Calling all rookies and veterans! Further your knowledge of Natural Selection and gain a sense of accomplishment and camaraderie by joining the newcomer draft tournament! New to competitive? Play on a team, get coached, make risky plays! Veteran player? Profess your love for smashing in your opponent’s teeth by teaching players how to ‘git gud.’

The NSL is hosting a brand new Newcomer's Draft tournament! Read more about it by clicking the link. This is a great opportunity for new players and veterans alike to come together and share knowledge, come up with sneaky gorge tunnel strats, exo rush your way to victory, but most importantly have fun! The tournament begins on June 18th at 12pm EST/ 6pm CEST. Anyone of any skill level is encouraged to sign up.

 --->You can sign up here!<--- 

The winners of the tournament will receive Gorge Plushies.
If you’re itching to play immediately, feel free to sign up for a website account and join the infamous Gather system! Don’t be daunted if it appears empty, players might be watching but not committing to playing just yet. 

 Calling all rookies and veterans! Further your knowledge of Natural Selection and gain a sense of accomplishment and camaraderie by joining the newcomer draft tournament! New to competitive? Play on a team, get coached, make risky plays! Veteran player? Profess your love for smashing in your opponent’s teeth by teaching players how to ‘git gud.’

The NSL is hosting a brand new Newcomer's Draft tournament! Read more about it by clicking the link. This is a great opportunity for new players and veterans alike to come together and share knowledge, come up with sneaky gorge tunnel strats, exo rush your way to victory, but most importantly have fun! The tournament begins on June 18th at 12pm EST/ 6pm CEST. Anyone of any skill level is encouraged to sign up.

 --->You can sign up here!<--- 

The winners of the tournament will receive Gorge Plushies.
If you’re itching to play immediately, feel free to sign up for a website account and join the infamous Gather system! Don’t be daunted if it appears empty, players might be watching but not committing to playing just yet. 

After the successful construction of a new mining station on asteroid codename: Kodiak, the crew of the Industrial Construction Vessel “Caged” sent out a distress signal. ALTERRA Corp quickly dispatched a private military unit to investigate the source of the distress, what they found was an empty vessel and no signs of human life…

Welcome to Caged, the newest official map in the NS2 universe. A throwback to the original NS1 Map by Nelson ‘manah’ Ferryman, Flaterectomy and other community contributors and testers have worked to honor the original but also offer a new take for the current state of play. Caged offers players a fun four techpoint map with plenty of res and unique rooms and corridors for epic combat engagements.



What would a new map be without some other goodies? As a special treat, players who play on caged for two hours or more within the first week of release will unlock a new skulk skin. This can only be earned until June 10, 2016. After this date you will only be able to trade or buy it from players that earned it in the community marketplace. Get it FREE while you can!



Travel deep into the heart of Caged and see what skulks in the cold darkness. With its piercing blue eyes and ravaging look, this Skulk is sure to make many a marine wary of the fight ahead.



Update 301 sees continued tweaks to the new features we’ve added over the last few weeks and also sees a newer variant of Alien Vision and Spores! With the help of Ironhorse we have gone over a lot of the effects and cinematics and made them friendlier to engagements and less screen clutter. See more in the update log below.

These last few weeks of development have been very interesting with new features and balance tweaks and we have appreciated all the feedback. Thank you again to our Playtesters and Leads for helping us get through the faster rate of updates to the game. Also a big thanks to those of you in the public that have been coming and playing the public beta with us, it has been a huge help. We have seen a recent influx of new players to the community and we hope we can only continue to grow these numbers in the future, but this also happens with your help in supporting and helping the new players feel encouraged. Thank you to those of you taking the time to teach and show new players why we love this game so much!

UPDATE LOG

Tweaks / Improvements

• New Map Caged by Flaterectomy:
  • Remake of the original NS1 map ns_caged
  • 4 Tech Points and 10 Resource Points
  • Added loading screens for Caged (thanks Samus)
  • Added an achievement “Unleashed” for playing on Caged for 2 hours
  • Added the new “Abyss” skulk skin, which is rewarded free for a limited time for unlocking “Unleashed”.
  • Added a new main menu background.

• Remind the server operators to add the map to their mapcycle!

