Searching for specific crew members can be annoying and time-consuming at times. Especially when you have already flown across several sectors to hire the correct crew members, only to realize that you’re now suddenly missing a general. That’s why we have improved the way that higher-ranking officers are handled, so that in the future you will no longer have to fly to countless stations to man your ship effectively.
First off, we removed the separate professions for higher ranking officers. As soon as the number of crew members of a certain profession increases so much that they now require a superior officer, your crew will automatically promote one of their colleagues from within this profession to a higher rank.
We have also made the crew more effective. Compared to before, you will only need half as many crew members to get your ship ready for action because each of them now has double the workforce. But good employees come at a price and the new crew knows what they are worth and demand a salary twice as high as before.
In turn, they are also willing to work under harsher conditions. Lower morale will no longer have an immediate effect on the workforce, even though morale will decrease somewhat faster than before if you don’t have enough crew quarters or if you don’t pay your crew. But if you do let morale go down all the way to 0% (you should feel ashamed for treating them so poorly!), all crew members on your ship will go on strike immediately. However, they will not leave the ship any more but simply refuse to work until the problem has been resolved.


We want to make the factions more interesting and give them more depth. Currently, the factions consist of a simple territory and that does not match our idea of growing and living civilizations. In the future, each faction will therefore have a central area and an outer area which will look and feel distinctly different from each other.
Each faction has a central area around the home sector that is very densely populated and has certain advantages for you. There are better trading options due to the many factories and other stations that are well connected by a close-meshed gate network. In addition, the central areas of the factions are very well protected, making pirate attacks in these areas less likely.
The outer faction area is rather sparsely populated, however sectors like asteroid fields or other (more or less welcome) surprises are much more likely in there.
In most cases, when moving into the territory of an unknown faction, you will first enter their outer area where you will encounter only a few of their ships and stations. There, you can assess them to decide whether you want to venture deeper into their territory to possibly find new allies, or if you’d rather stay away from them.
PS: The improved faction areas are compatible with existing saves!

Some things you achieve in Avorion are just too good not to be appreciated. Have you maybe defeated a certain boss or founded a mine on an asteroid? Or maybe you’re a new player feeling a little lost in the vastness of space and don’t know where exactly to start? This is why we’re introducing the new player profile, which will show you some things you should definitely try, and will remember the milestones you have reached, to give both new players and veterans inspiration for new goals. This means that, should you ever feel like you don’t know what to do next, you can look here for ideas for new challenges. Or if you’re feeling like taking a look back on your journey, this is where you can.



We want Hyperspace Travel to feel better and be less boring for mid & late-game ships. We want it to feel more like a journey and less like a “teleport-here”. To do this, we’re 1. massively reducing hyperspace cooldown time, 2. reducing hyperspace jump range gains from hyperspace cores and upgrades (don’t worry, overall travel times will be a lot shorter, even with reduced jump range!).

To get things started, it will be easier to travel to sectors that are further away than your jump range. You will be able to select any (non-rift) sector and your ship will automatically calculate a straight route of sectors to the destination. When arriving in an intermediate sector, you will be able to simply continue the journey without having to reopen the map to select new jump coordinates.

We also want to avoid people getting stranded in a new sector with no energy. New players especially fall into this frustrating trap. That’s why we’re reducing the total amount of energy required for a jump, and instead of cooling the hyperspace drive after the jump, the energy will now be required to charge up the hyperspace drive to jump. To perform the jump, you’ll now have to boost towards the blue jump marker. Your ship will then charge up its hyperdrive and start to glow. We added some nice visuals and SFX so you can really get a feel of the immense forces required to move a solid, heavy ship through hyperspace!

So jumping will require less energy in total now, and instead need a big spike of energy over a very short period of time. That’s why we also greatly improved battery blocks (since you might need them ;) ), giving these underappreciated blocks some more value. Finally, to make travel feel more fluent with bigger ships, you will be able to speed up hyperspace cooldown even more by prematurely boosting towards the jump point. This is meant as a high-end luxury though and will consume lots of energy.

We're introducing official French and Japanese localizations, and while we're already at it, fixing a few bugs.

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 Branch - Newest Changes & Experimental Features'.

"As our community is growing all over the world, we want to support more languages. In this patch we happily introduce the new supported languages of French and Japanese."

• Added French localization
• Added Japanese localization

• Torpedo shafts can now fire when not assigned to a group
• Reduced default size of damage numbers
• Improved performance of durability weakness effects
• Improved performance of line break algorithm
• Implemented a prototype functionality to enumerate all values in an Enum
• Enums can now be converted to a table via enumerate() (ie. BlockType.enumerate())
• Implemented a setting for servers to enforce steam networking and not fall back to TCP protocols

"As always, bugs marked with [UBR] are User Bug Reports, submitted through our in-game bug tracker. Thanks very much for helping and keep 'em coming!"

