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About this mod
This is the Sovereign-Class Reaper CV for Vanilla/Project Eden 1.7.
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->NOT CPU/REFORGED COMPLIANT<-
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This CV can take out two Level 10 Tovera-Class Dreadnaughts and their two escorts without taking any damage, but you have to fly it correctly and it will take some time. First let’s look at the important stats.
Mass in 0.95 G with Full Fuel, Pentaxid, and O2 Tanks
Empty Ship Mass: 118 kt
Battle Speed 140 m/s Acceleration (108 XL Thrusters)
Yaw 39 deg/s
Pitch 37 deg/s
Max Idle Time with Thrusters Off 65 hours 40 min (With Shield On)
Max Cargo for Top Acceleration {100 m/s} in 0.95 G at Battle Speed: 48.2 kt
Ship Total Mass: 166 kt
Yaw 39 deg/s
Pitch 37 deg/s
With 48.2 kt of Cargo and Ship Total Mass of 166 kt
Low Speed (24 Thrusters)
22 m/s Acceleration
Yaw 16 deg/s
Pitch 15 deg/s
Cargo Lift Available 229 kt
Hover Time 17 hours 18 min (With Shield On)
Medium Speed (48 Thrusters)
44 m/s Acceleration
Yaw 26 deg/s
Pitch 23 deg/s
Cargo Lift Available 624 kt
Hover Time 16 hours 03 min (With Shield On)
Battle Speed (108 Thrusters)
100 m/s Acceleration
Yaw 39 deg/s
Pitch 37 deg/s
Cargo Lift Available 1,612 kt
Hover Time 13 hours 37 min (With Shield On)
Max Cargo to Lift in 0.95 G: 1,656 kt
Ship Total Mass: 1,774 kt
Battle Speed 9 m/s Acceleration (108 Thrusters)
Yaw 38 deg/s
Pitch 36 deg/s
Turret Battery A: 28 Rocket Turrets
Turret Battery B: 22 Rocket Turrets 2 Artillery Turrets
Defensive Turrets: 12 Rocket Turrets (4 borrowed from Turret Battery B)
Planet Turrets: 6 Cannon Turrets 4 Minigun Turrets
39 320 kSU Containers 9 Advanced Constructors 180 Grow Plots in 3 locations 14 Food Processors Drill/Multi Turrets
6 Ammo Boxes
Projectile Rifle Rounds Needed to Fill all 167 Sentry Guns: 41750
Ammo Box 1-5
150mm H-MSL 5 Stacks 10,000
Ammo Box 6
Ls.Charge II CV 20 Stacks 40,000
160mm MSL 1 Half Stack 554
30mm Bullet 18.2 Stacks 27,340
15mm Bullet 8 Stacks 32,000
Projectile Rifle Round 16 Stacks 64,000
Size: 130x314x86 meters Unlock Level: 25 Size Class: 86 (lots of sculpted wall and ceiling blocks and hull shaping)
Don’t let the size disillusion you. This CV is not laggy and it’s very easy to get around. In fact you can get from the Bridge to any point inside this CV within 10 seconds thanks to its user friendly corridor and elevator design. Because the Bridge is in the front, when you are flying in first person the entire ship is behind you, and you get no graphics load. It’s like flying a tiny SV as far as framerates are concerned. The interior was designed to make textbook grinding as convenient as possible for those rare moments when you actually feel like doing some grinding or multi-player. Each of the 9 Advanced Constructors have their own 320 kSU Input and 320 kSU Output Containers. There is only one Gravity Generator and there is not one place within the interior where the player can walk into 0 G, or into a heat or radiation hazard for that matter. The player can walk suitless anywhere inside this CV with 0 danger.
This Reaper proves that CPU is already obsolete as you will see from the framerates. This CV should work just fine on your current graphics settings. When you are in an already laggy area like a forest or near a large POI, you may experience some framerate drop when you are inside the Reaper and you look towards the middle of the CV, causing the most blocks to render. In space you should have no abnormal framerate issues. If you do and you have your settings cranked up really high, like 4K, try lowering our Resolution to 2K. You don’t need to be able to zoom into the sub-atomic level of these textures. They aren’t top quality. This Reaper produces Epic Gameplay. If you have to lower your Resolution, Detail and Render distance, and filters such as Anistropic and Shadows to low to get Empyrion to run smoothly then do it. I would leave LOD at High as that will preserve the quality of the blocks. Bad Gameplay without this Reaper at 4K is Bad Gameplay. Epic Gameplay with this Reaper at 2K is Epic Gameplay. Even 1280x720 with this Reaper is better than 2K without it and with a gaggle of docked CPU snowflakes that move like slugs, never have everything you need, and just generally suck instead.
And here is a newsflash. Docking 5 CPU garbage CVs together causes a lot more lag than this Reaper. It’s also ugly and ridiculous. Can you believe this stupid idea actually came from the Devs? It was part of their “vision” for Empyrion. Docking 5 inadequate crappy CVs together, instead of building one CV that does everything. This is one more piece of evidence that the Devs don’t have a clue, and if you follow their “vision” you will be wasting your time with lame gameplay and frustrating immersion breaking broken element after immersion breaking broken element. For example, how fun is it when you Core a Zirax POI that was running just fine when it was shooting at you, and when you place a Player Core in it, BOOM! All the generators blow up. It’s best to just cut out all the lame Dev/circle jerker lameness and only play the parts of the game that actually function, with a lot of help from the Item Menu and some Configuration folder editing. For example, use the Item Menu to spawn an Advanced Core so the POI generators don’t all blow up when you Core it. God help you if you have spent 1,000s of hours grinding in this game that you have to restart every other month only to build a CPU piece of crap useless CV that gets stuck on every twig and planetary ring and lacks the power to wiggle loose and needs 4 other CVs docked to it in order to be able to fulfill all the game requirements. This non-CPU compliant Reaper has NONE of those issues.
The Combat Capabilities of This Reaper
This Reaper was built to prove that the circle jerker consensus that would have you believe that CVs should be heavily armored and slow with rear mounted power turrets and decoy turrets and blocks in the front, and then flown up close to enemy dreadnaughts and parked is pure idiocy. These people have obviously never played a real space game like X4: Foundations or even some of the Star Wars games.
Tanking has not been a thing since the 17th Century Ships of the Line. And even then they would use range and speed if possible, but in a formation. Ships don’t tank, jets don’t tank, and tanks don’t even tank. They use speed and range. Battleships were designed with a semi tanking concept, but their large cannons were meant to outrange smaller ships. Missiles made them obsolete because… they were slow sitting ducks like our carriers today.
There will never be a space ship that is designed to tank. The slightest damage can be catastrophic in space. This is reflected in ALL Sci Fi except for the Disney garbage. In “The Expanse” they don’t have shields but they have anti-missile turrets. The decision on whether to engage a target depends on the availability of the turret ammo required to handle all the incoming missiles for the duration of time that they will be in range. At the end of last season, Holder flew past the trap staying out of range of the 5 Belter Warships, hoping to lead them away, because he didn’t have enough turret ammo for all their missiles. After Drummer blew up two of the warships there was only one left and then the Rocinante had enough turret ammo to enter missile range.
The same approach is always taken with shields, as any player of X-Foundations can testify to. You don’t allow your shields to go down. You get out of range before that happens. Once your shields are down in a battle you are probably toast. If your main Thrust gets hit you will be slower than all the enemy ships with no shield, coming into range of more and more of them as they catch up with you and target you until you are targeted by every enemy in the area. These large CVs in Empyrion are not real dreadnaughts. The range in the game is too short, the mechanics too simple and one size fits all. In Mass Effect, Sovereign was two kilometers long. Think about that. Seven times bigger than my Reaper. In X-Foundations their actual dreadnaughts have shields with massive amounts of Hit Points that take more than 20 minutes of constant barrage to get to zero, and maybe 5 minutes to recharge. These X-Foundations dreadnaughts are slow moving, but their shields are so powerful that they actually do function like armor. They also have super weapons that Empyrion does not. Empyrion CVs are more like X-Foundations Medium-Class Frigates. They are fast moving, with smaller but fast recharging shields.
Shields were not invented to serve as armor. Shields were invented to protect you from damage while you penetrate enemy range and unload your volleys, after which you zip right back out of range. For some reason there is a circle jerk of pre-shield players and streamers that never did figure out what a shield is for. Tanking is seriously ridiculous.
In addition, as the 4 regular English speaking Empyrion streamers that get more than 2 views have been illustrating year after year (sigh), when you build a 5 Combat Steel/Xeno Steel layer, 100+ Power Turret, slow as molasses dreadnaught and park it next to another 5 armor layer hunk of junk and just twiddle your thumbs while they hammer each other like a jackass on stream (lol), even if you win, it’s going to cost half the spawn resources at least to repair it and it will literally take 2 or more real time days whether you use a Repair Bay or Station Services, unless you set repair time to Instant.
Another problem with the circle jerker consensus is the placement of turrets. I watch them build their hunks of junk and I say to myself, “Most of those turrets don’t have line of sight to the front.” And then I watch them take the hunk of junk into battle and 2/3 of the turrets and often none are firing, and they can’t figure out why, so they blame it on Eleon. And they place the power turrets as far back as possible, which forces them to bring the entire ship into range in order for all the turrets to fire. They can’t figure out basic physics, so they put “decoy blocks” in the front for the specific purpose of taking fire. Their logic is, “Take out half my ship, just don’t hit the power turrets. Look. I won. I lost ¾ of my ship, but I won. The decoy block worked.” You’re supposed to aim for an Epic victory, not a Pyrric victory. A CV with 200 turrets placed all around the hull on all sides will only be able to fire 1/3 of them at a time at best if they don’t have additional line of site issues. These circle jerkers love to place turrets in rows one behind the other. Totally useless.
This Sovereign-Class Reaper solves all these problems. This is the design theory, and it will work for any sized CV.
The Design Theory
Speed: 100 m/s acceleration in all 6 directions with the cargo necessary to operate for a long time. No Compromise.
Forward Mounted Turrets: Ideally the offensive turret batteries will be the literal front of the CV on the same Z plane for 100% forward line of site and simultaneous fire and minimal time in range.
T2 Vanilla Shield or better: I recommend mastering the flying technique with the 36,000 HP T2 Vanilla shield, and then installing the 100,000 Hit Point Bastion Shield.
The first thing I built for this Reaper was the heavy glass Bridge. Then I built the turret battery tentacles around it. I wanted to have 5 blocks between the Bridge glass and the closest turret or mounted weapon to avoid enemy fire area damage to the Bridge in the event that someone builds a real CV and it takes my shields down. Some of the mounted weapons wound up closer than 5 blocks to the Bridge heavy glass after I doubled the mounted lasers from 8 to 16. I know the AI targets the player in the Captain’s Chair but the turrets are closer, and will be targeted first as I make evasive maneuvers out of range.
Because the turrets are the actual forward most element of the Reaper, and they are all on the same Z plane, I can spend the absolute minimum time in range and unload a full volley of all 56 offensive turrets, and then S key right back out of range, where I watch the Tovera rounds dissipate just a few meters in front of me. Then I W key right back into range, and the volley of 56 turrets notifies me that the rocket turrets are in range.
This wide space between the two sides of the turret batteries caused the tentacles to be quite wide, and so I had to make the middle of the hull slightly wider and taller in order to keep the proper proportion, otherwise the ship would have been smaller. As it is, this Reaper only has 10 blocks to spare lengthwise, but the interior only occupies the front half of the ship. The tail is empty hull 0 G, but pressurized.
I had to alter the tentacle architecture to suit the physical realities of Empyrion. If I had made the front an exact replica of Mass Effect, the turrets would be much less effective. Empyrion doesn’t have a giant red laser that can casually sear dreadnaughts in half in one second. So in order for this Empyrion Reaper to have the respect a Reaper deserves, it needed to have the Empyrion version of a giant red laser that can sear a dreadnaught in half in one second. This Reaper CV can destroy every single CV or Base that has ever been built in Empyrion be it AI or PVP without taking damage.
Not only can this Reaper CV destroy every single CV or Base that has ever been built in Empyrion be it AI or PVP without taking damage, it can destroy more than one of them at the same time. More than 4 at a time in fact. Now it doesn’t happen in one second like a giant red Reaper laser, but it is 100% guaranteed. It took me more than two real time hours to destroy the two Toveras and their escorts that are in the screenshots. That was because I was only targeting turrets. But it was two hours of intense, epic space combat gameplay, even without physics, and when you start battles at range, you don’t get that framerate problem. The Combat Framerate drop is caused by too many turret round related particles rendering at once as well as over 100 turrets auto aiming at moving targets. They don’t render at 900 meters. But once the target has lost half of its turrets, you can get closer, like 400 meters, and not suffer the framerate drop.
The Offensive Turret Batteries
This Reaper has two offensive turret batteries. Turret Battery A has 28 Rocket Turrets. Turret Battery B has 22 Rocket Turrets and 2 Artillery Turrets. The Defensive Turrets borrow 4 Rocket Turrets from Turret Battery B. All Turrets are set to target Turrets and Mounted Weapons. If you want to target other devices, its best to have that Turret Battery target only that device type to guarantee that the devices get destroyed quickly. Turret Battery A is the most convenient to switch to other devices. If you switch Turret Battery B you should switch Defensive Turrets also, and remember to switch them back after the battle. The Drill/Multi Turrets and Turret Batteries all appear first in the Devices Tab. Here are the three options I have used and their time taken to destroy a Tovera-Class Dreadnaught.
Slowest: Target only Turrets and Mounted Weapons. Can take anywhere from 20 minutes to over an hour to destroy one Tovera.
Faster: Set Turret Battery A to target Thrusters only. Can take anywhere from 10 minutes to a half hour to destroy one Tovera.
Fastest: Set Turret Battery A to target Generators only. Can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 15 minutes to destroy one Tovera.
The combat is intense and you are always a one second mistake from disaster, but once you master the technique and have muscle memory with your key combos and mouse control you will be able to do it in your sleep. This is how you fly this Reaper in combat.
Flying This Reaper in Combat
The most important thing in space combat is SPEED. “Don’t stand still they’ll get you, right through the heart.”
When in doubt, HOLD the S key, and keep the nose pointed at the target until you are out of range, strafing if necessary but straight back is the fastest way to get out of range.
Never let your Shield drop below 75%. If it does, stay out of range until it returns to 100%, whether it’s a T2 Vanilla or a Bastion.
Fly in 1st Person from the Main Bridge, not the Emergency Bridge. That is only for escaping if you ever run into an actual challenge and take a bad hit.
The first priority is always to take down their shield. This is the most dangerous part of the battle. The Tovera is at full strength. It is going to fill space with rounds every time you get in range. Speed and range are two elements you have to constantly monitor.
Ls.Charge II Lasers have a 925 meter range, and a full auto cycle time of 0.6 seconds.
Rockets Turrets have a 1,000 meter range, and a cycle time of 4 seconds.
Artillery Turrets have a 950 meter range, and a cycle time of 6.7 seconds.
Until the shields are down, you will have to penetrate range to 925 meters to use your lasers on the shields. The weapons are all 22 meters in front of the Captain’s chair, so when you are flying in 1st person as you should be, and you are very experienced at this type of flying, you can strafe at 937 meters and have your lasers in range. But for beginners, you are going to want to keep your range between 900 and 850 meters while you aim and fire your lasers at the Tovera hull.
Make sure you have activated your Bridge Reticule in the Control Panel for the enhanced crosshair which works even with the HUD completely disabled. Put the cross hair on the Tovera hull and fly at 100 m/s straight at the Tovera. Once you hit 900 meters tap the S key to stop your forward motion and begin strafing while keeping the cross hairs on the Tovera Hull and firing your lasers full auto. The rockets can take the shields down themselves, but it takes longer and it’s a waste of rockets.
Do this for 4 or 5 laser volleys, several seconds, and then hold the S key while strafing all the way back out to 1200 meters and stop retreating. Wait for all the Tovera rounds to dissipate. Rockets have a 4 second cycle, so ideally you want to time your motion out of range and back into range to coincide with 4 seconds. You want to go in range, your rockets will all fire at 1,000 meters, then fire your lasers for several seconds at 900 meters, at 4 seconds your rockets fire a second time, then back out to 1200 meters always strafing, and then back in to break the 1000 meter point at 4ish seconds from the last rocket volley. This will give you 2 rocket volleys per penetration cycle and keep them coming (54 Homing Missiles and 2 Artillery Shells) more or less every 4 seconds. If the Tovera is doing too much damage to your shields then don’t spend 4 seconds in range firing lasers until your rockets fire a second volley, just linger for 2 seconds and then S Key out of range.
That is the most effective way to attack with this Reaper against a full strength monster ship with shields. Once you leave the Tovera’s range, it stops firing, and the space between you and the Tovera becomes empty. As soon as you enter the Tovera’s range, it fills the space between you with up to 100ish rounds coming straight at you. Rockets and lasers, including fast powerful lasers. It’s like a wide beam of destruction that resembles a giant shotgun blast. You want to avoid that wide beam because it can 0 your shields in seconds. By escaping the Tovera’s range you shut off that hose of destruction. It takes a few seconds for that hose to reach you when it turns on. Those are the seconds you use to shoot your lasers at that Tovera, after which you S key the hell out of range, while constantly strafing, and in this way your shield only takes a few hits each cycle.
It’s true that if the Reaper’s shield gets dropped to 0 and you wade into the Tovera’s beam of destruction you will lose a lot of turrets because of area damage, but if you fly it correctly this will only happen when you face this same CV or another CV with the same physical combat properties in PVP. The AI is not currently able to fly this CV properly. It would need to fire the mounted lasers and use range and strafing, while always pointing at the player. It would need to close range and fire two volleys while firing lasers, and then retreat out of range. It would need to stay out of range until its Shields recharge if they drop below 75%. If it did that it just might be unbeatable because it would never make mistakes. It might take two Reapers to beat one Reaper controlled by that type of AI configuration. You could nerf the AI on a scale for the 10 levels. This CV design will always beat a tank CV without taking damage. Only another properly flown CV of the same Speed, Forward Mounted Turrets, and T2 Shield design is capable of damaging this CV design.
Your goal is to never let your shield drop below 75%. This goal is completely reliant on your flying skill. Specifically, controlling range while strafing and aiming and firing lasers and tracking the 4 second rocket firing cycle. Once you get it right you will be in one continuous flow of motion where you smoothly strafe into range and fire a few accurate laser volleys that hit, then smoothly strafe back out to 1200 meters, and back into rocket range at around 4 seconds. It will be like skipping a stone on a lake, except it’s the Tovera’s beam of destruction. It’s like a classical dance. You will get a rhythm and it will just come naturally. The way you coordinate your keys and mouse will be like riding a bike. And the Tovera beam of destruction will always be just out of range, just to the left or right or above or below, always just barely missing, but always missing never the less.
It’s true that if you go out of range and wait for your shields to return to 100% after some bad hits drop it below 75%, the Tovera shield may very well recover to 100% as well. This means you will have to start the process of dropping it all over again. And you will have to do this quite a few times. But while the Tovera took damage, you DID NOT. This is what space combat with shields would be like. Whoever takes down the enemy shield consistently without losing their shield wins every time. The time it takes you to lower the Tovera shield and amount of damage your shield takes is completely dependent on your flying skill. The Reaper’s physical properties are maxed out.
Your flying skill depends on timing, monitoring range, aiming, and strafing. The timing, range monitoring and aiming are a matter of concentration. There is no way around it, but with practice, it becomes automatic. Like riding a bike. And mouse control is important for long range aiming at 900 meters.
Pitch and Yaw are key to mouse control. This Reaper’s Pitch and Yaw are in the 30s but I lower them to 17. This blueprint is set to 17. You should practice aiming at something from 900 meters while strafing and adjust the Reaper’s Yaw and Pitch in the Statistics Tab of the Control Panel accordingly. Make sure you keep them at the same value. This is key to long range aiming. You must have the correct Yaw and Pitch for your mouse. I find 17 is a good compromise between ease of aiming and turning ability. The lower you set the Yaw and Pitch the easier it is to aim at long range, but the longer it takes to turn. If you want to go to the trouble, you could set your Yaw and Pitch lower than 17 for easier aiming and then crank it up to max when not in combat for fast turning during normal travel or when squashing regular vehicles and bases or any CPU compliant snowflake. Just make sure Yaw and Pitch are the same number in the Statistics Tab, regardless of what you set it to, or you will have unintuitive flight response to your mouse.
Let’s make sure this is clear. With both offensive Turret Batteries activated, this Reaper will PULVERIZE any regular CV or Base and any CPU compliant snowflake within 3 to 15 seconds. You don’t need to worry about range. Just point. Just park and drop its shields if it has any in seconds with your lasers. Two or three rocket volleys and the fight is over, and there are some damaged blocks over there, not sure what that was. Half the time it’s one volley. Remember, every 4 seconds, 54 homing missiles fire and every 7 seconds two artillery rounds fire.
Strafing depends on your key combinations and timing. A for left, D for right, Space Bar for up, C for down, W for forward, S for back. Routine changing of direction is key, as well as Zig Zagging. Diagonal Zig Zagging seems to throw off the enemy rocket AI the best. It seems to cause it to pause to calculate the trajectory for a second or two. High miss probability. Diagonal Zig Zagging with W and S key range thrust is the best for dodging homing missiles, especially as a counter maneuver to getting flanked and triangulated by fast Decimators or Drone Swarms. Decimators are more dangerous than Toveras, because they are faster. They can flank you and then your shield is gone in a few seconds. They are hard to outrun because they have such high acceleration. You have to change direction. If they had more firepower, Decimators would be more deadly than Toveras too. Drone Swarms will kill your shields if you don’t constantly hold down the S key. They are FAST and they always try to flank you and triangulate you. Stay on the retreat while aiming at the nearest one and eventually they will all be wreckage.
So hold D C to go Right and Down, then switch to A Space Bar to go Left and Up. Then A C to go Left and Down, and D Space Bar to go Right and Up.
And for critical moments like when you get flanked or are in range of more than one enemy vessel, or just have to face a wide beam of destruction from a fresh Tovera, W D C to go Forward, Right, and Down, then S A Space Bar to go Back, Left, and Up, and W A C to go Forward, Left, and Down, and then S D Space Bar to go Back, Right, and Up. You can change your direction with your mouse to make these complex key combos move you in a general direction if you are extremely sophisticated. Once you have an enemy fire barrage gap or a clear path away, keep a straight max speed path away from the enemy cluster, because out of range is the best and only sure way to avoid enemy fire. But you can also come into 900 meter firing range of a fresh Tovera using W D C Forward, Right, Down, release the W Key, fire your 3 or 4 laser volleys, and then S A Space Bar to go Back, Left, and Up out of range, for best enemy homing missile avoidance, with every penetration cycle, not just emergencies, if you have the skill.
You do the three key combos while aiming and hitting the lasers, on the 4 second range penetration cycle, and you have it mastered. You need to be able to see the key combos in your head, see when you need them, and execute them reflexively, without thinking about it. Muscle memory. It just takes a few hours of combat practice. Also, once you have mastered this flying style, you will be able to “feel” what you need to do so well that your timing will be so accurate that you will be able to beat Toveras while hardly ever needing to resort to 3 key combos.
The best position to be in with this Reaper is to be retreating at 100 m/s while some sucker is pursuing you. If the distance between this Reaper and its pursuer is 900 metersish, and I am retreating at 100 m/s and the pursuer is chasing me at 100 m/s, this Reaper will be out of range of all his rounds, and he will be in range of all of mine. The Sweet Spot. Always keep your Bridge Reticule Cross Hairs on the target while retreating with the S key held down. Imagine if the AI could fly this Reaper that way. It would be a scary proposition to take on, because the AI doesn’t make mistakes.
You want to get out of range as soon as possible, but you may have to do some of that complex key combo strafing if you get in a pinch, or if your shields actually do go down. Eventually someone will make a ship like this one, we would hope. But you can also fight these together in multi-player. With two skilled pilots it’s quite exhilarating.
Once the Tovera Shields are down, you don’t have to use the lasers anymore, but you may want to in order to ensure that the Tovera Shield Cooldown Timer is reset and it doesn’t jump to 15% just before your homing missile volley hits. But you only need to hit it once with your lasers per penetration cycle to make sure the shields are down when the missiles hit.
If you are not firing the lasers, move forward until the turrets fire, then back out. Or, stay strafing in range for two rocket volleys, or 4 seconds. You can avoid enemy rockets by strafing much better at 1,000 meters than you can at 900 meters. If you have mastered the strafing key combos, you can easily stay in range for 12 seconds or 3 rocket volleys at 1,000 meters and take minimal damage to your shield, if any.
Once the Tovera Shield Generator blows up, you can just strafe around getting close enough to fire and then backing out of range and repeating. Once the Tovera has lost half of its turrets more or less you can start penetrating much deeper in to range, like 400 meters, and strafing in range for much longer, like three or more rocket firing cycles or 12+ seconds. From there it just gets easier and easier until all the turrets are gone. Then it’s a good idea to set Turret Battery A to target Thrusters only. Once it stops moving you can loot what’s left of the Tovera. If you want to kill it as quick as possible with as little damage as possible, set Turret Battery A to target Generators only from the start. That will preserve the most loot. Occasionally you will get lucky no matter what you are targeting and kill the Core in a few minutes. That will give you every loot container.
Ghosted AI Ships: How To Fix Them So You Can Loot Them
Unfortunately, when AI vessels die, especially when you target generators and thrusters, they often start ghosting. They will just keep flying slowly in circles and rotating, with no generators or thrusters, and you won’t be able to board them. Sometimes they load into the sector like this, and when you encounter them they will not have a bounding box, so you won’t be able to shoot them. Fortunately there is an easy way to fix this in Single Player. Just exit to the main menu and then reload your save. All ghosted spinning ships will now be solid and still, assuming they are dead. One time I had to reload a save twice. They pretty much ghost every time. So if you are suspicious of your targets being ghosts, just reload your save to be sure. I don’t know how to fix it in multi-player but at least you can fight each other.
And that was how you fly this Reaper in combat. The more time you spend in combat with Toveras, Decimators and Drone Swarms, the better you will become and the more reckless you will be capable of being. You will be able to linger longer in range with fresh Toveras and bring down shields much faster. I recommend mastering this flying technique with the stock 36,000 Hit Point T2 Vanilla Shield and then once you have become a flying ace, install the Project Eden Bastion Shield with its 100,000 Hit Points. That will make you god in Empyrion with this Reaper.
This Reaper and PVP
If you are a PVP player and you can find a server that will let you spawn a CV this size, you can have a ball by making the 5 Combat Steel layer flying brick with 10 m/s acceleration forward and 200 plus power turrets obsolete. I’ve destroyed countless Toveras, Decimators and Drone Swarms with this Reaper, but I only destroyed one Xen ‘uan Carrier. The reason is the Xen ‘uan Carrier is the easiest dreadnaught to destroy. So easy that it’s boring. Why? Because it’s too slow. It has way more turrets than the Tovera, but it’s so slow that it’s no challenge at all to get in and out of range. You hardly need to strafe and you can stay in range for long periods of time. It dies quick even if you are only targeting turrets.
These dreadnaughts are actually chasing you, but they are so slow that you can hardly tell when you are strafing around them because it takes them forever to turn and pick up speed in a new direction. If you keep revolving around a slow target and moving closer and then retreating out to 1,200 meters, it will appear to be immobile as it turns slowly and accelerates towards 20 degrees and then 50 degrees and then 120 degrees, etc… The Tovera is able to pick up speed once you stop strafing fast enough and that is why it will suddenly do lots of damage to your shield even as you retreat straight back. If you aren’t near the edge of range when you are retreating and the Tovera has full speed you will need to cut 90 degrees and continue reversing away. The Tovera will continue past you as it slowly starts turning and slowing down.
The Xen ‘uan Carrier is so slow that I doubt it even has a 100 m/s top speed. If you just casually strafe left and right from 900 meters it will miss you constantly. It is unable to close distance with you. It is the weakest of the dreadnaught adversaries of this Reaper simply because of its slow speed. How much more a 5 Combat Steel layer flying brick with 10 m/s acceleration forward, or actually less, and 200 plus power turrets. If it’s Xen ‘uan speed or slower, it doesn’t matter how much armor or how many hundreds of power turrets it has. It’s a sitting duck that will be so easy to destroy that it will be boring. Target generators to shut it down in 5 to 15 minutes and take no damage. Even if it’s as fast as a Tovera, you will still destroy it, you will just have to strafe better. But those bricks are not able to move as fast as a Tovera. That’s the price of all that armor. Obsolete.
But what if you can’t find a PVP server that allows this Size Class 87? You can build a smaller CV that is just as powerful as this one. Just follow the 3 rules. Speed – 100 m/s acceleration in all 6 directions with a full cargo load. Forward mounted turrets on the same Z plane. 1 T2 Vanilla Shield or better. Think of a way to mount the turrets and where to place the Bridge. If you place the Bridge above or below the turret assembly, you can fit 50 to 60 turrets into a much smaller circumference. This Reaper is like a deluxe CV. It has a lot of everything to levels that you don’t absolutely need but that sure make the gameplay Epic. It’s entertaining to just wander around this Reaper. You don’t need all that for PVP.
The first stage of this Reaper only had 28 forward mounted turrets. I destroyed a Kamirat Battle Carrier in Reforged Eden as a test with just 28 forward mounted Rocket Turrets. I was so dismayed with Reforged that I terminated testing there. Next I destroyed a Tovera in Project Eden with those 28 forward mounted Rocket Turrets without taking damage just to see if I could. I was so impressed that I decided to add 28 more Rocket Turrets to the rig and replace two with Artillery Turrets. That allowed me to have two deadly turret batteries that can target different devices exclusively, another key component to deadly volleys that end battles quickly.
Build a skeleton, mount the turrets, give it a shield and enough thrusters to have the max acceleration in all 6 directions, arm it, and go test it on Toveras and Decimators and Drone Swarms. You could find a way to cram in more than 56 turrets making it more deadly than this Reaper on a much smaller hull. Just remember it needs to have 100 m/s acceleration in all 6 directions while carrying enough cargo to operate for a long time, as well as to carry lots of loot.
The Block Material Types of This Reaper
Here is how I configured the block material types on this Reaper. The entire hull is 1 layer of Combat Steel with some Xeno Steel. The Bridge is completely encased in Combat Steel and Heavy Windows. The Emergency Bridge is Xeno Steel with a Combat Steel Floor. Every room is encased in one layer of Steel. Walls between rooms are 1 layer of Steel. Everything else is Carbon Composite. Between rooms, one wall will be Steel and the other Carbon Composite, but there may be parts of the Steel side that require devices and so that spot will have a steel block on the other side, on the otherwise all Carbon Composite Wall. So check with a multi-tool before you delete blocks if you are working on the Reaper, or you may create a gap in the Steel room encasing, which is a likely breach point.
The tail is hollow. The tail gives me enough hull area to place the 108 XL Thrusters needed to get the 140 m/s starting acceleration in all 6 directions. You will probably need half of the hull to be hollow too in order to be light enough with enough thrust to hit 140 m/s starting acceleration in all 6 directions. That will leave you with 40 m/s of acceleration in all 6 directions to use up on Cargo and Hi-G Planets. I built the entire hull before I placed the Thrusters. After the Thrusters I started the interior, building Engineering and Factory/Storage first and then the Docking Bay.
This Reaper can fight 3 battles with the 2 Tovera, 2 escort fleets in Project Eden without needing to restock the Ammo Containers except for the Artillery Shells because I only load a half stack since they use up so much SU. Make sure you have enough Storage.
No matter what the Size Class limitation on your PVP server, if you can design a CV that does what I just described that is under the limit, you will be the KING of that server. You should get your friends to spawn the same CV, or build others with the proper design, and then go literally conquer the PVP galaxy. No PVP faction will be able to stop you. It will be like Reapers harvesting the galaxy. You will be able to randomly pick a faction and then go attack their strongest force and destroy it all, loot it all, and dump it all in the factory to spawn more of your unbeatable ships.
Eventually everyone will start building their own speed and forward mounted CVs, but you will have a massive head start. And once everyone is fighting at 900 meters the PVP combat will be Epic and framerate drop free. Remember I killed a Tovera with this design with just 28 forward mounted Rocket Turrets without taking damage.
Landing This Reaper
This Reaper is easy to land on wild terrain because only the 4 legs, the Boarding Ramp, and the Hangar Ramp touch ground level, and the Hangar Ramp is one block up. Every other part of the CV is at least 5 blocks or 10 meters above ground, so it’s easy to avoid those annoying Trees, Tree Stumps, and Rocks. If you need to land in a Forest just pick an adjacent clearing and shoot any obstructive Trees into pulp with the 16 Mounted Lasers.
To land level turn on full Inertia Dampeners with the I Key, then hold the O Level Key while you hold the C Down Key. If the CV keeps moving there is a Tree Stump or something touching the bottom of the Hull somewhere. Try moving a few meters in any direction and O/C key again. If it stops moving release the C Down Key and then the O Level Key and stand. Then shut off the Thrusters and you have a level ship. So far the Boarding Ramp has always been within Jetpack distance for me to get back in, but most of the time it’s almost perfectly aligned with the ground. A couple of times I had to drill a little bit of dirt to get out. If the terrain is really rough and the CV won’t stop moving, release the C Down Key and wait for the CV to stop moving, then release the O Level Key and stand. That is when the Boarding Ramp is most likely to be above the ground a meter or two.
The four legs of this Reaper are placed close together so that you can land this CV sideways on a normal sized landing pad, but the Hangar Ramp will not open onto the pad. The Boarding Ramp is between the four legs and thus will open onto a sideways mounted landing pad.
Wireless Devices in This Reaper
This Reaper has all 10 Wireless Devices placed around the perimeter of the CV. There are Wireless Devices in the two widest center tentacles, under both Side Airlocks, in each leg by the Landing Gear, and at the tapering where the tail starts.
LCDs Used in This Reaper
Sovereign uses lots of LCDs from Allessia, CrazyZ, and sulusdacor. I made a lot of improvements to many of their LCDs. Many were centered, straightened, and/or made seamless. Some were resized for CV, which is ¼ size of a SV LCD, or ½ or 1/3 size. If you are one of them you should grab your improved LCDs off the Reaper to save yourselves some time. I also made 8 original LCDs that are worth having. Three of those are color reconstructions of monochrome legacy targeting LCDs. Those three nice ones. They are in the Emergency Bridge Captain’s Chair screenshot. You’ll know my original new ones when you see them.
There is a moving LCD on the Bridge called “Analyzing Corrupt String Section:” This LCD's Sensor is always turning Off and On. You can see it blinking on the ceiling. If you exit the game on the Bridge that sensor may save on the Off state. If that happens, when you reload the save the String LCD will no longer be moving. To get it started again you need to go to the Control Panel (P) and click the Custom 8. “CorruptStringReset” button until it turns Green. Then exit the Bridge and move more than one block away from the door. Then return to the Bridge and the String LCD will be moving again. If you exit the game while sitting in the Captain's Chair the LCD Sensor will not be Sensing you and thus the Corrupt String LCD will not be in danger of its Sensor being saved in the Off state.
The Interior of This Reaper
Now about the interior, the screenshots capture a walkthrough of the entire CV starting from the Boarding Ramp. Every room with a seat has a Flight Lights lever which keeps the lights on while you are sitting or not in the room. Remember to turn them off except for the Flight Lights Lever on the Bridge. I keep that one on at all times just because. The Bridge lights also activate some external aesthetic Blue Lights.
The Vacant Room and Ghosted Blocks
There is a Vacant Room that you can access next to the Emergency Bridge entrance. It’s a big room and the reason its empty is because I had exceeded 50,000 blocks and the Langoliers were catching up with me. That and there was nothing more that this Reaper could possibly need.
After you pass 50,000 blocks you will begin to get ghosted blocks. From what I understand it is triggered by too much block memory load in a given area. It is triggered by having lots of blocks in one area after 50,000 blocks is surpassed, or when you place a lot of sculpted blocks, like the thin pipe wall block, at the same time. Always place those one at a time with no symmetry. They can trigger a ghost that you don’t see until it’s baked into your saves and blueprint, at which point you might as well start over. Unfortunately, the Zirax Pentaxid Station has ghosted blocks baked into it under the asteroid.
In either case, if you spot the ghosted blocks before you exit your session to Main Menu, you can remove the ghosted blocks by simply using “Undo” from the N key in Creative Mode to remove all the blocks that triggered it. After I hit 50,000 blocks, the Portside Oxygen room started ghosting blocks each time a placed a sculpted ceiling block. These were evil ghosts too. The ghost side was on the bottom and they were floor blocks, so I couldn’t tell they were ghosted from the Portside Oxygen Room in God Mode. Fortunately I switched out of God Mode and then I fell half way through the CV.
