Icarus Week 178 Update | Solo Pause, Multiplayer Hitboxes, and more

We’re excited to roll out a long-requested Solo Play Pause feature. This is a true pause, stopping all aspects of gameplay. It’s a significant quality-of-life improvement for solo players, and we know how important it is when life pulls you away mid-session.

We also have a few big fixes coming through this week, including improved multiplayer creature hitboxes (especially on dedicated servers) and fixes for deep ore vein duplication on Prometheus.

We’re also discussing our new content coming next week, which will be an addition to the new signs we added in Week 176.

Notable Improvements:

• Fixed an Issue with Creature Deterrents that was preventing from repelling creatures correctly
• Fixed an issue with the equipment resupply button meaning it could only be used once per mission - this was incorrect, it is now fixed so it can be used multiple times
• Escape menu now closes after using Unstuck command

This Week: Solo Pause

We've introduced a true pause feature for solo play - a long-requested quality-of-life improvement, especially for those who often play alone.

We understand that real life can interrupt gameplay, and this feature ensures you won’t have to worry about a swarm of creatures approaching while you're away from the screen.

This functionality is exclusive to single-player sessions and does not apply to multiplayer or dedicated servers. Pressing Escape in a solo game will pause the session entirely: enemies will stop moving, health, food, and water will no longer deplete, items will stop crafting, and in-game time will completely freeze.

Implementing a proper pause system wasn’t something we could ‘flip on’. It required a detailed review of multiple game systems and mechanics to ensure everything would behave correctly without introducing bugs or breaking core gameplay. We've wanted to include it for some time, and we took extra care to do it right.

To make this work, we had to examine every system, both custom-built and those from the underlying engine, to ensure they respected a paused state. That meant ensuring everything was built around ‘delta time’ (the variable time between frames) since the pause effectively halts that flow to prevent any interactions from taking place.

Delta-time is a fundamental concept in game development. It ensures consistent and fair experiences regardless of a player’s frame rate. Frame rates can vary moment to moment due to hardware or software conditions. By scaling work (like crafting progress or resource depletion) based on delta-time, the game ensures a consistent experience for all players.

Take crafting in Icarus as an example. Crafting takes time—some items may take five seconds, others 30. Consider two players - James is running the game at 30 FPS, and another, Rebecca, at 60 FPS. If we increased crafting progress by 1 unit per frame, Rebecca’s crafts would complete twice as fast. By instead scaling progress by delta time, both players experience the same intended crafting duration.

There are notable examples in gaming history where systems weren’t designed this way. For instance, in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the physics engine was tied to the frame rate. Running the game above 60 FPS could cause the player to move faster and physics objects to behave unpredictably - think flying carts and launched NPCS.

We’d love your feedback. Let us know if you encounter any issues or edge cases in Feature Upvote.

This Week: Multiplayer NPC Hitbox Fix

We're currently trialling an improvement that will enhance the experience for players connecting to dedicated servers or friend-hosted games. This update ensures that creature animations are entirely played on the server while in combat, regardless of their visibility or distance from the host.

After a thorough investigation, we discovered that early optimizations made during Icarus' development led to desynchronization issues on the client side—specifically with NPC animations and hitboxes not always aligning correctly.

To resolve this, we’ve updated the animation system so that NPCs on the server and client should be in the exact same pose during combat. This should align hitboxes, weak points, and strong points and lead to a much more reliable experience for clients.

Internal testing and feedback from players on the experimental branch have been extremely positive so far, with a noticeable improvement, especially on dedicated servers. Thank you to our Veterans in Discord for helping us identify and resolve this issue.

This Week: Deep Ore Duplication Fix

We’ve resolved an issue where deep ore veins were duplicated each time a prospect was loaded. This could cause veins to appear as if they had changed resources, leading to significantly bloated save file sizes.

While earlier fixes made this more stable, we recently discovered a new issue with deep ore veins on the Prometheus map, introduced as part of the Null Sector update. Some objects were incorrectly configured during world generation, leading to duplication.

We’ve now addressed the root cause and added checks to prevent it from happening again. Additionally, any duplicated veins will be automatically cleaned from player save files when the game loads, with any attached drills preserved.

For those with save files badly affected by this issue, the fix should have a noticeable positive effect on load times. Please note that removing duplicates may cause ore veins to revert to the resource type first located there.

Next Week: Stone Signs

Next week, we are releasing another set of stone signs craftable at T1 so players can customise their base in a new and different way.

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 v2.2.53.136221

New Content

Fixed

Future Content