Week Forty Five’s update focuses on new features and fixes for our Mounts system that we introduced in week forty two. The new Husbandry Tree will allow you to invest into your Mounts prowess, in either taming, raising or riding.
We’ve also included a bunch of rebalances, tweaks and improvements to the system, addressing interaction issues with beds and troughs and overall general behaviour.
We’ve also included information on three upcoming features and systems. Read into the future of Mounts, Open World Mode, and Narrative Mission Chains.
Husbandry Tree
The new Husbandry Tree provides players with a way to become an expert in the Mounts' system, allowing you to either specialise into being the tamer, raiser or rider to support a team, or have a more ‘jack-of-all-trades' approach.
The left side of the tree focuses on the taming phase of the cycle, with talents focused on temperature tolerance, taming speed and providing juveniles immunity from attacking predators.
The middle of the tree provides talents focused on raising your Mounts and providing them baseline improvements. Talents in this branch focus on gathering, food and water consumption, Mount health and the amount predators will perceive them as a threat.
The right side of the tree provides talents that are centred on utilising your Mount for riding or as a pack animal. These feature stamina bonuses, reduced player oxygen/food/water requirements, carry weight and movement speed.
Key Mount Fixes & New Mechanics
We’ve gathered a large amount of feedback on our Mounts since launch. This week, we’re incorporating some fixes, rebalances and features to address some issues and areas for improvement:
- We have increased the default carry weight capacity of the Buffalo mount and added extra capacity to the pack harness
- We have added a new ability to manually feed and give water to Mounts from items in your quick-bar. Hand-feeding Mounts will give them a short burst of health regeneration.
- We have improved the Mount/Juvenile ability to navigate towards troughs and beds
- Mounts no longer starve to death when at a distance from the player
- Mounts/Juveniles now take item nutrition value into account when eating, meaning they will consume lower quantities of high nutrition items such as watermelon, but will consume higher quantities of low nutrition items such as berries
Future Mount Features
Our first iteration of Mounts has been a success, and we’ve been encouraged by the positive feedback and constructive criticism we’ve received from the community. We have a lot of plans for this new system to come in the future, and wanted to talk about a couple of these.
The Husbandry tree releasing today is one of those features, and as we move towards multi-mission persistence in the future we aim to expand these opportunities for player choice with the addition of mount levelling and talents. We have also been experimenting with Mounts being able to pull different items and machines across different terrains that offer various uses, along with different types of saddles and attachments.
We’re also looking at other animals that can be raised into Mounts, particularly in the next DLC expansion. We wanted to give special mention to the Icarus modding community who quickly incorporated Bears as an available Mount in a download. While we don’t have current plans to make Bears an available Mount, we enjoyed watching some of the gameplay and wanted to compliment you on your work.
The Future: 3 Distinct Game Modes
Last week we introduced our plans for our Open World Mode, our next large feature to be introduced in the future.
Our goal with this feature is to clearly define three different ways to enjoy Icarus, be it more traditional survival, our iconic instanced missions, or a more sandbox-esque peaceful building environment.
Open World Mode:
Open World Mode provides the ‘traditional survival’ experience, where you can access the entire map and choose your drop zones in a persistent, dangerous environment with respawning world bosses, weather impacts and no experience reduction.
Outposts:
Outposts will provide the ‘sandbox' experience, allowing you to create and build in a controlled environment where your creativity and ambition are able to run wild. This is designed to be a self-contained experience, giving you the space to innovate without consequence.
Missions:
Our Instanced Missions are the ‘bread and butter’ of Icarus, with self-contained stories and missions that play out over portions of the map and develop the narrative and future of this universe. We have no plans to stop developing and evolving them, as they are integral to Icarus and will always be the centre of our development.
Open World Mode and Outposts will both receive updates and improvements going forward with their own identities allowing both to evolve into their own designated features. Open World Mode has more unannounced features to come, and will launch with both Olympus and Styx as playable areas. As a result, the Olympus Outpost will be removed, but the smaller maps will stay and evolve with unique features in the future.
In the long-run, we are aiming to include the ability to trigger missions from your Open World Mode bases, but this will not be available in this first pass. Releasing this version, is the first step in our journey towards this goal.
