Steambirds Alliance News

We made Steambirds as a labour of love in hopes of bringing players together and building meaningful friendships between them. In some ways, we feel like we succeeded - we made an experience with significantly less toxicity and greater cooperation than many online games achieve. But in some ways we have to admit that we have failed, as the number of players returning to the game quickly dwindled post-launch despite our efforts. We tried to rejuvenate the game with two major updates (flocks together, and more together) and a number of smaller updates, but ultimately we weren’t able to achieve our goals.

It pains us to say this, but we can’t afford to keep working on this game. It has already cost us a great deal more than it has earned, and while we have plenty of ideas for how to improve Steambirds further, we have very little confidence that those ideas will be enough to turn things around. Spry Fox is a small, independent studio with no investors or wealthy patrons, and we can only do so much. Unfortunately, Steambirds is barely limping along right now and doesn’t have the critical mass of players that it needs to be a compelling MMO. Fixing the issues that are driving people away and getting lots more players to show up will cost significantly more money than we happen to possess.

Because of the aforementioned issues, effective immediately we are disabling IAPs for gold. We don’t want players to spend more of their hard-earned money on the hope of a long-term place to play, only to have it disappear in a few months. We will continue to keep the game online and running for at least four more months, but after that time it is likely that we will shut down the game to avoid further hosting and maintenance costs.

Thank you so much to everyone that has been part of this journey with us. We’re broken-hearted to be announcing the end of the road, but we take solace in the fact that we at least met some wonderful human beings along the way. We'd like to thank everyone in the community who gave us their support during these years, and especially those of you who stayed around even when things seemed dire. Without you, we wouldn't have even been able to make it this far. We hope you had a good time and made some friends along the way.

Good skies!

- All the Spry Foxes

Today’s update introduces a new endgame boss: the Urchin.

The Urchin is quite elusive: to find it you'll need to craft a special item and then use it in a specific place. We recommend that you bring a full fleet of seasoned pilots with you, as the encounter can be quite a handful!

The boss can drop a lot of the usual goodies, but also has a chance to drop 4 different URs and some other unusual items. Good luck!





With this update we are also addressing some balance issues and general improvements, both for new and veteran players. Community-suggested changes are indicated with

• Leader changes on mission selection now let the new leader pick a mission
  
• Low level ingredients can now be crafted into tradeable bundles.
  
• Players in lower tier missions now get their damage downscaled by a tier appropriate %.
  
• Upscaling of low level players during missions now caps at a mission tier appropriate %.
  
• Revised nanite trading fees to be more consistent with the cost of 5 upgrades of the same type.
  
• Buffed Merlin's Staff from 12% to 15% dmg.
  

• Fixed an issue where DK secondaries were missing supercharge/degradation stats.
  
• Fixed the XP Boost item description to properly show 90 minutes.
  

The team has been toiling away on a new major Steambirds Alliance update for the last few months. We’ve taken the opportunity to take a step back and re-evaluate why we made this game, what we’re trying to do with it, and how well we’re achieving those goals. We’ve written about this before - Steambirds is best when played with others. While we’ve tried to focus on this throughout development, our investigation revealed that a surprisingly small number of players were actually playing with others. Some of that can be attributed to lower-than-expected player numbers, but generally there were many ways that the game failed to bring players together. Sometimes, features inadvertently separated players. This goes against the entire reason we wanted to build Steambirds in the first place.

The More Together Update includes a number of fundamental changes to the game. The majority of changes are designed to actively bring players together in the game and keep them together, but we haven't stopped there; we’ve also included a revamp of the crafting system, the new Boss Arena, and a whole host of other smaller changes.


First thing’s first, we made changes so it is far less likely you’ll start playing new content alone. We asked “What if instead of going on individual quests, players joined shared missions with a clear focus?” As of this update, our revamped missions are multiplayer encounters a lot like dungeons. Each mission has a goal visible to everyone in the mission, shared progress towards the goals, and clear rewards.

