- 0.3.2602.24 UI scaling, career mode prototype improvements - 24 February 2026
This release publishes some previously shelved work and a smaller UI improvements pass to make this possibly final build more usable. What’s included: Full DPI/UI scaling support for modern displays.Implemented more proper UIs for career prototype, showing player fleet and faction status.A career setup screen with options for generating your own universe with many options and some presets.Display settings can now be applied without restart, but not while in-game.This doesn't make the career prototype into a finished mode, but it is now more accessible and replayable.
- End of Development - 7 December 2025
It is high time for me to acknowledge that the development on Battlefleet Engineer ended already some years ago. The game will not leave Early Access. The price has been reduced accordingly. TimelineStarted: June 2012 Early Access launch: August 2017 Last update: July 2022 Total development: ~13 years (active work ended ~3 years ago)I started this when I was 23 and still learning to program with C#, having made only small games and apps before. The project spans most of my adult life - from university student to professional software developer with a decade of industry experience. What I underestimated was the total effort required to complete a game like this solo while learning. The scope also kept expanding - in hindsight, keeping it simpler with basic progression mechanics would have been more feasible.The codebase grew from initial prototypes in 2012 to 115,000 lines by 2022. Devel…
- 0.3.2207.6 Ship editing and testing improvements, merge from beta branch - 7 July 2022
This update focuses on improvements to make the ship blueprint editing and testing gameplay loop smoother. All existing changes from the beta branch are now also included in the main branch. New functionality: Added options for fleet test battle to reduce need for manually setting up a desired scenario every time. The level size, enemy fleet, and fleet deployment distance can be chosen from a new dialog. Added the existing fleet generator tool to fleet editor. Game overlay (damage, resources etc.) enabled and opacity settings are now persisted in game settings file automatically. The values are separate for sandbox battles, normal battles, fleet editor, and ship editor. Position and visibility of ship editor dialogs is now retained until the whole fleet editor screen is closed. Enabled configuration modding of shield parameters like size, energy use etc. Ship mirror tool now uses existi…
- New features in beta branch - 24 December 2021
The "development" beta branch has been updated to the current state of development, which includes few still work-in-progress but already pretty functional features. During 2021 the amount of time spent on development has been admittedly pretty low and the work has focused on the sandbox campaign mode, which is still quite far from a releasable product. New features: Added simple configuration mod support. Don't like the balance of combat or want to try something wacky, like 10x faster fire rates on all weapons? Enable mods from a launcher or create your own by editing some JSON files. Added roaming pirate fleets to campaign sandbox. Added neutral single-station "free port" factions to campaign sandbox that are a good place to sell salvaged debris and rebuild your fleet. Station battles can be now fought manually in campaign sandbox. This feature is still pretty basic, but features stat…
- Workshop content usage hotfix - 2 August 2021
Fixed an issue that prevented playing some newer challenge levels and using ship blueprints downloaded from the workshop. These would show up in the game, but e.g. trying to add such ships to a level would just fail without any error message. The root cause was that the Steam workshop item IDs for new items are now larger numbers than what a 32-bit Integer can hold, which hasn't been an issue before. New feature updates will come eventually when those are ready. The "development" beta branch will get these first if you don't mind having some bugs.
- 0.3.2004.04 Fleet generator tool and fixes - 4 April 2020
This minor update adds a handy fleet generator tool to the battle sandbox. It allows quickly adding randomly selected ships similar to the battle setup screen. The tool may get introduced to the fleet and battle editors later. Minor changes and fixes since previous patch notes: Changed large plasma projectile damage modeling to allow them pass through multiple modules but not being able to fully destroy a module with a single hit. Made large plasma projectiles cause external explosion if they hit ship exterior armor. This is intended to spread some damage to adjacent armor segments as well and generally buff these projectiles against armor. Added a plasma destroyer ship design. It is a medium size ship with large plasma turrets and shields but very light armor. Improved / changed ship peak power use statistic to include charging of shields and weapons. This makes the stat more useful an…
- 0.3.2003.10 Performance improvements - 10 March 2020
A small service update that improves performance in certain areas, allowing larger ships and fleets. Fixed a significant issue with audio objects not getting released correctly if the sound never actually started playing due to a limit of simultaneous sounds. This caused whole game audio to eventually glitch and stop with large battles, and a long hang when returning to menu from a battle. It also gradually slowed the game down. Improved performance of ship resource distribution and especially that of radiator modules. The effect is very noticeable in very large ships or platforms with up to hundreds of radiator modules. Minor optimizations in particle spawning and ship weapon control logic.
