Lost Vessel news & patch notes

Lost Vessel is out now on Steam

A free-to-play idle survival RPG. The whole game, no price tag, no pay-to-win. You're a lone survivor rebuilding from a wreck. From nothing, you gather, craft, and fight your way back up: level dozens of skills toward mastery, forge legendary gear, push through zone after zone, and unlock system after system as you go. It idles while you're away and rewards you when you play. Drop in for five minutes or five hours, your save is always here. What's in it

• A deep solo game - skills, crafting, combat, research, prestige, and an endgame that keeps opening up.

• The Nexus Drift (optional co-op) - team up for expeditions, take on a server-wide world boss, and work specialist jobs.

• Raiders (optional PvP) - pick a faction, raid other survivors, defend your colony, fight for territory.

Both the co-op and the PvP are completely optional. Play it entirely solo and you lose nothing. Supporter Packs are live Lost Vessel is free, and it stays free - I will never sell power or an advantage. If you'd like to support development, Supporter Packs are now available: purely cosmetic titles, name effects, profile flair, and a founder badge. They unlock nothing in the game. They just help me keep building. More on the way This is a launch, not a finish line. I'm a solo developer, and I'm going to keep adding to it - more content, more systems, and the things you ask for. If you play and enjoy it, an honest review genuinely helps a small solo project get seen. Tell me what you think - the good and the rough edges. Thank you for being here.

Come say hi Join the community on Discord - I'm active there, and it's the fastest way to report bugs, suggest features, or just hang out with other survivors. See what else I'm building at Lazy Frog Games.

The whole interface, rebuilt

What changed

• One cohesive look across every screen - the homepage, your skills and combat, the Forge, Research, Raiders, the Codex, your profile and the rest.
• A redesigned skill nav rail with progress rings and at-a-glance status, plus a tidied top bar with Settings and your account tucked into clear menus.
• Raiders, rebuilt into five clear tabs - War Room, Offense, Defense, Spoils and Territory - with a live command readout and a proper war board for territory.
• Codex, profile and leaderboard got the same care: framed, readable, and a pleasure to browse, with profile backgrounds and name glows finally showing off properly.
• Cleaner everywhere - styled tooltips in place of the browser default, readable stacked chat and activity log, and sharper combat feedback.

And a wave of polish

• Combat reads right when you melt through enemies - damage numbers rise clear of the foe, and every new enemy pops in so a run of one-shots looks like a stream of kills.
• Expedition crew counts update live on the Nexus as other survivors join, and your active expedition shows its progress ring the moment you load in.
• Plenty of layout fixes: the survivor panel scrolls as one piece, tracked-goal names wrap instead of getting cut off, and the mobile view is tidier top to bottom.

• Pin your favorites to the top of the inventory. Right-click any item on desktop, or tap it open and hit Pin on mobile, and it jumps to the head of the list with a corner marker, so your go-to gear, crates and consumables are always right where you expect them. Pins stay put across reloads, and unpinning works the same way.
• The Forge's Scrap tab sorts now. Order the list by Yield to put the biggest material returns up top, or by Rarity to keep your best pieces clear of the scrapper, with each button flipping between high-to-low and back. Your raw inventory order is still there as the default.
• Tidy your Survivor Level rewards. A new "Hide claimed rewards" toggle under the panel headline clears out the tiers you have already taken, so only what is left to earn stays on the track. It remembers your choice across sessions.
• Your kill missions count the right style while you are away. Daily and weekly objectives for melee, ranged, void and weakness kills now credit fights you finish offline by the weapon you actually used, instead of logging everything as melee. Ranged and Void mains finally get full credit for an overnight grind.
• World Boss support donations stop at the top. Once a category reaches Tier 3 it reads MAXED and the donate button locks, so you can no longer pour resources past the point where they buy any extra buff for the team.
• Raiders runs cleaner. Your Spoils balance now always matches what the shop will actually let you spend, so a purchase never bounces because the count was a step ahead. Probes and raids no longer get stuck in limbo and lock you out of starting a new one. And stacking many copies of the same Legendary defense effect now returns a strong but fair amount rather than runaway value, so heavy defenses stay beatable.
• Distress Relay picks stick. The three bounties you choose for the day are saved the moment you pick them, so leaving the terminal right away no longer rolls your picks back.
• A wide round of polish. Toasts you can act on now jump straight to the right screen when clicked and no longer slip away while your cursor is on them; the Codex gained crate contents, an Implants section and a Nexus primer; item tooltips no longer linger or overlap the offline report; and the speed-boost timer no longer nudges your status bar around as it comes and goes.
• For the duration of Steam Next Fest, the Nexus chat channel is folded into Global so the whole crew talks in one place. The Nexus tab explains this, and it switches back on when the Fest wraps.
• Most of this round came straight from the small things you flagged. Big thanks to @less, whose long list of feedback shaped much of what is above.

