Greetings, Space Pilots!

Prepare to set your navigation systems because Boxelware Team is launching their course straight to Gamescom for an epic Meet & Greet!

Touch down coordinates: Under a tree at the Piazza in Koelnmesse! We will be there from 3:30PM-4:00PM CEST. Land your shuttles nearby, and warp on over to chat, interstellar networking, and classified intel about the game!

Before you depart from your space stations, remember, Earth’s sun is notorious in this galaxy. Cosmic rays play hard, so don't forget your sunscreen as you embark on your voyage to Gamescom! 🌌

Safe travels, pilots! See you at Gamescom! ⭐🛸

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for more developer news and updates!

Hello dear Spacefarers, Explorers, Pirates and Xsotan Hunters!

We are excited to be back to Avorion with many updates and a free DLC in the works! We have some new world minibosses, we made some improvements to escort AI, ship management, and more! We truly hope that you enjoy these changes, and of course, enjoy experiencing them when the time comes!


We all love exploring space, and to make sure it won’t get too boring, we added various Mini World Bosses! Now you’ll be running into some ‘friends’ as you travel around the galaxy… Oh, also, be careful, we can’t be held accountable for any property damage made to your vessels. These mini world bosses will each have their own unique designs as well as backstories! Some will even feature new and unique weapons!




Over time we’ve collected quite some feedback for the escort AI. We tried our best to improve the escort AI as much as possible with all the suggestions we’ve received, here are some of the changes we’ve made:

• Behavior improvement of ships set to “escort”,
  
• When ships are escorting other ships, their collective group jump range will be displayed on the map. Even when it is transitive escorting, ie. A escorts B which escorts C,
  
• Ships will now wait before a hyperspace jump until all escorting ships have recharged their hyperspace engines,
  
• Ships will send more meaningful messages when their escorted ship is lost,
  
• An escort order will not automatically end when the escortee is lost, instead the ship will wait for it to reappear, and even try to hyperspace jump to it, if it is in range,
  
• Travel commands will no longer break escort orders!

Considering ship management, we’re busy implementing your feedback as best we could, so we are working on making the management of fleets easier and better! We’ll be adding a compact view of the ship list, as well as a search function and filters! There will also be a feature that allows you to switch to any ship through this list. On top, you will have the convenience of managing ships that are in the same sector as you are, as if you were sitting in them! Unfortunately we cannot do this for ships in other sectors due to technical reasons 😞 Nonetheless, we hope you enjoy these new features when they are out!




A new Behemoth Event Series will be added as a new DLC! We’re really excited about this as it introduces a cool dynamic gameplay event for all players on the server to enjoy, adding more life to the galaxy! If you wish to partake, the Behemoth Event will feature the following:

• 4 new, very large and strong motherships will be attacking random sectors every few hours without previous warning in all 4 directions of the galaxy! (Don’t worry though, it will be one at a time.)
  
• The attacks will be called out on the entire server/galaxy!
  
• If they’re not defeated quickly enough, they will turn the entire sector to ashes
  
• If you do defeat them, they will drop new unique upgrades, (4 new upgrades in total)!
  
• And if you’re not strong enough… Flee!

Additionally we have worked on many other bug fixes and quality of life improvements as well!




We’ve been getting this question a lot since the initial announcement. We would like to communicate from the get-go that some of the content the update brings is optional. While we think the Behemoth Event will be a great addition to the game, time has shown that not everyone likes these kinds of updates/events. We've learned from our past experiences and want to communicate well and clearly, which is why we've decided we'll be releasing the Behemoth Event series as a free DLC. In the future, you might see more parts of updates released as free DLCs to communicate the, uh, optionality of these features.


We've got some good news here: After taking a short break from Avorion we've decided that we'll be supporting the game for at least another 2 years with more content, additional features, performance and bugfix updates! Full disclosure: We won't be able to release all three updates that we had initially planned on our Roadmap for 2023, but we're confident we'll be able to release two of them.

Thank you all so much for being with us, and supporting us. We will continue doing our best to deliver all these features as soon as possible!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/445220/Avorion/

Greetings, Space Pilots

After listening to all the amazing feedback, you’ve provided us with. We took some time to focus on improving our internal structures and workflows to ensure that the upcoming updates help improve your overall Avorion experience.

New updates are around the corner, so make sure to keep an eye out for them, as a new Free DLC and Free Update is lurking in the abyss! Get behind-the-scenes insights on what exactly to expect in the spectacular changes coming!

We’d like to thank all of you for taking part in this project of ours. Without you, all of this wouldn’t be possible!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/445220/Avorion/

We are thrilled to announce that Avorion will be part of Simfest – the Steam festival celebrating all things related to simulation games: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/simfest

From today through the 24th of July, 10 am PDT 2023, you can save 40% off all Avorion DLCs. In addition to that, you will also be able to experience some of the latest and greatest simulation titles and see what the future holds for the simulation genre with coming soon games. From simulators that cover hobbies you would love to experience to job simulators that revolve around your dream career (even out-of-this-world ones), Simfest will feature a wide variety of titles in the genre.