• Bot “Evolution”:
  • Alien bots evolve now into Lerks, Fades and Oni.
  • Improved the Lerks, Fade and Oni bot behavior.
  • Alien commander bots now manage better with their team ressources
  • Marine commander bots will also research The MG now.
• Aliens:
  • Alien Vision
    • Gorges and Babblers are highlighted and outlined in green
    • Friendly units are highlighted orange instead of red and are less highlighted than enemies
    • Enemy parasited outlines are now yellow to differentiate from friendlies
  • Lerk:
    • Spores:
      • Spores are now a ranged ability like Umbra
      • Spores require now biomass 4 (instead of 6)
      • Lowered damage to 15 health points (was 20)
      • Increased energy costs to 16 (was 8)
    • Umbra:
      • Umbra requires now biomass 5 (instead of 4)
  • Onos:
    • Boneshield
      • Boneshield requires now biomass 6 (instead of 5)
      • Added a new visual effects for bone shield
      • Boneshield now cost only 20 energy (instead of 40)
      • Boneshield restores now 112.5 armor per second (was 100)
      • The cooldown time of Boneshield now depends on how long it was used
      • The maximum cool down has been increased to 12.5 seconds (from 10)
      • You can now trigger Boneshield again after a misclick, and not have it instantly go on full cooldown
      • You can move now very slowly
  • Cysts:
    • The health points of a mature Cyst is now based on the length of the cyst chain to the hive. Cysts will have a minimum of 200 health points.
    • The Cysts redeploy radius has been increased to 7 (was 6)
    • The Cysts chains will now update when a hive is destroyed or completed.
    • Optimized cyst chain code to run faster
  • Hallucinations
    • The cooldown of hallucinations has been increased to 12 (was 6)
  • Silence Upgrade
    • Silence also stops attack sounds from playing
• Marines:
  • Flamethrower
    • Increased rate of fire by 50%.
    • Increased costs to 12 pres (was 10)
    • Lowered damage to 8 (was 16)
    • The Flamethrower now does more damage to structures over time (up to an additional 50% damage) when directly damaging a structure.
    • Removed Flamethrower making hit targets weigh more.
  • MG
    • Improved the sounds
• Health bars
  • Enemies are now marked (when first hit) based on server-authoritative damage, to make them more accurate
  • Updated the line of sight routine to make the hide and show correctly
• Blood splatter HUD damage effects have been improved (Thanks IronHorse!)
• Server browser
  • Ping and performance values will now be displayed via icons in the server list.
  • Choosing a server list tab will also reset the server list slide bar.

Fixes

• Fixed a critical script error when babblers tried to cling to a dead gorge causing the server to lag until the map got changed.
• Fixed that the Alien Vision outlined the skybox.
• Fixed the dropped MG outline not being red.
• Fixed that marines with a MG didn’t have a red ammo bar for Commanders
• Fixed that Umbra didn’t block any damage from the MG.
• Fixed that Lerk ragdolls did not dissolve.
• Fixed Hive-UI Icons scaling misalignment for 16:10 resolutions
• Fixed that the Alien Vision made entities blur when you blinked as Fade.
• Updated a few outdated in-game descriptions.

After the successful construction of a new mining station on asteroid codename: Kodiak, the crew of the Industrial Construction Vessel “Caged” sent out a distress signal. ALTERRA Corp quickly dispatched a private military unit to investigate the source of the distress, what they found was an empty vessel and no signs of human life…

Welcome to Caged, the newest official map in the NS2 universe. A throwback to the original NS1 Map by Nelson ‘manah’ Ferryman, Flaterectomy and other community contributors and testers have worked to honor the original but also offer a new take for the current state of play. Caged offers players a fun four techpoint map with plenty of res and unique rooms and corridors for epic combat engagements.



What would a new map be without some other goodies? As a special treat, players who play on caged for two hours or more within the first week of release will unlock a new skulk skin. This can only be earned until June 10, 2016. After this date you will only be able to trade or buy it from players that earned it in the community marketplace. Get it FREE while you can!



Travel deep into the heart of Caged and see what skulks in the cold darkness. With its piercing blue eyes and ravaging look, this Skulk is sure to make many a marine wary of the fight ahead.



