradus 15 before the expedition ends and it is yours — together with the Disciple medal, which carries its own bonuses for the following 30 days.
🧭 The Dowser — a strong starting pilot, with bonuses to sensors and to planetary probe duration and power, and good starting attributes.
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> Finish in the top 5 of the final ranking and the Dowser is yours.
The Golden Pass
The Pass is available as usual, and you know the arrangement: everything that comes in goes straight back into development and cloud costs. It is the reason the world has never had to reset.
The Pass grants the Messoria and the Dowser immediately, plus the golden reward at every Gradus — including the unique collectible items.
Reach the top Gradus on the golden path and you also get +1 to every Dowser attribute, the permanent Bearer medal, and a second Messoria, so you finish the month with two of the best miners in the game in your fleet.
New mission type: Publish
Survey data is now worth reputation, more xp, more money and tokens.
Publish missions ask you to sell your scanned data to the General Land Office. Your survey becomes part of everyone's map — which means new pilots will find good ore far faster than they used to, because someone else already walked the ground.
It is the first mission type where the thing you are selling is knowledge.
Probes now tell you what happened
A small change that removes a lot of guesswork.
When a probe reaches the end of its life, look at the colour of the circle it leaves behind:
- Green-blue — nothing was in range. Move on.
- Yellow-red — there was a deposit in range. Come back and work that area.
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Previously a dead probe told you nothing at all.
Everything else in 5.4.8
Expeditions now appear in preview. A few days before an expedition opens you can see exactly what is in it and plan accordingly. Worth remembering: some expeditions use the same tokens, so you can save tokens between expeditions and spend them where you most want to win.
A faster terrain generator. Several improvements under the hood, including a substantial speed gain on the surface maps.
Probe bonuses are live. The new duration and power bonuses are fully implemented and visible on the exploration page.
Duplicate pilots are now an upgrade, not a refund. Hire or receive a pilot template you already own and that pilot gains +1 to all attributes, instead of returning 50% of the cost.
You can pan past the map border while exploring, which makes deposits near the edges far easier to find.
Full mission descriptions on demand. The Active Missions page now has a Show full mission description button on each mission, for when you come back to something days later.
HQ terrain maps restored on Earth.
The newsletter archive is now public. Every Flight Log since January is readable at:
space.zerog.live/newsletter — there are a lot of hints and tips buried in the older ones.
Fixed
- Ships no longer appear to teleport across the terrain map after landing
- Newly recruited pilots now correctly receive their template abilities
Zero-G in the press
BrowserMmorpg.com covered Alpha 5.4.5 twice in one issue last week — once as a development update and once as a news article.
And if you want to know what is actually happening when you press Scan Local Map, we published the full technical write-up: how the engine generates surface detail down to centimetres from NASA mission data that is 463 metres per pixel, entirely in your browser. Read it here
Coming next
The next round of crafting brings planetary houses and bases. You and your Venture will be able to build on the surface — on ground you surveyed yourself.
And the aliens are moving. Expect trouble in the asteroid instances, and sooner or later, on land.
The numbers
1,704 registered pilots · 20,105 missions flown.
We passed 20,000 missions this week — more than 2,200 of them since the last Flight Log nine days ago. In January that number was zero, and the world has not been reset since.
Fly safe. Watch the slope.
Giuseppe & the Zero-G Team
FLY FAST PILOTS!
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