Video Game / Avorion

The universe is waiting since 0.15.

Avorion is a 4X Space Game based on ships made from blocks and procedurally generated factions and universe. You can mine asteroids, making ships out of them, and explore a thriving universe in search of the Galactic Core. Standing in your way however are hostile Starfish Aliens named the Xsotan. And progress-impeding subspace rifts.

This game is developed by a team of three led by a Konstantin 'koonschi' Kronfeldner, and has been available on PC through Steam Early Access since January 23rd, 2017.

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Avorion contains examples of these tropes:

• After the End: The game begins after a cataclysm which triggered an alien invasion that made people flee the Galactic Core. The player begins 450 sectors or so away from the Core and the game's "difficulty" "increases" towards the center.
• Alliance Meter:
  • Gaining the good graces of a faction will allow you access to more services, from a discount on Gate travel to being able to buy better equipment from their stations.
  • Averted in the case of factions such as Pirates, which will always have the worst possible relations with you. Interestingly, Xsotan will always stay at a "Neutral" value: reflecting the fact that they are not hostile towards you until you use any turrets.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Pirates and Xsotan will attack everything that isn't them. Pirates will even attack other pirate factions.
• April Fools: With a giant cube in place of a fish
• Arbitrary Weapon Range: All weapons. Especially so for Torpedoes, which suddenly disappear, which is very confusing if one is going towards the camera.
• Armor Is Useless: Averted. Armor is the best block in the game to make hull from, instead of hull blocks, as it has a better mass-to-health ratio and needs less crew to maintain. However, it can only be made from certain materials, unlike hull blocks, which can be made from everything.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • The AI's fight model is pretty simple, but has problems overestimating their ships' ability to brake. But it's going better over the development cycle: ships crashing into asteroids and each other are less frequent.
  • Now ships crash less into asteroids, but have problems muscling through dense enough asteroid fields to mine them, and they don't register damage done to what they're mining/salvaging so they can get stuck just beyond the edge of their weapons range while they are technically in range.
• Asteroids Monster: When the "The AI"'s blocks crumble, parts that can still make a ship get new weapons and becomes a new ship, which causes the boss's damage ability to rocket exponentially.
• Asteroid Thicket: Most non-empty sectors have more or less big asteroid fields, which can number up to six thousand and even more.
• The Battlestar: As turret systems and hangars are not mutually exclusive, most carriers end up as this.
• Bigger Is Better: One of the main constants of the game. Bigger means more upgrade module slots, up to 15, therefore more turrets to defend against ships and especially torpedoes, and usually more health.
• Boring, but Practical: The current metagame to make ships with is the good old cube.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Towards the center of the galaxy, you may rarely encounter an enemy with a "Hardcore" prefix, which has health and shield values in the hundreds of thousands, and likewise several thousand Omicron (DPS).
• Breakable Weapons: Inverted in Creative Mode, where destroying a turret used to give you two back (before a recent patch caused turret amounts to be "infinite").
• Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": Damage per second is called Omicron. Lampshaded by a loading screen tip, saying that "damage per second" is what earthlings would call it.
• Collision Damage: Avorion has realistic collision damage, meaning most collisions are very damaging, especially with asteroids as they are made of rock, which is much denser than hull and armor. You can turn collision damage off or on quarter by quarter alongside the difficulty level. However, as better materials are found and collision damage stay the same, collisions become less of an issue later in the game. See Early Game Hell.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • There is Color-Coded Item Tiers: Petty(grey), Common(white), Uncommon(green), Rare(blue), Exceptional(yellow), Exotic(a very red orange) and Legendary(purple).
  • These tiers coincide with the different materials blocks can be made of: Iron(beige), Titanium(white), Naonite(green), Trinium(blue), Xanion(yellow), Ogonite(orange) and Avorion(red)
• Cool Starship: Of course, since it's a voxel game where lore or less any kind of ship can be made, players have made wonderful creations! Avorion integrates an interface to the Steam Workshop to publish and download ships.
• Derelict Graveyard: Invoked by Scrapyards, which will always have a massive amount of wrecked ships in their system for you to salvage. The catch being, you must pay for a (timed) license to be able to salvage the wrecks without incurring the ire of the local faction.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • If a faction has a capital that ended up being replaced by a hyperspace rift during world generation, when asking a civilian ship of that faction about where their capital is, they will say that they "don't want to talk about it" and that the coordinates of their capital are no more.
  • If you already have high enough relations with a faction, you won't need to convince them to send ships to fight the Xsotan Wormhole Guardian they'll agree from the get-go, as you're already their ally.
