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Hey, Luke here.
Got an update regarding the unstable branch. Which you can access via:
Over the last two months we've been working on a heavy overhaul of ships movement. You know how sometimes your Tollies will charge right at a hostile battleship, then as it starts to retreat they get a little timid and scared about chasing after? Every seen a drone kind of just not get in range of a target that's fleeing? Or just rocket out into a weird orbit that doesn't help it? Ever seen a Partell just refuse to continue along this mortal coil and freezer perfectly in place?
Well that's a rather large and annoying issue, and it's been my job to handle movement code for the last eternity of years that we've been working on this game. So let me tell you it's not a trivial problem. There are a lot of unique units in this game that all want to do different things with the same movement code.
I breathed a sigh of spancial relief when I finally saw a Sparrow drone perfectly chase and orbit a fleeting target. When I watched an Otorell bear-charge a Harrier and blast it to pieces. When I giggled with glee as Tollies chased and absolutely bullied a set of retreating Cormorants. Something they had always been able to do, but never actually done correctly.
And not only that, but I've given Missiles and rammers a bit of cheaty movement. Missiles can now opt into using "fin force" (I'm sure there's enough dust in the spance) which lets them redirect their velocity towards their target to help them hit rapidly moving and dodging ships (as well as missiles).
Tractors now have a dedicated TRACTOR weapon that intelligently modulates it's pull/push force to keep a target at it's new holdDistance. As well as being smart enough to stop pulling, and not throw themselves into harms way as much.
Tractor ships were meant to be the active and direct counter to long ranged standoff/buildup units such as the various carriers and artillery ships (Cormorant, Noledar, Ospres, Katalosteer) but the application of their pull force was always really dumb and brutish. They just pulled at full force until the thing was within a given range. This just ended up flinging ships into themselves, and making harder targets for their allies to hit. Also our tractors obey Neuton's 3rd law (per Owl's demands) so they also just end up pulling themselves into harms way. The new ones are smarter, have the ability to pull less or even push, and don't throw themselves into the enemy firing line as much.
Thanks to Platform Wars, our community hosted skirmish-AI tournament, we've been able to identify some overperforming units and some underperforming ones.
The Vaalkorei have seen their Mediums' build times increased. The heavy Rook made faster to build. As well as many other weapon and unit stat tweaks.
The Kontaalen have seen their Heavies' build times increased for the Katalosteer and Grytes to 90s. Heat was reduced by 33% on the Lantra. While the Otorell gained 0.5 range (50m) and about 100 health. As well as many other weapon and unit stat tweaks.
OK that's it for now, I have to get back to work.
Cheers, Luke AP
Hey people, Luke here.
We're messing with some new movement system changes over on the new Unstable branch that are really experimental. But fix some very long-standing issues with how some of our ships approach, chase and track targets in respect to velocity and acceleration. Especially impactful on Drones and Lights. Sadly, this does have a lot of teething issues making the game somewhat unplayable while we get feedback and testing data on it. But that's the whole point of tester.
Since Default is now the actual stable version of the game, and tester is very unstable, we're going to go ahead and rename the Tester branch. This is going to kick everyone off it - and make sure no one is still on it thinking it's safe - but you can just opt back into the new Unstable branch if you want to help out and give feedback.
Cheers.
Luke AP
Luke here, I'm pushing out a general optimization and crash resolution patch for ATS.
We are still working to increase ATS's "heavy-load crash resistance".
Casual campaign gameplay should (I hope) no longer crash. Or at least take 8x longer to crash.
Gameplay under very heavy load (huge volumes of units) should take 8x longer to crash.
The game should run a bit faster also.
- Large amount of work across the project to reduce the generation of (this is technical) junk transitional archetypes during prefab>entity conversion, unit setup, damage application, health processing, hud operations, entity-entity messaging, and various other systems.
- Updated Unity to 6000.3.8f1
- ECS updated to 1.4.4, modded for 64MB allocator budget.
- New main menu scene. (sub_bg_mainMenu, for the level editors out there)
- Old main menu is now (sub_bg_greenGiant)
As mentioned in past posts, the recurrent crashes that people experience are mostly down to 3-year-old code and limitations in the Unity ECS systems. Aleks and I have hopefully improved the situation.
Hey people, Luke here.
Welcome to 0.91
A vast update.
