Alpha 5.4.5: planetary terrain you can land on
Alpha 5.4.5: planetary terrain you can land on
Zero-G runs in a browser tab, on desktop and on phones, with no download and no client. This release rebuilt the part of it that was weakest since launch: the ground.
The quadrant map is a real map now
Until this week, scanning a quadrant gave you one small blurred image. A quadrant is 32 × 16 km — 512 km² — shown as a thumbnail.
That is gone. A fully scanned quadrant now opens a terrain map you can zoom into, down to a scale of a few metres, built on NASA elevation data with real slopes and features.
A new Scan Local Map button resolves extra detail wherever you are looking, at any zoom, without ever loading a full quadrant at fine resolution. That is what keeps it affordable on a phone.
Land, and see your ship at its real size
Land, zoom in as far as it goes, and scan again.
That is the ship at true scale on Mars. The scale bar reads 20 metres.
Being straight about it: the tiling still repeats and there are only a handful of terrain types so far. The generator underneath was the expensive part of this release — new types are cheap to add from here.
Surveying is a minigame now
Finding ore deposits happens on the terrain map, and it is something you play rather than wait through.
You carry a Basic or Advanced Terrain Probe, select it, and double-click the map to deploy. The probe is consumed on deployment. Double-click elsewhere and it drives there, scanning as it goes.
Two things make it a decision rather than a click:
- Probe speed depends on the slope. A straight line over a ridge can cost you the whole run.
- Sweep range depends on the terrain. An Amplitude value sits next to the terrain type — higher is harder to scan through. Ice reads 1000 m, Highlands 3000 m.
- Basic Terrain Probe — 30 s · 0.2 km/s · 2.0 km max sweep
- Advanced Terrain Probe — 45 s · 0.5 km/s · 4.0 km max sweep Both sell at HQs in limited quantities and both blueprints are available, so players with Synthesis skills can produce them cheaply and sell them on the Auction House. Since every probe is consumed on use, the demand keeps coming back.
Also fixed
Laser power and range bonuses now show in combat; full pilot stats are visible before you acquire a pilot; the Auction House shows Buy Now and minimum bid. And account-wide refining bonuses were being ignored entirely — refining is now much faster even with a small bonus.
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