Naev TeamJul 17, 2017Free to playView on Steam ↗

Naev

Naev is a game about space exploration, trade, and combat in a large and vibrant universe. Players travel the galaxy and earn money by trading, fighting, and performing missions.

Action Free To Play Adventure RPG Indie Simulation Exploration Sci-fi

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Estimated lifetime revenue

Free-to-play

Revenue comes from in-game items and microtransactions, which our price-based model doesn't estimate. The player count below is how many people own it, not what they spent.

Est. players

11.2K

people who own it

Reviews

230

Review score

81%

8.1/10

Concurrent players

read Sep 17, 2026, 15:00 UTC

Followers

About

About the game

Naev is a game about space exploration, trade and combat. Players travel the galaxy and earn money by trading, fighting and performing missions.

Main features:

A large galaxy with hundreds of planets and moons to explore.
Real-time, semi-Newtonian gameplay reminiscent of the Escape Velocity games.
Many different ships to buy and pilot, and many ways to customize each of them.
Multiple factions, each with unique ship designs and personalities.
Open-source, meaning ultimate freedom of modding.

Currently Naev is a playable game, but it is far from being a complete one. To further mature the game, we, the developers, need you. Yes, you. All it takes is the motivation to be creative in some way! Probably the easiest way to help, as well as one of the most valuable ones, is by coming up with new stories for the game, and by shaping those stories into playable missions. Other ways to help include making art or sounds, improving gameplay via balancing work, or (if you have the ability) even a bit of coding on the main program.

A few things to keep in mind:

This game is a hobby project, not an indie development project. There is no final plan, no time frame for the "finished game".
The dev team does not accept monetary donations, only direct contributions to the game itself.
The game engine is written in Rust and C. Missions and other scripts are written in Lua.
Major releases are done roughly on a yearly basis.
There is an experimental multiplayer plugin, although it is quite limited.

Genres

More genres & tags

Player reviews (43)

Not recommended2h played6 found helpfulMar 2025

Не поддерживается русский язык

Not recommended17h played5 found helpfulDec 2024

Although the dev(s) claim that it's not a finished product etc, and while there aren't too many bugs to mention, it is unfortunately riddled with many unbalanced elements and generally involves a lot of frustration for the average player - after playing this as long as 17 hrs, I'm pretty sure i've already found enough reasons to go back to Endless Sky. Is it bad taste to mention another game in this review? i don't think so, especially given the amount of frustration at the unbalanced nature of the game, not to mention how... ummm... could i call it, obscure? lack of documentation or information etc? any informative resources for this game are either outdated or simply non-existent... And even if i were to give the benefit of doubt regarding this game, it's hard not to point out a number of 'features' that seem to be more about griefing the player than to facilitate smooth gameplay, especially when compared to numerous other games based in the same genre - an example of this would be point defense weapons versus missiles & torpedoes... on paper, the point defense weapon is supposed to target any ship, missile or torpedo entering its range; ships are hit and take damage, missiles explode if the shot hits (around 50% hit rate), while torpedoes get hit around 60% of the time but they *don't* get destroyed no matter how many hits from the point defense - so from observation, I infer that the actual hit box of all ships, missiles & torpedoes are roughly the same, about 5x5 pixels for ships, 3x3 for torpedoes and 2x2 for missiles. as before, ships take proper damage properly according to the weapon's ratings, missiles are 1-hit wonders, but torpedoes don't take any damage, none at all, i repeat, none at all (or if they did, then they need around the same amount of damage from the point defense as their power rating, roughly 400 points for a torpedo while point defense max at around 150 points over 5 seconds, clearly not enough to stop anything) so in conclusion with the example given, if your target is equiped with even one single torpedo launcher, you can write off the mission, you aren't going to have a chance because you can't even destroy the torpedo before it hits and wipes out everything