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Hello everyone - we're now into March, so here's our regular update on what we got done during February! Milestone 5 Progress: As always, our focus has been on getting Milestone 5 ready for public release. I said in the last update that we're hoping to do this in March and we're still on track for that, although the exact date depends on how smoothly the bugfixes go over the next few weeks - we're expecting mid-March if all goes smoothly, and late March if we run into issues. In coding terms, a lot of this month was spent ironing out gameplay / stability issues and tidying up some loose ends regarding new features added in Milestone 5, so although our programmers have done a lot of work there's not much in the way of exciting new headline additions for me to talk about here. However, we did find a few days to improve the shooting path calculations in the tactical combat so the permitted fire paths better match what the player would expect, particularly around doorways and corners, as community feedback suggested this area needed more polish (turns out the system had a couple of subtle bugs that needed fixing). Writing & Art: Last month was a big month on the writing front - the writing in the game is now largely complete. This means that all research projects now have research text, the phase briefings have been revised, more tactical missions have introductory character conversations, and there should be a more consistent narrative thread running throughout the whole game. Hopefully it's now much clearer why all the factions in the game are acting the way they are. Finishing this allowed us to send all the new game text off for translation, and we should have localised text in Milestone 5 in the next week or two (which was one of the main barriers to the public release). We've added some new illustrations to the game over the past month, most of which are just adding flavour art to the new UI popups related to the new Geoscape mechanics in Milestone 5. In our recent 5.13 Experimental update we also added unique illustrations for three of the five strategic operations (which should make it easier to tell them apart) and we're expecting to have the remaining two done shortly. Community Suggestion Review: Once Milestone 5 is done we'll be starting work on Milestone 6, which should be our final major update before then 1.0 launch. Alongside the last remaining features on our roadmap (Air Combat Revamp, Ending Cinematic, Soviet Town Biome, Mod Tools) we've been reading through the many, many community suggestions that have been posted on Steam, our Discord and our forums during the Early Access period. We're now reviewing all these suggestions as a team and looking at which ones we can include in Milestone 6. Although we can't add every suggestion to the game, there's a lot of good ideas here and we want to thank everyone who has given us feedback and suggestions during development - we may not always have responded immediately, but we did read them all eventually! That's everything for this update - thanks for reading, and hopefully we'll have a big announcement in the next few weeks about the public release of Milestone 5!

I tried changing the signup question a few days ago but it didn't help. I've actually just turned off new registrations entirely for a bit. The problem with having new posts require verification is that so many bots are spamming the forum that posts from anyone who isn't a bot would be completely lost and I'd have hundreds of spam posts to sort through each day. I'll re-enable registrations some time next week. Maybe the spam campaign would have stopped by then. If not, we'll have to think again.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! This is the first "release candidate" build for Milestone 5, and if we don't encounter any major issues then we'll release it to the standard branches next week as the Milestone 5 STABLE version. Please do report any bugs you encounter so we can make an informed decision about stability! Gameplay Changes: The strategy layer should now be properly deterministic, so if you load a save and choose not to reset the game seed then events should play out the same way every time. This may prove useful for tracking down some of the more elusive strategy bugs! Cursor snapping to the top of objects (cliffs, shipping containers, etc) has been disabled. In a future update we'll enable it for cliffs only, as it worked great on cliffs but not so well with the shipping containers. Outer walls of alien bases are now indestructible again, as we ran into quite significant problems trying to add the earth tiles to the upper levels of the alien base maps. Units now suffer 25% max HP damage, and 10% max HP in Stun Damage for each level they fall after the floor beneath them is destroyed. Minor adjustments to the invasion to make retaliation / resupply / construction / terror UFOs a bit stronger. There should also be fewer Destroyers once Observers and Abductors start spawning. Added artwork for the UOO-1 Sabotage and UOO-1 Bridge Assault research projects. Further translation updates. Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that would occur after a Xenonaut base is destroyed if there was an aircraft present that was repairing itself. Fixed a crash in the soldier inventory screen if the user was playing in Polish and activated a particular tooltip. Fixed a number of connected line of sight issues - e.g. shroud not revealing correctly, doors sometimes disappearing entirely when opened, soldiers stopping movement even when not revealing an enemy, etc. Fixed a bug where newly built bases would incorrectly start with only 1 of certain infinite quantity items (advanced aircraft missiles, advanced aircraft armour, etc). Fixed the Doomsday Counter tooltip showing incorrect values for the number of active supporters. Fixed open barn doors not correctly blocking vision etc. Fixed an issue with Mind Control that meant Psyons were using it less frequently than they should have. Fixed the outer walls of the UOO Bridge Assault mission being destructible. Fixed some shipping containers not displaying the units stood on top of them when the camera was at ground level. Fixed the Geoscape map not wrapping correctly on rightward movement. The War Machine achievement now correctly reads "Equip a soldier with Vanguard armour" for all translated languages.