• Difficulty Levels: There are seven difficulty levels: Beginner, Easy, Medium, Veteran, Expert, Hardcore and Insane, which scale the amount of damage all ships that aren't ships currently piloted by players do. On Expert the NPC do as much damage as the player(s), and in the latter enemy ships and weapons start becoming really big.
• Early Game Hell:
  • Build mode does not pause the action (in multiplayer), and apart from rare "neutral" sectors, hostile Pirates can spawn anywhere every eleven-or-so minutes, and starting sectors are very rarely neutral. It went much worse with the advent of Torpedoes which can and will intercept a fleeing drone, causing several post-spawn sad deaths. It's much better to make a Creative Mode galaxy as a "shipyard" to make ships to export to non-Creative galaxies.
  • Also, most of the beginning sectors' resources are Iron, the densest material, which cannot be made into Energy Generators, forcing the player to either find the rare Titanium asteroids to power their dampeners, or add a lot of (very inefficient) Solar Panels.
  • Since 1.0, also subverted as it became Late Game Hell, a la Terraria since as one destroys the final boss (and maybe even before), Xsotan invasions start happening...
• Made of Explodium: The true main point of the game. Most blocks explode! Explosions are exciting! Needs more explosions!
• Enemy Summoner: The aptly-named Xsotan Summoners which start appearing as the player breaches the Barrier.
• Game Mod: Most of the game content is made out of free-to-edit Lua scripts. But some things happening in-engine are inaccessible. Of course it's one of the game's objectives to make all of the mechanics accessible to modders.
  • Now with Steam Workshop mods!
• Gatling Good: The most primitive and first military turret type you'll see is Chainguns. They fall squarely into Boring, but Practical territory, firing at a relatively short range, but all the time (compared to most other weapons who need to cool down).
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Station building. Finding what supply and demand is in a sector gets harder and harder with each economy update... until 0.29 came with (mappable!) supply and demand ratios, trading system upgraded behavior and per-good station buy/sell behavior.
  • Ship building. There is no fixed scale, so most new players make nice-looking ships which are in fact way too small and weak. And even experienced ones will have problems approaching the right equilibrium between the different ship systems.
    • Especially, making a ship that can jump through hyperspace without having energy problems, since no interface element shows how much energy her core will use after jumping and the formula's secret, until, of course, comparing energy usage before and after a jump. Patch 0.20 also increased said energy usage, so so even ships that ''were'' jumping nicely may have problems...
    • So it's actually simpler to make bigger ships as some of the problem are linear while the power curve is exponential because of the Square-Cube Law.
• Healing Shiv: There are repair guns, either repairing hull, shield or both.
  • Horde of Alien Locusts: The Xsotan eat most things. They "infest" Avorion asteroids to make more of themselves and it is rumored that Avorion is actually organic and metallic matter assembled by the Xsotan to that effect.
• Hyperspeed Escape: Hyperspace jumping is instant, as long as the ship looks the right way, isn't jammed, and has a destination that the navigation computer has calculated.
• The Little Detecto: The C43 Object Detector module. It's not very useful as ore asteroids glow brightly and other things are either easily findable... or not interesting enough (like Secret Stashes and Reclaimable Derelict Ships). However, it can find claimable large asteroids (which can either have a mine founded on, or sold to a nearby faction for relations and a few hundred thousand credits), which can be hard to spot amidst all the other asteroids and with a high enough tier module they'll be highlighted throughout the entire sector.
• Living Ship: The Xsotan. Despite looking like alien ships, they are actually lifeforms made of organic and metallic matter behaving like animals.
• Lost Colony: Inverted: The advanced civilization within the center of the galaxy was trapped behind the Barrier during The Event, losing contact with the rest of the galaxy. This trope comes into play when some factions are split between being both inside and outside of the Barrier (although they still count as only one faction).
• Mega-Maw Maneuver: When mining too hungrily, you can and probably will charge the asteroid with your Mining Drone, sculpting a maw on the asteroid with its laser, then getting bitten by crashing inside.
• Mile-Long Ship: Very possible. In fact, at high enough difficulty levels, the player will have to make one (unless they do a balanced squad of smaller vessels to spite the trope)!
• Non-Indicative Difficulty: Difficulty levels change the amount of damage that NPC ships do, with Beginner having them deal very little and Insane having them deal huge amounts. However, all NPC ships are affected by this, so player-made NPC ships are also nerfed at low difficulties. This causes very long battles in earlier difficulties (at "Beginner", NPC do 40 times less damage...).
• Noodle Incident: The Event, which was centuries ago by the time the game starts, ripped apart the very fabric of space, creating numerous hyperspace rifts throughout the galaxy, most importantly creating the Barrier which encompasses the entire center of the galaxy.
• Not Completely Useless: Iron, the lowest material, used to be this. It's heavier and more fragile than all the other materials, but the only one that can be made into Inertial Dampeners (automatic space brakes) besides Avorion''. But then a patch made thrusters also cause passive deceleration.
