Good Evening Dear HWS Community @everyone
one blink with an eye later and it’s end of March! One breath later and it’s 9 years since I started the first HWS server.
I welcome all new players and old players to our 9th HWS Anniversary and thank everyone who followed us so far! 
It’s an incredible honor for me and I feel very thankful for seeing so many of you playing on our servers - some even since 9 years!
Without too much nostalgic talk this time I go straight to the points.
Empyrion 1.12 Patch
With the upcoming release of patch 1.12 there is a fresh air coming into Empyrion - also the reason why I had to wait for further full wipe plans.
Especially the Structure ownership transfer feature, as well as the Field repair, new Blocks and especially my highlight: Replace a structure at runtime.
With this, a new era of missions and POIs can begin and with that my decision to remove all old Stargate Missions and replace them step by step with new ones. I think you got tired of them anyways by now.
For that I need your help! Please send me your suggestions of new ones in the proper channels ( <#1048599970741223475> or <#1048599791308906556> ), ideally with a fledged out description of runtime, max. player count and gameplay of the mission and I try to make it possible!
HWS+ Release
After the last 5 years of regretful neglecting my own HWS+ scenario, it’s time to finally release it! I didn’t do nothing the last years, step by step it came together and the only thing that was missing was the reassembly of overthing together, with some changes due the feedback from the community.
I’m still in the process of doing that and I’m really sorry it took/takes so long!!
The current status is, that I reworked the universe, going back to the roots with one single solar system for the HWS System (with the one way trips, hotspots, PvPvE layout, Commodity trading routes, etc.) and some outer solar systems for the expansion / Star Fragments and NPC Campaign.
I posted a pre-version of it in the <#702199670574678016> channel and more about different things the next days/weeks throughout the release road.
The remaining time is used for “marketing”, trying to get more players on board, refining stuff and probably create a separate Early Access server for gathering the last feedback, focusing especially on the start experience.
With all of that and Patch 1.12 out of the way, I’m excited to announce to release HWS+ on Friday, 25th April 2025!
Stay tuned for more updates along the way.
To summarize HWS+ to the players that only know Empyrion via Reforged Eden: in short Reforged Eden is a Singleplayer PvE Scenario that I host regardless since our features make it Multiplayer compatible - more or less. PvP is basically still out of question, because it would involve bigger config / universe adjustments, which I don’t do, since I want to host the original spirit of it, how the creators have anticipated it.
So HWS+ is basically also a custom scenario such as RE, without vanilla dependencies, where I on the other hand focus mainly on Multiplayer and a PvPvE gameplay, with more focus on PvP.
Let me close by saying that I’m aware that it’s a “competition” with my RE servers and that the times, where we had 170 players playing daily on my own old HWS scenario won’t come back.
The goal of HWS+ is for one, releasing my own creation, how I enjoy it, so I can play the game myself again, maybe even with some relaxed Twitch sessions I stream and second, for all the people who just want to try something else, especially looking for bigger challenges and what Empyrion has to offer for Multiplayer/PvP.
HWS RE Full Wipe
Last but not least the info about the upcoming new HWS RE season. Also aligned with the 1.12 Patch, you can prepare for the next season which starts next week, on Friday, 4th April 2025!
The last days I was busy diving big in the code from Jascha and fixing big bugs and adding new logic, reworking some features and rebalance them along the way.
Let me summarize the highlights for the next season:
- reworking the OCD categories took longer than anticipated - sorry. But finally they are all done and ready. Since they are quite big, I don’t want to cause issues for the late notice. So for the last time, the current categories will be moved over to the next season and starting at 4th April, they will be instantly active. For the full overview of the new categories go here please
- an old but new feature will be activated: HWS Insurance. I had to fix few things in the code and it will take some balancing iterations but what it does is basically the same what the Station Service does in terms of “Repair to Template”. Just a little bit more advanced.
Like with an insurance, you activate the insurance on your ship with the commandegs:insurance:id. With this our tool grabs a backup of your current ship (make sure to click Save Template in the Control Panel). Then, if your ship gets damaged or destroyed, you can claim your insurance for a certain fee and your ship will get spawned above your head to the Template state you saved before. It has its limitations and rules, I’ll post the next days on a new dedicated HWS Guide page in our forum. - with the new season the upgrade price of EB and EGS will be increased slightly to counter the ingame inflation. Check the HWS Guide for the already updated prices.
- rebalancement (slight increase of HWS DNA cost for selling ships) and reworking of our EGS Recycle and Sell Ships feature. Using these features have now a usage limit per day, same as how many HWS Trader you can buy per day.
The limit is dynamic and scales with your EGS or EB Level. If you reached your limit for selling ships to the system nevertheless, you can buy ingame a new item called “HWS Sell Ship Token” to sell even more ships. (Not available for Recycling ships for now, since the limit is very generous in the first place)
Special NPC Traders and Mission rewards will offer them. More information will also follow on the dedicated HWS Guide forum post.
Beside this being discussed often times and suggested by the community, I recently collected the economy data about these features, especially the Sell Ship to System one and saw, how much credits are being made with it. Too much in some cases. This is a nice round up of these features in combination with the economy. - I’ll go over the PvP playfields again and remove legacy items and add more valiable RE2 items as loot
- If time allows working on my other TODOs
- fixing HWS POIs
- fixed an years old bug that I couldn’t exclude factions properly from specific playfields. I’ll make use of it now, to exclude faction(s) from a specific playfield, if they broke our rules for example
- fixed an years old bug that every Origin got the rewards for discovering a new playfield. This was originally intended to be an Explorer only bonus.