Exoplanet: First Contact

Exoplanet: First Contact has been in Early Access since December 2016 and remains there as of today. The developer, Alersteam, continues to communicate actively about progress toward a full 1.0 release. The most significant recent communication is a developer status update from August 3, 2025, in which Alersteam stated that "most of the core content is now in its final stage" and that the team has shifted into polishing, balancing, and rigorous testing. They confirmed they are "getting close" to a full release but are not yet ready to share a concrete launch date, saying they will do so "as soon as we're confident in it." The most recent build, 0.75, shipped on April 19, 2025. Its patch notes explicitly state that major quest content upgrades are in progress but not yet ready to ship — they laid groundwork for "new and updated quests coming in future builds" and introduced new NPC characters whose quest roles were described as forthcoming. This confirms unfinished content remains in the pipeline. Prior to that, Build 0.74 launched on July 2, 2024, and Build 0.73 on February 2, 2024, both delivering substantial gameplay systems, new quests, and world improvements. The two largest milestones in the game's Early Access history were "Major Update: The Edge" (October 27, 2021), which rebuilt the game nearly from scratch, and "Major Update 0.70" (November 30, 2022), the largest single content drop in the game's history, adding thirteen new quests and completing the first story arc on The Edge. The overall picture is of a small team in the final stretch of a long Early Access development cycle. The developer is actively communicating, has confirmed remaining content is still being finished, and has not yet announced a 1.0 release date. The last developer post was on August 3, 2025 — just over 14 months before today's date — which represents a longer-than-usual silence after an active update cadence, but the August 2025 post itself explicitly anticipated further updates ("We'll be back soon with more detailed updates"), making the silence consistent with the developer's own characterization of heads-down development rather than abandonment.