The ghosting phenomena will be triggered by the placement of one block, and it will just be one ghosted block somewhere nearby. You have to check after every few blocks you place after 50,000 blocks. The more sculpted the blocks are, the less it will take to trigger the first ghost. The lightest block is a cube. This is why I had to make the Portside Oxygen Room Ceiling out of Cubes instead of sculpted ceiling blocks like the Starboard Oxygen Room has. If you keep placing new blocks after the first ghost appears, each new block will change the ghosted area and make it exponentially bigger. To undo the ghosted phenomena, just undo the blocks you placed until the ghost is gone.
Once you are at the limit in an area, the only way to add a new block is to remove an existing one. But here’s the good news. I have never seen a Device cause a ghost problem. So you could edit BlocksConfig.ecf and enable Furnaces and Deconstructors on CV’s for either your Project Eden existing or new games or your Vanilla existing or new games. I will explain how further down at the end. And then you could stuff that Vacant Room full of those Furnaces and Deconstructors, and make this Reaper fully self-sufficient. I haven’t bothered. (Obviously I finally got around to it)
Every room is listed in the Elevator Directories except for the Emergency Bridge. I didn’t want to leave directions for a potential hostile boarding party. You will have to find it by touring the ship.
The Emergency Bridge is designed to be a holdout for the practically impossible chance that this Reaper gets disabled. It simply has too many XL Thrusters and too many armored T2 Generators to be disabled before a player makes it there from the Main Bridge or a Med Station. In the unlikely event that the Bridge Captain’s Chair gets destroyed out from under you, or you even get killed, you will have plenty of time to spawn in the nearest Med Station and get to the Emergency Bridge and Warp out. But if it did get disabled, the Emergency Bridge would be the safest place. It is a Xeno Steel Armed Fortress. With All Sentry Guns Enabled in the Control Panel, any boarding party would have to negotiate a juggernaut of Sentry Guns just to get near the Emergency Bridge. They would pay dearly for every step.
Both entrances to the Emergency Bridge are designed to kill lots of intruders with Sentry Guns. The Emergency Bridge itself has full Sentry Gun coverage of the doors. Inside you will find a full Medical Device Suite and two 16 kSU Cargo Boxes which should be pre-stocked with everything you need to start from scratch, as well as unique valuables such as Mission Items. Portable constructors and ores and guns and ammo. Lots of guns and ammo. It also holds an Oxygen Station, Armor Locker, and Repair Station. You should be able to hold out there for a long time, but it’s also the best place to abandon ship from.
Sentry Guns
Every room and corridor section has more than one Sentry Gun. Wherever possible the Sentry Guns have triangulation of crossfire. They are all camouflaged with decoys, so the intruder will be shooting the one he sees while two or three other Sentry Guns are shooting him from other angles and/or elevations. There is no safe zone. Running into another room would only expose you to a new triangulation of crossfire. They would have to fight a long struggle of attrition where they die scores of times. The Docking Bay is suicide for any intruders. In addition, there are Sentry Gun Batteries outside all three Airlocks and the Boarding Ramp and the Hanger Bay Door. The Control Panel Airlock Sentry Guns button will activate all of those external Sentry Guns, as well as the Sentry Guns within the 3 Airlock Corridors, for when you don’t want the entire interior to have Sentry Guns out. Some are on the Ground. The 8 Brig Security Door Sentry Guns are also controlled by the Control Panel All Sentry Guns button. If the Brig turrets are activated on planet, they may aim at a predator. They will reset when you reload your save.
The Advanced Core is buried in camouflaged Xeno Steel far from any targetable Device. Good luck finding it or destroying it with a CV.
The Brig and Advanced Signal Logic
Scenario and POI builders should look at the Brig. It features an advanced Signal Logic Function that I have never seen used anywhere. It allows you to have error free timer controlled doors and LCDs to control the movement of the player in the proper immersive way. The player cannot spam the sensor and create the possessed door effect. The function allows you to control a central door, with an option of two types of pre and post “doors” which are necessary in order to prevent unwanted Timer triggers. You can either have a Pre door or a pre sensor that is far enough away that the timers would run out before the Player returned to the door. The same goes for the post door. These can be cascaded throughout a POI and used to control spawners, explosions, and possibly Dialogue options, in addition to doors and LCDs.
With this signal logic that I put into my Brig, you could have immersive timed security doors opening and closing with LCD Projector messages that immersively force a player into a small dome shaped room with a double heavy door at the other end. The doors could close behind the player locking him in. Some LCDs talk trash. And then the other heavy doors open up to reveal two armored golems and the player is trapped in a small dome shaped room with nowhere to run, forcing him or them to become very good at Jet Pack jumping. After the Golems are dead the next Logic Gate could trigger, if that’s possible. Or a Dialogue Console which would eventually open the door to the next part of the dungeon could become accessible. You could also seamlessly spawn Zirax troops behind closed doors that open to perfect assault positions pertaining to where the player will be forced to enter. The player would enter and start a timer in this Function of mine, and with Vermillion’s AI mod, the aggressive Zirax would be trying to traverse the doors to get to the player just from hearing him move. The timer would just give them enough seconds to be stacked up on the doors. Then the doors all open simultaneously, and the player or players are rushed from well covered Zirax from multiple directions and elevations. It will feel like the player is fighting on Zirax home turf. They know the layout. The player doesn’t.
If you do decide to incorporate this function, it’s not for the faint of heart. You should reconstruct it in a creative start exclusively for this Signal Logic Function from Screenshots. The Brig Advanced Signal Logic Function starts at the beginning of the Signal Logic Tab in the Control Panel, after the Lower Deck Corridor Lights Logic Gate. This Reaper’s Signal Logic is ordered according to the Interior of the CV, from front to back, left to right, and bottom to top, so the Glass Dome Garden at the top is last. The same goes for the Screenshots in this post. You should use minimal props to represent doors and LCDs. LCDs just need descriptions of content. This way you can concentrate 100% on the Signal Logic with no distractions. Then you will be able to figure out how to alter it for your POI. Once it works in the Signal Logic save, Screenshot all the Signal Logic gates and load your POI build save and install it there by simply copying the Signal Logic from your Screenshots. Once you have the entire function memorized, it will be easy to apply it over and over again, but memorizing it won’t be easy. Yikes. I wrote it and it confuses me if I don’t stare at it for a while.
Also, regarding the Brig, there is a rumor that Gerald is being held in one of the cells. You will have to go see for yourself.
-May 9, 2022 A New Signal Logic/Door Type Block Bug
I noticed a new Signal Logic/door type block bug that Eleon introduced between 1.5 and 1.7. What it appears to do is make certain door blocks like Heavy Blocks, Shutter Blocks, and Ramp Blocks invert their Signal Logic. This seems to happen when a Player is too close to the closing block, and what will happen is that the block will open when the Sensor is telling it to close. Or it just won't close at all.
Now, when you exit the Brig, the last two bottom Heavy Doors don't close. You have to wait for the 12 second timer to run out and then just go near them from the hallway side and back up again. When you first exit these doors towards the Hallway they close on you instantly. Based on what others have noticed since 1.6 the Heavy Door Block seems to be deciding not to close if it will hit me. Like the same Logic that makes the trees pulverize now when we drive into them is making doors avoid hitting us and they are overriding the Signal Logic and dropping the instruction instead of delaying it until the Player is out of the way of the Heavy Door Block path.
This looks like these guys figured it out in Empyrion 1.6.3 Build 3512 in Nov 2021.
"I attempted to make an extendable bridge using a long blast door connected to a switch. I found that as I walked to the end of the door it would suddenly retract on me. It appears that for both blast doors and shutter doors you can sometimes trigger the door to open by touching the end of the closed door, even though a signal state should be holding it in its closed state. I believe it may be related to the 'safety stop' mechanism that prevents these doors from closing on the player."
Signal Logic doesn't just stop working all of a sudden. So there doesn't appear to be anything I can do to fix it. We will just have to wait and see if Eleon figures out within a year or two that if they undo what they did that broke Signal Doors they will start working again.
The Docking Bay
The Docking Bay is designed for BIG SVs and HVs. I recommend the Reaper Recon Elite, the Reaper Scout Elite, and, last but not least, the Reaper Destroyer. If you can find other non-CPU compliant decent SVs or HVs they should fit just fine. The Docking Bay has two 17x11 block or 34x22 meter Landing Pads and one Repair Bay of the same size. It uses one 13x7 Hangar Door.
The Docked Vessel Sensor Stuck On Bug
There is a bug with docked vessels and sensors. The first vessel you dock will cause a glitch with any Sensors that cover the vessel's area that locks the sensor in the on position when you reload the save, and causes a slight Framerate drop. So when you return to that save, the lights affected by that Sensor will be always on. To fix this, you just have to undock that vessel and then re-dock it. You will see the lights go off in the Docking Bay when it re-docks. It’s usually the same vessel, but occasionally you will have to undock and re-dock a different one. Then it will go back to the original bug culprit. I have verified that this bug is still present in 1.7.9, of course. You would think Eleon would make this a priority considering their dogma which insists that players build small crappy CVs and dock them all together in an ugly gaggle so they can drag their inadequate ships around the galaxy. Unfortunately, Teleporting is the same as loading a save, so every time you Teleport you will need to undock and re-dock the culprit vessel if you want the affected lights to turn off when you leave the Docking Bay. Basically every time you leave a build's spawn range, when you return you will have to undock and redock the culprit vessel to get the hangar sensors unstuck from the on position.
The Sanctorum Space Club
The Sanctorum Space Club is a particularly interesting room. For some reason, every dance club build I’ve seen has all the flashing lights on a wall and pointing into the air, while the dancers are all on the ground and barely affected by the lights. I placed corner lights on the ground around the perimeter pointing in, and then I cranked them up to high strength. Each side has two different colors, one of which flashes once per second, the other which flashes twice per second. The single flash color is only on that side, while the double flash color is also on the opposite side of the dance floor, which also flashes twice per second. It’s a real strobe light. The screenshots show lots of instances.
It’s a good idea to make sure you are in a minimum lag zone when you turn on the Dance Lights in Sanctorum Space Club because Empyrion has trouble with smoothly turning lights on and off as it is. If you go to an empty Sun Warp Sector or a UCHN Research Vessel Sector you should be fine. More powerful systems should be fine anywhere. The good news is that 1.5 has improved optimization whereby sensors and lights activate much faster. Turn on the Dance Lights Lever on the second floor balcony and go down onto the dance floor and wander around. You will see that it’s an amazing real strobe light. The Color Effects will be different depending on where you are standing and which direction you are looking. You should play some music that matches the Dance Animation. It must have a fast rhythm.
I have found that running any media player, even to play an mp3, will severely drop Empyrion frame rates, but streaming music from a browser does not. These Techno and Minimal videos are perfect for the Empyrion Dance Animation and my Strobe Light.
Techno Mix – March 2019
Boris Brejcha Style @ Art of Minimal Techno Tripping - The Mad Doctor by RTTWLR
Top Minimal Techno & Minimal House Mix 2020 - Weekend Boating By Patrick Slayer
And don’t forget this one.
Burned With Desire - Armin van Buuren ft. Justine Suissa (10 Years)
You can also use classics if they have a fast enough rhythm or the correct rhythm such as these two respectively.
Golden Earring - Twilight Zone
Bee Gees - Stayin' Alive (Official Music Video)
Stayin’ Alive goes amazingly well with the Empyrion Dance Animation. The Dancers now only travel two blocks from their starting position, with the exception of the Male Alien, so I didn’t use it. I filled every block that was more than two blocks from the edge of the dance floor with dancers facing random directions so that they are not all dancing in a line. They look totally random and they will form little sub groups, couples will form and break up, here and there 2 to 5 dancers may temporarily dance in a line. IT LOOKS LIKE A REAL DANCE FLOOR. Occasionally two of them will briefly overlap, but the Strobe Light makes that look like they are rubbing up on each other.
You have to see how much better the Dancer Models look under my Strobe Lights. If you play these songs while you wander around the Dance Floor in 1st person you will begin to forget you are in Empyrion. It starts to seem like the dance clubs in Mass Effect, only better because I like this architecture better. The Strobe Lights make the Dancers look real. You will see what I mean. Wandering around that dance floor with the Dance Lights on and the right songs playing is an activity in itself, because it’s so realistic. It’s a great way to unwind after a 2 hour battle with a bunch of Toveras and other monstrosities.
You can alter the Strobe Light Hues by activating the Blue Light Lever with the Dance Lights Lever on. That will turn on the 20 meter Luminosity 4 Blue Lights that are above the Dance Floor, changing the whole light effect to something a little mellower and more Sci Fi themed. The Blue Lights around the perimeter of the Club on both floors are activated by both Levers.
The Problem With the Reforged Scenario
Now to talk about how to find the Sweet Spot in Empyrion and get the best Epic Gameplay. In order to explain that, I will have to talk about what is wrong with the currently trending circle jerker Scenario as well as Eleon’s achievements and blunders.
So I was spawning this Reaper into Reforged Eden to test it out against some dreadnaughts and when I powered it on KABOOM. All the generators blew up. I thought to myself, “How nice.” The thing is this Reaper has plenty of power, especially in idle. It never uses more than 25%. Ever. I eventually got it to work with TWENTY+ Large Generators (T2) and THREE HUNDRED Quantum Cores, which easily fit into the empty tail. But when I flew it something was wrong. “Is that lag?” I thought to myself. “It’s moving really slow.” So I looked at the Acceleration Stat on the Statistics Tab and to my horror it said, “34 m/s Acceleration.” I thought to myself, “How is this possible? This Reaper has 136 m/s acceleration in all six directions in Vanilla. This Vermillion moron has nerfed 102 m/s of acceleration off of my Reaper! What the hell is going on here?”
My mind began to flash images of all the different streamers playing Reforged Eden like it was the greatest thing ever. I had encountered the neutered circle jerk clique before on the Empyrion Official Site. And I began to realize this was a cult of seriously deranged idiots. So I did the math. 34 m/s acceleration x 100 / 136 = 25%. Vermillion reduced my CV speed down to 25% of its correct value. A literal 75% reduction. Nerfed the CV Thrusters by 75%. Who does that? Seriously? And even more Twilight Zoney, who plays that? And even more Creep Showey, who streams that? I had to find out what other ridiculous changes Vermillion had made in his Reforged Scenario. So I read all his Scenario pages, determined to get to the bottom of it.
And there it was, from the Empyrion official site Reforged Galaxy page in “Thrusters Rebalancement.” “CVs though, they're slow. A decent CV can reach 100m/s in space at T2 with plenty for weapons, but it won't be moving like an SV fighter like they do in vanilla.” An open declaration that this scenario deliberately nerfs CV Thrusters to uselessness.
And to add insult to injury, Vermillion declares at the beginning of his post that he regrets not being able to nerf everything more because, according to him, barely moving CVs and everything else = realistic. “The original aim was to give the game a set of realistic values, while still remaining within the realms of playability. Many aspects had to be sacrificed because it's simply not feasible to make it fully realistic and still be fun to play, but it's realistic where possible and as consistent as possible.” Wow. This guy clearly has gone off the rails.
But he doesn’t stop at CVs. Oh no. Everything is nerfed to uselessness. Generators, Rockets, SVs, HVs. He claims he made HV Thrusters more powerful, but we all know HVs in Reforged cannot climb a hill or wiggle loose from a twig. This is from the “Power Rebalancement:” section. “For your average starter or early game HV/SV a single small generator is enough for mobility, but as you add more mass to your ships, more cargo and/or more weapons, you'll need better or more thrusters you'll need to upgrade to the next generator up. As the ship gets larger still, you'll need another generator and that puts strain on your CPU, requiring an additional extender, which means more space and more materials. Fueling self-motivated progression.” So the generators are nerfed so bad that you have to add more if you take on more cargo? This will force players to Gerry rig their vessels into ugly shanty vessels. Oh wait. That must explain why the Reforged cult streamers are always pushing their narcissist “Upgradeable” blueprints because “regular” players just aren’t smart enough to see the wisdom of playing Reforged and embracing the suck or of figuring out how to add 20 generators on their own. It’s not that “regular” or “new” players, as they call them, can’t figure out how to get something to work in Reforged, it’s that Reforged is a waste of time that makes gameplay MUCH WORSE than Vanilla, even with it piggy backing on Project Eden.
And then we get to the “Vehicle Weapons and Tools” section. “Rocket Turrets (HV, CV and BA) now fire slower-moving homing missiles that will take fancy flying to dodge. But they're still slower than your average SV.” Just Woooow. That explains why I had 3 volleys out before the first volley hit the Kamirat. Did you see how he said SVs will need fancy flying to dodge these slow as molasses but now fast turning rockets? But just below the Weapons section in “Thrusters Rebalancement” he said this about SVs. “Ships using heavier armors will be significantly harder to move and be ill-suited as a cargo ship (as expected). They're best used with Turrets (SV), since aiming with fixed weapons is extremely difficult due to slow handling of heavy ships.”
So according to this, Vermillion slowed the rockets down so you would have to use “fancy flying to dodge” these “slower-moving homing missiles” in a SV but he deliberately made the heavier SVs “significantly harder to move” and “extremely difficult” to aim “due to slow handling of heavy ships.” Is Vermillion Schizophrenic? He made the SVs too slow for fancy flying, and he made the rockets slow and fast turning so you need fancy flying to dodge them, and he put it in writing in the Reforged Galaxy Page. And we all know that light SVs in Reforged Garbage are just as slow and useless as the HVs. And the 4 streamers with more than 2 viewers are all worshipping Reforged like it’s the best scenario ever made. But wait there’s more.
From Reforged Eden Scenario A12, in “POI Combat – Missile Turrets:” we get “Their blast radius has been reduced by 1 since it was the same as an artillery turret in the base game, making them simply too dangerous for how cheap they are (both player and zirax versions).” Says who? Where and how does Vermillion draw these ridiculous conclusions? This next quote from “CV/BA: Missile Turrets” is a real doozy.
“The blast radius of these missiles is 4 in vanilla, the same as the ship-destroying Artillery. Which makes it clear there's some kind of ridiculous bias towards rockets over any other weapon type and the devs need to seriously STOP IT. In making every other weapon crap to highlight the various homing missiles, you bring the entire game down.”
Is Vermillion a Paranoid Schizophrenic? He said that the missile blast radius of 4 was proof that Eleon is biased towards rockets over any other weapon type and they need to “STOP IT.” Seriously. He then said Eleon made every other CV weapon crap to highlight the homing missiles. And that is what brings the game down. Not nerfing CV Thrusters by 75%. Oh no. But these paranoid delusions about Eleon discriminating against other turrets. Now that is what brings the game down.
Every other weapon is not crap. They each have their intended uses. Lasers are for taking down shields. Flak cannons are for taking out drones. Plasma cannons are for hammering stationary Bases. Artillery does three times the damage as missiles. Duh. I wonder what that is for. Vermillion is clearly the one with the erroneous biases. Plural.
Back in “POI Combat – Missile Turrets” he says, “In a battle against missile turrets your only chance is Hit-and-Run tactics. DO NOT STOP! Fly your SV like it's a jet fighter.” And later he says, “So I repeat: If you're up against missiles DO NOT STRAFE. You will not survive the experience.” Hey Vermillion, NEWS FLASH! An SV is NOT A JET FIGHTER. It’s what we in the gaming community like to refer to as a “space ship.” It has side thrusters and down thrusters. And furthermore, am I detecting a clear and present bias on the part of Vermillion against strafing? I most certainly am. And it’s clear why.
Basically Vermillion has used Reforged Garbage to make it impossible for a player vehicle to have any kind of horsepower and speed or to strafe. In addition he’s nerfed the most powerful player vehicle weapon, as well as every player vehicle weapon, and then buffed all the stats on the weapons his AI vessels and POIs use in order to stave off their obsolescence. In Reforged, POI turrets have ranges up to 1,300 meters, for example. You see, Vermillion’s fleet consists 100% of dinosaur tanking CVs. The only way they can be dangerous is if the player vessels are made even slower, and the Player weapons are ALL nerfed, which they are.
From “Ship Damage Distribution – CV/BA:” we have, “CV and BA weapons have had their damage greatly reduced by a specific amount for several reasons.” And the reason is, “3: Pre-balancing for full CV-vs-Planet combat - This is all done in preparation of being able to put CVs inside a planet's atmosphere with all weapons unrestricted. Oh yes, I bet you're all looking forward to that and i've got things all lined up so that when you bring a CV against a POI you don't just vaporize it in 3 seconds.” I’ll show you a much better way to enable CV turrets on planet further down. So Vermillion’s big plan is to nerf the CV weapons much further until they are unable to destroy a small base with 4 defensive turrets. Of course he won’t consider how that will make CVs useless in space. But the streamers will still circle jerk.
All this nerfing of player vessels removes more than half of the foundational elements of this 3D Game. Empyrion has 4 3D elements through which the player can interact with the environment. Here they are.
Speed
Shields (dependent on speed to be useful)
Firepower
Armor
Playing Reforged Garbage reduces these four to less than two.
Reduced Firepower
Armor
This makes for BORING LAME gameplay. No more strafing, which he is explicitly biased against, because his obsolete Tovera et al fleet is too slow. No more strafing means shields are useless. And the weapons are even nerfed while the POI turrets do increased damage with faster rounds and much greater range. So the only 3D element that the player can really interact with is armor. Hence the gazillion boring streams of tanked hunks of junk pounding away at each other while the streamers twiddle their thumbs.
- As of 2023 vermillion has given Reforged Garbage the ability to add an infinite number of auxiliary shields to a player build. This means an unlimited number of Shield Hit Points, if you waste 100's of hours farming Quantum Cores or use the Item Menu which takes 3 seconds. As a result LyfeForse has released a video of himself destroying a Tovera in a smaller CV in around a minute in Reforged Eden.
LyfeForse Destroys a Tovera in Reforged Eden With a CV in 80 Seconds
If you pause this video at 28 seconds you will see that the CV that LyfeForse is using, which is called EMP CV 1, has a Shield with 236,900 Hit Points. So this is the current state of this Reforged Garbage Scenario. You spend your whole game building up to this. This is the Grand Finale. You spend hundreds of hours farming enough Quantum Cores (lol it's hard and VERY time consuming) to get enough CPU points to place enough Auxiliary Shields to get your Shield Hit Points up to 236,900 so you can fly over the top of a Tovera and hover around 280 meters above its back, taking the full brunt of the Tovera's firepower, where you then fire your mounted guns at the point where the arms intersect the torso, what you might call the back of the Tovera's neck, for around 80 seconds to kill the Core that is located about 5 blocks down from that arm/torso intersection in the center. You don't have to strafe and you couldn't if you wanted to because vermillion nerfed every Thruster to 25% strength and then after much complaining graciously reduced the Thruster nerf from 25% strength to 33% strength.
In other words, vermillion, on one of his coke binges, decided that the gameplay would be better if he nerfed all thrusters to 33% strength and then made CPU mandatory but allowed you to augment your shield to hundreds of thousands of points if you grind for 100s of hours or use the Item Menu to just give yourself instant Quantum Cores so you can park your CV, SV, or HV next to any level of enemy fire and just sit still there for minutes with no damage. At 2 minutes and 4 seconds you can see that the CV Cored the Tovera with 80% Shields. This was after hovering 280 meters above the Tovera for 80 seconds. This means that this CV, the EMP CV 1, can hover above a Tovera absorbing the full brunt of its fire without moving for 6 minutes and 40 seconds before the Shield reaches 0 hit points. This does not conjure up images of Star Wars space battle scenes. This is a complex work that is way off base and off target. It's called "tweaking." Some elements are nice, most are trash.
I had not mentioned the Tovera Core location until now because it's kind of a spoiler, but by now everyone knows, I suppose. Rest assured that you can hit the Tovera Core from 900 Meters in my Sovereign-Class Reaper and from 600 meters in my Reaper Destroyer SV. You just have to aim for it with the Mounted Rockets once the Mounted Lasers down the Shields. Because of the max acceleration in all 6 directions of these two builds of mine you can easily stay "mounted" on top of and behind the Tovera at 900 meter range in the CV and 600 meter range in the faster SV from where you aim for the "back of the neck." You can kill the Tovera in a minute or less in this way with the CV and in a few minutes with the SV. Around 30% of the time this Sovereign-Class Reaper CV kills a Tovera with the Rocket Turret Volleys in less than a minute by pure luck, from 900 meter range.
I also wanted to illustrate how this Sovereign-Class Reaper and my Reaper Destroyer SV can completely pulverize and completely defang/immobilize a Tovera, respectively. So for the purposes of these posts I screenshotted both ships killing Toveras the hard way, without targeting the Core, in order to show the sheer damage my builds can dish out with vanilla weapons. And I explained how you need to pilot them in order to completely pulverize them. This is because once you develop your piloting skills to that level and THEN begin looking for quick kills like hitting the Tovera Core in the back of the neck, you WILL be deadly in this game. Imagine what you could do in PVP.
It's not just CVs that can kill a Tovera this way in Reforged Garbage. ArtemisRouge Gaming took out a Tovera in Reforged Eden with a Torpedo SV in around 3 minutes of engagement, with timeouts to recharge his Shield.
ArtemisRouge Gaming Destroys a Tovera in Reforged Eden With a Torpedo SV in 3 Minutes of Combat
In this video ArtemisRouge Gaming flies his Torpedo SV up close to the Tovera and takes close range torpedo shots at both the Core on the back of the neck intersection and the decoy turret clusters in the arm tips, which also take fire from the SV turrets. He consistently backs away from the Tovera to recharge his Shields back to 100% when they get depleted to various thresholds. At close range, even as close as 42 meters, it took 15 seconds for his Torpedo SV to drop to 70% Shields while he was moving constantly or hiding behind the stumps of the arms. This means that ArtemisRouge Gaming's Reforged Eden SV can withstand 50 seconds of the full brunt of a Tovera's firepower with a Reforged speed SV before it loses Shields. We all know this translates to 100,000s of Shield Hit Points. That's a lot of Quantum Cores for an SV.
For all of vermillion's talk of "balancing" the game "properly" over the years, SV's with 100,000s of Shield Hit Points sure seems overpowered and unbalanced, don't you think? And slow moving to boot.
What my Sovereign-Class Reaper and my Reaper Destroyer SV illustrate is how you can destroy a Tovera (multiple Tovera's, actually) without taking damage in Vanilla or the now defunct Project Eden (with the stronger Toveras) without taking damage, by harnessing physics through proper ship design. Speed, Shields, and Forward Mounted Turrets on the Same Z plane. Then you have to learn to strafe properly and fly at maximum range, and hit from maximum range with Mounted Lasers. It is a way to defeat Super Dreadnaughts with standard Shields and Weapons, with the exception of the Project Eden Augmented Shields as an unnecessary bonus, which weren't any where near being over powered, in a way that will continue to be valid and function in Blueprints that will continue to be able to be spawned and used indefinately through the endless Eleon update iterations. And because Eleon, as clueless and bumbling as they are, are still much better than a crackhead on a coke binge, fighting Space battles with the mechanics of the vanilla version of the game is much better than using the mechanics of the Reforged Garbage version. Project Eden used to have the vanilla mechanics.
Now just imagine a Best Of Scenario that has the galaxy map, all the custom weapons of Reforged Eden with all their special particle effects with vanilla level resource requirements that are Auto Repairable, and the AI file. And nothing more than some minor tweaks, like Boosters for CV Thrusters and Deconstructors and Furnaces on CVs. Only essential common sense elements from original additions or existing scenarios. NO NERFING. NO BUFFING. Leave that to Eleon. Put pressure on Eleon to get that right in vanilla. Physics.
This Best Of Scenario could include any new original quality content and the best elements of Reforged Eden and any others such as Star Salvage. It could include that scenario's HV, SV, and CV wrecks on planets and in space.
Now just imagine this Sovereign-Class Reaper RETROFITTED with Reforged Eden's custom turrets and mounted weapons AND 100 meters per second acceleration in all six directions, in addition to the faster AI vessels. Fifty six forward mounted on the same Z plane Rocket Turrets replaced with a mix of the deadliest Reforged Eden Turrets. The 20 Mounted Guns replaced with the deadliest Reforged Eden Mounted Guns like the Torpedos. Imagine all those custom weapons are auto repairable. Imagine using those from 900 meters range with 100 meter per second acceleration in all 6 directions and Boost. Imagine doing that in PVP. Even without physics it would be quite a wild ride. The best Space combat action achieved so far in Empyrion.
This Sovereign-Class Reaper would actually look almost like a Mass Effect Reaper with a giant red laser beam on the front. It would have a lot of colorful beams and very fancy projectile rounds firing from 56 forward mounted turrets on the same Z plane. It would rain down destruction from range like no one has ever seen. And best of all, all of its custom turrets, weapons, and devices would be auto repairable. And it would not be burdened by all the baggage that comes with Reforged Eden like 33% strength nerfed thrusters and exorbitant custom device costs. Not to mention unnecessary devices. Keep in mind that you don't necessarily have to use the turret and mounted weapon models from Reforged Eden. You could just find or make or buy your own and just add them in with normal costs and stats. A big giant model does big giant damage. But since Reforged Eden has so many available, it would be very easy to use those and give them much better stats in the Best Of Scenario config files.
This Sovereign-Class Reaper could be given a couple of custom large, red laser beam turrets that do 20,000 points of damage per second 4 block area damage and consume so much power that 4 large T2 generators would only allow for a couple of them. Then the front end of the Sovereign could be redesigned to look like the original Sovereign-Class Reapers from Mass Effect and it would be the deadliest CV in Empyrion with 2 large front turrets instead of 56 regular ones that actually looks almost exactly like this, in Empyrion.
Don't forget the Reaper Destroyer SV with its 32 forward mounted on the same Z plane Minigun Turrets and 120 meter per second acceleration in all six directions while fully loaded. Imagine the visuals you would get from the high speed strafing action of that at 600 meter range, if it was fully retrofitted with the deadliest Reforged Eden custom turrets and mounted weapons like the Torpedos in a scenario that made them cheap to build and auto repairable. It would be the best Space combat action so far achieved in Empyrion.
Overhauling an Alpha Game That Gets 5 Major Updates a Year is Pissing in the Wind
Reforged Garbage is not a scenario. It's a Total Overhaul. Now Overhauling is something you do with a game that has been released in its final state. There are many great Total Overhauls for games like the Total War series. To attempt to undertake the monumental task of Overhauling a game in its early Alpha stage is literally like Pissing in the Wind. It’s like living in Dark City, where the ground, walls and ceiling are always shifting beneath, beside, and above you.
Every update brings the potential that the Reforged Overhaul will be broken, i.e. Vermillion is unable to get the Reforged Blueprints to work again. He is literally going through the entire Configuration files and making impulsive changes to everything, which have compounded results that he doesn't fully understand, i.e. nerfing CV power turrets for planetary use that will ruin CV's usefulness in space. And every update makes changes that require him to go through all the files and change them again. It’s a quantitative, chaotic process instead of a qualitative, focused process. If Eleon were to implement physics, it would wreck Reforged Garbage and all of its proprietary Blueprints.
As it is, Eleon is rebalancing Weapons again. Expect that to totally unhinge all the ridiculous changes Vermillion has made to the Weapon Settings. Just like with 1.2, I think it was 1.2, when all the player's vessels were exploding thanks to Vermillion's ridiculous Overhaul attempt, this Weapon Rebalancing by Eleon will result in Reforged Player Weapons either being overpowered or nerfed beyond playability. Once again all the idiots who have volunteered to be held hostage by Vermillion will have to wait while he frantically tries to un&$@! his foolish Total Overhaul of Alpha Stage Empyrion so that Player Dreadnaughts aren't being destroyed by a single AI Space Drone. Wouldn't it be funny if that actually happened?
That is exactly the type of thing that will consistently happen when you attempt to Total Overhaul an Alpha Game. There is an old saying that says, "Measure twice, cut once." Total Overhauling an Alpha game as Reforged Garbage does is like never measuring and cutting infinitely. This is because there is no way to measure a game that is not yet complete. It is guaranteed to be in constant, major flux. And every update will cause all the Reforged Garbage Cultists to waste their time troubleshooting Reforged Garbage instead of the Vanilla Game.
Keep in mind we are talking about a game that is so Alpha that virtually every element is bugged. Bases still get up and move into the middle of the ocean. Docking still locks sensors in the on position. The game still has no physics making all interactions with terrain effectively broken. We could go on and on. To undertake to Total Overhaul a game in this broken stake is putting the cart before the horse. It's the Credit Default Swap of Gaming. It’s literally exponentially compounding the bugs. And Vermillion's biases are totally delusional.
To actually attempt to Total Overhaul a broken Alpha game like Empyrion seems like the type of thing a meth binger would do. Something that harnesses the endless stream of chaotic, raw energy into doing repetitive activity that never is as good as it seems to the subject. It’s like trying to mop the Ocean. Or trying to count every grain of sand on a beach.
Project Eden is not a Total Overhaul. It just adds some custom items, structures the galaxies into more sophisticated templates, and adds some missions. It can't be broken by the Updates, and it can't break Player Blueprints.
- As of 2023 this has changed. Ravien was indoctrinated by vermillion into the ways of forced, artificial scarcity and abandoned Project Eden. There is now no way to have that galaxy with the vanilla missions or without nerfing all thrusters and weapons.
Bad Decisions By Eleon Cascade Into Bad Scenarios and Streams
This just shows how the bad decisions made by Eleon have cascaded into idiots further propagating the idiocy behind these bad decisions through scenarios, streams, and builds. First Eleon decided that a CV should not be able to destroy a small base with 4 defensive turrets. How they could come to this conclusion is unknown but it clearly involves some clueless pointy-haired boss. Of course a CV can destroy a small base that has only 4 defensive turrets. IT’S SUPPOSED TO. I have a news flash for you. A CV can also destroy another CV that has only 4 defensive turrets with ease. Are you going to cry now? Should we disable CV Power Turrets in Space too? Do I really have to explain all this to the “elites” of Empyrion?
Making Bases Hold Their Own Against CV Power Turrets
The main differences between a ship and a base in Empyrion are mobility and number of shields. A base is a sitting duck, but it can be surrounded by defensive tower mini bases that each have their own shields. A CV can range fight, but it has only got one shield. If you want a base to be impossible for a CV to take out, surround it with 25 4 turret tower mini bases, each with their own shield, so that no matter how a CV approaches, it will be exposed to at least 50 of those turrets. Ravien did this for some high level bases in Project Eden, and it works. That would even give this Reaper pause, because Range in Atmosphere is short and with a 60 m/s speed cap strafing is much less effective on planet. And, obviously, you would set a standard that determines POI level by how many of these 4 turret tower mini bases surround a base. If that had been done from the start, every current POI would be properly configured and rated. What kind of idiot would decide to just turn off all CV power turrets and drills on planet and NIX HALF OF THE GAME PLAY?
A Single SV cannot take down a strong base. It’s not supposed to be able to. SVs, aka “small fighters” are meant to be used alone as scouts and in squadrons for base attacks. You use a squadron of fighters to draw enemy fire while you move your dreadnaughts in to fire the big guns. Do I have to explain everything to these Empyrion veterans with 1,000s of hours of idiotic grinding under their belts?
CPU and Reforged
Then Eleon implemented CPU. I’ve already covered this but now let’s look at how Vermillion ran with this train wreck. So CPU is supposed to force smaller builds because lag. But it is avoidable with an Advanced Core. Vermillion took that option away and nerfed the Advanced Core to only provide one million CPU points instead of negating it completely. So he forces you to use CPU. Then he adds these Quantum Cores, and if you just waste a couple 1,000 hours getting hundreds of them, or use the Item Menu, you can build a ship that is as big as physically possible in the grid. Are you seeing the circular logic here? This is like a dog chasing its own tail. So he forces you to have supposedly lag reducing CPU but you can completely negate it by grinding for a couple 1,000 hours, or just using the Item Menu, and build a behemoth. When you add this all up the bottom line is that Vanilla game play is much better than Reforged Garbage gameplay. But fortunately we have Project Eden for now. (Project Eden is no longer available as a standalone Scenario)
Reforged Blueprints Will Be Unusable When It Is Abandoned
And the worst thing about Reforged Garbage is that it forces you to build blueprints that will only work in Reforged Garbage. And inevitably, every time an update comes out, which is around 5 times a year, Reforged Garbage is going to have many problems that Vermillion needs to fix, because his overhaul of an Alpha Stage Game requires tweaking a massive amount of settings. And until he fixes Reforged Garbage for the update, every Reforged Garbage Blueprint is unusable. Eventually an update will come along that Vermillion will not be able to adjust his ridiculous settings for without breaking EVERY Reforged Garbage Blueprint. He will also eventually stop updating it, because it’s an insanely tedious labor in futility, at which point all those 1,000s of blueprints become useless. By forcing you to build proprietary blueprints, he is forcing you to play with his scenario. You never undertake to overhaul a game that is still in its Alpha stage and getting major updates 5 times a year. It’s asinine.