Narrative Chain Missions
We have been working on a few narrative missions which will form a chain to incorporate a new story from beginning to end with new characters and objectives. This allows us to form a more ‘campaign’ feel around a central story that spans multiple drops and we hope they will immerse our players deeper into the lore of Icarus.
These missions should also start providing more detail and insight into the various factions, characters, history and stories that surround the failed terraforming project and give players more engagement with the different elements of the universe.
Changelog v1.2.20.102562
New Content
- Added framework for Husbandry talent tree. - Renamed Construction talent group to Habitation
- Added base class for Spike Traps and cleaned up logic for Hedgehogs, basic Wood Hedgehog will now damage players, hedgehogs deal 50% damage to players
- Added ranks to Husbandry tree talents. - Renamed Husbandry tree talents from placeholder names to more accurate names
- Adding new Stats for Husbandry Talents
- Added stats to Husbandry talent points
- Updating Husbandy talents to include new stats
- Setting up modifiers for new taming aura's
- Setting up crafting cost reductions for saddles and taming equipment
- Adding new TamedCreatureModifiers Table for Determining the stat transfer between player and tamed creature / juvenile
- Setting up Virtual stats for new husbandry stats
- Hooking up Player States related to Riding Creatures (Oxygen, Food, Water Consumptions and Exposure Resistance)
- Adding new Stats for Player Husbandry Talent Tree
- Adding Missing Virtual Stats for Older Taming stats so we can work with the new system
- Updated stats on Husbandry talents to fix build validation error.
- Increased Buffalo Mount Health Regeneration
- Players will now be kicked out of the mount inventory screen if player/mount distance becomes too large. Mounts now use generic ragdoll behaviour shared with other NPCs
- Linked new stats to Husbandry talents.
- Updated Husbandry talent and related stat descriptions
- Creatures mounted by local player play audio when taking fall damage
- Players are now prompted with a dialog to set name when first claiming a tamed mount. Shifted 'open mount inventory' functionality into mount class instead of inside actionable
- Added first pass of Husbandry talent tree background
- Setup specific XP events for Moa, Juvenile Moa and Juvenile Buffalo.
- Enabled Juveniles to be counted towards baby animal kills and their respective parent creature type kills
- Adding Husbandry talent tree background asset
- Mounts and Juveniles will now have any player-owner driven stats applied to them when claimed, or when led by a new player in the case of juveniles. In the case of session reload, mounts and juveniles will wait for their most recent owning player to reconnect before reapplying relevant stats. Implemented following stats for use with husbandry talent tree: JuvenileFriendlyToPredators, TameSleepRequirement, IsJuvenile, IsMounted
- Tamed mount food/water is no longer reduced when their current level tile is unloaded
- Juvenile taming tooltip now switches temp requirement icon based on current environmental temperature. Fixed taming temperature virtual stat using the wrong base stats
- Added ability to feed and give water to mounts from currently equipped hotbar item. Nutritional value of food is now counted when mounts/juveniles go to eat, meaning it will take more than one item to completely satisfy hunger
Fixed
- Fix closed doors and windows sounding open after respawn. There is a potential issue with initialisation order, so try to set the open FMOD parameter again if it fails the first time on BeginPlay
- Optimization pass on Buildables textures. Consistency pass on texture settings and reducing 4k textures to save memory
- Optimized some assets with high triangle counts to improve performance
- Remove sequence reference from Cave diorama causing unnecessary asset loads, wasting memory
- Numerous texture optimizations and settings consistency pass to save memory
- Fix LOD settings on Dead Prospetor meshes (LOD3 was 5k triangles), should have 6 LODs with the final being <1k
- Delete unused Tree meshes which have bad LODs and no materials
- Optimized and/or deleted unused assets in VFX/TRE folder to improve performance
- Add LODs to assets missing them or needing settings improved. Delete unused assets
- Fixed inaccurate collision on Scorpion Hedgehog mesh causing hits to fail often