Update 301 sees continued tweaks to the new features we’ve added over the last few weeks and also sees a newer variant of Alien Vision and Spores! With the help of Ironhorse we have gone over a lot of the effects and cinematics and made them friendlier to engagements and less screen clutter. See more in the update log below.

These last few weeks of development have been very interesting with new features and balance tweaks and we have appreciated all the feedback. Thank you again to our Playtesters and Leads for helping us get through the faster rate of updates to the game. Also a big thanks to those of you in the public that have been coming and playing the public beta with us, it has been a huge help. We have seen a recent influx of new players to the community and we hope we can only continue to grow these numbers in the future, but this also happens with your help in supporting and helping the new players feel encouraged. Thank you to those of you taking the time to teach and show new players why we love this game so much!

UPDATE LOG

Tweaks / Improvements

• New Map Caged by Flaterectomy:
  • Remake of the original NS1 map ns_caged
  • 4 Tech Points and 10 Resource Points
  • Added loading screens for Caged (thanks Samus)
  • Added an achievement “Unleashed” for playing on Caged for 2 hours
  • Added the new “Abyss” skulk skin, which is rewarded free for a limited time for unlocking “Unleashed”.
  • Added a new main menu background.

• Remind the server operators to add the map to their mapcycle!

• Bot “Evolution”:
  • Alien bots evolve now into Lerks, Fades and Oni.
  • Improved the Lerks, Fade and Oni bot behavior.
  • Alien commander bots now manage better with their team ressources
  • Marine commander bots will also research The MG now.
• Aliens:
  • Alien Vision
    • Gorges and Babblers are highlighted and outlined in green
    • Friendly units are highlighted orange instead of red and are less highlighted than enemies
    • Enemy parasited outlines are now yellow to differentiate from friendlies
  • Lerk:
    • Spores:
      • Spores are now a ranged ability like Umbra
      • Spores require now biomass 4 (instead of 6)
      • Lowered damage to 15 health points (was 20)
      • Increased energy costs to 16 (was 8)
    • Umbra:
      • Umbra requires now biomass 5 (instead of 4)
  • Onos:
    • Boneshield
      • Boneshield requires now biomass 6 (instead of 5)
      • Added a new visual effects for bone shield
      • Boneshield now cost only 20 energy (instead of 40)
      • Boneshield restores now 112.5 armor per second (was 100)
      • The cooldown time of Boneshield now depends on how long it was used
      • The maximum cool down has been increased to 12.5 seconds (from 10)
      • You can now trigger Boneshield again after a misclick, and not have it instantly go on full cooldown
      • You can move now very slowly
  • Cysts:
    • The health points of a mature Cyst is now based on the length of the cyst chain to the hive. Cysts will have a minimum of 200 health points.
    • The Cysts redeploy radius has been increased to 7 (was 6)
    • The Cysts chains will now update when a hive is destroyed or completed.
    • Optimized cyst chain code to run faster
  • Hallucinations
    • The cooldown of hallucinations has been increased to 12 (was 6)
  • Silence Upgrade
    • Silence also stops attack sounds from playing
• Marines:
  • Flamethrower
    • Increased rate of fire by 50%.
    • Increased costs to 12 pres (was 10)
    • Lowered damage to 8 (was 16)
    • The Flamethrower now does more damage to structures over time (up to an additional 50% damage) when directly damaging a structure.
    • Removed Flamethrower making hit targets weigh more.
  • MG
    • Improved the sounds
• Health bars
  • Enemies are now marked (when first hit) based on server-authoritative damage, to make them more accurate
  • Updated the line of sight routine to make the hide and show correctly
• Blood splatter HUD damage effects have been improved (Thanks IronHorse!)
• Server browser
  • Ping and performance values will now be displayed via icons in the server list.
  • Choosing a server list tab will also reset the server list slide bar.

Fixes

• Fixed a critical script error when babblers tried to cling to a dead gorge causing the server to lag until the map got changed.
• Fixed that the Alien Vision outlined the skybox.
• Fixed the dropped MG outline not being red.
• Fixed that marines with a MG didn’t have a red ammo bar for Commanders
• Fixed that Umbra didn’t block any damage from the MG.
• Fixed that Lerk ragdolls did not dissolve.
• Fixed Hive-UI Icons scaling misalignment for 16:10 resolutions
• Fixed that the Alien Vision made entities blur when you blinked as Fade.
• Updated a few outdated in-game descriptions.

