Posted June 04, 2018
high rated
Hello everyone - developer here! With such a large influx of new players experiencing Xenonauts for the first time, I thought I'd post this up to highlight the extra free content available for the game that has been made by the community!
The two things I'm going to mention are the semi-official Xenonauts: Community Edition patch and the mod X-Division, which adds a LOT of content ot the game.
Xenonauts: Community Edition ("X:CE")
So, what is X:CE? Shortly after we finished development on Xenonauts and released it, we made the source code of the game available to a group of professional coders within the community who wanted to continue to update and improve Xenonauts. Over the past few years they've made a lot of improvements to the base game with regards to usability and stability, and have also included two of the more popular mods into X:CE (more maps and "lore" research projects).
Whilst X:CE is arguably a superior gameplay experience to vanilla Xenonauts, I recommend people play vanilla Xenonauts for their first campaign but then switch to X:CE for all future campaigns. The only issue with X:CE is that this extra mod content has been made by modders rather than the official development team. The quality is generally fairly high and follows the style of the original game quite closely - but it's not strictly canon. Playing at least one game with the vanilla content should give you some sense of what content is official and what is has been produced by modders!
A summary of the changes made in X:CE can be found here. The files for non-Steam users can be downloaded here (you'll have to manually install it, but that's not too hard).
X-Division:
There are lots of mods for Xenonauts, and there's several mods that are major overhauls of the game that add significant amounts of extra content. Currently the best-known conversion mod is probably X-Division (although there are others out there), which I guess could loosely be described as the Xenonauts equivalent of the Long War mod for XCOM.
You can read about it in the mod release thread, but it involves a LOT more of everything. I certainly wouldn't recommend this as a first playthrough given it's meant to be significantly harder than the normal game as well as having way more complexity, but if standard vanilla Xenonauts starts to get a bit dull then X-Division adds in 900 new research projects, 22 new aircraft, 186 new weapons, 13 new sets of armour and 9 new vehicles. If that sounds like your sort of thing then head over and check it out!
Full information on the mod can be found in the release thread here.
Please note that X-Division requires Community Edition to be installed because of the extra mod support the community coders have added in over the years!
The two things I'm going to mention are the semi-official Xenonauts: Community Edition patch and the mod X-Division, which adds a LOT of content ot the game.
Xenonauts: Community Edition ("X:CE")
So, what is X:CE? Shortly after we finished development on Xenonauts and released it, we made the source code of the game available to a group of professional coders within the community who wanted to continue to update and improve Xenonauts. Over the past few years they've made a lot of improvements to the base game with regards to usability and stability, and have also included two of the more popular mods into X:CE (more maps and "lore" research projects).
Whilst X:CE is arguably a superior gameplay experience to vanilla Xenonauts, I recommend people play vanilla Xenonauts for their first campaign but then switch to X:CE for all future campaigns. The only issue with X:CE is that this extra mod content has been made by modders rather than the official development team. The quality is generally fairly high and follows the style of the original game quite closely - but it's not strictly canon. Playing at least one game with the vanilla content should give you some sense of what content is official and what is has been produced by modders!
A summary of the changes made in X:CE can be found here. The files for non-Steam users can be downloaded here (you'll have to manually install it, but that's not too hard).
X-Division:
There are lots of mods for Xenonauts, and there's several mods that are major overhauls of the game that add significant amounts of extra content. Currently the best-known conversion mod is probably X-Division (although there are others out there), which I guess could loosely be described as the Xenonauts equivalent of the Long War mod for XCOM.
You can read about it in the mod release thread, but it involves a LOT more of everything. I certainly wouldn't recommend this as a first playthrough given it's meant to be significantly harder than the normal game as well as having way more complexity, but if standard vanilla Xenonauts starts to get a bit dull then X-Division adds in 900 new research projects, 22 new aircraft, 186 new weapons, 13 new sets of armour and 9 new vehicles. If that sounds like your sort of thing then head over and check it out!
Full information on the mod can be found in the release thread here.
Please note that X-Division requires Community Edition to be installed because of the extra mod support the community coders have added in over the years!
Post edited June 04, 2018 by ChrisEngland
