We were talking about this a couple weeks ago, and people were talking about it last night too. So lets start a new thread for this.
See also: (Idea thread) Formal War Declaration

I was playing with the idea of instead of declaring war on an empire, since empires are a weird and easily exploitable entity. And cities can be deleted or rebuilt in an instant, such as bulldozing capitol and building a new one. Maybe it would make more sense if you had to declare war on a solar system rather than an empire or city.
A solar system is a place that contains stuff and and it can't be changed (aside from its name). The owner of stuff in the solar system can change at the drop of a hat via surrender mechanics or be bulldozed. But most of the value is the solar system itself.

Also at the same time to slow down the amount of damage a single attacker can do in just a few hours, it would also be beneficial if the attacker had to leave warships in a solar system for an extended period of time to not make all attacks end within the same hour of the attacker entering the solar system.
This would also slow down wars a lot, making for a more relaxed and strategic movement of ships and frontlines.

Example for thought:

An attacker goes to the solar system they want to capture or destroy. They can freely attack all military targets in the solar system, such as; spacecraft, space stations, and military buildings. But they would not be able to harm civilian buildings right away.

In order to target or capture civilian targets, the attacker would have to contest/siege the solar system by removing defender's military presence. Then the spacecraft would have to remain in the solar system for an extended period of time, broadcasting propaganda and such on the hail channel so the inhabitants knows about it. Could even be a whole week for the capital solar system of an empire.

The defender can then try to stop the siege, or even broker peace with the attacker. Even if the defender is totally unable to do anything to defend themselves and no peace can be found, they will have time to request help from others. When the siege completes the attacker can destroy or capture any city, building, or world in the solar system.

In the end, this would mean that civilian targets can't simply be destroyed over night. The attacker would have to leave at least one spacecraft in the solar system, preventing them from destroying a whole empire with just one spacecraft over night.

Ok, let whatever else brainstorming begin!

In normal times I wouldn't ask this question ..I would simply be patient. But things being as they are I can't help but hope that he's alright and it's the game bugs that have silenced him ..not the covid bug.

Currently, players are able to accumulate levels when performing tasks, however these levels don't seem to do anything besides quantify accomplishment. I think it would fit in with the idea of avatars as higher beings if levels applied modifiers to the task at hand. This would work rather nicely for things like construction, manufacture, and trade - although not for more abstract things like space exploration. A positive quality of this suggestion is that it would discourage spurious alts, and encourage players to strategically use what characters they have.

Apologies if this has been suggested before; I couldn't find anything with search here or on the wiki.

Approaching a planetoid is a bit frightful as once in range, your ship is seemingly gripped by the gravity and thrown along a tumbling trajectory (which also strikes me as inaccurate since Shell Theorem implies the planetoid's rotation wouldn't make a difference unless there was frame dragging, although I guess this is to simplify player movement on their surface) even when still fairly distant. It might be worthwhile to apply some exponential factor to it to mediate between the two modalities.

I put this in Arena of Ideas since it arguably isn't a bug per-se, just a surprising game mechanic.

Title. Placed a bunch of stations in a room void for a bridge in a new starship design. Stations cannot be accessed by pressing E. Some stations seem to be usable by crew, however.

Etherium Fixes
A number of things got broken by the etherium change.

I am fixing them as fast as I can. Things are beginning to smooth out. Here are some specific bugs that were fixed in this update.

• Delete buildings or any atom from the scene and it does not disappear. Fixed scene removal of atoms; client update required.
  
• Vehicle factory does not make vehicles. Fixed initial placement of new vehicles.
  
• Database update of atoms no longer thread safe. Fixed construction of atom update transaction; it is much more efficient now, eliminating a time consuming step.
  
• Client sometimes receives a child atom before its parent; this causes problems. Fixed broken scene atom parent; client update required.
  
• System scans are blank. Fixed; client update required.
  

• Win64 update posted
  
• MacOS updates posted
  
• Manjaro update posted
  
• Win32 update posted
  
• Ubuntu update posted
  
• Mint update posted
  
• Debian update posted
  

Paper mills should require fabric as a tool in paper production.
Paper mills regularly have to replace fabrics on machines to run smoothly.

Too Many Galaxies
Players complain about there being too much space and it being too easy to hide.

Nerfed all but 4 galaxies.

Remaining galaxies are as follows:

• Shores of Hazeron
  
• Andromeda Rising
  
• Veil of Targoss
  
• Vulcan's Forge
  

Etherium
There is a problem recalling home. Sometimes it works; sometimes it does nothing or you end up somewhere weird.

