History
So our last update was quite an exciting one, it was to experiment with a brand new survival game mode, to see if it could work, get player feedback on it and if it fit the game. We were never fully convinced that it was a direction the game should go in but nonetheless wanted to try it.
It brought many challenges, both from a balancing and technical perspective which were quickly overcome however it had one huge side effect - it would change the normal game that has existed for years that players loved to play and worked countless hours trying to improve.
Therefore I have made the decision to not continue any further with the survival mode. That's not to say it may not appear further down the road again (a lot of stuff is coded now) but it's definitely not my main focus in the near future.
The positives
So having lots of enemies running at your base in a huge world is pretty hard to achieve technically (the base game was challenging enough!) and lots of changes to old code that hasn't been touched for 5-6 years was made. These gave us good performance improvements that will be present in the next build that will be published to the beta branch.
Going forwards
Going forwards, at least for the near future, will be focusing on getting PvP working again and make improvements where possible there.
Consideration will be given to the "vs twitch viewers" mode. This feature adds to my development and isn't really used - people just want to play the normal mode. This time could be spent say, adding more maps to the base game which more people would enjoy and make use out of.
Long story short; just add polish and fix things that already exist.
I'm sorry to those who were excited for the survival mode, it only ever was a very closed beta test for good reason (it's why I made it a Discord only invite). However I hope you can all appreciate that we got some great benefits out of it and I will continue to experiment once we've gone back and addressed some other issues. For me, this is all part of the development cycle - if we don't experiment with different things, we don't know what will work and suit.
I'll update everyone when the next build is live to test the performance improvements, it shouldn't be too long.