New Frontiers Expansion
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1648532/Icarus_New_Frontiers/Icarus: First Cohort dropped prospectors into safe Earth-like terraformed zones. Icarus: New Frontiers will take you deep into new regions of Icarus where alien creatures and habitats survived but were altered by the terraforming process.
You may need to restart steam or verify files to trigger the New Frontiers update.
New Frontiers comes packed with new content and a few surprises to discover:
- A brand new map PROMETHEUS, with three new biomes - the searingly hot volcanic region, murky swamplands and eerie alien grasslands
- 10+ mutated alien creatures. The terraforming process drastically impacted the local wildlife, and while it didn’t kill the creatures as it did in other zones, it terribly mutated them into the species you face now. Dreadwings, Lava Hunters, Needlers, Dracs, Drifters - their nicknames only tell half the story
- Exclusive to this new zone of Icarus are the new Red Exotics, found in exotic flora around the map
- A New series of Operations (narrative missions) play out in a sequenced story, leading you on a gradually darkening mystery. See below for details on how these compliment your Open World experience
- New mission logic and technology, allowing you to launch any mission, big or small, from your Open World. This will be retrofitted to some of the Olympus and Styx map missions in our future Hypatia update
- 100+ new items to craft, deploy and use across Icarus, along with five new raw resources generating a range of new recipes and tiers: Obsidian, Scoria, Crystalised Miasma, and more
- With this new currency come 30+ new items in the orbital workshop for you to purchase and a new system which allows you to purchase these from the surface via cargo pods
- New extreme weather events for each biome, reflective of the atmospheric conditions of each environment
Continuing with the trend we’ve maintained for almost two years now, we’ll continue to update both the base game and the New Frontiers expansion with content, fixes and new areas to explore.
New Frontiers is a paid expansion. Check out the Icarus sale page for launch discounts and bundles - including a discount on the Icarus base game if you want to invite friends to take on Icarus with you.
Combining Open World and Missions
Icarus originally launched only with time-limited ‘session-based' missions where you could earn exotics currency to spend in the orbital Workshop. Then, by popular demand, we added Open World mode that allowed for permanent bases and full map exploration. We also added simpler, dynamic 'SMPL3’ missions to Open World mode.
Beginning with New Frontiers, we are combing the best of both game modes. These will also be added to the base game in the upcoming Hypatia update.
For the first time, our new map PROMETHEUS allows players to follow a storyline through a chained series of missions in the Open World mode. We are calling these 'Operations' and all can be embarked on from your permanent Open World base. Rewards are earned without having to return to orbit in your dropship.
Some game modes allow you to mine and earn rare exotics, that allow you to research and craft unique gear in the orbital Workshop.
Currently, on Prometheus in Open World you can earn exotics by completing operations. You can also gain exotics the old way by launching missions from Orbit and going through the normal extraction process. In the upcoming patch (the Hypatia patch) we will add a way to extract exotics in Open World mode on all maps.
You can still choose to play the Operations as one-off timed Missions if you like.
In addition to all this, there is also the Outposts game mode where you can purchase small scale persistent worlds without mission content, exotics or threats where you can focus on building.
Performance Improvements
Icarus can be a fairly demanding game. We have made many performance optimizations to the game since launch, and this work is an ongoing priority.
A known issue frequently mentioned by players is occasional stuttering or hitching as you move through the world. This is caused by things such as caves and voxels loading and unloading in the background as you enter new areas.
This is not a simple problem to solve and takes many small adjustments to see sometimes negligible gains - but as the result of many weeks of work we believe the stuttering situation has been vastly improved in many circumstances. However, given the scope of some of these changes we want to make sure it is thoroughly tested before making it part of an update distributed to everyone.
We already have fixed some of the related hitching issues and we have a build deployed on experimental branch that you can try out, if you would like to see how it runs for you. You can access this in the builds, under experimental. Please backup your data before doing this. We will deploy this to main branch once it has received more extensive testing and it is confirmed stable.
