Hello and welcome to the #7 Dev Diary focused on Hazards.
Overview
What is a hazard? A hazard is an object or area that, due to lore, roleplay or gameplay reason, presents a certain level of danger to the environment. The danger can vary from a mild inconvenience, such as low radiation damage, to instakill death zones, such as the inner sun corona. Other hazards include planet atmospheres, anomalies, mines, and gas pockets. In addition to dangerous highly-radioactive space, radiation is often used to describe hazards not supported by game mechanics, such as heat damage that isn't a sun corona, or dark matter, which is beyond our real-life understanding of physics to begin with.
Hazards in the live version of the mod are extremely inconsistent. Not only are there many locations where, for example, mines and anomalies do zero damage, but a conceptually similar minefield on the other side of Sirius works fine. The goal of working with hazards this update is to represent them more accurately in-game and introduce a consistency standard between similar hazards in different areas.
Minefields
An attempted brute force path through the Alaska minefield.
Strict minefields are actually harmful now. No longer will it be possible to ignore a minefield like Zone-21 in a capital ship. Their damage per second is substantially increased, along with other parameters such as density. Note that this does not include hybrid asteroid-minefields, such as in Dublin or Omega-5. Those were standardized to remain relatively low on hull damage (as opposed to some doing zero damage) but high energy damage.
Anomalies
A Corvo flying too close to the Tau-23 anomaly.
Another hazard not properly displayed are anomalies. While their interpretation is open, due to their unexplainable existence, we're going with the "dangerous" rather than "harmless" approach. All anomalies will be a proper hazard you can still study and research, though approaching one is highly inadvisable.
Collapsed jump holes
A collapsed jump hole once connecting Edinburgh and Orkney -- effect by @Titan*.
Jump holes are an under-represented concept in Discovery in terms of their functionality. They are meant to be highly volatile and subject to collapsing and (re)opening, yet throughout history, it was either a 100% stable jumphole or zero trace of one. A newly introduced hazard will be collapsed jump holes, part of a jump connection overhaul of certain regions which will hopefully be covered in a future Dev Diary. Instead of completely deleting all changed jumpholes, we left some of them as collapsed, representing a once-existing connection between systems. Due to a strong electromagnetic field such jump holes are hazardous and should be avoided at all costs.
Not only are we introducing collapsed jump holes, but unstable ones as well. In other words, expect a few new snub-only jumpholes part of the above-mentioned jump connection overhaul, both for gameplay and lore reasons.
Mazes
If one strays away from the recommended path in Kepler, death is certain.
Another concept appearing in this patch, going hand-in-hand with hazards, are mazes. Mazes on their own are not hazardous but provide a safe passage through a hazard. An example on the live version would be the minefield in Connecticut. The minefield is the hazard, while the buoys follow a safe hollow path inside the minefield. Similarly, certain systems will have mazes in combination with hazards next patch.
Some systems containing a maze next patch are Alaska, Kepler and Omicron Pi. Kepler is entirely engulfed by dark matter storms, as per the story flow of vanilla throughout Discovery. Rather than deleting it or making it inaccessible, we turned it into a maze-like instakill system full of hazards with safe passages, and valuables for those successful in navigating the harsh environment. Omicron Pi is a new exploration-based system with its own unique story, mazes, hazards, and gathering clues. Alaska has been transformed into a highly guarded minefield-surrounded maze system much more dangerous to trespassers than before.
All three are worth checking out and exploring to the last corner.
Conclusion
The overall goal of this project is to make space more realistic and dangerous, while respecting the limits of game mechanics. In the future, there will be further fine-tuning of hazards. For example, we aim to represent gas pockets in-game as they are in lore - dangerous to capital ships but navigable by snubs. I'll also use this opportunity to encourage all of you to report any bug or illogicality with hazards once the patch drops.
Do you think a minefield is too harmless by being able to brute force it in a capital ship?
Do you think we missed an area that should have or be a hazard, like a strong radiation field around toxic debris?
Do you have an entirely new idea for a hazard we could implement in the future?
![[Image: BMdBL0j.png]](https://i.imgur.com/BMdBL0j.png)