Greetings!

Squad 5 badges are handed out by the Natural Selection 2 community and us developers to show our eternal gratitude to those who helped growing NS2 and its community.

Anybody who makes a sustained, positive, and reasonable effort to support NS2 and / or the vibrancy of its community may be awarded with a blue icon.

Silver and Gold are 'big deals' and are only awarded extremely sparingly for outstanding efforts.

Thank you all for your contributions even if you haven’t made it into Squad 5 yet, and thank you to those who took the time to nominate them.

Note that the only way a community member can be considered for Squad 5 is if YOU nominate them here!

Be sure to congratulate these community members, in game or in these forums, they deserve it.

Squad 5 Gold
@Person8880 - For his “Shine” modification and the outstanding support of the server operator and modding community in the last 3 years.

Squad 5 Silver
@Zavaro - Being a PT Lead, MT Lead and now the ENSL Admin. All of these take a phenomenal amount of time and effort, and absolutely deserves our thanks and gratitude

Squad 5 Blue
@Well - For all his work to get Natural Selection 2 speaking Russian. It's a difficult task to translate that much, but it's a worthy endeavor as it brings more players into our community. We appreciate everything you've done.

@Brute - For his “Wonitor” modification. Everybody always like to have fancy graphs about the in-game stats of a server.

@Scatter - For his various mods e.g. “NS2:Assault”, “NS2:Overhaul” and “Modular Exo”. Furthermore, he was always a driving force in ensuring the Australian NS2 Community stayed healthy and strong


@Oozle For being another force inside the Australian NS2 Community. Without him hosting NS2 servers for years Down Under we would have never known how passionate the Australian folks can be about Natural Selection.

Your badges will be ready to claim for use in game by visiting http://hive.naturalselection2.com/ and clicking redeem badges after you've logged in.

Thanks everyone, and congrats!!

Greetings!

Squad 5 badges are handed out by the Natural Selection 2 community and us developers to show our eternal gratitude to those who helped growing NS2 and its community.

Anybody who makes a sustained, positive, and reasonable effort to support NS2 and / or the vibrancy of its community may be awarded with a blue icon.

Silver and Gold are 'big deals' and are only awarded extremely sparingly for outstanding efforts.

Thank you all for your contributions even if you haven’t made it into Squad 5 yet, and thank you to those who took the time to nominate them.

Note that the only way a community member can be considered for Squad 5 is if YOU nominate them here!

Be sure to congratulate these community members, in game or in these forums, they deserve it.

Squad 5 Gold
@Person8880 - For his “Shine” modification and the outstanding support of the server operator and modding community in the last 3 years.

Squad 5 Silver
@Zavaro - Being a PT Lead, MT Lead and now the ENSL Admin. All of these take a phenomenal amount of time and effort, and absolutely deserves our thanks and gratitude

Squad 5 Blue
@Well - For all his work to get Natural Selection 2 speaking Russian. It's a difficult task to translate that much, but it's a worthy endeavor as it brings more players into our community. We appreciate everything you've done.

@Brute - For his “Wonitor” modification. Everybody always like to have fancy graphs about the in-game stats of a server.

@Scatter - For his various mods e.g. “NS2:Assault”, “NS2:Overhaul” and “Modular Exo”. Furthermore, he was always a driving force in ensuring the Australian NS2 Community stayed healthy and strong


@Oozle For being another force inside the Australian NS2 Community. Without him hosting NS2 servers for years Down Under we would have never known how passionate the Australian folks can be about Natural Selection.

Your badges will be ready to claim for use in game by visiting http://hive.naturalselection2.com/ and clicking redeem badges after you've logged in.

Thanks everyone, and congrats!!

Some of the DEV team is currently on DiamondGamers Dallas 2. Join up and hunt them down!

“THIS IS ALTERRA!” First off, how amazing is it that we are at Update 300? The blood sweat and tears that have been poured into this game by so many people over the last few years is nothing short of awesome. Now we look forward to what’s to come.

