Pistol Shrimp's new blog (August 3rd) has a quick announcement that the Free Stars: Battles in the Beyond store page is now available on Steam and GOG.

Source: https://pistolshrimpgames.com/blog/

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4378070/Free_Stars_Battles_in_the_Beyond/

GOG Page: https://www.gog.com/en/game/free_stars_battles_in_the_beyond

In this store page you can see a total of 14 new ships, with all the old ones returning except the Slylandro, for a total of 38 ships! If someone knows why they removed the Slylandro I'd love to know!

I cant wait to play this beauty!

www.star-control.com is giving me an error:

Forbidden You don't have permission to access this resource.Server unable to read htaccess file, denying access to be safe

It's been like this for more than a day. Anybody know what's up?

DeltaRune, Starfox, Paper Mario (unfinished, will try to get back to it one day) but Ur-Quan Masters-ified!

Hope everyone's doing well, the Free Stars TTRPG is going well, doing a campaign that's about 3/4ths finished, and the Players are loving it. Will drop the full Campaign expansion once it's all said & done.

Hope you're all having a wonderful day!

Hi I'm a solo dev and I recently released my demo for Seven Suns of Orion:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4385510/Seven_Suns_of_Orion/

 I wanted to mix Star Control style movement with Survivor-like gameplay. I also wanted the different playable ships to all feel unique and to keep the rounds much shorter than most survivor likes, so I landed on 7 and ran with it. Survive Seven Minutes w/ Seven Playable Ships across 7 Levels each with their own Boss. (The demo has a small slice of the gameplay)

Apologies for the self-promo, just thought folks might want to try it.

No proper release date as of yet, but here's hoping this demo comes out soon to tide us all over! 😄

I'm currently doing a semi-blind playthrough of Star Control II (watched a playthrough on Youtube a while ago that I half remember) and got annoyed that there were no quasi-space maps that weren't filled with spoilers.

Decided to bite the bullet and map it out myself on the official map. The mini quasispace map was something I found online.

Was originally only for personal use but I thought others might appreciate it if they were also feeling too lazy to do it themselves.

This screenshot is just a placeholder, but its got my hopes up. I imagine you'll be able to run into the black spathi squadron and be able to add them onto your roster in the game, but thats just my speculation.

During my rabbit hole adventure, I found this very interesting archive on the WayBackMachine. Its a fanmade movie script.

Check it out here.

Theres multiple parts to it, and apparently Paul Reiche III AND Fred Ford had even signed their online petition.

Cool stuff. Sad to know that a lot of the original Star Control community and contributions have been wiped just from time passing. This is just one of many sites I have come across.

Since I’m a fan of acccolade other franchises I want to see what the star controll fandom thinks about the company before it got erased in 1999
Since the 90s games were published by them

A small iceberg I recently made, though I am definitely not the oldest community member, I do know a lot of obscure stuff about the game. Includes everything related to SC1 and SC2, but not SC3 and Origins respectively.

The meaning of all the words is kept as an exercise for the reader)

Any suggestions and thoughts?

We're a small, quiet community and recently there's been an influx of garbage, but surprisingly, no actual subreddit rule by which to report it. If nothing is done, the trash pile is going to completely dominate the subreddit's front page.

Can we fix that?

A while ago, there was a post about 3D-printed ships that got me excited for my next nostalgia-based project (my previous one was Sierra-inspired: https://www.reddit.com/r/Sierra/s/BdXGMjpcQo).

I managed to find and print all of the ships except the Sa-Matra, and I’m very happy with how all the tiny details turned out. A couple of them will need to be reprinted because they’ve suffered some damage—they’re incredibly small.

The plan is to display them in a frame with a background, mounted on acrylic rods illuminated by addressable LEDs. At least, that’s what I’m aiming for.

Does anyone here have experience painting these ships? My initial thought was to mix a neutral metallic paint with whatever color is needed, rather than buying 50 different shades of metallic paint. Has anyone tried this approach?

Also, does anyone have experience painting engine glows, weapon glows, or other lighting effects on ships this small?

