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
      • The cooldown time of Boneshield now depends on how long it was used
      • You can now trigger Boneshield again after a misclick, and not have it instantly go on full cooldown
      • Boneshield now cost only 20 energy (instead of 40)
      • Boneshield restores 112.5 armor per second
      • The maximum cool down is 12.5 seconds
      • Bone shield only blocks 50% of damage (from the front)
  • 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.