Good day my fellow engineers!

Today’s state of the server announcement will be relatively brief as all recent happenings have been mostly limited to Earth City and Earth in general.

—-Earth City and the Space Elevator—-

The Space Elevator at Earth City has now been fully completed as per plans however is now entering a testing stage prior to opening. Carriages A1 and A2 are both passenger carriages and are scheduled to open within 2 weeks time. Carriages B1 and B2 will undergo a conversion to make them cargo lifts (so we can carry full sized small grid ships and other stuff up to space) and are expected to enter service by the end of the month.

Earth City continues to grow both in terms of server provided structures (like a new job openings board by the Metro Station and The Earth City Arcade) as well as privately owned areas, two of which are nearing completion (at least structurally). Additional lots have been placed for sale and more player traffic has been noted in the city area! Awsome guys!

—-Server Recruitment—-

This past week or so I began advertising the server on the steam forums. Unfortunately I was caught up building the space elevator more then I thought I would be and didn’t have time to do a proper recruitment campaign. I expect to resume active recruitment operations by mid-month (after Terminal A of space elevator is operational). We did have about 5-7 new players try out the server however with 2-3 deciding to join at this time.

For any new players to the server, please respond/comment on this announcement/start a discussion about any difficulties you had initially connecting to the server, any steps that seemed to work fixing the problem, and also what country you are in. I have noticed a problem with new people connecting and I am attempting to solve the problem but need more information.

—-Server Performance—-

Guys we have a city and a space elevator...holy crap this game has come a long way! Some of you know that this isn’t the first time we have tried to have a city area...let alone an elevator. And I keep bringing up the elevator because I just want it to be clear to everybody that it is a truely massive structure; and not simple like the one shown on main menu/release video...and after some hiccups during installation the server is handling it well!

To aid in server performance all engineers are asked to do the following; when you land or dock your ships please do so on another grid and use connectors/landing gear to lock your ship down. Landing on the ground (dirt, rock, ice, etc) should only be done for limited amounts of time (basically when your out mining/surveying etc) and you should get used to landing on some type of pad or using connectors (trust me on this one). Also when you dont use your landing gear or connectors to lock down your ship the server has to calculate the velocity of your ship constantly (even though it is “landed”) thus hurting performance.

Currently there are no real build limits in place on the server except those listed in the rules discussion page. Please be considerate of your operations though...yes building 20 refineries is “better” in the long run because you can process ore faster but all of those refineries firing up and running at the same time can cause a huge drop in server performance...in a case like that example try to plan ahead and have a stockpile of processed material on hand so that you don’t need to run that many refineries because you suddenly decide its time to build a new cruiser...we have had every strict limits on certain blocks in the past and I am trying to avoid that and so far everyone has been doing great so keep it up!

A note about inactivity...currently as per server rules after 20 days of inactivity (not logging into server grids are deleted). I have now changed this rule to 25 days and instead of deleting all of the grids, most of them will be transferred to the pirate faction and be raidable. This has occured to several bases in Earth already so keep your eyes out for pirate antennas!

One last note on performance...in the next day or so I will be upgrading the servers ram to hopefully allow for some more processing power. I am currently not sure if the game is reaching its max cpu available or if the server is topping out but I have noticed some large spikes recently and am working to stay ahead of it. I will also be tweeking some other settings and we will just have to see how that goes!

—-Conclusion—-

Thank you all for a great month and I know many of you are looking forward to the opening of the Earth City Space Elevator. There will be a vote soon about naming some items, setting adjustments, and more so stay tuned! Good luck, take your time, and cross your fingers!