One of the main complains that I've seen with the turn back to subscription was the amount of claims an avatar can have is a bit low and encourages people to have multiple accounts for a decent-sized empires.  I'm not asking for too much major of a change but for a bump in the number of claims an avatar can have or have it expand to an certain limit somehow.

If an avatar not belonging to an empire makes a farm with an animal production process, the animals that are spawned will be hostile towards the avatar. In some cases the animal just runs away instead.

I assume this is because the animals aren't part of an empire, and therefore have their normal animal AI.

If an avatar is in limbo of some kind, all solar systems protected by their Land seems to stop being protected almost right away.

I don't know what kind of limbo this is. For example I haven't been able to login on Doppler Effect for a couple weeks, and all the solar systems he had on his Land have already decayed.

I have seen this happen a number of times to others.

Here is a general update on plans for the near future of Hazeron.

We are working to get Hazeron Starship ready for release on Steam. It is fully integrated into our build processes so updates to the software propagate to all versions: the Hazeron Starship solo game and the Shores of Hazeron MMO clients and servers. My first priority is on the Steam release but changes often apply to the mmo client and/or servers as well.

Shores of Hazeron - The MMO Game
The mmo Shores of Hazeron will continue to be free online until Hazeron Starship is released on Steam. Then it will return to being $10 per month using PayPal, as before.

No changes are planned or pending that would force a reset of the database. There is no current plan to reset the database at any point along the way.

There is some hope that the solo game will drive players to try the mmo. The servers are being kept online until after the Steam release, to see how that plays out.

To be honest, it will take a miraculous surge in interest in the online game to keep the servers alive. They are expensive to maintain and they are not needed at all for the Steam version, which is solo playable only. 

In my opinion, I predict the servers are taken off line a few months after the Steam release.

The web site will remain up to support the wiki and the forum, mainly for bug reporting.

Hazeron Starship - The Solo Game
The solo Hazeron Starship is currently getting a surge of attention, to get ready for release on Steam.

The current plan is to work hard for the next three months to get ready, with the possibility of going six months, if that is needed.

Steamworks has fully approved Hazeron Starship for release on Steam. I just need to push the button and Hazeron Starship will be announced as "Coming Soon". It will remain in that state for two weeks before it is actually available in the Steam app store.

Rather than rush into that, I decided the game needed more solo play content. I wanted to give the player more value for their money. I also wanted to improve the story.

What I would really like to see is a continuing story that rambles along but never really ends, like a soap opera or comic book, like episodes of Star Trek or The Mandalorian. Updates to the software would include additions to the story as they become available.

To that end, it is beneficial to start with a substantial amount of story for players to play through. That way it takes them a while to catch up to the leading edge, where the author is now in the story. As the story grows longer, each new player after that has an even longer story to play, before they catch up.

I hired a professional novelist and playwright to take command of the story telling in the game. It is a long time Shores of Hazeron player who is passionate about the game. I do not yet know if they want their identity known to the players so that will remain unsaid for now.

They have the latitude to rewrite the story from scratch. No bit of the existing story need be saved.

This will lead to useful improvements in the story script engine.

Eventually, it might be possible to make the script engine available to the public. Then players could write and share stories between themselves. Some games have done this successfully. It doesn't really work for the mmo, unless someone at this end reviews and approves each script. Otherwise it's, "Oh look, is that a patent for warp 9 lying on the ground? Whoa Q255 even!"

Steam assigned an Adult rating to Hazeron Starship. It makes sense for a game where players can get naked, have sex, and bear children.

One benefit to that adult rating is that children won't be playing the game. It is detailed and complicated. It really isn't a game for children.

Another benefit to that is the author can write for an adult audience. Steam is a mature platform, with a lot of mature players. I think adults want to be spoken to like adults, not like children. Knowing the audience is comprised of adults, the author can develop an engaging story that might not be interesting to children. I don't mean pornography or crudeness, but complexity and subtlety, with adult themes and innuendo.

Steamworks currently shows 94 million active monthly users. An unknown number of them are adults. An unknown number of those adults might be interested in a complicated space game.

The square city building blocks were better and easier to use, as was the old ship designer.

Sunset Color
Light color on the clouds at sunset and sunrise is based only on the sun light color, which means there are only seven possible sunset colors. Could this be influenced by atmosphere color for more variety?

