This cycle, the beta arrives with some massive underlying technology changes and a lot of new gameplay and content. This release marks the first step into Naev’s next era with Rust-powered internals and the debut of our fully integrated plugin manager.
You should be able to continue old 0.10.0+ saves, but due to the scale of changes (especially engine-side), starting a new fresh save will give the smoothest experience. For saves older than 0.10.0, please load the save once with 0.12.6 before loading it with newer versions.
You have to opt-in to the beta from the game options menu on steam to try it out!
What’s new?
Engine migration begins: Rust + SDL3: The engine now uses SDL3 and the port to the Rust programming language has started, improving stability and paving the way for major future upgrades.
Integrated Plugin Manager: Naev now includes a native plugin browser, installer, and updater, all with access to the online plugin repository built right in.
Major content additions:
28 new missions and events
New intertwined Imperial minor houses
New systems, anomalies, portraits, objects, and more
20+ new songs
New and reworked outfits
11 new ship variants
Significant gameplay tweaks: Heat mechanism removed, pirates are less dangerous to new players, camera is truly isometric, improved forward weapon aiming for the player, and core outfits have been reworked to use a 1 or 2-slot system.
Lots of fixes, balance work, and internal cleanup: From physics touch-ups to mission fixes, weapon tweaks, save robustness, and API consistency, a lot has been improved in this release.
As usual, the beta may contain bugs, weirdness, or things that go “pop” in the darkness of space. Please try it out, break things, and tell us what happened so we can fix it before the 0.13.0 final release.
Full Changelog
Gameplay
Removed heat mechanic (to be readded as a new mechanic in the future)
Made pirates less dangerous to new players
Marauders are now intrinsically weaker than other pirates, especially with low pirate presence
Made pirates less aggressive
Change pirate spawning to be mainly marauders in low presence areas
Fuel from outfits has been tweaked a bit
NPCs now have skill levels that can affect their targeting and fighting ability
Bioships have had their skills and modifiers slightly reworked to be better balanced
Light, medium-heavy and ultraheavy ship now have two core hull/systems/engine slots, one main and one secondary
Effects of heavier cores can be obtained by stacking smaller ones
Engines have been reworked to be more coherent and consistent
Tricon engines have much higher acceleration to max speed ratio
Melendez engines have higher speed, but low acceleration and turn
More consistency across lines
Gauntlet intrinsics are stronger and now mutually exclusive
Intrinsics from a certain trader are now stronger
Ships now disabled below a certain armour threshold regardless of stress
AI is less susceptible to stealth bomber cheese
Point defence now shoots at all ships prioritizing smaller ones after missiles
Cargo delivery missions have increased cargo amounts
Minimum stealth range also affects detection and signature
Ships can have a minimum cargo-less mass of 50% of the ship base mass
Damage over time effects now can cause faction loss and other effects
New harder difficulty
Gauntlet negative bonuses are now multiplicative
Stealthing will temporarily jam locked on munitions
Changed forward weapon aiming algorithm for the player so it is easier to shoot small ships with skill
Reflective shell now shoots thorns
Quality of Life
Plugin manager built directly into Naev
Access to the online plugin repository
Can easily add or remove plugins from local or online sources
Autonav improvements
Can automatically land when following a ship
Improved autonav behaviour when losing a followed ship
Disables afterburner when getting ready to land or jump
Shooting non-point defence weapons resets autonav speed up
Combat and ambient music tries to play from where it was last stopped when applicable
Gave small untargetable time to player when using hypergates and wormholes
Ships that are scanning you use a different colour hilight
Landable but uninhabited space objects use a different icon
Deployed fighter equipment is no longer random
Added support for multiple automatic backups with 5 by default
Game will prompt if exiting the game when save data loss can occur
Escort mission revamp
Escorts now follow the player
Autonav will warn the player if jumping or landing will fail the mission
Autonav will wait for escorts when landing or taking off
Radar now has a linear area and a logarithmic area (outside the circle) to show more regional information
Support for automatically restarting Naev when changing options that require it
Contents
28 new missions and events
Go treasure hunting
27 new outfits and reworked cores
Outfit sets that gain bonuses as more elements of the set are equipped
11 new ship variants
New sensor anomalies
Two new intertwined minor houses of the Empire with new systems and lore
More space objects with new things to explore
New portraits
Over 20 new songs
More variation in landing and situational music
Significant changes in jumps (hidden and otherwise)
Reworked the visuals for some weapons using shaders
Start to more strictly enforce Oxford spelling
Racing reward system reworked
Reworked escort missions so that escorts follow the player and improved how it interacts with autonav
Engine
Began porting to Rust
Engine now uses SDL3 instead of SDL2
Camera is isometric-ish instead of using top-view game play (can be modified by plugins)
Engine supports modifying some important constants such as those related to the physics model for use in plugins
Use instancing instead of geometry shaders for space dust
Ship Lua scripting supports “onshootany” now
Support for price_mod on tech group commodities
Mission and Event NPC’s priority default to the priority of the parent
Local maps can have a range parameter now
Intrinsic outfits for ships are defined in instead of now
Systems can have waypoints that are accessible from missions
Fixed some flickering at the end of ship trails
Diff mode in the editor remembers filenames and diff names
Slots can have tags
Outfits can fit an additional slot property
Support for hiding dynamic ship stats from outfits in the equipment support
Outfits support inline Lua definitions
Can override long class names of spobs
Changed how ship statistics are computed: those from same source will be additive, while different sources will be multiplicative
New ship stats and changes
Weapon speed with variants for cannons and turrets
Minimum Stealth Range
Absolute Mass
Absolute CPU
Temporary Invincibility
Detection Range only affects ‘Detected at:’ range
Ship Visibility that affects detection, signature, and stealth ranges
Intro text is no longer hardcoded and is handled via Lua
SVG image support
WGSL shader support
trigger library to handle commonly mission code
Game will automatically try to detect extensions for image files
Fixes
The Bite turns off afterburners
Hiding on screen display information for missions also hides system markers
Sensor anomalies now appear in the on-screen display
Fixed texture interpolation when alpha is 0 for pixels
Fixed adding commodities to space objects via tech groups
Engine glow decay is less ridiculous on ships with really weird acceleration / speed ratios
Only try to load missions and events with file names that end in .lua
Action speed can no longer be negative and disables space worthiness
Don’t show OSD frame when not visible
Can’t stack Sirius ferry pilgrim missions anymore
Add marker mission to help the player find wild space
Bioships will reset their locked slots when swapping ship and loading
jump_delay was being applied instead of jump_warmup to the engine warm up animation
Mass modifiers now affect outfit mass too
Ships will no longer appear tilted in the equipment view
dv_antiflf02: Make the vigilances less pathetic
Gauntlet properly resets outfit cooldowns
Saves try to save outfits by slot name to be more robust to changes in the future
Player can’t stealth while disabled
Getting disabled turns off stealth
Carried fighters don’t carry commodities
darkshadow: enemies shouldn’t see through stealth
Cryogenic Nanobots no longer restore health to 100% on completing cooldown regardless of damage taken
Improved AI braking skills
Game will not save in certain cases like loading the game and immediately being forced to take off by a load hook
Improved handling of fullscreen toggling and resolution changes
Faction ships no longer show up as “Unknown” when you first discover a faction
Space mines in restricted systems have infinite duration
Made Love framework ignore events that were queued before opening
Lowered reputation gains from aiding hypergate construction sites
Use higher resolution icon
Lots of spelling and grammar fixes
Translation updates