Calling all rookies and veterans! Further your knowledge of Natural Selection and gain a sense of accomplishment and camaraderie by joining the newcomer draft tournament! New to competitive? Play on a team, get coached, make risky plays! Veteran player? Profess your love for smashing in your opponent’s teeth by teaching players how to ‘git gud.’

The NSL is hosting a brand new Newcomer’s Draft tournament! Read more about it by clicking the link. This is a great opportunity for new players and veterans alike to come together and share knowledge, come up with sneaky gorge tunnel strats, exo rush your way to victory, but most importantly have fun! The tournament begins on June 18th at 12pm EST/ 6pm …

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 …

Greetings!

Squad 5 badges are handed out by the Natural Selection 2 community and us developers to show our  eternal gratitude to those who helped growing NS2 and its community.

Anybody who makes a sustained, positive, and reasonable effort to support NS2 and / or the vibrancy of its community may be awarded with a blue icon.

Silver and Gold are 'big deals' and are only awarded extremely sparingly for outstanding efforts.

Thank you all for your contributions even if you haven’t made it into Squad 5 yet, and thank you to those who took the time to nominate them.

Note that the only way a community member can be considered for Squad 5 is if YOU nominate them here…

“THIS IS ALTERRA!” First off, how amazing is it that we are at Update 300? The blood sweat and tears that have been poured into this game by so many people over the last few years is nothing short of awesome. Now we look forward to what’s to come.

This update sees us making continued improvements to the server browser and an additional notification for news or updates on first open. After playing many games, reading and discussing feedback with players we’ve made some additional tweaks to newly introduced abilities and weapons. Aliens now have a new ability in Focus, so play around and see what you think. Also on the map front Derelict has seen some performance improvements, thanks …

Aliens didn’t get all the love, though. Marines have also received some new toys and changes to their existing tech. A preliminary version of the Heavy Machine Gun (HMG) has been added. This is a gun that was loved in NS1 and one which many of us have always wanted to see make a return in NS2. The HMG was pioneered successfully in Comp Mod, and now it has made its way into the main game.

We’ve also heard your cries and beacons, and recognize that Contamination tended to be very frustrating for Marines. We’ve made some changes to how it works to give Marine players more time to react to it. It will now do its damage over time …

After the response and tracking of a lot of the changes we introduced last week we decided to continue with another update of shakeups. There are some minor adjustments to a few items from the patch after more feedback. Also new this week is a revamped server browser! We have been hard at work to create a better way to filter and sort the list and even provide more information to the user before choosing what server to connect too. Our week to week experiments and changes have been very interesting to watch and see what works and what doesn’t and we aren’t done just yet! Over the next couple weeks there are plans for some additional UI changes, maybe …

The room was eerily silent, even the normal white noise of the industrial facility seemed to vanish. I proceeded forward as ordered but something felt uneasy and I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck begin to stand up. I continue to tell myself that I am a trained soldier and that I’ve encountered enough alien scum that nothing should surprise me, but still the unease raced across my body and the fear set in even more than before.

Suddenly I hear an all too familiar sound, one that can only be described as vacuumous vortex that death so quickly follows. I stand at the ready, shotgun in hand as I prepare for the Fade that I …

Fellow Chompers and Frontiersmen,

Today we introduce a new (small) gameplay change! One of our goals is to ‘shake up’ certain elements of gameplay- be it long standing balance issues, tech that has become obsolete, or barriers that cause excessive hardship to newer players. In update 294, we’re making what will be hopefully the first of several new gameplay tweaks.

We’re changing medpacks from 50 instant healing to 25 instant healing and 25 healing-over-time (the course of one second). Medpacks will still cost 1 res. What’s the point of splitting the healing like this, you ask?

The target of this change is excessive combat med spam. Currently it’s fairly common to med spam marines through engagements and one of the …

In our newest release we take a look back or should I say forward at marine Exo Suit. Our approach with this update was to improve the quality of life use for the Exo and the players interactions with using it. So suit up and join the fight against the alien scum and we’ll see you on the other side!

UPDATE NOTES

Tweaks / Improvements

• Exosuits have had a Quality of Life pass
  • While deploying, your view is no longer locked and you are frozen for less time to better match the animations
  • You can eject instantly, and it will throw you more in the direction you are looking. You can even use it to get to some vents!
  • Subnautica