Light color on the clouds at sunset and sunrise is now modulated by atmosphere color to give more variety.

Designer Preview Bug
Designer building design preview puts me in orbit.

Fixed initial placement bug in designer preview.

Designer Building Preview Terrain Bug
Building preview in designer does not deform the terrain.

Fixed terrain update bug in designer preview.

Star Map Docking Bug
The star map displays random images when you dock and undock it.

Docking and undocking appears to cause problems with the OpenGL map display. The only fix I could find for this was to prevent that window from docking at all.

Solo Atom Managers
Solo play needs more threads to run the universe in the background or it will get increasingly choppy as the player expands their empire.

Implemented atom managers from the scene servers. More threads will now enable a larger solo play empire.

Street lights take up building slots for 'too many buildings' morale debuffs. To really use them to make a city look nice you need quite a few. They also take up a lot of room in the 'building list' window which is a chunk to scroll through when I am managing the buildings.

So I think it would be a good idea to relocate street lights under landscaping so we do not have to worry about their abundance causing mass depression within the city when they go over the building limit.  :D

It seems that a lot of new players are confused as to why their ships traveling to explored space stop while they're avatar is offline.

A small easy solution could be to have it be part of the ship's welcome back message that the ship sends on the crew channel. Maybe something along the lines of:

Been trying to make a quick list of the most annoying issues and bugs that really slow down new players.

People have any other issues to add to the list? You can post them here or send them to me else where.
If I made a mistake on the list, you can leave a comment on it.

The spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...sp=sharing

And of course I would love it for you to look at this Haxus.

Light summary of spreadsheet's content:

• Asteroid Warning Missing
  
• Spacecraft Lost in Deep Space / Spacecraft Yeet Bug
  
• NPC's EV suits don't work
  
• Starmap Search Tool Issues
  
• Military Base doesn't Import Food
  
• Ships warping in the same sector collide
  
• Spacecraft Repair Time Too Long
  
• Running Manufacturing Line Adds Too Many Workers
  
• Manufacturing Production Bonuses Calculation Error
  
• Monster Encounters are confusing and not fun
  
• Logging Camp Issues
  

Steam Update
Steamworks has approved Hazeron Starship for distribution on Steam. I can post the 'Coming Soon' notice whenever I feel ready. That starts a two week countdown for the actual release.

I will likely post the Coming Soon notice later today.

The following changes are in the update posted today. Many of these things came out of testing the solo play version.

Startup Crash
Client program was crashing at startup.

Fixed missing ifdef needed for solo play.

Story Spacecraft
Story was failing to create Dr. Karlov's space ship.

The script was referencing a non-existent blueprint id. It is fixed.

Travel Direct Order
Travel direct to system. Ship arrives in the oort cloud and does not advance closer in to the system like it used to. This also leaves that order active and does not automatically progress to the next queued order.

NPC AI was improved to fix this. It works much better now.

Crew Confused
Crew said, "We are in orbital proximity of WSY'AB'NF'e Alpha Va, the ring's parent planet." The world was a titan at a gas giant.

Fixed crew confusion resulting from some travel orders.

Remote Cameras Broken
Remote cameras do not work for my new avatar.

Fixed a bug when restoring last used camera from local settings and there wasn't one.

Ringworld Snafu
Story engine needs to find a sector containing a ringworld to proceed to the (currently) final chapter. This fails when no wormhole has ever been explored in the sector. This really breaks the story in solo play.

Fixed universe generation to identify ringworld systems sooner.

Star Map Select Option
The list of places in the star map includes an item for my avatar. It would be nice if the right click menu for my avatar had an option to select my current sector.

Added an option to star map right click menu to select current sector, when the right-clicked object is your avatar.

QPainter Bug
I started seeing this bug reported: "QPainter::begin: Cannot paint on an image with the QImage::Format_Indexed8 format"

Reformatted 8bit bitmaps that are used in paint operations to be RGB.

Pressure Tent
Pressure tent does not settle to the ground like its supposed to. Sits high. Looks funny.

Fixed item CG error.

Obnoxious Ship Movement
Crew ordered to be in orbit should not move when someone gets near their ship. When crew are following an orbit order, the pilot will move the ship if anything moves too close. This makes docking aboard a ship impossible in that situation.

Fixed pilot AI to stop avoiding obstacles when the ship's location satisfies the mission order.