- Add new option to Graphics Menu (Limit Poolsize To VRAM) which may help alleviate blurry textures on GPUs with not enough memory. Note: this is enabled by default and should only be disabled if you are having texture issues. Disabling it may cause issues/crashes
- Remove some of the many old variations of WIP HAB levels to allow easier cleanup of old otherwise unused assets. Deep chained asset references result in expensive assets being shipped unnecessarily, causing larger builds, bigger load times and more memory consumption
- Removed Prospect007 entry from Terrains DT to fix validation error
- Remove old levels which cause a ton of unnecessary references and make cleanup of old assets impossible
- Prevent graphics settings from being applied before the graphics subsystem is ready, reset the resolution scale when entering/exiting DLSS/FSR, ensure r.ScreenPercentage CVar calls are made with ECVF_SetByScalability priority so that the LegacyScreenPercentageDriver can make changes, this means that resolution scaling works correctly (when DLSS/FSR are switched off) and multiple combinations of settings are applied
- Move marker for this quest to a new serialization system ('MapSearchArea' vs 'LocationSearchArea'), reload the mission several times to ensure the marker now always shows up, this means that the map marker should always appear after reload on the station to station mission
- Accolade: Ravenous only tracks food consumed when consuming stack, wired PlayerTracker to consume food (of stack size 1) on right click 'consume', different code path from right click 'consume stack', this means players are awarded progress towards consumption accolades when comsuming single food items as well as stacks of food items
- STRANGE HARVEST: Fixed typo in quest description
- HOMESTEAD: Updated Rustic Statue objective to Rustic Icarus Statue, to better guide players to the correct statue to craft
- Added Sandworm boss to all Olympus Exploration missions (min 1, max 4)
- Styx has different Biomes from Olympus, so map accolades to atmospheres rather than biomes, this means that players correctly attain progress towards Biome accolades on Styx (Scorched Traveller, Forzen Traveller et al.)
- Voyager Mission - Fixed Den item replenishment
- Strange Harvest: Fixed respawn on boss to ensure respawning on prospect reload
- Strange Harvest: Fixes issue preventing objective particles to appear
- Fixed Holdfast Outpost getting stuck on preparing geometry when crossing into the B4 tile by adding the missing level bounds actors which guarantee the correct levels are loaded
- Fixed weather timeline UI not updating correctly when mounted
- Fixed bug where talent tree view could break when trying to assign talent points while mounted
- Fixed bug where mounts and juveniles still wouldn't attempt to move to beds or water troughs if they were off navmesh
- Juvenile taming tooltip now switches temp requirement icon based on current environmental temperature. Fixed taming temperature virtual stat using the wrong base stats
- Fixed bug where talent tree view could break when trying to assign talent points while mounted
- Hand-feeding a mount will now apply a moderate amount of health regen, with the duration changing based on food's nutrition. Mounts can now be affected by warm and cozy buff
- Adding in all base AI setup for the Rock Dog, including all anim montages and placeholder stat values, still needs lava state hookup and lava based attacks to be completed
- Fixed Nurturing Presence aura not affecting juvenile taming speed. Fixed NPCs not being able to receive aura modifiers
- Fixing inherited collision on the wood gate that was stopping arrows, it is a door base BP which has the collision there to stop multiple doors being placed on top of eachother
- Fixed bug where cave modifier / visual effects wouldn't apply correctly when entering a cave while mounted
- Fixed bug where Juveniles/Mounts would stop short of their bed/trough when interacting with it. Juveniles and Mounts should hang back a little more when following player owner. Fixed bug where taming speed stat wasn't affecting the overall tame duration as expected; reworked the internal stats driving taming speed / duration
- Extended the level streaming distance on Holdfast Outpost to solve the preparing geometry screen appearing when crossing into the B4 tile
- Increased Buffalo mount carry weight limit to 300kg, Pack Harness adds an additional 300kg carry weight capacity
