Transmissions

Welcome to the new year!

Several new items have dropped with the ball, many of which can be found via Foraging or are teasers for things we're hard at work on.

To make way for planned updates, the Xiunus DPIP team have concluded that we need to make some adjustments to the way we handle colonist images here on Xiunus. These changes may be disappointing to some, but we promise that they will be worth it!!

In order to make way for more releases of custom backgrounds and some extra special customization we have planned, all new colonist images must be transparent to make use of the customization items. You are welcome to submit design update requests to adjust old images to be transparent at no cost, but any design changes will require the appropriate items.

Especially important is the fact that image dimensions and ratio, with transparency, is now regulated! All new colonist images must be 1830px by 1200px (OR a similar ratio sized down to no less than 1220px by 800px. They also need to fit within the same general scale and placement as the newly refreshed official line-art, which include PSDs with a layer for shadows beneath the colonist - optional especially for aquatic/reef/water type colonists! Transparency will no longer be automatically chopped off! This also means that all background items will have their extra padding removed. You are welcome to submit design update requests with your colonist images with this newly required scaling/padding, especially if you find that your colonists are a bit too close to the edges now.

You are not required to update old colonists to this new setup, however, they may not look the best and their placement on backgrounds probably won't look too great. To help with this adjustment, for every colonist that you update to a transparent background and the correct ratio via an update design request (accessible in the bottom of the colonist's sidebar), we will send you 25 RP.  For record-keeping, please submit a claim for these, in batches if you're updating more than one at a time. Please link to the colonist in question and mention the # of their design update request in these claims. The title for your claim can be something like "New Colonist Format."

Custom line-art is still allowed!! We have no plans of requiring the use of our official lines; however if our official lines are used, please use the updated versions! Some have some clean-up beyond just the sizing and shadows that we are eager to see in use.

We've made a new guidebook page to detail custom line-art and rules regarding accessories, size, etc, especially for those who have made custom line-art for the Xunari public to use. If anything's confusing, feel free to reach out to staff for clarification! We will be outfitting that page with image examples in the coming days, but all feedback in the meantime is highly appreciated!

To make way for planned updates, the free cave background items have had a face-lift! We've also released a new Ocean Caves background, seen below!

As many of you have noticed, we are in the process of releasing philters, special items that can be used to add single alleles for individual markings onto colonists, genos, and whelps. These are released via the Genetic Research prompt. Adding these philters to whelps via the automated breeding roller is coming soon, but you are welcome to "apply them" and add it in your post-weaning comments for us to manually remove the item from your inventory and process the new allele.

These will be available to craft, with recipes incoming in chunks as they are released. They will be all considered alchemy.

New pet + fauna, released last month: Bokbok! Coming over from Tark'ee, the Bokbok is a very finely rounded creature, sporting eggs from the females and strange powders from the males. Females account for about 75% of the population to account for the rarity of the males' drops. Their drops only build up for a few days. They've replaced the Huldah in the Wandering Merchant with the Bokbok.

While there are definitely some fun updates coming in the future with animals, we have revamped our Variants system to now be able to feed these new "Swill" items to your animals to make them the variations. They will be available via crafting and potentially can be found as Investigation rewards very soon. If you have any suggestions for their ingredients, feel free to shoot us a line!

There will be nine total colour options currently in the works: Black, Blue, Earth, Red, Grey, Olive, Spotted, Tan, and White. The current pets

Agriculture animals now cannot be assigned to individual colonists as pets.

All current Aquatic Tark'ee Natives have been created and released. That means all Aquatic Tark'ee genos that have been fully migrated from their original ARPG via the form have been created as genos and have been transferred to their owners. We also did this for Draconic Tark'ee genos, but there's still one or two of those Natives who we need to create and upload. 

What do I do with my migrated tark'ee?
If you want to use your old design from the original Tark'ee arpg, you may use that image, preferably with the background edited out. However, if you want to use the old lineart and/or old designs, it cannot be different from the original deviantart-posted design! If you want to use any other lineart from its official deviantart reference, you will need to base the design on their Xiunus genetics and marking/colour rules. Use the colonist creation guide and if you have any questions, feel free to ask via Discord!

I want to redesign my Tark'ee but I don't have the means
For the first month after your Tark'ee colonist is migrated, you are welcome to submit a Claim to request your Tark'ee be redesigned by the staff. All newly migrated Tark'ee that have already had their genos generated and sent to their owners have until one month after this news transmission to make that request. The same option will be available for the other Tark'ee subspecies upon their release as the event progresses.

Can I migrate my tark'ee genos from deviantart?
Unfortunately, genos on the deviantart version will not translate over after cut-off for its subspecies. Until the cut-off point, you may request geno conversion via the discord channel in the Tark'ee server and then use that to submit the design through the this deviantart form. We request that any of these newly submitted designs use the new line art and marking rules. To give us time to convert the geno and yourself time to design it, please leave two weeks of lee-way between when you request the geno conversion and the cut off point below.

