Steam News announces the availability of a new patch for Natural Selection 2 to update Unknown Worlds' newly released action/strategy sequel with a number of balance changes and bug fixes, which are detailed below:

Balance

• Evolving Onos eggs now requires three Hives instead of two. Onos eggs are a complex matter, and are a work in progress!
• Reduced Onos armor by 100 (-8%, effectiveness vs. Exos and heavy weapons impacted less because armor).
• Welder research time increased from 10 to 15.
• Exo armor changed from to 300/390/480/570 to 400/460/520/580.
• Welder rate reduced from 125/sec to 90/sec.
• Reduced shadow step cost from 15 to 10.
• Increased blink momentum to be close to build 220.
• Increase start blink energy cost from 8 to 12.
• Shift Hatch now creates 2 eggs, but costs 5 resources and has a 5 second cool down (was 1 tres per egg, no cooldown).
• Increased trait structure (Shell, Spur, Veil) mature health by ~20%. Also increased their base health to be closer to their previous mature health.
• Reduced spore research time from 90 to 60.
• Hive build time increased from 150 seconds to 180 seconds.
• Reduced Onos Gore range by 0.5 meters.
• Added cooldown to shift hatch ability.
• Lowered max healing on Crag.
• Added minimum healing from Hives.
• Changed combat timeout to 4 seconds.
• Reduced mega regeneration (max regeneration is now 10 per second instead of 120).
• Doubled ARC rate of fire (halved damage)

Fix

• Fixed bug where the server would leak memory under some circumstances.
• The ghost Power Node no longer takes damage, fixes a problem where the Power Node could not be rebuilt after being destroyed in some cases.
• Fixed rare bug where a Hive could become invulnerable if it was killed in the same frame as it finishes building.
• Fixed sound bug causing ambient sounds in the world to not play correctly.
• Fixed unbuilt shifts being able to generate eggs.
• Fixed Exo and Mine tooltips.
• Fixed regeneration effect showing up in combat.
• Fixed the "filter modded servers" option not always working correctly in the server browser.
• Fixed ARC targeting issues.
• Fixed already recycled units still taking damage.
• Added protection against speed hacking.

Improvement

• Added more loading screen tooltips.
• Added a display to the server browser to show the number of servers in the list.

Sdk

• Added the ability to specify "passes" for build rules in the Builder to setup simple dependency relationships.
• Added SoundEffectInstance:SetCoords() function.