- Fixed juveniles not being ignored by hostile creatures when using the 'One With Nature' talent
- Implement audio cues when player manually feeds or waters mounts. Audio refs still to be added
- Adding sounds and events for mounts being manually fed / watered
- Fixed bug where player would consume held food item when hand-feeding mounts. Mounts and Juveniles will now reset the spoil timer on stacks of food left over after feeding from troughs
- Fixed bug where player wouldn't have their internal 'IsMounted' stat removed when dismounting from saddle
- Strange Harvest: Significantly increased tether distance on boss to prevent unintentional resetting
- Fixed bug where the 'Feed'/'Give Water' tooltip would show when looking at a mount with an invalid held item
- Adding feeding mount sounds to BP and correcting the buffalo mouth socket in data table
- Mounts and Juveniles will now receive a health regeneration boost after eating from food troughs (similar to hand feeding)
- Fixed typo in Enzyme Geyser description, havest to harvest
- Added footstep particles to mounts
- Improved modifier stacking behaviour, longest modifier durations will now always take priority. TamingSpeed aura modifier is no longer visible to players
- Fixed bug where mounts would start drowning if stood in water for too long
Future Content
- Added Brick Buildable tier assets and added to blueprints
- Added BLD_Stairs_Brick
- Added foliage type asstes for the lava groundcover foliage. LC_Groundcover_A, LC Groundcover_B, LC_GrassA
- Added on to Transition Cave on Purple Quad, DLC Map
- Removed Tussocks and setup grass variations for Tundra Grass Layer
- Change Snow Tree foliage variations to be able to paint on AC_Snow
- Added SW_Bramble A, C, D, E, F, And G Foliage types, Blueprints, and added to FLOD Data table
- Fixed underground cave cliffs material to No RVT, Green Quad, Styx
- Added foliage types and BPs for several swamp plants, as well as the Toi Toi for Grasslands, along with all of their FLOD Data Table entries
- Adding Pbird Attack and death audio and FMOD events
- LC Ground Covers/Grass foliage setup
- Added tags/queries for sledgehammer harvesting, currently set up so the node can only take damage from sledgehammer hits
- Added sledgehammer breakable node class/functionality, with an example setup called BP_BreakableRockExample
- AC Bushes/Foliage (Harvestable) Foliage Setup
- Adding missing sledgehammer code files from previous commit
- Added Cliffs for Avalanched AC on Blue Quad, DLC Map
- Create SM from IceBorer SK
- Tweak IceBorer constraints
- Point to correct mesh for Ice Borer meshable and delete old greybox assets
- Added Buttercups to GL_Grass and Foliage Setup
- TU Tussocks Foliage Setup and Proedural Foliage Spawner
- LC to SW Transition Cave Set Dressing, Purple Quad, Prometheus
- Landscape Painting, Decal Pass and Cliff Placement, Green and Yellow Quad, DLC
- Adding Pbird data table entries and setup and distant idle audio
- Update Hitable row for Rock to reference new native C++ class
- Set Reeds as Foliage type for Swamp
- Manual AC Foliage Placement on Blue Quad, DLC Map
- Decal painting, landscape painting and foliage manual painting in arctic biome, Green and Yellow Quands, DLC
- Fixed up Needler assets. Added Carcass mat variation. Pointed SKs to their appropriate materials. Deleted SM. Optimized texture settings
- LC to SW Transition Cave Set Dressing, Purple Quad, Prometheus
- Swamp Macros - LOD pass, material edits on 04-06, plus GL and TU variants. Tweaked LOD distances on all meshes to transition sooner
- Foliage Setup and Procedural Spawner for General SW_Dirt plants
- Grass/GroundCover Setup for SW_Dirt
- Foliage Setup and Procedural Spawner for Tree/Saplings on SW_Muddy
- Toggle Grassland option on DLC1 Landscape to use new foliage/ grass options on CF layers
- Foliage Setup for Shelf Mushrooms
- Tweak Mangrove/Cypress Saplings generation values to balance spawn amount on SW_Muddy
- Moved Large Scale Swamp Cliff Meshes Into the Persistant Level, Purple Quad, Prometheus
- Remove E_Waterfall_Base_Foam_smallBurst emitter which is unused but contains errors and shows up in log in Steam build
- Adding S.Bird close and far idle audio
- SW Impassable meshes - added 01-06
- Prototyped Stalactites/Stalagmites placement solution
- Removed RVT option fo Cave entrance on CF_Cave_MED_01 to fix underground cave RVT problems
- Adding S.Bird Attack vocalisations and event
