This is an update for the default Steam version that contains all the fixes from the 1.30 versions which have been tested on the Experimental banch. It adds support for increasing or decreasing the duration of mission timers, and fixes the annoying bug where grenades sometimes miss even on a 100% hit chance throw.

If you are experiencing the "stuck UFO" crash (which is an alien base Resupply mission) then this patch does not fix that issue - but if you switch to our Experimental branch, our newest patch (1.31) does include that fix and should allow you to continue playing.

• Added a campaign difficulty option that allows you to modify the mission duration / reinforcement timers (this doesn't yet update the numbers in the mission briefing text).
  
• Added new artwork for Cleaner Origins, Wraith Interrogation and Tissue Regeneration research projects.
  
• Terror missions now grant -10 Panic reduction if you win.
  
• The cost text for a project on the Engineering screen now displays in red if you lack the funds to afford it.
  
• Flares no longer become far louder if you have more than one on-screen at the same time.
  
• Added proper silhouette images for all the weapons for use in the soldier minitabs at the top of the tactical UI.
  
• You can no longer throw grenades into UFOs through their roof.

• Fixed the issue where grenades could miss even when showing 100% hit chance.
  
• Fixed air combat autoresolve failing to fire torpedoes at UFOs with escorts and therefore giving a much worse result than the manual air combat does in those instances.
  
• Fixed a bug where all Accelerated Rifles would turn into Cleaner Accelerated Rifles if you recovered one and were playing in a non-English language.
  
• Fixed soldiers sometimes rotating to face the wrong direction when throwing a grenade.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!

• Fixed the crash that could occur after a UFO gets stuck on the Geoscape (these are resupply missions for Alien Bases).
  
• Dropship auto-fill button now obeys the Vehicle Capacity rules for the dropship.
  
• Engineering Screen - the quantity arrows for the projects now update correctly if you add a new project and can no longer afford to add more quantity to existing projects.
  
• You no longer get a building complete notification for buildings in destroyed bases.
  
• If playing Iron Man, the game no longer always quits to Main Menu rather than giving you the option to quit to Desktop too.
  
• The "Captured VIP" item in the base stores is now hidden, as it's a research trigger item (and you still also get the Captured Psyon item).
  
• Fixed the region highlight outline for Soviet Russia being misaligned in some cases.
  
• Fixed the newlines in the "Base Destroyed" loss condition text.
  
• Fixed the game showing incorrect values in the Xenopedia for the MARS and Sentry Gun stats.
  
• Fixed the Cleaner SMG and Accelerated Rifles being equippable by vehicles.
  
• It's now possible to shoot through the glass doors in the desert trailer park houses.
  
• Pillars are now crushable (which means the MARS can move diagonally through fences).

Although we are busily working on our next major update (Milestone 2) we are also continuing to patch and improve the currently available version of Xenonauts 2.

We have just released Milestone 1.29d onto our standard branches after a week of testing on the Experimental branches, while Milestone 1.30 will shortly be rolled onto the Experimental branch to begin testing the next batch of fixes (which will include the mission timer duration setting, and a fix for grenades sometimes missing even at 100% hit chance).

The full changelog for 1.29 is attached below!

• It is now possible to redirect aircraft squadrons that are already in flight via the Launch Aircraft panel (this also allows you to split aircraft out of airborne squadrons).
  
• Updated the AI so it will only perform attacks on units that an alien unit has seen that turn, as it was apparently previously ignoring the vision rules. This could lead to some rather unfair situations where enemies were shooting beyond vision range or throwing grenades over walls at units they had never seen.
  
• Cleaner units reduced in Accuracy from 65 down to 55 for the suited guys (Agents) and 60 for the hazmat guys (Soldiers).
  
• Accuracy for enemies on Recruit difficulty has been dropped from 85% of normal values down to 80% of normal values.
  
• Stun Gun has been buffed a little - it now does slightly more Stun Damage, has improved accuracy and holds 4 shots rather than 3.
  
• UFO Armour and Health are now shown at maximum zoom level in the air combat.
  
• Updated a number of translation languages files to incorporate various changes and fixes.
  
• Pressing Esc on the soldier memorial screen now correctly returns you to the Geoscape.