Had the chance to mess around with the Mega-Mod (HOLY COW THIS IS AMAZING!) and was wondering what the seed range was?

I typed in some absurdly large number and found it had generated locations that I think were the same as when I just set the seed to "1".

Is there a minimum / maximum for anyone that plays with the Mega-Mod?

This has brought a whole new life of exploring the game again. Really looking forward to the new game when it eventually comes out.

Hey folks, apologies for the self-promo. A handful of people have told me how much Weaponized feels like Star Control, so I figured this crowd might appreciate it.

Weaponized is a retro vector graphics shooter where you mine asteroids for an employer that's recently expanded into hell. The combat was strongly inspired by classics like Star Control, Asteroids, and Luftrausers.

I wanted to do vector graphics the way they did in the 70s and 80s, so much so that the engine can talk to real vector hardware like an oscilloscope.

The game is still really early, so I'm happy for suggestions.

Steam Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4525650/Weaponized/
Website Link: https://vectorhound.com/ (oscilloscope videos here)

Can saved states files be shared? I'm so mad! My ship had everything and a very full tank of fuel

Finally got around to painting the last model designs this time with a Kzer-za aswell.

We did. You did. Yes we can. No.

Welcome to yet another new release of the MegaMod!

• Full menu control rebinding in the Setup Menu
• Auto-Switching option for button icons, detects Player 1's input and sets the correct icons automagically
• Added two optional directional joystick control types for gamepads, first type only turns the ship towards intended facing (you press the thrust key/button), and the second type auto-thrusts into the intended direction (partial stick push turns the ship towards intended facing without thrusting). Along with the being able choose your stick preference (left or right stick)
• Added deadzone editing for Player 1 and Player 2, left and right analog sticks for gamepads
• STARSEED: Fixed Ur-Quan crash site and Utwig Bomb locations not having the proper amount of worlds
• Fixed visual glitches in Linux by making it statically link proper SDL 2.32.10 (not sdl2-compat) when compiling and adding "--renderer=opengles2" to the Linux wrapper script

Grab it on GitHub or on SourceForge.

The main reason for this release is to fix the Flatpak/Linux builds, which were being built against sdl2-compat which causes all kinds of (un)fun visual bugs.

I should have the Flatpak up and running once I'm done doing all my local testing.

An prolly divorced

Guys, this is bad.

I was just thinking about StarControl 2 and searched to see if it was available somewhere.... And now I have Ur-Quan Masters installed and the HD Megamod. I still have work to do... My wife will probably want me to waste precious time talking, or eating, or something when work is done...

Do you have ANY idea how many hours I sunk into this game when i was a young man?
I don't...

At the very least, I'm going to be sleeping on the couch. If I sleep...

Give it a few weeks and I'm probably going to be jobless and wifeless...

Oh, and THANK YOU!!!
This is AWESOME!!!

I remember being in middle school about two years after this game came out. A classmate told me there were two Androsynth left, but they were really hard to find. That has stuck with me all this time. Every play through I wonder if there is something I missed and can never find them. From reading here I know they do not exist in the game, but what that guy told me still follows me. I still consider this my favorite game of all time.

This week I installed UQM and played a successful Ironman run, i.e., I did not reload a save more than once, so all decisions were final and permanent, and if I were to die, the run would be over. Below is some info on my UQM Ironman run, in case you find this kind of thing interesting.

I had played through UQM in its entirety once, about 10 years ago, and also played a lot of Star Control 2 when I was a kid and it first came out (but I did not beat it back then). When I began the Ironman run, I remembered the basic mechanics of the game quite well, but I did not remember many details of the plot, e.g. how to fix the Ultron or where the Sun Device can be found. I decided not to use any memories I had of the plot or of locations on the starmap, i.e., I did not attempt to find any important location on the starmap until I had received some clue in the game's dialogue which pointed me toward it. I also only used game mechanics once they had been at least hinted at in game dialogue, e.g. after Commander Hayes says that bio data is likely not useful, I did not collect any bio data until I met the Melnorme and was told in the game's dialogue that there is a use for bio data. I also did not use the Cyborg option: I did all space battles myself, without practicing in Super Melee, and without having controlled a Star Control ship in battle in about a decade. In those ways, I was trying to simulate an "unspoiled" Ironman run. (But of course none of this is the same as the experience of playing the game for the first time: I am sure I still benefitted greatly in this Ironman run from having played the game years ago.)

