Naev 0.13.0-beta.1

BY NAEV DEVTEAM, ON NOVEMBER 23RD, 2025

This cycle, the beta arrives with some massive underlying technology changes and a lot of new gameplay and content. This release marks the first step into Naev’s next era with Rust-powered internals and the debut of our fully integrated plugin manager.

You should be able to continue old 0.10.0+ saves, but due to the scale of changes (especially engine-side), starting a new fresh save will give the smoothest experience. For saves older than 0.10.0, please load the save once with 0.12.6 before loading it with newer versions.

What’s new?

1. Engine migration begins: Rust + SDL3: The engine now uses SDL3 and the port to the Rust programming language has started, improving stability and paving the way for major future upgrades.

2. Integrated Plugin Manager: Naev now includes a native plugin browser, installer, and updater, all with access to the online plugin repository built right in.

3. Major content additions:
   • 28 new missions and events
   • New intertwined Imperial minor houses
   • New systems, anomalies, portraits, objects, and more
   • 20+ new songs
   • New and reworked outfits
   • 11 new ship variants

4. Significant gameplay tweaks: Heat mechanism removed, pirates are less dangerous to new players, camera is truly isometric, improved forward weapon aiming for the player, and core outfits have been reworked to use a 1 or 2-slot system.

5. Lots of fixes, balance work, and internal cleanup: From physics touch-ups to mission fixes, weapon tweaks, save robustness, and API consistency, a lot has been improved in this release.

As usual, the beta may contain bugs, weirdness, or things that go “pop” in the darkness of space. Please try it out, break things, and tell us what happened so we can fix it before the 0.13.0 final release.

You can get the new version from any of the sources below:

Remember that you have to opt-in to the beta with steam.

Full Changelog

Gameplay

• Removed heat mechanic (to be re-added as a new mechanic in the future)
• Made pirates less dangerous to new players
  • Marauders are now intrinsically weaker than other pirates, especially with low pirate presence
  • Made pirates less aggressive
  • Change pirate spawning to be mainly marauders in low presence areas
• Fuel from outfits has been tweaked a bit
• NPCs now have skill levels that can affect their targeting and fighting ability
• Bioships have had their skills and modifiers slightly reworked to be better balanced
• Light, medium-heavy and ultraheavy ship now have two core hull/systems/engine slots, one main and one secondary
  • Effects of heavier cores can be obtained by stacking smaller ones
• Engines have been reworked to be more coherent and consistent
  • Tricon engines have much higher acceleration to max speed ratio
  • Melendez engines have higher speed, but low acceleration and turn
  • More consistency across lines
• Gauntlet intrinsics are stronger and now mutually exclusive
• Intrinsics from a certain trader are now stronger
• Ships now disabled below a certain armour threshold regardless of stress
• AI is less susceptible to stealth bomber cheese
• Point defence now shoots at all ships prioritizing smaller ones after missiles
• Cargo delivery missions have increased cargo amounts
• Minimum stealth range also affects detection and signature
• Ships can have a minimum cargo-less mass of 50% of the ship base mass
• Damage over time effects now can cause faction loss and other effects
• New harder difficulty
• Gauntlet negative bonuses are now multiplicative
• Stealthing will temporarily jam locked on munitions
• Changed forward weapon aiming algorithm for the player so it is easier to shoot small ships with skill
• Reflective shell now shoots thorns

Quality of Life

• Plugin manager built directly into Naev
  • Access to the online plugin repository
  • Can easily add or remove plugins from local or online sources
• Autonav improvements
  • Can automatically land when following a ship
  • Improved autonav behaviour when losing a followed ship
  • Disables afterburner when getting ready to land or jump
  • Shooting non-point defence weapons resets autonav speed up
• Combat and ambient music tries to play from where it was last stopped when applicable
• Gave small untargetable time to player when using hypergates and wormholes
• Ships that are scanning you use a different colour highlight
• Landable but uninhabited space objects use a different icon
• Deployed fighter equipment is no longer random
• Added support for multiple automatic backups with 5 by default
• Game will prompt if exiting the game when save data loss can occur
• Escort mission revamp
  • Escorts now follow the player
  • Autonav will warn the player if jumping or landing will fail the mission
  • Autonav will wait for escorts when landing or taking off
• Radar now has a linear area and a logarithmic area (outside the circle) to show more regional information
• Support for automatically restarting Naev when changing options that require it

