Relentless Expanse news & patch notes

Before I start talking about anything else, I first wanted to say that we’re hosting an event on our community discord server to celebrate the 1-Year Anniversary for Cowmera Games! Do you have a map idea that you’ve always wanted in the game? Now’s your chance to add it! Check #announcements for more details: https://discord.com/invite/ZjaBnbDVcU 

Now, I’ll have a long and hopefully interesting studio update below, but let’s first talk about the update! For this one, we REALLY wanted to finally fix multiplayer. We know that this has been a long-standing issue for quite a while now, and frankly, despite our best attempts, we really haven’t had the capability to properly address it until recently. That being said, we’ve hunted down dozens of multiplayer-specific bugs, fixed the long-standing lag/desync issues, and overall hopefully made multiplayer perform almost as well as singleplayer! I’m sure that there are some things we missed, but at the bare minimum the multiplayer should be actually enjoyable rather than a broken mess that some people basically couldn’t even play. While we were at it, we also fixed several random singleplayer bugs that we found or were reported! I genuinely hope that all of you enjoy playing the new update with your friends, and we’ll make sure that the next one has some content to go along with it as well!

Since this is the 1-Year Anniversary of our studio, I also thought it’d be fun to bring up some numbers for those that are interested! Since its release, Relentless Expanse has had more than 5,400 people play the game! Of those, we currently have 118 in the discord server, and our largest concurrent player count was 45 players in August of 2025 whenever a streamer tried the game out! …And then trashed on it for breaking instantly whenever he brought 30+ people into a lobby LOL. 

Seriously though, as fun and exciting as it’s been to see Relentless Expanse become something that so many people enjoy, we still want to make it better, while also working on other games that can actually help us turn this hobby into a real job. I’ll get into more specific numbers closer to, or maybe after, our next game release, but currently I’m spending just under an average of $1,500/month on our next game. I’m very grateful to be in a position where I’m capable of doing this… but it’s very straining on my finances, so I hope that puts into perspective why I’ve had to slow the updates for Relentless Expanse recently.

But on that note, when am I going to be releasing, or at least teasing, the next game? To be blunt, I have a vague idea, but I’m not entirely sure. Our team can only work VERY part-time due to the limited budget, so progress is steady but slow, and game development in general is a bit unpredictable. For that reason, I’d rather not promise anything or give myself any specific deadlines, but I CAN say that I’m very confident that I’ll at least be able to start teasing the game within the next year, hopefully even by the end of this year! It’s honestly quite an ambitious project for the genre it’s in, so I’m very excited to show it off whenever we feel that it’s ready :D

WAIT, TOO MANY WORDS, I CAN TELL YOU’RE LOSING FOCUS, QUICK DANCE BREAK ♪┏(・o･)┛♪

Anyways, I can also say that the gameplay itself is actually coming along really well! Most of the core mechanics are either already finished or nearly finished, and a lot of the art is progressing smoothly too. The story (yes, it has a story!) is also getting fleshed out very well, and I’m excited to show off the art for some of the characters whenever we get to that stage of development :) 

With the first year of Cowmera Games reaching its end, I’m extremely excited for what’s to come! I’ll be teasing the next content update for Relentless Expanse as soon as we know for sure what that will look like and when it’ll happen, and of course I’ll be keeping everyone updated with the next game as soon as we have news on that too! I’ll see you all again next month with another Studio Update, thanks for going on this journey with us!

Hey everyone, we're not dead! We've been hard at work on our next game for the studio (hint hint), although I can understand why you would think otherwise since we've been deathly silent since the 1-year anniversary update for Relentless Expanse. So, although we're not quite ready to announce anything, I wanted to break that silence!

This will be the first monthly studio update for Cowmera Games, where I'll focus on telling you all more about the studio, what we've been doing, what we plan to do, and plenty more fun stuff! So, while we're not quite ready to tease our next game (more on that next month?), I figured now would be the best time to introduce myself and the brief history of our studio!

Before Cowmera Games, and while we were still developing Relentless Expanse, it was just me (MrCowdisease), our awesome artist (Timberlate), and our musical genius (Andrew Sutherland). Me and Andrew met while working on a different project, which never saw the light of day, and Timber joined us after I found him on the mystical and terrifying forums of Reddit.

After that, we honestly kinda speedran making Relentless Expanse considering our experience. It really only took about 4 months to go from idea to release, which was impressive, but of course came with its own issues. As many of you know, the game has had more than just a couple of issues in many aspects, and the initial state of it upon release was frankly pretty barebones even compared to just a few months afterwards. Still, despite all of that, the game was able to reach thousands of players, got 90% positive reviews, and still has hundreds of monthly users!