Achievements: A whole set of interesting, challenging, and sometimes just odd challenges.
Modding, making your own ships, weapons, factions, putting them in your own custom maps.
Tychon is playable (but still incomplete) in Skirmish, with it's unique port-based building system.
Rewritten campaign missions for Kreydell, updated briefings, comms, remade maps, updated maps, rough but acceptable challenge versions of 12/15 missions (Relaxed/Trauma)
New Skirmish maps.
Heavily improved visuals for ship damage, explosions, general combat and scene visuals like map backgrounds, spance clouds, etc.
Updated Level Editor with new capabilities.
Crash fixes, bug fixes, performance improvements, etc.
Faction balance and adjustments to many many units.
Rewritten tactical tooltips for all the factions.
New mini-faction The Fryhart (made for Apocrypha which can now get back in development)
Improved UI presentation, settings, keybindings, and stuff.
Brendan and I have been awake for the last 4 days trying to squeeze the bow onto the campaign's large amount of text, for this enormous leviathan of an update, while Aleks tinkered on some new Kon Skirmish AIs and finishing some Tychon stuff. I am extremely exhausted, but very pleased to finally have this thing "good enough" for everyone. So please enjoy, and leave your feedback.
Did you know 61% of the playerbase is on Tester?
... People really want more ATS. It will come faster now.
Luke
Hey people, Luke here.
A real update to live. we have been aiming for the 14th, but we are lagging a bit behind (map reworks still being refined) so may need another week. But come hell or high water an update is going out in Jan.
By the 14th it will be the one-year anniversary of ATS's release. We've managed to actually make a living off this insane project of ours and have continued to dump thousands of manhours into improving a vast amount of stuff in ATS that we simply didn't have the time to deal with before release.
Huge enhancements to unit visuals, damage effects, weapons, unit behaviors, unit balance, visual niceties like rotating parts and pistons on buildings. Entirely new scene backgrounds with different spance-cloud tech. Overhaueld missions and plot-points, human-made-character-art.
An uncountable number of adjustments and improvements all across the board, an insane and ridiculous under-the-hood improvement from the now ancient Live version.
As noted previously, there are only three of us. On top of that at most two people are working on the project at any given time over the last year as availability permitted. And sadly, everything takes time to get done. There's no magic, and no amount of willpower can get labor done faster for the same cost.
The move from Unity ECS 0.51 to Unity ECS 1.14 was huge and required about 4 months of work to get back to where we were. I know a terrible waste in a sense, but it gave us not only performance improvements, less crashes, but entirely new lighting, physics, technical and graphical tools.
I had to rebuild the unit-builder pipeline in order to give use the power and flexibility to have dynamic hit boxes, and the new hull-blackening damage visual. It seems like a small think I know, but nothing is small in the land of performant code for thousands of units.
Hundreds of bugs and issues have been squashed. Also the great crashes are dead. It took us like 5 months, but the crashes are finally gone. Short of overloading the game with 30,000 units, it will hold together. In fact, I've seen it break apart at stupidly ridiculously high unit counts but not crash. Which isn't exactly great, but it's is amusing to me as a good enough win.
Letting people make their own factions and ships is really important for indie games, it helps ATS outlive my own ability to create stuff. So I spent a rather significant amount of time making a proper modloader for the game. People such as Bagel and Alophox (veteran ATS Testers) have already spent a rather large amount of time working on their own mod factions and helping me bug/stress-test the modloader. It's been a rather fun and exacerbating adventure. But it's critically important.
Also yes, mods can be put into custom maps. You could make your ATS if you wanted to!
We've finally found someone to make character art. Our AI placeholders have been accepted and loved by our community (at least the bulk of it), but they were never proper renderings of the characters as we wanted them. I know some people will ask to have the old ones back, and perhaps a legacy toggle of old-halts can be done at some point, but we have to move forward with man-made art. Not only for quality reasons, but for moral ones.
There are a number of missions and plot points that were left underdeveloped in the rush to get the game out by the 14th, after 4 years of work. So, I've had to spend most of 2025 just rewriting Kreydell, and rewriting, reviewing with Brendan, changing, overhauling, testing, and redesigning missions. This includes enhancing parts of Shallows' tutorials. Across the board there is new map-tech to help scripted events happen more reliably and improvements to the design of various scenes for visibility purposes.