• Fixed a couple of memory leaks that triggered each time you saved the game.
  
• Fixed players being unable to demolish base structures.
  
• Actually fixed the Geoscape multi-select dialog revealing hidden missions like the Cleaner Base.
  
• Fixed the opening cutscene and several buttons on the tactical UI ignoring the settings volume sliders.
  
• Fixed units being able to shoot through floor tiles in the Alien Base maps if they had taken damage.
  
• Fixed a calculation issue that was causing the game to generate female soldiers at a higher rate than intended.
  
• Fixed aircraft callsigns repeating before all available names had been exhausted.
  
• Fixed "War Machine" achievement triggering off the Exosuit, rather than the Colossus (which isn't yet in the game).
  
• Fixed one of the barn window types not correctly shattering.
  
• Achievements are now disabled during the tutorial.
  
• Servitor Wreckage is no longer incorrectly called Gun Drone Wreckage.
  
• Fixed various hitbox issues around the edges of the Geoscape regions so they now better match the highlighted areas.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!

Assuming no major stability issues are found in this version we expect to push it out onto the standard Steam branch in time for the weekend!

• It is now possible to redirect aircraft squadrons that are already in flight via the Launch Aircraft panel (this also allows you to split aircraft out of airborne squadrons).
  
• Updated the AI so it will only perform attacks on units that an alien unit has seen that turn, as it was apparently previously ignoring the vision rules due to a bug. This could lead to some rather unfair situations where enemies were shooting beyond vision range or throwing grenades over walls at units they had never seen.
  
• Cleaner units reduced in Accuracy from 65 down to 55 for the suited guys (Agents) and 60 for the hazmat guys (Soldiers).
  
• Accuracy for enemies on Recruit difficulty has been dropped from 85% of normal values down to 80% of normal values.
  
• Stun Gun has been buffed a little - it now does slightly more Stun Damage, has improved accuracy and holds 4 shots rather than 3.
  
• UFO Armour and Health are now shown at maximum zoom level in the air combat.
  
• Updated a number of translation languages files to incorporate various changes and fixes.

• Fixed a couple of memory leaks that triggered each time you saved the game.
  
• Fixed players being unable to demolish base structures.
  
• Actually fixed the Geoscape multi-select dialog revealing hidden missions like the Cleaner Base for real.
  
• Fixed the opening cutscene and several buttons on the tactical UI ignoring the settings volume sliders.
  
• Fixed units being able to shoot through floor tiles in the Alien Base maps if they had taken damage.
  
• Fixed a calculation issue that was causing the game to generate female soldiers at a higher rate than intended.
  
• Fixed aircraft callsigns repeating before all available names had been exhausted.
  
• Fixed "War Machine" achievement triggering off the Exosuit, rather than the Colossus (which isn't yet in the game).
  
• Fixed one of the barn window types not correctly shattering.
  
• Achievements are now disabled during the tutorial.
  
• Servitor Wreckage is no longer incorrectly called Gun Drone Wreckage.
  
• Fixed various hitbox issues around the edges of the Geoscape regions so they now better match the highlighted areas.

We intend to post monthly updates on our progress on Xenonauts 2 to keep our community in the loop about what we've been working on here at Goldhawk Interactive.

Obviously the big news this month has been our Early Access launch two weeks ago, which has been a great success. Over 40,000 people have supported the project by purchasing a copy of the game, and we're hugely grateful to everyone who has done so.

We've spent almost all our time this month fixing "critical issues" with the game. Broadly speaking there's three categories of these issues - crashes, performance problems, and frustrating gameplay bugs.

We've been working a lot of hours recently and have made good headway with these fixes, releasing 1.28b last Friday which addressed many of the worst bugs and performance issues. The sheer number of helpful people in the community willing to provide detailed bug reports really helped with this, so thanks to anyone that did so!

We'll shortly be releasing 1.29 onto the Experimental branches which fixes the memory leak that tanks performance in long play sessions, as well as several other quite irritating gameplay bugs. It also contains a small balance patch to make the game a bit more forgiving on the easier difficulty settings. Assuming no stability issues are found, this should make its way onto the standard branches by the weekend.