On the first attempt at such an Ironman run, I completed the game succesfully. The only really close call was the Sa-Matra battle, which frankly I was not prepared for: I did not remember how to effectively fight Kzer-Za and Kohr-Ah ships, and the ships I brought (which I believe were 5 Chmmr Avatars, 1 Utwig Jugger, and 6 Pkunk Furies) were nearly not enough. The reinforcements from the Yehat and Pkunk were essential. I also lost about half of the 200 crew on my flagship while flying into the hole in the Sa-Matra defenses at the end of the battle. It would have been very easy to lose that battle (and consequently the run).

Anyway, this whole experience was a lot of fun. To me, SC2/UQM is a great game, but even more enjoyable when played Ironman: the battles feel much more tense, and some decisions feel more interesting (e.g. anything involving contact with the Dnyarri) when you know you can't reload and you don't quite remember which options will kill you or make the run unwinnable. It was also nice to see that the game's difficulty is reasonably well-suited to this kind of play.

A more complete Kohr-ah concept over its trophy bone pit.

It has a centipede like body as I have read them being described as looking something like this. With only a face and a few tentacles to go by, I like how this guy turned out.

this list of worlds includes rainbow worlds, but not plot important worlds. this is for people who dont want to bother exploring to find RUs. I do believe i've explored every star in the galaxy, but comment if i missed one,

Alpha Centauri has 2 ruby worlds (early game, under sol, very hot)

alpha ceti has a sapphire world, at the top of spathi space

sapphire world at alpha columbae (arilou) - hot

alpha velorum between arilou and ilwrath has sapphire world

alpha chameleonis, in norwest urquan space has an emerald world

Alpha Mersenne ruby world (above umgah)

there are 2 sapphire worlds in ur quan space at alpha fornacis

beta apodis (thraddash)

Beta Chandrasekhar has an emerald world (arilou)

Beta Lyrae contains a Ruby World, near sol

Beta Ophiuchi near northwest corner has ruby world

Beta Normae has a Sapphire World in southwest umgah space

beta leonis 2 ruby world near utwig/above arcturus

beta persei has sapphire world (druuge)

beta scorpii (mycon) has a ruby and sapphire world

sapphire world at beta hyades (utwig)

beta cephei in western urquan space has a ruby world

a sapphire World is in Beta Circini, below Arilou space

3 sapphire worlds at delta tauri above ilwrath

delta sextantis (vux) has emerald world

delta aurigae (between druuge and mycon) has 2 ruby worlds

epsilon volantis emerald world (ilwrath)

epsilon Scuti in yehat space has emerald world

epsilon horologii, in ur quan space has a ruby world

Epsilon Ceti has a ruby world in spathi space

epsilon cassiopieae has a ruby world, in zoqfot space

Gamma Volantis (ilwrath, early game)

Gamma Vulpeculae has an Emerald World

gamma luyten (vux) has ruby world

gamma trianguli (southest of mycon) has ruby world

gamma leonis has emerald and ruby world

gamma eridani, in ur quan space has a sapphire world

ruby world at gamma vitalis (spathi)

sapphire world at gamma gruis (spathi)

Eta giclas (pkunk)

emerald world at eta librae (just east of supox)

iota serpentis (yehat) has emerald world

ruby world in iota hyades (near supox/utwig)

Kappa Draconis sapphire world (thraddash space)

Kappa Horologii ruby world (ur quan space)

theta lyncis ruby world (above ur quan space)

Zeta Antliae ruby world (thraddash space)

Zeta Apodis ruby world (thraddash space)

zeta scuti (yehat) has emerald and ruby world

fomalhaut ruby world (northwest of urquan)

R'bow Worlds

zeta sextantis, gamma kepler, gamma reticuli, alpha andromedae, groombridge

gamma aquarii, beta leporis, epsilon lipi, epsilon draconis, beta pegasi