News6 Feb 2026Coming Soon: Steam PvP Fest 2026Every year, Valentines day is a time to be with friends and loved ones and reflect on your friendship and love. Well, not this year! In 2026, it's all about having simulated gun fights with friends and loved ones. Welcome to Steam PvP Fest 2026. There's nothing more romantic than a space marine deathmatch. You Deserve a Medal Participate in a Deathmatch skirmish in Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop du…
A minor update has been released for Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop. · Fixed a client crash in the Traitors game mode. · Added a note in the Swarmopedia about the IAF Medical SMG's increased accuracy while crouching. · Added a description for EC-02 Stun Grenades in the Swarmopedia.
Fixed black bars appearing on the sides of the screen for screen resolutions with an aspect ratio wider than 16:9. · Fixed traitor players showing as having 99 player kills in the scoreboard. · Fixed buzzers bleeding red blood on the client.
Special thanks to Dmitriy, Mithrand, jhheight, 法克尤尔马泽尔, and Grimowy for the majority of the changes in this update. New Game Mode: "Traitors!" Commander, As the human shield, the IAF has achieved great victories in countless battles against the swarm, but also suffered tremendous losses. We sincerely thank you and your squad members for your outstanding contributions in defending against the al…
Added rd_lobby_query_servers convar (default 0 until the problem with the Steam API is fixed) to disable server list queries, which are currently not being properly filtered to just Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop servers by the Steamworks API. · Note: This means that HoIAF servers are not labelled in-game currently. Progress is still tracked, and HoIAF servers can be found via the Steam Client "Gam…
It's that time of the year again. The anniversary of Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop's Steam release. As always, Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop is only possible due to contributions from community volunteers in the form of donations , code , translations , and game content . Also as always, there's a double experience bonus going on all throughout this week in-game, and if you look hard enough, you migh…
It wouldn't be an Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop anniversary update without a shipload of fixes! Missions · Jacob's Rest: Landing Bay: A crate in the welding tutorial room no longer allows bullets and grenades to pass through. · Jacob's Rest: Deima Surface Bridge: The Bloodhound no longer does friendly fire damage. · Jacob's Rest: Deima Surface Bridge: Moved the forklift and box on the bridge sligh…
It's 2025, and to start the year off we have a pile of community-requested fixes! · Commanders searching for anomalous materials together may find them quicker. · Added convar rd_chat_item_messages to opt out of messages about players obtaining items such as medals and crafting materials. (Suggested by Ax-now) · Fixed commanders who opted into phase 2 but not phase 1 not being able to see certa…
It's December, and that means it's time for the monthly update! · There's a message here, addressed to you. · M868 Flamer Unit: Adjusted friendly fire damage and duration on normal friendly fire difficulty. (Thanks, ModdedMarionette). · Hardcore friendly fire is unchanged. · Friendly fire with a flamethrower now once again ignites immediately. · Damage now scales up linearly rather than slower…
22A7-Z Prototype Assault Rifle: Removed damage falloff from alternate fire. Now does 1 damage regardless of distance for any target it hits rather than some fraction of a point of damage. · IAF Incendiary Sentry Gun: Fixed a 2010 era bug causing this sentry to consume 2.5 ammo per shot. · Fire Extinguisher: This item can now always be picked up both in the temporary slot or in a normal weapon s…
Mapping Competition 2024 Winner Downed Station by legomanas Changes in this update · Removed the cl_interp convar. The game will now act as if it was set to 0. · Improved the error message that is shown when attempting to connect to a server that hasn't updated yet. · Fixed a particle related crash due to the "emit noise" operator being broken in this engine build. · Fixed a possible crash when…
This month's update is mainly related to weapon quality of life improvements. · X-33 Damage Amplifier: Fixed a carried beacon not reliably connecting to the gun of the marine carrying it. · X-33 Damage Amplifier: rd_buff_grenade_attach_sw_auto can now be set to 2 to restore the old behavior of allowing a special weapons marine to carry multiple damage amplifiers. You can still only pick one up…
New material shader: RDCharacter This replaces the VertexLitGeneric shader and the AlienSurfaceFX and NightVisionSelfIllum material proxies for characters in Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop. For Modders · If your mod does not contain VMT files for characters, you do not need to make any changes. · If your mod's VMT files for characters start with the word "patch", you are likely already using the up…