In the next few days we are planning to start work on adding a difficulty settings option that allows you to tweak the mission timers to your preference (this will include the option to disable the timers entirely).

At the same time we'll also be doing a first pass on optimising the loading times, as we know slow load times are an issue for a lot of players (although the memory leak being fixed in 1.29 will help with this too).

We're then planning to spend the remainder of the month working on Milestone 2. This will be the first major update for the game and it will involve changes to the campaign, which unfortunately means it will break save games (although people can continue to play their Milestone 1 campaigns on the Legacy branches if they want).

We'll be focusing Milestone 2 on the air combat balance and the pacing issues in the existing campaign. This is likely to extend the playable time beyond 180 days but it will not yet introduce additional UFO types to the game - it's more likely that we'll be expanding the role of the Cleaners at the start of the game instead.

This should give us a chance to act upon the feedback that the community has provided over the past couple of weeks, while allowing the programmers to focus their time on bugfixes and usability improvements. If all goes well the first Milestone 2 build will arrive on the Experimental branch in the next two or three weeks.

The final thing to mention is that the income from our Early Access launch means we now have the opportunity to expand our team, which should speed up development and help us create a higher-quality game.

The first positions we're looking to fill are that of a Level Designer and a Gameplay Programmer. I've linked the posts below if anyone is potentially interested - we always look favourably on candidates who are familiar with our game!

• Level Designer (Remote)
  
• Gameplay Programmer (Remote)

Overall, July was a great month for the project. Although it has been a very intense few months for us, it's been great to see people playing and enjoying Xenonauts 2 and we're keen to keep improving the game!

This is an update for the default Steam branches that contains all the fixes from versions 1.26 to 1.28 that were being tested on the Experimental build over the past few days.

This patch contains performance fixes, stability fixes and also some gameplay tweaks. The combined changelogs are shown below:

Gameplay:

• Using shot preview move (Ctrl+Shift) no longer causes significant performance problems.
  
• Various smaller performance updates to both strategy and tactical layer (we'll be looking at load times shortly).
  
• Added a "mission briefing" button to the Geoscape info panel for a tactical mission, which allows you to see the tactical mission briefing on the strategy layer before you equip your troops.
  
• Cleaner SMGs and Cleaner Accelerated Rifles are now recoverable and usable (by popular demand).
  
• The intro cinematic and the game mechanic popups are now enabled at the start of each campaign, regardless of whether the tutorial is enabled or not.
  
• Xenonaut Sentry Guns can now open doors, but are unable to crush objects.
  
• Reduced the spawn rate of Cleaner anomalies at the start of the game.
  
• Tooltips have been added for the various stat columns on the Soldier Recruitment panel.
  
• Snowmobiles should now explode when destroyed.
  
• Stalker Stealth Armour now displays as Gas Immune in Xenopedia.
  
• When hovering the cursor over the base icons in the top right, the base name is now displayed instantly rather than after a short delay.
  
• When hovering the cursor over a soldier in the vertical list on the dropship soldier arrangement screen, the popup showing their face / equipment is now show instantly rather than after a short delay.

Key Fixes:

• Fixed a bug where the day 180 "Content Complete" popup was not being shown, and the game loss conditions were not triggering if you lost enough regions.
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur if you tried to begin a crash site mission when there was a wreckage site also present on the Geoscape.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause multiple popups to spawn when intercepting UFOs or sending a dropship to a tactical mission. In both cases this could cause crashes.
  
• Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur during the alien turn if the aliens were using hovering units like Servitors.
  
• Fixed two rare crashes that could occur in the Soldier Equip pool due to corrupted Kickstarter backer soldiers.
  
• Fixed a rare crash that could occur if you built over 50 planes.

General Fixes:

• It's no longer possible to find undiscovered Cleaner Cells / Bases / etc by clicking on a UFO or mission that has spawned near to where they are hidden.
  
• Fixed grenades / aircraft missiles not properly upgrading if you skip the Alenium project and go straight for Fusion (sadly I don't think this fixes existing campaigns though)
  
• Aircraft will now start to immediately repair Armour after being upgraded.
  
• Fixed the tactical soldier inventory incorrectly charging TU for you to pick an item up and then put it back in the same spot.
  
