Pioneer dev forum

Hi all, I just tried out the February 2026 release of the game yesterday, and here are my thoughts so far as a new player.

Firstly, great job everyone, it feels like a worthy upgrade to the original Frontier which I played decades ago. Now to the issues...

The "easy start" Mars starting ship, Coronatrix, doesn't have any passenger cabin equipment slots. This is unfortunate since some of the best-looking missions as a new player are the ones to transport people. In order to take those missions I would first have to downgrade my ship to a Pumpkinseed or Lunar Shuttle, which seems... wrong? Even the "hard start" ship, Xylophis, has a passenger cabin slot.

My suggestion: Add some passenger cabin slots to the Coronatrix.

Second issue - the "capacity" of a ship is not well defined. Sometimes it is implied that capacity is the total cargo and equipment capacity, and other times it is implied that cargo and equipment are measured separately. Examples:

The wiki (https://wiki.pioneerspacesim.net/wiki/S ... properties) says that the capacity property is "The cargo and equipment capacity of the ship". This implies that "capacity" should always be a larger number than "cargo". However, the ship definition JSON files vary - some have capacity larger than cargo, and others have cargo much larger than capacity.

In the game itself, "Capacity" is the most featured number. It has a column in the Ship Market screen, and is shown on all of the "comms" screens, at the bottom next to Cash, Cabins, and Legal status. However, all these mentions of Capacity seems to have nothing to do with cargo - it is just the amount of equipment. This confused me for a long time - it seems that the only way to discover how much cargo space I have is to go to the Personal Info -> Economy and Trade screen and look on the right. Even the Commodity Market trading screen doesn't show how much free cargo space I have.

My suggestion: Remove the separate "cargo" stat, and just use capacity for the total equipment and cargo combined. This allows fun gameplay trade-offs like - should I fit additional shields and missile racks at the expense of cargo space? I'm pretty sure this is how the original Frontier did it.

Also, if you implement this then you don't need to explicitly add passenger cabin slots to ships - cabins would just fill up the available space, with posher cabins taking more space. Currently passenger cabins don't take up any space at all - they don't take up either equipment OR cargo space - neither number changes when I add or remove cabins. This definitely seems wrong.

My final bit of feedback is that the "Add jump" button for hyperspace jumps is too well hidden. It literally took me about an hour to find it. I went to the sector view and clicked on a planet, and it was highlighted, but the hyperdrive button was greyed out. So I thought maybe I have to take off first. After flying away from the planet an enormous distance, it was still greyed out. I searched the web, which confidently told me that "after clicking on a planet, click on the + sign on the bottom right of the screen to add it as a jump destination". But there was no + button anywhere on the screen. I picked a mission and tried adding the target as the nav destination, which showed the target planet highlighted, but still no "add jump" button. For a while I thought maybe the game was broken. Eventually I realised that I have to click on the Info button on the top left in order to see the jump menu, and that menu is not shown by default! This is not very intuitive.

My suggestion: Either have the info menu displayed by default whenever a planet is selected in the Sector screen, or have a right click menu for planets which contains "add jump" as one of the options.

Okay, that's all for now. Hope a developer reads this and finds it useful.

Thanks for the feedback!
I agree with the second and third points (capacity, and jump button).
Ideally we would have (at some point) a tutorial mode when starting the game.

The wiki is as updated as players/contributors are willing to keep it.

I thought about the equipment -vs- cargo issue some more, because it didn't make sense to me that a game based on Frontier wouldn't have copied Frontier's ship capacity implementation in the first place. And it looks like my suspicion was right - Pioneer was originally implemented with the fun trade-off mechanic that I remember. Then I found this post by sturnclaw outlining a plan to split out cargo space and equipment space into separate scalars.

Since that post is from six years ago, I guess it's too late to say... uh... don't do that. 😅

Out intent is not to make a modernized Frontier clone, and wasn't for a while now. But to make a good space game, while not forgeting our Frontier roots.
The equipment issues are due to the whole thing being in a transitional state, and the aim is that you can use the cabin space for additional purposes eventually, like you could install a workshop for maintenance, and so on. Maybe even as extra cargo space, up to a limit.
The Frontier way of treating the ship as a volume does not allow for much ship differentiation or roles, and oversimplifies trade-offs and ship structure, narrowing it to a one-dimensional problem.
Not to mention that we want equipmemt damage for combat, and already layed out ship interiors for that, and to seemtheir capacity.

I'm not against changing things if the result is better. The only aspect of the change I don't like is having cargo and equipment as separate weight pools. All the other things you mention, and also those mentioned in sturnclaw's post, like - equipment damage, storing equipment in the hold without equipping it, needing slots for different equipment types, an on-board workshop, transporting drone ships - they all sound good and can all be still be done even if you keep a single "capacity" weight pool for equipment and cargo. In fact, now that you have equipment slots I'm not sure what the separate equipment capacity pool is even for.