• [UBR] Fixed an issue where all players end up in the same sector once 3000+ players are registered
• Fixed an issue where safe mode was always on (even when turned off) when transforming a shipyard-requiring block into a non-shipyard requiring block without a shipyard in the sector
• Fixed an issue where colors weren't correctly translated in building mode
• Fixed an issue where hyperspace engine didn't go on cooldown properly when changing reach
• Fixed an issue where upgrades of ships could disappear through breaking blocks
• Fixed an issue where clicking coordinates in chat was possible while mouse was visible or obscured by windows
• Fixed an issue where the Hermit Dialog wasn't shown when another player already spawned Swoks in that sector
• Fixed an issue where Exodus Mission wasn't updating correctly
• Fixed a GPU memory leak

Hello everyone!

This time we would have loved to show you some fancy new screenshots but sadly we’re currently in a development phase where we can’t show any because the assets aren’t ready yet. Instead, we’d like to show you our development progress towards the 2.0 update!

These are the most important things we want to have in update 2.0, and at the same time our development progress.

• Better UI visuals
  
• New progression system based on knowledge for different materials
  
• Scenario: "Classic Avorion" without the new progression
  
• Improvements to Independent Targeting
  
  • Removal of the 50% damage penalty
    
  • Amount of independently firing turrets can be increased with various existing and new upgrades
• Less micro-intensive commanding of ships
  
  • 10 new or updated commands (ie. go fly a trade route, go salvage, go explore)
  • Captains with classes & perks
  • Improved performance for remotely operating ships
• Bounties on Bulletin Boards
  
• More civilian ships for improved flair
  
• Improved visuals for busy sectors
  
• Tons of QoL

• More diverse faction areas on the galaxy map
  
  • Central vs. outer regions where different rules apply
• Player Profile w/ Milestones
  
• Crew Improvements
  
  • QoL; Sergeant, Lieutenant, etc. will be ranks within professions and no longer separate professions
• Hyperspace Jump Improvements
  
  • QoL; Improvements to game flow, jumps, reduction of waiting times
• Fighter Improvements
  
  • QoL; Fighters will be remote controlled, will support boosting, will be cheaper to build but require stricter preconditions to have them on the ship
• Autopilots

• Scenario: "Free Play" that can be configured to your individual liking
  
• Torpedo loot drops
  
• Improvements to the tutorial
  
• Listing of build mode features & "tricks" in the encyclopedia
  
• Various community-requested & QoL features
  
• Polishing, Bugfixing

We know you’re all super stoked (we are, too!) for a release date, and we will announce the date once we know for sure that we can meet it. The update is set to release in Q2 2021 and our 5 people dev team is working hard to achieve that. The reality is that we’re still working from home (thanks Corona) and game development is a highly iterative and sometimes unpredictable process. In the past we’ve experienced that trying to meet deadlines by force leads to crunch, stress, exhaustion, and thus poor quality and bugs. We as a studio want to avoid all of the above for the 2.0 update (and also in general, d’uh) so this time we’ll take a “when it’s done” approach. We want this update to be amazing and live up to the hype! We’ll continue sharing progress about the development over the next few weeks!

See you then!

When you scroll through the Avorion Workshop, you will find an insane collection of creative, unusual and very funny ships! You constantly have new creations and impress us with your ideas again and again!

Therefore we would like to make a little competition out of it and reward the coolest constructions!

The theme for your ships should be the following for this event:


Create the most delicious hot dogs or the most amazing sushi rolls, whatever comes to your mind, we are looking forward to it! Let your creativity run wild and surprise us with your ideas!

At the end of the event, we will raffle Avorion merch worth 50€ to the best ship design, so it's worth participating ;)

The event will take place through our Discord server, so join quickly: https://discord.gg/ebwtqkQ

As soon as you have built your ship, upload it to the workshop and post the link in the --Event-Entries-- channel.

And that's it!
The event will end on 30.06.2021, so everyone has enough time to put the finishing touches on their masterpiece. The winner will be officially announced in the Discord Channel and notified via DM.

We are looking forward to your ideas and your participation! Let the Food War begin!

With the introduction of the new captains, we also improved the way you can give orders to your ships. Whenever you order your captains to carry out a command, you will need to select an area for them to work in. They will analyze that area and they will predict how successful they will be. This depends on several factors such as the individual abilities of the captain, the likelihood of the ship being attacked in that area, and whether the area is suitable for the specific command in general.

To see the pictures in full resolution, right-click on them and select "Open Image in new tab"!