Yeah, but remember Xenonauts 2 already isn't a game you can complete in a couple of hours. If you're assuming that each mission takes only 15 mins (which is a bit of stretch once you get past the early missions) then that's still 8.75 hours for a campaign spent just on the tactical map. Realistically each campaign is an absolute minimum of 10 hours, and for a lot of people it's in the 15-20 hour region. It's already a long game, even if you win your first campaign - much longer than the first game was. However once the mod tools are out I can almost guarantee someone will immediately make a longer and expanded version of the campaign and everyone will be happy. The type of people who like Long War are a pretty small subset of the people who buy these types of games, but they're hugely overrepresented in terms of the active community and people who are interested in making mods!

Just so everyone is clear - the plans for the air combat are not massive gameplay changes. It's bringing in the new UI and the tutorial, which will keep the same basic mechanics but will make everything look much more polished. There's going to be a few smaller changes to the mechanics but they're minor ones. We're obviously not going to cut out the air combat. It's connected to loads of other parts of the game; it'd probably be more work to remove it than to finish it.

Then don't penalize for non rescued civilians. Like I said, set X amount of civilians that qualify for success. Like in XCOM you clearly did not need to rescue everyone and you weren't penalized for deaths unless there were too many casualties. . In X-COM you also didn't need to rescue everyone, heck you'de be happy to save anyone, all it mattered was being positive on the score. Ah typical. Save scummer talks about balance. You obviously missed the point of what I was trying to say.

After battle table need to use distinct colours 1. Survived use same colour as Wounded Status Survived must be clear different to anything else. Those are the dead but revived. Those have to shine above all. FIX : For sake of consistency, Use similar scale (shades) of red colour as you use for wounded soldiers in Armoury screen. It means, injured soldiers are light pink, wounded orange, survived red 2. On top, the gray hatching pattern as background of health status makes information UNREADABLE ! I dont understand your graphic language, it looks to me that someone has an idea, then push it everywhere no matter what. You also ue same Gray hatching pattern in armoury as background for items makes all items loose details, looks horrible. You also use this toxic pattern as background for button like crouch(tactical panel), which is the exact opposite of visual standard. I mean, standard since Xerox invented GUI in about 1980 says : If it is gray, with low contrast it means "not readable = not active". Your GUI designer is truly revolutionary. He said, fuck it - I make the revolution - gray and low contrast means active now. OMG. FIX: Would you be so kind, make your game READABLE, remove all those gray hatching background from active buttons AND info panels AND item background? Thank you a lot.

No, they won't. Although we'll keep Milestone 5 available on the legacy branches so you could finish a Milestone 5 campaign if you wanted to.

Since the forum is overrun by bots, i thought it would be a good idea to increase the security checks to have new users posts being verified by staff before being shown to other people. This includes X1 and X2 threads.

The joys of being old as dirt is getting to see all the things you love crumble to dust...nobody makes games with love anymore, it's all about the cash grab. (I am by NO MEANS pointing that at GHI, btw)

When research is completed, you get the prompt to start new research, so you into research and select something else, and only when you come back to the geoscape do you get the report for the thing you just finished researching. That's backwards. When the research is done, the first thing that should pop up is the report, then prompt you to research something else. It's been the same in all the v5.x builds I've tried, I assumed it would be fixed but apparently not.

Units on higher floor are invisible if camera is not set on that level. I'm pretty sure this has been a "forever issue", but reported it just in case. This issue is tied to a larger issue with how roofs and other vision blocking elements currently work. I've discussed this earlier with @Chris via Discord and he then commented it's a work in progress and that my explanations about the issues and possible solutions for it were a "fair point" and that "he'd need to think about it". I also posted a suggestion regarding this in the Discord suggestions: https://discord.com/channels/702822278148390983/1347171088056062023

This should be a priority fix. Cursor changing elevation automatically (for example around shipping containers) causes wrong commands and is highly annoying.