• Fixed the tactical soldier inventory incorrectly forgetting to charge TU if you moved the same item multiple times.
  
• TU costs for abilities are now rounded up rather than down. This fixed some odd situations where it was occasionally better to have fewer TU.
  
• It should no longer be possible to use a jetpack to fly between rooms in the Alien Base, or to jetpack through the roof of the Dragonfly dropship.
  
• Fixed an issue where it was not possible to redirect a dropship in flight to a landed UFO site.
  
• MARS vehicles now correctly display their names in the tactical combat.
  
• Disabled the day 300 Orbital Bombardment research report (which wasn't supposed to be in the game).
  
• Psyon VIP on Cleaner Cell missions no longer reports recovering both a Stunned Psyon and a Cleaner VIP if captured alive.
  
• Stalker Stealth Armour no longer shows the hair of soldiers floating inside their helmet.
  
• Dead Cyberdrones should no longer appear to be alive again after loading a save.
  
• Fixed some terrain objects in the Xenonaut base showing a bright pink error texture when destroyed.
  
• Fixed the Boreal sawmill building roofs so they correctly disappear if destroyed.
  
• Fixed typos in the strategy tutorial, Frag Grenade tooltip, and Ballistic Weapons and Fighter Datacore research text.
  
• Fixed the Engineering recruit panel having tooltips referring to scientists instead of engineers.
  
• Fixed a text overflow issue in the soldier memorial screen.
  
• Cleaner ballistic rifles no longer have an additional 5-round burst.
  
• Bomber UFO no longer incorrectly referred to as "medum-size" in Xenopedia.
  
• HEVY now displays its damage type as Thermal on tooltips.
  
• Tactical Inventory no longer incorrectly refers to the Tactical Vest as the Belt.
  
• Rush replace on aircraft now correctly costs the listed amount of money.
  
• Fixed an issue where you could drag any type of ammo onto any weapon on the Soldier Equip screen and it would accept it.
  
• Fixed some Xenopedia / tooltip typos.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!

Gameplay Changes:

• The intro cinematic and the game mechanic popups are now enabled at the start of each campaign, regardless of whether the tutorial is enabled or not.
  
• Cleaner SMGs and Cleaner Accelerated Rifles are now recoverable and usable (by popular demand).
  
• Xenonaut Sentry Guns can now open doors, but are unable to crush objects.
  
• TU costs for abilities are now rounded up rather than down. This fixed some odd situations where it was occasionally better to have fewer TU.
  
• Reduced the spawn rate of Cleaner anomalies at the start of the game.

Key Fixes:

• Fixed a pathfinding crash that had been introduced in 1.26, which usually crashed during the AI turn but also could affect the player.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause multiple popups to spawn when intercepting UFOs or sending a dropship to a tactical mission. In both cases this could cause crashes.
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur on the Soldier Recruitment panel due to a corrupted Kickstarter backer soldier.
  
• Fixed a bug where the day 180 "Content Complete" popup was not being shown, and the game loss conditions were not triggering if you lost enough regions.

General Fixes:

• Fixed grenades / aircraft missiles not properly upgrading if you skip the Alenium project and go straight for Fusion.
  
• Fixed the tactical soldier inventory incorrectly charging TU for you to pick an item up and then put it back in the same spot.
  
• Fixed the tactical soldier inventory incorrectly forgetting to charge TU if you moved the same item multiple times.
  
• It should no longer be possible to use a jetpack to fly between rooms in the Alien Base, or to jetpack through the roof of the Dragonfly dropship.
  
• MARS vehicles now correctly display their names in the tactical combat.
  
• Disabled the day 300 Orbital Bombardment research report (which wasn't supposed to be in the game).
  
• Psyon VIP on Cleaner Cell missions no longer reports recovering both a Stunned Psyon and a Cleaner VIP if captured alive.
  
• Stalker Stealth Armour no longer shows the hair of soldiers floating inside their helmet.
  
• Dead Cyberdrones should no longer appear to be alive again after loading a save.
  
• Fixed some terrain objects in the Xenonaut base showing a bright pink error texture when destroyed.
  