On Project Eden
Ravien has produced the Project Eden scenario with the correct kinds of modifications. It’s not an overhaul. Its modifications don’t alter the player blueprints or the Vanilla settings. He adds some new items with their own stats. Project Eden will never be broken by an update. It’s the total vision behind what Ravien made Project Eden into that makes it so good. Project Eden is the direction where Vanilla should go. It has much better galaxies, much better missions, and much better random content. The Sun Type Exploration/Research mission is amazing. The UCHN Research Vessels are brilliant. It all really makes the game much more immersive. It’s the perspective. Eleon should hire Ravien to design their Vanilla galaxies and missions.
Unfortunately it is flawed in that vermillion has indoctrinated Ravien into his artificial scarcity obsessive compulsive disorder which he acquired from the dolts at Eleon. So all of Project Eden's custom turrets, weapons, and items are useless because they are WAAAAAAY TOOOO EXPENSIVE and they DO NOT AUTO REPAIR. Just ignore them and enjoy the better galaxy and traders and extra missions. As a whole the Vanilla missions are better because there are way more of them and they are complete. But Ravien's custom missions are of a higher quality than the Vanilla missions, although the Dead Planet mission final stage is overpowered for one player.
- As of 2023 this has changed. Ravien was indoctrinated by vermillion into the ways of forced, artificial scarcity and abandoned Project Eden. There is now no way to have that galaxy with the Vanilla missions or without nerfing all thrusters and weapons. And he never finished his missions.
On Grinding and Artificial Scarcity
But Ravien is also influenced by the terrible vision that Eleon has adopted. This lame narrative of artificial scarcity and ridiculously long grinding requirements that are only so because they add a zero to a setting line. In Vanilla, all the resources are only available in 1/10th the quantity that they should be. And they only produce 1/10th of what they should in construction. And there are already way too many resource types for the scale of the game. This is all done to expand the grind as much as possible. They should also increase the Force output of all Thrusters by a factor of 10. This would allow you to build good looking vessels without needing 108 XL Thrusters to reach Max Acceleration on all six sides. I would only need 1.8 XL Thrusters per side, and I would be able to use smaller Thrusters for more aesthetics. It would be futile to waste time editing the ecf files to implement these changes, for the same reason that the changes Vermillion makes in Reforged Garbage are futile. Empyrion is still an Alpha game with 5 major updates every year. Only Eleon can correct this fallacy.
One Planet has enough energy resources to power a CV for more than a few days, but not according to the devs. One whole planet should have enough promethium to power a fleet forever. According to the vision of the devs, the universe is a place of universal scarcity. Everything is scarce. You may need to deplete entire planets just to get enough steel to build one CV. It’s the same everywhere. You have to keep depleting planet after planet and asteroid field after asteroid field just to keep one CV going. The whole universe is like that. It’s extremely lame. And there are so many different resources. They add resources every year.
It’s all meant to make the grind take up as much of the Player’s time and attention as possible. Because Eleon have no plan for a Main Game. The circle jerkers call it the “End Game,” as a gas-lighting gimmick. It’s the Main Game. You know, that part where the fruits of your labor all pay off and you are able to fight epic battles and win consistently. You are able to go on awe inspiring missions. You are able to have visually and physically realistic epic space and planetary battles that are in themselves not capable of ever becoming boring. We are talking about physics of course. Eleon has stated that they will not be implementing physics.
On Mining Networks and Military Campaigns
You see, you should be able to build a mining network out of a base or network of bases that allows you to automate the mining of all the resources on that planet. You could have some Mining Devices and Crew and Mining Drones that would just fly back and forth between the base and all the planetary deposits. They would fill your Base Ore Containers. All the player would need to do is come back and transfer the ingots to their CV.
This would free the player up to build awesome vessels and then use them to complete missions and clear out territories. There could be a political /military conquest element, like taking over a chunk of Zirax Space, or all of it. You could even make Alliances to get other factions to help you conquer Zirax or any other faction’s space. A long term Military Campaign. Where you could have Allies Warp in upon request to join your battles with mutual enemies. And you could use those Allied ships as bullet sponges for enemy rounds while you range fight at 900 meters.
There could be a Command Base and a Drone Base requirement to own a planet, with the same applying to the space orbits and sectors. The Player Faction could take over Planets and Orbits and Sectors by Coring the Command and Drone Bases. This would not affect non-hostile Faction owned Bases, but it would flip all remaining enemy Bases to the Player Faction. The Player could be given the ability to repair these Cored Bases with pre-existing Templates. Some Automation Devices installed in the Command Base could keep all the flipped bases stocked and operational. The playfields would then be under Player Faction Drone protection. The Player could even be able to build and deploy his own Patrol Vessels, possibly through the Factory with an option to “Spawn as Patrol Vessel.” Even Configure their Patrol Routes.
In this way the Player Faction could take over Solar Systems. And it could only require a percentage of the Planets and Sectors to flip the whole Solar System to the Player Faction. The same way the current simplistic design has Base Attacks, Empyrion could have enemy fleets attack a Player Faction owned Complete Solar System, Planet, or Sector. The Player would get a Mission Pop Up telling him which Star System is under attack and by how many fleets and ships with some general intelligence on ship classes. Then the Player would have to Warp there and call in all Allies to Warp in reinforcements as the Player hunts down each fleet and engages it. Great for Single and Multiplayer. Many other possibilities that we have all played in some form or another in other games could also become part of Empyrion. Now imagine all this with a full implementation of Physics. This is what we call Main Game, not “End Game.” Instead this is how Empyrion works by design.
Eleon’s Vision for Empyrion Gameplay: Empyrion Groundhog Grinding Day
You start the game and you grind. And then you grind some more. And then you grind some more. The circle jerkers tell you that you get cool points if you “earn it.” Yes they actually say that on stream. And in text. Yes if you use the Item Menu in this eternally broken game you are “not cool.” These circle jerkers literally worship Empyrion and the devs as a cult. So you grind some more and a couple hundred hours or even thousands of hours later, you are finally able to build that… garbage CPU Reforged piece of crap CV that doesn’t have this and doesn’t have that and needs a tugboat to start moving. “End Game.” Get the picture? That is exactly what the devs and all the circle jerkers and streamers are selling you.
And if everyone keeps promoting Reforged Garbage as if it’s the best scenario ever, the clueless devs are going to think that everyone actually likes it, when it’s really just that tiny clique of circle jerkers and streamers. And they are going to start moving Vanilla in the Reforged Garbage direction. They already said they are going to rebalance weapons in the next update. Are the turrets going to come out all nerfed like in Reforged Garbage? That will make the game unplayable.
If the players don’t stop pretending that Reforged Garbage isn’t just that, garbage, then this is what is going to happen to Empyrion in the future. CPU will be made mandatory. Everything, I mean everything, will be nerfed by 75% or more. And the current 14 or whatever it is ores that are in the grind will double to 28 scarce ores you now have to find and mine in slow, weak, low cargo space hunks of junk. It will take TWICE as LOOOONG to grind. And the circle jerkers will say, “Isn’t that awesome?”
Stupidium
And one of the new ores will be called “Stupidium.” And the same four streamers will be streaming Let’s Play Season 72. And it will go something like this.
“I’ve found my first deposit of the new ore called Stupidium. Jolly good! I am now going to use my 458th slow, crappy, low storage CPU, Reforged Garbage mining HV to mine the Stupidium. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ‘Nothrusty.’ So I’m drilling a hole into the ground. There I just got some Stupidium. Uh oh. I can’t move. Nothrusty seems to be stuck, Ladies and Gentlemen. Let me get out and see what it’s stuck on. Damn I fell all the way down to the bottom of the hole. There is no way to jetpack out of here. I don’t have time to drill my way out.
Ladies and Gentlemen I will now do a cheeky cheat and use God Mode to go… INSPECT Nothrusty. Oh I see the problem. The drill missed a tiny pinch of dirt, and its hovering right behind Nothrusty. Not only can Nothrusty not push anything because it has no thrusty, but Empyrion has no physics, so a couple granules of sand floating in the air can stop an HV. Eleon please fix. I’ll have to dig Nothrusty out in God Mode.
Ok I have dug a path that Nothrusty can use to get out of the hole. Here goes. Oh Damn. Nothrusty doesn’t have enough thrust to negotiate the incline of the path I just spent a half hour drilling out in God Mode with my Epic Drill on stream.” One and a half hours later, “Ok I’m BACK. I finally got Nothrusty out of the Stupidium Deposit hole that I dug for myself, and I finished mining the Stupidium ore with the Epic Drill and Player Drone. It took me five minutes with an Epic Drill. Guys, it’s easier to mine Stupidium with an Epic Drill and your Player Drone than it is to use a mining HV.”
- The Stupidium story turned out to be a prophetic tome... within exactly 30 days. You see I originally posted this Sovereign-Class Reaper on June 28, 2021. No less and no more than 30 days later on July 27, 2021, a certain jolly streamer did THIS!
Watch From 21 Minutes to 38 Minutes and 30 Seconds
Gosh that looks like great "fun." That must be some of the Reforged Garbage "much improved gameplay" that all the streamers are always braying about. You know, that kind of gameplay is just as much "fun" to watch someone stream as it is for them to play it. It’s as if he was trying to demonstrate his loyalty to all things Vermillion and Reforged Garbage by proving my prophecy wrong, and... kaboom!
- Deja Vu. Ooops he did it again. This time on Jan 9, 2023. Spanj did the exact same thing that he did in the video above. They say the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. And here we are. Empyrion is at extremely, unplayabley bug ridden 1.9.2 (or Alpha 13.9.2 as we call it in reality) and Spanj is ready to start another play through. Hmm. I wonder which scenario he will play?
Reforged Garbage has just released a promo for Fall 2023 that shows how vermillion is busy doing the vital, all important work of replacing all the mounted weapon models with turret models that will still be static mounted guns, not turrets. This is absolutely retarded on its face, and history tells us that we can safely assume that Spanj will of course cue off of this and go full retard with yet another play through of Empyrion Reforged Garbage.
And in true Reforged Garbage Circle Jerk tradition, we can count on Spanj to stay true to the protocols of insanity by repeating the installation of Empyrion, the Subscription to Reforged Garbage, and the starting of yet a 3rd Let's Play without a clue in the world that all the same game breaking bugs and cocaine binge inspired idiotic Reforged Garbage Scenario changes will lead to the same disastrous train wrecks over and over again starting with the always reliable vermillion nerfing of all thrusters so that the absolute most barebones HV can't move up any incline whatsoever and culminating in the usual "dreadnaught" (not really) that is too slow to keep its shields up and Spanj wouldn't even try anyways so it loses more than 50% of its blocks against a weakling Tovera for the anticlimactic, deflationary, minor finale of the series.
And in true Reforged Circle Jerk fashion, straight out the gate in the first episode of the series we have Spanj building his absolute minimum barebones HV and... and... can you see where this is going?
Watch From 4 Hours to 4 Hours and 30 Minutes
We call this one "Stuck in a Gorge," or to be more accurate, "Stuck in multiple gorges and gorges within gorges." This one is pure comedy. It's even funnier than the first time. He put the absolute minimum blocks and devices into this HV, and it could not handle any incline whatsoever. And it was over CPU by more than 30%, because Eleon gave the Ground Repulsor Engine 400 CPU! In this stream Spanj and the Chaos Crew assumed that is was vermillion. To be fair it is the kind of thing he does. Does this give you that vertigo sense of a turd circling down a flushing toilet bowl?
This is why I always say never play Reforged Garbage and either Item Menu Advanced Cores into all your builds or turn off CPU. I can't wait to see Spanj try to open his first locked POI door. lol Or discover the new Teleporter game breaking bug. Or the vanishing fuel bug. In this first 5 hour stream they did nothing but grind ores in a way over nerfed and over CPUed HV that got stuck over and over again. What Spanj needs is an HV like my Reaper Recon Elite Starter HV. It's the only HV worth using without physics.
This stream is quite hilarious. It should be in a comedy category. It's the extreme and frequent train wrecks that are so entertaining, not the dazzling space action. There is a lot of comedy gold in Spanj's old videos, and it is always due to the phenomena I have been articulating in this post. The toxic Circle Jerk environment that Eleon brought about when they implemented CPU and rejected physics. It makes anyone who cucks to CPU and Reforged Garbage become stupid by default. Because CPU and Reforged Garbage are illogical contradiction constructs.
Like that time when Spanj was so proud of his cave base, and it came under attack by Zirax Bomber and Minigun Drones. He died and death looped for awhile until he was able to get into his damaged SV without his backpack. He had lost his forward thrusters so the only way to stop was to crash into the ground which causes no damage because of no physics. So he smashed into the ground, got out and grabbed his backpack and got back in when BOOM! His cockpit was gone and he was dead. Then he was caught in an inescapable death loop because the area was covered by two Zirax Bomber Drones and two Zirax Minigun Drones. And he's on foot with a T1 Sniper Rifle. lol And the Zirax Drones are hammering him every time he spawns. lol He had to call in his faction to rescue him by taking out the Zirax Drones.
Watch From 3 Minutes and 46 Seconds to 15 Minutes
It's a good idea to take out the Drone Base before you build a base. Or arm your base with turrets before building other things. But the funniest part was how absolutely PISSED he was. HAHAHAH. He didn't believe it was possible that it could happen to him.
But this was nothing compared to the other time when he had all his life savings in his 1st CV, and he was taking on some Pirate Station with a long line of four or five Mini Defense Stations loaded with turrets. So he decides to "strafe" them by flying past the whole line and attacking the last one which is the farthest away. lol He reaches the final Mini Defense Station under a barrage of fire from all five of them and BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!
Spanj's CV is GONE! He's stranded in a sector with no planets and no Pentaxid for his lucky SV that survived. HAHAHAH He was so PISSED. Lost all his resources. So he made up some unconvincing excuse for what happened that involved Ctrl W which activates Cruise Control and him not knowing that the SV was moving and then not being able to move it. But in the video he says he is going to straff and it doesn't stop moving until its 80% pulverized by the Bandit Stations. Maybe it is just the video he was left with. But it is suspicious how much it looks like he is just trying to cover up for how stupid that Pass in Review to a hostile enemy was. Had to start over from scratch.
Watch From 43 Minutes and 10 Seconds To the End
Always shoot the closest target first. Spanj understands this in First Person Shooting but he just can't seem to grasp the tactics of Space Ship combat. He really needs to play a real game with physics like Space Engineers until he masters the craft. After this disaster Spanj looked around for Pentaxid in the sector in order to escape in his SV, which he eventually did. This Sovereign-Class Reaper has no problem with ANY Pirate force of any size. And my Reaper Destroyer SV doesn't either, but it is also the perfect vehicle to use against Pirate sized CVs. Use it to get your Reputation with the Kriel and Colonists maxed out by destroying all Pirate ships in all sectors you enter for awhile. It is awesome fast action. And easy to loot them too. This Reaper is too big for Pirates. I mean you can, but the Pirate Ships will be completely pulverized along with all the loot, unless you only use the Defensive Turret Battery. But my SV is just perfect for dogfighting small fast CVs.
Here is another funny one where Spanj parks his small SV on the side of a Zirax POI so that he can use the POI for cover from a nearby Zirax Base with the deadly Green Plasma Turret from Reforged Eden. It works just fine until he deastroys the Zirax Core. Once that Core is gone, the nearby Zirax Base with the Green Plasma Turret is no longer restricted from shooting through the Zirax POI that is protecting Spanj's SV. Just watch it to see what happens.
Watch from 2 Minutes and 40 Seconds to 8 Minutes and 30 Seconds
That action was pretty entertaining. The game requires you to always think intuitively in order to survive. Just imagine if it had physics. And no bugs. Even with the outdated graphics and animations and NPC models. Combat would be exponentially more entertaining. As it is now, unfortunately these immersive moments are rare. Most of the time your immersion is shattered by tactic blocking mechanical inadequacies and monster bugs.
The thing is these immersion stoppers never happen in Space Engineers streams or any other real game streams. They don't happen once and they definitely don't happen over and over and over and over again. And who streams the same garbage game over and over and over again, year after year after year? Spanj's personality is what converts his streams from the usual Incompetent and Lame category that all the other Empyrion streams are in to the Comedy category that his streams are in. Sort of an Englishman cross between Mr. Magoo, Elmer Fudd, and Gimli the Dwarf with fiery red hair. And it works. For a while. But eventually people get tired of watching clowns get pied in the face by their own doing. Except for the Circle Jerkers of course. But that's a shrinking pool of viewers.
And then the next streamer comes on.
HV Stuck In A Gorge
“OK so I’m back with Stage 17-D-45H of my 253rd crappy CPU Reforged Garbage HV. I wanted to try to reintroduce a role for HVs in Empyrion (Reforged Garbage), because they don’t really have much use anymore (due to nerfing of all Thrusters to 25% now 33% strength). I want to make this HV compatible with Vanilla but I also want it to be compatible with Reforged, and of course it must have CPU because reasons. But I can’t make it work in both. Ooooh Gosh. I don’t know what to do. Should I make two versions? Gosh, I just don’t know.
I want to add another Thruster here but I don’t have enough CPU. I could add another Extender but that’s going to make it very expensive. I could just not play Reforged Garbage and use an Advanced Core or turn off CPU but all the idiots are using CPU and playing Reforged Garbage so of course I have to because…
Ok so my HV is ready for its first test. I always build the whole thing and texture it before I even think about testing it. So I’m driving off the Landing Pad. Ok it seems to have good speed going down the ramp. That’s a good sign. Ok I’m on wild terrain now. Oh darn, I’m stuck. What the hell? I can’t move at all. Let me get out and see what… oh gosh it’s stuck on this little twig. I’ll have to get a Saw and chop it down.”
The next episode comes along.
“Ok guys, I’m here with my buddies on this exotic planet with high plateaus. My new HV is ready for deployment. Today we are going to kill some Zirax in Reforged Garbage. So I landed my CV on this plateau. I’m driving my HV out the Hangar Door. Ok I’m on the ground. Oh no it’s sliding down the incline. The ground here is too steep, even with 100 Thrusters this HV doesn’t have enough acceleration to stop sliding down this 25 degree incline. Oh no it’s getting close to the cliff. Oh no it’s a deep gorge. Stop darn it. STOP! It just went over the edge. I’m falling. Still falling. Still falling. Oh NO. I’m stuck at the bottom of this 200 meter deep gorge. I can’t move at all. Hey guys. I need help here. My brand new HV is stuck at the bottom of a 200 meter deep gorge on its first voyage as soon as it left the CV.”
“Ok we’re all on our way. Let me call the Server Administrators.”
“Hi I’m one of the Server Administrators. Wow. You are really stuck down there. It looks like I am going to have to bring a CV that can fit down that gorge and we are going to have to get your HV to dock to it so we can pull it out.”
“Yeah, because it sure doesn’t have the power to climb a hill on its own.”
These two events actually happened to JRandall and XCaliber during two streams in April 2021. Here is one of them.
Watch From 36 Minutes to 2 Hours and 1 Minute
(Yes it took them one and a half hours to get the Reforged Garbage CPU HV Tank out of the gorge.)
This is the second event. During the first CPU HV with thrusters nerfed by vermillion disaster, JRandall was screaming "Noooo! Nooooo!" as this HV Tank slid off the CV ramp and straight into a gorge. XCaliber plays a recording of those "Noooo!"s at
39 Minutes and 26 Seconds.
I think XCaliber deleted that 1st HV stuck in a gorge disaster video because it was very embarrassing and traumatic for JRandall. And JRandall must have deleted his "Work in Progress" video where that tank immediately got stuck on a twig and he had to saw the twig away in order to move his massive Reforged Garbage CPU HV Tank that looks pretty and is useless.
This is what Vermillion calls “realistic.” But you all get the picture. Yet, just because people make bad choices in some areas doesn’t mean they can’t get other things right and vice versa. Now about the good things that Eleon and Vermillion have accomplished in this game.
If you absolutely insist on playing Empyrion, there is only one way to get the best and most out of it. Get the best and most out of it. Ravien was indoctrinated by vermillion so there is no longer a Project Eden scenario. It was getting lamer and lamer with more and more artificial scarcity anyways, and no more vanilla missions. Spanj or anyone with a crew that could handle the work should take their crew and make their own Best Of Scenario but they should do it the smart way, if possible.
Smart means keeping the individual workload of the project to a bare minimum. This means division of labor, as in have three people do the galaxy and three people do the custom weapons and effects and 3 people do the Star Salvage HV, SV, and CV wrecks. It means having three people to do custom POIs and three people to do custom missions. It means making these things in a way that doesn't have multiple cascading dependencies and that use vanilla assets. This alone will make the creation and maintenance of an excellent Best Of Scenario very easy for a crew. Nobody will need to stay up all week on coke.
Smart also means attempting to only update your server, clients, and scenario when a final version of a good update comes out, if it is practical to do so. But even if you have to roll with each update, not wasting time redoing what Eleon has already done will mean much less work than what vermillion and ravien put in and you will be dividing that lesser amount of labor by a crew. When Spanj made the Farr content he had a couple dozen players working on the content. So somebody needs to do that for a Best Of Scenario.
There is evidence that it is possible to roll back to an earlier version, and more importantly, stay on that version without another update everytime you start Empyrion, but it looks like it will be in a format that includes intermittent periods when it does not work. Steam is who decided to make updates mandatory, and they are moving in the direction of ending access to older versions of games, but the Steam client intermittently stops the ability to download older versions and then enables it again later. Apparently it currently works with the Steam Client again as of January, 2023. I suspect that the method through which you stop Steam from updating games will also be subject to intermittent periods when it doesn't work. If the current trend continues, at some point Steam will prevent all downloading of older versions of games and all methods of stopping updates when the Steam Client is on.
How to Stop the Steam Client From Updating
This is why it could be useful to disable Steam Client Updates on your Client Installation. This apparently is easy to do. This guide shows you the Steam Client GUI options that you have available to manipulate Updates, and last it shows you how to stop the Steam Client itself from updating. This would be useful to do while you are in a version of Steam that allows you to download old Manifests and stop game updates. You would want to block the updates, then after you verify that a new Steam Client update still allows you to download Manifests and stop game updates, you would let the Steam Client update again, and then block it from updating until the next one. The basic instructions are as follows:
1. Add start attributes to the Steam shortcut
A. Right-click on your Steam desktop icon, then select Properties.
B. Go to the Target field.
C. Add the following startup arguments after the path: -noverifyfiles -nobootstrapupdate -skipinitialbootstrap - norepairfile
-overridepackageurl
2. Block the Steam client from updating
A. Use the Windows key on your keyboard, then search for Notepad, and open it.
B. Write down the following line:
BootStrapperInhibitAll=Enable
C. Save the file in the Steam installation folder as Steam.cfg.
The Guide warns that using this method to stop Steam Client Updates is "highly discouraged" and "putting yourself at risk." I am not sure if he is referring to hacking vulnerabilities or potential bans from Steam. It is worth looking into it before you actually do it.
Making a total overhaul scenario is pissing in the wind with this game because it will never be finished and will constantly be getting worthless updates. By the same logic, accepting every update when it is forced out is pissing in the wind. You can use Steam console commands to get steam to install an older version and you can also stop updates to a specific game by editing a file in the (Steam\Steamapps) folder. When I used to play Empyrion I would never update until the absolute last version from a decent update. I only ever installed 1.7.9 and I still have 1.7.9. It was obvious from reading the complaints that 1.8 was crap, and so was 1.9. 1.9 is still unplayable. I don't expect any future versions to be playable. But they may have one more update that at least fixes the stupid changes in 1.9, like the armor suit light on the head that requires a helmet. Apparently they made some progress in 1.9.2 with optimization and the 100% RAM VRAM CPU usage when you have 32 GB of RAM and 16 GB of VRAM on an i7 bug. At least I saw some echoes of that. Fingers crossed, eh lads?
How to Roll Back to a Previous Game Version and Stop Steam Forced Game Updates in 2023
The easiest way to roll back a version of Empyrion after a forced update is to get into the habit of making a backup of your game folder after every update that you want to be able to roll back to. Go to (Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival) and copy all files and folders to a backup location and paste them into a folder named with an appropriate naming convention like "Empyrion 1.7.9 220214." Had you done this, when Empyrion was updated to 1.8, you could have simply deleted the game files and folders in (Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival), or backed them up as well before deleting them to avoid having to download them again if you want them later, and then copied your backup game files and folders from that backup folder that you named "Empyrion 1.7.9 220214." back into its original Steam game folder location called (Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival)).
Basically, if you make a backup of all the game files of every version of Empyrion that you have as soon as you have verified that it works, then you will always be able to roll back to those versions. Simple as. You just need the hard drive space. And once you have copied a version's game files to a backup folder and then copied your current game save files back to (Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\Saves\Games), replacing old game save files by deleting them first, you can delete the save game files in the backup folder that you just made, which will be in "Empyrion 1.7.9 220214\Saves\Games," in order to save hard drive space.
You should also make sure that (Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\Saves\Blueprints\"some number") has the latest files that you should have also backed up before you copied an old version of the game files there. You should always have a current Blueprint folder backup before you make any changes to the game version in (Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival)or before you mess with the Saves folder that is in there. The same goes for always having a current game save folder backup before you make changes.
You should also backup (Steam\Steamapps\appmanifest_383120.acf) with the same game version game files as this is the file you will need. Save them together. When you copy the older game files over to your game folder you will probably need to copy the backup appmanifest_383120.acf to (Steam\Steamapps), overriding the new one, and edit 3 fields. One of the best free text file editors is Notepad++ so use that to edit the acf file and the scenario config files. This will require some experimentation and will vary over time. It may be possible to just use the latest appmanifest_383120.acf with the older game files now or at some point in the future.
To sum it up, make a properly named backup folder for your blueprints folder and your game save folder. Keep them current by copy/delete/pasting from your game folder once a week or so, and before changing game version. Backup your (Steam\Steamapps\appmanifest_383120.acf) file. You could also backup your scenario folder. Make a copy of each update's game files in an appropriately named backup folder and delete the saves if you are worried about hard drive space. Blueprints are tiny files so it's up to you if you want to delete them. By doing this consistently you will be able to instantly roll back to any version of Empyrion and you will never lose your saves or have to redownload blueprints from the workshop that you are already subscribed to. But there is one more caveat.
What do you do when Steam forces out the next Eleon update? Worse still, most likely Steam will try to update your older version of Empyrion every time you start it, if you have it configured that way. Whenever it's configured to update, it will because Steam will see that its an older version. This reddit post explains how to stop updates entirely for a specific game. The explanation is in broken English so I'll explain it.
When Eleon pushes an update to Steam, Steam updates its records and checks a file in your (Steam\Steamapps) folder called appmanifest_383120.acf. The number 383120 is the Steam App ID for Empyrion which you can find from the URL of the Steam Empyrion Store page. This file has a few fields that get updated by the update and those new values will tell Steam that Empyrion is up to date every time it checks appmanifest_383120.acf when you start the game. You have to edit your older version appmanifest_383120.acf so that the relevant fields have the same values as the latest Empyrion update appmanifest_383120.acf. The easiest way to make sure you have the correct data is to let it update your game to the latest version and then make a backup copy of your new latest appmanifest_383120.acf.
Then copy your older version game files over to your empty game folder and the corresponding older appmanifest_383120.acf over to (Steam\Steamapps) where you should have backed up the new one along with the new game files and then deleted it. You could also experiment with keeping the new appmanifest_383120.acf to see if you can run the older version of the game with it. Otherwise you will need to compare the old appmanifest_383120.acf to the new appmanifest_383120.acf and fix the following fields of the old appmanifest_383120.acf:
1. Change the State Flags to 4.
2. Change the "buildid" of the old file to the number in the new file.
3. Add any missing manifests if Eleon added any new ones. It will definitely be easier to copy the manifests from a current
appmanifest_383120.acf than it would to figure them out from the steamdb.info site.
Here is a sample acf file for Portal 2.
"AppState"
{
"appid""620"
"Universe""1"
"name""Portal 2"
"StateFlags""4"
"installdir""Portal 2"
"LastUpdated""1546915851"
"UpdateResult""0"
"SizeOnDisk""12772699651"
"buildid""3261795"
"LastOwner""76561198124511924"
"BytesToDownload""0"
"BytesDownloaded""0"
"AutoUpdateBehavior""0"
"AllowOtherDownloadsWhileRunning""0"
"ScheduledAutoUpdate""0"
"StagingFolder""1"
"UserConfig"
{
"language""english"
}
"InstalledDepots"
{
"624"
{
"manifest""6415342253277896102"
}
"622"
{
"manifest""2180841775043336221"
}
"621"
{
"manifest""5315625579909971887"
}
"323180"
{
"manifest""4821416258997072443"
"dlcappid""323180"
}
}
"MountedDepots"
{
"624""6415342253277896102"
"622""2180841775043336221"
"621""5315625579909971887"
"323180""4821416258997072443"
}
}
The reason for editing an old one instead of using the new one is that other fields such as "SizeOnDisk" won't be the same. You can probably edit the new appmanifest_383120.acf with the appropriate values from the old one to get it to work, as well as editing the old one with new data for those three fields. All the posts say that this is a trial and error thing, but that it works, so once you figure it out, write it down.
This page has an older alternative way to stop Steam from requiring an update to play a game that may or may not
still work, and an excellent, detailed explanation of how to edit the appmanifest_383120.acf so that Steam won't update Empyrion.
How to Download an Older Version of Empyrion like 1.7.9 That Isn't Listed in the Steam Options
But what if you don't have a backup of the game files for the version of Empyrion that you want to play? Then you can use steamdb.info to locate that package and then instruct steam to download it in the Steam Client Console. This Steam Community Guide shows you how to locate and download an older version of a game in Steam using the Steam Client Console. That guide is on the Steam Community servers so don't feel like its some shady secret.
The guide is a little old so the steamdb.info website looks a little different now, but you just search for Empyrion, click the blue 383120 next to Game Empyrion - Galactic Survival, then click the Depots tab under the game summary, which will change the information below to the Depot large white font title. Under that click the blue 383121 next to Empyrion - Galactic Survival Content and then click the Manifests tab under the game summary. Manifests is the list of updates that have been pushed out with their MANIFESTIDs and dates.
You then open the Steam Client Console by typing "steam://nav/console" in your browser's URL. Press Enter and a Steam Launch Application should pop up. Choose "Steam Client Bootstrapper" which will open the Steam Client Console in your Steam Client. The syntax to the "download_depot" command is as follows:
download_depot <appid> <depotid> [<target manifestid>] [<delta manifestid>] [<depot flags filter>] : download a
single depot
You only need to worry about the first three arguments to it. Type the command, then the App ID, Depot ID, and the Manifest ID of the depot version you want, which you got from the steamdb.info page for Empyrion. So let's say I wanted to download the v1.9 Patch from 20 Dec, 2022. In other words, the game files for that prerelease of 1.9 so that I could roll back from the current 1.9.2. On the steamdb.info Empyrion Manifests page you can see the list of Manifests with their dates. From the Steam Empyrion Community News Tab you can see that the v1.9 Patch was released on 20 Dec, 2022. On the steamdb.info Empyrion Manifests page the closest date is 19 Dec, 2022. Click on the blue number for that date which is 516790545777180957 and you will see that the Permanent Link on the blue bar for that Manifest page has the date 20 Dec, 2022, the same date that is on the Steam News Page announcement and the Empyrion Online Announcement. In this case I would type the following in the Steam Client Console and press Enter:
Empyrion App ID Depot ID Manifest ID <-- For Empyrion v1.9 Patch from 20 Dec, 2022.
download_depot 383120 383121 516790545777180957
Then it would download and when it was finished it would tell you where it was saved to. You would go there and copy it to a backup location and then to your empty game folder if you wanted to play it. Then you would probably have to mess with the appmanifest_383120.acf in order to stop Steam from updating it. I'm not sure if the Manifest ever includes an appmanifest_383120.acf file. It may be edited and created by the Steam Client separately from the Manifest file contents. Using a current appmanifest_383120.acf and editing the appropriate fields to match the older Manifest, such as package size as I explained above, may be a way to solve the appmanifest_383120.acf problem when you download an old Manifest if there is a problem. Once you get this deep into the weeds you will know what to search for to solve whatever problems you run into. But there are always caveats.
Both downloading Manifests of older Updates as well as stopping Steam from updating when you install an older version are not exact sciences. Steam goes through periods where one or the other or both of these features are blocked. They may shut them permanently at some point. But both parts are currently working according to players as of January 2023. People are using it to play old versions of Valdheim Online.
Another problem is download speeds. Steam actively throttles certain older manifests at certain times. You may get good speeds or you may get a very slow one. This is why backing up new updates as soon as you verify they work is the best policy. The steamdb.info website appears to be an advocacy group that wants Steam to allow more freedom with regards to updates. They oppose the forced updates and blocking of rollbacks. Make that the inconveniencing of rollbacks. They have a blog page regarding Manifests that is worth a read to get the history of Steam decisions with regards to player rights and updates/rollbacks.
There is also an alternative way to download Manifests that uses the 3rd Party Depot Downloader App. The benefit of this app is that over the last 3 years there have been times when the Steam Client Console would not work, but the 3rd Party Depot Downloader App did, as well as vice versa, and times when they both worked and neither worked. Here is a guide to getting and using the 3rd Party Depot Downloader App. Be aware that this app uses more arguments than the first 3 that the Steam Client Console uses. And it uses your Steam Account and Password. This is posted in the Steam Community so I wouldn't worry about it being some kind of phishing expedition. If you look into the Depot Downloader or steamdb.info which also uses your Steam account you will see that they are legitimate organizations with secure apps.
Once you discover the current working method to roll back and stop game updates you can post a guide on your Server Discord Page. There are lots of posts of people claiming to be doing it for online game play with games like Valdheim. Access to the Blueprint Workshop and the online functionality in general may be some of the things that intermittently stop working while playing older versions.
While Steam is the policy maker that forces updates and is making rolling back a game version difficult, this policy is exacerbated by the incompetence of Eleon. The more frequent a dev team pushes an update, the more problems Steam players will have, especially when it comes to online gaming through Steam with a game that can be modded. I've seen at least 10 posts on Steam saying that 1.9 locked all of a server's players out during the week of Christmas, and that Eleon does this every year. Clients can not connect to a server until it updates to the same version of Empyrion that the client is on. Servers running scenarios like the Total Overhaul Reforged Garbage and Star Salvage have to wait for the scenario creators to update them to the new Empyrion version before they can be upgraded. This is a problem that is caused by Eleon's ineptness when it comes to timing and choices in general, and the creators of the Total Overhauls who have bitten off way more than they can chew.
Scenarios in Empyrion should only include essential galaxy structure, custom weapons and effects and other added things like wrecks that don't have multiple, cascading dependencies that have to be followed to their source and edited. And they should include custom POIs and custom missions that use the vanilla assets. Keep it as simple as possible. Parts that Eleon configures will improve when they improve them, without you wasting recurring hours doing it for them in your scenario. Don't change the already sorted out mechanics. You are supposed to be adding excellent content, not duplicating the work of the devs. Lobby the devs with one voice to fix the things they have already put into the game, like mechanics. The more complicated you make your scenario, the harder it will be to maintain and the more likely an update will break it.
Steam is definitely not a one size fits all platform. Their restriction of roll backs and forced updates reflect their concerns over bandwidth costs. Unfortunately "Early Access" usually means unqualified devs who don't know what they are doing and this translates into countless unnecessary updates that cost Steam money. If they got rid of "Early Access" games they would probably not have to restrict roll backs and not have to force updates.
Steam player problems are directly proportional to how often a game gets updates and whether it can be modded or not. The more updates it gets, the more problems players will have on Steam. If it has mods, the players will have problems on Steam. So for a linear game with no mods and few updates, players on steam would have no problems ever. But for a game like Empyrion with 10 dev idiots ineptly replacing placeholders with different placeholders year after year with at least 20 total updates (hotfixes lol) per year that also has idiots making Total Overhaul scenarios like Reforged Garbage, players on Steam will be pulling their hair out from the endless frustrations and game breaking catastrophes, which will happen during Christmas week, repeatedly, among other badly chosen times. It is much easier to figure out ways to prevent the game from updating. Think outside the box.
If you are willing to jump through all these hoops to run a server with an older version of Empyrion and show your players how to roll back to an older version of the client on your Discord, you could follow my approach and only update and publish your scenario when you find an absolutely final version of a decent update. Like 1.7.9 instead of 1.7.0. And then you would skip 1.8 and 1.9 completely because they are crap. But if it's not practical to stay on an older version, or if it stops working at some point, then you would just have to update your scenario with every full release of a new number, such as 1.8 and then 1.9. You usually won't need to update a scenario for 1.8.1 through 1.8.9 etc. The division of labor and avoidance of Total Overhaul endeavors, basically not redoing anything the devs already did, and sticking to only adding elements that are worth the effort it takes to make and maintain a scenario will make the workload very low even if it is not practical to roll back and stay back.