Contents

• 28 new missions and events
  • Go treasure hunting
• 27 new outfits and reworked cores
  • Outfit sets that gain bonuses as more elements of the set are equipped
• 11 new ship variants
• New sensor anomalies
• Two new intertwined minor houses of the Empire with new systems and lore
• More space objects with new things to explore
• New portraits
• Over 20 new songs
  • More variation in landing and situational music
• Significant changes in jumps (hidden and otherwise)
• Reworked the visuals for some weapons using shaders
• Start to more strictly enforce Oxford spelling
• Racing reward system reworked
• Reworked escort missions so that escorts follow the player and improved how it interacts with autonav

Engine

• Began porting to Rust
• Engine now uses SDL3 instead of SDL2
• Camera is isometric-ish instead of using top-view game play (can be modified by plugins)
• Engine supports modifying some important constants such as those related to the physics model for use in plugins
• Use instancing instead of geometry shaders for space dust
• Ship Lua scripting supports “onshootany” now
• Support for price_mod on tech group commodities
• Mission and Event NPC’s priority default to the priority of the parent
• Local maps can have a range parameter now
• Intrinsic outfits for ships are defined in <intrinsics> instead of <slots> now
• Systems can have waypoints that are accessible from missions
• Fixed some flickering at the end of ship trails
• Diff mode in the editor remembers filenames and diff names
• Slots can have tags
• Outfits can fit an additional slot property
• Support for hiding dynamic ship stats from outfits in the equipment support
• Outfits support inline Lua definitions
• Can override long class names of spobs
• Changed how ship statistics are computed: those from same source will be additive, while different sources will be multiplicative
• New ship stats and changes
  • Weapon speed with variants for cannons and turrets
  • Minimum Stealth Range
  • Absolute Mass
  • Absolute CPU
  • Temporary Invincibility
  • Detection Range only affects ‘Detected at:’ range
  • Ship Visibility that affects detection, signature, and stealth ranges
• Intro text is no longer hardcoded and is handled via Lua
• SVG image support
• WGSL shader support
• trigger library to handle commonly mission code
• Game will automatically try to detect extensions for image files

Fixes

• The Bite turns off afterburners
• Hiding on screen display information for missions also hides system markers
• Sensor anomalies now appear in the on-screen display
• Fixed texture interpolation when alpha is 0 for pixels
• Fixed adding commodities to space objects via tech groups
• Engine glow decay is less ridiculous on ships with really weird acceleration / speed ratios
• Only try to load missions and events with file names that end in .lua
• Action speed can no longer be negative and disables space worthiness
• Don’t show OSD frame when not visible
• Can’t stack Sirius ferry pilgrim missions anymore
• Add marker mission to help the player find wild space
• Bioships will reset their locked slots when swapping ship and loading
• jump_delay was being applied instead of jump_warmup to the engine warm up animation
• Mass modifiers now affect outfit mass too
• Ships will no longer appear tilted in the equipment view
• dv_antiflf02: Make the vigilances less pathetic
• Gauntlet properly resets outfit cooldowns
• Saves try to save outfits by slot name to be more robust to changes in the future
• Player can’t stealth while disabled
• Getting disabled turns off stealth
• Carried fighters don’t carry commodities
• darkshadow: enemies shouldn’t see through stealth
• Cryogenic Nanobots no longer restore health to 100% on completing cooldown regardless of damage taken
• Improved AI braking skills
• Game will not save in certain cases like loading the game and immediately being forced to take off by a load hook
• Improved handling of fullscreen toggling and resolution changes
• Faction ships no longer show up as “Unknown” when you first discover a faction
• Space mines in restricted systems have infinite duration
• Made Love framework ignore events that were queued before opening
• Lowered reputation gains from aiding hypergate construction sites
• Use higher resolution icon
• Lots of spelling and grammar fixes
• Translation updates