• Fixed the Boreal sawmill building roofs so they correctly disappear if destroyed.
  
• Fixed typos in the strategy tutorial, Frag Grenade tooltip, and Ballistic Weapons and Fighter Datacore research text.
  
• Fixed the Engineering recruit panel having tooltips referring to scientists instead of engineers.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!

Gameplay:

• Using shot preview move (Ctrl+Shift) no longer causes significant performance problems.
  
• Various smaller performance updates to both strategy and tactical layer (although these are unlikely to be noticable in an Experimental build due to the extra logging reducing overall performance)
  
• Aircraft will now start to immediately repair Armour after being upgraded.
  
• Rush replace on aircraft now correctly costs the listed amount of money.
  
• Fixed an issue where you could drag any type of ammo onto any weapon on the Soldier Equip screen and it would accept it.
  
• MARS now correctly displays its name in the tactical combat.
  
• Fixed some Xenopedia / tooltip typos.

Crash Fixes:

• Fixed a crash that could occur if you tried to begin a crash site mission when there was a wreckage site also present on the Geoscape.
  
• Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur during the alien turn if the aliens were using hovering units like Servitors.
  
• Fixed a rare crash that could occur in the Soldier Equip pool.
  
• Fixed a rare crash that could occur if you built over 50 planes.

We've now released V1.25 off our Experimental branches onto our main branches for everyone to play. We want to say a big thanks to everyone that tested on our Experimental branches over the past couple of days!

As the current version on the standard branches was 1.23b, this changelog includes the fixes from both 1.24 and 1.25.

Gameplay Changes:

• Item sell prices now increase / decrease correctly per item sold even if you sell in a stack, meaning there is no longer any benefit to hoarding items in your stores to sell all at once.
  
• The items on escort UFOs are now also recovered if you win the crash site. This means you can now get the bonus Alloys and the Fighter Datacore items when you shoot down a UFO that has alien Fighter escorts.
  
• Added a new settings option to disable Camera Edge Scrolling in the tactical combat (i.e. the camera moving if you put the mouse near the edge of the screen).

Bugfixes:

• Fixed an issue where the game would fail to load up at all if the /My Documents/ directory was inaccessible for some reason.
  
• Added support for command line override of the default save path:    -gameSaveFolder="<PATH>"
  
• Fixed a bug where the Cleaner Cell missions would not register when a unit carrying the VIP steps into a dropship for the first time, and did not automatically end the mission with victory like it should (although it did register if that soldier moved a second time within the dropship).
  
• Fixed an issue where you could stack Extra Armour modules on the MARS if you were playing in a non-English version of the game.
  
• Fixed an AI hang that could occur during the alien turn.
  
• Attempted to fix the lockups some people were experiencing in the strategy section of the tutorial.
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur when holding Shift or Ctrl when triggering a C4 detonator, as well as various other crashes related to using similar items with one or both of those keys held.
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur if achievements were mis-set on Steam or GOG.
  
• Fixed a couple of Kickstarter backers with invalid portraits who could crash the game if sent into tactical combat.

EDIT - we temporarily reverted back to 1.23b after releasing this version due to an issue with the save path, which caused the game not to find existing save games (see my comment below). This has now been resolved.

If you have any missing save games, please move the contents of the /Xenonauts 2 Editor/ folder into /Xenonauts 2/ in the directory "/My Documents/My Games/!

This is an update to Milestone 1.24 that we released yesterday on our Experimental branch. This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although note they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!

This update fixes a couple of issues our 1.24 changes had introduced, and also contains some additional crash fixes. If this build proves stable we'll likely push it out to the main branch tomorrow!

Changelog:

• Added support for command line override of the default save path:    -gameSaveFolder="<PATH>"
  
• Fixed various issues that were causing hangs / softlocks during the tutorial.
  
• Fixed a crash when loading a save game that contained a MARS.
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur when holding Shift or Ctrl when triggering a C4 detonator, as well as various other crashes related to using similar items with one or both of those keys held.
  
• Fixed a crash that could occur if achievements were mis-set on Steam or GOG.
  
• Fixed a couple of Kickstarter backers with invalid portraits who could crash the game if sent into tactical combat.