Beta Branch Note: These changes are currently available on the beta branch. The beta branch is for testing experimental changes and for finding and fixing errors.

This is how you get access to the beta branch (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK):
Right-Click on Avorion in your Steam list, Properties -> Betas -> Select branch 'beta'.

• Transferring a ship to the alliance requires the alliance to pay the difference in founding fee

• Increased range of r-mining lasers and r-salvaging lasers by 100%
• Ship founding costs are now capped at 10m

• Added a warning icon on the top left when computer is low on memory
• Added a warning icon for performance when founding 25th or more ship

• [UBR] Fixed a crash in building mode when a field in quick selection was empty
• [UBR] Fixed a crash in building mode when exiting turret building mode
• Fixed an issue with rendering of shipyard costs when player isn't in a ship
• Fixed a crash in alerting of absent players when alerting them in a sector with unowned objects

"We know that fighters of carrier miners are unable to pick up ores. We're working on this!"

Beta Branch Note: These changes are currently available on the beta branch. The beta branch is for testing experimental changes and for finding and fixing errors.

This is how you get access to the beta branch (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK):
Right-Click on Avorion in your Steam list, Properties -> Betas -> Select branch 'beta'.

"We reworked mining to make it feel more like actual mining, and less like just shooting rocks until you're rich. So the most efficient mining lasers no longer refine ores and you'll have to ship them to a refinery yourself. In order to avoid massive complexity in the beginning, we left refining mining lasers in there, like for example for the drone."

• Resource Asteroids carry 33% more resources
• Added new weapon types: Raw mining lasers, Raw salvaging lasers
• Previous mining + salvaging lasers are now refining mining/salvaging lasers
• Raw mining lasers deal 200% damage compared to refining mining lasers
• Efficiency Changes (lowest to highest rarity & possible rate):
• Raw mining lasers have very high efficiencies of 57% - 99%
• Reduced efficiencies of refining mining lasers to 11% - 18% from 5% - 75%
• Raw salvaging lasers have efficiencies of 5% - 40%
• Reduced efficiencies of refining salvaging lasers to 7% - 14% from 8% - 36%
• Mining lasers of the drone remain unchanged
• Raw lasers drop Raw Ores or Scrap Metals
• Raw Ores and Scrap Metals ...
• - are trading goods that require a cargo bay
• - cannot be used as a currency yet
• - cannot be stored in the global bank
• - must be refined into resources before they can be used
• - can be sold to merchants
• Added a refinery option to all Resource Depots
• Refinery refines ores and scrap metals to resources 1:1
• Refinery takes a small tax of 1 to 5%, based on relations
• Added new asteroids with very high-value, hidden resource depots in their center block
• Can be detected with mining upgrade (Auto-mining-ships need this to find them, too)
• Added AI-ship commands for refining ores and metals on board
• Amount of resources in asteroids is now only visible with a mining system installed

"Per Kiilstofte remade the entire combat music for Avorions. He's the mind behind Avorion's previous combat music, but we worked together and he wrote a completely new soundtrack specifically for Avorion! On top of that, Hannes Kretzer made six new background tracks for Avorion, too! With this update, you can enjoy all those new tracks in-game!"

• Added 6 new background ambience tracks (Thanks Hannes!)
• Replaced old combat music with new combat music (Thanks Per Kiilstofte!)
• Ambient music is now mood-oriented based on which sector the player is in, and no longer completely random
• Increased length of silence between tracks to at least 90 seconds

"There have been some other gameplay updates, which are not directly related to mining."

• Delivery missions no longer give players dangerous or illegal goods
• Dangerous goods are no longer a concern if player's relations are "Admired" (>80.000)
• Ships that are ordered to fly through gates now wait if the path is blocked
• Harvest AI now only uses armed turrets if no salvaging turrets are available

"There have been some other balancing updates, which are not directly related to mining."

• Destroyed blocks and crafts now drop scrap metal & ores in addition to refined resources
• Smoothened out probabilities of resource types in asteroids
• Less low-tier materials are less likely to be spawned in high-tier material regions
• Only the latest 3 tiers of available materials are used for ships, turrets, etc. to avoid obsolete technology appearing where it doesn't belong (ie. Iron AI ships in Xanion territory)
• Increased production time by 300s for ships at shipyards when a crew is requested
• Increased costs of crews at shipyards by +50%
• Fast moving AI ships no longer damage player-owned ships if they're more than twice as fast
• Changed relation status ranges:
• Friendly: 15.000 - 30.000 (from 5.000 - 15.000)
• Good: 30.000 - 60.000 (from 30.000 - 40.000)
• Excellent: 60.000 - 80.000 (from 40.000 - 70.000)
• Admired: 80.000 - 100.000 (from 70.000 - 100.000)
• Captains now cost 15.000 Credits, up from 7.500
• Hiring Pilots, Boarders or Commanders now requires relations of at least 'Friendly'
• Hiring Generals or Captains now requires relations of at least 'Good'

