[Starsector Mods][0.9.1a] Gates Awakened (updated 2021-01-12)

Gates Awakened gives you access to a small number of fast-travel Gates, changing up exploration and colony planning. While it is, of course, not canon, the mod is intended to fit into the game’s lore (if you squint a little bit). To keep the activation of the gates a secret from the rest of the Sector, the player will not use the Gates while being observed.

The mod tries to encourage early exploration and ease later-game traveling, without feeling like a cheat.
Once a Gate is activated, the player may travel to any other active Gate for a fuel cost based on the distance traveled.

To get started, simply check around at bars until something Gate-related pops up.

Features

Massive thanks to toast for his inspirational mod,

Active Gates, without which this mod would not exist.
If activating every gate and being able to jump all over the Sector sounds better than only getting to play with a few gates, go check out Active Gates!
Where Active Gates allows you to jump right in and activate everything (for a price), Gates Awakened introduces gates more slowly and in a limited amount, making an attempt at acknowledging the game lore.

Bugs? Suggestions? Questions? Want me to talk about why you should be coding in Kotlin instead of Java until you can’t take it any more? Ping me on

Discord @Wisp#0302, or just leave a comment in this thread.

Changelog

“I want to activate all of the gates and travel for free!”

Compatibility
Boggled’s Terraforming Mod: Can jump both to and from Boggled’s player-built astral gates.
Active Gates: Untested, but it should be possible to jump to gates activated in Active Gates.

Credits
toast: The original Active Gates mod
LazyWizard: LazyLib, Console Commands, and a font of knowledge
Many others on Discord for help, support, reports, and being a motivating community
And of course Fractal Softworks for this incredible game

In theory, they should be compatible. I would expect gates activated using Gates Awakened to only be able to jump to other gates activated using Gates Awakened, and same for Active Gates, but the mods shouldn’t have compatibility issues with each other.

– Added new intel that displays all active gates
– Updated intel icons to be cooler
– Reduced fuel requirement to use gates to 80%
– Removed dependency on LazyLib
– Fixed bug where the second quest would not appear, even if you met the requirements

version 1.2.0 (2019-9-29)

– Gates may now be deactivated to reclaim an activation code
– Number of reward activation codes increased to 3 (was 2)
– Now prompts player to enable transponder when needed
– Added hyperspace transition animation
– Gates Awakened quests are now marked with the Story intel tag

– Gates now get their original name back after being deactivated
– Slightly improved gate intel formatting
– Balance is for gymnasts. Added configuration for # of activation codes

The game is balanced around travel. This mod exists because I started to find it tedious in the late-game, but being able to activate any gate will make the distance between places largely meaningless and remove some of the strategy/decision-making/gameplay loop. I’d caution against going too crazy.

That said, it’s your decision, not mine. In “mods/Gates-Awakened/data/config/settings.json”, there is a setting called “gatesAwakened_midgameQuestRewardCodeCount”.
Simply change that to the number of gate activation codes you want (+ you will have an additional two from the first quest that activates two gates) and reload your game (if that doesn’t work, restart Starsector).
Note that you must have finished the second (final) quest to unlock at-will gate activate/deactivation.

You may also change the fuel cost ratio in the same file, using “gatesAwakened_FuelMultiplier”.

The second mission is to investigate a planet in what I assume is a randomly picked system. Well, thanks to my surveying in the early game, I have already surveyed every planet in the system the mission is telling me to go investigate. So I’m sort of stuck.

Help please.

I will say I like the idea behind the limited gates. It makes you consider them when you are setting up colonies.

So I just got the mod and I’ve run into a bit of an issue with it.

The second mission is to investigate a planet in what I assume is a randomly picked system. Well, thanks to my surveying in the early game, I have already surveyed every planet in the system the mission is telling me to go investigate. So I’m sort of stuck.

Help please.

I will say I like the idea behind the limited gates. It makes you consider them when you are setting up colonies.

There might be a way to reset that the exploration done on that planet via the console mod. But I don’t know what command you would need off the top of my head. You can type in “help” to get that figured out or ask on the mod page itself.

So I just got the mod and I’ve run into a bit of an issue with it.

The second mission is to investigate a planet in what I assume is a randomly picked system. Well, thanks to my surveying in the early game, I have already surveyed every planet in the system the mission is telling me to go investigate. So I’m sort of stuck.

Have you investigated the planet and nothing happens? I don’t think that whether you’ve surveyed it should have any effect on the quest – you don’t need to survey it for the quest, in fact.

From a role-playing standpoint, surveying is looking for habitability and major planet features, but doesn’t explore every nook and cranny of a planet. The quest has you go to a specific location on the planet’s surface.

Would it be possible to add a usable in-game item that can add activations? (Kinda like how blueprints or mod-specs work.) I’m thinking that you can add that item as guaranteed drops from full-size [REDACTED] stations (with lower chances on lesser stations, possibly generated on sector creation to prevent save-scumming if you wish.)

This way, exploration feeds back on itself with a reward for the player in the long run. Players can at least earn their conveniences.

You may have to figure out a way to prevent any of these items from being used before gaining the ability to activate/deactivate gates though. (Or it could be an alternate method for the more combat-oriented player; [REDACTED] stations are mid- and late-game opponents for the most part.)

(Also, maybe a rare drop from ruins?)

I think the only thing that would truly trivialized travel in the game is if someone makes a mod to be able to build new gates as a skill. (So you can plop one down anywhere you want.) Otherwise, there would be having Gates as a build option for stable points in a system (along side Comms, Navs, and Sensors.)

Like you said, it’d be a bonus reason to keep exploring and you’d have to keep making decisions about which gates to activate, which is interesting. It’d be tricky from a lore perspective, but that

so it could be made to work.

I’ve started a different mod, though, and am considering Gates Awakened to be complete, at least for now. I’ll add this as a potential new feature over at https://github.com/davidwhitman/Gates-Awakened/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Aupdated-desc, and maybe I’ll pick it up for the future.

Thanks for the feedback! Just out of curiosity, are you on v1.3.1 or using v2.0.1 from the Discord? I’m hoping to see one or two people get all the way through v2 before I release it everywhere.