Commander, The Office appreciates your hard work on the anomalous materials project. The folks in the lab say they'll be ready for phase 2 soon. We'll let you know when it's ready. You'll know it when you see it. Oh, and happy wrath month. Dr. Helvetica Scenario Ecological Consistency Dept. Office of Consensus Maintenance Aliens · Aliens no longer fail to deal damage when melee attacking anothe…
We've extended the deadline for submissions to the 2024 mapping competition until the end of July, so you have two extra months to make your mission. An update has been released with the following changes: Balance · Reduced the attack speed of drones that are on fire by 40%. (Or 28.6%, depending on how you do the math. It now matches their normal attack speed.) · Retrying the first mission of a…
It's Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop's 7th birthday, which means it's time for our second annual mapping competition! The theme this year is Space Station . Create a standalone mission (of any type) that takes place on a space station or other large spaceship. Here are some ideas to get you started: · A deathmatch mission with hazards that can be activated via panels scattered around the ship. · An…
It's Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop's 7th birthday, and that means a week of double experience points from missions, our second annual mapping competition, and the possibility of cake. 2023 in Review Since Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop's 6th birthday last year, the game has gained improved shaders , better weapon readability , additions to Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces including mission boun…
We've fixed a few issues reported by the community. · Fixed a crash on the main menu when hovering over the public lobby list or list of friends. · The Season 20 Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces medals were given out with the wrong numbers. These have been revoked and re-issued. · Fixed the Report a Problem text box only allowing English letters. · Fixed the Maximum Game Bandwidth settin…
Next month (April) is Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop's 7th anniversary. We're not planning on having a huge update this year because we've decided it's better to release new content as soon as it's ready instead of waiting for an arbitrary time of year. March (this month) brings with it some new menus, fixes for various problems reported by the community, and some updates to an infrequently used NP…
We've released a hotfix with the following changes: · Fixed a crash related to bounty notifications on the main menu. (hotfix went out shortly after midnight UTC on Feburary 1st) · Fixed bounty notifications duplicating the first mission in a group instead of showing all missions together in one notification. (hotfix went out shortly after midnight UTC on Feburary 1st) · Fixed low frame rate or…
This month's update includes some large changes to Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces , as well as some balance changes for the Infection Deathmatch mode and several other fixes. A note on Lag Compensation The internet doesn't transmit information instantly. Information can only travel at the speed of light, and sometimes the speed of light is just too slow. For example, if a player from F…
Starting in Season 20 (February 2024), Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces is gaining two new sources of points. Additionally, we are updating the score multipliers of nearly every mission and many challenges. What's Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces? Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces (HoIAF) is a monthly competition to complete as many difficult missions as possible on particip…
Happy new year! This month's update contains fixes for controller issues, updates to the Infection deathmatch challenge, and a few miscellaneous fixes and new features. Official Missions · BioGen Corporation: Operation X5: Fixed a door that was inadvertently classified as a ladder. · BioGen Corporation: Invisible Threat: Fixed speedrun time being incorrectly calculated. Controller · Fixed doubl…
Spectators will now see the full length laser pointer for the marine they are spectating. · Using the healing ability on a medic weapon now dims the laser pointer in the same way that firing any other gun does. · Lobbies with no ping information now sort to the bottom of the list by ping instead of the top. · Fixed the Create Lobby screen not loading the saved lobby name from the previous lobby…
Menus We're testing the new main menu layout that will be officially launching on April 20, 2024. · The main menu has been redesigned, with information about the current Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces season, recent major updates, and trending Steam Workshop addons. · To revert to the previous layout, enter the console command rd_legacy_ui 2017; host_writeconfig . This console command…
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Announcements are the developer’s own posts to the game’s Steam news feed: updates and their patch notes, in-game events, releases and sales. The important ones are marked on the players chart.