Galaxy Harvester News

The main new feature coming to you today is the Interplanetary Survey Droid interface. You can now upload your saved survey droid mails to Galaxy Harvester and automatically update resources for that planet. Also, if you play on a server like Rogue One where the Survey Droid report has been enhanced to include stats, Galaxy Harvester will pick up the resource stats as well! The primary page to use this interface is on the Survey List page. If you upload a report there, all resources in the report will be either added or verified, and any resources of the class that are not in the report will be removed from the planet. There is also a tool on the Add Resources page. If you load a survey droid report there, all spawns listed in the report will be loaded onto the page for you to review and submit. No removal is done.

There are also a few other updates of note. To make it simpler for server admins to request their server be added to galaxy harvester and manage it thereafter, a new Galaxy Admin page is added. New server admins launching public servers can go to the Galaxy Admin page to submit them now.

Also for players on NGE based servers, the schematics tools have been adjusted so that Pre-CU Professions and schematics are no longer listed.

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Hi harvesters, the main feature coming to you today is a new way to set up your resource spawn alerts. You will now find a new separate table on the My Alerts page where you can define alert filters a little differently. Instead of specifying minimum stat values, you specify some combination of percentage weights for stats and a minimum quality value. Galaxy Harvester will check new spawns of that resource type/group to see if the calculation of their quality score meets your specified min based on the stat weights you specified and alert you if the quality score is at least the minimum.

Also, remember, you can use the Find Tool in compare mode to get an idea of quality scores of your current resources to help with figuring out what min quality scores to set for your alerts.

As usual, there's a few other minor fixes, etc. also, here they are:

• Fixed favorite schematics on alerts page not filtering by selected galaxy.
• Add ability to click on a waypoint row to copy in-game create waypoint command to clipboard.

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Decided to pick off the top two items on the Suggestions page today. Here are the features involved:

The first feature is all about checking what a resource might currently be good for. The way this has been implemented is a button on each individual resource page labeled "Check Current Best Uses". When you click this button Galaxy Harvester will go out and essentially redo the lookups for server best resource, then replace the currently displayed list of server best events that triggered when the resource spawned with a new list showing what schematics it currently scores well on. The criteria is a little more lax when running this operation compared with the initial spawn server best checks, to show more possibilities.

Second up is a new field on the My Alert Filters screen where you can now add a group name or note to each filter. You might use this area to group together similar filters by profession or some other general grouping (the rows will sort by it), or just a general note to help remind you what you set the alert for.

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Earlier this year, the source code for Galaxy Harvester was opened up for collaboration on GitHub. I am happy bring you the first feature provided by a guest developer through collaboration on GitHub today. GitHub user, cbortz provided a new feature called creature harvesting, as well as a few display fixes.

The creature harvesting feature is tool that allows you to look at the creature data on galaxy harvester from a higher level. Feel free to take a look, maybe it will prove helpful to some of you other scouts out there.

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The variety of SWG play servers and custom content on them continually expands. Some servers add new professions and/or new schematics, and some servers are running NGE professions which have some new schematics that were part of NGE. Until now, there was really no way to take advantage of the schematic based tools on Galaxy Harvester for these custom schematics. With today's update comes the ability to create custom schematics that show up in Galaxy Harvester just for a particular server/galaxy. Assuming the schematic is entered correctly, it will then be available to all users viewing that galaxy on Galaxy Harvester to base recipes on, and get server best alerts on. For more information on this feature, visit the help page section on it.

If any servers have custom schematics related to the existing base SWG professions, those can be added with no custom setup. However if a server has custom professions, or NGE professions, we need to do some setup in the background to make those profession selections available for adding schematics to for that server. I encourage server admins to send us a note at the contact address link at the bottom of the page with any custom professions that need to be added here. There are two servers where we have already gotten requests for this feature on though, and they have already had their professions added on Galaxy Harvester:

• Rogue One Server: Custom professions (Antique Dealer, Elite Arsenalist, Elite Blacksmith, Mechanic, Miner, Jedi Knight/Journeyman)
• SWG Legends Server: NGE Trader professions

We have another update as well related to custom play server content. You can now add custom creature data to the resource type pages of creature resources. You can also enter base harvest yield and mission level of the creature to help other players decide what creatures to hunt. Just browse to the resource type page of the resource type that the creature drops and click the Add Creature button.

Keep in mind that in order to help ensure knowledgeable players are entering this data, you must have unlocked the ability to use the custom schematic and custom creature data entry features. So, if you are logged into Galaxy Harvester and don't see the Add Schematic or Add Creature buttons yet, I encourage you to keep contributing to the site by posting resource data to build your reputation until you unlock these abilities.

Other release notes:

• Added list of unlocked abilities to user profile page.
• Added notifications for users when new abilities are unlocked.
• Fix bug in resource find list "Next 20" button not returning more results.