You will only need to give one order to get a captain to carry out a complex task, for example when you command a ship to travel from one side of the galaxy to the other. Depending on the equipment of the ship, you can order your captains to go mining or salvaging, and you can tell them how long they should be gone for and which materials to return with. If the ships have ores on board, the captains can take them to a refinery for you, and if they have torpedo storage, they can go and acquire torpedoes.
Are you simply curious about what might happen to your captains if you just send them out into the great unknown? You can give them the order to scout in a new region or send them on an expedition and they will tell you about their adventures and share their loot with you when they get back.
Those of you that are ready to build up a trading empire can use their captains to procure certain goods or to sell some of the wares they already have on board. And if you already have a bunch of stations, your captains will be able to supply them with goods that the factories require to produce.


We know that there are some quite dangerous regions in the galaxy, and your captains don’t need to brave all difficulties on their own. You can have your ships escort each other, making it less likely to get attacked while carrying out a command. And then you will be on your way to having the most effective fleet in the galaxy!

Today we’ll give you some info on the new progression system! We want the journey towards the center of the galaxy to be more challenging. From now on, you’ll have to unlock Building Knowledge about each new material (starting with Naonite, you’ll start out with knowledge about Iron and Titanium) before you’ll be able to use it for ship building. Unlocking the next material will also unlock the ability to build bigger ships with higher subsystem socket numbers.

There will be different ways to get your hands on above Building Knowledge. In any case, we want players to prove themselves in a new area before they can unlock the next building tier. You can get the knowledge for the next material by either beating a boss in the area or a difficult pirate encounter. In case you’re not the fighting type you can also buy the building knowledge at a shipyard from an allied faction in the specific region.


Building Knowledge will not only allow you to use the materials, but the higher-material knowledge you acquire, the more functional blocks you will be able to add to your ships. Adding functional blocks will not only increase the processing power but also the number of subsystem sockets of your crafts. This has always been part of the game, but now we’re visualizing it better. While taking a hard look at the processing power requirements for subsystem sockets we realized that some number tweaking might be necessary, so from now on you’ll unlock new upgrade sockets earlier (less processing power required)!

Finally, the new progression will only be active for newly created galaxies. All your old savegames will remain the way they are. In case you’re not a fan of the new progression and prefer the more sandboxy approach, we are also going to introduce a new “Classic Avorion” scenario which allows you to play without the new progression. Whenever you create a new galaxy you will be able to select the option in the main menu.

We noticed that hiring captains used to be a bland affair that was necessary but rather boring. This did not go in accordance with our vision of the game. The new captains will have up to two classes, for example “Merchant”, or “Scavenger”, with their own individual capabilities. Captains will gain experience when completing commands, and leveling up will make them even more effective.



To show that each captain has their own personality, we also added character traits that make each captain special. These traits influence how well a captain is able to perform a certain task, so always make sure to put the right person on a certain job! Which captains you will be able to hire depends on at which stations you look for them and how much you are willing to pay. But don’t worry: none of the new captains will be able to do less than the old captains, but many of them will be capable of doing so much more!

Stay tuned for another Update 2.0 news flash next week!

We (and you, we know) aren’t completely happy with the way independent targeting is handled at the moment, so we went ahead and implemented some direly needed changes. Let’s start off with the most important change: turrets set to auto targeting will no longer deal -50% damage! The 2.0 Update will allow you to set a certain number of turrets to independent targeting, based on a slot system. We also made it easier to keep an eye on the turret slots you have available, showing which turrets need multiple slots and what kinds of slots are still unoccupied.


PDCs no longer use up military slots but are put into their own PDC slots, called “Defensive” slots. There will be specific subsystems that increase the number of PDCs you can install, but most other turret control systems will also add defensive slots. All PDCs will automatically have independent targeting enabled, so you won’t have to trade any slots or other firepower for defensive weapons.

Stay tuned for another Update 2.0 news flash next week!

We also added more colors to the inventory. Now it is much easier to keep track of your items of different rarities and everything has a more concise look. The window itself got a sleeker, more metallic style and the tooltips received a new paint job.



Avorion’s GUI received some direly needed sprucing up and we’re very happy with the results. We freshened up the HUD, pulling the bars apart and adding icons to the individual bars for more clarity.



The old design simply did not have the high-tech look you would expect from a space game. But the new tab is not only more pleasing to the eye, it also explains much better how the volume of the ship limits the processing power and therefore the number of subsystem slots.

We know that our old GUI was difficult to read for people who are color blind. The 2.0 Update will introduce an option to change the color palettes of Avorion, allowing players to choose between different colorblind modes.

Over the next few weeks we will be posting more Update 2.0 news flashes, so stay tuned!

The entire Boxel Team wishes you a Happy Easter!