Hello all and welcome to the latest episode of NI's "far-too-late-to-the-scene" changes (please comment if you have a better title!).

Today's new public feature is... the end of leaving houses without leaders!

From now on, if you are a leader and you leave your house you will be required to set a new leader:


You will be required to select one of the existing members of your house to pass on the role to. And if you have no other members for some reason, you will be warned that leaving will dissolve your house.

For non-leaders, you will also see a similar screen which replaces the old pop-up box you may be used to but is functionally the same as it was.

Hopefully this should reduce the number of accidents and forum posts!

Elsewhere, we have made a few more changes to the backend, including an upgrade to the version of php we have been using (its less interesting but if I run out of regular updates I might detail some of these changes).

But for today, thus ends the update on the new public features.

/Nao

Hi all,

I need to apologise to you all - a slight error on my part has been made.

Whilst optimising some backend code, a plus was missed, resulting in players who completed quests getting only the value of the quest, rather than in addition to their existing points.

The code has since been fixed, but I have had to roll back the db for faction_points and quests to just prior to the change to the server code. This means that you have all your points back, and the quest progress is as it was.

The impact should be minimal but I have to apologise for this serious oversight.

Apologies again!

/Nao

Hello all,

So, following the previous update we have a couple of minor new tweaks to the site.

Firstly, as suggested, the password reset has been made more obvious on the home page and links to the login page where it now has its own section. Whilst the content has always been on the login and registration pages, accessing them was not obvious so hopefully this will resolve some issues.

Secondly, in the "visible" changes, houses taxes have been tweaked slightly. The max debt has now been limited to 10K gold (was 15K), however the tax for dissolved houses (below 1K funds) has been increased to 150 gold to discourage failing to pay your dues. Against this, houses will soon be able to "unbankrupt" themselves soon - code is in progress. There was requests to remove the tax, but we are not going to do this for now. Some other changes are coming that should help increase happiness however.

Lastly, though you will likely not notice, there have been some tweaks to filenames, some minor code & css fixes, the mobile sidebar has been tweaked slightly, and some wording changed on a couple of pages.

Anyway, that's all we have for you tonight and stay tuned for more coming soon!

/Nao

Its been a very long time coming (it was mentioned when I joined NI), but there is now finally an actual inventory page!

Visually it's very similar to the market and offers the same filter options, but it has a button to enable and disable selling - this should hopefully help some accidents!

Elsewhere, we have had to shave a couple of letters of other titles here and there, but this should not affect any functionality.

Regarding the future updates to the site, I can say there is quite a number of things being worked on. A lot of "simple" changes have incredibly deep knock-on effects on the site as a whole which then results in a massive project to completely rethink how we do things, such as when is a house not a house? But, there is still stuff being worked on!

However, I would like to encourage you all to yell loudly below - I'm curious what is the most requested change and what would result in the biggest differences to folks. And of course, what you do/don't like about the new page.

/Nao

Hi all,

Emails

As some of you may have noticed, there has been an issue with the forum emails.

Simply put, the issue is too many emails. The email hosts blocked the account for the volume of email.

I have therefore moved the emails to a new provider however their free tier is rather limited. As such, all subscriptions to posts and PM notifications have been turned off. I should be clear - you can still chose to receive and email by specifically changing your settings but if I still see more issues I will have to disable this completely.

If you have been trying to reset your password or activate your account and you have not spoken to me, then please request a reset again now or contact NI on discord and I'll have a look for you.


Funds

The alternative option is that we use a service paying for the emails we send, through Amazon SES or similar, however NI donations do not cover the NA & EU game servers* as it is and I don't want to add yet another bill that I personally will end up having to pay. For reference, there have been around 5 donations this year, excluding AU and China for around 100 euros. This is the cost of 1 month of game servers. The web server is not included in this cost.

*The AU servers are directly paid for by AU players, and therefore not totally relevant & the Chinese players have covered all costs associated with their server every month - a very big thank you to them for that!


So, two things please. Be sensible when asking for email updates from the forum and please, donate - please help me keep NI alive. And, if the donations are sustainable then we will use a paid mailer - and you can have all the emails you could ever want!


Thanks
/Nao

Another month, another blueprint cycle.  The legendary upgrade selection for July has been made.

The previous round of upgrade recipes will be removed in approximately 24 hours.

Greetings,

The AU servers are back again thanks to community donations!  For those who don't know, the upkeep is 32 AUD per month and you can check our current AU account balance any time from the Alien Hosting Public Pay page which is linked to on our Donate page.  Payment is due on the 15th of each month so we're looking for a credit balance of $32 by the time that rolls around.

Thanks and enjoy!
- Kip

June has arrived... and so has another legendary upgrade collection.

The previous round of upgrade recipes will be removed in approximately 24 hours.