Building roofs shouldn't be removed if any tile is revealed inside as it's currently implemented. I would suggest auto-removing the roof only if: visible enemy is inside the building my own units are inside the building mouse cursor is inside the building toggle roof button is disabled Also, stacked shipping containers should be all visible all the time unless: visible enemy is behind them my own units are behind them mouse cursor is behind them toggle roof button is disabled This would be the default behaviour. The system proposed here is logical in a sense that, as long as roofs are toggled on (default mode) the roofs are all on and you'll see a realistic "birds eye view" of the battlefield unless there's something critical to see that is inside a building. It's also visually more pleasing to see full buildings than a huge black area just because one of your units sees a square meter of emplty floor from a window. Also, regarding the container part: this will remove the issue where you either can't see the enemy on top of the container or the enemy floats in the air as the container is not seen, which both are sub-optimal. All height levels and all roofs/containers etc. should be visible if roofs are toggled on (default). One can always hover with cursor or use the roof toggle button if you need to see / plan something, while critical stuff like units and enemies auto-remove roofs. Simple and logical. And the same logic should be applied to dropships and UFOs too. If there's nothing important to see inside, why not show your beautiful hull graphics instead? ...and you can always remove the roof with mouse hover or roof toggle button if you need to see inside. I'm pretty sure this is how things worked in X1 too... or at least in it's CE version. And to further justify the mouse hover, it's a quite established mechanic to remove roofs and other FOV blocking elements in other games too like Diablo, Fallout, Baldur's Gate etc., so I'm confident it's gonna work perfectly like this.

5.16 Introducing doomsday from day 0 right after you place your first base feels wrong. It's fine to give some high level lore about it at that point, but especially when there's no gameplay mechanics involved yet (it just stays at 0), it's just confusing and serves no point. Doomsday progress bar and more detailed information regarding it should be introduced at the same time with infiltrators at day 5. Phase intro texts are unskippable. I think it would also be better for the phase intro text to appear all at once and not slowly like the dialogues. Supporter info should mention about it being an infiltrator and show the negative effects it has and not the buffs it would normally grant. Check the quick mockup below. Camera is still force tracking my moving units!! Is it intended that the doomsday daily change can go negative? For some reason I find this image below quite hilarious: I just never thought Alenium was these huge crystal formations, but rather some sophisticated microscopic substance that can be extracted from alien tech. If 26pc of Alenium looks like that, I find it odd that we never see these comically huge yellow crystals in any UFOs or alien bases...

Typo. It was 150 before, not 100.

You need to un-select the auto-selected planes if you want to send out a squadron from a different base. It's somewhat unintuitive.

Thanks for the report! Yeah, there's currently a bug on mind control on 5.15, we're working on getting it fixed

Injured soldiers are supposed to show white if healthy, pink if slightly hurt and red if badly hurt. It used to in v4, but in v5 it seems randomly inconsistent. See attached screenshot -- one soldier with 15% health is appropriately red, but another with 10% health is white. In another case 63% and 86% are pink but 76% is white.

Not everything that isn't visually perfect is AI art. Lots of artists work with photobashing, where they grab photo references and paint over them. If they're pulling together multiple photos then the vanishing points often don't match (and even the best artists often get the vanishing point wrong anyway, as they're only human). In the second image the dubious vanishing point is forced by the UI. There's a few suspicious things with the first image that I'll speak to the artist about, although I'm not necessarily convinced AI is responsible. I doubt either of the other two have any AI in them from what I've seen of the WIP versions.

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! Changes: Fixed a crash that would occur accessing the Soldier Equip / Base Stores / Aircraft Equip screen after you'd completed a Corpse Analysis engineering project that marked the corpses as "Junk". Unfortunately, we can't fix corrupted saves here - you'll need to revert to a previous save from before you completed the Corpse Analysis project. Fixed an issue where Biters could spawn on the other side of walls from the impact point. Fixed the Aerial Warfare project not giving a "project available" popup when it is unlocked. Fixed the Pegasus doors misbehaving. Fixed the colour-coding for wounded / injured soldiers in the bottom left soldier list on the Soldier Equip screen, as it was getting out of sync in some situations. Fixed the Rush Replace aircraft button having unreadable black text rather than white. Updated the styling of the Doomsday counter tooltip to make it a bit more readable. Added artwork for the Andron Praetorian corpse.

We're working towards getting this patched out, should be fixed on the next hotfix! And, thanks, it's always good to hear people enjoy the game!

With no description at all of what problem(s) you encountered? Are all these reports for the same problem? This makes it very hard for the developers to know what you're reporting. Please provide a description of what the problem is. If there are different bugs, please create different bug report threads with a useful description and only the relevant zip file attached.

Hi, I am getting the same problem - bug report attached. BTW, many thanks for the ongoing work, the game is really coming together nicely! bug_report_2025-03-06-16h20_st_5.14.0_unhandled_exception_0.zip

Thanks for the bug reports! We're working towards getting the armory crash fixed asap!