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The entire source code including database seed for Galaxy Harvester is finally moved to a publicly available repository. Previously the source link on the page footers would link to a tarball of the sites web files, but now it links to this new GitHub repository where all Galaxy Harvester development activity will happen now. I hope this will serve these purposes:

• Help people be able to set up their own private Galaxy Harvesters easier.
• Disaster recovery incase the site needs to be recreated somewhere else for whatever reason.
• Allow for an avenue for more contributors to site development in the future.
• Provides a place to share documentation, users to report bugs, and activity to be shared/tracked.

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A few updates happened over the day, here is a summary:

The long ago originator of most of the graphics on Galaxy Harvester cooked up some new header images for the site. There are many more now, and even some seasonal ones. Thanks Apex!

In order to keep current resources somewhat cleaned up for servers using automatic resource uploading, Galaxy Harvester would previously automatically mark unavailable any resource that was available for over 30 days. To tighten this up even more, this cleanup will now happen according to the default maximum spawn durations typically set. 11 days for most Inorganics, and 22 days for Organics and JTL resources.

Rogue One server recently added a new planet, Lothal. Lothal is now added to Galaxy Harvester so resources can be reported there.

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Being a community driven site, we sometimes have issues with data in Galaxy Harvester. The reputation system is intended to help manage that in an automatic way, so that if someone gets enough negative reputation hits in a certain galaxy the system will limit their access to the resources in that galaxy. Unfortunately the system around that wasn't very developed and people have been running into issues where the reputation system is missing some problems and even restricting people when it should not. So we're going to start enhancing that system a bit to help with this.

This update is the first wave of enhancement to the reputation system. I expect at least one more update to follow with more tweaks and possibly an achievements based addition that will not only enhance reputation but also be a help to new users in general. Here is the initial changes that you will start seeing with today's update.

• Additional check for detecting resources added to the wrong galaxy.
• Reputation award for contributions after resources have despawned added.
• Home page alerts provided when reputation changes.
• Added cooldown period for posting after reputation drop to reduce new accidental wrong entries.

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The number of SWGEmu based servers continues to expand, and many of those projects continue to add exciting new content to expand on the game we love - even new planets.

You may have noticed references to these new planets on Galaxy Harvester even if the server you play on does not have them. That is because Galaxy Harvester was never designed to represent different galaxies having different available planets. When we went to add the latest planet addition, it seemed a good time to do something about that, as the additions could end up being quite a clutter of unnecessary information for some people. So in addition to adding the planet Mandalore as an available selection today, we have also made the following changes.

• When adding resources, the available planets to pick from will be based on your currently selected Galaxy.
• When viewing resource lists, the planet bar will only include planets that are valid for that resources galaxy.
• On the Waypoint Maps and Survey Tool screens, only planets related to your selected galaxy will be shown.

As always, if you are running an SWGEmu server listed on Galaxy Harvester and have new planets added to your server, email us at the contact address to get those planets associated to your galaxy on the site so players can select them.

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What is a server best resource? This question is more complicated than it sounds, it comes with a lot of "It depends...". What profession? What schematic? What experimental property? For example, do you care about encumbrance or effectiveness? Filling or duration? Different crafters are interested in different things, so... it depends. Based on suggestion votes though, many people sure are interested in hearing when a new server best resource spawns, so we set out to build the tools to make that happen.

In the most recent update to Galaxy Harvester you will find some new functionality in existing pages that allow you to keep track of the new top spawns you care about. In the following list, I'll go over the specific areas on the site where you can take advantage of this.

• Default Alert Types - Your profile page now has a new setting to define your default alert types. This will define how you are alerted for all server best alerts, and the default types selected when you create a new general spawn alert.
• Favorite Professions - On the My Alerts page is a new section where you can favorite a profession. By selecting a profession as a favorite, you subscribe to all server best alerts for that profession.
• Favorite Schematics - On the Schematics page is a new option to view the list of your favorite schematics, and each individual schematic page has a star you can click to select that schematic as a favorite. By selecting a schematic as a favorite, you subscribe to all server best alerts related to that schematic.
• Resource History - On each resource spawn page (the one you go to when clicking the name of a specific resource spawn anywhere on the site), there is a new list that will show up if that resource spawned as or close to a server best.

Galaxy Harvester checks all new spawns that are entered to see if they are the new server best or close to it (within 5%) in any experimental property group for any schematic. Any results are published to that spawns server best history, and if you are subscribed to any related schematic or it's profession, you will get an alert. You can easily subscribe to a whole profession, but if you find that you are getting alerts you don't care about, you might consider un-favoriting the profession and just selecting as favorites the schematics of that profession you care about.

Other minor updates:

• Add an nicer format for all Alert E-mails.
• Log the previous stats of a resource when it is edited.
• Improve performance on resource adds by delaying after checks.
• Fix bug causing blank screen if you go to recipes page when not logged in.
• Add Recipes button in logged in toolbar and remove redundant links from other links on home page.

We hope these tools help to ensure you never miss out on a great resource. Enjoy, and please post here and let us know how the new Server Best tools are working out for you.

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