- 0.3.2002.19 Big Guns - 19 February 2020
This larger update brings a new class of weapons, changes to shields, an easier way to fly-test your ship designs, and lots of small fixes. New large modules These new 2x2 modules are beam turret, plasma turret, and shield generator. They function similarly to the existing smaller versions, but with about 10 times the raw damage output and resource usage they form a new significantly higher tier. The large plasma and large beam are intended as main weapons of large ships that can provide enough energy and cooling to reach their potential. Normal shields are not adequate to defend against these weapons, which is where the large shield comes to play. Large beam turret has slow rotation speed but can fire a perfectly accurate 4-second burst with medium range. If the firing ship and target stay still enough, the beam can drill its way through multiple modules. The large beam can be very eff…
- 0.3.1910.12 Battle Sandbox improvements - 13 October 2019
A minor update with mostly small user interface improvements in the Battle Sandbox game mode. New functionality Added options for what you can select in Command and Edit modes of the Battle Sandbox. This helps avoid accidental selection of e.g. enemy ships or missiles, asteroids. Added ability to select, manipulate and rebuild destroyed ships in Battle Sandbox edit mode. Fixes Fixed a rendering issue that was causing jagged edges e.g. on weapon beams. Fixed crash when using debug overlay in Battle Sandbox and selecting projectiles. Going to Edit mode in Battle Sandbox now releases manual control of ship. Fixed crash when using ship manual control in Battle Sandbox mode while the fleet AI is enabled. Fixed static / stuck weapon beam lights appearing in battle after it has been loaded from a Level file. This also affected entering Battle Sandbox mode from an existing battle. Moving a ship…
- 0.3.1909.19: New game mode: Battle Sandbox - 20 September 2019
One of the major design goals for Battlefleet Engineer has always been to give the player freedom and tools to make their own fun with different ship designs and battle compositions. However, a significant limitation has been that the battles need to be set up completely beforehand with the fleets, level parameters, and asteroids fixed. The new Battle Sandbox mode can be started from any ongoing battle and allows commanding ships in both fleets, adding ships and removing objects, ship and asteroid manipulation etc. - all without even having to pause the simulation! In addition, the "Command" mode of the sandbox lets you still play the battle as usual, with some additions such as being able to also fly and command the enemy ships if you want. Current features include: Add, delete, rearm, repair and rebuild ships. Teleport or drag ships, missiles and projectiles around. Move ships between…
- 0.3.1908.21 Switch to 64-bit - 21 August 2019
The game is now available as 64-bit (only). The immediate benefit from this is that the "Out of memory" crashes are now fixed. These crashes were occurring usually when starting or ending a battle, or when trying to run the game at 4k resolution. Going 64-bit required large technical changes to get rid of 32-bit only dependencies, but also means that the game no longer depends on outdated and unsupported tech. Replacing XNA with FNA The Microsoft's XNA Framework 4 has been replaced with the FNA library that is an open source reimplementation of XNA. Under the hood the game now uses SDL2, renders using OpenGL instead of DirectX, and installation of the XNA Framework redistributable is no longer needed. FNA also supports Linux and Mac, but porting Battlefleet Engineer to those platforms is not currently planned. Replacing Awesomium with CefSharp Battlefleet Engineer uses a web browser eng…
- 0.2.1906.10 First version of campaign prototype - 11 June 2019
The default branch now includes a very early version of a "survival sandbox" overworld where you have a persistent fleet in a small universe of warring factions. It only has minimal graphics and UI, but many of the intended core mechanics are there such as Newtonian fleet movement, persistent fleet damage, resource scavenging from battle debris, power struggle between AI factions, and a simple resource economy to generate fleets for you to raid. https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F30166125%2F55fcfe6a4b2287a8a92a6c08f9c9a4e84a32f566.png Please let me know what you think. It has been quite a while since last update, so I thought releasing this in the current state is better than just continuing the radio silence while making slow progress.
- 0.2.1811.3 Battle challenge workshop support, new fleet editor features - 5 November 2018
This update adds publishing of battle challenges to the Steam Workshop and some new tools for fleet editing. However, much of the work since last update has been in background functionality to support persistent fleets and other functionality needed for new game modes. Battle Challenges You can now publish your own battle challenges made in the Battle editor to the Steam Workshop and download ones made by others. The challenges can include your own ship designs for both the enemy and player fleet. Highscores are still only local for now at least. Can now subscribe to battle challenges from the workshop using the Steam client or Steam Workshop website. Can now publish your own battle challenges to the workhop from the battle challenges screen in-game. Battle challenges screen now shows a preview image of the level including level bounds, asteroids, ships and deployment areas. https://ste…
- 0.2.1808.13 Workshop publishing fixed - 13 August 2018
This is a specific bug fix update. Feature development has been going on in the area of fleet editing and persistency, but those are not ready for release yet. Apparently publishing ship blueprints to the workshop has been unreliable / broken for some time now, but since there hasn't been any direct complaints I haven't thought much of it. Fixing the issues required migrating to use a different Steam API wrapper for C# and a quite serious investigation to find a really tricky bug, but the integration should now work reliably. The publishing is now truly asynchronous as well, so the game doesn't lock up while uploading.