So, since the game had some pretty decent success, especially considering we were all complete newbies and put very little thought into advertisement, we decided to try forming a studio! I took the helm since I was basically already leading the operation, and since I was able/willing to shoulder the financial risks. We deliberated for a while, and ultimately decided on the name "Cowmera" since we're nerds and there were 3 of us, and I was the "head" of the group! Thus, Cowmera Games itself was officially founded on June 15th, 2025, much to the dismay of many.

Around that time, I also secretly started working on our Studio's next game while also maintaining Relentless Expanse. However, disaster struck shortly after... I GOT A JOB!!!!

...Okay, it wasn't that bad, but the change in my free time and lifestyle was definitely heavily felt and not properly addressed for quite a while. I had graduated college that spring, and getting my degree frankly didn't take up nearly as much of my time, hence why I was able to make Relentless Expanse. Updates slowed, and I *technically* said that I would tease the new game by fall of 2025... which I think I slightly missed. So, the studio was making progress on both games, but much slower than before, and certainly not at a sustainable pace.

Suddenly, January of this year, I had an amazing, brilliant, genius realization... I have adult money now. Everyone knows that adult money is the ultimate subsidy for bad decisions! So, while having a job drained me of most of my free time, it also helped me expand the studio and fund our next game, which until then had been working off of revshare and wasn't making significant progress.

Finally, that brings us to today. My funds are, of course, quite limited, so that's still the main limiting factor for the game's progress, but the scope and amount of work being done on it has been able to increase drastically thanks to the funding! With all of that being said, Cowmera Games will be celebrating its first birthday on June 15th, so be sure to keep an eye out for a Relentless Expanse update, a fun event, and more! Most of that will be hosted in the community discord server, so feel free to hang out with us there: https://discord.gg/ZjaBnbDVcU

Thanks for reading and for supporting us, see you next month!

WE'RE GIVING AWAY $100!!!

Now that I have your attention: Hey everyone, it's time for the 1 Year anniversary update, which is possibly the biggest update we've ever had for the game! And, great news, the game is now P2W! I know you were all greatly looking forward to P2W, so I figured this was the best time to include it :) Alongside that, there's also multiple new settings, features, a new map, and some fixes for some very annoying, and sometimes longstanding, bugs. Thank you all so much for playing, and if you're not in our discord server then be sure to join and check #announcements for a chance to win one of our giveaways, with $100 in total up for grabs! Here's an invite: https://discord.com/invite/ZjaBnbDVcU

• Added P2W!!! From now on, you must select your income bracket for singleplayer games. This will affect the difficulty of the game (how quickly you generate energy and ships). The income brackets are:

  • Homeless (0.1x)

  • Low Income (0.25x)

  • University Student (0.5x)

  • Middle Income (1x)

  • High Income (1.5x)

  • Shareholder (2x)

  • Megacorporation CEO (5x)

  • Gabe Newell (20x)

  • Keep in mind that the game was NOT made with having the amount of ship production on higher income brackets in mind, so having repeat send active on lots of planets on those income brackets may or may not lag/crash the game :)

• Added 6 or 7 (it's 7) new achievements!

• Implemented a new setting called "Hyperlane Density" which affects the amount of hyperlanes that connect planets

• Added a new map called "The Line"

• Added a "reset" button to the in-game escape menu, which allows you to reroll the galaxy generation with the exact same settings

• Added a "randomize" option for all of the settings in the singleplayer menu

• Pathfinding has been buggy and unpredictable for way too long, so for now we're disabling all "intelligent" logic behind the pathfinding, and just making it as predictable as possible. It now has no problem going through neutral or enemy planets to reach its destination, as long as that's the shortest path. Let me know if you see any behavior at all that doesn't match this logic, as it should be 100% predictable every time now!

• Made it so that black holes now effectively double the defense of their ships, rather than just halving the enemy fleet (for example, attacking a black hole with 20 ships on it with a fleet of 100 now results in 40 attacking ships being destroyed, rather than 50 like before)

• Hopefully fixed ships sometimes "passing by" each other on the way to planets (definitely report this if you see it!)

