Icarus Week 243 Update | Livewire Revamp

Welcome to Week 243.

This week we're revamping one of the very first missions ever created for the game: Livewire on Olympus. Our goal is to continue revisiting older missions like this, bringing them in line with the quality and design standards of our more recent content.

We're also giving you a small preview of what's coming next week: in-world fish and a new fishing rod. These additions are designed to make the world feel more alive, with fish of that location now naturally inhabiting rivers and lakes across Icarus.

Notable Improvements:

• Fixed cases where Mission Rewards (Blueprints, Workshop Items, Legendary Weapons) were not always unlocking correctly, causing players to lose their rewards when leaving the active session
• The Lava Hunter will no longer attack random creatures or endlessly chase players across the map
• Optimized Prebuilt Structure loading to reduce stuttering during missions
• Fixed Prebuilt Structures incorrectly connecting to existing resource networks
• Fixed Clay, Scoria, and Obsidian Sledgehammer Attachment recipes requiring incorrect item inputs
• Metal Grate Building Pieces now have destructible meshes and will break apart like other buildings
• Disabled Beast Scanner scans on Mounts due to incorrect damage modifier behaviour
• Fixed Snow Wolf carcass material being set on the alive mesh character BP
• Fixed held item not charging correctly when wearing Solar Backpack

This Week: Livewire Revamp

This week brings our largest entry in the Olympus Operation Update yet, featuring a major revamp to Livewire. This is the first combat and defense Operation players undertake and because it was made early in development, it did not benefit from the tools and experience we have today. Our newer Operations excel at framing why you are undertaking each task. They guide you with clear hints, detailed scene setting, and active NPCs for greater depth and immersion. We are excited to bring that same magic back to where your journey began.

While our earlier updates smoothed out mission steps and added hints, Livewire gives a proper taste of the larger changes coming over the next few months. It features a fresh flow, new tactical challenges, and a heightened level of excitement throughout. We will keep making these Olympus Operation Updates as long as they deliver real value to you. Expect a mix of balance changes, bug fixes, helpful hints, and heavily revamped Operations.

Someone in our Discord recently asked about the end goal of the Olympus Operations Update. My career in design has always been to improve the player experience iteratively so I did not have a specific end goal in mind, but the question prompted some reflection. Revamping Missions is a complex task because we want to preserve that sense of struggle and achievement that makes victory feel earned. While we know gameplay cannot always be smooth sailing, our team has learned a great deal about how to refine our work so that we don’t get in the way of your fun. Many of you explore the game through the Open World, which already provides a fantastic and immersive experience. To ensure we are on the right track, our mission design must complement that fun rather than stand in its way. In the past, some of our early missions lacked sufficient functional context. We often failed to provide enough information about the tasks at hand, which occasionally led to unnecessary backtracking or frustration. While overcoming challenges is part of the fun, some hurdles felt like a waste of your time. Further,  Missions frequently introduce new concepts and our previous ability to explain those ideas was quite limited. We now liberally use hint tips to better point out areas of interest or to save you from scrolling through the extensive tech trees. I may not have a singular end goal, but my commitment is to provide greater clarity, utilize our current technology to create smoother Missions, and gradually elevate the quality of our older Missions to match the high standards of our latest content. John Frank - Senior Designer (Sotere on Discord)

Next Week: In-World Fish & Carbon Rod

Coming up next week is an exciting change to the slightly wetter parts of Icarus. Since release, we've had Fish which swim around in water bodies and can be killed and harvested for Fish Chunks. Up until now, the selection of those Fish has been limited to the 3 types known as Fish01, Fish02, and the little poisonous Piranha known as Fish03.

Since then, we've added an entire Fishing system with dozens of unique Fish for you to catch, and now all of those variations will be represented in-world and the areas they spawn in will match the areas they can be fished from, so you get a true matching in-world representation of all the different varieties of Fish you can find on Icarus.

To celebrate this we're also introducing the Carbon Fishing Rod, a very sleek and stylish carbon fiber Fishing Rod. Crafted on the Fishing Bench, you'll find this upgraded Rod has increased stats to make fishing a breeze on a cool sunny afternoon, on the porch of your lakeside cabin.

Your support makes these updates possible.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1648533/Icarus_Dangerous_Horizons_Expansion/
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/81998/Icarus_Free_Weekend_Bundle/

Changelog 3.0.21.155201-rel-DangerousHorizons

New Content

Fixed

Future Content