Avorion News

We improved the economy so that factories create a perceptible supply and demand. This supply and demand is regional and will directly influence the prices of goods. High demand -> high prices and vice versa. Most importantly: You can influence this by founding or destroying factories, so go nuts! Very high demand lets prices rise up to 130% of their base price, while high supply can make them go as low as 70%. Combined with other factors such as reputation or current factory stock, prices can range between ~50% and ~150%, giving you a potential 100% revenue.

IMPORTANT: This affects existing saves! The galaxy generation algorithms have changed and sectors visited BEFORE the update still have the factories of the old algorithms. This means that the supply/demand prediction will mismatch around those sectors. You can fix this easily by simply visiting those sectors. Their factories will be updated into the galactic trade network and supply/demand prediction around them will correct itself.
Although, if you've been thinking about starting a new playthrough anyways, now would be a good time.


With 'Exotic' and 'Legendary' type Trading System Upgrades you can now view above supply and demand fields on the galaxy map for every single trading good. This is a massive help when finding your own trading routes, since you can now see where to go to buy cheap and sell high!


In order to make the above changes happen, we had to do some major restructuring of the procedural generation algorithms. We are now able to reliably predict most of the content of a sector, without having to generate it (thus saving a lot of performance). This is probably mostly important for modders, but it's going to help us a lot with development in the future. Yay!


A feature that we have wanted for a long time and that basically came for free with the above changes are buyable faction territory maps. You can now buy different maps of a faction's territory, making it easier to find the perfect gate route or trade route.

Consumer stations such as habitats, casinos and biotopes (also: mines, shipyards, repair docks, etc) now behave a little differently. Previously, they just bought goods and used them up to create an end point for goods in the economy tree. Since all they do is buy and essentially destroy goods, players would not get any advantage by founding those stations themselves. In order to remedy this, we allowed those stations to "buy" goods for free, so that players can just pick up those goods every once in a while. This led to a few economical issues and made those consumer stations massively overpowered (imagine getting regular free deliveries of 50 body armors or mining robots).
We changed the behavior in this update. Players now have to pay for the goods bought by consumer stations (if they're configured to buy goods). But when the population of the station uses up the good, they buy them from players first, for a 5% increased price than what the player paid for them. This nets the player a long-term 5% profit from all goods bought by their consumer stations.


We're changing the difficulty settings. We got a lot of feedback telling us that the game is too easy, and we saw that the current 'Insane' difficulty is actually more of an 'Expert' mode. At the same time we had a few difficulties that seemed arbitrary. The 'Insane' difficulty that you've known until now is now 'Expert'. 'Veteran' got quite a bit harder, and 'Normal' and below difficulties remain almost unchanged. We've added a 'Hardcore' Mode and 'Insane' is now 'Hardcore' with additionally ramped up damage.

Some of these changes aren't final yet, but so far they performed well on the beta branch, so we're setting them live for everyone now and will be listening closely for your feedback. We're planning a few more improvements to difficulties, such as bigger, badder and more specialized enemies. Sadly those changes didn't fit into this update, but you can expect them in one of the next updates!

• [UBR] Fixed an issue with Trading Posts where prices would fluctuate between it and Trading System Upgrade
• [UBR] Player stations' prices are no longer influenced by relations to other buying/selling factions
• [UBR] Fixed warning message about missing Reconstruction Tokens when on Hardcore or higher difficulty

There are several other changes that are being introduced with this update, like an improved factory configuration UI, stackable upgrades, less random loot drops and more. You can check out the full patch notes here:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/445220/announcements/detail/1618410615047152560
https://steamcommunity.com/games/445220/announcements/detail/1618410615065638352
https://steamcommunity.com/games/445220/announcements/detail/1699475956774070125
https://steamcommunity.com/games/445220/announcements/detail/1699475956795465518
https://steamcommunity.com/games/445220/announcements/detail/1710735679732186793

Beta Branch Note: These changes are currently available on the beta branch. The beta branch is for testing experimental changes and for finding and fixing errors.

This is how you get access to the beta branch (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK):
Right-Click on Avorion in your Steam list, Properties -> Betas -> Select branch 'beta'.

• Increased amount of goods used up per tick in consumer stations
• Using up of goods now happens every 2 minutes and is no longer dependent on RNG
• Player owned Consumers by default now don't buy, until they're told to

• Added a button to Consumer where buying can be toggled on/off

• Fixed an issue in turret factory supplier related to using up of goods
• Fixed trading manager UI not getting updated correctly on buy/sell

The Steam Autumn Sale is coming to an end and with that the chance to nominate Avorion for an award.

It would be a tremendous honor if you could head over to the Steam Awards and nominate Avorion for Labor of Love!

Thank you very much and keep having fun with Avorion!

Beta Branch Note: These changes are currently available on the beta branch. The beta branch is for testing experimental changes and for finding and fixing errors.

This is how you get access to the beta branch (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK):
Right-Click on Avorion in your Steam list, Properties -> Betas -> Select branch 'beta'.

"We reworked the behavior of consumer stations. Consumer stations include Habitats, Casinos, Biotopes, Military Outposts, Shipyards, Equipment Docks, and some more. Those stations buy goods and use them up, making them an important economic final sink for trading goods. Those stations use up (read: destroy) goods continuously, so at first we thought it would be unfair to have players pay for the goods delivered to those stations. But this led to valuable goods being delivered to player stations for free, giving players a lot of free money as they can just pick them up from their stations. We've now come up with a different system where those stations no longer get goods for free and still use them up, but without giving players a disadvantage."

• Consumer Stations (ie. Habitats, Casinos, Repair Docks, Research Stations, etc.) must now buy goods instead of getting them for free
• The population on consumer stations buys the goods from the player before using them up
  • The population pays 105% of the buy price, netting the player a 5% profit
• Removed transaction tax from player owned Trading Post
• Player Trading Post buys and sells goods regularly, instead of getting/selling them for free and giving players a transaction tax

"We did a necessary compiler update on linux - this is mostly relevant to linux server hosters that use older systems like Ubuntu 14.04 and the like. This may lead to errors with missing libraries, please see the instructions on how to fix the problem on your system if you can't run an upgrade."

• Changed compiler from gcc 4.8 to gcc 5
  • This may lead to issues with missing libraries older linux systems. Please refer to this manual on how to fix it:
  • https://wiki.avorion.net/Setting_up_a_server#Ubuntu_14.04

• Added a display for how many inventory slots are occupied

• [UBR] Fixed a crash in multi-line text boxes when moving cursor to the left

Beta Branch Note: These changes are currently available on the beta branch. The beta branch is for testing experimental changes and for finding and fixing errors.

This is how you get access to the beta branch (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK):
Right-Click on Avorion in your Steam list, Properties -> Betas -> Select branch 'beta'.

• Added 'wasRepaired' flag to onBlocksAdded callback, in front of the variable argument list 'blockIndices'
  

• [UBR] Fixed an issue where transform, match block and shape shortcut keys could get stuck
  
• [UBR] Fixed an issue where block-by-block repairs were terminated after the first block
  
• Fixed a server hang related to multithreading
  
• Fixed an issue in trading overview
  
• Fixed an issue with spawning of head hunters while not in a ship
  
• Fixed an issue with stolen cargo warning while not in a ship