Right now the demo isn't a sliver of the game - it's the entire thing. No content gates, every system unlocked, free, all the way until launch. After launch those systems lock behind the purchase, so this is the window to play the whole game for nothing. Lost Vessel is a sci-fi survivor idle-RPG: salvage and craft your way up through deep skill trees and a melee/ranged/void combat system, then push into the co-op Nexus - a server-wide world boss, group expeditions, and a shared frontier.

What sets it apart:

• No signup wall - one click and you're in, as a guest, on Steam or in your browser.

• Your save travels with you - the same character across browser and the Steam client.

• Built in the open - one developer, shaped week by week with its community.

Steam-exclusive Fest rewards: time on the Steam client this week earns permanent cosmetics - a title at 2 hours, a profile background at 8, and a name glow at 20. Only during Next Fest, only on Steam.

If you like it, the best thing you can do is wishlist it - that is how Lost Vessel reaches more players and sets up the launch.

See you out there.

What is Lost Vessel?

What makes it different

• Your save travels with you. Start in your browser on a break, keep playing on Steam at home. Same character, same progress, nothing to redo.
• No signup wall. Jump straight in and play. Make the account permanent whenever you are ready, not before.
• PvP that never sets you back. Raid and defend for rewards and bragging rights, never at the cost of your own progress. Skip it entirely and you lose nothing.
• Built in the open. A big chunk of what is in the demo exists because players asked for it. We are shaping this game together as it grows.

One developer, one ship

The demo is live - crash-land for free

LIMIT BREAK

• Skill level cap raised from 99 to 999. Past 99 each level costs a flat amount of XP, making it a genuine long-term post-mastery grind rather than an exponential wall. If you kept earning XP after maxing a skill at 99, that banked XP finally counts - your skills jump to their true level on next login.
• Survivor (player) level cap raised from 50 to 100, with 50 new milestone reward tiers continuing the existing cadence: endgame materials, crates, Neural Chips, Skill Primers, Voidshine and fracture mats. Three special milestones drop a RANDOMIZED legendary - a low-tier piece at level 75, a higher one at level 90, and a tier-4 legendary plus the new "Apex Survivor" title at level 100. Each rolls a random weapon, armor or tool with fresh affixes.
• 12 new achievements for the raised caps: four Survivor Level milestones (50 / 75 / 90 / 100), five "Beyond Mastery" skill achievements at level 200, a combined all-skills-at-200, a Combat 200, and "Apex Completionist" for claiming every one of the 100 Survivor Level rewards. Several are hidden surprises.
• Speed boosts are finally visible. Skill action cards and the active-action header used to show the raw base time even when tools, ship augments, mastery, implants or a Stim-Fungus buff were speeding you up. The displayed time is now your EFFECTIVE time, with a "-N%" badge when boosts are active. Hover or tap the time for a full per-source breakdown - it even flags equipped speed gear that applies to a different skill, so you know your tool is working, just not for this action.
• Bulk forge upgrades. Clicking UPGRADE on an item you can afford to upgrade several times now opens a quantity picker - 1 / 5 / 10 / 50 / 100 / 500 / 1000 / Upgrade all - so you can process a whole stockpile of low-tier gear or consumables in one go instead of clicking UPGRADE hundreds of times.
• Quantum Decoder ship augment reworked. It used to boost the yield of one single Analysis resource, which did nothing visible for most players. It now boosts the yield of EVERY Analysis action (+8% per level, up to +40% at max), the same way Ore Processor boosts all ore gathering. Existing invested levels carry over unchanged.
• Fix: raid shields could fail silently. Activating a shield consumed the item and then registered the protection as a separate step - if that step failed, the item was gone with no shield active, and you could still be raided. Shield activation is now a single reliable operation: the item is only spent if the shield actually goes up, and a clear message tells you if it did not.
• Fix: research accelerators now credit their full advertised time. A 10-minute accelerator could appear to skip only ~9 minutes if you had a research-speed bonus active. It now removes its full advertised wall-clock time from the research timer regardless of bonuses.
• Fix: the leaderboard Survivor Level column was clamped at 50. Players past level 50 now show their real level on the leaderboard.
• Fix: skill and combat panels showed wrong numbers past level 99 - a level-193 skill displayed as "MAX" with a broken XP bar. Both panels now display level and XP correctly all the way to 999.
• Fix: Survivor Stats expanded view. Gear affixes were not always shown for equipped items, and the Effective Totals section was missing most of the bonuses the engine already computes. The expanded view now lists your full augment, mastery, implant and affix contributions, and a check on every save load ensures equipped rare-and-up gear always carries its rolled affixes.
• Fix: the Forge Scrap tab quantity picker could keep a stale maximum after scrapping or when inventory changed. It now stays in sync with what you actually have on hand.
• Combat status-effect icons no longer shove the combatant layout up and down as statuses apply and expire - the icon row holds a stable height whether or not a status is active.
• Mobile polish: combat damage / status floaters, the Survivor Stats panel sections, and the combat status row are all sized properly for phones now.
• Routine stability and under-the-hood maintenance around save reliability, offline simulation accuracy, and interface consistency.