Build 160 of the Natural Selection 2 Beta is now available on Steam. If you've pre-ordered the game, it will automatically download on Steam. If not, now is a great time to pre-order because we're having a two-for-one holiday special!

NS2 Build 160

• Fixed egg spawning so that players don't spawn in walls
• Fixed HUD damage indicators so that they point in the correct direction
• Fixed problem with IP not starting as built on map reset
• Fixed bug where the commander UI being on the screen after logging out/game ending
• Fixed players being blinded when they were hit by the flamethrower
• Fixed bug where the player would fire immediately after closing the armory buy menu
• Fixed bug where an armory would become unusable
• Fixed bug where you didn't start with the correct weapon on spawn
• Fixed problem with weapons being deleted after a time
• Fixed bug where players could use structures on the other team
• Fixed bug where pre-placed IPs weren't present after being destroyed and then the map reset
• Fixed bugs where tooltips were played at weird times
• Improved the blood and flamethrower effects
• Added more variations for environment steam and water drip effects
• Added afterburner jets for MAC
• Improved the usability of the commander minimap
• Added research complete alerts on the minimap
• Added scene pre-processing to the loading process to reduce hitches when moving throughout the world
• Removed the jetpack from the UI until it's released
• Added pre-game where players are frozen during countdown
• Added the ability to tweak the sorting of nearby emitters with a "sort order" property

Balance Changes

• Reduced Fade armor from 150 to 100
• Reduced backward speed for marines (now 40% of max movement speed, like NS1)
• Reworked marine weapon firing to be much tighter and (in theory) exactly like NS1
• Made weapon switching much more responsive
• Sentries now take 1/3 of the time to spin up
• Players get points for building structures

We were hoping to have the ability to update NS2 with the HLDSUpdateTool in this patch, but unfortunately the timing didn't work. Valve has generously helped us get everything set up, but by the time we had everything ready on our end, our support person at Valve was on vacation. So we'll have that for you when he's back in the office and we do our next update.

Finally NaturalSelection2HD has been putting out loads of interesting NS2 videos. For those that don't know, NS2HD is a member of our community that's been making awesome videos of NS2 since our first release of the "engine test". We loved what he was doing, so we've given him "inside" access to our builds and chat room (and he was a big help in making our gameplay trailer). Here's his latest video of one of our internal playtests of Build 160.