After three years of grinding, tears, sweat, and toiling away at the Early Access rendition of Avorion, German developers Boxelware announced that the space-faring sandbox game will finally graduate from Steam’s Early Access division on March 9th, 2020.

We’ve been covering Avorion since it’s days back on Steam Greenlight, and even did an interview with Boxelware back in 2015 to discuss the game’s permadeath feature, procedural damage for the space ships, and the ability to command capital ships.

In late January of 2017 the developers finally launched Avorion into Early Access on Steam and never looked back. They’ve been steadily updating and improving the game over the last three years, even though they had originally scheduled to only keep Avorion in Early Access for up to 12 months.

Well, the time has finally come for the team to move the game into the big leagues and out of Early Access come March 9th.

As you can see in the trailer, you start off as a simple drone with a mining laser. You’ll need to earn resources by gathering ore from nearby asteroids. You’ll need to use the resources you gather to upgrade and customize your ship using voxels, not unlike the way you can customize your ship in Space Engineers.

Once you manage to build a decent sized vessel you’ll need to explore the solar system where you’ll encounter other procedurally generated ships and space stations. You’ll be able to mine bigger asteroids as you upgrade your ship, and unlock more powerful weapons you can use to take on space bandits, pirates, and outlaw outposts.

Again, much like Space Engineers you can utilize physics based velocity and mass to crush, cripple, and even destroy other space craft and outposts…. assuming your ship is big enough.

As you continue to level up you can recruit squadrons, steal resources, sell resources, interact with other players, battle other players, or team up with other players and become space pirates. The emergent player economy also seems to borrow a bit from CCP’s EVE Online, where players can manipulate and grow the economy or shrink it based on their actions.

Avorion is also one of the rare new-gen games that not only supports online multiplayer but also LAN play as well.

If you’re more interested in story-oriented gameplay, there’s even a campaign mode for single-player enthusiasts where you must overcome a tyrannical alien race and the space boundary they setup around the galaxy’s core. You can even download new ships and assets using the Steam Workshop support.

You can learn more about Avorion or wishlist the game by visiting the Steam store page. Alternatively you can wait for it to graduate from Early Access and then pick up a digital copy.

(Main image courtesy of Commander Aramix)