New cosmetic items are now available in Natural Selection 2! Tundra adds ice-cold Shotgun, Rifle, Exosuit, and marine armor paint jobs to the battlefield. These items are available now in the brand new Natural Selection 2 item store.

The new Natural Selection 2 Item Store

Those of you with keen eyes might have noticed something different about these items. Unlike previous cosmetic items, which were Steam Store DLC packs, these items are available individually as part of the Steam Economy. Much like items in Rust. This means you can choose to buy only the pieces of the Tundra pack you really want. You can also sell and trade the items.

In fact, you can trade a whole lot more than just Tundra items. Skyler (Remi) has been doing some serious tinkering under Natural Selection 2's hood. He has performed major upgrades to the way NS2 interfaces with Steam, opening up a wide array of new functionality. All the items you've purchased in NS2 are now tradeable. Reaper pack, Kodiak pack, Reinforcement Program - They are now all available in your Steam Inventory. Don't want an item anymore? You can sell it. Missed out on an item that's no longer on sale, and really want it? You might be able to buy it from another player in the marketplace. An example Steam inventory containing an array of new and old NS2 items

All this new functionality has great potential for Natural Selection 2's future. Instead of just making and shoveling out packs of cosmetic garbage, the NS2 development team can take signals from the Steam Economy, and work on things people actually really want. We could potentially work together with community creators to put sweet new customization options into NS2. Specific actions - Such as helping new players, or winning a particular NSL tournament, could result in the award of dedicated items.

Tundra Marine Armor

To fill up your Steam Inventory, run NS2 and then select 'Player Customization' from the main menu. NS2 will talk to Steam for a little bit, and then all your items will appear in your Steam Inventory. If you buy a Tundra Bundle from the Item Store, do the same thing and select 'unpack bundle' to unpack all the Tundra items into your Inventory.

We've tinkered with NS2's guts with this update. There's a good chance we've broken something or other. There may be bugs in our Steam Economy implementation, and crazy stuff might happen. If it does, please let us know and we'll get cracking on finding solutions. Rest assured that all DLC and item purchases are tracked by rock-solid transaction databases - If we've broken something, you will not lose your items. We are looking forward to hearing your feedback about all this. This is a big experiment, and the NS2 dev team is not 100% sure about how we will use all this new functionality. Do you have ideas for items, inventories, and economies? Could veteran players be identified with special items? Might new players receive items for completing tutorials and other training? Should Black Armor be tradeable (!) ? Let us know what you think in the comments below. CHANGELOG Tweaks / Improvements

• Added a bar on the main menu to show your progress to the next hive level
• Added all new Tundra items (Armor, Exosuit, Shotgun, Rifle, and Shoulder Patch)
• Changed all previous customization variants to be items instead of DLC (except Black Armor)
• Added ability to open the Tundra Bundle from within the customize menu
• Added simple event recording system, so we can track things like tutorial completion rates and if new players are viewing the tip videos

Fixes

• Fixed case where rifle could have the wrong texture
• Fixed not being able to see skins of other players while spectating in first person
• Commander dropped equipment will be of the commander's selected variant
• Fixed animation issue with Rifles which may have caused issues with its animation graph (might fix gun jams, please report!)
• Tweaked numbers again to try to fix redplug issues when a client alt+tabs (introduced in build 283)
  • Increased snapshot history on servers to 3 seconds instead of 2
  • Changed time until throttling of alt+tabbed clients to 2.8 seconds instead of 1 second
• Fixed inconsistencies in the consistency checker causing consistency checks to sometimes fail

ns2_derelict

• Added some new vents  from Garage to Alley and Offices to help give aliens more flank routes
• Added some objects to block sight lines in Alley, to prevent window sniping
• Added some objects to block sight lines in Turbines
• Added new vent from Botany to Plaza/Bridge