- 0.2.1805.25 Module drag and drop in ship editor - 25 May 2018
A small update with 2 features: Easier ship editing by simply dragging to move or duplicate modules in ship editor, ship motion traces test in debug overlay. Module dragging Simple demonstration video Selected modules can be moved at once by dragging them to desired location and dropping. Selected modules can be duplicated by dragging and holding left ctrl when releasing the drag. Modules can be dragged to disconnected positions, but the ship has to be in one piece to exit editing. Note: Active origin (core) module can't be replaced or deleted by dragging other modules over it. Core and thruster modules can be moved by dragging as well. Ship motion traces Implemented a simple test of tracing ship movement semi-persistently in debug overlay. It looks quite neat so I thought it worth mentioning. I might later make a proper implementation with better performance and visuals as a battle ove…
- 0.2.1805.16 Missile controls and synchronized move command - 17 May 2018
This update gives more control over missiles and adds synchronized movement mode for ships. Also includes some smaller fixes. Missiles New missile launch controls UI allows disabling automatic launching and lets player manually launch missiles from selected ships. Launching missiles can be queued and is automatically optimized to launch requested number of missiles as fast as possible. Missiles can now be selected and followed with camera. Missiles can be given movement command that sets their heading. Missile target can be manually set as a ship or module within a ship. A group of missiles can be given multiple targets at once. Game logic distributes the targets between the selected missiles. Enemy missiles can be now set as targets, but still only beam weapons will damage them. https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F30166125%2Fddd058dbc1e6bcaa10933d5252d4393e%25E2%2580%25A6
- 0.2.1803.03 New particle effects. - 4 March 2018
Almost all particle effects in the game have been revised to make them bigger and prettier. Most noticeable additions are explosion, flame and smoke effects that also make it very clear when a ship or module gets disabled. The number of spawned particles can be adjusted from the settings screen at any time so you can control the performance impact. Gameplay video with the new effects The game has had GPU accelerated particle systems (which can handle a lot of debris and effect particles) since before the first release but the effects have been pretty subtle. While the subtle effects were more realistic, bigger effects can greatly add to the visual appeal of the game, especially on video where details are lost in compression and scaling. Changelog New flame and smoke effect when an active (not armor or hull) module gets disabled. Redesigned explosion effect when a propellant tank module…
- 0.2.1803.03 New particle effects. - 4 March 2018
Almost all particle effects in the game have been revised to make them bigger and prettier. Most noticeable additions are explosion, flame and smoke effects that also make it very clear when a ship or module gets disabled. The number of spawned particles can be adjusted from the settings screen at any time so you can control the performance impact. Gameplay video with the new effects The game has had GPU accelerated particle systems (which can handle a lot of debris and effect particles) since before the first release but the effects have been pretty subtle. While the subtle effects were more realistic, bigger effects can greatly add to the visual appeal of the game, especially on video where details are lost in compression and scaling. Changelog New flame and smoke effect when an active (not armor or hull) module gets disabled. Redesigned explosion effect when a propellant tank module…
- Version 0.2! New damage model and game balance. Updated ship library and battle challenges. - 11 February 2018
The major damage model and game balance changes have been in the beta branch for a while. This update makes them official and contains updated battle challenges, bug fixes. See previous announcements for details about the changes. New features Armor plate simulation with per-segment damage independent from module damage Explosion simulation Armor piercing explosive projectiles that explode after penetrating Projectile passthrough, ship internal ricochets Projectile penetration, armor plate and module damage visualization Beam (weapon) penetration and passthrough, distance-based shield interaction Content changes All stock ship designs either improved or replaced with new ones Existing challenge levels updated and tweaked to take the new game balance into account 3 new challenge levels: "Canyon battle", "Obstacle race 2", "Obstacle race 3" Imrovements and fixes since the previous beta ve…
- Version 0.2! New damage model and game balance. Updated ship library and battle challenges. - 11 February 2018
The major damage model and game balance changes have been in the beta branch for a while. This update makes them official and contains updated battle challenges, bug fixes. See previous announcements for details about the changes. New features Armor plate simulation with per-segment damage independent from module damage Explosion simulation Armor piercing explosive projectiles that explode after penetrating Projectile passthrough, ship internal ricochets Projectile penetration, armor plate and module damage visualization Beam (weapon) penetration and passthrough, distance-based shield interaction Content changes All stock ship designs either improved or replaced with new ones Existing challenge levels updated and tweaked to take the new game balance into account 3 new challenge levels: "Canyon battle", "Obstacle race 2", "Obstacle race 3" Imrovements and fixes since the previous beta ve…