You’ll join missions from the Mission Command in the Rebel City. This is a regularly-updating list of missions you can join, and a short list of some upcoming missions. Each mission tells you upfront your goal, the rewards you can earn, and how many other players are actively playing. When you join a mission, you’ll be teleported directly to a squad of players doing the same mission.



All the old great content you’ve come to love has been converted into missions accessed via Mission Command. This replaces the old system of getting missions from the Pilot Pub and then jumping into an overworld carrier. The pub is still there, but now it’s primarily for daily rewards and bounties. We’ll be looking at adding more bounties and similar content to the pub at a later stage.


Now that players are starting with others due to the new Mission Command structure, we’ve made more changes to try keep them together: squads, speed changes, and closing the power gap.

[h2]Squads[/h2]
When you join a new mission from Mission Command, you are immediately teleported to a squad of players, all actively doing the same mission. One of the players will automatically be selected as the squad leader, generally the strongest or most veteran player. In most missions, if the squad is far away from a mission target, the leader can instantly teleport much closer, and any player that gets separated from the leader can quickly teleport to join them. Gone are the days of having to travel across a huge world to find that one distant target.

Everyone within a squad will be pointed at the same mission target with the radar indicator. Your radar will only show the other players in your squad, and a prominent indicator of the current squad leader. You should follow your squad around, but if you get too far away from your squad, we start to zoom in your camera a bit, limiting your vision and reminding you that you’re not with your squad. At the same time, we highlight that you can quickly teleport to the squad leader with a button press.

If you’re successful with your current mission, the leader can sometimes also pick some follow-up missions so your squad can stick together and take on more content as a unit!

[h2]Speed Changes[/h2]
In our investigations we found that speed engines and other speed modifiers were a big contributor to player separation. If you don’t know exactly where you should be going, you are instantly left behind. Even if you do know exactly where you should be going, players without the top-tier speed engines, upgrades and skills, found it very difficult to keep up with speedy players zipping around. We’ve made the tough decision to remove the speed engines (existing speed engines will be automatically converted to damage engines) and nerf a lot of the other speed bonuses throughout the game. We’ve compensated slightly by giving all players a +15% baseline speed boost. This is quite a significant change, so we ask that you please give it some time to get used to - we’ll also be keeping our eyes on this and adjusting further as needed.

[h2]Closing the Power Gap[/h2]
There’s a huge variation in the difficulty of different content in the game. Veterans are not only more experienced players, but their planes also have much stronger gear. This wide power gap makes it almost impossible for new players to join veterans, which is currently unsustainable unless we have a large number of active players. With this update, lower-tier players will get an armor and damage boost to bring them a bit closer to top-tier players. We hope this will make it easier for newbies to contribute and be more valued by veterans.




This update brings the addition of the new Boss Arena. The core is that you’ll be fighting more than 100 different combinations of bosses and minibosses in a small locked room. You’ll find this mission showing up in Mission Command. Check out the exciting new combinations and see if you can overcome the challenges!




Crafting in Steambirds has always had some rough edges. We’ve taken the time to both improve the UI and make crafting a more critical aspect of playing the game.

The biggest change here is the addition of ingredients. Instead of having to juggle various crafting items - a rather clunky affair - most crafting now relies on ingredients. Ingredients don’t take up any cargo or storage space, and can be stacked up to a limit of 100 or more. You can see your list of ingredients from an option at the bottom of the inventory menu.



One big change that crafting ingredients enables: tiered items can be upgraded with copper up to T8. Most enemies in the game now drop varying amounts of copper. Instead of hoping to get lucky and get that much-need T8 weapon, you can now rely on the much more consistent upgrade path to getting there. We’ve also added many different catalysts that drop from different parts of the game and are needed to craft or fuse new SPEC or ELEM items. We’re excited for more changes that the granularity of the ingredients allows us to do - we can slowly give you resources to craft a rare drop, instead of relying on a tiny drop percentage to create rarity.



The addition of ingredients removes the old hack of storing excess items inside crafting recipes, so we’ve removed this from most recipes. We’ve also improved the logic for which recipes are shown/hidden so you aren’t inundated with a huge number of recipes that aren’t relevant. All of your old crafting progress should be maintained and automatically migrated into the new system.

