Customizable Difficulty Settings & more

Customizable Difficulty Settings & more

Heyho Captains, 

Today we have another great update tackling your feedback that came in during the first weeks after launch - no April's Fools - promised.

In this update specifically we present you - among another batch of technical improvements, bug fixes, balancing refinements and quality of life enhancements - most importantly, new tools to shape your own journey through the unknown.

With the brand new customizable run settings, you decide how Voyager survives the Delta Quadrant. Fine-tune resources, change difficulties, quest balancing, and story pressure to match your playstyle - whether you want a tense survival challenge or a more strategic, story-driven experience.

Adapt the rules. Rewrite the odds.

Detailed Changelog

Game Difficulties

NEW: Custom Difficulty Setting

  • Added a custom difficulty setting that is selectable as a fourth option when starting a new game

  • The following variables can be customized for new runs:

    • Challenge Mode (manual saves disabled; auto-save after every event)

    • Mutiny

    • Homesick morale penalty per sector

    • Spent too much time in the sector penalty

    • Spent too much time in the sector penalty start

    • Resource deposit size

    • Base storage capacity

    • Enemy combat power

    • Dialogue checks difficulty

    • Points of interests positive outcomes

    • Away mission challenges

    • Away mission XP

    • Construction times

    • Research times

    • Crew treatment time

Balancing for standard Difficulties

Adventure

  • Reduced resource deposit size

  • Reduced construction times

  • Reduced research times

  • Reduced crew treatment time

  • Spent too much time in the sector penalty starts later

Years of Hell

  • Slightly reduced enemy combat power

  • Slightly increased resource deposit size

  • Increased construction times

  • Increased research times

  • Increased crew treatment time

Gameplay & Systems

  • Bio Laboratories will now stop producing when the storage of the produced resource (bio-neural gel packs or nanites) is at maximum capacity.

  • Available work teams are now automatically assigned if room operations would be interrupted because the current work team is no longer available.

  • Heroes are now properly prioritized in sickbay.

  • Disabled nebulas for sector 11 (“Uprising”).

  • In Caretaker when the hull feature is not yet active, players can no longer accidently assign work teams to hull repair.

  • Moved "Equinox Antimatter Injector" tech from tier 5 to tier 3 and adjusted costs.

  • Moved “Scientific Milestone” and “History of Humankind” techs from tier 4 to tier 3 and adjusted costs. 

  • Moved “Friendship One Remnant” tech from tier 3 to tier 4 and adjusted costs

  • Increased effect for two techs: 

    • “Scientific Milestone” research rate increased from 15% to 20% 

    • “Friendship One Remnant” research rate increased from 15% to 25% 

  • The damage reduction provided by a hero in the navigational deflector is now applied correctly.

Combat

  • Reduced Dilithium gained after the final fight of the side mission “Think Tank”.

  • Borg are now no longer able to surrender or flee.

  • Increased the strength of Malon vessels to be closer to their in series counterparts.

  • Updated the fights against the Equinox to make sure the ship won't be incorrectly destroyed in the first combat.

  • Phasers in combat are now fired from the phaser banks and the related charge up animation was added.

  • The Borg Cutting Beam and the Disruptor Beam no longer share their weapon locations with the phasers in combat.

  • The target reticles around enemies in combat now get disabled, if an enemy gets destroyed or flees.

  • The U.S.S. Voyager has the ablative armor now deployed in combat, if the related tech got unlocked in Endgame. Balancing-wise this was always the case, but the visual representation was missing.

Quests & Narrative

  • Scorpion

    • Fixed missing feedback during dialogue when unlocking Borg tech if Kes is not available.

  • Dark Frontier

    • Added 2 missing alternative dialogues for Lani so she doesn’t introduce herself as Lieutenant Torres

  • One small step

    • Fixed Workshop room widget displaying a blank name for the item “Shuttle Shield Adjustments.”

  • Infinite Regress

    • Fixed availability handling for Seven in the last part of the mission.

  • Infinite Regress 

    • Side Mission dialog choices are no longer incorrectly marked as important choices.

  • Friendship One

    • Changed the Torpedo crafting step of the “Photon Torpedo Modifications” from requiring a unique item to the base torpedoes, as Voyager already crafts photon torpedoes anyway with the base recipe.

  • Friendship One

    • Added side mission icons to the scannable planets to make this step easier to complete. 

  • Think Tank

    • Changed the “Communication Jammer” Tech reward from already researched to unlocked only in the Tech Tree.

  • Homesickness

    • Fixed the morale malus in “Old Friends New Enemies” to be applied correctly again.

UI / UX

  • Added a menu entry in graphics settings for invalidating shader precache: Activating this setting causes shaders to be recompiled the next time you start or load a save game. This can reduce hitches after GPU hardware or driver changes.

  • The combat hero selection now uses correct localized text to display combat abilities.

  • Fixed an issue where some hero combat ability descriptions didn’t mention their cooldown. 

  • Fixed a size issue with portrait icons of heroes when assigned to bigger rooms.

  • Added a sound notification when the quest tracker is updated. 

  • Fixed a display bug with the ally list on the bridge.

  • Fixed an issue with UI layering.

  • Added max capacity to dilithium tooltip.

  • Loading screen text no longer gets cut off in some languages.

  • Visually improved production and energy production in tooltip UI.

  • Hover tooltip UI improvements for: resource production, energy production and battery.

  • Added deuterium production from bussard collectors to deuterium tooltip.

Graphics / Rendering / Art

  • The hull damage visualization now also gets applied to the U.S.S. Voyager in cutscenes for a more coherent experience

  • The hull damage visualization is now correctly initiated when arriving in a new sector.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed an issue where free crew beds were not calculated correctly.

  • Fixed wrong homesick modifiers for easy difficulty.

  • Fixed combat hero selection not being cleared when returning to the main menu.

  • Fixed an issue where the message "deflector offline" was triggered incorrectly.

  • Fixed combat autoresolve not accounting (visually or functionally) for game difficulty.

  • Fixed combat overview tab's average enemy power not accounting for game difficulty.

  • The borg cutting beam control room no longer clips through adjacent rooms to the side.

  • Fixed an issue where players couldn’t continue after having the call list open when arriving at a story Point of Interest that starts another dialogue.