And then what you would do with 1.7.9, as an example for the sake of argument since 1.8 and 1.9 are garbage, is make a Best Of Scenario that takes your own original mods, if any, plus ONLY the good stuff from scenarios that have good stuff. Take the Reforged Eden galaxy, custom weapons and weapon effects, and the AI file. But give ALL the custom weapons and devices vanilla resource requirements, consumption rates, and properties such as mass. Make them cost, consume, and weigh the relative same as the vanilla devices SO THEY CAN BE AUTO REPAIRABLE and SO THEY DON'T RUIN A BUILD. And because arbitrarily high costs, consumption rates, and weights are RETARDED! duh And don't forget custom POIs and custom missions. And no multiple, cascading dependencies and only use vanilla assets.
The missions might be too much to cut out because of all their dependencies so skip them unless your crew has the skills and time. Reforged Eden's Galaxy Explorer mission should only depend on Reforged Eden's Custom Galaxy, which you would be using already. Missions that involve custom POIs are much more complex and involve possible custom NPCs and weapons that may not be planned to be included in your Best Of Scenario. The vanilla missions will be plenty with all the best stuff from Reforged and the others. You could also add the HV, SV, and CV wrecks from Star Salvage to the planets and space sectors appropriately, as in in SPARSE quantities, not every 100 meters across the entire planet or sector.
But the key is to only do it during the final version of a decent update. This way you minimize the tail chasing and wheel spinning. Play a good update version of Empyrion with a Best Of Scenario and don't ever update until a better Empyrion update is released. Then when that decent update reaches its absolute final state, such as 1.7.9, activate the Spanj crew to put in the time to update the Best Of Scenario to this final version of a new decent Empyrion update. Even if you go 2 years without updating because Eleon has a 90% garbage update track record, you will be saving yourselves hundreds of hours of headaches and anxiety while you enjoy the absolute best that Empyrion can offer under its current dev team without those pesky monster bug surprises every other week. Make your Empyrion experience a truly fully released one that has the stability and predictability that is expected of such.
This sort of thing takes a lot of work. So don't spin your wheels. Version 1.9 (really 13.9) is crap. Don't waste your time making a perfect Best Of Scenario for that version. Wait for Eleon to undo all the STUPID changes they made, such as nerfing the T2 and Epic weapons, making your helmet mandatory to turn on your armor suit light, which is now three lights that HOVER around your forehead, and cutting the sprint while jet packing in typical, clueless, bumbling Eleon fashion. It would be worth it to make this perfect Best Of Scenario for 1.7.9 because it’s playable. Then later, if Eleon actually makes another playable update, it will be easy to make all the scenario changes to the new files for the final version of that update only. That could easily be once every couple of years. And then you just keep playing that working and playable version on your servers until by some miracle Eleon releases a new final version of a playable update. No more stress over garbage Eleon updates.
This would allow Spanj or whoever makes it to produce the best multi player streams ever, and as more and more servers and single players adopt this new best of scenario, fewer and fewer players would waste time on garbage updates, which would eliminate the feedback that Eleon relies on to do their job for them, and this would force them to at least tighten up the quality of their updates. With that kind of leverage and unity, the Spanj crew and fans or whoever makes it could bring pressure on Eleon to get rid of CPU and implement physics, which would be the point at which everyone sees for the first time just how awesome a game with this combination of elements can be. And that would be when Empyrion has a real chance to resemble No Man's Sky (which still isn't all that) with their late bloom. If Empyrion were to get physics like Space Engineers (and eliminate all the bugs, of course), which is VERY DOABLE, Space Engineers would lose a chunk of their market share, but players who are totally new to this genre would also show up, because that version of Empyrion would be more accessible to noobs than Space Engineers. Empyrion would go viral to blockbuster status. But I digress.
What Eleon Gets Right
(This was posted in 2021. Eleon are now clearly idiots and the game is dead.)
Eleon has done great work on the galaxy and the planets. Everything looks very good now, and the new galaxy map was brilliant. The potential for infinite save game size growth is a problem, though. Every new System you visit makes your save file get bigger. Hopefully that can be concatenated somehow. (Don't hold your breath.)
The vessel AI used to be terrible. It’s decent now. The AI vessels pursue you and Reinforcement Vessels will run if they take enough damage. It still needs more sophistication as I described earlier, but it’s already playable. This Reaper wouldn’t have been worth it for the old AI.
The best work that Eleon has done lately is optimization. I haven’t seen many people commenting on it but the devs have made some great strides in reducing framerate loss and general lag. I noticed the distance scaling in Alpha 12, maybe even 11. It’s been awhile. Each new version has been getting higher and higher framerates. You still get lag spikes and forests are still laggy, but the general game is running much smoother, and the game can have much more rendering on screen without losing framerates.
1.5 appears to have involved some effective data optimization. I have long suspected that the code has a lot of redundant data requests. Eleon has greatly improved how fast sensors activate their devices. Lights are much less likely to turn on late, and when they are delayed, it’s for much less time. Heavy Doors now open instantly, literally like Star Trek. Swish. This was very timely, because this Reaper uses a lot of Heavy Doors. The resulting improvements of this update’s optimization make this Reaper experience noticeably better. You can also tell that all graphics are lighter. They have clearly refined some key data throughput code. It feels like a new game.
It still has all the bugs and is headed in the wrong general direction, but these changes indicate that at least part of the Eleon team knows what they are doing. Or perhaps they all agree on CPU but still manage to get the galaxy and optimization right for one update every decade.
Vermillion’s Awesome AI Files
Now moving on to Vermillion, he clearly doesn’t understand the futility of overhauling an Alpha Game, and his vision is worse than Vanilla, but somehow, someway, he got the NPC AI in EClassConfig.ecf and EClassConfig_Eden.ecf just right. The way those Zirax come hunting you is exactly what this game was missing. No more easily shooting 4 in a row in the back of the head. They constantly turn around. And if you just walk they seem to hear you. It’s great for clearing out destroyed Toveras. All I have to do is Jetpack over and into one of the giant hull breaches and take a few steps, then fly back out about 50 meters away from the edge of the tattered hull. Within 10 seconds all the spawned Zirax will come running to that spot, and when I start shooting them they will run towards me. Many will run right off the edge of the tattered hull and fall into the oblivion of space.
Even small POIs that you already are familiar with are appealing because of Vermillion’s AI mod. Unfortunately it’s not possible to configure subroutines for AI vessels in the ecf files. Only Eleon can improve the Vessel AI. But the way Vermillion set those two ecf files is perfect. He said that he lowered the NPC hit points to compensate for the increased aggression and effectiveness. I am not sure that is necessary, and that would only apply to Reforged Garbage anyways. I just place the Reforged Eden AI files in Project Eden and they work.
Either way I would not play Empyrion without Vermillion’s AI mod files. They are literally must haves. Hopefully when he eventually gives up on Reforged Galaxy, he will continue to update the two AI ecf files. His work would be much easier and more rewarding if he just focused on the AI files, which are complete, and building awesome POIs with advanced Signal Logic. Overhauling an Alpha Stage Game is pissing in the wind.
Which begs the question. Why is it that Vermillion was able to overhaul the entire EClassConfig.ecf file in one fowl swoop, and make it perfect, but Eleon releases an entire update, 1.5 of course, that is focused on improving the AI of Veloceraptors, and when they release it the Veloceraptors are NOT set to target players? Why? Eleon needs to hire Vermillion to fix their AI, just like they need Ravien to make their missions and galaxies for them. If Vanilla was to become Project Eden with Vermillion’s AI Mod settings, then the scenarios would be even better.
The Sweet Spot of Empyrion
Now to explain how I secure the SWEET SPOT in Empyrion and get the best gameplay out of it that is currently possible. This involves a combination of using the correct vessels and base, in conjunction with the correct scenario, and then the correct ecf file tweaks. Only a few tweaks. The ones that are absolutely necessary.
You can either build your own vessel, or you can search the Steam Workshop. There are more and more on Nexus, but the Workshop is where most of the blueprints are. Of course you are looking for design, but the most important thing is the answer to two questions.
if blueprint x = CPU
then send x, trash
if blueprint x = Reforged Garbage
then send x, trash
If you follow that code you will save yourself a lot of time. Then you look for the usual things like design, practicality, combat strength, bla bla bla. The thing is, it’s hard to find builds that have the lights configured at all, never mind properly, as well as many other basics that so many builders neglect. It was always hard to find a good Blueprint, but before CPU there were a lot of talented builders like Pystonworks. They all left after CPU was implemented. I have preserved Pystonworks SV called the Proxima Skiptracer and his HV called the Diablo Gato. Those are good examples of what you are looking for. The Proxima Skiptracer is a heavy fighter with 6 Gatling Guns and 9 Minigun Turrets that are just a ball to shoot ground troop Zirax with, as well as Drones. The Diablo Gato is a low profile Heavy Tank that can also drill as well as is possible without physics (I never drill with HVs anymore). While the Diablo Gato is formidable, it could have more power turrets. If Jeff Randall didn’t build CPU/Reforged garbage, his HVs would be better looking and more deadly than the Diablo, which is a low profile build by Pystonwork’s description, although it is still bigger than CPU garbage, but it is narrower than other large tanks, making it slightly easier to drive through a forest. It’s just narrow. Fits in smaller spaces with a bigger bang. But this Reaper has a ginormous Docking Bay so HV and SV size is moot. I also built an Ancient Alien style base with a landing pad big enough for this Reaper to Repair on called the Wolf’s Lair. You just park the Reaper diagonally with the appropriate front leg over the Repair Bay device as shown in the screenshot. Make sure the extremities have distance between them and the Defense Towers and main Base Tower so the Repair Field won’t conflict.
More on Project Eden
When it comes to scenarios, the only one I am aware of that is really good is Project Eden by ravien_ff. I wouldn’t play Empyrion without Project Eden. It’s in a league of its own. The galaxies make sense, the missions are immersive and better than you would think possible in this game's current state. And they aren’t even finished yet. The Vanilla missions are produced by someone who just doesn’t have the knack. They are so wordy you might as well not even have the 3D game. Just make it an RPG blog site. But Ravien’s missions are intuitive and extremely interesting and flow with the lore. He makes maximum use of the physical possibilities of the game. He has an exploration mission where you have to visit every different kind of Sun or System center. It’s reminiscent of the library in Mass Effect. It gives you real information on each Sun type. That is a great mission to do without rushing in this Reaper.
Ravien and The Circle Jerker Influence
Pretty much everything in Project Eden is correct when it comes to its original content. The only problem it has is that Ravien is also under the influence of these circle jerker cultists who believe that grinding in a broken game for 1,000s of hours is a way to virtue signal that you “earned it,” whatever that means. So Ravien has added zeros to Mission Item Number requirements that are ridiculous. For Example you need 100 Data Chips to make an Encryption key.
This isn't necessarily so bad if you find the Class 3 and 4 Exploration Sectors and unlock their Vaults. But that is nothing compared to the HIGH COSTS of all his custom weapons and items. And they CANNOT AUTO REPAIR. To build his custom Augmented Light Armor and Boosters you need 400 Progenitor Technology Fragments and they are extremely tedious to obtain. For over an hour of work you can get around 20 per planet if you are lucky. That is 20 hours of the most repetitive, redundant gameplay you will ever experience. And you need 1,000s of Progenitor Technology Fragments if you want to build Vulcan Turrets, Antimatter Warp Drives, or Bastion Shields. The Armor is good but by the time you are able to build it there is nothing left to do in the game.
I don’t have hundreds of hours to waste pulling levers and finding elevated holes in Obelisks. Whenever designers do things like that in this or any other game, I and everyone else just have our Crew do it. Meet my Crew. It’s called the Item Menu. All you have to do is search in the Item Menu for Data Chip or Progenitor. Or any unique Project Eden ingredient or mission related item. Whenever it’s reasonable I will complete the requirements to get something such as Magnacite, which is easy to mine in this Reaper with all CV turrets enabled on Planet, but not when it’s some ridiculous, arbitrary, cultist virtue signally waste of time. Another way to make valuable items hard to obtain is to make the player fight some dreadnaught or fleet and then get through a custom POI. These obstacles could require specific preparation and threshold CVs. Ultra Rare Loot Containers could hold 1,000s of Progenitor Technology Fragments at the end of the POI, possibly behind puzzles.
Not every case where something is counted in large numbers is necessarily wrong. I have played the final Dead Planets mission. Its description has a typo. Ravien clearly meant to say, “For 10 to 40 Players,” not “1 to 4.” (lol one) I now know what happened to the Dead Planets. That mission should be renamed “Ravien Genocides all the Single Players.” On a serious note, the number of horrors is a “little” high. Just a tad. But it’s meant to be a Multi-Player mission. And I forgot about those Immunity Shields. Duh. I’ll remember next time. I’ve seen the streamers complete it with 4 Players. They aren’t very good at space ship combat, but the streamers are good at FPS shooting. You can’t deny that.
Another area where Ravien has succumbed to the universal scarcity/virtue signaling cult is with the attributes of his two most important custom devices, the Bastion Shield and the Antimatter Warp Drive. Ravien has made them way too heavy, consume too much Pentaxid, and the Recharge Time on the Bastion Shield is way too slow. This Reaper can handle Ravien’s settings. A 4 kt Antimatter Warp Drive is nothing to a Sovereign-Class Reaper, but it’s an arbitrary waste of cargo mass. Furthermore, these are things that are not buildable until you have spent a lot of time in Progenitor Space. And by the time you have enough Progenitor Technology Fragments and Dark Matter and Magnacite to build your Bastion Shield and Antimatter Warp Drive, you don’t need them anymore. You have already done everything there is to do in the game.
Once again, it would be better if you had quests that involved defeating dreadnaughts and custom POIs that enabled you to get these items at the beginning of the game, when you actually need them. Many games make this mistake. This is why we have Trainers and Cheat Menu mods. There should be some other standalone reward for reaching Progenitor Space. The Bastion Shield and Antimatter Warp Drive affect all game play, which is why they are useless at the end of the game.
And this brings me to the ecf file tweaks. So I have to edit various things to enable CV turrets on planet, fix the Bastion Shield and Antimatter Warp Drive attributes, and get Vermillion’s AI mod files from Reforged Eden into Project Eden. Here is a summary of how to hit the Sweet Spot in current Empyrion 2021.
Sweet Spot How To Summary
Use these five builds or their equivalent in conjunction with the Reaper, as needed.
HV: Reaper Recon Elite (Only HV worth using without physics)
SV: Reaper Scout Elite and Reaper Destroyer SV (The Destroyer is the unmatched god SV of Empyrion)
CV: Reaper Explorer CV (can dock in the Reaper Hangar Bay)
Base: Wolf's Lair (Can easily park this Reaper on the landing pad and repair it and has the factory/storage to supply the Reaper)
Play Project Eden with enemies set to Hard, resources set to plenty and slow degradation. I turn on CPU but use Advanced Cores for everything.
In the Content/Configuration Folder of the Project Eden Scenario folder, make these changes.
1. Enable all CV turrets on Planet, including Tool turrets.
2. Give the Bastion Shield the same attributes as the T2 Vanilla Shield (leave the 100,000 Bastion Shield Hit Points intact of course)
with a 60 second recharge from zero rate and a 5 second Cooldown.
3. Give the T2 Vanilla Shield a 60 second recharge from zero rate and a 5 second Cooldown.
4. Give the Antimatter Warp Drive the same weight and Pentaxid consumption rate as the Vanilla Warp Drive
5. Replace the Project Eden AI files with the Reforged Eden AI files.
6. Enable Boost for all CV Thrusters.
My Starting Scenario and Spawning Blueprints With SBP
That’s it. And you are ready to play. Now what I do (if I want to get straight to the Sovereign gameplay) is start a Project Eden Survival Game, and then I Spawn this Sovereign-Class Reaper, the Diablo Gato Elite, and the Proxima Skiptracer and I dock them in the Reaper and then I use the Item Menu to FULLY STOCK each vessel. To Spawn a Blueprint without filling the factory, press the Tilde Key, `, which is left of the number 1 on your keyboard. This will open the Console. Type help to see all the commands. Type a command followed by help to see the description and switches for that command. Type "sbp" which stands for Spawn Blue Print. Then press Esc to Exit the Console and open your Blueprint Factory. Select Sovereign and click "Spawn." Spawn it.
In my imaginary scenario I arrived in Andromeda with an intact, fully stocked Reaper. It is so much more fun to play Empyrion that way. I may or may not maintain the Reaper stock by actually grinding. It takes hours to stock these ships even when you are going straight from the Item Menu. More proof that grinding is totally broken and just a placeholder gimmick for the actual Main Game, which has not yet manifested in Vanilla.
(I have modified my approach a little. Now I use no cheats until I have the Reaper Recon Elite and the Reaper Destroyer SV and I need to warp to other Solar Systems. Then I use the Item Menu to give my Reaper Destroyer SV an Antimatter Warp Drive and I explore the Galaxy. The Reaper Destroyer SV can kill a Tovera without taking damage, but it takes time. When I am ready for a proper mother ship I use the SBP command to spawn in the Sovereign. The early game is fun without cheating, but because Eleon are not sophisticated enough to consolidate and delegate grinding in the late game, you have no choice but to use Console Commands and the Item Menu. This allows me to still get the fun out of the early game, and then the fun of having this Sovereign-Class Reaper. This Reaper alone adds a lot of fun to the gameplay that is just not possible with any other CV I have seen! If this were not the case, I would not have needed to build the Sovereign. And it was not easy.)
How To Edit the ecf Files
(Some OldEden results may no longer be in the ecf files in future updates, but this guide will still work fine. Just make the changes as directed.)
Now to explain exactly how you edit the ecf files. Let’s start with Vanilla. The files that pertain to the game content and settings are located here.
Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\Content
Everything in the Content Folder can be edited by the Player. But not everything can be edited in the Content Folder. Some things are hard coded, like the Vessel AI. Everything in the Content Folder is easy to understand if you take the time to read it.
There are two types of files. 3D Content files for things like playfields, planets, solar systems, and blueprints are one type. Changes to these files will only take effect in a New Game. This is because you are adding or altering or removing POIs, planets, galaxies and other physical objects. These types of files are located in folders like Content\Playfields, Content\Prefabs, and Content\RandomPresets. We are not going to mess with these types of files. Scenario and POI builders usually mess with them.
The other type of files are the Attributes and Settings files. The files that say how many hit points a Zirax trooper has, which build types can have each Device, where a turret can operate, how much a Bastion Shield weighs, and everything else like that. These files are located in the Content\Configuration folder. Changes to these files WILL TAKE EFFECT IMMEDIATELY. You do not need a new game. If you look at each file in the Configuration Folder, you will see that most of them are intuitively named. But you can figure out for sure what they are just by reading them, ideally in Notepad++. The code language is simple, and they have lots of comment descriptions. So you could figure out how to modify anything with a little bit of reading. The more you read it the quicker you will be able to figure out more etc…
But we aren’t here to become coders, we just want to change 4 files so we can hit the Sweet Spot in Empyrion. The Config_Example.ecf file used to be the way to enable CV Turrets on planet. This file was a copy of ItemsConfig.ecf. All you had to do was make your change to it and then rename it to Config.ecf. It’s hardcoded to not be used anymore. Today you have to edit the ItemsConfig.ecf file directly, which is just as easy. You can theoretically also copy any file from the Configuration Folder into the Mods folder and edit it there, and that will override the Configuration Folder version, but I have not tested it.
Any change you make to the main Content\Configuration folder will affect any Vanilla game, past or future. When you screw up the game will inform you of this by not loading Vanilla saves or new games. This is why you must always make backups before you edit files in the Configuration Folder. Just make a new folder in there called “Backup,” and copy ItemsConfig.ecf, for example, in to the new Backup Folder and then go ahead and edit the main ItemsConfig.ecf file. If you lose your backup too somehow, you just need to reinstall the game. So don’t.
But we are going to play Project Eden, so we want to edit the Configuration Folder that belongs to that scenario. Each Scenario is stored as a Folder version of the old Config_Example.ecf file. Meaning, a Scenario is just a compilation of edited files from the Vanilla Content Folder. Playfield files as well as Configuration Folder files, and some new ones for custom content. A scenario’s folder simply contains all the files it modified from Vanilla, and all the files it added. When you select that Scenario in the New Game Menu, the game tells itself to override the Vanilla files with the files in that Scenario folder. Because of this, since we want to play Project Eden, we don’t want to edit the Vanilla Configuration Folder files, we want to edit the Project Eden Scenario Configuration Folder Files. Those are located here.
Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\Content\Scenarios\Project Eden 1.4 \Content\Configuration
In there you will see most of the same files you saw in the Vanilla Configuration Folder, but not all of them. That is because Ravien only needs to include the files he altered or added.
Backup ecf Files In the Configuration Folder First
Make sure you have the correct, matching version of Project Eden and Reforged Eden installed. To enable all CV turrets on planet, we are going to edit the Project Eden version of ItemsConfig.ecf. Go to Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\ Content\Scenarios\Project Eden 1.4 \Content\Configuration and make a new folder called “Backup.” Copy these 3 files into it.
BlocksConfig.ecf
EClassConfig.ecf
ItemsConfig.ecf
If you screw up and lose your backups, all you have to do is re-install Project Eden, and the files will be restored, after which you make new backups and start over. Also, you will need to make these changes after every Project Eden update, not every Empyrion Game update.
1. Enable All CV Turrets on Planet
So to enable CV Turrets on planet open ItemsConfig.ecf in Notepad ++. Replace every instance of AllowAt: Space and AllowAt: "Space" (for CV Tools) with AllowAt: "Space, Planet". The first AllowAt: Space result will be a section that starts with this line.
{ +Item Id: 103, Name: TurretMSArtilleryWeapon
That is the Artillery Turret. All you have to do is change AllowAt: Space to AllowAt: "Space, Planet" You can preload the two phrases into the Search/Replace engine, and just keep hitting Replace. It will cycle through all the CV Weapons and Tools. There aren’t that many. Searching for AllowAt: "Space" you will arrive at a CV Tool section where the first line says this.
{ +Item Id: 132, Name: TurretMSDrillWeapon
Just change AllowAt: "Space" to AllowAt: "Space, Planet" and you will be able to use a CV Drill Turret on Planet. Just cycle through all the Weapons and Tools then save and you are done. You can test it by loading a Project Eden Save and firing your Mounted Weapons or drilling with your CV on planet, as well as just checking the affected Device Stats in your Control Panel Device Tab. Go near enemy Drones to test the Power Turrets.
2. Edit the Bastion Shield Attributes
Next we want to adjust the Shields and Antimatter Warp Drive. To do this we open BlocksConfig.ecf in Notepad++ and search for Bastion. The first result will be an old ID list.
# Eden_ShieldGeneratorBastion
The next result will be an old Eden Shield.
{ +Block Id: 230, Name: OldEden_ShieldGeneratorBastion, Ref: ShieldGeneratorBA
The next result will be a very long ChildBlocks: list. There will be several of these. Then you will get this.
{ +Block Name: Eden_ShieldGeneratorBastion, Ref: ShieldGeneratorBA
A Bastion shield generator for POIs. The next result will be 4 T levels of Bastion POI shields.
{ +Block Name: Eden_ShieldGeneratorBastionT0, Ref: Eden_ShieldGeneratorBastion
Then a New Blocks ID list.
# 230, Eden_ShieldGeneratorBastion <- for POIs
Below you will see For Players: and below that you will see this.
# 242, Eden_ShieldGeneratorAugmentedCV
We have identified the correct Search Term that refers to the Player Bastion Shield Attribute Configuration Section in this BlocksConfig.ecf file. Now we search for Eden_ShieldGeneratorAugmentedCV. The first result is the place where we found this term. It says this is the old way to name it, but it’s still being used because it works in 1.4. The next result is this.
{ +Block Id: 242, Name: OldEden_ShieldGeneratorAugmentedCV, Ref: ShieldGeneratorCV
Now this says OldEden but there is another one that is an exact match. There are also two entries like this for the Bastion Shield in BlocksConfig_Eden.ecf, but they don’t make a difference. The correct one is probably the next one, but I changed the OldEden one as well. So clicking Find Next in Notepad++ will get us two lines down to this line.
PickupTarget: Eden_ShieldGeneratorAugmentedCV
And then clicking Find Next again will get us to the most likely correct section to edit.
{ +Block Name: Eden_ShieldGeneratorAugmentedCV, Ref: ShieldGeneratorCV
You want to change these settings
EnergyIn: 144000, type: int, display: true, formatter: Watt # 36000
CPUIn: 4000000, type: int, display: true # 33100
EnergyInIdle: 3200, type: int, display: true, formatter: Watt # 1600
ShieldCapacity: 100000, type: int, display: true # 36000
ShieldRecharge: 240, type: int, display: true # recharge rate per sec. 120
ShieldCooldown: 30, type: int, display: true # in seconds
ShieldPerCrystal: 250, type: int, display: true # 1000
to this.
EnergyIn: 36000, type: int, display: true, formatter: Watt # 36000
CPUIn: 33100, type: int, display: true # 33100
EnergyInIdle: 1600, type: int, display: true, formatter: Watt # 1600
ShieldCapacity: 100000, type: int, display: true # 36000
ShieldRecharge: 1667, type: int, display: true # recharge rate per sec. 120
ShieldCooldown: 5, type: int, display: true # in seconds
ShieldPerCrystal: 1000, type: int, display: true # 1000
Notice that I used most of the numbers from the end of the lines with pound signs. That is because those are the T2 Vanilla Shield Settings. But notice that I used different numbers for ShieldRecharge: and ShieldCooldown:. This is because I set the Recharge Time to 60 Seconds for a full recharge from 0 Shield Hit Points. To do this I divided 100,000 ShieldCapacity: Hit Points by 60 Seconds to get 1,667. This means that my Bastion Shield will fully recharge from 0 in 60 Seconds. The ShieldCooldown: 5 means the Cooldown Timer from being shot is 5 Seconds instead of the Vanilla default 15 Seconds. This means I only need to evade fire for 5 Seconds for my Bastion Shield to begin recharging.
I make these changes because they are how it’s supposed to be and is in every other game. I don’t have ten minutes to twiddle my thumbs every time my shield needs to recharge. It’s asinine. Shields are useless if they take 10 minutes to recharge. 60 Seconds is even kind of long. If I had Shield Cooldown set to 15 seconds that would be 1 and a quarter minutes of twiddling my thumbs every time my Bastion Shield gets low. That could add up to hours in no time. Hours that are better spent actually doing something like fighting the battle. In Project Eden high level AI Shields already recharge fast, but ideally they would just set them all to 60 seconds for a full Recharge and a 5 Second Cooldown. I can’t be bothered.
The reason I showed you the long way to find the Bastion name being used in BlocksConfig.ecf for the Player’s Bastion Shield is because the names will change over time, due to Eleon updates, so you need to be able to start with generic terms like “shield,” and also there are often multiple entries for a particular type of device. You need to edit the correct one, but editing all of them is the best way to be sure.
3. Edit the T2 Vanilla Shield Attributes
This Reaper Blueprint comes with a T2 Vanilla Shield, which also takes too long to Recharge and Cooldown, so let’s fix that too. Searching the BlocksConfig.ecf file for Shield will find us the name of the T2 Vanilla Shield which is ShieldGeneratorCVT2. Searching for that we will find this line.
{ +Block Id: 1811, Name: ShieldGeneratorCVT2, Ref: ShieldGeneratorCV
We will change this line
ShieldRecharge: 120, type: int, display: true # recharge rate per sec
to this.
ShieldRecharge: 600, type: int, display: true # recharge rate per sec
36,000 Shield Hit Points divided by 60 Seconds is 600 Shield Hit Points per Second. Then we add the Cooldown line from the Bastion Shield right after it. The Shield Defaults to 15 if you don’t specify a Shield Cooldown value.
ShieldCooldown: 5, type: int, display: true # in seconds
Now the T2 Vanilla Shield will Recharge from 0 Hit Points in 60 Seconds and it will begin Recharging 5 Seconds after its last impact from enemy fire. Next we need to adjust the Antimatter Drive.
4. Edit the Antimatter Warp Drive Attributes
Searching for Antimatter we find this line.
# Eden_WarpDriveAntimatter
Searching for Eden_WarpDriveAntimatter we find
{ +Block Name: Eden_WarpDriveAntimatter
after the same OldEden section like what we found with the Bastion Shield. This Antimatter Warp Drive weighs way to much so change this
Mass: 4000000, type: float, display: true, formatter: Kilogram
to this,
Mass: 82200, type: float, display: true, formatter: Kilogram
which is the weight value of the Vanilla Warp Drive. Further down change these two
EnergyIn: 2000, type: int, display: true, formatter: Watt
CPUIn: 5000000, type: int, display: true
to this.
EnergyIn: 25, type: int, display: true, formatter: Watt
CPUIn: 40000, type: int, display: true
You may have noticed this part.
BlastParticleIndex: 10
BlastRadius: 36
BlastDamage: 100000 # Huge explosion when destroyed.
This means that if this Antimatter Matter Warp Drive is destroyed, 100,000 Hit Points of damage will be done over a radius of 36 blocks or 72 meters. The Antimatter Pentaxid Tank and Bastion Shield also have huge explosions specified. You can change those back to the Vanilla values if you want. Just look them up in the same file. I just leave them as they are. Que sera sera.
Edit the Furnace Attribute
Now you may want to allow Furnaces and Deconstructors to be placed on CVs for the Vacant Room on the Reaper. I have done it and this is how. There is currently only one Furnace and Deconstructor entry. Search for Furnace in BlockConfig.ecf to find this line.
{ +Block Id: 1132, Name: Furnace
In that section, change this
AllowPlacingAt: Base, display: true
to this.
AllowPlacingAt: "Base,MS", display: true
Edit the Deconstructor Attribute
This will allow the Furnace to be placed on the Reaper in the Vacant Room. Next, search for Deconstructor in BlockConfig.ecf to find this line
{ +Block Id: 1371, Name: Deconstructor
In that section, change this
AllowPlacingAt: Base, display: true
to this.
AllowPlacingAt: "Base,MS", display: true
Now the Deconstructor can also be placed on the Reaper. Now Save the file and you are done with BlocksConfig.ecf All these values should show up on the Devices in game now. You can use the Item Menu to check them quickly.
5. Replace the Project Eden AI Files With the Reforged Eden AI Files
The last part of this process is the easiest. You want to place Vermillion’s Reforged AI files into Project Eden, overwriting or replacing the Project Eden files, depending on your style. These are the two AI files that you need to copy from Reforged Eden.into Project Eden.
EClassConfig.ecf
EClassConfig_Eden.ecf (this file is no longer used in Reforged Eden 1.7 but may be again in the future)
Go to Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\Content\Scenarios\Reforged Eden 1.4\Content\Configuration and copy those two files. Now go to Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\Content\Scenarios\Project Eden 1.4\Content\Configuration and paste those two files you just copied from Reforged Eden. Click Yes to Overwrite the Project Eden version files if you didn’t delete them.
6. Enable Boost for all CV Thrusters
Once again open Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\Content\Scenarios\Project Eden 1.7\Content\Configuration and open the BlocksConfig.ecf file in the Project Eden scenario folder. Now do the same in the Reforged Eden scenario folder. In the Project Eden BlocksConfig.ecf search for "ThrusterMS" and then do the same in the Reforged Eden BlocksConfig.ecf. The first result in Project Eden will be
{ +Block Id: 453, Name: ThrusterMSRoundArmored
while in Reforged Eden it will be
CustomIcon: ThrusterMSRoundSlant.
Click Find Next to get to
{ +Block Id: 453, Name: ThrusterMSRoundArmored
in both files. Now scroll down in the Reforged Eden file to find these two lines:
ThrusterForce: 7500, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
ThrusterBoosterFactor: 1.1, type: float, display: true
Now find the same ThrusterForce line in Project Eden.
ThrusterForce: 18100, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
Note that there is no ThrusterBoosterFactor entry under this line in Project Eden. So copy the ThrusterBoosterFactor from the Reforged Eden file to the Project Eden file to make the Project Eden file look like this.
ThrusterForce: 18100, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
ThrusterBoosterFactor: 1.1, type: float, display: true
These CV Thrusters now have the same boost that they have in Reforged Eden.
As a side note, look at the Reforged Eden ThrusterForce value of 7500 versus the Project Eden Vanilla ThrusterForce value of 18100. Vermillion has NERFED this CV Thruster by 59%! Now you can see why all Reforged vessels move like molasses, and why Reforged Garbage is just that- garbage.
Now keep searching until you get both files to this line.
{ +Block Id: 457, Name: ThrusterMSDirectional
You will notice that Vermillion has not given any boost to the small CV Thruster in Reforged Eden, but go ahead and give it the previous value anyways. Now the Project Eden file should look like this.
ThrusterForce: 7200, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
ThrusterBoosterFactor: 1.1, type: float, display: true
Now keep searching until you get both files to this line.
{ +Block Id: 458, Name: ThrusterMSRoundNormal2x2
Now copy the ThrusterBoosterFactor line from the Reforged Eden file to the Project Eden file, which should look like this.
ThrusterForce: 192100, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
ThrusterBoosterFactor: 1.2, type: float, display: true
Now keep searching until you get both files to this line.
{ +Block Id: 497, Name: ThrusterMSRoundNormal3x3 # Parent: ThrusterMSRound3x3Blocks
Now copy the ThrusterBoosterFactor line from the Reforged Eden file to the Project Eden file, which should look like this.
ThrusterForce: 920000, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
ThrusterBoosterFactor: 1.3, type: float, display: true
Note the Reforged Eden ThrusterForce value of 235000 versus the Project Eden Vanilla ThrusterForce value of 920000. That is a Vermillion Reforged Garbage Thrust NERF reduction of 74% on the XL CV Thrusters!!
Keep searching until you get both files to this line.
{ +Block Id: 772, Name: ThrusterMSRoundBlocks
Now copy the ThrusterBoosterFactor line from the Reforged Eden file to the Project Eden file, which should look like this.
ThrusterForce: 18100, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
ThrusterBoosterFactor: 1.1, type: float, display: true
Keep searching until you get both files to this line.
{ +Block Id: 778, Name: ThrusterMSRound2x2Blocks
Now copy the ThrusterBoosterFactor line from the Reforged Eden file to the Project Eden file, which should look like this.
ThrusterForce: 192100, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
ThrusterBoosterFactor: 1.2, type: float, display: true
Keep searching until you get both files to this line.
{ +Block Id: 835, Name: ThrusterMSRound3x3Blocks
Now copy the ThrusterBoosterFactor line from the Reforged Eden file to the Project Eden file, which should look like this.
ThrusterForce: 920000, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
ThrusterBoosterFactor: 1.3, type: float, display: true
You have now added the Reforged Eden CV Thruster Boost to all CV Thrusters in Project Eden. There are some more CV Thruster entries in Reforged Eden further down the file, but they don't apply to Project Eden as they appear to be custom for Reforged Eden and have no Project Eden matching entries.
That’s it. You are done modding Project Eden. You will only have to repeat this process after every Project Eden Update that you allow to install.
Your Project Eden saves and future games now have all CV turrets enabled on planet. The Bastion Shield recharges in 60 seconds with a Cooldown of 5 seconds, as well as the T2 Vanilla Shield. The Bastion Shield uses normal power and Pentaxid. The Antimatter Warp Drive now weighs the same as the regular Warp Drive. Your CVs can have Furnaces and Deconstructors and they have Thruster Boost. And you now have the Reforged Vermillion Aggressive NPC AI in Project Eden without all the other rubbish like Player Vessels nerfed by 67% and forced CPU. Server Owners should run this configuration when Project Eden 1.5 is released. Streamers would produce the best Empyrion content ever if they used this Reaper for a Let’s Play in my modded version of Project Eden 1.5. Fight the most dangerous Ultra++ vessels in 1st Person Epic Gameplay and take little to no damage. Ace.
Basic Reaper Safety Rules
To finish off this long post, let me remind you about the Basic Reaper Safety Rules.
Never activate your Reaper Turret Batteries until you are ready to pulverize.
Never point your activated Reaper Turret Batteries at anything you do not intend to pulverize.
It’s best to keep the Turret Batteries off when not in combat. Empyrion has a tendency to trigger unwanted turret fire from time to time, and one volley of this Reaper makes small things lucky if any blocks are even left. It can easily destroy mission items if they aren’t Admin Cored. You can also defeat regular random drones and even small CVs with the Defensive Turrets alone to save Missiles. You can range fight tougher ships with just the Defensive Turrets to beat them. You can also use only one Turret Battery on mid-sized ships. The Control Panel makes this Reaper very versatile. Use it. Don't forget the 3 speeds. Use only 24 Thrusters from one of the Airlock Captain's Chairs to line this Reaper up perfectly with a Space Station Entrance.
This Reaper Blueprint was saved in 1.4, so if you are smart enough to wait for the final Empyrion and Project Eden 1.5 updates before starting a new game, then you can spawn this Reaper Blueprint right into your current 1.4 save game, as well as the other five builds I recommended, and get right to playing. I didn’t want any of the new blocks from 1.5. Maybe when they put the Posters on LCD Projectors.
Go Forth and Harvest Empyrion, My Reapers.
