Let's revisit the scope. What should people expect from engineering in 4.0?

So as of now for 4.0, let's start with life support. So we will have life support that has the fire system in it. So life support is also a valid counter for fire that you will see on your ships. We will have room propagation. So you opening a door to the outside will basically evacuate all the atmosphere of your ship to the outside. We have atmosphere maintenance, where you as the player are responsible for making sure that your life support generator runs well enough so that there's enough breathable atmosphere inside the rooms. So the Life Support Generator is a new item that we will introduce. And the Life Support Generator will then create a new resource. Right now, it's still called Life Support Resource; we are really, really creative with names. There's a filter that is also a new item, added as the consumable for the Life Support Generator. And yeah, that's just the life support segment of the resource network release. Talking about engineering, here we have the power management that will be introduced. You were not able to see it yet in the Arena Commander mode because we were not ready yet. So especially UI is still a lot of work for us, because we need to get it right, accessible. It cannot be this highly scientific method of you basically measuring the joules of the power plant. We have to make it accessible for the general player audience, but still interesting for those that are really interested in those engineering mechanics. We will introduce the relays as the connection point between the items, with the fuses. So these are already things that you even see in live in some of the ships that are already prepared. So for example, the Retaliator already has the relay boxes with the fuses inside. And in the Arena Commander experimental mode, you can actually witness their functionality. The huge thing, and that's more on our side, on the design side, is the rebalance of items again. But as already mentioned, with all the pre-work that has been done for 3.23, we have a very, very clear goal of what we want to achieve here. And that is we want to really facilitate the items inside the resource network. So items should be more meaningful in ships. So we have a meaningful difference between item classes, for example, where there's a huge difference in the look and feel in terms of gameplay for the civilian and military components, as well as the grades. So this is our internal high goal for the release: that we have a meaningful difference there, so that player choice actually matters here. And also what we want to achieve here is that the differences are clearer. So players understand what's the difference between a civilian and an industrial item more easily, and it's very clear to players what to pick for the journey they want to take. Something that, sadly, I had a discussion yesterday, we will not make it for 4.0, as of now, is the batteries. So we might push the batteries to a later release. Doesn't mean that they won't come. It just means they come at a later point, because this is such a crucial feature and we need to get it right. And every time that we can spend on polish is better invested than actually forcing additional features in. So we would rather spend time polishing the feature and then just making sure that everything is in. I think no one would like it if everything is in there and it's not working, or it's not working well enough. That's the best safe phrasing I could come up with.

I hear you, and I appreciate you sharing that with us. Obviously, when ISC comes back in about a month, one of the stories we'll be telling on our journey to 4.0 will be another revisiting of engineering and life support, and you'll get to see how it's all working out there.

Because I'm not done. So there's more. There's simple repair. So we have the repair of ship items that you also can already witness in the Arena Commander experimental mode: exchange of fuses, exchange of broken items. And we mentioned at the beginning of this show that there's now a distortion counter. And that basically leads to the last bit that we will introduce with the resource network engineering gameplay, which is malfunctions. So here we will start with three malfunctions. The initial release will come with those three, which are fire, damage to the item, and distortion to the item, because we now have dedicated counters to them, so that we can actually introduce meaningful gameplay and you're not just suffering from whatever malfunction the item will suffer from. But we made sure that the malfunction system is so vast that if we notice that those three are not enough yet, in later patches or later releases we can add more bespoke malfunctions, so we can slowly widen the gameplay. Because I can tell you, it's already quite a lot that you have to manage and learn. So it will be fun, but it will also be a huge learning curve that some of us have to go through.