Kleinem's Enhanced Ship Tree (KEST) is a ship tree made by Kleinem. While other mods completely replace the vanilla tree, KEST keeps all vanilla ships and instead adds more ships. These ships are exclusively balanced with vanilla ships. While KEST is not featured in Modding space, it is often used for the Alpha Centauri Wars, a massive team mode event held by the developers once each month for each region.
Game Settings
Kleinem Enhanced Ship Tree is a Team Mode based mod with 3 teams.
Asteroids have 80% of their normal shield.
Asteroids give 20% more gems.
Stations require 50 times the normal amount of gems to upgrade; an amount typical for the Alpha Centauri Wars.
The map is the map used in the Alpha Centauri Wars.
Game Mechanics
Healing Lasers- This is a new mechanic added to team mode that changed the way many people played the game! This update made more people think more tactically. This update lead to many players helping teammates by healing them. To heal you need to go to the station depot and click on the option where it says "Healing" when this is done your lasers turn into much more of a fun and laser which shows "+" when you heal a player. The amount the player gets healed by is determined by your ship and its stats. The game mechanic allows players to act more as a group and stops the problem with people flying solo and killing the whole team. Healing gives points in team mode thanks to the october 2019 update. Also the best healer is recognized in a team. The best miner and the best killer will also be recognized.
Gem-Transfer- This is a new mechanic added to team mode that allows players to drop gems for other team mates! This update furthermore allowed players to think as one and to play as one as there is no "I" in TEAM! This mechanic is done by holding "V" which allows you to drop gems by the amount you need to upgrade each stat such as a t3 can only drop 15 gems while a t6 can drop 30 gems! This is a very good strategy in team mode as you can help teammates that need gems so they can upgrade get gems and help your team get ready for danger and be prepared for opponents. This mechanic added more thought into the games and more fun things to do.
Ship Rescues- This was a mechanic added to team mode just before the first Alpha Centauri Wars as a way for players to return to the game on the same team after disconnecting or leaving. If they player leaves the game while in a gem depot they will not lose their ship, gems, credits, secondaries or points. If done outside of a depot, the player still keeps their ship upon their return(Assuming the player had extra lives), but it counts as a death.
Gem-Stealing Countermeasure-This was a mechanic added to team mode to help prevent gem stealing when mining. Before this was added, when an asteroid was destroyed anyone could come and immediately pick up the gems, leading to teammates fighting over gems from asteroids and taking gems from an asteroid they didn't mine themselves. With this mechanic only the person who dealt the most damage to an asteroid can pick up the gems immediately; other players will need to wait 2 seconds until the game allows them to pick the gems up themselves. While it drastically reduced cases of teammates gem-stealing, it is still possible to occasionally gem-steal if you are a heavier ship and you knock your teammate away from the gems they just mined.
Ships
KEST has a large variety of ships. There are 57 total ships in the mod, adding 25 ships to the original 32 from vanilla. It follows the scheme 3-4-7-9-12-15-7.