Xenonauts 2 hits 1.0 after almost three years of early access and paves the way for mods galore

“The year is 2009,” opens the 1.0 launch trailer for Xenonauts 2, a sentence that tickles me greatly considering the game’s alternate future vibes. It presents a vision of the world that differed greatly from my actual experience of worrying about swine flu and whether or not Yu-Gi-Oh! was cool any more. And yet that is the reality of the turn-based tactics game, which exits out of early access almost three years after its initial release.

Xenonauts 2, for the uninitiated, imagines a world where aliens have invaded and you are in charge of a multinational military group that has to take them down. The name of the game is just as much about research as it is turn-based combat. You’ll send out your troops on various missions, hoping to learn more about your extraterrestrial foes by collecting samples and seeing how they fight.

The 1.0 release comes with some notable editions, too. For one, the farm tactical maps have had a big rework, and a couple of new scout UFO maps have been added to each biome. A bevy of art has been updated, including various bits of background art, with improvements the the top-down interceptor art on the aircraft screen meaning you can see any changes you make to your loadout live. The game should play a bit better now as well, with faster loading times, reduced strategy UI sluggishness, and enemy AI should make their decisions faster.

You can expect mods to work now too! “This update contains the last of the technical work required for making mods work, including the ability to edit texture files using code mods and in-game UI for managing mods and uploading / deleting mods to Steam Workshop,” developer Goldhawk Interactive explain in this Steam blog post. “Although the general-purpose mod editor tools are not yet complete, experienced modders who are familiar with Harmony code modding should now theoretically have everything they need to be able to create and distribute mods.”

Said blog post also has a laundry list of tweaks, fixes, and changes that would take the rest of your evening to read here, so do it there instead. If you’ve been putting off checking out Xenonauts 2 until release, now’s a great time to check it out, as it’s also discounted until the middle of the month. You can pick it up on Steam right here.