Icarus Week 248 Update | Scoria Deep Ore Veins

Welcome to Week 248.

This week, we’re introducing Scoria Deep Ore Veins to all maps, meaning they will no longer be exclusive to Prometheus and can now be found across Icarus.

We also cover a fix for a long-standing issue where fire could appear to never extinguish for clients, even after it had been successfully put out.

And finally, we take a quick look at what’s coming next week: Workshop Power Banks.

Notable Improvements:

• Cleaning up Client Side Ghost Fire Particle that could occur on clients as a result of server desync
• Fixed an issue with the Forest Wolf not correctly displaying its textures and fur when skinned
• Reverted Gold and Sulfur icons back to original as they were easier to tell apart
• Increased Sun/Moon position updates to be 50ms instead of 200ms to help with smooth shadow movement at sunrise/sunset.
• Fixed using taxidermy knife on Piglet rewarding the Piglet Trophy instead of the Piglet Head

This Week: Scoria Deep Ore Veins

This week, Scoria Deep Ore Veins will begin appearing on all prospects and outposts. On newly created worlds, these veins will spawn naturally across the map. Existing prospects will require use of the Deep Cycler introduced in Week 325 to generate them. This brings the new resource to existing maps and provides an easy way to access its associated technologies.

This Week: Client Ghost Fires

One long-standing issue we’ve had in Icarus is the potential for the Fire system to desynchronise between the server and clients. When this occurred, a fire could be successfully extinguished on the server, while the visual effects remained active on a client, making it appear as though objects were still burning. We dubbed these internally as “Ghost Fires”.

This has been a particularly difficult issue to track down because the Fire system is one of the oldest and most complex systems in Icarus. Rather than simply treating fire as a visual effect, the system simulates heat transfer and thermodynamics to determine how fire behaves and spreads. It’s arguably more complicated than a survival game really needs, but it’s also a big part of what makes the system feel convincing when playing.

To support this while keeping the networking overhead manageable, we don’t replicate every individual flammable object and fire instance between the server and clients. Instead, the fire simulation runs independently on both the server and client, with the server sending state updates to keep the client simulation in sync. This allows us to maintain a detailed fire simulation without requiring hundreds or potentially thousands of individual fire states to be replicated over the network.

Unfortunately, this approach also introduced some opportunities for desynchronisation. In the case of Ghost Fires, we found that the replication system could sometimes skip an intermediate object state change for efficiency. When this happened, the client could fail to transition through the expected state, leaving the visual fire effects active even though the fire had already been extinguished on the server.

For this update, we’ve implemented a cosmetic-only fix that will clean up lingering fire particles on clients when the fire has already been extinguished on the server. This won’t address the underlying cause of the desynchronisation, but it should prevent the most visible symptoms of Ghost Fires for now.

We are planning to implement a full fix for the underlying desynchronisation in the coming weeks.

Next Week: Workshop Battery Bank

Next week we are expanding the orbital workshop by adding a purchasable powerbank so you can recharge your tools on the go, similarly with the hydrazine and oil canisters in the workshop, it comes pre-charged.

Your support makes these updates possible.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1648533/Icarus_Dangerous_Horizons_Expansion/

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

Changelog 3.0.26.156677-rel-DangerousHorizons

New Content

Fixed

Future Content