• Old-School Dogfight: Defied, until the moment you get into Trinium and its hangars, which launch Fighters which more or less dogfight as they're really tiny.
• One-Word Title
• Oxygen Meter: Lacking. There's only an alarm if Life Support stopped working (due to crippling energy problems or careless energy prioritization). Beware sudden crew losses!
• Randomly Generated Loot: Turrets and ship upgrade modules have randomly-generated stats (and appearances for turrets). Some of them are better than others: you may encounter common turrets of a give material and tech level that'll be better than exceptionals of the same material and techlevel. There are Turret Factories that can churn out turrets of a given rarity and type, and those are also generated with a fixed random seed proper to the factory.
• Recoil Boost: Most projectile weapons have recoil but Cannons have it the most.
• Robot Buddy: The player may be one, as you begin as a tiny and vulnerable Mining Drone.
• Rogue Drone: Inverted with the "The AI" boss. It just follows its programming of "Destroy all Xsotan things". Big Brother plays it straight, being originally created by the civilizations within the Barrier to fight the Xsotan, but ended up being subverted by them. "5468 6520 4149" averts it entirely, being seemingly built by the Xsotan to begin with.
• Sequence Breaking: Merchants generated with "random loot" such as those that spawn under attack by pirates or those in passing fleets can spawn with any kind of cargo item, including Avorion Scrap and Ore. Avorion Hyperspace Cores can make the ship jump through rifts, bypassing the eight necessary quests to open a gate through the Barrier.
• Solar Sail: There is a Solar Panel block which makes energy relative to it's surface, so they used to make great sails. Until their HP got nerfed that is. They can also be very good as radiators as there is no recognition of block or sun exposition and can be crammed inside a ship with no negative consequences.
• Space Fighter: Once gotten into the Trinium tier, the player can make Hangar blocks out of it, allowing the deployment of various fighters made from any turret type, including military turrets, but also civilian mining lasers, salvage lasers, force turrets and repair turrets. There are also Cargo Shuttles, made from no turret at all.
• Space Friction: A very minute amount, which is then demultiplied by Inertial Dampener blocks.
• Space Pirates: Of many flavors. There are "usual" Pirate factions that randomly attack sectors and are at permanent war towards the player. There are also Pirate factions that function in ordinary normal faction way, and their variants the Syndicates, which also begin hateful or abhorrent towards the player.
  • As per 0.29, it's impossible to become friendly with them since there is no way of stopping the permanent war.
• Stupidity Is the Only Option: The only way to make yourself immune to the M.A.D. Science Mobile Energy Lab's overcharged lightning turrets is to coat your ship in stone, which makes it very difficult to manuver. Lampshaded by some of the research logs you find while investing M.A.D. Research Satellites:
  Research Satellite: Research Status: lightning weapons are still unable to penetrate stone. Fortunately, nobody builds their ships out of stone.
• Tactical Suicide Boss: The "The AI" has invincible shields when not attacking, but "reroutes energy from shields to weapons" when it detects a Xsotan Artifact on the player's ship.
• Teleport Spam: Quantum Xsotan ships teleport a short distance whenever they are hit. Fidget does the same, except they can teleport a far greater distance.
• Too Fast to Stop: There is a Module that reduces energy production and increases the ship's Maximum Velocity to a arbitrarily high value, so she can accelerate indefinitely. This trope is what will usually happen after installing. Also, it will also happen with ships with very few or no Inertial Dampener volume and low rotation speed.
• Unnecessarily Large Vessel: Averted. All blocks need Engineers and/or Mechanics to maintain, so huge ships need a lot of crew.
• Unobtainium: For those living outside of The Barrier, Avorion is this. Ogonite, while being largely found inside of it as well, can be found rarely the regions directly outside of it.
• The Unpronounceable: Randomly-generated faction and ship names. The funniest part is, some factions have prefixes and suffixes like "The United States of X" or "The Coalition of X".
• Unstable Equilibrium: Like most Wide Open Sandboxes, when the player gets loads of resources (enough materials to make a huge ship, enough credits to make several stations), she'll tend to get more and more (with said huge ship cleaning sectors with no competition and said stations producing and selling goods). Conversely the player can get stuck punched around by Persecutors (and now Bounty Hunters and faction-warring pirates) if they gets in a tight spot near enough for them to spawn.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: Tries to be one. There is sure plenty of space in the million of sectors the galaxy is made of. Most sectors are empty, some have factions visible by normal scan, and some have other things and are only highlighted by deep scan.
• Worthless Yellow Rocks: Naonite. Awesome once player finds it as they can make shield generators with them, basically doubling (or more) the health of their ships. The next material, Trinium, surpasses it in every regard, can be made into armor unlike Naonite, and is arguably ''the most'' practical material due to its lightness, turning poor Naonite into the material the player uses to mask the fact that Trinium is so useful players usually use it for everything. Then the next material, Xanion, has the same gimmick of "technological material" as Naonite, making it useless in both practice and theory.

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