Icarus Week 174 Update | New ‘opt-in’ mechanics and tools for seed harvesting

This week, we’re introducing a big change to how seeds are collected for farming. This includes four new items and a new ‘opt-in’ mechanic for harvesting seeds.

We’ve also got an update on our internal playtesting of the upcoming Great Hunts expansion.

Notable Improvements:

• Allowing more items to be placed on other deployables, including the tackle box, many vases and the workshop cooker and heater
• Reduced Fire Capsule size on MXC Campfire so that you can no longer catch on fire by simply standing next to it
• Added camera shake to horse mount kick montage for added zest
• Changed fluid ammo weapons to have a progress bar display rather than shot numbers

This Week: Seed Collection Changes

Since the introduction of seeds, one common piece of feedback we've received is that collecting crops in the wild often clogs up players' inventories. While these crops can be useful, many feel that the game provides an excessive amount that isn't necessary unless they actively participate in cooking and farming activities. The introduction of the Seed Pouch aimed to address this but was more of a ‘bandaid’ fix rather than anything permanent.

We decided to tackle this problem by making seed collection an ‘opt-in’ mechanic. That is, when farming or collecting wild crops, you will no longer automatically collect seeds, resulting in less inventory clutter.

To get seeds, you will now need to follow one of the methods below:

T1 - The Seed Extractor

• This device automatically turns crops into seeds when you place them inside. It takes about a minute to generate one seed, which can then be planted in crop plots or dirt mounds like normal.

T2 - Progenitive Fertilizer

• This fertilizer will enable seeds to be collected when harvesting from dirt mounds or crop plots.

T3 - Sickles Threshing Attachment

• At T3, we have added a sickle attachment that will allow sickles to collect seeds from wild plants or crop plots, as you currently do.

Workshop - The Reaper Sickle

• We have also added a workshop sickle called ‘The Reaper’, which acts just like the threshing attachment mentioned above with some added bonuses for seed yield.

In addition, we have added 2 new talents to the ‘Cooking / Farming’ player talent tree, which increases seed yield when harvesting in one of the ways mentioned above.

Seed Master

• Increases the Yield of Harvesting Seeds from Wild or Farmed Crops

Prolific Crop

• Increases the number of Seeds that Farmed Crops can produce

This has wider effects as well, especially in the early game, with the collection of seeds for recipes and the creation of vegetable oil. Both of these recipes may become more relevant outside of cooking in the future.

What is next for farming? And why not just drop the concept of seeds entirely and go back to how the game was at launch? On one hand, seeds provide a nice way to pace and balance farming, something that wasn’t present in the game on release. On the other hand, an issue we are aware of is the abundance of food in Icarus. People don’t really struggle to keep their food meter full, as it is very easy to find, grow and cook decent meals, which really goes against the survival nature of the game. We feel this patch moves the game in the the right direction, as it will help players now make more meaningful choices when it comes to finding and growing their own crops for food rather than every crop being easily accessible on planet. In addition, a feature we would really like to add in future is the ability to genetically modify your crops, and even carry inherited 'traits' from one generation of plants to the next. This would open up the posibility of providing buffs to crops when they are used in food, manipulation to be able to grow crops outside their natural biomes or even allowing cross-pollination or the creation of entirely new plants.

Coming Soon: Great Hunts

While playing through some of the Great Hunt Campaigns internally, we have decided to invest more time into raising these to a higher standard in line with our vision for the Expansion.

To give everyone context, there are over 40 new missions across three campaigns in this new expansion. We’ve designed this to be engaging and immersive, so our efforts are to keep refining these with this in mind. We want to make sure we get this right and deliver a quality that we can be proud of.

This may mean delaying the Expansion a bit as we continue to work and iterate, something we’ve done before, such as on ‘Null Sector’ when we deemed it needed more polish.

Next Week: Envirosuit QoL

Next week, we’re making some changes to allow envirosuits to be swapped out on the planet without leaving the prospect.

More details to come.

Your support makes these updates possible.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/40692/Icarus_Pets_Bundle/

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/35727/Icarus_Complete_the_Set/

Changelog v2.2.49.135257

New Content

Fixed

Future Content