Other crafting improvements:

• Added a confirmation box to crafting
  
• Improved the crafting details panel
  
• Removed the confusing location goal from crafting recipes
  
• Fixed a scroll bug where details can move off the screen
  

This wouldn’t be a major update without a list of other changes to the game. Community-suggested changes are indicated with

• Tentative fix for the notorious chat bug
  
• Automatic skill loadout switching when changing planes, based on last one used on that plane
  
• Suggest another active flock if yours seems mostly inactive (maximum of once per day)
  
• Adjusted the default camera zoom to show 15% more
  
• Improvements to the flock register
  
• Increased range of T0-T5 machine guns (for newbies playing the Quad)
  
• Fix combat sim bug where stationary enemies spawned on 2 adjacent walls couldn’t be killed
  
• Siege Tank can use flak while in siege mode
  
• When you are idle for too long, kick you to the RC selection menu instead of quitting the client
  
• Apex Military Academy mission is now more granular (more goals so you can see progress)
  
• Prevent spamming of trade requests outside the RC
  
• Fixed dungeon mod descriptions for AMA and HFSC dungeons
  
• Show the teleport effect on other players
  
• Fixed some more small bugs/issues
  
• Probably even more small changes we’ve missed here...
  

This week we’re shipping our last update of 2019. While it may be last, it’s still packed with some awesome stuff. We’re introducing a new class, the Vampire, a new combat sim mode, and a bunch of other changes!



The vampire class is making its appearance in this update. It uses sword weapons and comes with a new ability “Bite” and a new maneuver “Redline.” Bite lets you take a chomp out of a nearby enemy, giving both you and nearby allies some health. Redline lets you convert your armor into steam. It won’t kill you, but if you play it close to the wire it can give you a big boost to your effective available steam! The vampire of course also has its own set of skills to select from. Give it a spin and see if you can figure out its secrets!



We’ve added a new “survival” combat sim mode with this update. It plays a bit differently to other modes - survival isn’t about clearing waves - it’s just about surviving as long as possible. Killing enemies might help you survive longer, but it’s not required! This will be in the regular rotation of daily combat sim modes, and hopefully add some welcome new variation.

We’ve also made a number of other improvements and changes to the combat sim in this update, including:

• Make sure you always either get all DPS classes or all non-DPS classes (and a choice of single vs double stick if possible)
  
• Vary the number of builds you can choose from between 1 and 5
  
• Fixed a lot of weird/bad enemy behaviour in the combat sim, including: Mystic, Great Pooper, Mecha-Angel, Duelist, Disinfector, Bureaucat, Crowd Control, Retaliator, Poison Convoy, Husky, Augmentation Therapist
  
• Removed all 2-width walls in combat sim so enemies aren't unshootable.
  
• Fixed some issues with treasure chests
  

Finally, there’s also a whole bunch of other changes in this update:

• Founder can assign different roles to people in the flock.
  
• Clicking on another player's name in chat opens the friend list with them selected.
  
• Changed the Bomb Factory from T2 to T3, and the Laser Playground from T3 to T4
  
• Removed middle row of bullet belt on boss stage of Laser Playground
  
• Nerfed Meowzaghast shots during M2's death phase
  
• Revised trade fees
  
• Reduced plane xp thresholds for levels 16 to 20 (it's now easier to level up)
  
• Titanium rods have new graphics and aren't marked as rare
  
• Fix the broken siege animation
  
• Fix scrolling offset displays for quest-related menus
  
• Renamed "Cubic Gem" to "Arena Gem", so it’s not confused with the new Cube Gem item
  
• Adjusted some AI behaviour to hopefully fix some wandering units
  

We're shipping our first really big post-launch update to SBA! It includes a healthy combo of new content, new features, plus solutions to major pain points that the community has informed us about in Discord. 🙂

I know this blog post is huge, so let me give you the TDLR: we’ve added: Flocks (aka guilds), a new “combat sim” daily activity, a new dungeon called the “Military Academy“, new Fox allies to help the birbs in their lonely fight against the cats, aaaaand we’ve substantially reduced how much SBA punishes you when you die. PLUS a bunch of other QoL changes and freebies (like free hangar and storage space) that ya’ll have been asking for. Read on for details!

