X Rebirth patch 1.18 could be available “before the weekend,” say Egosoft

Maybe I can smalltalk this NPC into making trade function.

The latest word emerging about X Rebirth’s patching schedule is that Patch 1.18 could be available “before the weekend.” That’s according to an update from developer Bernd Lehahn posted on Egosoft’s official forums earlier today.

As both public and professional critiques have made quite clear, X Rebirth is currently in a mess. If you want more in-depth detail about just how much of a mess, my review is happy to help you in that regard. Trade is the major problem at present, as so much of the game is dependent on it working correctly. At the moment, it does not. An X Rebirth modder has made a valiant attempt to fix it already, but Patch 1.18 may have a more official solution.

“It turned out that the issues many of you are seeing with trade ships not working correctly is not one bug but a whole series of connected problems. After resolving the first issue with 1.17, more problems became apparent. This is the reason we are now testing the next patch 1.18 a lot longer than the other patches,” says Bernd, before adding that “We had a group of testers dedicated to testing our economy over a long period of time. These guys used a special version of the game which allowed them to run the entire economy at a higher speed. It seems that most of these problems we now see did not happen with this time acceleration.”

Somewhat ironic, given that several players would like the ‘SETA’ time acceleration feature brought back. It was there all along! If you were a tester.

Anyway, there’s a chance that trading will work better in Patch 1.18. Here’s what else you can look forward to:

• Fixed several causes of crashes in-game and when loading savegames.
• Fixed a specific problem resulting in periodic slow-downs.
• Improved general performance (first small improvement only, more to come).
• Fixed several problems with ship/drone docking/undocking behaviour.
• Fixed problem with player drone formations.
• Fixed several small localisation issues.
• Improved skill levels for new NPCs.
• Improved readability of entries in interaction menus.
• Improved GPU listing on laptops with multiple GPUs (still some driver-related issues on certain hardware).