The Circle Jerkers Will Be Indoctrinated.
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This CV can take out two Level 10 Tovera-Class Dreadnaughts and their two escorts without taking any damage, but you have to fly it correctly and it will take some time. First let’s look at the important stats.
Mass in 0.95 G with Full Fuel, Pentaxid, and O2 Tanks
Empty Ship Mass: 118 kt
Battle Speed 140 m/s Acceleration (108 XL Thrusters)
Yaw 39 deg/s
Pitch 37 deg/s
Max Idle Time with Thrusters Off 65 hours 40 min (With Shield On)
Max Cargo for Top Acceleration {100 m/s} in 0.95 G at Battle Speed: 48.2 kt
Ship Total Mass: 166 kt
Yaw 39 deg/s
Pitch 37 deg/s
With 48.2 kt of Cargo and Ship Total Mass of 166 kt
Low Speed (24 Thrusters)
22 m/s Acceleration
Yaw 16 deg/s
Pitch 15 deg/s
Cargo Lift Available 229 kt
Hover Time 17 hours 18 min (With Shield On)
Medium Speed (48 Thrusters)
44 m/s Acceleration
Yaw 26 deg/s
Pitch 23 deg/s
Cargo Lift Available 624 kt
Hover Time 16 hours 03 min (With Shield On)
Battle Speed (108 Thrusters)
100 m/s Acceleration
Yaw 39 deg/s
Pitch 37 deg/s
Cargo Lift Available 1,612 kt
Hover Time 13 hours 37 min (With Shield On)
Max Cargo to Lift in 0.95 G: 1,656 kt
Ship Total Mass: 1,774 kt
Battle Speed 9 m/s Acceleration (108 Thrusters)
Yaw 38 deg/s
Pitch 36 deg/s
Turret Battery A: 28 Rocket Turrets
Turret Battery B: 22 Rocket Turrets 2 Artillery Turrets
Defensive Turrets: 12 Rocket Turrets (4 borrowed from Turret Battery B)
Planet Turrets: 6 Cannon Turrets 4 Minigun Turrets
39 320 kSU Containers 9 Advanced Constructors 180 Grow Plots in 3 locations 14 Food Processors Drill/Multi Turrets
6 Ammo Boxes
Projectile Rifle Rounds Needed to Fill all 167 Sentry Guns: 41750
Ammo Box 1-5
150mm H-MSL 5 Stacks 10,000
Ammo Box 6
Ls.Charge II CV 20 Stacks 40,000
160mm MSL 1 Half Stack 554
30mm Bullet 18.2 Stacks 27,340
15mm Bullet 8 Stacks 32,000
Projectile Rifle Round 16 Stacks 64,000
Size: 130x314x86 meters Unlock Level: 25 Size Class: 86 (lots of sculpted wall and ceiling blocks and hull shaping)
Don’t let the size disillusion you. This CV is not laggy and it’s very easy to get around. In fact you can get from the Bridge to any point inside this CV within 10 seconds thanks to its user friendly corridor and elevator design. Because the Bridge is in the front, when you are flying in first person the entire ship is behind you, and you get no graphics load. It’s like flying a tiny SV as far as framerates are concerned. The interior was designed to make textbook grinding as convenient as possible for those rare moments when you actually feel like doing some grinding or multi-player. Each of the 9 Advanced Constructors have their own 320 kSU Input and 320 kSU Output Containers. There is only one Gravity Generator and there is not one place within the interior where the player can walk into 0 G, or into a heat or radiation hazard for that matter. The player can walk suitless anywhere inside this CV with 0 danger.
This Reaper proves that CPU is already obsolete as you will see from the framerates. This CV should work just fine on your current graphics settings. When you are in an already laggy area like a forest or near a large POI, you may experience some framerate drop when you are inside the Reaper and you look towards the middle of the CV, causing the most blocks to render. In space you should have no abnormal framerate issues. If you do and you have your settings cranked up really high, like 4K, try lowering our Resolution to 2K. You don’t need to be able to zoom into the sub-atomic level of these textures. They aren’t top quality. This Reaper produces Epic Gameplay. If you have to lower your Resolution, Detail and Render distance, and filters such as Anistropic and Shadows to low to get Empyrion to run smoothly then do it. I would leave LOD at High as that will preserve the quality of the blocks. Bad Gameplay without this Reaper at 4K is Bad Gameplay. Epic Gameplay with this Reaper at 2K is Epic Gameplay. Even 1280x720 with this Reaper is better than 2K without it and with a gaggle of docked CPU snowflakes that move like slugs, never have everything you need, and just generally suck instead.
And here is a newsflash. Docking 5 CPU garbage CVs together causes a lot more lag than this Reaper. It’s also ugly and ridiculous. Can you believe this stupid idea actually came from the Devs? It was part of their “vision” for Empyrion. Docking 5 inadequate crappy CVs together, instead of building one CV that does everything. This is one more piece of evidence that the Devs don’t have a clue, and if you follow their “vision” you will be wasting your time with lame gameplay and frustrating immersion breaking broken element after immersion breaking broken element. For example, how fun is it when you Core a Zirax POI that was running just fine when it was shooting at you, and when you place a Player Core in it, BOOM! All the generators blow up. It’s best to just cut out all the lame Dev/circle jerker lameness and only play the parts of the game that actually function, with a lot of help from the Item Menu and some Configuration folder editing. For example, use the Item Menu to spawn an Advanced Core so the POI generators don’t all blow up when you Core it. God help you if you have spent 1,000s of hours grinding in this game that you have to restart every other month only to build a CPU piece of crap useless CV that gets stuck on every twig and planetary ring and lacks the power to wiggle loose and needs 4 other CVs docked to it in order to be able to fulfill all the game requirements. This non-CPU compliant Reaper has NONE of those issues.
The Combat Capabilities of This Reaper
This Reaper was built to prove that the circle jerker consensus that would have you believe that CVs should be heavily armored and slow with rear mounted power turrets and decoy turrets and blocks in the front, and then flown up close to enemy dreadnaughts and parked is pure idiocy. These people have obviously never played a real space game like X4: Foundations or even some of the Star Wars games.
Tanking has not been a thing since the 17th Century Ships of the Line. And even then they would use range and speed if possible, but in a formation. Ships don’t tank, jets don’t tank, and tanks don’t even tank. They use speed and range. Battleships were designed with a semi tanking concept, but their large cannons were meant to outrange smaller ships. Missiles made them obsolete because… they were slow sitting ducks like our carriers today.
There will never be a space ship that is designed to tank. The slightest damage can be catastrophic in space. This is reflected in ALL Sci Fi except for the Disney garbage. In “The Expanse” they don’t have shields but they have anti-missile turrets. The decision on whether to engage a target depends on the availability of the turret ammo required to handle all the incoming missiles for the duration of time that they will be in range. At the end of last season, Holder flew past the trap staying out of range of the 5 Belter Warships, hoping to lead them away, because he didn’t have enough turret ammo for all their missiles. After Drummer blew up two of the warships there was only one left and then the Rocinante had enough turret ammo to enter missile range.
The same approach is always taken with shields, as any player of X-Foundations can testify to. You don’t allow your shields to go down. You get out of range before that happens. Once your shields are down in a battle you are probably toast. If your main Thrust gets hit you will be slower than all the enemy ships with no shield, coming into range of more and more of them as they catch up with you and target you until you are targeted by every enemy in the area. These large CVs in Empyrion are not real dreadnaughts. The range in the game is too short, the mechanics too simple and one size fits all. In Mass Effect, Sovereign was two kilometers long. Think about that. Seven times bigger than my Reaper. In X-Foundations their actual dreadnaughts have shields with massive amounts of Hit Points that take more than 20 minutes of constant barrage to get to zero, and maybe 5 minutes to recharge. These X-Foundations dreadnaughts are slow moving, but their shields are so powerful that they actually do function like armor. They also have super weapons that Empyrion does not. Empyrion CVs are more like X-Foundations Medium-Class Frigates. They are fast moving, with smaller but fast recharging shields.
Shields were not invented to serve as armor. Shields were invented to protect you from damage while you penetrate enemy range and unload your volleys, after which you zip right back out of range. For some reason there is a circle jerk of pre-shield players and streamers that never did figure out what a shield is for. Tanking is seriously ridiculous.
In addition, as the 4 regular English speaking Empyrion streamers that get more than 2 views have been illustrating year after year (sigh), when you build a 5 Combat Steel/Xeno Steel layer, 100+ Power Turret, slow as molasses dreadnaught and park it next to another 5 armor layer hunk of junk and just twiddle your thumbs while they hammer each other like a jackass on stream (lol), even if you win, it’s going to cost half the spawn resources at least to repair it and it will literally take 2 or more real time days whether you use a Repair Bay or Station Services, unless you set repair time to Instant.
Another problem with the circle jerker consensus is the placement of turrets. I watch them build their hunks of junk and I say to myself, “Most of those turrets don’t have line of sight to the front.” And then I watch them take the hunk of junk into battle and 2/3 of the turrets and often none are firing, and they can’t figure out why, so they blame it on Eleon. And they place the power turrets as far back as possible, which forces them to bring the entire ship into range in order for all the turrets to fire. They can’t figure out basic physics, so they put “decoy blocks” in the front for the specific purpose of taking fire. Their logic is, “Take out half my ship, just don’t hit the power turrets. Look. I won. I lost ¾ of my ship, but I won. The decoy block worked.” You’re supposed to aim for an Epic victory, not a Pyrric victory. A CV with 200 turrets placed all around the hull on all sides will only be able to fire 1/3 of them at a time at best if they don’t have additional line of site issues. These circle jerkers love to place turrets in rows one behind the other. Totally useless.
This Sovereign-Class Reaper solves all these problems. This is the design theory, and it will work for any sized CV.
The Design Theory
Speed: 100 m/s acceleration in all 6 directions with the cargo necessary to operate for a long time. No Compromise.
Forward Mounted Turrets: Ideally the offensive turret batteries will be the literal front of the CV on the same Z plane for 100% forward line of site and simultaneous fire and minimal time in range.
T2 Vanilla Shield or better: I recommend mastering the flying technique with the 36,000 HP T2 Vanilla shield, and then installing the 100,000 Hit Point Bastion Shield.
The first thing I built for this Reaper was the heavy glass Bridge. Then I built the turret battery tentacles around it. I wanted to have 5 blocks between the Bridge glass and the closest turret or mounted weapon to avoid enemy fire area damage to the Bridge in the event that someone builds a real CV and it takes my shields down. Some of the mounted weapons wound up closer than 5 blocks to the Bridge heavy glass after I doubled the mounted lasers from 8 to 16. I know the AI targets the player in the Captain’s Chair but the turrets are closer, and will be targeted first as I make evasive maneuvers out of range.
Because the turrets are the actual forward most element of the Reaper, and they are all on the same Z plane, I can spend the absolute minimum time in range and unload a full volley of all 56 offensive turrets, and then S key right back out of range, where I watch the Tovera rounds dissipate just a few meters in front of me. Then I W key right back into range, and the volley of 56 turrets notifies me that the rocket turrets are in range.
This wide space between the two sides of the turret batteries caused the tentacles to be quite wide, and so I had to make the middle of the hull slightly wider and taller in order to keep the proper proportion, otherwise the ship would have been smaller. As it is, this Reaper only has 10 blocks to spare lengthwise, but the interior only occupies the front half of the ship. The tail is empty hull 0 G, but pressurized.
I had to alter the tentacle architecture to suit the physical realities of Empyrion. If I had made the front an exact replica of Mass Effect, the turrets would be much less effective. Empyrion doesn’t have a giant red laser that can casually sear dreadnaughts in half in one second. So in order for this Empyrion Reaper to have the respect a Reaper deserves, it needed to have the Empyrion version of a giant red laser that can sear a dreadnaught in half in one second. This Reaper CV can destroy every single CV or Base that has ever been built in Empyrion be it AI or PVP without taking damage.
Not only can this Reaper CV destroy every single CV or Base that has ever been built in Empyrion be it AI or PVP without taking damage, it can destroy more than one of them at the same time. More than 4 at a time in fact. Now it doesn’t happen in one second like a giant red Reaper laser, but it is 100% guaranteed. It took me more than two real time hours to destroy the two Toveras and their escorts that are in the screenshots. That was because I was only targeting turrets. But it was two hours of intense, epic space combat gameplay, even without physics, and when you start battles at range, you don’t get that framerate problem. The Combat Framerate drop is caused by too many turret round related particles rendering at once as well as over 100 turrets auto aiming at moving targets. They don’t render at 900 meters. But once the target has lost half of its turrets, you can get closer, like 400 meters, and not suffer the framerate drop.
The Offensive Turret Batteries
This Reaper has two offensive turret batteries. Turret Battery A has 28 Rocket Turrets. Turret Battery B has 22 Rocket Turrets and 2 Artillery Turrets. The Defensive Turrets borrow 4 Rocket Turrets from Turret Battery B. All Turrets are set to target Turrets and Mounted Weapons. If you want to target other devices, its best to have that Turret Battery target only that device type to guarantee that the devices get destroyed quickly. Turret Battery A is the most convenient to switch to other devices. If you switch Turret Battery B you should switch Defensive Turrets also, and remember to switch them back after the battle. The Drill/Multi Turrets and Turret Batteries all appear first in the Devices Tab. Here are the three options I have used and their time taken to destroy a Tovera-Class Dreadnaught.
Slowest: Target only Turrets and Mounted Weapons. Can take anywhere from 20 minutes to over an hour to destroy one Tovera.
Faster: Set Turret Battery A to target Thrusters only. Can take anywhere from 10 minutes to a half hour to destroy one Tovera.
Fastest: Set Turret Battery A to target Generators only. Can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 15 minutes to destroy one Tovera.
The combat is intense and you are always a one second mistake from disaster, but once you master the technique and have muscle memory with your key combos and mouse control you will be able to do it in your sleep. This is how you fly this Reaper in combat.
Flying This Reaper in Combat
The most important thing in space combat is SPEED. “Don’t stand still they’ll get you, right through the heart.”
When in doubt, HOLD the S key, and keep the nose pointed at the target until you are out of range, strafing if necessary but straight back is the fastest way to get out of range.
Never let your Shield drop below 75%. If it does, stay out of range until it returns to 100%, whether it’s a T2 Vanilla or a Bastion.
Fly in 1st Person from the Main Bridge, not the Emergency Bridge. That is only for escaping if you ever run into an actual challenge and take a bad hit.
The first priority is always to take down their shield. This is the most dangerous part of the battle. The Tovera is at full strength. It is going to fill space with rounds every time you get in range. Speed and range are two elements you have to constantly monitor.
Ls.Charge II Lasers have a 925 meter range, and a full auto cycle time of 0.6 seconds.
Rockets Turrets have a 1,000 meter range, and a cycle time of 4 seconds.
Artillery Turrets have a 950 meter range, and a cycle time of 6.7 seconds.
Until the shields are down, you will have to penetrate range to 925 meters to use your lasers on the shields. The weapons are all 22 meters in front of the Captain’s chair, so when you are flying in 1st person as you should be, and you are very experienced at this type of flying, you can strafe at 937 meters and have your lasers in range. But for beginners, you are going to want to keep your range between 900 and 850 meters while you aim and fire your lasers at the Tovera hull.
Make sure you have activated your Bridge Reticule in the Control Panel for the enhanced crosshair which works even with the HUD completely disabled. Put the cross hair on the Tovera hull and fly at 100 m/s straight at the Tovera. Once you hit 900 meters tap the S key to stop your forward motion and begin strafing while keeping the cross hairs on the Tovera Hull and firing your lasers full auto. The rockets can take the shields down themselves, but it takes longer and it’s a waste of rockets.
Do this for 4 or 5 laser volleys, several seconds, and then hold the S key while strafing all the way back out to 1200 meters and stop retreating. Wait for all the Tovera rounds to dissipate. Rockets have a 4 second cycle, so ideally you want to time your motion out of range and back into range to coincide with 4 seconds. You want to go in range, your rockets will all fire at 1,000 meters, then fire your lasers for several seconds at 900 meters, at 4 seconds your rockets fire a second time, then back out to 1200 meters always strafing, and then back in to break the 1000 meter point at 4ish seconds from the last rocket volley. This will give you 2 rocket volleys per penetration cycle and keep them coming (54 Homing Missiles and 2 Artillery Shells) more or less every 4 seconds. If the Tovera is doing too much damage to your shields then don’t spend 4 seconds in range firing lasers until your rockets fire a second volley, just linger for 2 seconds and then S Key out of range.
That is the most effective way to attack with this Reaper against a full strength monster ship with shields. Once you leave the Tovera’s range, it stops firing, and the space between you and the Tovera becomes empty. As soon as you enter the Tovera’s range, it fills the space between you with up to 100ish rounds coming straight at you. Rockets and lasers, including fast powerful lasers. It’s like a wide beam of destruction that resembles a giant shotgun blast. You want to avoid that wide beam because it can 0 your shields in seconds. By escaping the Tovera’s range you shut off that hose of destruction. It takes a few seconds for that hose to reach you when it turns on. Those are the seconds you use to shoot your lasers at that Tovera, after which you S key the hell out of range, while constantly strafing, and in this way your shield only takes a few hits each cycle.
It’s true that if the Reaper’s shield gets dropped to 0 and you wade into the Tovera’s beam of destruction you will lose a lot of turrets because of area damage, but if you fly it correctly this will only happen when you face this same CV or another CV with the same physical combat properties in PVP. The AI is not currently able to fly this CV properly. It would need to fire the mounted lasers and use range and strafing, while always pointing at the player. It would need to close range and fire two volleys while firing lasers, and then retreat out of range. It would need to stay out of range until its Shields recharge if they drop below 75%. If it did that it just might be unbeatable because it would never make mistakes. It might take two Reapers to beat one Reaper controlled by that type of AI configuration. You could nerf the AI on a scale for the 10 levels. This CV design will always beat a tank CV without taking damage. Only another properly flown CV of the same Speed, Forward Mounted Turrets, and T2 Shield design is capable of damaging this CV design.
Your goal is to never let your shield drop below 75%. This goal is completely reliant on your flying skill. Specifically, controlling range while strafing and aiming and firing lasers and tracking the 4 second rocket firing cycle. Once you get it right you will be in one continuous flow of motion where you smoothly strafe into range and fire a few accurate laser volleys that hit, then smoothly strafe back out to 1200 meters, and back into rocket range at around 4 seconds. It will be like skipping a stone on a lake, except it’s the Tovera’s beam of destruction. It’s like a classical dance. You will get a rhythm and it will just come naturally. The way you coordinate your keys and mouse will be like riding a bike. And the Tovera beam of destruction will always be just out of range, just to the left or right or above or below, always just barely missing, but always missing never the less.
It’s true that if you go out of range and wait for your shields to return to 100% after some bad hits drop it below 75%, the Tovera shield may very well recover to 100% as well. This means you will have to start the process of dropping it all over again. And you will have to do this quite a few times. But while the Tovera took damage, you DID NOT. This is what space combat with shields would be like. Whoever takes down the enemy shield consistently without losing their shield wins every time. The time it takes you to lower the Tovera shield and amount of damage your shield takes is completely dependent on your flying skill. The Reaper’s physical properties are maxed out.
Your flying skill depends on timing, monitoring range, aiming, and strafing. The timing, range monitoring and aiming are a matter of concentration. There is no way around it, but with practice, it becomes automatic. Like riding a bike. And mouse control is important for long range aiming at 900 meters.
Pitch and Yaw are key to mouse control. This Reaper’s Pitch and Yaw are in the 30s but I lower them to 17. This blueprint is set to 17. You should practice aiming at something from 900 meters while strafing and adjust the Reaper’s Yaw and Pitch in the Statistics Tab of the Control Panel accordingly. Make sure you keep them at the same value. This is key to long range aiming. You must have the correct Yaw and Pitch for your mouse. I find 17 is a good compromise between ease of aiming and turning ability. The lower you set the Yaw and Pitch the easier it is to aim at long range, but the longer it takes to turn. If you want to go to the trouble, you could set your Yaw and Pitch lower than 17 for easier aiming and then crank it up to max when not in combat for fast turning during normal travel or when squashing regular vehicles and bases or any CPU compliant snowflake. Just make sure Yaw and Pitch are the same number in the Statistics Tab, regardless of what you set it to, or you will have unintuitive flight response to your mouse.
Let’s make sure this is clear. With both offensive Turret Batteries activated, this Reaper will PULVERIZE any regular CV or Base and any CPU compliant snowflake within 3 to 15 seconds. You don’t need to worry about range. Just point. Just park and drop its shields if it has any in seconds with your lasers. Two or three rocket volleys and the fight is over, and there are some damaged blocks over there, not sure what that was. Half the time it’s one volley. Remember, every 4 seconds, 54 homing missiles fire and every 7 seconds two artillery rounds fire.
Strafing depends on your key combinations and timing. A for left, D for right, Space Bar for up, C for down, W for forward, S for back. Routine changing of direction is key, as well as Zig Zagging. Diagonal Zig Zagging seems to throw off the enemy rocket AI the best. It seems to cause it to pause to calculate the trajectory for a second or two. High miss probability. Diagonal Zig Zagging with W and S key range thrust is the best for dodging homing missiles, especially as a counter maneuver to getting flanked and triangulated by fast Decimators or Drone Swarms. Decimators are more dangerous than Toveras, because they are faster. They can flank you and then your shield is gone in a few seconds. They are hard to outrun because they have such high acceleration. You have to change direction. If they had more firepower, Decimators would be more deadly than Toveras too. Drone Swarms will kill your shields if you don’t constantly hold down the S key. They are FAST and they always try to flank you and triangulate you. Stay on the retreat while aiming at the nearest one and eventually they will all be wreckage.
So hold D C to go Right and Down, then switch to A Space Bar to go Left and Up. Then A C to go Left and Down, and D Space Bar to go Right and Up.
And for critical moments like when you get flanked or are in range of more than one enemy vessel, or just have to face a wide beam of destruction from a fresh Tovera, W D C to go Forward, Right, and Down, then S A Space Bar to go Back, Left, and Up, and W A C to go Forward, Left, and Down, and then S D Space Bar to go Back, Right, and Up. You can change your direction with your mouse to make these complex key combos move you in a general direction if you are extremely sophisticated. Once you have an enemy fire barrage gap or a clear path away, keep a straight max speed path away from the enemy cluster, because out of range is the best and only sure way to avoid enemy fire. But you can also come into 900 meter firing range of a fresh Tovera using W D C Forward, Right, Down, release the W Key, fire your 3 or 4 laser volleys, and then S A Space Bar to go Back, Left, and Up out of range, for best enemy homing missile avoidance, with every penetration cycle, not just emergencies, if you have the skill.
You do the three key combos while aiming and hitting the lasers, on the 4 second range penetration cycle, and you have it mastered. You need to be able to see the key combos in your head, see when you need them, and execute them reflexively, without thinking about it. Muscle memory. It just takes a few hours of combat practice. Also, once you have mastered this flying style, you will be able to “feel” what you need to do so well that your timing will be so accurate that you will be able to beat Toveras while hardly ever needing to resort to 3 key combos.
The best position to be in with this Reaper is to be retreating at 100 m/s while some sucker is pursuing you. If the distance between this Reaper and its pursuer is 900 metersish, and I am retreating at 100 m/s and the pursuer is chasing me at 100 m/s, this Reaper will be out of range of all his rounds, and he will be in range of all of mine. The Sweet Spot. Always keep your Bridge Reticule Cross Hairs on the target while retreating with the S key held down. Imagine if the AI could fly this Reaper that way. It would be a scary proposition to take on, because the AI doesn’t make mistakes.
You want to get out of range as soon as possible, but you may have to do some of that complex key combo strafing if you get in a pinch, or if your shields actually do go down. Eventually someone will make a ship like this one, we would hope. But you can also fight these together in multi-player. With two skilled pilots it’s quite exhilarating.
Once the Tovera Shields are down, you don’t have to use the lasers anymore, but you may want to in order to ensure that the Tovera Shield Cooldown Timer is reset and it doesn’t jump to 15% just before your homing missile volley hits. But you only need to hit it once with your lasers per penetration cycle to make sure the shields are down when the missiles hit.
If you are not firing the lasers, move forward until the turrets fire, then back out. Or, stay strafing in range for two rocket volleys, or 4 seconds. You can avoid enemy rockets by strafing much better at 1,000 meters than you can at 900 meters. If you have mastered the strafing key combos, you can easily stay in range for 12 seconds or 3 rocket volleys at 1,000 meters and take minimal damage to your shield, if any.
Once the Tovera Shield Generator blows up, you can just strafe around getting close enough to fire and then backing out of range and repeating. Once the Tovera has lost half of its turrets more or less you can start penetrating much deeper in to range, like 400 meters, and strafing in range for much longer, like three or more rocket firing cycles or 12+ seconds. From there it just gets easier and easier until all the turrets are gone. Then it’s a good idea to set Turret Battery A to target Thrusters only. Once it stops moving you can loot what’s left of the Tovera. If you want to kill it as quick as possible with as little damage as possible, set Turret Battery A to target Generators only from the start. That will preserve the most loot. Occasionally you will get lucky no matter what you are targeting and kill the Core in a few minutes. That will give you every loot container.
Ghosted AI Ships: How To Fix Them So You Can Loot Them
Unfortunately, when AI vessels die, especially when you target generators and thrusters, they often start ghosting. They will just keep flying slowly in circles and rotating, with no generators or thrusters, and you won’t be able to board them. Sometimes they load into the sector like this, and when you encounter them they will not have a bounding box, so you won’t be able to shoot them. Fortunately there is an easy way to fix this in Single Player. Just exit to the main menu and then reload your save. All ghosted spinning ships will now be solid and still, assuming they are dead. One time I had to reload a save twice. They pretty much ghost every time. So if you are suspicious of your targets being ghosts, just reload your save to be sure. I don’t know how to fix it in multi-player but at least you can fight each other.
And that was how you fly this Reaper in combat. The more time you spend in combat with Toveras, Decimators and Drone Swarms, the better you will become and the more reckless you will be capable of being. You will be able to linger longer in range with fresh Toveras and bring down shields much faster. I recommend mastering this flying technique with the stock 36,000 Hit Point T2 Vanilla Shield and then once you have become a flying ace, install the Project Eden Bastion Shield with its 100,000 Hit Points. That will make you god in Empyrion with this Reaper.
This Reaper and PVP
If you are a PVP player and you can find a server that will let you spawn a CV this size, you can have a ball by making the 5 Combat Steel layer flying brick with 10 m/s acceleration forward and 200 plus power turrets obsolete. I’ve destroyed countless Toveras, Decimators and Drone Swarms with this Reaper, but I only destroyed one Xen ‘uan Carrier. The reason is the Xen ‘uan Carrier is the easiest dreadnaught to destroy. So easy that it’s boring. Why? Because it’s too slow. It has way more turrets than the Tovera, but it’s so slow that it’s no challenge at all to get in and out of range. You hardly need to strafe and you can stay in range for long periods of time. It dies quick even if you are only targeting turrets.
These dreadnaughts are actually chasing you, but they are so slow that you can hardly tell when you are strafing around them because it takes them forever to turn and pick up speed in a new direction. If you keep revolving around a slow target and moving closer and then retreating out to 1,200 meters, it will appear to be immobile as it turns slowly and accelerates towards 20 degrees and then 50 degrees and then 120 degrees, etc… The Tovera is able to pick up speed once you stop strafing fast enough and that is why it will suddenly do lots of damage to your shield even as you retreat straight back. If you aren’t near the edge of range when you are retreating and the Tovera has full speed you will need to cut 90 degrees and continue reversing away. The Tovera will continue past you as it slowly starts turning and slowing down.
The Xen ‘uan Carrier is so slow that I doubt it even has a 100 m/s top speed. If you just casually strafe left and right from 900 meters it will miss you constantly. It is unable to close distance with you. It is the weakest of the dreadnaught adversaries of this Reaper simply because of its slow speed. How much more a 5 Combat Steel layer flying brick with 10 m/s acceleration forward, or actually less, and 200 plus power turrets. If it’s Xen ‘uan speed or slower, it doesn’t matter how much armor or how many hundreds of power turrets it has. It’s a sitting duck that will be so easy to destroy that it will be boring. Target generators to shut it down in 5 to 15 minutes and take no damage. Even if it’s as fast as a Tovera, you will still destroy it, you will just have to strafe better. But those bricks are not able to move as fast as a Tovera. That’s the price of all that armor. Obsolete.
But what if you can’t find a PVP server that allows this Size Class 87? You can build a smaller CV that is just as powerful as this one. Just follow the 3 rules. Speed – 100 m/s acceleration in all 6 directions with a full cargo load. Forward mounted turrets on the same Z plane. 1 T2 Vanilla Shield or better. Think of a way to mount the turrets and where to place the Bridge. If you place the Bridge above or below the turret assembly, you can fit 50 to 60 turrets into a much smaller circumference. This Reaper is like a deluxe CV. It has a lot of everything to levels that you don’t absolutely need but that sure make the gameplay Epic. It’s entertaining to just wander around this Reaper. You don’t need all that for PVP.
The first stage of this Reaper only had 28 forward mounted turrets. I destroyed a Kamirat Battle Carrier in Reforged Eden as a test with just 28 forward mounted Rocket Turrets. I was so dismayed with Reforged that I terminated testing there. Next I destroyed a Tovera in Project Eden with those 28 forward mounted Rocket Turrets without taking damage just to see if I could. I was so impressed that I decided to add 28 more Rocket Turrets to the rig and replace two with Artillery Turrets. That allowed me to have two deadly turret batteries that can target different devices exclusively, another key component to deadly volleys that end battles quickly.
Build a skeleton, mount the turrets, give it a shield and enough thrusters to have the max acceleration in all 6 directions, arm it, and go test it on Toveras and Decimators and Drone Swarms. You could find a way to cram in more than 56 turrets making it more deadly than this Reaper on a much smaller hull. Just remember it needs to have 100 m/s acceleration in all 6 directions while carrying enough cargo to operate for a long time, as well as to carry lots of loot.
The Block Material Types of This Reaper
Here is how I configured the block material types on this Reaper. The entire hull is 1 layer of Combat Steel with some Xeno Steel. The Bridge is completely encased in Combat Steel and Heavy Windows. The Emergency Bridge is Xeno Steel with a Combat Steel Floor. Every room is encased in one layer of Steel. Walls between rooms are 1 layer of Steel. Everything else is Carbon Composite. Between rooms, one wall will be Steel and the other Carbon Composite, but there may be parts of the Steel side that require devices and so that spot will have a steel block on the other side, on the otherwise all Carbon Composite Wall. So check with a multi-tool before you delete blocks if you are working on the Reaper, or you may create a gap in the Steel room encasing, which is a likely breach point.
The tail is hollow. The tail gives me enough hull area to place the 108 XL Thrusters needed to get the 140 m/s starting acceleration in all 6 directions. You will probably need half of the hull to be hollow too in order to be light enough with enough thrust to hit 140 m/s starting acceleration in all 6 directions. That will leave you with 40 m/s of acceleration in all 6 directions to use up on Cargo and Hi-G Planets. I built the entire hull before I placed the Thrusters. After the Thrusters I started the interior, building Engineering and Factory/Storage first and then the Docking Bay.
This Reaper can fight 3 battles with the 2 Tovera, 2 escort fleets in Project Eden without needing to restock the Ammo Containers except for the Artillery Shells because I only load a half stack since they use up so much SU. Make sure you have enough Storage.
No matter what the Size Class limitation on your PVP server, if you can design a CV that does what I just described that is under the limit, you will be the KING of that server. You should get your friends to spawn the same CV, or build others with the proper design, and then go literally conquer the PVP galaxy. No PVP faction will be able to stop you. It will be like Reapers harvesting the galaxy. You will be able to randomly pick a faction and then go attack their strongest force and destroy it all, loot it all, and dump it all in the factory to spawn more of your unbeatable ships.
Eventually everyone will start building their own speed and forward mounted CVs, but you will have a massive head start. And once everyone is fighting at 900 meters the PVP combat will be Epic and framerate drop free. Remember I killed a Tovera with this design with just 28 forward mounted Rocket Turrets without taking damage.
Landing This Reaper
This Reaper is easy to land on wild terrain because only the 4 legs, the Boarding Ramp, and the Hangar Ramp touch ground level, and the Hangar Ramp is one block up. Every other part of the CV is at least 5 blocks or 10 meters above ground, so it’s easy to avoid those annoying Trees, Tree Stumps, and Rocks. If you need to land in a Forest just pick an adjacent clearing and shoot any obstructive Trees into pulp with the 16 Mounted Lasers.
To land level turn on full Inertia Dampeners with the I Key, then hold the O Level Key while you hold the C Down Key. If the CV keeps moving there is a Tree Stump or something touching the bottom of the Hull somewhere. Try moving a few meters in any direction and O/C key again. If it stops moving release the C Down Key and then the O Level Key and stand. Then shut off the Thrusters and you have a level ship. So far the Boarding Ramp has always been within Jetpack distance for me to get back in, but most of the time it’s almost perfectly aligned with the ground. A couple of times I had to drill a little bit of dirt to get out. If the terrain is really rough and the CV won’t stop moving, release the C Down Key and wait for the CV to stop moving, then release the O Level Key and stand. That is when the Boarding Ramp is most likely to be above the ground a meter or two.
The four legs of this Reaper are placed close together so that you can land this CV sideways on a normal sized landing pad, but the Hangar Ramp will not open onto the pad. The Boarding Ramp is between the four legs and thus will open onto a sideways mounted landing pad.
Wireless Devices in This Reaper
This Reaper has all 10 Wireless Devices placed around the perimeter of the CV. There are Wireless Devices in the two widest center tentacles, under both Side Airlocks, in each leg by the Landing Gear, and at the tapering where the tail starts.
LCDs Used in This Reaper
Sovereign uses lots of LCDs from Allessia, CrazyZ, and sulusdacor. I made a lot of improvements to many of their LCDs. Many were centered, straightened, and/or made seamless. Some were resized for CV, which is ¼ size of a SV LCD, or ½ or 1/3 size. If you are one of them you should grab your improved LCDs off the Reaper to save yourselves some time. I also made 8 original LCDs that are worth having. Three of those are color reconstructions of monochrome legacy targeting LCDs. Those three nice ones. They are in the Emergency Bridge Captain’s Chair screenshot. You’ll know my original new ones when you see them.
There is a moving LCD on the Bridge called “Analyzing Corrupt String Section:” This LCD's Sensor is always turning Off and On. You can see it blinking on the ceiling. If you exit the game on the Bridge that sensor may save on the Off state. If that happens, when you reload the save the String LCD will no longer be moving. To get it started again you need to go to the Control Panel (P) and click the Custom 8. “CorruptStringReset” button until it turns Green. Then exit the Bridge and move more than one block away from the door. Then return to the Bridge and the String LCD will be moving again. If you exit the game while sitting in the Captain's Chair the LCD Sensor will not be Sensing you and thus the Corrupt String LCD will not be in danger of its Sensor being saved in the Off state.
The Interior of This Reaper
Now about the interior, the screenshots capture a walkthrough of the entire CV starting from the Boarding Ramp. Every room with a seat has a Flight Lights lever which keeps the lights on while you are sitting or not in the room. Remember to turn them off except for the Flight Lights Lever on the Bridge. I keep that one on at all times just because. The Bridge lights also activate some external aesthetic Blue Lights.
The Vacant Room and Ghosted Blocks
There is a Vacant Room that you can access next to the Emergency Bridge entrance. It’s a big room and the reason its empty is because I had exceeded 50,000 blocks and the Langoliers were catching up with me. That and there was nothing more that this Reaper could possibly need.
After you pass 50,000 blocks you will begin to get ghosted blocks. From what I understand it is triggered by too much block memory load in a given area. It is triggered by having lots of blocks in one area after 50,000 blocks is surpassed, or when you place a lot of sculpted blocks, like the thin pipe wall block, at the same time. Always place those one at a time with no symmetry. They can trigger a ghost that you don’t see until it’s baked into your saves and blueprint, at which point you might as well start over. Unfortunately, the Zirax Pentaxid Station has ghosted blocks baked into it under the asteroid.
In either case, if you spot the ghosted blocks before you exit your session to Main Menu, you can remove the ghosted blocks by simply using “Undo” from the N key in Creative Mode to remove all the blocks that triggered it. After I hit 50,000 blocks, the Portside Oxygen room started ghosting blocks each time a placed a sculpted ceiling block. These were evil ghosts too. The ghost side was on the bottom and they were floor blocks, so I couldn’t tell they were ghosted from the Portside Oxygen Room in God Mode. Fortunately I switched out of God Mode and then I fell half way through the CV.