Cutoffs for deviantart design approval:

• Aquatic/Wave: February 9 (One month after this post)
• Draconic/Serpentine: February 9 (One month after this post)
• Flight/Aerial: TBA
• Volcanic/Rock: TBA
• Base species/Earth: TBA

Happy halfway through the year! There are several game mechanisms that are in desperate need of rebalancing.

IMPORTANT: Colonist stats.
Regarding repools, we've observed considerable min-maxing, where users allocate most stats to one or two areas, creating colonists who excel in specific tasks. While this is acceptable, it often leads to neglecting the roleplay aspect of what these stats would realistically represent. To address this, we are developing a canonical document that outlines the functionality of characters at various stat levels, such as what a Strength of 1 would entail.

Additionally, we will introduce a permanent "minimum stat" requirement of 5 for each stat during repooling and for orphan/recruit characters. The new requirement will also ensure that orphans/recruits have a stat pool of no less than 30.

This "minimum stat" code will be implemented in early-mid July, date pending.

We will also undertake additional stat rebalancing to compensate for this change, which will likely include a boost to the current stat pools for existing colonists who have small stat pools.

Pet Drops
Pet drop resell prices have been reduced as a stop-gap before staff are able to rebalance drops. Expect more changes to pet drops in the coming months as we determine what works best and what doesn't break the game too much with upcoming additions.

Items
Items, the way they are found or crafted, and sellback prices are something that we will be sitting down and revisiting in the coming months. If anyone has experience in balancing these sort of game mechanics, we are all ears!

All items in the "Retired Items" category will be deleted and converted either into their gear equivalent or a new item called ERROR. This new item may be used in future crafting or events, but it's your choice whether to keep your retired items for conversion or sell them back for one FS during the event. This cleanup will also remove all current marking cards from the treasure maps used in previous event stages, as well as the map pieces for Ocean and Bunkers.

Recycling will commence one month after Stage Three begins. Given the recent influx of Natives being discovered, we are delaying Stage Three to allow you to focus on Natives without the added pressure of the event.

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After some deliberation, we have decided to implement a two-week cooldown period between design updates. This is valid regardless of whether the colonist in question is a whelp having a free redesign or an adult with a design update and the cooldown will reset whenever a colonist is adopted from the immigration center.

This does not apply to age-up requests, as to not add an arbitrary wait time for colonies speeding their whelps to adulthood.

Also, please remember to be considerate and compassionate when talking about Xunari designs in the Discord, particularly about Immigration Center designs and plans for design replacement.

Staff have decided to revise XP requirements to limit abuse and make sure we keep our submissions both high quality and fun!

Bonuses
A number of the bonuses for art and literature submissions may no longer be used to meet the minimum XP listed for art rolls, story mode, observations, etc. Those include foreign colonists, tribal visitors, and affiliated arpgs. The full list is on the experience guide at the bottom of the page. Note that you can still submit for pure XP/RP if you don't meet the minimums! This is specifically for activities that require a certain amount of effort and detail.

For now, these are the things that can count towards that minimum:

Story Mode Calculations
A few of the Story Mode prompts don't require colonists, which has led to some confusion about calculating RP for those submissions, particularly among new colonies. As a reminder, for most things XP cannot be calculated without a colonist present. XP is a Colonist currency.

After discussion, we've come up with this compromise:

These are the applicable Story Mode prompts, and the above is only applicable when there are no colonists present:

• C1.A2. Depict your researcher.
• C1.A3. Depict your colony location. (If there is no researcher present in the piece, calculate this as a "Landscape Only" research but you may include "Home Location" as a bonus to reach 7 RP.)
• C1.B4 - B. Investigating the plants, wildlife, geography, or anything else around their new home.

The wait is finally over! Our new version and accompanying site redesign is finally here! With that, and the progress of the event, we have revealed the name of the event: Tark'ee Trespass!

There are a lot of new updates, which you can see in our development log. If you notice anything strange or a broken link, please comment on the dev log or create a bug report!

The wait for Tark'ee is almost over, with the Aquatic subspecies having been discovered through the event. Native Aquatic Tarkee will continue to be released via the event and there will be a few others sprinkled in with them. Migration for user-owned Aquatic Tarkee from the original game will begin once the Natives are released.

How will migration work?
Back when the merger was announced a little bit over a year ago, a form was sent out for all members of Tark'ee on their deviantart page to request any of their Tark'ee with existing designs be transferred over. That form is still in use and available for submissions. Submitted Tark'ee will have their genomes examined and converted into Xiunus genomes, then will be created as genos on Xiunus.

We are creating them as genos to give every migrated Tark'ee the freedom to be redesigned on the newly released official Xiunus lineart, if they so desire. There were some significant changes to what markings Tark'ee will have coming in, but we understand if individuals don't want to or have the means to redo new designs.

I want to redesign my Tark'ee but I don't have the means
For the first month after your Tark'ee colonist is migrated, you are welcome to submit a Submission to request your Tark'ee be redesigned by the staff.