We're human, and the game has roughly ~150 units including structures and such. It's very time demanding to adequately ensure everything is interacting in a fair and satisfying way. As such a lot of balance has happened over 2025, but that then requires testing and rebuilding campaign missions. Consequences had to see some updates as well as most missions in the game. Changing one unit can have rather significant knock-on effects that are only visible when you go and test it out. Tychon's continued development has had rather serious impacts on the missions they feature in.
My point is that we had a lot to do in one big go, there had not been a point yet were everything was good and stable. However, that is coming to a close. The game is working, things are polished, there are some requested settings and tweaks, new missions design that are quite fun. Clearer story progression... it should be good.
See in another week or two.
Luke AP
Hey People! Luke here.
I know it's been almost a year, but an actual update to the stable version of the game is coming!!! (ironic because tester version is more stable, though level balance is direly needed so the baseline experience for a new player is pretty bad)
With any luck, I'll finish my cleanup work on Shallows and Kreydell by October 10th, but no promises sadly I'm one guy working on Kreydell and there's a lot to get done. I'd love for this to have all been done months ago but it ain't so easy.
Since the last 8 months have been about overhauling the game's internals and adding a whole lot of new visual fidelity and stuff, there wouldn't be much to replay if you'd already beaten ATS. (there are overhauled levels but only 3) So......
While I'm updating all our levels across the entire game, what better time to get some achievements setup for people to have fun with.
We have 24 achievements some easy, some traumatic and some just weirder than others! Three of them aren't acquirable yet (Annihilate The Spance, Apocrypha, and White Tower), they are there as a little reminder that there's more to come.
A reminder that you can play the latest tester build of ATS by:
right-click on ATS > properties > Betas > Beta Participation > None > tester - unstable
Alright, back to work for me.
Cheers.
Hey people, Luke here.
A reminder that you can play the latest \ build of ATS by: right-click on ATS > properties > Betas > Beta Participation > None > tester - unstable
( Reminder that campaign balance is a mess due to past changes, and may crash due to bugs )
Alright let me catch you up on the last few months of work.
Yes, modding is here. You can make your own Faction and Units.
Though still buggy and incomplete, I've put together a rather approachable "character sheet" modding system for creating new units and factions with their own models, behaviours, stats and weapons. All without you needing to write any code at all! The (very incomplete) Example Glaves Mod on the Discord contains everything you need to start making a full faction. Modded factions can even be put into Custom Maps. Just remember that the player needs a copy of the mod in order to run it.
The mod example currently contains an example of a Light Ship, a Platform, and a Yard. Eventually it will contain a complete tutorial on how to make most things in the game. The only issue is I'm the one that has to put all this together, and I still have a ton of other work to get done that's more important. So sadly you'll have to fight with a very incomplete example mod. But at least it's a good starting point and there are plenty of people to talk to on the Discord if you want help.
Also editor bug: You can't give modded units to the player's loadout via the Editor > Config menu yet. But you can do it via map events. Sorry will get this fixed at some point.
Also you can play modded faction in Skirmish if you set a loadout for them in their faction file. Fun.
It's not done yet, but Brendan has been doing a lot of work to get a whole new mini-faction of opponents for us to face. (I should know, I keep having to code new/adjusted features for them!)
Rest assured that you will meet some wondrously terrifying objects in the storm'ed dusts.
We managed to figure out the big crash last month. Long story short it's a Unity issue that we've had to brute force a solution to. It's a problem baked into the high-performance ECS systems that ATS uses to have all it's ships running around.
But I've gotten us around it, so crash-to-desktop should only happen if you run the game for several days straight or play ~30 unique maps in one sitting. Hah, which would be both impressive and concerning. Do remember to sleep and rest, games like all things are more enjoyable in moderation.
A lot of units have had their death-effects spruced up by Brendan. More explosions, more bits and bobs thrown around. Lots of pretty stuff to look at. On top of that several units have had fixes to their behaviour and changes to their strengths and weaknesses. The Kontaalen missile heavy, the Grytes - as a recent example - just got a heaping +45 piercing on it's Anti-Armour rockets with a small reduction of 25 damage.