This update sees us making continued improvements to the server browser and an additional notification for news or updates on first open. After playing many games, reading and discussing feedback with players we’ve made some additional tweaks to newly introduced abilities and weapons. Aliens now have a new ability in Focus, so play around and see what you think. Also on the map front Derelict has seen some performance improvements, thanks Loki!


We would like to introduce the newest skin to the marine arsenal, Skull ‘n’ Crossfire. This black beauty is almost splattered with the blood of its enemies and is enshrined with the skull of the fallen to taunt those foes that dare face it next! Check it out now in the ITEM STORE.

NS2 is currently running a 50% off sale through May 30th, we hope to see some new players on the battlefield. Your help to encourage and inspire teamwork will go a long way to retaining them for the long haul. Thanks for playing NS2!

Tweaks / Improvements

• Main Menu:
  
  • Added a new changelog pop up:
    
    • Will show up after the client has been updated
    • Shows latest changelog
    • Allows you to give feedback on the changes
  • Tweaked the right side of the main menu slightly
  • Replaced the reload, favorite and history icons in the Server Browser to look better.
• Marines:
  
  • Rifle
    
    • Added the new fancy Skull ‘n’ Crossfire skin. http://store.steampowered.com/itemstore/4920/detail/801/
  • HMG
    
    • Thanks for all your feedback on the HMG!
    • Added new sounds
    • Fixed the model textures
    • Renamed it to Machine Gun (MG) because it’s not really a HMG
    • Deals 6 damage to structures, 12 to players
    • Spread is 4.5 degrees
    • Weights twice as much as the rifle
    • Magazine size is 100
    • Has maximum 5 magazines
    • Reload takes about 4.2 seconds
  • Mines
    
    • Increased cost to 10 pres (was 8)
    • Lowered armor to 5 (was 10)
  • Flamethrower
    
    • Decreased cost to 10 pres
  • Power nodes will no longer show enemies on the map unless it is under attack
• Aliens:
  
  • Shade Hive - Added Focus
    
    • Deals 50% more damage to primary attacks
    • Increases the delay between attacks by 50% (slows rate of attacks)
  • Crag Hive - Crush
    
    • Increased extra damage to player to 7% for each shell (21% with 3 shells)
  • Heal/Regeneration:
    
    • If an alien gets healed by 20% of its total health in 2 seconds every further heal is reduced to 20%
  • Hallucination Cloud:
    
    • Spawns now 2 skulk hallucinations if no players were targeted.
  • Revised nutrient mist cinematic to be less obscuring
  • Revised mucous membrane cinematic to be less obscuring
  • Rupture parasite time reduced to 10 seconds ( was 44 seconds )
  • Gorge Build Menu:
    
    • Swapped position of Webs and Babbler Egg. Webs are now in slot 3
  • Babblers now cling to their owner when they hatch from their egg
• Other:
  
  • Increased the damage number animation speed
  • Increased the health bars animation speed
  • Disabled the consistency check for local servers
  • Removed heavy damage effects
  • The local player gets highlighted in the scoreboard

Fixes

• Fixed that the reserved slot count could be negative ending up with server having more slots in the server browser than they really have
• Fixed that the marine weapon icons were not displayed correctly in spectator view
• Fixed that the health bars were wrongly colored in spectator
• The give cheat command will no longer cause script errors with invalid command arguments
• Fixed that the Onos stomp sound repeated itself in spectator view
• Fixed that the Alien Commander did not re-cyst to ressource points correctly
• Fixed that in case a server reported a negative amount of reserved slots the server browser displayed more slots than available.
• Fixed that the Alien Vision wasn’t working on Linux (thanks rkfg)

Translations

• Swedish translations are at 88%, just a little more love!

SDK

• Added Shared.GetAnimationLength() callback. Accepts model name (with filepath) and animation name. Returns length of time for an animation (as a float).
• Added Client.GetClientUpdated which returns true if the client got updated before the last client start, otherwise it returns false.

Maps

• Derelict
  
  • Improved FPS inside Nursery (specifically when entering from flooded biosphere) and Turbines.
  • Several duplicated lights have been removed in Turbines.
  • Added additional occlusion geometry around Heat Xfer and Geothermal.

“THIS IS ALTERRA!” First off, how amazing is it that we are at Update 300? The blood sweat and tears that have been poured into this game by so many people over the last few years is nothing short of awesome. Now we look forward to what’s to come.