You need a place to organize your peeps…?

Yep, we finally have guilds (which we call “Flocks”) in SBA. To be more precise, we have two kinds of Flocks: leaderless “trainee Flocks” which everyone will be encouraged to join soon after creating a new account, and “professional Flocks” which are created and managed by veteran players.

You receive an XP boost when flying alongside members of your Flock, and your trading fees are lower when trading with members of your Flock (but you can’t trivially hop between Flocks to abuse that discount for mercenary purposes – there’s a cooldown.) And best of all, you can join four other of your guildmates to participate in the daily guild Combat Sim (more on that below.) We’ve also added a Flock chat system, which you can switch to and from freely while playing the game.

You can be a member of up to 3 Flocks at any one time. One of those will be your “default” Flock — you only get bonus XP and trading fees with people in your default Flock. But you can change your default whenever you wish (for example, if you want to participate in all of your 3 Flocks’ daily Combat Sims.)

To create a new “professional” guild and become its founder/leader, you will need to find a Flock Founder Token. These are going to be rare, but tradeable, so worst case if you can’t find one, maybe you can trade for it.

We wrote and shared a big document on our plans for Flocks a while back; if you never saw that and are curious to learn more, I encourage you to read it. 🙂

New home of the Combat Sim in the Rebel City

I’ve personally been looking forward to this for a while. There’s a new “Combat Sim” building in the Rebel City, and once you’ve unlocked it, you’ll have access to two new modes of play: the Daily Solo Sim and the Daily Guild (5-person coop) Sim.

Daily sims are randomly generated encounters with unusual conditions and constraints. When playing a sim, you are given a throwaway, virtual plane and equipment, so there’s absolutely nothing to lose by getting shot down (it’s not real!) For example, you might be required to choose between playing with a Level 1 Assault or Level 1 Hog at the start of the sim. You might also start with a Level 20 Raptor equipped with Special Legendary equipment. Either way, it’s all temporary.

Your goal is to survive to the end of the encounter, and to complete it as quickly as possible. The conditions of the encounters are, as I said, somewhat random, but we’ve modified things to make the pacing better (for example, in the Solo Combat Sim, you get a huge damage buff when fighting bosses, and you gain MUCH more XP than normal when starting at level 1, so you can level up extremely rapidly.) You only get one free play of a Sim each day, so you want to make it count!

You get rewarded in two ways when playing Sims. First, you get a simple reward immediately upon completion of the Sim, based on how well you performed. Then you get a second, larger reward the following day, once the leaderboard has been finalized. The higher up you are on the leaderboard, the better that reward will be. And hey, those of you who have been asking for more opportunities to flex, your wish has been granted. Show us all what you’re made of on the leaderboards. 😉

The closer you get to the top of the leaderboard, more likely you are to earn multiple trail gems for our two new trails:



And the closer you get to the top of the leaderboard, the higher your (still small) chance of earning one of our four new Legendary SPEC items:

• Sawed-Off Flakgun: Siege Tank secondary ability SPEC that spams much more flak than normal, but it spews all over the place. Also grants bonus DPS.
  
• Merlin’s Staff: Merlin secondary ability SPEC that has a smaller sized bullet wipe in exchange for +2 HP, +12% DPS, and +10% turn rate.
  
• Spiritual Oasis: Paladin secondary ability SPEC. Its effective radius is much smaller than normal, but it lasts a little longer, heals a bit more than T10, and stays where you put it, so your allies can use it as a safe place to retreat to. For making the sacrifice of not carrying it with you, you also get -10% maneuver cost and +10% camera view.
  
• Hunter Killer: Raptor secondary ability SPEC with a significantly shorter cooldown than regular mines, lower steam cost, and MUCH more damage. Best of all, it rapidly seeks out and blows up enemies like a heat-seeking missile. Downside: it does not slow enemies the way normal mines do.
  

