Naev is a free and open source 2D space trading and combat game — a top-down action RPG set in space, inspired by Ambrosia Software’s classic Escape Velocity series. You start with a single ship, a little cash and no obligations, then make your own way across a galaxy of more than a thousand planets, moons and stations by trading cargo, running missions, and fighting when that pays better than talking.

Flight is real-time and semi-Newtonian: your ship keeps its momentum, so you navigate by burning in the direction you want to travel rather than simply flying where the nose points. Around that core sits a deep simulation — many ships with different mass, armour, cargo space and slot layouts, an outfit system for building each one out, multiple factions that react to your reputation, and a large hand-written story with branching missions plus an in-game wiki explaining the mechanics and the lore.

The engine is written in C and Rust, with missions, events and whole plugin campaigns scripted in Lua against a documented API. A built-in plugin manager installs and removes those plugins without touching the game files. Naev has been developed in the open since 2008 by the Naev DevTeam, with releases roughly yearly; 0.13.5 is the current version (June 2026).

Key Features

• A galaxy worth exploring — over a thousand planets, moons and stations, with distinct factions, ship designs and local reputations.
• Real-time semi-Newtonian flight — momentum-based navigation and combat in the spirit of Escape Velocity, played with mouse and keyboard.
• Trade, missions and combat — earn credits hauling commodities, running faction missions, bounty hunting, pirating, or disabling and capturing other ships.
• Deep ship customisation — a wide range of ships to buy and pilot, each with weapon, utility and structural slots to fill with outfits and systems.
• 3D ship models, 2D gameplay — the 0.12 series rebuilt nearly every ship in 3D with lighting and tilt effects while keeping the classic top-down action.
• Built-in plugin manager — browse, install and remove community plugins from inside the game, including an experimental multiplayer plugin.
• Lua scripting for content — missions, events and plugin storylines are written in Lua, so total conversions are first-class citizens.
• No store, no account, no cost — free download from the official site or your distribution, GPL-licensed source, no monetisation and no telemetry.

Why Use Naev?

Naev is one of the few free games that treats space trading as a real simulation rather than a menu: commodity prices shift per system, your reputation is local rather than global, and a fight you cannot win can usually be avoided by running. Because the whole thing is open source and scripted in Lua, it doubles as a sandbox — you can read how the galaxy is built and then build your own. It runs on modest hardware, needs no launcher, store account or online connection, and development has been steady for close to two decades.

Use Cases

• Play a long, open-ended trading and combat campaign on a low-spec Linux, Windows or macOS machine.
• Get the Escape Velocity experience on modern hardware without buying or emulating anything.
• Write missions, factions or a full plugin campaign with the Lua API and the in-game plugin manager.
• Study a mature open source game engine written in C and Rust as a learning or contribution project.
• Run relaxed cargo runs and exploration sessions, or take on harder bounty-hunting and pirate routes when you want a fight.

Platforms

Linux · Windows · macOS. Official installers cover Windows 10 or newer, a universal macOS 11+ disk image for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, and 64-bit AppImages for Linux (glibc 2.30 or newer). Naev is also packaged as naev by Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Arch Linux, openSUSE, Fedora, Manjaro and OpenBSD.

Licence

Free and open source: the source code is released under the GNU General Public License, version 3. Contributions made after 6 January 2021, and those from a listed set of contributors, may additionally be redistributed under any later version of the GPL. Artwork and other assets carry their own licences, noted in the repository.

Website

naev.org · source code (Codeberg) · GitHub mirror

Similar in the directory

• Endless Sky — another open source 2D space trading and combat game inspired by the same Escape Velocity lineage, with a bigger map and a different feel.
• Pioneer — open source space sim that trades the arcade flight model for a realistic Newtonian one and a whole galaxy to explore.