Update 0.2.9: The Oasis Update is Here! 🌴🐟
Hello Survivors,
The wasteland of Scorching Desert is becoming more alive—and just a little bit more bearable. With today's Update 0.2.9, we are breathing fresh life into the barren dunes, revamping the wilderness, and delivering a massive boost to game performance!
Here is a breakdown of the most important changes:
Discover the New "Paradise Oasis"
A new sanctuary awaits you amidst the scorching sands. Oases have received a major visual overhaul, featuring much more environmental variety. You will now find mossy underwater rocks, new types of grass, and dense bushes that can be harvested for crucial resources like branches, fibers, and leaves. To make sure you don't lose track of your hard-earned loot, we have also increased the size of branches so they are easier to spot in high grass.
New Food Sources and Vibrant Nature
Survival is getting a lot more dynamic:
Fishing: The oasis waters are now populated with killable and edible fish.
New Wildlife: Keep your eyes (and ears) open for frogs, which have started inhabiting certain oases.
Atmosphere: Improved ambience audio ensures the world feels more immersive and alive as you explore.
Massive Performance Optimizations
We have completely reworked how the game handles vegetation. Loading trees now requires drastically fewer resources. Even better: tree runtime performance has been heavily optimized, now consuming 95% fewer resources while the game is running. This should translate directly into smoother framerates and a much better gameplay experience.
Full Changelog
Features & Improvements:
Added the new "Paradise Oasis".
Added new harvestable bushes that yield branches, fibers, and leaves.
Added more and varied grass types to oases.
Added underwater mossy rocks and specific underwater grass types to certain oases.
Increased the size of grounded branches for better visibility in high grass.
Added killable and edible fish to the water.
Added killable frogs to some oases.
Added and improved ambient audio.
Added a UI indicator showing exactly how many items you will receive when crafting.
Bug Fixes:
Fixed an issue where the "Close" button was being overlapped by quickslots when looting dead creatures.
Increased the icon resolution for crafting gear.
Performance:
Massively reduced the resources required for loading in trees.
Optimized tree runtime performance (now requires 95% less resources at runtime).
Thank you all for your continuous feedback and support during development. As always, let us know what you think of the new oases and the performance gains in the community discussions!
Stay hydrated out there,
The Scorching Desert Development Team