Five years in, chill exploration-crafting game Astroneer gets its first paid expansion

Sandboxy exploration and crafting game Astroneer has released its first paid expansion after five years of free releases and development. Glitchwalkers is a change of pace for Astroneer, a story and character-focused expansion that takes the varied mechanics of the old game onto a new planet with its own separate progression and save file.

"Aeoluz, a brand new planet, is our biggest and most complex to date. New biomes and challenges await any Astroneer brave or foolish enough to set foot on this uncharted world. This planet will provide much more of a challenge, as your foe has re-written the very rules of this world to stop you," says developer System Era Softworks.

Long-time Astroneer players will also dread and/or celebrate the return of a feature from Astroneer's earliest early access days: Storms! The new glitched storms aren't exactly like the old, dangerous dust storms of the Early Access period that'd blow you and all your unsecured stuff away, but they are pretty cool. They're actually in both the expansion as extra-vicious "hacked storms" and the base game as lesser "glitched storms" via a free update.

Planet Aeoluz is accessed via playing Astroneer's normal campaign for a while, until you complete the mission "A Core Concept." Once you've done that you can use the new Glitchwalkers main menu to drop down to Aeoluz.

System Era Softworks says that in addition to the release of storms there's also new unannounced and hidden content added to the base game of Astroneer. Which is pretty bonkers, honestly, because they've spent years giving this game big free content updates past the 1.0 release into Early Access from 2019. That's past the three years in Early Access!

You can find Astroneer on Steam alongside Glitchwalkers, and both are available in a bundle that's on sale for just $18 until November 27.