We are happy to announce that the A29 "Factions Update" is coming on the 19th of January (Tuesday). We will post detailed information about the update and patchnotes when the update launches. But there's definitely a lot coming in this update, so let's get a quick overview.
The Factions Update has been in active development and testing for quite a while now but it is finally ready for release! It includes quite a few nice additions and slowly brings the game towards the finished state. There are still things we want to finish before release, but it's getting closer and closer to how we envisioned CryoFall to be in its finished form.
Since this update is called Factions Update—as you can imagine, factions are the key feature it introduces. Anyone can create their own faction (in both PvP and PvE) and invite other players to join it. You can also create a public faction where anyone can join freely. Once your faction is created you can assign roles to its members allowing you to tightly manage your faction permissions. You can also configure your land claims and doors to ensure that only certain faction roles would have access to them. So, you don't need to worry that if you invite strangers into your faction that they might deconstruct everything and steal your possessions—just don't give them unnecessary permissions.
And yes, the most important feature of factions is the Leaderboard. Players can compete for the highest rank on the server. The game will track the progress of all faction members and derive a score for each faction. It tracks a number of different metrics measuring the faction's performance and based on your feedback we will continue expanding and tweaking the leaderboard system in future versions of the game.
Some other key additions and changes include:
- massively reworked map with new areas, new boss arenas, large central city, and new secrets
- 3 new creatures and a new boss!
- fast travel through the network of alien teleports which you can discover on the map
- automated sentry turrets to help you defend your base during raids on PvP servers
- new wall type (fence) which you can shoot through (unlocked in T3)
- significant changes to UI and overall presentation of the game
- several new world events
- lots of new items, crafting recipes, food, plants, technologies, status effects, etc.
- many performance and QoL improvements
Anyway, we will have a detailed announcement when the update launches, so stay tuned, it is just a few days away!
Launch date: 19th January, 1 PM by GMT/UTC time
For your convenience, here is the local time in the primary time zones we have:
• 7 AM by Central US (CST, GMT-6 winter time)
• 2 PM by Central EU (CET, GMT+1 winter time)
• 16:00 by Russia/Moscow (GMT+3)
• 21:00 by China/Beijing (GMT+8)
• 10 AM by Argentina/Brazil (GMT-3)
• 10 PM by Japan and South Korea (GMT+9)
This time all the official servers (both PvP and PvE) will be wiped as A29 is a massive update that introduces breaking changes into the game. When the update hits—we welcome you to join all the newly started servers with the fresh economy and all of the new stuff introduced by the update!
As usual, we will provide a legacy branch for the previous (A28) version if you intend to keep playing with it on a community or a private server.
Don't forget to join Official Discord to be aware of all news and updates. We post a lot of upcoming content art and other interesting things there regularly.