Icarus Week 127 Update | Foliage Regeneration

Welcome to week 127.

This week we’re completing our project clinic, with a bunch more improvements, tweaks and content additions.

For those unfamiliar with what a project clinic is, read our post from last week which goes into more detail.

We’re also introducing a performance improvement this week, focusing on late-game stutters and looking at the root cause of some of these instances.

Next week we hope to further improve late-game performance, and we’ll be returning to our regular update cadence so jump in and have a read of all the changes we’ve got for you this week.

Notable Improvements

• Collision with small foliage / small trees has been removed allowing players and creatures to walk through them which makes traversal through the world feel a lot better.
• Fixed a massive stutter that was occurring when opening crafting menus, this has now been optimized to ensure a much smoother experience
• Improved first-person and third-person interactions with objects placed in the light slot when the object is emitting light
• Arctic Moa can now use all saddles present in the creature comforts DLC
• Adding stats for digging yield on shovels and properly scaled shovel resource yield and item wear
• Increased the amount of dirt collected with the shovel
• Fixes to CRYSTAL quest so the quest now works with some recent item changes

This Week: Late Game Hitch Improvements

We’ve been investigating some of the root causes of late-game hitches. As you mine more resources, chop more logs, build larger bases and level up and move around faster, all this data grows and short hitches or stutters can start to build up - typically late in the game after many hours of game time.

Our investigation uncovered a few key culprits.

A key cause is to do with how we optimize objects such as trees, rocks and plants in the game. In their untouched natural state they're well optimized simple objects that we call 'imposter' objects.

Once you start mining, chopping or interacting with them the game remembers their altered ‘state’ and what you did to them. As you move back and forth across the map, these objects are loaded and unloaded constantly.

Burning and burnt trees were a major culprit of these loading hitches. Burnt trees are permanent modified objects, not simple optimized imposter objects, so these load in and out when you enter an area.

To address this we've stopped recording the trees burnt state. When you reload a saved game, all trees will load back in irrespective of their burnt status and items like foliage will not check to see whether they've been harvested previously or not. This does affect balance, but we felt like addressing the stuttering was a higher priority. We also noticed internally this brought some life back to our bases, as I'm sure prospectors are used to the area immediately surrounding their base getting clear-cut of bushes and resources and losing some of that natural look.

Fibre Foliage Respawn Setting

These can be accessed in the settings menu if you are hosting the game yourself or for dedicated servers set in the command line or ServerSetting.ini.

ServerSettings.ini

OpenWorldFibreRespawn=True

This setting will restore all the fibrous plants in the world to fully-grown plants that can be collected again when you revisit them later. Plus they will become more optimised imposter objects again. This means less save data, less area reloading, a more consistent environment and a bit more fibre to gather. This only affects plants that provide fibre, fibrous seeds and sticks not resources such as fruit/vegetables.

Note: This option will not restore in a small area around where you have placed your buildings, so if you have collected resources before placing down floors those changes will stay permanently.

This Week: Project Clinic Part II - Highlights

The second week of our Project Clinic has now concluded and we’ve got our last round of associated fixes, tweaks, additions and improvements:

More Medicines

We have performed an additional pass of medicines as they have become more important since last week's afflictions duration update. We have created several new items to help with this.

Vitamins crafted at the chemistry bench will provide resistance when ingested against basic wounds, poisons and extreme temperature escalation conditions such as frostbite, heatstroke, hyperthermia, and hypothermia.

Survival Kits can be crafted at the medicine bench which allows the curing of wounds, deep wounds, frostbite and overheating, providing all the benefits of the basic bandages, and suture kits in one item.

Xigo Quick-Fix Kits can be purchased from the workshop and will heal almost any injury but will not provide any resistance - a good emergency item to have on hand.

There is also a new medical bag that can be crafted on the textiles bench which allows you to store all your medicines in one place without taking up any extra inventory slots.

In addition to the new items, we have also done a small balance on vaccines that can be purchased from the workshop. Their prices and durations have been altered to better fit the current state of the game.

Platinum Lighting Rod

Something that we have wanted to add since the introduction of batteries is a lightning rod which would conduct lighting strikes and charge your batteries and provide a quick burst of power to your network. So we came up with the new Platinum Lighting Rod. Now you can protect your base and receive a big influx of energy at the same time.

Dirt Expanded

After adding the dirt foundations last week, many community members requested a dirt corner piece to help their aesthetics and to build nice ramps. So we have added it and just like the other pieces it will break instantly if it does not collide with the terrain.

We have also added dirt to some recipes as it felt like a natural fit - namely crop plots and fertilizers.

Charging Station

Last but not least, we've added a charging station for small handheld devices. This is a new object crafted on the fabricator and is now a requirement for recharging flashlights - which are no longer an unlimited light source but will require recharging. On initial crafting of a flashlight, it will come with a full energy charge, but when they run out they will need to be recharged at the charging station.

We have many other devices that we want to use this system with, with the flashlight being the first.

Farming Carts

We have made some additions to farming carts to bring them more in line with the game economy. One such change is the massive reduction of water cost when using the watering cart as it was consuming far too much water to be effective. The other small change made is that the seeding cart now requires dirt for the dirt mounds to be created alongside the seeds being planted.

Next Week: Back to Normal

With the conclusion of our project clinic, we’ll be returning to our regularly scheduled updates from next week. The project clinic has given us an incredible amount of improvements and tweaks, and this patch along with the last one have been considerably larger and more time-intensive, something not sustainable in the long term.

We’ll be returning to a more balanced cadence which will still deliver smaller weekly content updates, while working on the larger changes in the background, the next of which we hope to announce soon.

Next Week: Hitching Improvements Part 2: Rocks

We were hoping to include this in this weeks update but had to pull it at the last minute, so once we've worked out the last couple of kinks we can include the next phase of our plan to address late-game hitching. Similar to the issue this week with burnt trees, the game tracks the state of rock voxels and has to restore these as you move around the map. We'll go into more details on this change in next weeks update post.

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 v2.2.2.122731

New Content

Fixed

Future Content