Regular Future Updates
We do several types of game update: free weekly updates (we’ve done 90 weeks in row so far!), occasional bigger named updates (like the previous Galileo and upcoming Hypatia update), and paid expansions (like New Frontiers).
For example, you’ll see the Prometheus map still includes some zones the UDA and Group 15 still have to unlock in future Operations.
The upcoming free Hypatia update delivers on more of the features in our roadmap, including reworking some of the missions on our current Olympus and Styx maps to work in Open World mode, an Orbital Exchange system for your gear and new items in a Biolab Research Lab. These apply to the base game as well as New Frontiers.
Next week’s regular weekly update will add a Metal Wind Turbine and wind power, plus any fixes and updates for the Prometheus map.
For players who experience hitching and want to help us evaluate our progress, we have made the latest build available on a separate Experimental Branch in Steam. To access the Experimental Branch, in your Steam Library, right-click on Icarus, select Betas and Experimental. While every effort is made to make this version of the game as stable as the default one, the changes are very cutting-edge and may not yet have had thorough testing so there is added risk you may encounter issues.
Your Guide to New Frontiers
There is a lot to learn in New Frontiers, so join our Discord to share experiences and ask questions.
If you’re returning to Icarus after a while, check out this helpful guide from one of our regular community content creators Fortizar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAiC1hJ82AU
Returning to Icarus?
A lot has changed if you haven't been keeping up with Icarus, here are some basic recommendations to make your journey start well:
- If you haven't played in the last nine months your original character may be missing. At the end of last year we migrated all character data to your local PC. We provided a migration service for several months but if you missed this window you may have to start again. To help out, when you begin Prometheus for the first time we've provided an option to start at Level 20, and at Level 10 on the Styx map.
- Dead bodies attract carnivores, so cleanup your kill quickly before it is attacked by hungry animals. This is especially true in areas where carnivores find it difficult to find other animals to eat.
- Animals will sometimes attack other animals. This can be useful, but it also might mean a panicking animal runs a dangerous enemy into you.
- Don't forget you can use the repair hammer to automatically upgrade stuff instead of having to pick it up first.
- If you have a steam cloud conflict that won't go away when you click the try again option, try starting the game. Often that completes the steam cloud synchronization and solves the issue.
- If your camera ends up in a weird position when you get on your mount, remove the saddle and add it back on to reset the camera position.
- Aluminum building tier has been fixed so that it is correctly equivalent to the stone tier, but much lighter to carry. Perfect for the arctic.
- Make sure you update your drivers to the latest, as Nvidia released a new driver specifically to support the New Frontiers launch.
- If you plan on hosting a game with more than two players in total, consider running a dedicated server especially if you are streaming or your computer is struggling. There is a lot of data going on with the game, so offloading some of the work to the dedicated server can help a great deal.
- If you want to try out our fixes for "hitching" or "stuttering" during gameplay, try out the build on experimental branch but be aware this branch may update often so it is not appropriate for those with slow download or download problems.
Migrating Prospects from local to dedicated servers
We have prepared a guide that you can download to go through how to move your prospect from being locally hosted, to being hosted a dedicated server. This will dramatically improve performance. Note there is still some fixes to come for dedicated servers.
The Bone Armor Saga
We had planned on a very cool Twitch drop, allowing you to earn a full set of an exclusive bone armor by supporting your favorite streamers. Unfortunately, Valve told us they could not allow us to have Steam keys to give away on another site unless we also give them away to Steam customers. As Steam customers are 100% of our customers, that would mean everyone would get a key. We aren't really sure what to do, but instead we will be crowd-sourcing ideas about how to give this away instead on our Discord. So hop in there and let us know. Maybe we might just give them away to everyone if we can beat our max Twitch viewer count on steamdb?
Changelog Version 2.0.0.115212
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note: This list simply includes the commits from the last week, changes that are part of New Frontiers have not been included.
- Fixing Quest Typo
- Adjusting Miasmic Modifier so it doesn't get added every few seconds
- Fixed T3 Masonry bench not having the T3 Masonry Bench recipe set, preventing crafting of new Brick building sets.