The ghosting phenomena will be triggered by the placement of one block, and it will just be one ghosted block somewhere nearby. You have to check after every few blocks you place after 50,000 blocks. The more sculpted the blocks are, the less it will take to trigger the first ghost. The lightest block is a cube. This is why I had to make the Portside Oxygen Room Ceiling out of Cubes instead of sculpted ceiling blocks like the Starboard Oxygen Room has. If you keep placing new blocks after the first ghost appears, each new block will change the ghosted area and make it exponentially bigger. To undo the ghosted phenomena, just undo the blocks you placed until the ghost is gone.
Once you are at the limit in an area, the only way to add a new block is to remove an existing one. But here’s the good news. I have never seen a Device cause a ghost problem. So you could edit BlocksConfig.ecf and enable Furnaces and Deconstructors on CV’s for either your Project Eden existing or new games or your Vanilla existing or new games. I will explain how further down at the end. And then you could stuff that Vacant Room full of those Furnaces and Deconstructors, and make this Reaper fully self-sufficient. I haven’t bothered. (Obviously I finally got around to it)
Every room is listed in the Elevator Directories except for the Emergency Bridge. I didn’t want to leave directions for a potential hostile boarding party. You will have to find it by touring the ship.
The Emergency Bridge is designed to be a holdout for the practically impossible chance that this Reaper gets disabled. It simply has too many XL Thrusters and too many armored T2 Generators to be disabled before a player makes it there from the Main Bridge or a Med Station. In the unlikely event that the Bridge Captain’s Chair gets destroyed out from under you, or you even get killed, you will have plenty of time to spawn in the nearest Med Station and get to the Emergency Bridge and Warp out. But if it did get disabled, the Emergency Bridge would be the safest place. It is a Xeno Steel Armed Fortress. With All Sentry Guns Enabled in the Control Panel, any boarding party would have to negotiate a juggernaut of Sentry Guns just to get near the Emergency Bridge. They would pay dearly for every step.
Both entrances to the Emergency Bridge are designed to kill lots of intruders with Sentry Guns. The Emergency Bridge itself has full Sentry Gun coverage of the doors. Inside you will find a full Medical Device Suite and two 16 kSU Cargo Boxes which should be pre-stocked with everything you need to start from scratch, as well as unique valuables such as Mission Items. Portable constructors and ores and guns and ammo. Lots of guns and ammo. It also holds an Oxygen Station, Armor Locker, and Repair Station. You should be able to hold out there for a long time, but it’s also the best place to abandon ship from.
Sentry Guns
Every room and corridor section has more than one Sentry Gun. Wherever possible the Sentry Guns have triangulation of crossfire. They are all camouflaged with decoys, so the intruder will be shooting the one he sees while two or three other Sentry Guns are shooting him from other angles and/or elevations. There is no safe zone. Running into another room would only expose you to a new triangulation of crossfire. They would have to fight a long struggle of attrition where they die scores of times. The Docking Bay is suicide for any intruders. In addition, there are Sentry Gun Batteries outside all three Airlocks and the Boarding Ramp and the Hanger Bay Door. The Control Panel Airlock Sentry Guns button will activate all of those external Sentry Guns, as well as the Sentry Guns within the 3 Airlock Corridors, for when you don’t want the entire interior to have Sentry Guns out. Some are on the Ground. The 8 Brig Security Door Sentry Guns are also controlled by the Control Panel All Sentry Guns button. If the Brig turrets are activated on planet, they may aim at a predator. They will reset when you reload your save.
The Advanced Core is buried in camouflaged Xeno Steel far from any targetable Device. Good luck finding it or destroying it with a CV.
The Brig and Advanced Signal Logic
Scenario and POI builders should look at the Brig. It features an advanced Signal Logic Function that I have never seen used anywhere. It allows you to have error free timer controlled doors and LCDs to control the movement of the player in the proper immersive way. The player cannot spam the sensor and create the possessed door effect. The function allows you to control a central door, with an option of two types of pre and post “doors” which are necessary in order to prevent unwanted Timer triggers. You can either have a Pre door or a pre sensor that is far enough away that the timers would run out before the Player returned to the door. The same goes for the post door. These can be cascaded throughout a POI and used to control spawners, explosions, and possibly Dialogue options, in addition to doors and LCDs.
With this signal logic that I put into my Brig, you could have immersive timed security doors opening and closing with LCD Projector messages that immersively force a player into a small dome shaped room with a double heavy door at the other end. The doors could close behind the player locking him in. Some LCDs talk trash. And then the other heavy doors open up to reveal two armored golems and the player is trapped in a small dome shaped room with nowhere to run, forcing him or them to become very good at Jet Pack jumping. After the Golems are dead the next Logic Gate could trigger, if that’s possible. Or a Dialogue Console which would eventually open the door to the next part of the dungeon could become accessible. You could also seamlessly spawn Zirax troops behind closed doors that open to perfect assault positions pertaining to where the player will be forced to enter. The player would enter and start a timer in this Function of mine, and with Vermillion’s AI mod, the aggressive Zirax would be trying to traverse the doors to get to the player just from hearing him move. The timer would just give them enough seconds to be stacked up on the doors. Then the doors all open simultaneously, and the player or players are rushed from well covered Zirax from multiple directions and elevations. It will feel like the player is fighting on Zirax home turf. They know the layout. The player doesn’t.
If you do decide to incorporate this function, it’s not for the faint of heart. You should reconstruct it in a creative start exclusively for this Signal Logic Function from Screenshots. The Brig Advanced Signal Logic Function starts at the beginning of the Signal Logic Tab in the Control Panel, after the Lower Deck Corridor Lights Logic Gate. This Reaper’s Signal Logic is ordered according to the Interior of the CV, from front to back, left to right, and bottom to top, so the Glass Dome Garden at the top is last. The same goes for the Screenshots in this post. You should use minimal props to represent doors and LCDs. LCDs just need descriptions of content. This way you can concentrate 100% on the Signal Logic with no distractions. Then you will be able to figure out how to alter it for your POI. Once it works in the Signal Logic save, Screenshot all the Signal Logic gates and load your POI build save and install it there by simply copying the Signal Logic from your Screenshots. Once you have the entire function memorized, it will be easy to apply it over and over again, but memorizing it won’t be easy. Yikes. I wrote it and it confuses me if I don’t stare at it for a while.
Also, regarding the Brig, there is a rumor that Gerald is being held in one of the cells. You will have to go see for yourself.
-May 9, 2022 A New Signal Logic/Door Type Block Bug
I noticed a new Signal Logic/door type block bug that Eleon introduced between 1.5 and 1.7. What it appears to do is make certain door blocks like Heavy Blocks, Shutter Blocks, and Ramp Blocks invert their Signal Logic. This seems to happen when a Player is too close to the closing block, and what will happen is that the block will open when the Sensor is telling it to close. Or it just won't close at all.
Now, when you exit the Brig, the last two bottom Heavy Doors don't close. You have to wait for the 12 second timer to run out and then just go near them from the hallway side and back up again. When you first exit these doors towards the Hallway they close on you instantly. Based on what others have noticed since 1.6 the Heavy Door Block seems to be deciding not to close if it will hit me. Like the same Logic that makes the trees pulverize now when we drive into them is making doors avoid hitting us and they are overriding the Signal Logic and dropping the instruction instead of delaying it until the Player is out of the way of the Heavy Door Block path.
This looks like these guys figured it out in Empyrion 1.6.3 Build 3512 in Nov 2021.
"I attempted to make an extendable bridge using a long blast door connected to a switch. I found that as I walked to the end of the door it would suddenly retract on me. It appears that for both blast doors and shutter doors you can sometimes trigger the door to open by touching the end of the closed door, even though a signal state should be holding it in its closed state. I believe it may be related to the 'safety stop' mechanism that prevents these doors from closing on the player."
Signal Logic doesn't just stop working all of a sudden. So there doesn't appear to be anything I can do to fix it. We will just have to wait and see if Eleon figures out within a year or two that if they undo what they did that broke Signal Doors they will start working again.
The Docking Bay
The Docking Bay is designed for BIG SVs and HVs. I recommend the Reaper Recon Elite, the Reaper Scout Elite, and, last but not least, the Reaper Destroyer. If you can find other non-CPU compliant decent SVs or HVs they should fit just fine. The Docking Bay has two 17x11 block or 34x22 meter Landing Pads and one Repair Bay of the same size. It uses one 13x7 Hangar Door.
The Docked Vessel Sensor Stuck On Bug
There is a bug with docked vessels and sensors. The first vessel you dock will cause a glitch with any Sensors that cover the vessel's area that locks the sensor in the on position when you reload the save, and causes a slight Framerate drop. So when you return to that save, the lights affected by that Sensor will be always on. To fix this, you just have to undock that vessel and then re-dock it. You will see the lights go off in the Docking Bay when it re-docks. It’s usually the same vessel, but occasionally you will have to undock and re-dock a different one. Then it will go back to the original bug culprit. I have verified that this bug is still present in 1.7.9, of course. You would think Eleon would make this a priority considering their dogma which insists that players build small crappy CVs and dock them all together in an ugly gaggle so they can drag their inadequate ships around the galaxy. Unfortunately, Teleporting is the same as loading a save, so every time you Teleport you will need to undock and re-dock the culprit vessel if you want the affected lights to turn off when you leave the Docking Bay. Basically every time you leave a build's spawn range, when you return you will have to undock and redock the culprit vessel to get the hangar sensors unstuck from the on position.
The Sanctorum Space Club
The Sanctorum Space Club is a particularly interesting room. For some reason, every dance club build I’ve seen has all the flashing lights on a wall and pointing into the air, while the dancers are all on the ground and barely affected by the lights. I placed corner lights on the ground around the perimeter pointing in, and then I cranked them up to high strength. Each side has two different colors, one of which flashes once per second, the other which flashes twice per second. The single flash color is only on that side, while the double flash color is also on the opposite side of the dance floor, which also flashes twice per second. It’s a real strobe light. The screenshots show lots of instances.
It’s a good idea to make sure you are in a minimum lag zone when you turn on the Dance Lights in Sanctorum Space Club because Empyrion has trouble with smoothly turning lights on and off as it is. If you go to an empty Sun Warp Sector or a UCHN Research Vessel Sector you should be fine. More powerful systems should be fine anywhere. The good news is that 1.5 has improved optimization whereby sensors and lights activate much faster. Turn on the Dance Lights Lever on the second floor balcony and go down onto the dance floor and wander around. You will see that it’s an amazing real strobe light. The Color Effects will be different depending on where you are standing and which direction you are looking. You should play some music that matches the Dance Animation. It must have a fast rhythm.
I have found that running any media player, even to play an mp3, will severely drop Empyrion frame rates, but streaming music from a browser does not. These Techno and Minimal videos are perfect for the Empyrion Dance Animation and my Strobe Light.
Techno Mix – March 2019
Boris Brejcha Style @ Art of Minimal Techno Tripping - The Mad Doctor by RTTWLR
Top Minimal Techno & Minimal House Mix 2020 - Weekend Boating By Patrick Slayer
And don’t forget this one.
Burned With Desire - Armin van Buuren ft. Justine Suissa (10 Years)
You can also use classics if they have a fast enough rhythm or the correct rhythm such as these two respectively.
Golden Earring - Twilight Zone
Bee Gees - Stayin' Alive (Official Music Video)
Stayin’ Alive goes amazingly well with the Empyrion Dance Animation. The Dancers now only travel two blocks from their starting position, with the exception of the Male Alien, so I didn’t use it. I filled every block that was more than two blocks from the edge of the dance floor with dancers facing random directions so that they are not all dancing in a line. They look totally random and they will form little sub groups, couples will form and break up, here and there 2 to 5 dancers may temporarily dance in a line. IT LOOKS LIKE A REAL DANCE FLOOR. Occasionally two of them will briefly overlap, but the Strobe Light makes that look like they are rubbing up on each other.
You have to see how much better the Dancer Models look under my Strobe Lights. If you play these songs while you wander around the Dance Floor in 1st person you will begin to forget you are in Empyrion. It starts to seem like the dance clubs in Mass Effect, only better because I like this architecture better. The Strobe Lights make the Dancers look real. You will see what I mean. Wandering around that dance floor with the Dance Lights on and the right songs playing is an activity in itself, because it’s so realistic. It’s a great way to unwind after a 2 hour battle with a bunch of Toveras and other monstrosities.
You can alter the Strobe Light Hues by activating the Blue Light Lever with the Dance Lights Lever on. That will turn on the 20 meter Luminosity 4 Blue Lights that are above the Dance Floor, changing the whole light effect to something a little mellower and more Sci Fi themed. The Blue Lights around the perimeter of the Club on both floors are activated by both Levers.
The Problem With the Reforged Scenario
Now to talk about how to find the Sweet Spot in Empyrion and get the best Epic Gameplay. In order to explain that, I will have to talk about what is wrong with the currently trending circle jerker Scenario as well as Eleon’s achievements and blunders.
So I was spawning this Reaper into Reforged Eden to test it out against some dreadnaughts and when I powered it on KABOOM. All the generators blew up. I thought to myself, “How nice.” The thing is this Reaper has plenty of power, especially in idle. It never uses more than 25%. Ever. I eventually got it to work with TWENTY+ Large Generators (T2) and THREE HUNDRED Quantum Cores, which easily fit into the empty tail. But when I flew it something was wrong. “Is that lag?” I thought to myself. “It’s moving really slow.” So I looked at the Acceleration Stat on the Statistics Tab and to my horror it said, “34 m/s Acceleration.” I thought to myself, “How is this possible? This Reaper has 136 m/s acceleration in all six directions in Vanilla. This Vermillion moron has nerfed 102 m/s of acceleration off of my Reaper! What the hell is going on here?”
My mind began to flash images of all the different streamers playing Reforged Eden like it was the greatest thing ever. I had encountered the neutered circle jerk clique before on the Empyrion Official Site. And I began to realize this was a cult of seriously deranged idiots. So I did the math. 34 m/s acceleration x 100 / 136 = 25%. Vermillion reduced my CV speed down to 25% of its correct value. A literal 75% reduction. Nerfed the CV Thrusters by 75%. Who does that? Seriously? And even more Twilight Zoney, who plays that? And even more Creep Showey, who streams that? I had to find out what other ridiculous changes Vermillion had made in his Reforged Scenario. So I read all his Scenario pages, determined to get to the bottom of it.
And there it was, from the Empyrion official site Reforged Galaxy page in “Thrusters Rebalancement.” “CVs though, they're slow. A decent CV can reach 100m/s in space at T2 with plenty for weapons, but it won't be moving like an SV fighter like they do in vanilla.” An open declaration that this scenario deliberately nerfs CV Thrusters to uselessness.
And to add insult to injury, Vermillion declares at the beginning of his post that he regrets not being able to nerf everything more because, according to him, barely moving CVs and everything else = realistic. “The original aim was to give the game a set of realistic values, while still remaining within the realms of playability. Many aspects had to be sacrificed because it's simply not feasible to make it fully realistic and still be fun to play, but it's realistic where possible and as consistent as possible.” Wow. This guy clearly has gone off the rails.
But he doesn’t stop at CVs. Oh no. Everything is nerfed to uselessness. Generators, Rockets, SVs, HVs. He claims he made HV Thrusters more powerful, but we all know HVs in Reforged cannot climb a hill or wiggle loose from a twig. This is from the “Power Rebalancement:” section. “For your average starter or early game HV/SV a single small generator is enough for mobility, but as you add more mass to your ships, more cargo and/or more weapons, you'll need better or more thrusters you'll need to upgrade to the next generator up. As the ship gets larger still, you'll need another generator and that puts strain on your CPU, requiring an additional extender, which means more space and more materials. Fueling self-motivated progression.” So the generators are nerfed so bad that you have to add more if you take on more cargo? This will force players to Gerry rig their vessels into ugly shanty vessels. Oh wait. That must explain why the Reforged cult streamers are always pushing their narcissist “Upgradeable” blueprints because “regular” players just aren’t smart enough to see the wisdom of playing Reforged and embracing the suck or of figuring out how to add 20 generators on their own. It’s not that “regular” or “new” players, as they call them, can’t figure out how to get something to work in Reforged, it’s that Reforged is a waste of time that makes gameplay MUCH WORSE than Vanilla, even with it piggy backing on Project Eden.
And then we get to the “Vehicle Weapons and Tools” section. “Rocket Turrets (HV, CV and BA) now fire slower-moving homing missiles that will take fancy flying to dodge. But they're still slower than your average SV.” Just Woooow. That explains why I had 3 volleys out before the first volley hit the Kamirat. Did you see how he said SVs will need fancy flying to dodge these slow as molasses but now fast turning rockets? But just below the Weapons section in “Thrusters Rebalancement” he said this about SVs. “Ships using heavier armors will be significantly harder to move and be ill-suited as a cargo ship (as expected). They're best used with Turrets (SV), since aiming with fixed weapons is extremely difficult due to slow handling of heavy ships.”
So according to this, Vermillion slowed the rockets down so you would have to use “fancy flying to dodge” these “slower-moving homing missiles” in a SV but he deliberately made the heavier SVs “significantly harder to move” and “extremely difficult” to aim “due to slow handling of heavy ships.” Is Vermillion Schizophrenic? He made the SVs too slow for fancy flying, and he made the rockets slow and fast turning so you need fancy flying to dodge them, and he put it in writing in the Reforged Galaxy Page. And we all know that light SVs in Reforged Garbage are just as slow and useless as the HVs. And the 4 streamers with more than 2 viewers are all worshipping Reforged like it’s the best scenario ever made. But wait there’s more.
From Reforged Eden Scenario A12, in “POI Combat – Missile Turrets:” we get “Their blast radius has been reduced by 1 since it was the same as an artillery turret in the base game, making them simply too dangerous for how cheap they are (both player and zirax versions).” Says who? Where and how does Vermillion draw these ridiculous conclusions? This next quote from “CV/BA: Missile Turrets” is a real doozy.
“The blast radius of these missiles is 4 in vanilla, the same as the ship-destroying Artillery. Which makes it clear there's some kind of ridiculous bias towards rockets over any other weapon type and the devs need to seriously STOP IT. In making every other weapon crap to highlight the various homing missiles, you bring the entire game down.”
Is Vermillion a Paranoid Schizophrenic? He said that the missile blast radius of 4 was proof that Eleon is biased towards rockets over any other weapon type and they need to “STOP IT.” Seriously. He then said Eleon made every other CV weapon crap to highlight the homing missiles. And that is what brings the game down. Not nerfing CV Thrusters by 75%. Oh no. But these paranoid delusions about Eleon discriminating against other turrets. Now that is what brings the game down.
Every other weapon is not crap. They each have their intended uses. Lasers are for taking down shields. Flak cannons are for taking out drones. Plasma cannons are for hammering stationary Bases. Artillery does three times the damage as missiles. Duh. I wonder what that is for. Vermillion is clearly the one with the erroneous biases. Plural.
Back in “POI Combat – Missile Turrets” he says, “In a battle against missile turrets your only chance is Hit-and-Run tactics. DO NOT STOP! Fly your SV like it's a jet fighter.” And later he says, “So I repeat: If you're up against missiles DO NOT STRAFE. You will not survive the experience.” Hey Vermillion, NEWS FLASH! An SV is NOT A JET FIGHTER. It’s what we in the gaming community like to refer to as a “space ship.” It has side thrusters and down thrusters. And furthermore, am I detecting a clear and present bias on the part of Vermillion against strafing? I most certainly am. And it’s clear why.
Basically Vermillion has used Reforged Garbage to make it impossible for a player vehicle to have any kind of horsepower and speed or to strafe. In addition he’s nerfed the most powerful player vehicle weapon, as well as every player vehicle weapon, and then buffed all the stats on the weapons his AI vessels and POIs use in order to stave off their obsolescence. In Reforged, POI turrets have ranges up to 1,300 meters, for example. You see, Vermillion’s fleet consists 100% of dinosaur tanking CVs. The only way they can be dangerous is if the player vessels are made even slower, and the Player weapons are ALL nerfed, which they are.
From “Ship Damage Distribution – CV/BA:” we have, “CV and BA weapons have had their damage greatly reduced by a specific amount for several reasons.” And the reason is, “3: Pre-balancing for full CV-vs-Planet combat - This is all done in preparation of being able to put CVs inside a planet's atmosphere with all weapons unrestricted. Oh yes, I bet you're all looking forward to that and i've got things all lined up so that when you bring a CV against a POI you don't just vaporize it in 3 seconds.” I’ll show you a much better way to enable CV turrets on planet further down. So Vermillion’s big plan is to nerf the CV weapons much further until they are unable to destroy a small base with 4 defensive turrets. Of course he won’t consider how that will make CVs useless in space. But the streamers will still circle jerk.
All this nerfing of player vessels removes more than half of the foundational elements of this 3D Game. Empyrion has 4 3D elements through which the player can interact with the environment. Here they are.
Speed
Shields (dependent on speed to be useful)
Firepower
Armor
Playing Reforged Garbage reduces these four to less than two.
Reduced Firepower
Armor
This makes for BORING LAME gameplay. No more strafing, which he is explicitly biased against, because his obsolete Tovera et al fleet is too slow. No more strafing means shields are useless. And the weapons are even nerfed while the POI turrets do increased damage with faster rounds and much greater range. So the only 3D element that the player can really interact with is armor. Hence the gazillion boring streams of tanked hunks of junk pounding away at each other while the streamers twiddle their thumbs.
- As of 2023 vermillion has given Reforged Garbage the ability to add an infinite number of auxiliary shields to a player build. This means an unlimited number of Shield Hit Points, if you waste 100's of hours farming Quantum Cores or use the Item Menu which takes 3 seconds. As a result LyfeForse has released a video of himself destroying a Tovera in a smaller CV in around a minute in Reforged Eden.
LyfeForse Destroys a Tovera in Reforged Eden With a CV in 80 Seconds
If you pause this video at 28 seconds you will see that the CV that LyfeForse is using, which is called EMP CV 1, has a Shield with 236,900 Hit Points. So this is the current state of this Reforged Garbage Scenario. You spend your whole game building up to this. This is the Grand Finale. You spend hundreds of hours farming enough Quantum Cores (lol it's hard and VERY time consuming) to get enough CPU points to place enough Auxiliary Shields to get your Shield Hit Points up to 236,900 so you can fly over the top of a Tovera and hover around 280 meters above its back, taking the full brunt of the Tovera's firepower, where you then fire your mounted guns at the point where the arms intersect the torso, what you might call the back of the Tovera's neck, for around 80 seconds to kill the Core that is located about 5 blocks down from that arm/torso intersection in the center. You don't have to strafe and you couldn't if you wanted to because vermillion nerfed every Thruster to 25% strength and then after much complaining graciously reduced the Thruster nerf from 25% strength to 33% strength.
In other words, vermillion, on one of his coke binges, decided that the gameplay would be better if he nerfed all thrusters to 33% strength and then made CPU mandatory but allowed you to augment your shield to hundreds of thousands of points if you grind for 100s of hours or use the Item Menu to just give yourself instant Quantum Cores so you can park your CV, SV, or HV next to any level of enemy fire and just sit still there for minutes with no damage. At 2 minutes and 4 seconds you can see that the CV Cored the Tovera with 80% Shields. This was after hovering 280 meters above the Tovera for 80 seconds. This means that this CV, the EMP CV 1, can hover above a Tovera absorbing the full brunt of its fire without moving for 6 minutes and 40 seconds before the Shield reaches 0 hit points. This does not conjure up images of Star Wars space battle scenes. This is a complex work that is way off base and off target. It's called "tweaking." Some elements are nice, most are trash.
I had not mentioned the Tovera Core location until now because it's kind of a spoiler, but by now everyone knows, I suppose. Rest assured that you can hit the Tovera Core from 900 Meters in my Sovereign-Class Reaper and from 600 meters in my Reaper Destroyer SV. You just have to aim for it with the Mounted Rockets once the Mounted Lasers down the Shields. Because of the max acceleration in all 6 directions of these two builds of mine you can easily stay "mounted" on top of and behind the Tovera at 900 meter range in the CV and 600 meter range in the faster SV from where you aim for the "back of the neck." You can kill the Tovera in a minute or less in this way with the CV and in a few minutes with the SV. Around 30% of the time this Sovereign-Class Reaper CV kills a Tovera with the Rocket Turret Volleys in less than a minute by pure luck, from 900 meter range.
I also wanted to illustrate how this Sovereign-Class Reaper and my Reaper Destroyer SV can completely pulverize and completely defang/immobilize a Tovera, respectively. So for the purposes of these posts I screenshotted both ships killing Toveras the hard way, without targeting the Core, in order to show the sheer damage my builds can dish out with vanilla weapons. And I explained how you need to pilot them in order to completely pulverize them. This is because once you develop your piloting skills to that level and THEN begin looking for quick kills like hitting the Tovera Core in the back of the neck, you WILL be deadly in this game. Imagine what you could do in PVP.
It's not just CVs that can kill a Tovera this way in Reforged Garbage. ArtemisRouge Gaming took out a Tovera in Reforged Eden with a Torpedo SV in around 3 minutes of engagement, with timeouts to recharge his Shield.
ArtemisRouge Gaming Destroys a Tovera in Reforged Eden With a Torpedo SV in 3 Minutes of Combat
In this video ArtemisRouge Gaming flies his Torpedo SV up close to the Tovera and takes close range torpedo shots at both the Core on the back of the neck intersection and the decoy turret clusters in the arm tips, which also take fire from the SV turrets. He consistently backs away from the Tovera to recharge his Shields back to 100% when they get depleted to various thresholds. At close range, even as close as 42 meters, it took 15 seconds for his Torpedo SV to drop to 70% Shields while he was moving constantly or hiding behind the stumps of the arms. This means that ArtemisRouge Gaming's Reforged Eden SV can withstand 50 seconds of the full brunt of a Tovera's firepower with a Reforged speed SV before it loses Shields. We all know this translates to 100,000s of Shield Hit Points. That's a lot of Quantum Cores for an SV.
For all of vermillion's talk of "balancing" the game "properly" over the years, SV's with 100,000s of Shield Hit Points sure seems overpowered and unbalanced, don't you think? And slow moving to boot.
What my Sovereign-Class Reaper and my Reaper Destroyer SV illustrate is how you can destroy a Tovera (multiple Tovera's, actually) without taking damage in Vanilla or the now defunct Project Eden (with the stronger Toveras) without taking damage, by harnessing physics through proper ship design. Speed, Shields, and Forward Mounted Turrets on the Same Z plane. Then you have to learn to strafe properly and fly at maximum range, and hit from maximum range with Mounted Lasers. It is a way to defeat Super Dreadnaughts with standard Shields and Weapons, with the exception of the Project Eden Augmented Shields as an unnecessary bonus, which weren't any where near being over powered, in a way that will continue to be valid and function in Blueprints that will continue to be able to be spawned and used indefinately through the endless Eleon update iterations. And because Eleon, as clueless and bumbling as they are, are still much better than a crackhead on a coke binge, fighting Space battles with the mechanics of the vanilla version of the game is much better than using the mechanics of the Reforged Garbage version. Project Eden used to have the vanilla mechanics.
Now just imagine a Best Of Scenario that has the galaxy map, all the custom weapons of Reforged Eden with all their special particle effects with vanilla level resource requirements that are Auto Repairable, and the AI file. And nothing more than some minor tweaks, like Boosters for CV Thrusters and Deconstructors and Furnaces on CVs. Only essential common sense elements from original additions or existing scenarios. NO NERFING. NO BUFFING. Leave that to Eleon. Put pressure on Eleon to get that right in vanilla. Physics.
This Best Of Scenario could include any new original quality content and the best elements of Reforged Eden and any others such as Star Salvage. It could include that scenario's HV, SV, and CV wrecks on planets and in space.
Now just imagine this Sovereign-Class Reaper RETROFITTED with Reforged Eden's custom turrets and mounted weapons AND 100 meters per second acceleration in all six directions, in addition to the faster AI vessels. Fifty six forward mounted on the same Z plane Rocket Turrets replaced with a mix of the deadliest Reforged Eden Turrets. The 20 Mounted Guns replaced with the deadliest Reforged Eden Mounted Guns like the Torpedos. Imagine all those custom weapons are auto repairable. Imagine using those from 900 meters range with 100 meter per second acceleration in all 6 directions and Boost. Imagine doing that in PVP. Even without physics it would be quite a wild ride. The best Space combat action achieved so far in Empyrion.
This Sovereign-Class Reaper would actually look almost like a Mass Effect Reaper with a giant red laser beam on the front. It would have a lot of colorful beams and very fancy projectile rounds firing from 56 forward mounted turrets on the same Z plane. It would rain down destruction from range like no one has ever seen. And best of all, all of its custom turrets, weapons, and devices would be auto repairable. And it would not be burdened by all the baggage that comes with Reforged Eden like 33% strength nerfed thrusters and exorbitant custom device costs. Not to mention unnecessary devices. Keep in mind that you don't necessarily have to use the turret and mounted weapon models from Reforged Eden. You could just find or make or buy your own and just add them in with normal costs and stats. A big giant model does big giant damage. But since Reforged Eden has so many available, it would be very easy to use those and give them much better stats in the Best Of Scenario config files.
This Sovereign-Class Reaper could be given a couple of custom large, red laser beam turrets that do 20,000 points of damage per second 4 block area damage and consume so much power that 4 large T2 generators would only allow for a couple of them. Then the front end of the Sovereign could be redesigned to look like the original Sovereign-Class Reapers from Mass Effect and it would be the deadliest CV in Empyrion with 2 large front turrets instead of 56 regular ones that actually looks almost exactly like this, in Empyrion.
Don't forget the Reaper Destroyer SV with its 32 forward mounted on the same Z plane Minigun Turrets and 120 meter per second acceleration in all six directions while fully loaded. Imagine the visuals you would get from the high speed strafing action of that at 600 meter range, if it was fully retrofitted with the deadliest Reforged Eden custom turrets and mounted weapons like the Torpedos in a scenario that made them cheap to build and auto repairable. It would be the best Space combat action so far achieved in Empyrion.
Overhauling an Alpha Game That Gets 5 Major Updates a Year is Pissing in the Wind
Reforged Garbage is not a scenario. It's a Total Overhaul. Now Overhauling is something you do with a game that has been released in its final state. There are many great Total Overhauls for games like the Total War series. To attempt to undertake the monumental task of Overhauling a game in its early Alpha stage is literally like Pissing in the Wind. It’s like living in Dark City, where the ground, walls and ceiling are always shifting beneath, beside, and above you.
Every update brings the potential that the Reforged Overhaul will be broken, i.e. Vermillion is unable to get the Reforged Blueprints to work again. He is literally going through the entire Configuration files and making impulsive changes to everything, which have compounded results that he doesn't fully understand, i.e. nerfing CV power turrets for planetary use that will ruin CV's usefulness in space. And every update makes changes that require him to go through all the files and change them again. It’s a quantitative, chaotic process instead of a qualitative, focused process. If Eleon were to implement physics, it would wreck Reforged Garbage and all of its proprietary Blueprints.
As it is, Eleon is rebalancing Weapons again. Expect that to totally unhinge all the ridiculous changes Vermillion has made to the Weapon Settings. Just like with 1.2, I think it was 1.2, when all the player's vessels were exploding thanks to Vermillion's ridiculous Overhaul attempt, this Weapon Rebalancing by Eleon will result in Reforged Player Weapons either being overpowered or nerfed beyond playability. Once again all the idiots who have volunteered to be held hostage by Vermillion will have to wait while he frantically tries to un&$@! his foolish Total Overhaul of Alpha Stage Empyrion so that Player Dreadnaughts aren't being destroyed by a single AI Space Drone. Wouldn't it be funny if that actually happened?
That is exactly the type of thing that will consistently happen when you attempt to Total Overhaul an Alpha Game. There is an old saying that says, "Measure twice, cut once." Total Overhauling an Alpha game as Reforged Garbage does is like never measuring and cutting infinitely. This is because there is no way to measure a game that is not yet complete. It is guaranteed to be in constant, major flux. And every update will cause all the Reforged Garbage Cultists to waste their time troubleshooting Reforged Garbage instead of the Vanilla Game.
Keep in mind we are talking about a game that is so Alpha that virtually every element is bugged. Bases still get up and move into the middle of the ocean. Docking still locks sensors in the on position. The game still has no physics making all interactions with terrain effectively broken. We could go on and on. To undertake to Total Overhaul a game in this broken stake is putting the cart before the horse. It's the Credit Default Swap of Gaming. It’s literally exponentially compounding the bugs. And Vermillion's biases are totally delusional.
To actually attempt to Total Overhaul a broken Alpha game like Empyrion seems like the type of thing a meth binger would do. Something that harnesses the endless stream of chaotic, raw energy into doing repetitive activity that never is as good as it seems to the subject. It’s like trying to mop the Ocean. Or trying to count every grain of sand on a beach.
Project Eden is not a Total Overhaul. It just adds some custom items, structures the galaxies into more sophisticated templates, and adds some missions. It can't be broken by the Updates, and it can't break Player Blueprints.
- As of 2023 this has changed. Ravien was indoctrinated by vermillion into the ways of forced, artificial scarcity and abandoned Project Eden. There is now no way to have that galaxy with the vanilla missions or without nerfing all thrusters and weapons.
Bad Decisions By Eleon Cascade Into Bad Scenarios and Streams
This just shows how the bad decisions made by Eleon have cascaded into idiots further propagating the idiocy behind these bad decisions through scenarios, streams, and builds. First Eleon decided that a CV should not be able to destroy a small base with 4 defensive turrets. How they could come to this conclusion is unknown but it clearly involves some clueless pointy-haired boss. Of course a CV can destroy a small base that has only 4 defensive turrets. IT’S SUPPOSED TO. I have a news flash for you. A CV can also destroy another CV that has only 4 defensive turrets with ease. Are you going to cry now? Should we disable CV Power Turrets in Space too? Do I really have to explain all this to the “elites” of Empyrion?
Making Bases Hold Their Own Against CV Power Turrets
The main differences between a ship and a base in Empyrion are mobility and number of shields. A base is a sitting duck, but it can be surrounded by defensive tower mini bases that each have their own shields. A CV can range fight, but it has only got one shield. If you want a base to be impossible for a CV to take out, surround it with 25 4 turret tower mini bases, each with their own shield, so that no matter how a CV approaches, it will be exposed to at least 50 of those turrets. Ravien did this for some high level bases in Project Eden, and it works. That would even give this Reaper pause, because Range in Atmosphere is short and with a 60 m/s speed cap strafing is much less effective on planet. And, obviously, you would set a standard that determines POI level by how many of these 4 turret tower mini bases surround a base. If that had been done from the start, every current POI would be properly configured and rated. What kind of idiot would decide to just turn off all CV power turrets and drills on planet and NIX HALF OF THE GAME PLAY?
A Single SV cannot take down a strong base. It’s not supposed to be able to. SVs, aka “small fighters” are meant to be used alone as scouts and in squadrons for base attacks. You use a squadron of fighters to draw enemy fire while you move your dreadnaughts in to fire the big guns. Do I have to explain everything to these Empyrion veterans with 1,000s of hours of idiotic grinding under their belts?
CPU and Reforged
Then Eleon implemented CPU. I’ve already covered this but now let’s look at how Vermillion ran with this train wreck. So CPU is supposed to force smaller builds because lag. But it is avoidable with an Advanced Core. Vermillion took that option away and nerfed the Advanced Core to only provide one million CPU points instead of negating it completely. So he forces you to use CPU. Then he adds these Quantum Cores, and if you just waste a couple 1,000 hours getting hundreds of them, or use the Item Menu, you can build a ship that is as big as physically possible in the grid. Are you seeing the circular logic here? This is like a dog chasing its own tail. So he forces you to have supposedly lag reducing CPU but you can completely negate it by grinding for a couple 1,000 hours, or just using the Item Menu, and build a behemoth. When you add this all up the bottom line is that Vanilla game play is much better than Reforged Garbage gameplay. But fortunately we have Project Eden for now. (Project Eden is no longer available as a standalone Scenario)
Reforged Blueprints Will Be Unusable When It Is Abandoned
And the worst thing about Reforged Garbage is that it forces you to build blueprints that will only work in Reforged Garbage. And inevitably, every time an update comes out, which is around 5 times a year, Reforged Garbage is going to have many problems that Vermillion needs to fix, because his overhaul of an Alpha Stage Game requires tweaking a massive amount of settings. And until he fixes Reforged Garbage for the update, every Reforged Garbage Blueprint is unusable. Eventually an update will come along that Vermillion will not be able to adjust his ridiculous settings for without breaking EVERY Reforged Garbage Blueprint. He will also eventually stop updating it, because it’s an insanely tedious labor in futility, at which point all those 1,000s of blueprints become useless. By forcing you to build proprietary blueprints, he is forcing you to play with his scenario. You never undertake to overhaul a game that is still in its Alpha stage and getting major updates 5 times a year. It’s asinine.