As an additional note, I expect that switching from a tonnage based system to a cubic meter based system for the cargo is likely to bring more headaches than benefits. How will you balance ship thrust? Currently you know the minimum and maximum weight of any ship, because it's in the stats. So you can set the engine thrust value to something reasonable. But if one unit of cargo can vary wildly in weight then EITHER you have to set the ship thrust so that ships are ridiculously over-thrusted when empty, and flying around the solar system is basically free because it uses so little fuel, OR you have to potentially put the player in situations where they can accept a mission to transport cargo, the cargo is loaded into their hold, and boom, it was 5 units of uranium so their tiny Xylophis now contains 100t of mass and can't physically lift off from the planet surface. Game over. That's not a fun gameplay mechanic, it's just annoying. So then to prevent this you'd have to add weight checking code all over the place to warn the player off such situations. Or a mechanism to allow them to change their mind after accepting a contract. Though that doesn't help if the mission target is to land on a planet and it turns out they are too heavy and smash into the planet's surface instead. So you need more checks for that. But what if the player has plenty of time to fulfil the contract and stops off at heavier planet along the way? You can't check for that because the game doesn't know that they are going to do it. In the end all of this is a lot of work for not much effective gameplay change.

Anyway, these are just my opinions, I realise you guys are coding the game for fun. So as long as you personally are having fun it kind of doesn't matter. I mostly enjoyed playing the game for the short time that I tried it. I hope that I can come back and try next year's version and be able to write a post saying "Wow, you addressed all my concerns in ways I hadn't even thought of - the new cargo system is great!" 😋

The trust issue is already solved by having an acceleration cap for each ship and direction. Partially due to structural limits, partially due to human tolerances. Sure, you can overload your ship a bit, but most of them are set up in a way that you can still produce 1.5 gee-ish up acceleration.
And there's another gameplay reason for that: a 16g capable ship isn't much fun to do combat with.
Also, having to watch out for TWR can be an interesting trade-off. Admittedly the UI isn't yet there for that though.

I'm not sure if you're saying that there is a maximum and minimum acceleration cap, or just a maximum. Either way I think you still have a problem...

Let me be totally clear here - as a player I really only care about "how much stuff can I fit on my ship". The fact that a heavier ship moves more slowly is a potentially interesting side-effect, but generally I'm not thinking about that at all. It only comes up when I am looking at missions and wondering whether I can meet the deadline. When it comes to that trade-off, it is understood as - I could carry less cargo to make the ship lighter, and then it will go faster. Fine. I'm probably not going to strip out any equipment just to take a mission, but maybe I would if it's a really good one. These all seem like reasonable gameplay mechanics.

To this end, it basically doesn't matter whether the "stuff" on the ship is measured in tonnes or cubic meters. It is abstracted to the "capacity" of the ship, and different equipment takes up different amounts of that capacity. If I don't have any passenger cabins then I have more "capacity" for cargo. Also fine.

What I think doesn't work is making the player worry about both volume and mass separately. Sure, it's more realistic, but does it work in the game? If the entire setting was deep space, then maybe it would, because any fractional g force would be enough to move things, potentially over a timescale of months, between two stations. But then in that scenario, actually no, volume wouldn't matter at all, because you can always stick things on the outside of the ship, because in deep space streamlining doesn't matter. So then you'd be back to - only bother tracking mass.

It's basically one of those triangular trade-off charts:

A. Landing in gravity wells
B. Allow a player to put too much mass on their ship
C. User-friendly gameplay

Pick any two.

I can actually imagine a UI feature where any celestial body is shown with a big red exclamation mark over it if your current ship's TWR would be too low to safely land. But this can't account for accepting a mission to transport cargo before you've accepted the mission. I can't think of any way you can realistically warn the player in advance about all the possible ways in which they could get stuck. Much better to put a cap on mass, and measure cargo and equipment in mass units.

With the direction the code is currently going in, if you're going to have an acceleration minimum cap, then the result is: Measure cargo in terms of volume, track the mass separately, display the mass in the UI somewhere, and then have the player ignore it and only focus on volume, because really they only care about "how much stuff can I fit on my ship" and the acceleration caps mean that mass doesn't matter very much. The entire switch to tracking volume and mass separately was pointless!

Alternatively, if there is no acceleration minimum cap, then you have all the problems that I have outlined.

impaktor wrote: I agree with the second and third points (capacity, and jump button).

Just to clarify, I agree it can be confusing at first, but to me that is a UI / tutorial issue, I do not agree to going back to the Frontier system.

I hope that I can come back and try next year's version and be able to write a post saying "Wow, you addressed all my concerns in ways I hadn't even thought of - the new cargo system is great!"

I don't think anyone on the current dev team has further cargo/capacity work on their schedule. Your first issue, on the default layout of the starter ship can easily be fixed by yourself, e.g. as a mod.