The latest patch for the Natural Selection 2 Beta is now available on Steam.

We spent a good portion of this week investigating the causes of performance slowdowns on the server. We found two major problems; one of them we were able to address this week so you should see smoother games with larger numbers of players. We still have more work to do though, and the other problem we'll be working on for next week's patch. You can always keep up to date with what we're working on with our real-time progress tracker.

Build 159 changelog

• Fixed footstep sounds and ricochet effects not playing properly because the material was unknown
• Improved client and server performance
• Added hot-loading support for Lua scripts
• Fixed gorge heal spray (actually effective now)
• Slowed resource production a lot to come closer to NS1 (estimating that NS1 teams spent ~50% of resources on weapons and health/ammo)
• Drifters now auto-heal
• Crags auto-heal drifters
• Hives start with 3 eggs, Masses 5 and Colonies 7
• Added hive mist effects
• Spawned structures should start at 0% built and end when 100% built
• Added whip attack sound
• New rifle sounds
• New alien commander sprites

Thanks to everyone that send us e-mail about being a part of our internal playtest group. We're currently in the process of selecting people and granting them access to our testing resources. More people applied than we have space for, so unfortunately we won't be able to use everyone at this time. However, we'll keep all of the names handy in-case we need more testers.