On Project Eden
Ravien has produced the Project Eden scenario with the correct kinds of modifications. It’s not an overhaul. Its modifications don’t alter the player blueprints or the Vanilla settings. He adds some new items with their own stats. Project Eden will never be broken by an update. It’s the total vision behind what Ravien made Project Eden into that makes it so good. Project Eden is the direction where Vanilla should go. It has much better galaxies, much better missions, and much better random content. The Sun Type Exploration/Research mission is amazing. The UCHN Research Vessels are brilliant. It all really makes the game much more immersive. It’s the perspective. Eleon should hire Ravien to design their Vanilla galaxies and missions.
Unfortunately it is flawed in that vermillion has indoctrinated Ravien into his artificial scarcity obsessive compulsive disorder which he acquired from the dolts at Eleon. So all of Project Eden's custom turrets, weapons, and items are useless because they are WAAAAAAY TOOOO EXPENSIVE and they DO NOT AUTO REPAIR. Just ignore them and enjoy the better galaxy and traders and extra missions. As a whole the Vanilla missions are better because there are way more of them and they are complete. But Ravien's custom missions are of a higher quality than the Vanilla missions, although the Dead Planet mission final stage is overpowered for one player.
- As of 2023 this has changed. Ravien was indoctrinated by vermillion into the ways of forced, artificial scarcity and abandoned Project Eden. There is now no way to have that galaxy with the Vanilla missions or without nerfing all thrusters and weapons. And he never finished his missions.
On Grinding and Artificial Scarcity
But Ravien is also influenced by the terrible vision that Eleon has adopted. This lame narrative of artificial scarcity and ridiculously long grinding requirements that are only so because they add a zero to a setting line. In Vanilla, all the resources are only available in 1/10th the quantity that they should be. And they only produce 1/10th of what they should in construction. And there are already way too many resource types for the scale of the game. This is all done to expand the grind as much as possible. They should also increase the Force output of all Thrusters by a factor of 10. This would allow you to build good looking vessels without needing 108 XL Thrusters to reach Max Acceleration on all six sides. I would only need 1.8 XL Thrusters per side, and I would be able to use smaller Thrusters for more aesthetics. It would be futile to waste time editing the ecf files to implement these changes, for the same reason that the changes Vermillion makes in Reforged Garbage are futile. Empyrion is still an Alpha game with 5 major updates every year. Only Eleon can correct this fallacy.
One Planet has enough energy resources to power a CV for more than a few days, but not according to the devs. One whole planet should have enough promethium to power a fleet forever. According to the vision of the devs, the universe is a place of universal scarcity. Everything is scarce. You may need to deplete entire planets just to get enough steel to build one CV. It’s the same everywhere. You have to keep depleting planet after planet and asteroid field after asteroid field just to keep one CV going. The whole universe is like that. It’s extremely lame. And there are so many different resources. They add resources every year.
It’s all meant to make the grind take up as much of the Player’s time and attention as possible. Because Eleon have no plan for a Main Game. The circle jerkers call it the “End Game,” as a gas-lighting gimmick. It’s the Main Game. You know, that part where the fruits of your labor all pay off and you are able to fight epic battles and win consistently. You are able to go on awe inspiring missions. You are able to have visually and physically realistic epic space and planetary battles that are in themselves not capable of ever becoming boring. We are talking about physics of course. Eleon has stated that they will not be implementing physics.
On Mining Networks and Military Campaigns
You see, you should be able to build a mining network out of a base or network of bases that allows you to automate the mining of all the resources on that planet. You could have some Mining Devices and Crew and Mining Drones that would just fly back and forth between the base and all the planetary deposits. They would fill your Base Ore Containers. All the player would need to do is come back and transfer the ingots to their CV.
This would free the player up to build awesome vessels and then use them to complete missions and clear out territories. There could be a political /military conquest element, like taking over a chunk of Zirax Space, or all of it. You could even make Alliances to get other factions to help you conquer Zirax or any other faction’s space. A long term Military Campaign. Where you could have Allies Warp in upon request to join your battles with mutual enemies. And you could use those Allied ships as bullet sponges for enemy rounds while you range fight at 900 meters.
There could be a Command Base and a Drone Base requirement to own a planet, with the same applying to the space orbits and sectors. The Player Faction could take over Planets and Orbits and Sectors by Coring the Command and Drone Bases. This would not affect non-hostile Faction owned Bases, but it would flip all remaining enemy Bases to the Player Faction. The Player could be given the ability to repair these Cored Bases with pre-existing Templates. Some Automation Devices installed in the Command Base could keep all the flipped bases stocked and operational. The playfields would then be under Player Faction Drone protection. The Player could even be able to build and deploy his own Patrol Vessels, possibly through the Factory with an option to “Spawn as Patrol Vessel.” Even Configure their Patrol Routes.
In this way the Player Faction could take over Solar Systems. And it could only require a percentage of the Planets and Sectors to flip the whole Solar System to the Player Faction. The same way the current simplistic design has Base Attacks, Empyrion could have enemy fleets attack a Player Faction owned Complete Solar System, Planet, or Sector. The Player would get a Mission Pop Up telling him which Star System is under attack and by how many fleets and ships with some general intelligence on ship classes. Then the Player would have to Warp there and call in all Allies to Warp in reinforcements as the Player hunts down each fleet and engages it. Great for Single and Multiplayer. Many other possibilities that we have all played in some form or another in other games could also become part of Empyrion. Now imagine all this with a full implementation of Physics. This is what we call Main Game, not “End Game.” Instead this is how Empyrion works by design.
Eleon’s Vision for Empyrion Gameplay: Empyrion Groundhog Grinding Day
You start the game and you grind. And then you grind some more. And then you grind some more. The circle jerkers tell you that you get cool points if you “earn it.” Yes they actually say that on stream. And in text. Yes if you use the Item Menu in this eternally broken game you are “not cool.” These circle jerkers literally worship Empyrion and the devs as a cult. So you grind some more and a couple hundred hours or even thousands of hours later, you are finally able to build that… garbage CPU Reforged piece of crap CV that doesn’t have this and doesn’t have that and needs a tugboat to start moving. “End Game.” Get the picture? That is exactly what the devs and all the circle jerkers and streamers are selling you.
And if everyone keeps promoting Reforged Garbage as if it’s the best scenario ever, the clueless devs are going to think that everyone actually likes it, when it’s really just that tiny clique of circle jerkers and streamers. And they are going to start moving Vanilla in the Reforged Garbage direction. They already said they are going to rebalance weapons in the next update. Are the turrets going to come out all nerfed like in Reforged Garbage? That will make the game unplayable.
If the players don’t stop pretending that Reforged Garbage isn’t just that, garbage, then this is what is going to happen to Empyrion in the future. CPU will be made mandatory. Everything, I mean everything, will be nerfed by 75% or more. And the current 14 or whatever it is ores that are in the grind will double to 28 scarce ores you now have to find and mine in slow, weak, low cargo space hunks of junk. It will take TWICE as LOOOONG to grind. And the circle jerkers will say, “Isn’t that awesome?”
Stupidium
And one of the new ores will be called “Stupidium.” And the same four streamers will be streaming Let’s Play Season 72. And it will go something like this.
“I’ve found my first deposit of the new ore called Stupidium. Jolly good! I am now going to use my 458th slow, crappy, low storage CPU, Reforged Garbage mining HV to mine the Stupidium. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ‘Nothrusty.’ So I’m drilling a hole into the ground. There I just got some Stupidium. Uh oh. I can’t move. Nothrusty seems to be stuck, Ladies and Gentlemen. Let me get out and see what it’s stuck on. Damn I fell all the way down to the bottom of the hole. There is no way to jetpack out of here. I don’t have time to drill my way out.
Ladies and Gentlemen I will now do a cheeky cheat and use God Mode to go… INSPECT Nothrusty. Oh I see the problem. The drill missed a tiny pinch of dirt, and its hovering right behind Nothrusty. Not only can Nothrusty not push anything because it has no thrusty, but Empyrion has no physics, so a couple granules of sand floating in the air can stop an HV. Eleon please fix. I’ll have to dig Nothrusty out in God Mode.
Ok I have dug a path that Nothrusty can use to get out of the hole. Here goes. Oh Damn. Nothrusty doesn’t have enough thrust to negotiate the incline of the path I just spent a half hour drilling out in God Mode with my Epic Drill on stream.” One and a half hours later, “Ok I’m BACK. I finally got Nothrusty out of the Stupidium Deposit hole that I dug for myself, and I finished mining the Stupidium ore with the Epic Drill and Player Drone. It took me five minutes with an Epic Drill. Guys, it’s easier to mine Stupidium with an Epic Drill and your Player Drone than it is to use a mining HV.”
- The Stupidium story turned out to be a prophetic tome... within exactly 30 days. You see I originally posted this Sovereign-Class Reaper on June 28, 2021. No less and no more than 30 days later on July 27, 2021, a certain jolly streamer did THIS!
Watch From 21 Minutes to 38 Minutes and 30 Seconds
Gosh that looks like great "fun." That must be some of the Reforged Garbage "much improved gameplay" that all the streamers are always braying about. You know, that kind of gameplay is just as much "fun" to watch someone stream as it is for them to play it. It’s as if he was trying to demonstrate his loyalty to all things Vermillion and Reforged Garbage by proving my prophecy wrong, and... kaboom!
- Deja Vu. Ooops he did it again. This time on Jan 9, 2023. Spanj did the exact same thing that he did in the video above. They say the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. And here we are. Empyrion is at extremely, unplayabley bug ridden 1.9.2 (or Alpha 13.9.2 as we call it in reality) and Spanj is ready to start another play through. Hmm. I wonder which scenario he will play?
Reforged Garbage has just released a promo for Fall 2023 that shows how vermillion is busy doing the vital, all important work of replacing all the mounted weapon models with turret models that will still be static mounted guns, not turrets. This is absolutely retarded on its face, and history tells us that we can safely assume that Spanj will of course cue off of this and go full retard with yet another play through of Empyrion Reforged Garbage.
And in true Reforged Garbage Circle Jerk tradition, we can count on Spanj to stay true to the protocols of insanity by repeating the installation of Empyrion, the Subscription to Reforged Garbage, and the starting of yet a 3rd Let's Play without a clue in the world that all the same game breaking bugs and cocaine binge inspired idiotic Reforged Garbage Scenario changes will lead to the same disastrous train wrecks over and over again starting with the always reliable vermillion nerfing of all thrusters so that the absolute most barebones HV can't move up any incline whatsoever and culminating in the usual "dreadnaught" (not really) that is too slow to keep its shields up and Spanj wouldn't even try anyways so it loses more than 50% of its blocks against a weakling Tovera for the anticlimactic, deflationary, minor finale of the series.
And in true Reforged Circle Jerk fashion, straight out the gate in the first episode of the series we have Spanj building his absolute minimum barebones HV and... and... can you see where this is going?
Watch From 4 Hours to 4 Hours and 30 Minutes
We call this one "Stuck in a Gorge," or to be more accurate, "Stuck in multiple gorges and gorges within gorges." This one is pure comedy. It's even funnier than the first time. He put the absolute minimum blocks and devices into this HV, and it could not handle any incline whatsoever. And it was over CPU by more than 30%, because Eleon gave the Ground Repulsor Engine 400 CPU! In this stream Spanj and the Chaos Crew assumed that is was vermillion. To be fair it is the kind of thing he does. Does this give you that vertigo sense of a turd circling down a flushing toilet bowl?
This is why I always say never play Reforged Garbage and either Item Menu Advanced Cores into all your builds or turn off CPU. I can't wait to see Spanj try to open his first locked POI door. lol Or discover the new Teleporter game breaking bug. Or the vanishing fuel bug. In this first 5 hour stream they did nothing but grind ores in a way over nerfed and over CPUed HV that got stuck over and over again. What Spanj needs is an HV like my Reaper Recon Elite Starter HV. It's the only HV worth using without physics.
This stream is quite hilarious. It should be in a comedy category. It's the extreme and frequent train wrecks that are so entertaining, not the dazzling space action. There is a lot of comedy gold in Spanj's old videos, and it is always due to the phenomena I have been articulating in this post. The toxic Circle Jerk environment that Eleon brought about when they implemented CPU and rejected physics. It makes anyone who cucks to CPU and Reforged Garbage become stupid by default. Because CPU and Reforged Garbage are illogical contradiction constructs.
Like that time when Spanj was so proud of his cave base, and it came under attack by Zirax Bomber and Minigun Drones. He died and death looped for awhile until he was able to get into his damaged SV without his backpack. He had lost his forward thrusters so the only way to stop was to crash into the ground which causes no damage because of no physics. So he smashed into the ground, got out and grabbed his backpack and got back in when BOOM! His cockpit was gone and he was dead. Then he was caught in an inescapable death loop because the area was covered by two Zirax Bomber Drones and two Zirax Minigun Drones. And he's on foot with a T1 Sniper Rifle. lol And the Zirax Drones are hammering him every time he spawns. lol He had to call in his faction to rescue him by taking out the Zirax Drones.
Watch From 3 Minutes and 46 Seconds to 15 Minutes
It's a good idea to take out the Drone Base before you build a base. Or arm your base with turrets before building other things. But the funniest part was how absolutely PISSED he was. HAHAHAH. He didn't believe it was possible that it could happen to him.
But this was nothing compared to the other time when he had all his life savings in his 1st CV, and he was taking on some Pirate Station with a long line of four or five Mini Defense Stations loaded with turrets. So he decides to "strafe" them by flying past the whole line and attacking the last one which is the farthest away. lol He reaches the final Mini Defense Station under a barrage of fire from all five of them and BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!
Spanj's CV is GONE! He's stranded in a sector with no planets and no Pentaxid for his lucky SV that survived. HAHAHAH He was so PISSED. Lost all his resources. So he made up some unconvincing excuse for what happened that involved Ctrl W which activates Cruise Control and him not knowing that the SV was moving and then not being able to move it. But in the video he says he is going to straff and it doesn't stop moving until its 80% pulverized by the Bandit Stations. Maybe it is just the video he was left with. But it is suspicious how much it looks like he is just trying to cover up for how stupid that Pass in Review to a hostile enemy was. Had to start over from scratch.
Watch From 43 Minutes and 10 Seconds To the End
Always shoot the closest target first. Spanj understands this in First Person Shooting but he just can't seem to grasp the tactics of Space Ship combat. He really needs to play a real game with physics like Space Engineers until he masters the craft. After this disaster Spanj looked around for Pentaxid in the sector in order to escape in his SV, which he eventually did. This Sovereign-Class Reaper has no problem with ANY Pirate force of any size. And my Reaper Destroyer SV doesn't either, but it is also the perfect vehicle to use against Pirate sized CVs. Use it to get your Reputation with the Kriel and Colonists maxed out by destroying all Pirate ships in all sectors you enter for awhile. It is awesome fast action. And easy to loot them too. This Reaper is too big for Pirates. I mean you can, but the Pirate Ships will be completely pulverized along with all the loot, unless you only use the Defensive Turret Battery. But my SV is just perfect for dogfighting small fast CVs.
Here is another funny one where Spanj parks his small SV on the side of a Zirax POI so that he can use the POI for cover from a nearby Zirax Base with the deadly Green Plasma Turret from Reforged Eden. It works just fine until he deastroys the Zirax Core. Once that Core is gone, the nearby Zirax Base with the Green Plasma Turret is no longer restricted from shooting through the Zirax POI that is protecting Spanj's SV. Just watch it to see what happens.
Watch from 2 Minutes and 40 Seconds to 8 Minutes and 30 Seconds
That action was pretty entertaining. The game requires you to always think intuitively in order to survive. Just imagine if it had physics. And no bugs. Even with the outdated graphics and animations and NPC models. Combat would be exponentially more entertaining. As it is now, unfortunately these immersive moments are rare. Most of the time your immersion is shattered by tactic blocking mechanical inadequacies and monster bugs.
The thing is these immersion stoppers never happen in Space Engineers streams or any other real game streams. They don't happen once and they definitely don't happen over and over and over and over again. And who streams the same garbage game over and over and over again, year after year after year? Spanj's personality is what converts his streams from the usual Incompetent and Lame category that all the other Empyrion streams are in to the Comedy category that his streams are in. Sort of an Englishman cross between Mr. Magoo, Elmer Fudd, and Gimli the Dwarf with fiery red hair. And it works. For a while. But eventually people get tired of watching clowns get pied in the face by their own doing. Except for the Circle Jerkers of course. But that's a shrinking pool of viewers.
And then the next streamer comes on.
HV Stuck In A Gorge
“OK so I’m back with Stage 17-D-45H of my 253rd crappy CPU Reforged Garbage HV. I wanted to try to reintroduce a role for HVs in Empyrion (Reforged Garbage), because they don’t really have much use anymore (due to nerfing of all Thrusters to 25% now 33% strength). I want to make this HV compatible with Vanilla but I also want it to be compatible with Reforged, and of course it must have CPU because reasons. But I can’t make it work in both. Ooooh Gosh. I don’t know what to do. Should I make two versions? Gosh, I just don’t know.
I want to add another Thruster here but I don’t have enough CPU. I could add another Extender but that’s going to make it very expensive. I could just not play Reforged Garbage and use an Advanced Core or turn off CPU but all the idiots are using CPU and playing Reforged Garbage so of course I have to because…
Ok so my HV is ready for its first test. I always build the whole thing and texture it before I even think about testing it. So I’m driving off the Landing Pad. Ok it seems to have good speed going down the ramp. That’s a good sign. Ok I’m on wild terrain now. Oh darn, I’m stuck. What the hell? I can’t move at all. Let me get out and see what… oh gosh it’s stuck on this little twig. I’ll have to get a Saw and chop it down.”
The next episode comes along.
“Ok guys, I’m here with my buddies on this exotic planet with high plateaus. My new HV is ready for deployment. Today we are going to kill some Zirax in Reforged Garbage. So I landed my CV on this plateau. I’m driving my HV out the Hangar Door. Ok I’m on the ground. Oh no it’s sliding down the incline. The ground here is too steep, even with 100 Thrusters this HV doesn’t have enough acceleration to stop sliding down this 25 degree incline. Oh no it’s getting close to the cliff. Oh no it’s a deep gorge. Stop darn it. STOP! It just went over the edge. I’m falling. Still falling. Still falling. Oh NO. I’m stuck at the bottom of this 200 meter deep gorge. I can’t move at all. Hey guys. I need help here. My brand new HV is stuck at the bottom of a 200 meter deep gorge on its first voyage as soon as it left the CV.”
“Ok we’re all on our way. Let me call the Server Administrators.”
“Hi I’m one of the Server Administrators. Wow. You are really stuck down there. It looks like I am going to have to bring a CV that can fit down that gorge and we are going to have to get your HV to dock to it so we can pull it out.”
“Yeah, because it sure doesn’t have the power to climb a hill on its own.”
These two events actually happened to JRandall and XCaliber during two streams in April 2021. Here is one of them.
Watch From 36 Minutes to 2 Hours and 1 Minute
(Yes it took them one and a half hours to get the Reforged Garbage CPU HV Tank out of the gorge.)
This is the second event. During the first CPU HV with thrusters nerfed by vermillion disaster, JRandall was screaming "Noooo! Nooooo!" as this HV Tank slid off the CV ramp and straight into a gorge. XCaliber plays a recording of those "Noooo!"s at
39 Minutes and 26 Seconds.
I think XCaliber deleted that 1st HV stuck in a gorge disaster video because it was very embarrassing and traumatic for JRandall. And JRandall must have deleted his "Work in Progress" video where that tank immediately got stuck on a twig and he had to saw the twig away in order to move his massive Reforged Garbage CPU HV Tank that looks pretty and is useless.
This is what Vermillion calls “realistic.” But you all get the picture. Yet, just because people make bad choices in some areas doesn’t mean they can’t get other things right and vice versa. Now about the good things that Eleon and Vermillion have accomplished in this game.
If you absolutely insist on playing Empyrion, there is only one way to get the best and most out of it. Get the best and most out of it. Ravien was indoctrinated by vermillion so there is no longer a Project Eden scenario. It was getting lamer and lamer with more and more artificial scarcity anyways, and no more vanilla missions. Spanj or anyone with a crew that could handle the work should take their crew and make their own Best Of Scenario but they should do it the smart way, if possible.
Smart means keeping the individual workload of the project to a bare minimum. This means division of labor, as in have three people do the galaxy and three people do the custom weapons and effects and 3 people do the Star Salvage HV, SV, and CV wrecks. It means having three people to do custom POIs and three people to do custom missions. It means making these things in a way that doesn't have multiple cascading dependencies and that use vanilla assets. This alone will make the creation and maintenance of an excellent Best Of Scenario very easy for a crew. Nobody will need to stay up all week on coke.
Smart also means attempting to only update your server, clients, and scenario when a final version of a good update comes out, if it is practical to do so. But even if you have to roll with each update, not wasting time redoing what Eleon has already done will mean much less work than what vermillion and ravien put in and you will be dividing that lesser amount of labor by a crew. When Spanj made the Farr content he had a couple dozen players working on the content. So somebody needs to do that for a Best Of Scenario.
There is evidence that it is possible to roll back to an earlier version, and more importantly, stay on that version without another update everytime you start Empyrion, but it looks like it will be in a format that includes intermittent periods when it does not work. Steam is who decided to make updates mandatory, and they are moving in the direction of ending access to older versions of games, but the Steam client intermittently stops the ability to download older versions and then enables it again later. Apparently it currently works with the Steam Client again as of January, 2023. I suspect that the method through which you stop Steam from updating games will also be subject to intermittent periods when it doesn't work. If the current trend continues, at some point Steam will prevent all downloading of older versions of games and all methods of stopping updates when the Steam Client is on.
How to Stop the Steam Client From Updating
This is why it could be useful to disable Steam Client Updates on your Client Installation. This apparently is easy to do. This guide shows you the Steam Client GUI options that you have available to manipulate Updates, and last it shows you how to stop the Steam Client itself from updating. This would be useful to do while you are in a version of Steam that allows you to download old Manifests and stop game updates. You would want to block the updates, then after you verify that a new Steam Client update still allows you to download Manifests and stop game updates, you would let the Steam Client update again, and then block it from updating until the next one. The basic instructions are as follows:
1. Add start attributes to the Steam shortcut
A. Right-click on your Steam desktop icon, then select Properties.
B. Go to the Target field.
C. Add the following startup arguments after the path: -noverifyfiles -nobootstrapupdate -skipinitialbootstrap - norepairfile
-overridepackageurl
2. Block the Steam client from updating
A. Use the Windows key on your keyboard, then search for Notepad, and open it.
B. Write down the following line:
BootStrapperInhibitAll=Enable
C. Save the file in the Steam installation folder as Steam.cfg.
The Guide warns that using this method to stop Steam Client Updates is "highly discouraged" and "putting yourself at risk." I am not sure if he is referring to hacking vulnerabilities or potential bans from Steam. It is worth looking into it before you actually do it.
Making a total overhaul scenario is pissing in the wind with this game because it will never be finished and will constantly be getting worthless updates. By the same logic, accepting every update when it is forced out is pissing in the wind. You can use Steam console commands to get steam to install an older version and you can also stop updates to a specific game by editing a file in the (Steam\Steamapps) folder. When I used to play Empyrion I would never update until the absolute last version from a decent update. I only ever installed 1.7.9 and I still have 1.7.9. It was obvious from reading the complaints that 1.8 was crap, and so was 1.9. 1.9 is still unplayable. I don't expect any future versions to be playable. But they may have one more update that at least fixes the stupid changes in 1.9, like the armor suit light on the head that requires a helmet. Apparently they made some progress in 1.9.2 with optimization and the 100% RAM VRAM CPU usage when you have 32 GB of RAM and 16 GB of VRAM on an i7 bug. At least I saw some echoes of that. Fingers crossed, eh lads?
How to Roll Back to a Previous Game Version and Stop Steam Forced Game Updates in 2023
The easiest way to roll back a version of Empyrion after a forced update is to get into the habit of making a backup of your game folder after every update that you want to be able to roll back to. Go to (Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival) and copy all files and folders to a backup location and paste them into a folder named with an appropriate naming convention like "Empyrion 1.7.9 220214." Had you done this, when Empyrion was updated to 1.8, you could have simply deleted the game files and folders in (Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival), or backed them up as well before deleting them to avoid having to download them again if you want them later, and then copied your backup game files and folders from that backup folder that you named "Empyrion 1.7.9 220214." back into its original Steam game folder location called (Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival)).
Basically, if you make a backup of all the game files of every version of Empyrion that you have as soon as you have verified that it works, then you will always be able to roll back to those versions. Simple as. You just need the hard drive space. And once you have copied a version's game files to a backup folder and then copied your current game save files back to (Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\Saves\Games), replacing old game save files by deleting them first, you can delete the save game files in the backup folder that you just made, which will be in "Empyrion 1.7.9 220214\Saves\Games," in order to save hard drive space.
You should also make sure that (Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\Saves\Blueprints\"some number") has the latest files that you should have also backed up before you copied an old version of the game files there. You should always have a current Blueprint folder backup before you make any changes to the game version in (Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival)or before you mess with the Saves folder that is in there. The same goes for always having a current game save folder backup before you make changes.
You should also backup (Steam\Steamapps\appmanifest_383120.acf) with the same game version game files as this is the file you will need. Save them together. When you copy the older game files over to your game folder you will probably need to copy the backup appmanifest_383120.acf to (Steam\Steamapps), overriding the new one, and edit 3 fields. One of the best free text file editors is Notepad++ so use that to edit the acf file and the scenario config files. This will require some experimentation and will vary over time. It may be possible to just use the latest appmanifest_383120.acf with the older game files now or at some point in the future.
To sum it up, make a properly named backup folder for your blueprints folder and your game save folder. Keep them current by copy/delete/pasting from your game folder once a week or so, and before changing game version. Backup your (Steam\Steamapps\appmanifest_383120.acf) file. You could also backup your scenario folder. Make a copy of each update's game files in an appropriately named backup folder and delete the saves if you are worried about hard drive space. Blueprints are tiny files so it's up to you if you want to delete them. By doing this consistently you will be able to instantly roll back to any version of Empyrion and you will never lose your saves or have to redownload blueprints from the workshop that you are already subscribed to. But there is one more caveat.
What do you do when Steam forces out the next Eleon update? Worse still, most likely Steam will try to update your older version of Empyrion every time you start it, if you have it configured that way. Whenever it's configured to update, it will because Steam will see that its an older version. This reddit post explains how to stop updates entirely for a specific game. The explanation is in broken English so I'll explain it.
When Eleon pushes an update to Steam, Steam updates its records and checks a file in your (Steam\Steamapps) folder called appmanifest_383120.acf. The number 383120 is the Steam App ID for Empyrion which you can find from the URL of the Steam Empyrion Store page. This file has a few fields that get updated by the update and those new values will tell Steam that Empyrion is up to date every time it checks appmanifest_383120.acf when you start the game. You have to edit your older version appmanifest_383120.acf so that the relevant fields have the same values as the latest Empyrion update appmanifest_383120.acf. The easiest way to make sure you have the correct data is to let it update your game to the latest version and then make a backup copy of your new latest appmanifest_383120.acf.
Then copy your older version game files over to your empty game folder and the corresponding older appmanifest_383120.acf over to (Steam\Steamapps) where you should have backed up the new one along with the new game files and then deleted it. You could also experiment with keeping the new appmanifest_383120.acf to see if you can run the older version of the game with it. Otherwise you will need to compare the old appmanifest_383120.acf to the new appmanifest_383120.acf and fix the following fields of the old appmanifest_383120.acf:
1. Change the State Flags to 4.
2. Change the "buildid" of the old file to the number in the new file.
3. Add any missing manifests if Eleon added any new ones. It will definitely be easier to copy the manifests from a current
appmanifest_383120.acf than it would to figure them out from the steamdb.info site.
Here is a sample acf file for Portal 2.
"AppState"
{
"appid""620"
"Universe""1"
"name""Portal 2"
"StateFlags""4"
"installdir""Portal 2"
"LastUpdated""1546915851"
"UpdateResult""0"
"SizeOnDisk""12772699651"
"buildid""3261795"
"LastOwner""76561198124511924"
"BytesToDownload""0"
"BytesDownloaded""0"
"AutoUpdateBehavior""0"
"AllowOtherDownloadsWhileRunning""0"
"ScheduledAutoUpdate""0"
"StagingFolder""1"
"UserConfig"
{
"language""english"
}
"InstalledDepots"
{
"624"
{
"manifest""6415342253277896102"
}
"622"
{
"manifest""2180841775043336221"
}
"621"
{
"manifest""5315625579909971887"
}
"323180"
{
"manifest""4821416258997072443"
"dlcappid""323180"
}
}
"MountedDepots"
{
"624""6415342253277896102"
"622""2180841775043336221"
"621""5315625579909971887"
"323180""4821416258997072443"
}
}
The reason for editing an old one instead of using the new one is that other fields such as "SizeOnDisk" won't be the same. You can probably edit the new appmanifest_383120.acf with the appropriate values from the old one to get it to work, as well as editing the old one with new data for those three fields. All the posts say that this is a trial and error thing, but that it works, so once you figure it out, write it down.
This page has an older alternative way to stop Steam from requiring an update to play a game that may or may not
still work, and an excellent, detailed explanation of how to edit the appmanifest_383120.acf so that Steam won't update Empyrion.
How to Download an Older Version of Empyrion like 1.7.9 That Isn't Listed in the Steam Options
But what if you don't have a backup of the game files for the version of Empyrion that you want to play? Then you can use steamdb.info to locate that package and then instruct steam to download it in the Steam Client Console. This Steam Community Guide shows you how to locate and download an older version of a game in Steam using the Steam Client Console. That guide is on the Steam Community servers so don't feel like its some shady secret.
The guide is a little old so the steamdb.info website looks a little different now, but you just search for Empyrion, click the blue 383120 next to Game Empyrion - Galactic Survival, then click the Depots tab under the game summary, which will change the information below to the Depot large white font title. Under that click the blue 383121 next to Empyrion - Galactic Survival Content and then click the Manifests tab under the game summary. Manifests is the list of updates that have been pushed out with their MANIFESTIDs and dates.
You then open the Steam Client Console by typing "steam://nav/console" in your browser's URL. Press Enter and a Steam Launch Application should pop up. Choose "Steam Client Bootstrapper" which will open the Steam Client Console in your Steam Client. The syntax to the "download_depot" command is as follows:
download_depot <appid> <depotid> [<target manifestid>] [<delta manifestid>] [<depot flags filter>] : download a
single depot
You only need to worry about the first three arguments to it. Type the command, then the App ID, Depot ID, and the Manifest ID of the depot version you want, which you got from the steamdb.info page for Empyrion. So let's say I wanted to download the v1.9 Patch from 20 Dec, 2022. In other words, the game files for that prerelease of 1.9 so that I could roll back from the current 1.9.2. On the steamdb.info Empyrion Manifests page you can see the list of Manifests with their dates. From the Steam Empyrion Community News Tab you can see that the v1.9 Patch was released on 20 Dec, 2022. On the steamdb.info Empyrion Manifests page the closest date is 19 Dec, 2022. Click on the blue number for that date which is 516790545777180957 and you will see that the Permanent Link on the blue bar for that Manifest page has the date 20 Dec, 2022, the same date that is on the Steam News Page announcement and the Empyrion Online Announcement. In this case I would type the following in the Steam Client Console and press Enter:
Empyrion App ID Depot ID Manifest ID <-- For Empyrion v1.9 Patch from 20 Dec, 2022.
download_depot 383120 383121 516790545777180957
Then it would download and when it was finished it would tell you where it was saved to. You would go there and copy it to a backup location and then to your empty game folder if you wanted to play it. Then you would probably have to mess with the appmanifest_383120.acf in order to stop Steam from updating it. I'm not sure if the Manifest ever includes an appmanifest_383120.acf file. It may be edited and created by the Steam Client separately from the Manifest file contents. Using a current appmanifest_383120.acf and editing the appropriate fields to match the older Manifest, such as package size as I explained above, may be a way to solve the appmanifest_383120.acf problem when you download an old Manifest if there is a problem. Once you get this deep into the weeds you will know what to search for to solve whatever problems you run into. But there are always caveats.
Both downloading Manifests of older Updates as well as stopping Steam from updating when you install an older version are not exact sciences. Steam goes through periods where one or the other or both of these features are blocked. They may shut them permanently at some point. But both parts are currently working according to players as of January 2023. People are using it to play old versions of Valdheim Online.
Another problem is download speeds. Steam actively throttles certain older manifests at certain times. You may get good speeds or you may get a very slow one. This is why backing up new updates as soon as you verify they work is the best policy. The steamdb.info website appears to be an advocacy group that wants Steam to allow more freedom with regards to updates. They oppose the forced updates and blocking of rollbacks. Make that the inconveniencing of rollbacks. They have a blog page regarding Manifests that is worth a read to get the history of Steam decisions with regards to player rights and updates/rollbacks.
There is also an alternative way to download Manifests that uses the 3rd Party Depot Downloader App. The benefit of this app is that over the last 3 years there have been times when the Steam Client Console would not work, but the 3rd Party Depot Downloader App did, as well as vice versa, and times when they both worked and neither worked. Here is a guide to getting and using the 3rd Party Depot Downloader App. Be aware that this app uses more arguments than the first 3 that the Steam Client Console uses. And it uses your Steam Account and Password. This is posted in the Steam Community so I wouldn't worry about it being some kind of phishing expedition. If you look into the Depot Downloader or steamdb.info which also uses your Steam account you will see that they are legitimate organizations with secure apps.
Once you discover the current working method to roll back and stop game updates you can post a guide on your Server Discord Page. There are lots of posts of people claiming to be doing it for online game play with games like Valdheim. Access to the Blueprint Workshop and the online functionality in general may be some of the things that intermittently stop working while playing older versions.
While Steam is the policy maker that forces updates and is making rolling back a game version difficult, this policy is exacerbated by the incompetence of Eleon. The more frequent a dev team pushes an update, the more problems Steam players will have, especially when it comes to online gaming through Steam with a game that can be modded. I've seen at least 10 posts on Steam saying that 1.9 locked all of a server's players out during the week of Christmas, and that Eleon does this every year. Clients can not connect to a server until it updates to the same version of Empyrion that the client is on. Servers running scenarios like the Total Overhaul Reforged Garbage and Star Salvage have to wait for the scenario creators to update them to the new Empyrion version before they can be upgraded. This is a problem that is caused by Eleon's ineptness when it comes to timing and choices in general, and the creators of the Total Overhauls who have bitten off way more than they can chew.
Scenarios in Empyrion should only include essential galaxy structure, custom weapons and effects and other added things like wrecks that don't have multiple, cascading dependencies that have to be followed to their source and edited. And they should include custom POIs and custom missions that use the vanilla assets. Keep it as simple as possible. Parts that Eleon configures will improve when they improve them, without you wasting recurring hours doing it for them in your scenario. Don't change the already sorted out mechanics. You are supposed to be adding excellent content, not duplicating the work of the devs. Lobby the devs with one voice to fix the things they have already put into the game, like mechanics. The more complicated you make your scenario, the harder it will be to maintain and the more likely an update will break it.
Steam is definitely not a one size fits all platform. Their restriction of roll backs and forced updates reflect their concerns over bandwidth costs. Unfortunately "Early Access" usually means unqualified devs who don't know what they are doing and this translates into countless unnecessary updates that cost Steam money. If they got rid of "Early Access" games they would probably not have to restrict roll backs and not have to force updates.
Steam player problems are directly proportional to how often a game gets updates and whether it can be modded or not. The more updates it gets, the more problems players will have on Steam. If it has mods, the players will have problems on Steam. So for a linear game with no mods and few updates, players on steam would have no problems ever. But for a game like Empyrion with 10 dev idiots ineptly replacing placeholders with different placeholders year after year with at least 20 total updates (hotfixes lol) per year that also has idiots making Total Overhaul scenarios like Reforged Garbage, players on Steam will be pulling their hair out from the endless frustrations and game breaking catastrophes, which will happen during Christmas week, repeatedly, among other badly chosen times. It is much easier to figure out ways to prevent the game from updating. Think outside the box.
If you are willing to jump through all these hoops to run a server with an older version of Empyrion and show your players how to roll back to an older version of the client on your Discord, you could follow my approach and only update and publish your scenario when you find an absolutely final version of a decent update. Like 1.7.9 instead of 1.7.0. And then you would skip 1.8 and 1.9 completely because they are crap. But if it's not practical to stay on an older version, or if it stops working at some point, then you would just have to update your scenario with every full release of a new number, such as 1.8 and then 1.9. You usually won't need to update a scenario for 1.8.1 through 1.8.9 etc. The division of labor and avoidance of Total Overhaul endeavors, basically not redoing anything the devs already did, and sticking to only adding elements that are worth the effort it takes to make and maintain a scenario will make the workload very low even if it is not practical to roll back and stay back.
