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[Neils Iyssada]

On the topic of updating published designs. While the code is capable of doing this, there is currently no mechanism in the game to do it. The game has never permitted changes to published designs due to the obvious potential for abuse. E.g build a little shuttle then update the design to a battle star.

To fully enable the updating of designs would require some additional work in the game. Simply changing a design in the library could cause a severe disconnect between existing ships and the library. A lot of information stored on a ship is derived from the library design when the ship is built. Numbers and types of system modules and damage accrued are examples. A design change might force existing ships to reset all modules and damage as if they were newly built.

As things are now, an updated design will have to be published as a new design on Steam. The old one could then be safely unpublished from the workshop and anyone using that design would continue to do so.

This leads to a question. Should I do the work to enable updates to an existing blueprint in the Steam Workshop? My gut says no.

Hello Haxus. As Dean, I find it would be handy. While updating isn't a big deal for one spacecraft (discord advertising + new workshop entry + links in former workshop page), whole building sets could become tedious.
It could create a new internal blueprint ID for each update. Older IDs would be saved until not used anymore (= no abuse for existing entities).

[Deantwo]

I imagine that if a blueprint you are using in your save-game is updated, then the current blueprint you have been using should be marked as obsolete somehow, and the new blueprint be added to the save-game. Then any buildings/ship you construct from that point on will use the new blueprint, leaving all previous buildings/ships as they were with the old now obsolete blueprint.

However this would likely require a cleanup function to delete obsolete blueprints that aren't used in the save-game anymore, or else someone could really blot the size of people's save-games if they kept updating a workshop blueprint.