Icarus Week 128 Update | Farming carts are now rideable

Welcome to Week 128.

After a couple of big weeks of Project Clinic updates, we’re returning to our normal cadence and making some changes to the carts we recently introduced in Laika - letting you ride them rather than just lead them as they operate.

We’ve also got some more information on the performance work we’re currently undertaking, particularly the mined stone deposit loading threads we discussed last week.

Finally, we’ve got news on what to expect next week - hint, you’re going to need a bigger dog bed.

Jump in and have a read.

Notable Improvements

• Adding small dog drinking and eating animation duplicates for montages and adding unique audio for both sizes to differentiate between the small and big dogs
• Updated modifier times on tooltips to show in minutes if over 120 seconds
• Added APEX DM meshes, as well as many of their blueprints, for multiple buildable assets for all tiers
• Removed the ability to jump while riding mounts that have a cart attached
• Fixed issued with building pieces not hiding foliage paired with a slight GPU optimization
• Fixed sticks going to hotbar instead of backpack.

This Week: Rideable Farming Carts

We’re taking the three animal farming carts added in the recent Laika update and making a big improvement.

Carts will now be able to be ridden while farming, no longer restricted to only being led.

The current mounts usable with carts are Buffalo and Tuskar, and when you now equip a Seeding/Harvesting/Watering cart it’ll apply to the base saddle you ride on. You can also interact with the mount both when riding and when next to it, so you can control whether the device is active or not.

The Watering Cart will also fill itself up from nearby sources when it interacts with the mount, and the watering process will only activate when it comes into contact with a dirt mound.

The Seeding Cart now requires both dirt and seeds, with dirt to create mounds and seeds to plant. If there are no seeds in the inventory but there is dirt, then the cart will create empty dirt mounds, and if there are seeds but no dirt, it’ll only plant when you pass over an empty dirt mound.

The Harvesting Cart will now collect all crops that are ‘harvestable’ that have been created by a player within a small radius of the cart. Bushes and wild flora will not be collected.

The movement speed of the mount being used to pull the cart does have an impact on the speed modifier of the cart, so keep this in mind when using it.

Mined Rocks & Performance Improvements

Last week we talked about the improvements we wished to make specifically with regards to the state of the mined stone deposits around the map. This was something we were aiming to include in our last patch but it was pulled out to do some unresolved crashes and issues that came up in testing. We were also hoping to get it in this week but further work put into it has uncovered some more issues that still require more time to iron out.

The change we’re looking to implement is to do with how mined rocks are loaded and unloaded. As you traverse the map, you load different zones which then require all mined rocks within a relevant range to load in. As part of this loading process not only do we load the objects but we also load the state they were left in (that is every pickaxe swing that was done on the object) and this takes additional time. Due to the fact all of this loading (it could be in the thousands of instances) happens in one frame, it can cause hitches. This is mainly to do with the map being tile based and when one map tile loads, the mined rocks are triggered to load in at the same time. This is especially bad at some points across the three different maps - and depending on where you are - you can constantly be loading tiles and objects due to their relevancy range.

The change we are currently making involves placing all this ‘logic of loading’ on a separate thread allowing these objects to load in the background while you are playing rather than in a single instance on the main game thread. One of the interesting things about splitting things out to be on separate threads is that you can’t have the main thread or separate threads interacting with the same object simultaneously, otherwise, the data becomes corrupted and can be forced into bad states.

We have had some decent success so far with our internal testing and this work seems to have made some strong progress in reducing hitching. We are currently still in a testing phase and will roll this out if and when we believe it is in a stable enough state.

Next Week: Pugs & Laika

Next week we plan on adding two new pets, one to the base game as a free pet, and one to the Pet Companions Pack DLC.

The base game will be getting Laika the dog, in celebration of the heroic pooch who was the first four-legged adventurer into space. The Pet Companions Pack will be getting a Pug as a new breed you can bring down from the space station.

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 v2.2.3.122924

New Content

Fixed

Future Content