• Buying ships on the "No Ships" challenge now only costs 3 energy instead of 5

• The game now remembers between sessions whether you have colored hyperlanes and defensive platform ranges toggled on or off

• Fixed a bug with the visible range for defensive platforms not going away sometimes and also not displaying the correct range for different planet sizes

• Fixed two factions of the same color sometimes spawning in singleplayer

• Fixed issue where the command UI would hide unnecessarily when a planet was taken over

• Lots of random multiplayer improvements and bugfixes, including fixing chat, defensive platforms, negative energy, and leveling planets infinitely, but unfortunately still trying to track down the desync issue

• Disabled the in-game player list in the bottom-right for now, since it's effectively unused and halfway broken sometimes

Hi everyone, we're back again with an update that focuses on challenges and fixing lots of long-standing bugs! Good luck winning without any energy! I really want to say that the game is finally in a very stable place after this update, but not even I believe myself when I say that... so please report every bug that you see, even if it's been reported in the past! As much as I try to address each and every issue, it's difficult to keep track of them all, so I want to make sure that I'm aware of every bug or issue that's currently left in the game! Thank you so much for your support, and I hope you enjoy the update :)

• Added "Challenge Modes" for singleplayer, and new achievements to go along with them, including:

  • No Energy: Win without being able to generate energy!

  • No Ships: Win without being able to generate ships! (Be sure to buy ships!)

  • Fog of War: Every planet is a gas giant!

  • Neutral Attack: Exactly what it sounds like, difficulty ranges from fairly easy to entirely impossible!

• You can now press "F" (or click the new button for it in the top right in-game) to toggle hyperlane colors, which will help visualize where ally/enemy planets are

• You can now explode the ships and asteroids in the main menu, have fun :)

• Various AI improvements (especially regarding the new celestial bodies)

• Added a setting to adjust the amount of particles planets emit to help improve performance on some machines

• Lots of refactored code and internal improvements (this may have fixed or caused some bugs unintentionally, please report all bugs, even if they've been reported in the past!!!)

• Several small QoL improvements and fixed lots of long-standing bugs

Hey everyone, I'm finally back with the first big update since we've become a studio, and this is a massive one! The new gameplay changes adds tons of new cool strategies, and the overall gameplay should be much more stable now that we've fixed a lot of long-standing annoying bugs! As always, I hope you all enjoy the update, and let me know if you run into any issues!

• Added new 5 new celestial bodies! Each of them has certain specialties, or new mechanics, surrounding them, which are:

  • Red Giant: A massive star that produces lots of energy but very few ships

  • Asteroid Cluster: A collection of asteroids which is great at mass-producing ships, but has very little energy production and ship capacity

  • Gas Giant: A planet that has a very large ship capacity and hides the number of ships inside of it from other players, but has poor production

  • Neutron Star: A unique star that has very high energy and ship production, however is unable to build any defenses at all

  • Black Hole: A mysterious phenomenon that has very little production, but destroys 50% of all enemy ships that touch it

• Added a setting to adjust the rate of these new celestial bodies, so that you can still play "vanilla", or so that you can make the galaxy completely chaotic

• Added a few achievements for the new celestial bodies

• Implemented an actual tutorial! Let us know if you break it or just if you have any general feedback on it :)

• Massively improved the help menu (it's useful now AND looks good!)

• Implemented a new galaxy shape and matching achievement (Eclipse)

• Hopefully finally fixed a long-standing bug with ships pathing incorrectly/weirdly, please let me know if you still see any unintended behavior!

• Made the game play nice with (hopefully) any resolution. Let me know if you have a non-standard monitor size and still run into any issues! (also, the placeholder resolution setting was removed since your resolution should automatically be detected)

• Fixed a bug where ships sometimes got stuck inside/on the edge of planets

• Slightly nerfed the ship cap for large planets (350 -> 300)

• Made energy sync much better in multiplayer, allowing us to re-enable defensive platforms consuming energy in multiplayer games

• Fixed the "Preferred color" setting not working in multiplayer

• Fixed an unreported long-standing bug with settings not saving sometimes

• Fixed the "ships decaying" icon showing up at the start of games when it shouldn't

• Made ships a bit bigger to fix a new issue where they would sometimes accidentally "miss" other ships when going through a hyperlane

• Loadssss of smaller bugfixes and QoL changes!

P.S. I recently discovered that the game actually plays pretty well on the steam deck, give it a shot if you have one! I might make it fully compatible in a future update!

Hey everyone, just a small update for now to address many of the issues that players have encountered with the new multiplayer! After this update we'll focus on polishing multiplayer some more, before we finally move on to the next major content update, which will add new planet types and stars which will all have unique mechanics associated with them! I hope you all enjoy the fixes that come with this update!

• Added a way to investigate what's causing the multiplayer delay issue. If you run into the issue, then before you start another game, type %appdata% into your windows search bar, press enter, and then go to Godot -> app_userdata -> Relentless Expanse. In that folder, you'll find a file called "lastGameReport.dat". Just create a bug report, post that file, and we'll take it from there! Every report helps us narrow down the issue, so we greatly appreciate everyone that's able to help us with this!