Thanks for the bug report. We'll take a look and see what's causing it to crash

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain! Gameplay Changes: Added unique art for the first two strategic operations (Raise Funds, Reduce Tensions). We've made a number of fixes / updates to the shooting mechanics, which should hopefully reduce instances where shot paths seem to pass through solid walls or at unrealistic angles through doors or around corners etc. Open doors now act as physical objects that block movement, vision and shooting. Units pathing through an open door (not an open doorway) will automatically close it so they have a clear move path. Weapons now have a minimum fire range in the air combat, which compensates for the fact that weapons actually fire from the center point of all aircraft / UFOs. This shouldn't have much of an effect on Xenonaut interceptors (basically their weapons can no longer attack if the target is past the nose of the interceptor), but it should make a big difference against large UFOs with powerful frontal weapon - previously these would fire as soon as an interceptor flew across the centerpoint of the UFO (usually because the interceptor overshot when approaching from behind), dealing massive instant damage that was impossible to evade. Completing the Corpse Analysis engineering projects will now mark the appropriate corpses as "junk" on the Base Stores screen. The Panic bar is not shown on the Geoscape region info pop-up in Phase 1 any more. It appears in Phase 2 when the Panic mechanic is introduced. The Capture Resources / Eliminate VIP mission briefings now correctly refer to bonus Operations Points, rather than Doomsday decreases. The Cleaner Leader on the Eliminate VIP mission now grants 30 Operations Points if stunned and captured alive. Cyberdrones should actually now be unable to perform reaction fire. Alien Magnetic LMG now has a 3d model that matches the 2D art. Bugfixes: Fixed a crash that could occur after killing an alien unit that mind controlled your soldier. Fixed a crash that could occur after the UOO-1 Sabotage mission. Fixed a rare crash that could occur if an offscreen bullet hit a target while the camera was still trying to pan to track it. Fixed a bug where strategic operations could get stuck in the cooldown state. Fixed a bug where AI units would go into "combat mode" on sighting a dead enemy unit. We think fixing this may help address the alien units in terror missions being incredibly aggressive, as those maps contain lots of civilians and even a dead civilian would trigger the alien to think it was in active combat. Fixed a bug where certain aliens (e.g. Psyons, Reapers) had issues climbing ladders, sometimes ending up hovering in the air or stuck inside walls. Fixed the wage expense for scientists / engineers being incorrect on the Hire Scientists / Engineers screen after having unlocked the appropriate region bonuses. Fixed the Phase 4 timer ("UOO-1 Completion") being set to finish at the wrong point. Fixed some non-functional teleporters in one of the Cruiser UFO map variants. Fixed one of the Battleship UFO map variants having missing internal walls in one section of the Battleship. Another attempt at fixing the issue where enemy units are revealed when you move a unit in the deployment phase before the Cleaner Base mission. Fixed the "release captured civilians [x/10]" objective always being ticked in an Abduction mission, rather than only becoming ticked when you'd opened all the tubes. Fixed Cleaner reinforcements getting stuck in one of the boreal VIP extraction map. Fixed a number of visual issues with the white walls in the UOO-1 Bridge assault mission. Fixed the alien grenades and MARS Smoke Launcher having projectiles that did not match their art.

Before you add morre gases, Gas mask should get an overhaul towards SITUATIONAL defensive counter measure. Otheerwise, Current mask is just a weight in the inventory. No gameplay, you either sacrifice the weight or not, that is all. If you add more gases, include enviromental (rooms) then gas mask turns into a mandatory weight in backpack. No gameplay. Proposal : Mask is ON-OFF equipment controlled by an icon in the grenade area. Soldier could have a mask in the inventory then take it on - off baseed on situation. Mask ON gives bonus - safe against gas, reduce radioactive dmg from burning UFO engine, Mask ON give penalty - reduced sight range -2 tiles, reduced accuracy 1% per tile, reduced Reaction stat by 10% These are quite severe penalty, so player have to balance, what is less harmful. Set mask on or offf ? Decision is SITUATIONAL. Set mask on / off costs 20% TU

Thanks. Looks like you've not managed to shoot down a Harvester yet? You need the Ultradense Alloys from that or the Battleship for the Vanguard.

Thanks for the report! We'll look into it and see what's going on

That is the exact moment which triggered me ! I checked the game credits, there is a 4 programmers and about 10 artists. Half of them are Chinese (asians) perhaps those artist have the same problem as I do. I cant recognize asian or afircan people from each other. Perhaps this picture was made an asian artist who tried to draw "a_white_woman" This picture have to be fixed.

ah bullshitter backpeddles because they know they HAVE no point.

I belive that Xenonauts should be grim. Player should be as underdog most of the campaign, and sort of get beating. Main improvement for abduction should be an after-mission art of an civilian mounted into alien probing table, while art is fading into dark human scream sound is played. Anyway, proposal for turn extension for released tube sounds interesting, but 10 tubes means 10 rounds, it is too much. 1 round for 4 tubes sounds reasonable. Setting of this mission should not allow usually save all. I agree that mission effcts on briefing are confusing, but have no idea how to fix it.