We may be a few hours or even days off from Sirian Standard Time, but our local time still says so. And that's all that matters, right?
With the new year, the new apps for our PDAs go online as full releases. No bugs, no exploits, all clean now! Let me give you a quick rundown on the new apps:
Token Trader
While we are mostly self-sufficient when it comes to our basic needs, the cargo bay containers are stuffed with nice little things from Sirius that previously needed to be requested from Quartermaster Sombra and permitted by Commander Aguilar. With Token Trader, we now have a tool to manage things better. As before, every crew member gets a set amount of tokens per month that can be traded in for items from the cargo bay and other amenities and services. Token Trader now allows to trade these tokens among crew members.
Commander Aguilar gave every item in the inventory a set token value. Token Trader is directly linked to the cargo manifest, allowing everyone to check the inventory and prices of all items at any time from anywhere. You can requisition any item faster than before - just pay with a token and a KSR will deliver it directly to your room. The requisition now works anonymously, so neither Sombra nor Commander Aguilar need to be approached.
(Of course this is only the theory, given everything on the Apahanta is tracked with triangulating sensors, so Commander Aguilar knows anyway.)
Of course the regular meals and basic needs will remain covered for free, so if you spent your tokens for the month already, the canteen will always have food and the group showers in the dormitories will remain available.
You can also set up your own Token Trades for individual trades, for example for services, duty shift trades, Deck 13 things and so on. More on that later.
The distribution of tokens per month is still as before:
- Engineers and medical staff receive three (3) tokens per month.
- Bridge officers receive two (2) tokens per month.
- Everyone else receives one (1) token per month.
As before, you can earn additional tokens by partaking in the crew rotation training program - completing a module will grant you one additional token once, and obviously qualify you for trainee assignments for the essential crew jobs.
Matchmaker
The new Matchmaker App was created to make certain things a bit easier to organize, if you catch my drift. You can either set your preferences and no-go's or, given the limited amount of crew on the ship in first place, just mark who you are interested in and to what degree. That being said, the moment a match is found, both parties get notified!
Matchmaker also has Deck 13 mode, which notifies interested parties in free slots on Deck 13. Compatible with Token Trader, by the way. Completely anonymous!
Space Empires
Some of our nerds (including me) sat together to code a space game. Some of you know about it already, but I'll give it a quick summary here regardless:
Space Empires!
You start out with a colony ship and explore space until you find a habitable planet to settle - or you build space stations instead! Or both! And from there, you start your own empire - become a powerful House, a rich Megacorporation, a Bounty Hunter fleet or a lead a pirate clan to glory! We used 3D models from the database to generate various civilizations, so don't be surprised if you see a Tokugawa ingame. The game is online non-stop and you can decide whether to fight other players or team up with them against AI-generated enemies and nations.
If you want to get creative, design your own ships and stations - the sky is the limit!
Token Trader is automatically installed to all crew PDAs, while Matchmaker and Space Empires are available for download from the Apahanta Crew Data Core.