And then what you would do with 1.7.9, as an example for the sake of argument since 1.8 and 1.9 are garbage, is make a Best Of Scenario that takes your own original mods, if any, plus ONLY the good stuff from scenarios that have good stuff. Take the Reforged Eden galaxy, custom weapons and weapon effects, and the AI file. But give ALL the custom weapons and devices vanilla resource requirements, consumption rates, and properties such as mass. Make them cost, consume, and weigh the relative same as the vanilla devices SO THEY CAN BE AUTO REPAIRABLE and SO THEY DON'T RUIN A BUILD. And because arbitrarily high costs, consumption rates, and weights are RETARDED! duh And don't forget custom POIs and custom missions. And no multiple, cascading dependencies and only use vanilla assets.
The missions might be too much to cut out because of all their dependencies so skip them unless your crew has the skills and time. Reforged Eden's Galaxy Explorer mission should only depend on Reforged Eden's Custom Galaxy, which you would be using already. Missions that involve custom POIs are much more complex and involve possible custom NPCs and weapons that may not be planned to be included in your Best Of Scenario. The vanilla missions will be plenty with all the best stuff from Reforged and the others. You could also add the HV, SV, and CV wrecks from Star Salvage to the planets and space sectors appropriately, as in in SPARSE quantities, not every 100 meters across the entire planet or sector.
But the key is to only do it during the final version of a decent update. This way you minimize the tail chasing and wheel spinning. Play a good update version of Empyrion with a Best Of Scenario and don't ever update until a better Empyrion update is released. Then when that decent update reaches its absolute final state, such as 1.7.9, activate the Spanj crew to put in the time to update the Best Of Scenario to this final version of a new decent Empyrion update. Even if you go 2 years without updating because Eleon has a 90% garbage update track record, you will be saving yourselves hundreds of hours of headaches and anxiety while you enjoy the absolute best that Empyrion can offer under its current dev team without those pesky monster bug surprises every other week. Make your Empyrion experience a truly fully released one that has the stability and predictability that is expected of such.
This sort of thing takes a lot of work. So don't spin your wheels. Version 1.9 (really 13.9) is crap. Don't waste your time making a perfect Best Of Scenario for that version. Wait for Eleon to undo all the STUPID changes they made, such as nerfing the T2 and Epic weapons, making your helmet mandatory to turn on your armor suit light, which is now three lights that HOVER around your forehead, and cutting the sprint while jet packing in typical, clueless, bumbling Eleon fashion. It would be worth it to make this perfect Best Of Scenario for 1.7.9 because it’s playable. Then later, if Eleon actually makes another playable update, it will be easy to make all the scenario changes to the new files for the final version of that update only. That could easily be once every couple of years. And then you just keep playing that working and playable version on your servers until by some miracle Eleon releases a new final version of a playable update. No more stress over garbage Eleon updates.
This would allow Spanj or whoever makes it to produce the best multi player streams ever, and as more and more servers and single players adopt this new best of scenario, fewer and fewer players would waste time on garbage updates, which would eliminate the feedback that Eleon relies on to do their job for them, and this would force them to at least tighten up the quality of their updates. With that kind of leverage and unity, the Spanj crew and fans or whoever makes it could bring pressure on Eleon to get rid of CPU and implement physics, which would be the point at which everyone sees for the first time just how awesome a game with this combination of elements can be. And that would be when Empyrion has a real chance to resemble No Man's Sky (which still isn't all that) with their late bloom. If Empyrion were to get physics like Space Engineers (and eliminate all the bugs, of course), which is VERY DOABLE, Space Engineers would lose a chunk of their market share, but players who are totally new to this genre would also show up, because that version of Empyrion would be more accessible to noobs than Space Engineers. Empyrion would go viral to blockbuster status. But I digress.
What Eleon Gets Right
(This was posted in 2021. Eleon are now clearly idiots and the game is dead.)
Eleon has done great work on the galaxy and the planets. Everything looks very good now, and the new galaxy map was brilliant. The potential for infinite save game size growth is a problem, though. Every new System you visit makes your save file get bigger. Hopefully that can be concatenated somehow. (Don't hold your breath.)
The vessel AI used to be terrible. It’s decent now. The AI vessels pursue you and Reinforcement Vessels will run if they take enough damage. It still needs more sophistication as I described earlier, but it’s already playable. This Reaper wouldn’t have been worth it for the old AI.
The best work that Eleon has done lately is optimization. I haven’t seen many people commenting on it but the devs have made some great strides in reducing framerate loss and general lag. I noticed the distance scaling in Alpha 12, maybe even 11. It’s been awhile. Each new version has been getting higher and higher framerates. You still get lag spikes and forests are still laggy, but the general game is running much smoother, and the game can have much more rendering on screen without losing framerates.
1.5 appears to have involved some effective data optimization. I have long suspected that the code has a lot of redundant data requests. Eleon has greatly improved how fast sensors activate their devices. Lights are much less likely to turn on late, and when they are delayed, it’s for much less time. Heavy Doors now open instantly, literally like Star Trek. Swish. This was very timely, because this Reaper uses a lot of Heavy Doors. The resulting improvements of this update’s optimization make this Reaper experience noticeably better. You can also tell that all graphics are lighter. They have clearly refined some key data throughput code. It feels like a new game.
It still has all the bugs and is headed in the wrong general direction, but these changes indicate that at least part of the Eleon team knows what they are doing. Or perhaps they all agree on CPU but still manage to get the galaxy and optimization right for one update every decade.
Vermillion’s Awesome AI Files
Now moving on to Vermillion, he clearly doesn’t understand the futility of overhauling an Alpha Game, and his vision is worse than Vanilla, but somehow, someway, he got the NPC AI in EClassConfig.ecf and EClassConfig_Eden.ecf just right. The way those Zirax come hunting you is exactly what this game was missing. No more easily shooting 4 in a row in the back of the head. They constantly turn around. And if you just walk they seem to hear you. It’s great for clearing out destroyed Toveras. All I have to do is Jetpack over and into one of the giant hull breaches and take a few steps, then fly back out about 50 meters away from the edge of the tattered hull. Within 10 seconds all the spawned Zirax will come running to that spot, and when I start shooting them they will run towards me. Many will run right off the edge of the tattered hull and fall into the oblivion of space.
Even small POIs that you already are familiar with are appealing because of Vermillion’s AI mod. Unfortunately it’s not possible to configure subroutines for AI vessels in the ecf files. Only Eleon can improve the Vessel AI. But the way Vermillion set those two ecf files is perfect. He said that he lowered the NPC hit points to compensate for the increased aggression and effectiveness. I am not sure that is necessary, and that would only apply to Reforged Garbage anyways. I just place the Reforged Eden AI files in Project Eden and they work.
Either way I would not play Empyrion without Vermillion’s AI mod files. They are literally must haves. Hopefully when he eventually gives up on Reforged Galaxy, he will continue to update the two AI ecf files. His work would be much easier and more rewarding if he just focused on the AI files, which are complete, and building awesome POIs with advanced Signal Logic. Overhauling an Alpha Stage Game is pissing in the wind.
Which begs the question. Why is it that Vermillion was able to overhaul the entire EClassConfig.ecf file in one fowl swoop, and make it perfect, but Eleon releases an entire update, 1.5 of course, that is focused on improving the AI of Veloceraptors, and when they release it the Veloceraptors are NOT set to target players? Why? Eleon needs to hire Vermillion to fix their AI, just like they need Ravien to make their missions and galaxies for them. If Vanilla was to become Project Eden with Vermillion’s AI Mod settings, then the scenarios would be even better.
The Sweet Spot of Empyrion
Now to explain how I secure the SWEET SPOT in Empyrion and get the best gameplay out of it that is currently possible. This involves a combination of using the correct vessels and base, in conjunction with the correct scenario, and then the correct ecf file tweaks. Only a few tweaks. The ones that are absolutely necessary.
You can either build your own vessel, or you can search the Steam Workshop. There are more and more on Nexus, but the Workshop is where most of the blueprints are. Of course you are looking for design, but the most important thing is the answer to two questions.
if blueprint x = CPU
then send x, trash
if blueprint x = Reforged Garbage
then send x, trash
If you follow that code you will save yourself a lot of time. Then you look for the usual things like design, practicality, combat strength, bla bla bla. The thing is, it’s hard to find builds that have the lights configured at all, never mind properly, as well as many other basics that so many builders neglect. It was always hard to find a good Blueprint, but before CPU there were a lot of talented builders like Pystonworks. They all left after CPU was implemented. I have preserved Pystonworks SV called the Proxima Skiptracer and his HV called the Diablo Gato. Those are good examples of what you are looking for. The Proxima Skiptracer is a heavy fighter with 6 Gatling Guns and 9 Minigun Turrets that are just a ball to shoot ground troop Zirax with, as well as Drones. The Diablo Gato is a low profile Heavy Tank that can also drill as well as is possible without physics (I never drill with HVs anymore). While the Diablo Gato is formidable, it could have more power turrets. If Jeff Randall didn’t build CPU/Reforged garbage, his HVs would be better looking and more deadly than the Diablo, which is a low profile build by Pystonwork’s description, although it is still bigger than CPU garbage, but it is narrower than other large tanks, making it slightly easier to drive through a forest. It’s just narrow. Fits in smaller spaces with a bigger bang. But this Reaper has a ginormous Docking Bay so HV and SV size is moot. I also built an Ancient Alien style base with a landing pad big enough for this Reaper to Repair on called the Wolf’s Lair. You just park the Reaper diagonally with the appropriate front leg over the Repair Bay device as shown in the screenshot. Make sure the extremities have distance between them and the Defense Towers and main Base Tower so the Repair Field won’t conflict.
More on Project Eden
When it comes to scenarios, the only one I am aware of that is really good is Project Eden by ravien_ff. I wouldn’t play Empyrion without Project Eden. It’s in a league of its own. The galaxies make sense, the missions are immersive and better than you would think possible in this game's current state. And they aren’t even finished yet. The Vanilla missions are produced by someone who just doesn’t have the knack. They are so wordy you might as well not even have the 3D game. Just make it an RPG blog site. But Ravien’s missions are intuitive and extremely interesting and flow with the lore. He makes maximum use of the physical possibilities of the game. He has an exploration mission where you have to visit every different kind of Sun or System center. It’s reminiscent of the library in Mass Effect. It gives you real information on each Sun type. That is a great mission to do without rushing in this Reaper.
Ravien and The Circle Jerker Influence
Pretty much everything in Project Eden is correct when it comes to its original content. The only problem it has is that Ravien is also under the influence of these circle jerker cultists who believe that grinding in a broken game for 1,000s of hours is a way to virtue signal that you “earned it,” whatever that means. So Ravien has added zeros to Mission Item Number requirements that are ridiculous. For Example you need 100 Data Chips to make an Encryption key.
This isn't necessarily so bad if you find the Class 3 and 4 Exploration Sectors and unlock their Vaults. But that is nothing compared to the HIGH COSTS of all his custom weapons and items. And they CANNOT AUTO REPAIR. To build his custom Augmented Light Armor and Boosters you need 400 Progenitor Technology Fragments and they are extremely tedious to obtain. For over an hour of work you can get around 20 per planet if you are lucky. That is 20 hours of the most repetitive, redundant gameplay you will ever experience. And you need 1,000s of Progenitor Technology Fragments if you want to build Vulcan Turrets, Antimatter Warp Drives, or Bastion Shields. The Armor is good but by the time you are able to build it there is nothing left to do in the game.
I don’t have hundreds of hours to waste pulling levers and finding elevated holes in Obelisks. Whenever designers do things like that in this or any other game, I and everyone else just have our Crew do it. Meet my Crew. It’s called the Item Menu. All you have to do is search in the Item Menu for Data Chip or Progenitor. Or any unique Project Eden ingredient or mission related item. Whenever it’s reasonable I will complete the requirements to get something such as Magnacite, which is easy to mine in this Reaper with all CV turrets enabled on Planet, but not when it’s some ridiculous, arbitrary, cultist virtue signally waste of time. Another way to make valuable items hard to obtain is to make the player fight some dreadnaught or fleet and then get through a custom POI. These obstacles could require specific preparation and threshold CVs. Ultra Rare Loot Containers could hold 1,000s of Progenitor Technology Fragments at the end of the POI, possibly behind puzzles.
Not every case where something is counted in large numbers is necessarily wrong. I have played the final Dead Planets mission. Its description has a typo. Ravien clearly meant to say, “For 10 to 40 Players,” not “1 to 4.” (lol one) I now know what happened to the Dead Planets. That mission should be renamed “Ravien Genocides all the Single Players.” On a serious note, the number of horrors is a “little” high. Just a tad. But it’s meant to be a Multi-Player mission. And I forgot about those Immunity Shields. Duh. I’ll remember next time. I’ve seen the streamers complete it with 4 Players. They aren’t very good at space ship combat, but the streamers are good at FPS shooting. You can’t deny that.
Another area where Ravien has succumbed to the universal scarcity/virtue signaling cult is with the attributes of his two most important custom devices, the Bastion Shield and the Antimatter Warp Drive. Ravien has made them way too heavy, consume too much Pentaxid, and the Recharge Time on the Bastion Shield is way too slow. This Reaper can handle Ravien’s settings. A 4 kt Antimatter Warp Drive is nothing to a Sovereign-Class Reaper, but it’s an arbitrary waste of cargo mass. Furthermore, these are things that are not buildable until you have spent a lot of time in Progenitor Space. And by the time you have enough Progenitor Technology Fragments and Dark Matter and Magnacite to build your Bastion Shield and Antimatter Warp Drive, you don’t need them anymore. You have already done everything there is to do in the game.
Once again, it would be better if you had quests that involved defeating dreadnaughts and custom POIs that enabled you to get these items at the beginning of the game, when you actually need them. Many games make this mistake. This is why we have Trainers and Cheat Menu mods. There should be some other standalone reward for reaching Progenitor Space. The Bastion Shield and Antimatter Warp Drive affect all game play, which is why they are useless at the end of the game.
And this brings me to the ecf file tweaks. So I have to edit various things to enable CV turrets on planet, fix the Bastion Shield and Antimatter Warp Drive attributes, and get Vermillion’s AI mod files from Reforged Eden into Project Eden. Here is a summary of how to hit the Sweet Spot in current Empyrion 2021.
Sweet Spot How To Summary
Use these five builds or their equivalent in conjunction with the Reaper, as needed.
HV: Reaper Recon Elite (Only HV worth using without physics)
SV: Reaper Scout Elite and Reaper Destroyer SV (The Destroyer is the unmatched god SV of Empyrion)
CV: Reaper Explorer CV (can dock in the Reaper Hangar Bay)
Base: Wolf's Lair (Can easily park this Reaper on the landing pad and repair it and has the factory/storage to supply the Reaper)
Play Project Eden with enemies set to Hard, resources set to plenty and slow degradation. I turn on CPU but use Advanced Cores for everything.
In the Content/Configuration Folder of the Project Eden Scenario folder, make these changes.
1. Enable all CV turrets on Planet, including Tool turrets.
2. Give the Bastion Shield the same attributes as the T2 Vanilla Shield (leave the 100,000 Bastion Shield Hit Points intact of course)
with a 60 second recharge from zero rate and a 5 second Cooldown.
3. Give the T2 Vanilla Shield a 60 second recharge from zero rate and a 5 second Cooldown.
4. Give the Antimatter Warp Drive the same weight and Pentaxid consumption rate as the Vanilla Warp Drive
5. Replace the Project Eden AI files with the Reforged Eden AI files.
6. Enable Boost for all CV Thrusters.
My Starting Scenario and Spawning Blueprints With SBP
That’s it. And you are ready to play. Now what I do (if I want to get straight to the Sovereign gameplay) is start a Project Eden Survival Game, and then I Spawn this Sovereign-Class Reaper, the Diablo Gato Elite, and the Proxima Skiptracer and I dock them in the Reaper and then I use the Item Menu to FULLY STOCK each vessel. To Spawn a Blueprint without filling the factory, press the Tilde Key, `, which is left of the number 1 on your keyboard. This will open the Console. Type help to see all the commands. Type a command followed by help to see the description and switches for that command. Type "sbp" which stands for Spawn Blue Print. Then press Esc to Exit the Console and open your Blueprint Factory. Select Sovereign and click "Spawn." Spawn it.
In my imaginary scenario I arrived in Andromeda with an intact, fully stocked Reaper. It is so much more fun to play Empyrion that way. I may or may not maintain the Reaper stock by actually grinding. It takes hours to stock these ships even when you are going straight from the Item Menu. More proof that grinding is totally broken and just a placeholder gimmick for the actual Main Game, which has not yet manifested in Vanilla.
(I have modified my approach a little. Now I use no cheats until I have the Reaper Recon Elite and the Reaper Destroyer SV and I need to warp to other Solar Systems. Then I use the Item Menu to give my Reaper Destroyer SV an Antimatter Warp Drive and I explore the Galaxy. The Reaper Destroyer SV can kill a Tovera without taking damage, but it takes time. When I am ready for a proper mother ship I use the SBP command to spawn in the Sovereign. The early game is fun without cheating, but because Eleon are not sophisticated enough to consolidate and delegate grinding in the late game, you have no choice but to use Console Commands and the Item Menu. This allows me to still get the fun out of the early game, and then the fun of having this Sovereign-Class Reaper. This Reaper alone adds a lot of fun to the gameplay that is just not possible with any other CV I have seen! If this were not the case, I would not have needed to build the Sovereign. And it was not easy.)
How To Edit the ecf Files
(Some OldEden results may no longer be in the ecf files in future updates, but this guide will still work fine. Just make the changes as directed.)
Now to explain exactly how you edit the ecf files. Let’s start with Vanilla. The files that pertain to the game content and settings are located here.
Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\Content
Everything in the Content Folder can be edited by the Player. But not everything can be edited in the Content Folder. Some things are hard coded, like the Vessel AI. Everything in the Content Folder is easy to understand if you take the time to read it.
There are two types of files. 3D Content files for things like playfields, planets, solar systems, and blueprints are one type. Changes to these files will only take effect in a New Game. This is because you are adding or altering or removing POIs, planets, galaxies and other physical objects. These types of files are located in folders like Content\Playfields, Content\Prefabs, and Content\RandomPresets. We are not going to mess with these types of files. Scenario and POI builders usually mess with them.
The other type of files are the Attributes and Settings files. The files that say how many hit points a Zirax trooper has, which build types can have each Device, where a turret can operate, how much a Bastion Shield weighs, and everything else like that. These files are located in the Content\Configuration folder. Changes to these files WILL TAKE EFFECT IMMEDIATELY. You do not need a new game. If you look at each file in the Configuration Folder, you will see that most of them are intuitively named. But you can figure out for sure what they are just by reading them, ideally in Notepad++. The code language is simple, and they have lots of comment descriptions. So you could figure out how to modify anything with a little bit of reading. The more you read it the quicker you will be able to figure out more etc…
But we aren’t here to become coders, we just want to change 4 files so we can hit the Sweet Spot in Empyrion. The Config_Example.ecf file used to be the way to enable CV Turrets on planet. This file was a copy of ItemsConfig.ecf. All you had to do was make your change to it and then rename it to Config.ecf. It’s hardcoded to not be used anymore. Today you have to edit the ItemsConfig.ecf file directly, which is just as easy. You can theoretically also copy any file from the Configuration Folder into the Mods folder and edit it there, and that will override the Configuration Folder version, but I have not tested it.
Any change you make to the main Content\Configuration folder will affect any Vanilla game, past or future. When you screw up the game will inform you of this by not loading Vanilla saves or new games. This is why you must always make backups before you edit files in the Configuration Folder. Just make a new folder in there called “Backup,” and copy ItemsConfig.ecf, for example, in to the new Backup Folder and then go ahead and edit the main ItemsConfig.ecf file. If you lose your backup too somehow, you just need to reinstall the game. So don’t.
But we are going to play Project Eden, so we want to edit the Configuration Folder that belongs to that scenario. Each Scenario is stored as a Folder version of the old Config_Example.ecf file. Meaning, a Scenario is just a compilation of edited files from the Vanilla Content Folder. Playfield files as well as Configuration Folder files, and some new ones for custom content. A scenario’s folder simply contains all the files it modified from Vanilla, and all the files it added. When you select that Scenario in the New Game Menu, the game tells itself to override the Vanilla files with the files in that Scenario folder. Because of this, since we want to play Project Eden, we don’t want to edit the Vanilla Configuration Folder files, we want to edit the Project Eden Scenario Configuration Folder Files. Those are located here.
Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\Content\Scenarios\Project Eden 1.4 \Content\Configuration
In there you will see most of the same files you saw in the Vanilla Configuration Folder, but not all of them. That is because Ravien only needs to include the files he altered or added.
Backup ecf Files In the Configuration Folder First
Make sure you have the correct, matching version of Project Eden and Reforged Eden installed. To enable all CV turrets on planet, we are going to edit the Project Eden version of ItemsConfig.ecf. Go to Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\ Content\Scenarios\Project Eden 1.4 \Content\Configuration and make a new folder called “Backup.” Copy these 3 files into it.
BlocksConfig.ecf
EClassConfig.ecf
ItemsConfig.ecf
If you screw up and lose your backups, all you have to do is re-install Project Eden, and the files will be restored, after which you make new backups and start over. Also, you will need to make these changes after every Project Eden update, not every Empyrion Game update.
1. Enable All CV Turrets on Planet
So to enable CV Turrets on planet open ItemsConfig.ecf in Notepad ++. Replace every instance of AllowAt: Space and AllowAt: "Space" (for CV Tools) with AllowAt: "Space, Planet". The first AllowAt: Space result will be a section that starts with this line.
{ +Item Id: 103, Name: TurretMSArtilleryWeapon
That is the Artillery Turret. All you have to do is change AllowAt: Space to AllowAt: "Space, Planet" You can preload the two phrases into the Search/Replace engine, and just keep hitting Replace. It will cycle through all the CV Weapons and Tools. There aren’t that many. Searching for AllowAt: "Space" you will arrive at a CV Tool section where the first line says this.
{ +Item Id: 132, Name: TurretMSDrillWeapon
Just change AllowAt: "Space" to AllowAt: "Space, Planet" and you will be able to use a CV Drill Turret on Planet. Just cycle through all the Weapons and Tools then save and you are done. You can test it by loading a Project Eden Save and firing your Mounted Weapons or drilling with your CV on planet, as well as just checking the affected Device Stats in your Control Panel Device Tab. Go near enemy Drones to test the Power Turrets.
2. Edit the Bastion Shield Attributes
Next we want to adjust the Shields and Antimatter Warp Drive. To do this we open BlocksConfig.ecf in Notepad++ and search for Bastion. The first result will be an old ID list.
# Eden_ShieldGeneratorBastion
The next result will be an old Eden Shield.
{ +Block Id: 230, Name: OldEden_ShieldGeneratorBastion, Ref: ShieldGeneratorBA
The next result will be a very long ChildBlocks: list. There will be several of these. Then you will get this.
{ +Block Name: Eden_ShieldGeneratorBastion, Ref: ShieldGeneratorBA
A Bastion shield generator for POIs. The next result will be 4 T levels of Bastion POI shields.
{ +Block Name: Eden_ShieldGeneratorBastionT0, Ref: Eden_ShieldGeneratorBastion
Then a New Blocks ID list.
# 230, Eden_ShieldGeneratorBastion <- for POIs
Below you will see For Players: and below that you will see this.
# 242, Eden_ShieldGeneratorAugmentedCV
We have identified the correct Search Term that refers to the Player Bastion Shield Attribute Configuration Section in this BlocksConfig.ecf file. Now we search for Eden_ShieldGeneratorAugmentedCV. The first result is the place where we found this term. It says this is the old way to name it, but it’s still being used because it works in 1.4. The next result is this.
{ +Block Id: 242, Name: OldEden_ShieldGeneratorAugmentedCV, Ref: ShieldGeneratorCV
Now this says OldEden but there is another one that is an exact match. There are also two entries like this for the Bastion Shield in BlocksConfig_Eden.ecf, but they don’t make a difference. The correct one is probably the next one, but I changed the OldEden one as well. So clicking Find Next in Notepad++ will get us two lines down to this line.
PickupTarget: Eden_ShieldGeneratorAugmentedCV
And then clicking Find Next again will get us to the most likely correct section to edit.
{ +Block Name: Eden_ShieldGeneratorAugmentedCV, Ref: ShieldGeneratorCV
You want to change these settings
EnergyIn: 144000, type: int, display: true, formatter: Watt # 36000
CPUIn: 4000000, type: int, display: true # 33100
EnergyInIdle: 3200, type: int, display: true, formatter: Watt # 1600
ShieldCapacity: 100000, type: int, display: true # 36000
ShieldRecharge: 240, type: int, display: true # recharge rate per sec. 120
ShieldCooldown: 30, type: int, display: true # in seconds
ShieldPerCrystal: 250, type: int, display: true # 1000
to this.
EnergyIn: 36000, type: int, display: true, formatter: Watt # 36000
CPUIn: 33100, type: int, display: true # 33100
EnergyInIdle: 1600, type: int, display: true, formatter: Watt # 1600
ShieldCapacity: 100000, type: int, display: true # 36000
ShieldRecharge: 1667, type: int, display: true # recharge rate per sec. 120
ShieldCooldown: 5, type: int, display: true # in seconds
ShieldPerCrystal: 1000, type: int, display: true # 1000
Notice that I used most of the numbers from the end of the lines with pound signs. That is because those are the T2 Vanilla Shield Settings. But notice that I used different numbers for ShieldRecharge: and ShieldCooldown:. This is because I set the Recharge Time to 60 Seconds for a full recharge from 0 Shield Hit Points. To do this I divided 100,000 ShieldCapacity: Hit Points by 60 Seconds to get 1,667. This means that my Bastion Shield will fully recharge from 0 in 60 Seconds. The ShieldCooldown: 5 means the Cooldown Timer from being shot is 5 Seconds instead of the Vanilla default 15 Seconds. This means I only need to evade fire for 5 Seconds for my Bastion Shield to begin recharging.
I make these changes because they are how it’s supposed to be and is in every other game. I don’t have ten minutes to twiddle my thumbs every time my shield needs to recharge. It’s asinine. Shields are useless if they take 10 minutes to recharge. 60 Seconds is even kind of long. If I had Shield Cooldown set to 15 seconds that would be 1 and a quarter minutes of twiddling my thumbs every time my Bastion Shield gets low. That could add up to hours in no time. Hours that are better spent actually doing something like fighting the battle. In Project Eden high level AI Shields already recharge fast, but ideally they would just set them all to 60 seconds for a full Recharge and a 5 Second Cooldown. I can’t be bothered.
The reason I showed you the long way to find the Bastion name being used in BlocksConfig.ecf for the Player’s Bastion Shield is because the names will change over time, due to Eleon updates, so you need to be able to start with generic terms like “shield,” and also there are often multiple entries for a particular type of device. You need to edit the correct one, but editing all of them is the best way to be sure.
3. Edit the T2 Vanilla Shield Attributes
This Reaper Blueprint comes with a T2 Vanilla Shield, which also takes too long to Recharge and Cooldown, so let’s fix that too. Searching the BlocksConfig.ecf file for Shield will find us the name of the T2 Vanilla Shield which is ShieldGeneratorCVT2. Searching for that we will find this line.
{ +Block Id: 1811, Name: ShieldGeneratorCVT2, Ref: ShieldGeneratorCV
We will change this line
ShieldRecharge: 120, type: int, display: true # recharge rate per sec
to this.
ShieldRecharge: 600, type: int, display: true # recharge rate per sec
36,000 Shield Hit Points divided by 60 Seconds is 600 Shield Hit Points per Second. Then we add the Cooldown line from the Bastion Shield right after it. The Shield Defaults to 15 if you don’t specify a Shield Cooldown value.
ShieldCooldown: 5, type: int, display: true # in seconds
Now the T2 Vanilla Shield will Recharge from 0 Hit Points in 60 Seconds and it will begin Recharging 5 Seconds after its last impact from enemy fire. Next we need to adjust the Antimatter Drive.
4. Edit the Antimatter Warp Drive Attributes
Searching for Antimatter we find this line.
# Eden_WarpDriveAntimatter
Searching for Eden_WarpDriveAntimatter we find
{ +Block Name: Eden_WarpDriveAntimatter
after the same OldEden section like what we found with the Bastion Shield. This Antimatter Warp Drive weighs way to much so change this
Mass: 4000000, type: float, display: true, formatter: Kilogram
to this,
Mass: 82200, type: float, display: true, formatter: Kilogram
which is the weight value of the Vanilla Warp Drive. Further down change these two
EnergyIn: 2000, type: int, display: true, formatter: Watt
CPUIn: 5000000, type: int, display: true
to this.
EnergyIn: 25, type: int, display: true, formatter: Watt
CPUIn: 40000, type: int, display: true
You may have noticed this part.
BlastParticleIndex: 10
BlastRadius: 36
BlastDamage: 100000 # Huge explosion when destroyed.
This means that if this Antimatter Matter Warp Drive is destroyed, 100,000 Hit Points of damage will be done over a radius of 36 blocks or 72 meters. The Antimatter Pentaxid Tank and Bastion Shield also have huge explosions specified. You can change those back to the Vanilla values if you want. Just look them up in the same file. I just leave them as they are. Que sera sera.
Edit the Furnace Attribute
Now you may want to allow Furnaces and Deconstructors to be placed on CVs for the Vacant Room on the Reaper. I have done it and this is how. There is currently only one Furnace and Deconstructor entry. Search for Furnace in BlockConfig.ecf to find this line.
{ +Block Id: 1132, Name: Furnace
In that section, change this
AllowPlacingAt: Base, display: true
to this.
AllowPlacingAt: "Base,MS", display: true
Edit the Deconstructor Attribute
This will allow the Furnace to be placed on the Reaper in the Vacant Room. Next, search for Deconstructor in BlockConfig.ecf to find this line
{ +Block Id: 1371, Name: Deconstructor
In that section, change this
AllowPlacingAt: Base, display: true
to this.
AllowPlacingAt: "Base,MS", display: true
Now the Deconstructor can also be placed on the Reaper. Now Save the file and you are done with BlocksConfig.ecf All these values should show up on the Devices in game now. You can use the Item Menu to check them quickly.
5. Replace the Project Eden AI Files With the Reforged Eden AI Files
The last part of this process is the easiest. You want to place Vermillion’s Reforged AI files into Project Eden, overwriting or replacing the Project Eden files, depending on your style. These are the two AI files that you need to copy from Reforged Eden.into Project Eden.
EClassConfig.ecf
EClassConfig_Eden.ecf (this file is no longer used in Reforged Eden 1.7 but may be again in the future)
Go to Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\Content\Scenarios\Reforged Eden 1.4\Content\Configuration and copy those two files. Now go to Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\Content\Scenarios\Project Eden 1.4\Content\Configuration and paste those two files you just copied from Reforged Eden. Click Yes to Overwrite the Project Eden version files if you didn’t delete them.
6. Enable Boost for all CV Thrusters
Once again open Steam\Steamapps\Common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\Content\Scenarios\Project Eden 1.7\Content\Configuration and open the BlocksConfig.ecf file in the Project Eden scenario folder. Now do the same in the Reforged Eden scenario folder. In the Project Eden BlocksConfig.ecf search for "ThrusterMS" and then do the same in the Reforged Eden BlocksConfig.ecf. The first result in Project Eden will be
{ +Block Id: 453, Name: ThrusterMSRoundArmored
while in Reforged Eden it will be
CustomIcon: ThrusterMSRoundSlant.
Click Find Next to get to
{ +Block Id: 453, Name: ThrusterMSRoundArmored
in both files. Now scroll down in the Reforged Eden file to find these two lines:
ThrusterForce: 7500, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
ThrusterBoosterFactor: 1.1, type: float, display: true
Now find the same ThrusterForce line in Project Eden.
ThrusterForce: 18100, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
Note that there is no ThrusterBoosterFactor entry under this line in Project Eden. So copy the ThrusterBoosterFactor from the Reforged Eden file to the Project Eden file to make the Project Eden file look like this.
ThrusterForce: 18100, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
ThrusterBoosterFactor: 1.1, type: float, display: true
These CV Thrusters now have the same boost that they have in Reforged Eden.
As a side note, look at the Reforged Eden ThrusterForce value of 7500 versus the Project Eden Vanilla ThrusterForce value of 18100. Vermillion has NERFED this CV Thruster by 59%! Now you can see why all Reforged vessels move like molasses, and why Reforged Garbage is just that- garbage.
Now keep searching until you get both files to this line.
{ +Block Id: 457, Name: ThrusterMSDirectional
You will notice that Vermillion has not given any boost to the small CV Thruster in Reforged Eden, but go ahead and give it the previous value anyways. Now the Project Eden file should look like this.
ThrusterForce: 7200, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
ThrusterBoosterFactor: 1.1, type: float, display: true
Now keep searching until you get both files to this line.
{ +Block Id: 458, Name: ThrusterMSRoundNormal2x2
Now copy the ThrusterBoosterFactor line from the Reforged Eden file to the Project Eden file, which should look like this.
ThrusterForce: 192100, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
ThrusterBoosterFactor: 1.2, type: float, display: true
Now keep searching until you get both files to this line.
{ +Block Id: 497, Name: ThrusterMSRoundNormal3x3 # Parent: ThrusterMSRound3x3Blocks
Now copy the ThrusterBoosterFactor line from the Reforged Eden file to the Project Eden file, which should look like this.
ThrusterForce: 920000, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
ThrusterBoosterFactor: 1.3, type: float, display: true
Note the Reforged Eden ThrusterForce value of 235000 versus the Project Eden Vanilla ThrusterForce value of 920000. That is a Vermillion Reforged Garbage Thrust NERF reduction of 74% on the XL CV Thrusters!!
Keep searching until you get both files to this line.
{ +Block Id: 772, Name: ThrusterMSRoundBlocks
Now copy the ThrusterBoosterFactor line from the Reforged Eden file to the Project Eden file, which should look like this.
ThrusterForce: 18100, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
ThrusterBoosterFactor: 1.1, type: float, display: true
Keep searching until you get both files to this line.
{ +Block Id: 778, Name: ThrusterMSRound2x2Blocks
Now copy the ThrusterBoosterFactor line from the Reforged Eden file to the Project Eden file, which should look like this.
ThrusterForce: 192100, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
ThrusterBoosterFactor: 1.2, type: float, display: true
Keep searching until you get both files to this line.
{ +Block Id: 835, Name: ThrusterMSRound3x3Blocks
Now copy the ThrusterBoosterFactor line from the Reforged Eden file to the Project Eden file, which should look like this.
ThrusterForce: 920000, type: int, display: true, formatter: Newton
ThrusterBoosterFactor: 1.3, type: float, display: true
You have now added the Reforged Eden CV Thruster Boost to all CV Thrusters in Project Eden. There are some more CV Thruster entries in Reforged Eden further down the file, but they don't apply to Project Eden as they appear to be custom for Reforged Eden and have no Project Eden matching entries.
That’s it. You are done modding Project Eden. You will only have to repeat this process after every Project Eden Update that you allow to install.
Your Project Eden saves and future games now have all CV turrets enabled on planet. The Bastion Shield recharges in 60 seconds with a Cooldown of 5 seconds, as well as the T2 Vanilla Shield. The Bastion Shield uses normal power and Pentaxid. The Antimatter Warp Drive now weighs the same as the regular Warp Drive. Your CVs can have Furnaces and Deconstructors and they have Thruster Boost. And you now have the Reforged Vermillion Aggressive NPC AI in Project Eden without all the other rubbish like Player Vessels nerfed by 67% and forced CPU. Server Owners should run this configuration when Project Eden 1.5 is released. Streamers would produce the best Empyrion content ever if they used this Reaper for a Let’s Play in my modded version of Project Eden 1.5. Fight the most dangerous Ultra++ vessels in 1st Person Epic Gameplay and take little to no damage. Ace.
Basic Reaper Safety Rules
To finish off this long post, let me remind you about the Basic Reaper Safety Rules.
Never activate your Reaper Turret Batteries until you are ready to pulverize.
Never point your activated Reaper Turret Batteries at anything you do not intend to pulverize.
It’s best to keep the Turret Batteries off when not in combat. Empyrion has a tendency to trigger unwanted turret fire from time to time, and one volley of this Reaper makes small things lucky if any blocks are even left. It can easily destroy mission items if they aren’t Admin Cored. You can also defeat regular random drones and even small CVs with the Defensive Turrets alone to save Missiles. You can range fight tougher ships with just the Defensive Turrets to beat them. You can also use only one Turret Battery on mid-sized ships. The Control Panel makes this Reaper very versatile. Use it. Don't forget the 3 speeds. Use only 24 Thrusters from one of the Airlock Captain's Chairs to line this Reaper up perfectly with a Space Station Entrance.
This Reaper Blueprint was saved in 1.4, so if you are smart enough to wait for the final Empyrion and Project Eden 1.5 updates before starting a new game, then you can spawn this Reaper Blueprint right into your current 1.4 save game, as well as the other five builds I recommended, and get right to playing. I didn’t want any of the new blocks from 1.5. Maybe when they put the Posters on LCD Projectors.
Go Forth and Harvest Empyrion, My Reapers.
The Circle Jerkers Will Be Indoctrinated.