Simfest is a Steam festival co-hosted by Auroch Digital and Stray Fawn Studio. This year’s event will be the second Simfest, after Simfest: Hobby Edition took place in 2022. Join Avorion and many other incredible simulation games in Simfest 2023. We hope to see you there!

In addition to all DLCs being discounted, we also have news on future updates that we're working on! We'll reveal more about those very soon, so stay tuned!

Hey Space Pilots! 🚀

After all the battles, farming, building, and exploring, we got some exciting news to share with you!

Avorion will be participating in the Steam Summer Sale this holiday with an astronomical 50% discount! Make sure to check it out, this is something you don’t want to miss!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/445220/Avorion/

"While working on our next free content update (more on that here) we've made major improvements to sector loading times, as well as some adjustments to our RAM management, that we didn't want to keep from you, so, enjoy!"

• Improved performance of base game loop (client & server) by 0.6ms (ca. +4% better performance at 60FPS)
• Note: This was on our office workstations, impact on other machines can differ, but there should be a notable impact especially for older hardware
• Improved performance of loading screens when ambient shuttles are enabled, but none are active in the sector
• Drastically improved performance of loading screens when there are lots of asteroids and shaders are set to "Normal"
• Note: 24s loading screen down to 6s loading screen for massive asteroid fields on our workstations at the office
• Improved general performance of scripts
• Strongly reduced memory usage of scripts
• Improved server performance when leaving rift sectors
• F10, /profile and /status no longer stall client/server during the output filedump

• Dev-Script lib/entitydbg.lua is no longer added to everything by default but when pressing F4

Hello dear space farers, pirates, miners, explorers, and faction war wagers!

It's the end of the (work) year for us here at Boxelware and we'd like to take the time to share our plans for Avorion for 2023 with you.

Sadly, it looks like we were a little too ambitious with some things on our 2022 update schedule, so some features will have to be postponed to 2023. We've been hard at work, but some things just take time and we want to make sure to deliver only the best updates in the future.

For 2023, we now have a clearer schedule/roadmap/milestones (call it however you want) for the planned updates (yes they'll be free) which you can find on our updated roadmap! They include more content, blocks, a photo mode, and also some improvements to factions. With each update we also always want to include quality-of-life improvements, content, bug fixes, and, if possible, performance improvements.

Some of the latest performance improvements that we were working on are already available on the beta branch, and you should definitely check them out! Over there, we have improved general performance, but also greatly reduced loading screen times and memory usage of Avorion.

If you want the full overview, check out the updated roadmap here:
https://avorion.fandom.com/wiki/Roadmap

We hope you have some great fun with whatever solstice festivities you celebrate, happy holidays and a wonderful new year 2023.

We'll see you then!

- Boxelware

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'.

"While working on our next free content update (more on that later this week) we've made some adjustments to our RAM management, that we didn't want to keep from you, so, enjoy!"

• Improved general performance of scripts
• Strongly reduced memory usage of scripts
• Improved server performance when leaving rift sectors

"More performance updates as a small christmas gift for y'all!"

• Improved performance of base game loop (client & server) by 0.6ms (ca. +4% better performance at 60FPS)
• Note: This was on our office workstations, impact on other machines can differ, but there should be a notable impact especially for older hardware
• Improved performance of loading screens when ambient shuttles are enabled, but none are active in the sector
• Drastically improved performance of loading screens when there are lots of asteroids and shaders are set to "Normal"
• Note: 24s loading screen down to 6s loading screen for massive asteroid fields on our workstations at the office
• F10, /profile and /status no longer stall client/server during the output filedump
• Mostly for modders: Dev-Script is no longer added to everything by default but when pressing F4

Avorion has been on Steam for a few really exciting years now, and that time was a hell of an exciting ride for our team. But over the time Avorion always remained a passion project for us, adding new content, ideas, and a whole lot of love.

With the category Labor of Love at this year's Steam Awards, you can nominate not only new titles, but also a work that has still received good support and a lot of care from the devs over the years.

So, if you've been following us a bit on the exciting adventure of developing Avorion, enjoying the game all these years or maybe just discovered it for yourself - please consider nominating Avorion for the Labor of Love award!



You can submit your nominations as of now during the Steam Autumn Sale. The final voting for the most popular nominations will take place during the Winter Sale!

So submit your nomination, and maybe we'll see Avorion in the next round - you would make us very proud!


Thank you for your time!
Your Boxelware Team

In today's developer stream, Konstantin and Felix talk with you about the latest patch 2.3 for Avorion! Check out the stream right here on Steam or on our Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/boxelware.

We look forward to seeing you!