Content-wise, right now, we have a few different scenarios baked into the Sim. In the future, we intend to add a bunch more, including, for example, a “Pacifist mode” where you have to survive as long as possible WITHOUT killing anything with your guns or secondary abilities. We look forward to adding this additional content in future updates not long from now. 🙂


This is another big one. As we discussed in detail over the past month, we’ve decided to seriously soften the permadeath aspects of this game. The reasons are pretty simple: a ton of users have told us they don’t like the permadeath bits, and our analytics data show that people — both new users and veterans alike — tend to quit immediately after dying. This game was always supposed to be first and foremost about playing with your friends (and making new friends), but somewhere along the way we became too focused on making it really hard and punishing. Mea culpa. We’re going back to focusing on what really matters now.

So now, when you crash, you don’t lose your plane. You lose some of your upgrades, and all your gear and cargo gets damaged, but your plane remains. The more times you crash, the more damaged your cargo gets. Eventually, it won’t be worth using anymore. But you can repair it, and maybe even supercharge it if you’ve got the right materials, so nothing is truly “lost” anymore.

How do you repair your equipment? You can do it in the Workshop. It’ll require a bunch of materials, but most of all, it’ll require a new currency that you gain by recycling spare equipment that you don’t need anymore.

We’ve called that new currency “Scrap“, because that’s the perfect name for it, and we’ve renamed the old currency “Iron.” I know it’s a bit confusing — hopefully everyone will get used to it soon!



How exactly do you earn this new Scrap currency? Easy. Instead of simply dropping your trash items like you’ve always done, now you’ll use the exact same command to recycle them. You can also select items individually and recycle them at any time. The more valuable the item, the more Scrap you get by recycling it.

The most valuable items (T10, Elem and SPEC) are expensive to repair. Not only do they require a lot of Scrap, they also require an equivalent item (i.e. use a T10 to repair a T10) and several “Nanites”, which are things you can craft by fusing 5 upgrades together. Excitingly, nanites can also be used to Supercharge items, which gives them semi-random bonuses that make them even more powerful than regular, pristine equipment!

Since you don’t die anymore, we had to change the way we give out pilot XP (which was previously awarded ONLY when you die.) Now you get 65% of your pilot XP in real time, while playing. Which means you can rank up at any time. We know you’ve all wanted something like that for a long time, so we were happy to have the excuse to do it. You get the remaining 35%, plus Iron rewards, when you voluntarily choose to retire a plane, which you can do from inside the Hangar.

We’ve tested this stuff carefully, but I will be the first person to admit that it’s a huge change, with a lot of complex implications, and I would not be surprised in the slightest if we need to do a bunch more fine-tuning of the economy in the weeks ahead. We have already decreased the droprates of certain items in anticipation to compensate for the fact that people won’t be losing items when they die. We have also reduced the “loot drop multipliers” for dungeon mods to 1x/2x/4x. And lastly, we’ve tuned the repair and supercharging costs of items to help consume many of the resources in the game that might otherwise become inflationary. But I doubt we’ll have perfectly guessed what every number should be, and that’s OK; these numbers are easy to change! Please play for a while — ideally at least a week or so, to get a good feeling for stuff and not be biased by short term RNG — and let us know what you think needs tweaking. We’ll be listening carefully to you, as always.

Wait, why do those drones have beaks??

Before Meowza became the god-leader of the world, she was a promising student in the Cat military regime. Much of her training occured in the Apex Military Academy, an old and well-respected educational institution whose instructors had absolutely no idea what Meowza might turn into someday.

One of the core training rituals at the academy was an unusual “sport” in which teams of students were expected to capture spawn points while fighting off guardian mechs that vaguely represented combat class archetypes (like “the sniper” and “the tank”). Teams that managed to capture enough points would eventually reach the the Control Unit, a particularly tough mech that tended to humiliate less-prepared students.



Design-wise, the Military Academy functions a bit like HFSC. It is accessible to mid-level players, but should still represent a fun challenge (and opportunity!) for higher-level players thanks to some pretty stiff veteran mods. The Military Academy is also home to two of our newest SPEC items:

• Pet Turret: extremely powerful turret SPEC that follows the Engineer around like a (somewhat erratic but very loyal) pet.
  