- Fixing up Frozen Ore UI
- Added specific dynamic quest rewards for the unique fruit and vegetables, rather than a single reward for both.
- Fixed Electroshock being 10x as much damage as other elemental effects, due to high tick rate but same damage. Have reduced tick rate and damage to do the same overall dps.
- Fixed water bodies not receiving the correct network settings.
- FAdded validation to rep policy table to warn if policies target classes don't have bReplicates set as it can potentially cause issues with the policy not propagating to child classes.
- Adding Seeker Trailer to Title Screen
- Fixed floating voxels and foliage across purple and green quads and moved floating deep ore deposit, prometheus
- Fixed Obsidian Arm armor being the same as it's chest armor, setup stats for the arm armor.
- Disable custom weather for quests in open world
- Added extra icons to the different 'New Game' buttons and map selection buttons to show what kind of content is available. Added one-time popup when clicking on 'New Game' button that describes new 'Outpost' mechanics introduced in New Frontiers. Added bold text on top right corner of screen making it more obvious if the player is currently selecting 'Open World', 'Missions', or 'Outposts'
- Enabled CPU Access flag on the various SlimeTrail static meshes
- Fix orbital laser strike effects are not correctly replicating to clients
- Swapping Map Icon from mission object to quest, as the icon was being culled due to relvency settings
- PRO_Story_6: Fixed replication on non-deployable cave assets, respawned cave assets that are unable to have replication added easily
- PRO_Story_6: Fixed decal orientation, and decal and light respawning on reload.
- Shifted Story6s cave lights and decals into a separate IcarusActor so it reloads and replicates correctly. Increased lighting intensity values for some of Story6s cave lights so they show up better in the darkness
- Adding RepGraph Policy for Orbital Lazer and setting up replicated variables so the effect plays correctly on clients
- Fixed player reward records not reloading previously received red exotics counts
- Adding Collision to bone armor packaged mesh
- Fixed reloading preventing miasmic debuff not removing on death.
- Reduced the titanium cost of the Encrypted Satellite Communcator, added some electronics to be representitive of the device's tech level.
- Adding fixes for mission 4 & 6 mission blockers, after spawning AI and logging out, missions become uncompleteable
- Rebalanced in-world exotics availability.
- Red exotic collectables have reduced rewards (harvested exotics have the same rewards).
- Reduced chance of red exotics collectables to appear to 20% from 25%.
- Cleaning raw red exotics now grants 2 red exotics. With the above changes this means that harvesting exotics yields twice as many rewards, while other sources provide the same amount.
- Noxious Crust that grants exotics of either kind now grant 5 instead of 10 (universal 5 across all resources per Noxious Crust).
- Increased spawn rate of Purple Exotic voxels, now spawns at 10% chance rather than a flat 10 per mission.
- Doubled yield of Exotics from Purple Exotic voxels.
- Fixed game mode using the wrong value when checking if exotic plants had been spawned on startup. This was causing exotic plants to be duplicated each time the prospect was reloaded.
- Fixed issue where researching new workshop items through the OEI would fail
- Increased Aluminum building tier to match Stone, causing it to only take damage in the same storms as stone buildings.
- Red Exotic Plants suffer from fatigue and their growth rate decreases every harvest by 100%
- Generating Enum based on farming seeds row to use rows in code correctly
- Tomatoes and Beans are no longer rotated so that their stakes are off the ground when planted in Crop Plots. D_FarmingSeeds rows can now specify the kind of random rotation they'd like to apply to visible mesh when planted
- Adding in a plant fatigue for all plants, each harvest will increase the effectiveness of the plant fatigue modifier by 10% for all normal plants and 100% for exotics, the fatigue modifier reduces plant growth and yeild, making it beneficial to replant plants every 4 or so harvests
- Bump the recommended nVidia driver version to 537.13 Game Ready
- Adding in new map images for the Prometheus Map