• Fixed neutral pop multiplier not working properly in multiplayer

• Fixed buy ships not working in multiplayer

• Fixed an issue in multiplayer where repeat send commands weren't being cancelled properly whenever a planet was taken over

• Temporarily removed trading. This will be reworked and then added back at some point in the future, however for now it's too buggy and is almost never used by players

• Fixed various smaller issues relating to multiplayer

Hey everyone, I have an exciting bit of news that will forever change the development of Relentless Expanse, and much more! Today, we are officially announcing the creation of Cowmera Games, our very own indie studio! Alongside this, we are already deep into development with our next game! I won't be giving any more details on that for a while still, but hopefully sometime in Fall of this year I can start teasing it!

To accommodate these changes, you'll notice that the discord server has changed so that it's now focused on Cowmera Games as a whole, rather than just Relentless Expanse. Here's a link to the discord server for those that aren't in it yet:

https://discord.com/invite/ZjaBnbDVcU

Lastly, what does this mean for the future of Relentless Expanse? The rate of updates will slow down a bit, however we still plan to support Relentless Expanse until it's out of Early Access, which is quite a ways away! Relentless Expanse is still our main game, and we don't plan to abandon it!

If you have any more questions about what this means, or just any questions in general about Cowmera Games, then feel free to ask away. This is a massive step forward for our team, and we're super excited that all of you have made this possible for us, thank you so much for your support!

Wow, this one has been a VERY long time coming, hasn't it? Well, it's finally here! You don't have to worry about being limited to just 3 servers or about servers randomly crashing or going offline, you can create your own lobbies, and you can directly invite your friends through steam! This one took a LOT of code, both adding new code and changing old code, so we're really excited to finally have it out!

With the release of this update, Relentless Expanse finally feels like it's in a fairly stable position, although there's certainly plenty of aspects that can and will be improved upon. Also, we can now start working towards more ambitious updates that change up the gameplay in fun and unique new ways! We'll tease more about updates in the future if they start taking too long, so be sure to join our discord here:

https://discord.com/invite/ZjaBnbDVcU

Also, as always, and for this update especially, keep an eye out for any bugs that may have slipped through the cracks! We playtested this one more than we normally do, but it's definitely not perfect (defensive platforms still don't cost energy to fire in multiplayer, although this will be fixed soon), and this update changed a LOT of code, so even though it shouldn't change singleplayer gameplay at all, it's possible that it introduced some new bugs for it.

P.S. Keep an eye out for a MASSIVE announcement within the next few days that will heavily effect the future of Relentless Expanse! I hope you all enjoy the update :)

• Halved the speed of decay when planets are above the ship cap
• Adjusted AI numbers a bit to make sure they don't get stuck in niche situations where they get stuck trying to take over planets
• Fixed planetary defense not shooting in multiplayer (apparently this was related to them not being able to see how much energy players have, which unfortunately wasn't an easy fix, so while they still shoot, they won't be able to consume any energy for now)
• Fixed some issues with earning/not earning the new achievements
• Several other minor fixes that I forgot to note

• Added 12 new achievements!
• Added 2 new galaxy shapes and a new "random" option that randomly selects from every galaxy shape
• Reverted some changes for AI so that they're much more aggressive again (and not so "slow" to react)
• Reworked defensive platforms so that they now consume 1 energy for every shot. This change has two main purposes: To make energy more valuable, and to slightly nerf defensive platforms. I'll be monitoring feedback on this change closely to see whether or not it lands well with players, so let me know your thoughts on it!
• Planets now decay much quicker whenever they're very far above their cap
• Spruced up the main menu with some fun extra visual stuff
• Added a preview in the settings menu for the preferred color options
• Added visual and audio feedback for whenever a player purchases ships
• Made it so that a message is sent in chat which tells you how many planets (and to what level) were upgraded whenever you mass-upgrade
• Fixed an issue where AI were, apparently, not gaining any energy from their starting planet!
• Fixed a bug where typing in chat or other input boxes could trigger keybinds
• Several other smaller QoL changes and bugfixes

