2021-02-19 Dimensions, Mantifloss, Story Asteroid

[Rockinsince87]

Story Asteroid
A story function was added to trigger the asteroid. It is documented in the wiki as worldScheduleAsteroid.

That's a really cool idea. 

Dark Matter Death
Conditions under which a spacecraft or vehicle are destroyed by dark matter were relaxed a bit.

Dark matter is a form of cleanup that occurs when vehicles or spacecraft transition from one solar system to another.

Vehicles are now destroyed by dark matter only if unoccupied. No occupant has to be on line.

Spacecraft are now destroyed by dark matter when they do not have an AI first officer and there is no avatar aboard. Spacecraft are not destroyed if an AI officer or an avatar are aboard. Nobody has to be on line.

Very nice changes and it makes sense. 

I would also note that travelling long distances at this point in the beta is very difficult. I must have attempted to launch my ship from the starting cluster to the center of the galaxy 20-30 times and I was only successful twice. In my experience I found that the game was usually fine if I was there to move the controls every so often (I did this in both my successful attempts) however the game was prone to freeze if left unattended for the 6-7 hours required to travel to the galactic center at warp 9. I have no idea what causes this issue, but it is highly frustrating as the game reverts to the last manual save point when it crashes like this. Hence why I needed to attempt the journey 20-30 times.

And yes, some options for auto-saving would be nice. Such as after avatar creation, after founding a new city, after every system transition, and at an hourly time interval.

Yeah auto-save is a must. I don't know about hourly though. Why not every 10-15 minutes, or make it configurable?