"Founding Ships now costs an initial fee, that starts out very low and increases with every new ship. We want to move large (!) fleets more into mid- or late game, while giving new players more incentive to push for higher-tier materials. As long as we don't have good sinks for large amounts of resources, we're still very careful with exponential fleet growth and the snowballing that comes with it. That's just a nightmare to balance. We've seen how much money players tend to have in late game stages and we think these costs are fair. They're also subject to change based on your feedback, so get playing!"

• Note: Ship fees are based on how many ships you HAVE right now, not how many ships you founded so far.
• When one of your ships gets destroyed, the founding fee also goes down again
• Ships 1 - 3 now cost 500 Iron and 0, 0, 1.000 Credits respectively
• Ships 4 - 6 now cost 500 Titanium and 5.000, 10.000, 20.000 Credits respectively
• Ships 7, 8 now cost 500 Naonite and 50.000 and 100.000 Credits respectively
• Ships 9, 10 now cost 500 Trinium and 200.000 and 500.000 Credits respectively
• Ships 11 - 15 now cost 500 Xanion and 750.000, 1m, 1.5m, 2m, 2.5m Credits respectively
• Ships 16 - 20 now cost 500 Ogonite and 3m, 3.5m, 4m, 4.5m, 5m Credits respectively
• Ships 21 and more now cost 500 Avorion and 1m more per ship, with costs increasing by 1m for every 10 new ships

• Replaced all icons in-game that were only used as placeholders
• Added icons & tooltips for uncollectable loot that show why loot is uncollectable
• Added an alert when pirates attack a sector without players but with player ships
• Added an alert when xsotan attack a sector with an unmanned player ship
• Cargo amount in cargo tab is now displayed with dots for better readability
• Improved clarity of discard blocks button text and tooltip
• Added a warning window when a player is about to delete his ship in the build mode
• Implemented warning symbols at the top left of the screen when ping or server performance is bad
• Galaxy map is now updated correctly when a player ship jumps to an unknown sector

• Implemented a window that shows the latest important changes of the mining update
• Added a window that shows patchnotes when there has been an update
• Improved refreshing of positions of objects around the player ship and its targets
• This fixes several sync-issues, like loot following the player ship or objects not taking damage
• Renamed factories with ambiguous names, i.e. factories that use a production result in their name and have more than one result

• Networking is now done asynchronically on client
• Pings are more frequent (10 per second) and server answers them immediately, not during update loop (avoids inaccurate pings)
• Improved performance and accuracy of pings (now shows network time only, no longer influenced by update frequency)

• Fixed an issue where sometimes server started to hang for everybody when a single player caused large amounts of traffic
• Fixed an issue where server started to hang for everybody when a single player applied a very large craft plan

"With the mining rework, we also moved our turret, weapon and fighter generation code to scripts for more transparency and easier modification through modders."

• Moved turret, weapon and fighter generators to scripts
• Added a ProgressBar UI element
• Added getters for amount of different entities in Sector
• Bosses can now be associated with music tracks
• Added access to Music API
• Added function invokeFunction() to client-side Player
• Added a getter for the player's craft's faction on the client
• Added a getter for controlling faction in Galaxy
• Added getters for local & nearest faction in client-side Galaxy
• Added estimates to sector templates about number of generated stations and ships
• Fixed several issues where text would be wrongly aligned when set to Center
• Added a fitIntoRect() function to Picture
• sendChatMessage() function of Faction, Player and Alliance now allows entities and NamedFormat as sender

"As always, bug reports marked with [UBR] are user bug reports. Thanks everybody for reporting and helping us, and keep it up!"

• Fixed a crash when multiple entities were being pushed away by stations
• Fixed a wrong callback being called when player changes group
• [UBR] Fixed shot size not scaling with weapon size
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where torpedoes could be entered by players, leading to a crash
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where loot would follow the player ship indefinitely without actually being picked up
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where objects (mostly asteroids, wrecks) would be in the wrong position
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where objects (mostly asteroids, wrecks) wouldn't take damage
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where loot drops for alliance ships were reserved for the players piloting it
• [UBR] Fixed custom turret design shot colors not being applied to missiles
• Fixed an issue where shield sounds were played in menus or loading screen
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where scrolling down in the building quick selection caused items to become hidden
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where turrets in the quick selection in building mode were reset when opening the building inventory
• Fixed flickering of faction areas on map when an update of the area comes in
• Fixed an issue where cargo loot would still "lock on" to ships and follow them even if their cargo bay is full
• Fixed an issue where station titles in chat messages weren't translated correctly
• Fixed an issue where crew costs were wrong at shipyards
• Fixed an issue where client would wait for a 30 second timeout when connecting to a local server in Steam Offline Mode
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where players with a space in their name could not be invited to trade
• Fixed an issue where the ship's order icon wasn't reset when entering a craft
• Fixed an issue where ai factions would get coaxial turrets