A lot of stuff has changed with Tychon, as Aleks works to get the awkward third child ready to play with the battle hardened older siblings of the family. Quite a lot of careful reconsidering is going on, a lot of stepping back and thinking. Tychon is intended to be as unique as is reasonable from the other two factions. It's obviously no good having another Kontaalen, or another Vaalkorei when they already exist. It's also tough to gauge how strong or weak a unit or strategy should be, when the entire faction works differently to the other two.
A reminder to join the Discord for frequent updates, and just to chat with us three Developers.
Alright, that's it from me. Cheers.
Luke AP
Hey people, Luke here.
Been a while, let me catch you up on some things you might have missed over on the \ branch.
(Campaign progress at the end.)
= = =
A reminder that the \ beta branch is available and regularly updated. If you want to help us sort out crashes, find issues, and test horribly broken campaign missions then swap over to \ and join the Discord to chat with us about your findings.
(Note campaign balance is broken due to a wide variety of fixes and balance adjustments.)
= = =
I've been deep in the code jungle for the last few months. Owl has been working on general game balance, Apocrypha and the Vaalkorei. Aleks has been away but is now back finally.
I've been rooting out a rather massive set of issues and problems caused by our engine update. (Which was very necessary regardless of the price I've had to pay in sanity.)
A lot of crashes have been resolved thanks to our testing team and some new crash handling stuff.
There are still crashes - mostly down to there being too much ATS in our ATS. But I'm weeding them out.
However, it wasn't just fixing issues! We have a variety of new things that I've managed to fandangle for us. As mentioned in the last update, our rendering setup can now handle lovely damage visuals for all our ships, drones, structures, and even matter rocks. As well as correctly handle the team-recolouring of subobjects (turrets) along with their glows AUTOMATICALLY. Previously we've had the rather sad tech limitation of not being able to turn off glows on turrets or subobjects and having to manually specify which materials would be recoloured or glowified by our system. (I ran out of time on this feature and still had the rest of the game to program). Which means we couldn't have spinny bits or moving parts on structures and units because if they turned off, the still-on glowy bits would be obvious and confusing. And if the team recoloured, they wouldn't be either. Now that can change.
So not only have the Kontaalen now received a rather large volume of moving bits and pieces on their structures but a number of ships have had their turrets painted up in team colour. Additionally, Tychon - whom have always had more glows than we could support recolouring and disabling - is now able to disable all their structure and unit glows when they die or go offline or become \.
Vaalkorei have also received a new defense structure; The Nanite Tower which is able to repair units as well as send out area-of-effect murder swarms.
Tychon is also busy being worked on by Aleks with a large set of balance changes and finalisations. (Yes this does mean Owl and I need to rebalance every missions that has the Tychon in them, don't remind us...)
Capital ships across the board have received increased health, armour, weapons, and more to help them feel worth their cost.
We've been too busy sorting out this engine update and trying to improve balance and fun. So we've not had the time to get to work physically on the Vaalkorei campaign "Fortune's Progress". It's story is done - yet to be refined in the fires of actually making the maps - but done as is the whole story ATS. As usual our main issue is manpower to get work done. However...
The side campaign Apocrypha is coming along well and has undergone a number of remakes in accordance with tester feedback and enjoyment (or lack thereof) so it is likely that you will be able to get your hands on it soon enough. Owl wants to finish this first, before we start work on Fortune.
So once I finish fixing the last of the crashes and tidy up a few other things, I'll have time to finally get all the difficulties done for Kreydell as well as work on general precieved difficulty and player-training. I know there have been complaints about mission 14 from people, but the issue is rather complex. Different players handle situations differently and learn different lessons. Much of ATS can be brute forced (by design), but this means a decent set of players don't gain the skills in actually handling a rather complex mission like 14. Which is more of a puzzle than a regular mission. The problem lies (probably) in how I fail to train players up to that point, or in how overwhelming the mission is to people that see it for the first time. It's my fault to fix, but I still want mission 14 to be a genuinely mindful mission that takes a degree of careful planning not brute force. Nothing insane, but more than usual.
Okay I think that's enough of an update for the moment, see you later I have work to do.
Luke
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This page aggregates Steam news feeds, patch notes, and developer announcements for Annihilate The Spance, sourced from official Steam community posts.
Major updates, balance changes, and seasonal events often correlate with player-count spikes — cross-reference announcements here with the live charts on the main Annihilate The Spance statistics page.
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