- SW Impassable meshes - added 07-08, material tweaks on all meshes
- Manual AC & TU Foliage Placement on Blue Quad, DLC Map
- Decal painting, landscape painting and foliage manual painting in arctic biome, Green Quand, DLC
- LC to SW Transition Cave Set Dressing, Purple Quad, Prometheus
- Adding GL_TussockA and it's 3 variants, including foliage types
- Updated Brick Tier Buildable changes
- FT_D_TU_DirtDebris - decal created from Tundra grass terrain textures
- Moved Large Scale Swamp Cliff Meshes Into Purple Quad Level, Purple Quad, Prometheus
- Small SW rocks - material parenting changes, duplicated meshes for Tundra and Grasslands
- Added inverted versions of selected cave stalagmites to create stalactites. Added foliage groups for these to allow them to be painted in the level. Tweaked material on Rock_Cave_Stalagmite_05 to match the others
- Med SW rocks - material parenting changes, duplicated meshes for Tundra and Grasslands
- Foliage Setup for ToiToi/GL Tussocks/Aspen Tree and Procedrual Spawners
- Setup Foliage for SW Internal Cliff Plants
- Tweaks to GL Foliage Instance Settings, Cull distance and shadows
- Adding S.Bird flinch and death sounds and events
- Added AC_TussocksA variants, including Foliage Types and BPs, and added them to the FLOD data table
- Manual AC & TU Foliage Placement on Blue Quad, DLC Map
- Manual Foliage Placement in the Volcanic Biome, Purple Quad, Prometheus
- Decal painting, landscape painting and foliage manual painting in arctic biome and underwater dressing, Green Quand, DLC
- Adding S.Bird Nip jaw and nip vocalisations and event
- Swamp Rocks - FTs and associated BPs added for Lrg, med, sml rocks
- Grasslands Rocks - FTs and associated BPs added for Lrg, med, sml rocks
- tundra Rocks - FTs and associated BPs added for Lrg, med, sml rocks
- Volcanic Rocks - FTs and associated BPs added for Lrg, med, sml rocks
- Added 3 variants of bulbous flax plant for the lava biome with foliage types and blueprints
- Adding S.Bird Nip audio to event and all footstep notifiers. Also adding all data entry tables for creature so far
- Added bulbous Flax to the FLOD data table
- Updated Brick Tier Floor
- Swamp/GL/TU macros - polish on textures+materials
- Volcanic Rocks - voxel cache files for LRG, MED, SML rocks
- Swamp Rocks - voxel cache files for LRG, MED, SML rocks
- Adding S.Bird aggro vocals and more unique idle layers
- Tundra Rocks - voxel cache files for LRG, MED, SML rocks
- Grasslands Rocks - voxel cache files for LRG, MED, SML rocks
- Adding in base implemenation of opening wooden gate to use with the railings, all base assets and data table setups, currently is awarded to the player along side the wooden railing when it is unlocked, using the same cost processor recipe
- Adding data table entries for aggro event for S.Bird
- Manual Foliage Placement in the Volcanic Biome, Purple Quad, Prometheus
- Manual AC & TU Foliage Placement on Blue Quad, DLC Map
- Decal painting, landscape painting and foliage manual painting in arctic biome and underwater dressing, Green Quand, DLC
- Added SW Impassable 09, plus GL variants of 1-9
- macro replacement with impassables, green quad (WIP)
- Adding S.Bird notifiers for movement sounds
- Added AC_Pine_SnowLite and AC_Fir_SnowLite, including foliage types and BPs, as well as Data Table entries
- Setup SW Rocks, Moss function tweak to fix moss inside voxels, Added rocks to SW_Dirt_Foliage Spawner
- Submitting first pass fortification implemenation, includes wall, spikes, walkway and stairs and all base data table setups as well as relevant blueprints the system uses our existing deployable socket and snapping features, so doesnt requiore a building grid
- SW Impassables - added 10-14, plus GL variants
- Fixed UV distortion of SW_MAC_05
- macro replacement with impassables, green quad (WIP2)
- Created PFS for GL/CF/SW and General Resources, changed AC_Stone Shader to not use RVT for TU use, Added DLC Layers to Resources
- Manual Foliage Placement in the Volcanic Biome, Purple Quad, Prometheus
- Spawning SW Foliage on Blue Quad, DLC Map
- Decal painting, landscape painting and foliage manual painting in arctic biome and underwater dressing, Green Quand, DLC
- SM_Breakable_Scoria blueprint, mesh, material and textures
- Setting up Deployable to call down an exotic extraction ship for delivering exotics while on a prospect (this is preperation of the data decentralisation game flow
- Added Wood Railing Gate Icon to D_Itemable