Icarus Hypatia: Part I Update | 19 new Operations in Styx Open World to play

The first part of our Hypatia Update is here adding Operations ('Open World Missions') to the Styx Expansion

These have proven really popular in the Prometheus map of our New Frontiers expansion, so we’re excited to bring these to Styx - a map rich with challenging geography, unique missions and violent fauna.

Styx was released back in 2022 and has since undergone a major transformation, with 27 missions, unique fauna, fish species, SMPL3 quests, and more. If you’ve enjoyed New Frontiers, or even Olympus (the original Icarus map), then Styx provides a new challenge for you to sink your teeth into.

Notable Improvements

• Mesh and Texture adjustments to most building tiers which will provide some performance benefits and allows us to cosmetically skin these in future
• Fixed Longbow being unable to be crafted or repaired on the forge or foundry as it was supposed to be
• Fixed some collision issues present on the Arcticus Outpost
• General cleanup of many Styx and Olympus missions using new technology and replacing the tech from 2 years ago to provide a better mission experience

This Week: Hypatia: STYX OPERATIONS

Styx has now been completely overhauled adding Operations ('Open World Missions') to the Styx expansion. This updated functionality is free for everyone who already owns Styx.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1995690/Icarus_Styx_Map__Missions_Pack/

These have proven really popular in the Prometheus map of our New Frontiers expansion and will be coming in the next few weeks to the Olympus map.

We’ve converted 19 Missions over to ‘Operations’, meaning they can now be launched and played from your Open World sessions rather than a session that resets itself. This really changes how you play and engage with Icarus.

Styx is a paid expansion, and if you already own it you don’t have to purchase it again to play the Operations. This included people who received Styx for free back when it was initially released.

While we have converted 19 Missions into Operations, we haven’t converted all of them. Some Missions, such as pure exploration ones or time-limit ones, are still best suited to a session-based experience. You can also still play all the Operations in their original Missions format if you prefer.

Extra Detail: Styx as a stepping stone in our development

Due to the conversion process of some Missions to Operations some existing prospect saves on Missions for Olympus & Styx may not be able to be completed in their old state. So we have provided a branch on steam that will keep the current build on before this week's patch so you can complete your Missions before switching over. Icarus[pre-hypatia] You can find the full details below.

Icarus[pre-hypatia] branch information

This Week: PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS - Buildings

A couple of weeks ago, we made some improvements to the building system and asked for feedback, along with more suggestions of what you’d like to see. This week, we’re implementing many of those suggestions, which also lead to performance improvements.

• Roof Corner pieces now allow placement of other Roof Corner pieces in the same location. This allows you to create your own roofing with two different materials in a V shape.
• Half walls now have an upper half variation which can be placed in the same location as the lower half wall, allowing you to make walls from two materials with a horizontal split. Notably, you can make large windows by using glass half walls.

To improve the performance of buildings we’ve converted all building tiers to the kit-based asset system, similar to Stone and Brick tiers. This kit system means each building tier shares a base set of textures, with each piece being created from a kit of pieces that use those textures. This results in much lower graphical memory usage for building within the game.

As an example, the wood building tier has 26 assets with unique textures, that’s a total of 78 textures at 4k resolution. Each piece uses the base kit of 9 textures, plus some individual smaller textures, resulting in 17.25 textures, compared to the original 78.

These kit-based assets provide the best of both worlds - allowing us to use high-resolution textures while keeping the memory usage low. You’ll also be able to see some more of our upcoming building improvements in the future updates section of the patch notes!

Coming Soon: Hypatia Part II: OLYMPUS OPERATIONS

Hypatia Part II will focus on bringing Operations to the original Olympus map. This is making steady progress and we are in the phase of doing detailed testing on mission flow, player interactions and bug sweeping.

This update will also bring Open World Resource Respawning, and we are currently testing this feature. We’ll have more news on when to expect Hypatia Part II: Olympus Operations very soon.

Next Week: Tusker - New Styx Mount

Next week's update will bring a new mount, that will be exclusive to the Arctic region of Styx for now.

This is the Tusker, which is a large, formidable beast with a much higher resistance and health total. It also has a faster stamina regeneration and the highest carry capacity of any mount but is slightly slower compared to the buffalo.

Support our Project

If you like what we’re doing with Icarus, and want to support our continued development, consider purchasing one of our DLCs for a few dollars, it would mean a lot to us.

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

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/33813/Icarus_Complete_the_Set/

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/34141/Icarus_Outposts_Bundle/

Changelog v2.1.0.116866

New Content/Hypatia

Fixed

Future Content