We’re about 24 hours from Astroneer finally making its way to Early Access and Game Preview. To say we’re excited for you to help make Astroneer an amazing video game of aerospace industry and interplanetary exploration is an understatement. The 6 of us at System Era have been eager for this moment for almost 3 years. It’s finally happening.

The first few months

We’ve been doing a lot lately to really set some expectations of the game when it first releases as a paid-alpha, but we also want to take this chance to talk about the game’s future. A lot of you have been asking about a road map for the game and we’re happy to share it with you now. Before that, however, I want to talk really quickly about what you can expect for the next following months from us.

At a high level, this list is pretty straight forward:

Address bugs and crashes to improve game stability and performance across all platforms. E.g. Client experience in multiplayer or performance drops Leverage existing game content into additional or improved gameplay and features E.g. Creative Tools Suite or Improved Crane Gameplay Develop and Communicate brand new features E.g. Dedicated servers or Narrative-focused Gameplay

1 will happen faster than 2, 2 will happen faster than 3, and so on. That’s the gist of our approach to the game’s development; Stagger the updates between stabilizing the experiences, improving the experiences, and offering brand new experiences.

The road ahead

We really want to expose you to the game’s development and our Road map is the best way to do that. Consider it a brief look into the ideas we’re excited for and the direction the game will be pushed in.

ASTRONEER ROAD MAP ON TRELLO

You’ll notice some labels attached to the cards.

Blue labels represent “Priority” tasks for us. That is say, things we’re going to be focusing on first/next.

Orange labels represent on-going tasks for us that will likely be updated in most updates we publish to the game. Things like “Bugs” and “Visual Update” on existing art content is bound to happen often.

Everything else without a label is subject to change over time, as the game grows. In other words: Just because we’ve called them out in this road map doesn’t guarantee it will be in the game. It just means it’s a feature or an idea for the game we’ve been excited for and hope to one day develop, should it still feel appropriate to do so for Astroneer.

At a high level, the features we’ve been excited about for 3 years – and the sort of things we’d shoot-the-breeze about as a team and get VERY excited for – looks like this in no particular order:

Creative Suite

Land & Space Vehicular Gameplay

Dedicated Servers/Multiplayer

Complex Encounters/Discoveries

Automation Sandbox

Complex Hazards

Customization

World Fauna

Narrative

Narrative Art Direction & Visual Design

Trade/Player Economy

Advanced Terrain Technology

Survival Mechanics (Food/Hunger)

Community

In addition to checking out our road map today we’d also love to have you join us on our brand new forum.

Like everything we do with Astroneer we hope to grow the official forums to something great. In this case a direct line between playing the game and giving feedback, reporting bugs, or any other comments you may of the game is really important to us. These forums and growing the community here are the first step towards that.

Tomorrow

Astroneer releases tomorrow and introducing the road map and the forum to you today is an important step to us to making sure we develop this game as informed as possible. To anyone who takes the time to share a story from playing the game, or a bug they came across, or a cool idea you and a friend came up with while playing: thank you. We can’t wait to make this game.

Adam

You can find Astroneer on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and Twitch. Astroneer also has its community growing on Reddit, Steam, and the Astroneer forum.