"We reverted yesterday's changes to captains from the previous version of this patch. We didn't think that change through and it wouldn't have achieved what we wanted to achieve anyways (which is getting exponential growth of mining fleets & passive income a little more under control). We still want to make fleets somewhat more mid- and late-game focused, but not at the cost of early game becoming a mindless grind."

• Fighters fly differently when using non-armed weapons (mining/salvaging lasers, etc)
• Fighters approach their target slower and fly away later

• Crew salaries are now visible as tooltips in Fleet Tab

• Fixed an issue where mining fighters would generate less revenue without a player in the sector
• Fixed an issue where Xsotan were not attacking
• Fixed an issue with scrolling in quick selection

After reviewing your criticism we decided to roll back the update 0.20.5 due to a very specific issue: Captains now costing lots and lots of upkeep. This made it impossible for players with fleets of lots of small ships to keep up financially, potentially leaving their ships stranded without crews and screwing up their saves. We apologize if this patch resulted in crews leaving your ships, we rolled it back as soon as we realized what damage it could do.

We wanted to push fleets and fleet management a little more to mid and late game, because we feel that that's the place for it, not early game. Early game in Avorion should be focused on building and improving your first ship. What we underestimated, is how many players there are who had already built ships and fleets in the early game and how this change impacted them.

Nobody likes grinding, and we do want you to be able to automate some tedious tasks towards mid and end game. So this change has nothing to do with us wanting you to grind even more. Automation, especially with the latest update, has become a very important gameplay pillar in Avorion and is here to stay. (Just please keep in mind that having hundreds of ships is not possible due to hardware and engine restrictions, the game engine simply isn't made for that kind of simulation.)

We stand with what we think about early, mid and late game and we will be looking into making fleets more of a mid, late or end game focused feature, but not at the cost of having the early game be a tedious grind, because nobody wants that. Instead, we want to give you more challenges to overcome, sinks to invest your resources into, and to give you goals you can work towards. We want founding new ships to give you a sense of progress, every new ship you found to be more special, and not just yet another mindless minion doing tedious tasks.

The update has been rolled back since it screwed up existing saves and fleets.

We're currently preparing a statement as to why we did what we did and what our current struggles with Avorion are.

We still want to push automated miners more into mid/late game, since we're facing a few long-term issues with passive income starting at a very early stage. But we realize that this patch was too premature to be released and we apologize for any inconveniences.

The update has been rolled back since it screwed up existing issues. To get the rolled-back version, please restart Steam.

We're currently preparing a statement as to why we did what we did and what our current struggles are.

We still want to push automated miners more into mid/late game, since we're facing a few long-term issues with passive income starting at a very early stage. But we realize that this patch was too premature to be released and we apologize for any inconveniences.

• Fighters fly differently when using non-armed weapons (mining/salvaging lasers, etc)
• Fighters approach their target slower and fly away later

"With the new update, players now have a tendency to build a lot of ships and abuse things like automatic mining very early. We don't want to inhibit you from automating some things, but we want to raise the bar a little for automated ships in the early game. So we're adding some static costs to captains and increase the difficulty to get them a little, to make automated ships more the mid- to late-game feature they are meant to be."

• Captains now cost 75.000 Credits
• Hiring Pilots now requires relations of at least 40.0000 (Excellent)
• Hiring Boarders now requires relations of at least 40.0000 (Excellent)
• Hiring Commanders now requires relations of at least 40.0000 (Excellent)
• Hiring Generals now requires relations of at least 40.0000 (Excellent)
• Hiring Captains now requires relations of at least 70.0000 (Admired)

• Crew salaries are now visible as tooltips in Fleet Tab

• Fixed an issue where mining fighters would generate less revenue without a player in the sector
• Fixed an issue where Xsotan were not attacking
• Fixed an issue with scrolling in quick selection

We improved the pathfinding and flying AI, so now ships will fly full speed and use boost whenever they safely can. They will also maneuver a lot smarter, for example through sectors with lots of objects like asteroid fields. Keep in mind that this will make the game harder, since you won't be able to run from enemies as easily as before!


