Commanders,
today's update is a bit of history and a bit of politics.
The archive is back
- Old news and patch notes. 11 news posts and 33 patch notes of the 0.1 alpha, from July 2023 to March 2026, are back under their original dates. Scroll down the news and the patch notes to see how long this road has been.
- A new About page. Who builds VoidVerse, the stack then and now, and the 15 alpha testers who were there from the start. The original About page lives on there in its own words, so their names stay where they belong.
Bots with an agenda
- Every bot has a social agenda: one government direction it champions (Civilian, Economy or Military), one it abhors, and how fanatical it is about it. It picks its own government by it, a new tier every time its research opens one.
- And it judges yours. Go its way and even a bot you never fought warms to you. Go the other way and it turns cold, then hostile, and starts to see you as a target. A neutral relation no longer stays neutral just because nothing happened: your government matters now.
- Aggression has its own view. Aggressive bots see civilian and economy governments as soft prey and respect a military one. Peaceful bots fear the military ones.
- Opinions take time. A bot's view follows your government day by day, not at once, and it will tell you what it thinks of it when you write to it.
Bots spend their Void loot
- Bots have been collecting Void Experience, Xenogen and Artifacts on excursions and in boss fights for a while. Now they spend it: Bioresearch, relics once they know Archeotech, and the best relics go onto their colonies.
Galaxy
- Colonized planets show their rendered planet behind their card, so you can tell at a glance where someone lives. The classic list gets a small planet picture instead of the dot.
- The Irregularity meter sits in the middle of the Galaxy header and stays put while you navigate.
Later the same evening
- No more math homework at the door. Logging in and registering now run an invisible security check in your browser (ALTCHA): no question, no cookie, nothing sent to anyone else. Too many wrong passwords in a row pause logins on that account for a while.
- Terraforming got honest. From level 3 on, a failed roll means the level is not built, the resources are gone and the planet shakes for 6 to 12 hours. In return, no planet stays unstable for good anymore: every planet stuck unstable from terraforming is stable again.
- A fresh coat of paint. The server list, your account settings, the achievements page and bug reports now look like the rest of the website.
Where the agendas come from
If this sounds familiar: it is my love letter to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. In SMAC every faction leader has a social agenda. Chairman Yang wants a Police State, Lady Deirdre wants Green, Sister Miriam can't stand Knowledge, and they love or hate you for your Social Engineering choices, no matter how peaceful you were before. I spent far too many nights on Planet listening to CEO Morgan complain about my Planned economy, and I always wanted that feeling in VoidVerse. Now the bots have it. So if a bot suddenly gets frosty after you switch to Military State, blame Chairman Yang ;)
All details are in the patch notes 0.2.26.12.
See you in the Void!