• You can now choose the shape of the galaxy that you want to play in! There are currently 7 options, and more can be easily added in the future, feel free to suggest new shapes!
• Heavily adjusted the decision-making for AI, they will now do a LOT of things differently, explore the new AI and let me know if you find any weird new behaviors!
• Added the ability to change keybinds in the settings
• You can now right-click on any empty space when you have planets selected and choose to mass-upgrade the selected planets
• Added a "preferred color" option in the settings (only works in singleplayer for now, will work in multiplayer after the multiplayer update!)
• Adjusted pathfinding some more - the vast majority of the time it will act intelligently and path around neutral and enemy planets, however it may still do some weird pathfinding sometimes. Let me know if the pathfinding is better this way!
• Defensive Platform radius colors will now be shown as red if they belong to an enemy, and you will see a preview of the range of the defensive platform if you hover over the purchase button for defense
• Added OpenGL as a launch option for users with GPUs that can't run Vulkan
• Lowered the 5x speed option to 4x speed to help prevent some performance issues and other bugs that could occur at high speeds
• Ships can now be "culled" if there are too many on the screen at once, to help prevent bad performance issues later in the game. Only ship sizes of less than 5 can be culled, and when a ship is culled the health it had will be returned to a random planet belonging to its faction
• Fixed a bug where only 1 defensive platform would be destroyed if the planet was taken over at defense level 2, instead of destroying both defensive platforms
• Fixed a bug where all of your planets would be deselected when one of your planets got taken over, instead of just the planet that was taken over
• Fixed an issue where ships wouldn't collide with newly taken over planets if they were inside of the planet's hitbox when it was taken over (also known as ship-juking)
• Several other small QoL changes and bug-fixes

• Added the ability to pause the game in singleplayer (you can also press space to toggle it, and it will auto-pause the game when you open the escape menu now)
• Added the ability to speed up or slow down the game in singleplayer (press 1 for 0.5x speed, 2 for 1x speed, 3 for 2x speed, and 4 for 5x speed)
• Added a button and keybind (Q) to toggle all of your defensive platforms on or off, and added individual buttons for every planet so that you can toggle the defensive platforms for specific planets
• Added a button and keybind (E) to toggle the visibility of the range of defensive platforms
• Added a "Buy Max" button to the "Buy Ships" UI
• Replaced the placeholder "Gift Ships" button with a "Send Num" button that allows you to send an exact amount of ships (ships can be "gifted" through the trading mechanic anyways)
• Added 2 new icons to planets that appear whenever the planets are repeatedly sending or losing ships
• Ship pathfinding has been reverted to an earlier version that is now more "intelligent" (they'll generally try to avoid suiciding into neutral or enemy planets), however it may also be more unpredictable and weird, let me know which pathfinding you guys prefer!
• Made the colors of players and AI more visually distinct
• Chat is now hidden by default and is only shown if a message has been sent recently or if you're typing a message
• Implemented missing assets for "Buy Ships" UI
• A couple minor QoL features
• Several small bug fixes

• Fixed an issue where planets weren't able to stop their continuous send orders in multiplayer
• Fixed a minor bug where 1 ship would get subtracted from player planets at the start of every game (inconsequential but very annoying)

• Added 2 new servers to play on!!!
• Optimized ships a LOT, it should be very difficult to crash the game or get less than 30 fps now, let me know if you’re still having issues after this update! Benchmark tests showed an increase from ~5 to ~40 fps when repeatedly sending ships from every planet on a max size galaxy. Here are some of the optimization changes you’ll notice in the gameplay:
• Repeatedly sending ships from planets now waits until there are at least 3 ships before they are sent out, I know this is a bit annoying but the performance payoff is really big!
• Ships will now only send as a single ship from each planet instead of spawning in groups of 1, 5, 25, etc.
• Hopefully fixed the bug where players would disconnect for seemingly no reason, this may cause issues if a player loses connection mid-game so be sure to report any bugs regarding this to me! It will also cause servers to never restart if someone loses connection, so servers will now restart after 30 minutes automatically if it detects that someone has lost connection (this will obviously still cause servers to close prematurely sometimes but a 30-minute delay is much better than instantly!)
• Every planet now has 3 small numbers to the right of it to display their levels so that you don’t need to select a planet to see what its levels are
• Players and AI will now try to spawn at least 3-4 planets away from other players and AI when possible
• Probably fixed the bug where negative numbers would sometimes show on planets
• A few other minor bug fixes and QoL improvements

• AI will now more aggressively push advantages and focus less on expanding to neutral planets, I’ll be keeping an eye on this to see if this causes any weird behavior or if it makes the AI weaker rather than stronger
• When you select planets you can now see the total amount of ships that you have selected on those planets at the bottom of the screen, and whenever you’re sending ships to another planet it will also display the number of ships that you would be sending
• You can now press “R” to automatically select every planet that you control
• Added a LOT of new sound effects and 3 new music soundtracks! One plays whenever you’re in a lobby, another plays randomly in-game, and the last one plays some “final showdown” style music whenever there are only 2 players remaining!
• Fixed a lot of bugs (including the one where defensive platforms had extremely long range) and made a few minor QoL improvements