This update sees us making continued improvements to the server browser and an additional notification for news or updates on first open. After playing many games, reading and discussing feedback with players we’ve made some additional tweaks to newly introduced abilities and weapons. Aliens now have a new ability in Focus, so play around and see what you think. Also on the map front Derelict has seen some performance improvements, thanks Loki!


We would like to introduce the newest skin to the marine arsenal, Skull ‘n’ Crossfire. This black beauty is almost splattered with the blood of its enemies and is enshrined with the skull of the fallen to taunt those foes that dare face it next! Check it out now in the ITEM STORE.

NS2 is currently running a 50% off sale through May 30th, we hope to see some new players on the battlefield. Your help to encourage and inspire teamwork will go a long way to retaining them for the long haul. Thanks for playing NS2!

Tweaks / Improvements

• Main Menu:
  
  • Added a new changelog pop up:
    
    • Will show up after the client has been updated
    • Shows latest changelog
    • Allows you to give feedback on the changes
  • Tweaked the right side of the main menu slightly
  • Replaced the reload, favorite and history icons in the Server Browser to look better.
• Marines:
  
  • Rifle
    
    • Added the new fancy Skull ‘n’ Crossfire skin. http://store.steampowered.com/itemstore/4920/detail/801/
  • HMG
    
    • Thanks for all your feedback on the HMG!
    • Added new sounds
    • Fixed the model textures
    • Renamed it to Machine Gun (MG) because it’s not really a HMG
    • Deals 6 damage to structures, 12 to players
    • Spread is 4.5 degrees
    • Weights twice as much as the rifle
    • Magazine size is 100
    • Has maximum 5 magazines
    • Reload takes about 4.2 seconds
  • Mines
    
    • Increased cost to 10 pres (was 8)
    • Lowered armor to 5 (was 10)
  • Flamethrower
    
    • Decreased cost to 10 pres
  • Power nodes will no longer show enemies on the map unless it is under attack
• Aliens:
  
  • Shade Hive - Added Focus
    
    • Deals 50% more damage to primary attacks
    • Increases the delay between attacks by 50% (slows rate of attacks)
  • Crag Hive - Crush
    
    • Increased extra damage to player to 7% for each shell (21% with 3 shells)
  • Heal/Regeneration:
    
    • If an alien gets healed by 20% of its total health in 2 seconds every further heal is reduced to 20%
  • Hallucination Cloud:
    
    • Spawns now 2 skulk hallucinations if no players were targeted.
  • Revised nutrient mist cinematic to be less obscuring
  • Revised mucous membrane cinematic to be less obscuring
  • Rupture parasite time reduced to 10 seconds ( was 44 seconds )
  • Gorge Build Menu:
    
    • Swapped position of Webs and Babbler Egg. Webs are now in slot 3
  • Babblers now cling to their owner when they hatch from their egg
• Other:
  
  • Increased the damage number animation speed
  • Increased the health bars animation speed
  • Disabled the consistency check for local servers
  • Removed heavy damage effects
  • The local player gets highlighted in the scoreboard

Fixes

• Fixed that the reserved slot count could be negative ending up with server having more slots in the server browser than they really have
• Fixed that the marine weapon icons were not displayed correctly in spectator view
• Fixed that the health bars were wrongly colored in spectator
• The give cheat command will no longer cause script errors with invalid command arguments
• Fixed that the Onos stomp sound repeated itself in spectator view
• Fixed that the Alien Commander did not re-cyst to ressource points correctly
• Fixed that in case a server reported a negative amount of reserved slots the server browser displayed more slots than available.
• Fixed that the Alien Vision wasn’t working on Linux (thanks rkfg)

Translations

• Swedish translations are at 88%, just a little more love!

SDK

• Added Shared.GetAnimationLength() callback. Accepts model name (with filepath) and animation name. Returns length of time for an animation (as a float).
• Added Client.GetClientUpdated which returns true if the client got updated before the last client start, otherwise it returns false.

Maps

• Derelict
  
  • Improved FPS inside Nursery (specifically when entering from flooded biosphere) and Turbines.
  • Several duplicated lights have been removed in Turbines.
  • Added additional occlusion geometry around Heat Xfer and Geothermal.