This is caused by a desync problem that moves you to unexpected and deadly places, seemingly at random. It manifests in many different ways. Recent changes exacerbated the problem.

Groking the desync problem exposed a logical conundrum that was impossible to solve within the atom hierarchy of the SoH universe. A low level data structure that has endured since the first days of writing the SoH code was fundamentally flawed when used by multiple threads simultaneously, even though it was guarded by appropriate locks. I won't go into details because there is always someone who will say it was obviously stupid to do it that way in the first place (and I hate that). Then there are others who might follow in my footsteps and get waylaid by the same pitfall, which I would not mind.

The solution to the problem required a rewrite of the game universe's atomic structure. This took about a week; lots of code changed; every atom was affected. An entirely new object was created to manage atoms in a different way. I call it etherium, hence the title of this topic. It is a little nod to Nikola Tesla, who discusses the ether as the medium of space.

Etherium eliminates many problems with the old atom data structures; we shall see if it creates any new ones. Most of the server deadlocks of the past could not have happened if this was done years ago.

I've tested the critical parts as well as I can on the debug servers. Don't be surprised if there are problems. The live server farm is quite a different animal from the debug servers. There is a lot more going on simultaneously. Rest assured I'll be monitoring this closely. I'm looking forward to nailing this and putting it behind me.

My town is ready for Gagarin to show up. Now I can find out why he is not doing that, which is the next bug on my to-do list, after this etherium change.

I apologize for the instability of the past week. I added 10 days of time to all active accounts, to compensate for the brokenness of things while I worked on fixing the problem.

Recall Pose
My pose is wrong when I awaken in my berth from recalling.

Should be fixed by the etherium change.

System Transition
System transitions seem to make your avatar appear in odd places.

Should be fixed by the etherium change.

Ships Collide
And the bigger one, ships flying in the same sector seem to collide.

Should be fixed by the etherium change.

Transition Death
Oh right, another thing that happens after transitions would be suffocating on the ship, even while weaing an ev suit.

I think this is fixed. I had a similar bug while working on etherium and I fixed that bug.

Homeworld Death
People still report starting a new avatar, appearing in space and dying, then respawning somewhere else with one less item.

Etherium changes likely fixed this. I haven't been able to recreated the problem on the debug servers since the change. We'll see if this one is gone for good; I think it is.

Star Map Selection Bug
There is a bug that prevents selecting things on the star map when zoomed in closely.

Fixed a projection matrix inconsistency that was introduced when I last worked on the star map.

Magmium EV Suit
Metal EV suit patent should be a prerequisite to developing the magmium EV suit patent.

Fixed an error in the manufacturing process data.

Asteroid Report
It would be nice to know if the asteroid hit the sun or something.

Observatories will now report the event when an asteroid hits the sun or a planet.

System Map Location
Show my location on the solar system map

Done.

Patent Q
Minimum production Q should consider the Q of patents that are required and limit Q.

Min Q setting now affects the minimum Q of patents that are fetched.

Monster Origin?
When a monster is spotted aboard, the spotter should speculate where it came from if possible.

The crewman who spots a monster will now say something about its origin. This will give a hint to how it got aboard the ship.

Acid Immunity
My ship seems to be immune to acid damage from insidious atmosphere, from orbit all the way to the ground, if I keep it over the airport.

A spacecraft must now be on the ground at the airport to be immune to atmospheric damage. This is supposed to represent the presence of ground crew who take care of your ship while you are at the airport, though it does not require the airport to actually have workers or people. Droids?

Acid Damage Spam
Acid damage from insidious atmo message is spammy.

Fixed.

Client Crash on Scene Change
When teleporting from a planet, it is not uncommon to have the client program crash.

This happens to me a lot because I teleport a lot. It is always caused by a background thread building some terrain or plants or something. The etherium changes fixed the crash for me.

Vehicle Transporter Magmium Heat Sink
Why does a vehicle transporter require a magmium heat sink? A personnel transporter doesn't require any heat sinks. It seems like a big jump to go right to magmium, putting Atlantis that much farther out of reach. :(

Vehicle transporter now requires cryo heat sinks instead of magmium heat sinks.

Persist sensor UI on scene transition, a mostly quality of life improvement imo, I prefer looking at a 3D Cartesian plane from pic related angle, but unfortunately this always reverts back to the default and have to set it again.