Icarus Week Ninety Update | New Frontiers

Icarus: New Frontiers, the first expansion of the Icarus experience, has landed. It brings with it a new map, with all new biomes, mutated alien creatures, narrative missions (known as Operations) that further unveil the story and can are integrated into your Open World game, craftables, exotics, and more.

New Frontiers Expansion

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.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1648532/Icarus_New_Frontiers/

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.

ICARUS - New Frontiers Expansion Introduction

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?

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