We added improvements to the AI for harvesting, ie. mining and salvaging. Before, this was done by the same AI that's responsible for attacking enemies, making mining look silly and be rather inefficient. We've now implemented a separate AI for harvesting, which will improve some behavior of miners and salvagers a lot.


We reworked the player fleet management window. Aside from obvious layout and overview improvements, it can now display every ship's plan so you can easily see which is which. You can also rename your ships in this window now, and it shows you what each ship is doing, and where it is - including a button to show you on the map.

This is one of the main reasons the update took so long and this technical background will probably mostly interest modders or other Avorion-tech-enthusiasts: We've been laying the ground work for calling functions and executing code between sectors. Scripts from one sector will now be able to call functions in scripts of another sector. This wasn't possible at first, due to the asynchronous structure of the Avorion server and its simulation. But this will lead to a lot of great features, like...


The above groundwork allowed us to do the following: Inter-Sector commands for ships! You can now command ships over the galaxy map even when they're not in the same sector as you. But that's not all: We're also adding command queues, so you'll be able to order your ships to fly to one sector, mine asteroids, trade goods or attack enemies, and then jump to yet another sector. And you'll be able to loop these commands as well, so you can now have ships doing more complex things all over the galaxy.


VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR MODDERS AND SERVER ADMINS: We've added extra security for calling functions remotely, THIS WILL BREAK YOUR OLD MODS if you're using client-server remote invocations. Check out the patch notes for 0.20.0 for more details!

We added lots and lots of other improvements as well, including
- Massive performance improvements while saving sectors
- Map improvements (you can toggle various features of the map on/off)
- Auto-reloading of torpedoes
- Transporters for long-distance interaction with stations
- Alliance map editing rules
To see the full log of changes, check out the patchnotes below:

You can find the full patchnotes posts here:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/445220/announcements/detail/1736603828382199440
https://steamcommunity.com/games/445220/announcements/detail/1737729374513583078
https://steamcommunity.com/games/445220/announcements/detail/1701699309006895212
https://steamcommunity.com/games/445220/announcements/detail/1701698220997927027
https://steamcommunity.com/games/445220/announcements/detail/3225038806769208976
https://steamcommunity.com/games/445220/announcements/detail/1702821402270802571
https://steamcommunity.com/games/445220/announcements/detail/1701694867577204850

This time the patchnotes aren't long, but all the more important!
We could finally fix one pesky bug that's been with the game since the very beginning, and we finally managed to reproduce it!
We also improved some issues with server performance when sectors with lots of activity or blocks were unloaded.

We're also planning to set the update live to the default branch early next week!

Beta Branch Note: These changes are currently available on the beta branch. The beta branch is for testing experimental changes and for finding and fixing errors.

This is how you get access to the beta branch (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK):
Right-Click on Avorion in your Steam list, Properties -> Betas -> Select branch 'beta'.

• Improved server performance a lot when sectors are being unloaded
• This fixes some hangs that could take over 30 seconds and more

• [UBR] Fixed an issue where ships would keep flying during loading screen, crashing into things
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where craft portraits would contain messed up pictures on AMD

Beta Branch Note: These changes are currently available on the beta branch. The beta branch is for testing experimental changes and for finding and fixing errors.

This is how you get access to the beta branch (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK):
Right-Click on Avorion in your Steam list, Properties -> Betas -> Select branch 'beta'.

• Removing upgrades at enemy equipment docks is no longer possible

• Improved readability of cargo amounts

• Added Version class
• Added GameVersion() function that returns the version of the game

• [UBR] "Attack Enemies" orders given to stations via map commands are now persistent
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where items could be duplicated when selling them as trash
• Fixed an issue with looping of commands
• Assigning orders to a ship is now impossible if a player is piloting it
• Fixed a massive performance issue after founding a station
• Fixed a rare crash when changing a player's craft through scripts

Beta Branch Note: These changes are currently available on the beta branch. The beta branch is for testing experimental changes and for finding and fixing errors.

This is how you get access to the beta branch (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK):
Right-Click on Avorion in your Steam list, Properties -> Betas -> Select branch 'beta'.

• Attacking ships check for free line of sight before firing (considering allies)
• Ships without a player automatically comply after the timeout when investigated by an anti-smuggle ship
• Improved AI while chasing (again)

• Fixed an issue in search and rescue mission
• Small performance improvements
• Fixed some scripts changing the player's relations even if interacting as an alliance
• Fixed a cash in trading stations
• [UBR] Alliances are now correctly handled in pirate/xsotan attacks and smuggler fight
• Fixed a crash for objects that are being pushed away by stations