PAST v0.05 Released

I decided to go ahead and get a copy of the latest PAST prototype out to my Patreon supporters. It's functional enough that you can at least play it reasonably stable and enjoy a better combat experience than what Bethesda gave us.

You can still find the latest package in the PAST #public-releases channel of the GreslinGames Discord, available to Citizen role users. (If you don't currently have Citizen, please read the #read-this-first channel for instructions.)

I've begun auditing the game quests, and have verified that PAST v0.05 now works well in the Vectera battle intro, the Kreet Lab pirate followup, and Nova Shipyards. I'm going to continue moving through the quests and audit support as I go.

The four major enemy groups (Spacers, Crimson Fleet, Ecliptic, Varuun) should all mostly be working, aside from a few funky faction things that Bethesda did that confuse my detection code.

Custom patch support via keywords, faction relationships and race detection is now supported. For the most part, we should be able to now custom patch similar to PANPC.

There are enough safeguards on the scripts now that you should be able to easily uninstall PAST from your save. Just go back to your ship and give the system a chance to unload the NPCs before saving and uninstalling.

I've added a few more debug tools that I wish I'd had the knowledge and foresight to have done in 2018 with PANPC. One is a debug recon mode that highlights all active PAST AIs in the loaded cell. There are two ESMs now included with the package (Debug, Debug No Logging), and both turn on the recon mode. The debug log cranks out a lot of material, so if you don't want to do that, use the No Logging variant.  (Only use one of the Debug ESMs, and load it below PAST.esm in your load order.)

We're still way early in this whole process, and until Creation Kit is released for Starfield, this should still be considered highly experimental. However, it has been pretty stable in testing and I haven't yet encountered any issues that would concern me in regular gameplay.

Have fun,

- G.