• Sledgehammer Shield: Dagger Knight secondary ability SPEC that significantly improves your DPS even more than usual in exchange for much lower superSpeed during the times when you are shielded.
  

It turns out that the Cats haven’t subjugated every race other than the birds. At least one other race has resisted Meowza’s yoke. I refer, of course, to the Foxes! (Come on, you knew it had to be them.)



Yes, you can now select a Fox portrait for your pilot – just dive into the Options Menu to bring up the portrait selector, and you’ll find 9 new portraits alongside the usual birbs. You’ll notice that the Combat Sim building is staffed by a Fox as well. We look forward to doing more with the Foxes (lore-wise) in the months to come. 🙂


There’s a bunch of other good stuff in this update that isn’t covered above. And hey, we’ve got a new system for identifying and celebrating changes that were a direct result of community feedback — any such change will be preceded by an SBA salute graphic: It means a lot to us that ya’ll are willing to patiently explain what you think the game needs and give us time to address those concerns. You deserve multiple salutes for that. 🙂

• Major update to Elder Arena, in response to player complaints tha it was too long / too boring:
  
  • Made it so waves only go up to 15, with 2 miniboss phases
    
  • Shortened time between waves by 2 seconds
    
  • Spotters move faster after initial shot, making their time spent offstage a lot shorter.
    
  • Reduced spawn radius of enemies by 20% so they don’t spawn far off-screen.
    
  • Improvements to harasser enemies that weren’t very interesting.
    
  • Fixed bug with miniboss battle ending prematurely
    
  • Art fixes: Updated VFX, added more warnings to enemy attacks, reduced art model overuse
    
  • Added 2 room variants to the encounter
    
  • Fixed issue where enemies would spawn over each other
    
  • Added basic aimed gun to boss
• Damage boosts to the following weapons:
  
  • Almost all Blasters: +15%
    
  • Void Prism: +28% damage
    
  • Quantum Reach: +15% damage
    
  • Frost Dagger 1, 2 and 3: +18% damage
    
  • Tiger Whisker 1, 2 and 3: +5% damage
• Now only half the rooms in the Crypt are locked (the “setpiece” rooms) instead of 100% of the rooms. Should speed up progress.
  
• You can now earn cool new stuff when you hit certain pilot ranks.
  
  • For example, at rank 12, you’ll earn another free hangar slot, and at various ranks, you earn a free storage slot. This is on top of what you already start with for free.
    
  • You can see graphics representing stuff you have earned / will earned in the timeline on the left side of the pilot skills UI.
    
  • We’re definitely planning to add more unlocks in the future; things like emotes and trails and other goodies that you cannot acquire any other way. We just ran out of time to do more in this update but we look forward to surprising you with more soon!
    
  • All unlock rewards will of course be granted to you retroactively if you’ve already surpassed any given rank prior to this update.
• It is now possible to enter “/t UserName” to private message other players in game.
  
• When you filter the Pilot Skills UI by class, we now condense the previously-huge blocks of empty space in between skill groups at higher ranks. No more pointless scrolling.
  
• You can “favorite” items in your cargo, so they won’t ever be accidentally recycled. (People have been asking for this forever; it seemed particularly worth doing now that “drop” has been replaced with “recycle”.)
  
• We’ve rebalanced Iron (aka “old scrap”) rewards. You get less from things like the login bonus and beating M1 & 3 Brothers, and we’ve made that up via the Combat Sim rewards.
  
• There are fewer quests available per hour, but they give a LOT more XP than they used to. We’ve also made copper rewards from quests more valuable by letting you use them to craft T9s and Nanites.
  
• We’ve also made collection quests less unpredictable/subject to bad RNG. (More improvements to quests will come in updates soon.)
  
• Various minor bugfixes not worth mentioning individually.
  
• Ongoing server improvements.
  
• A boatload of other minor changes that I’m probably forgetting but what the heck, this blog post is long enough already!