As planned, we’re continuing with the iteration on Season 5. Not without your help, of course, so we’d like to thank you again for sending all the feedback, bug reports, and just playing the game. All of it is invaluable for us to make better decisions when it comes to the season’s direction and the whole gameplay experience.
It’s not a secret that we’re currently working on the next map in the roster to continue the progression - Sleeping Giants. It will unlock Clay tier and will add a lot of new content to the game at the same time. Remember the Okkam with the Rupu shooting on its back from the trailer? You’ll spot it right away when the map comes out (unless it spots you first).
It will also bring a new and improved Rupu behavior and classes, including an entirely new support class of Rupu that help their fellow warriors in battle instead of rushing you all together with wooden sticks, intended to make camp encounters more varied and interesting. Same as we did with Cradle and Canyons for Season 5, Sleeping Giants will be an entirely new experience, only this time we have your feedback to guide us towards a better version from the very start.
For today, we’ve prepared a smaller patch to address some more urgent issues. The main change is the traveling system.
We’ve heard a lot of complaints about the current system and how it is more of a chore than a challenge. It’s difficult to plan routes because the traveling tunnels close too soon, which might put you in a dead end if the tunnel you were hoping to use closed while you were traveling through another map. We’ve seen some routes suggested by the system being so long that it can sometimes take literal hours to get to the tile you’re aiming for. That, and a whole lot of other suggestions on how to improve rarity and PvP were submitted, but more on that below.
To be clear from the start - we’re nowhere near done making improvements to the traveling and the more we hear about what you like or dislike about it, the better and quicker we can rework it. For now, to address some of those issues, we’ve come up with solutions that are both quick and, hopefully, super effective. First thing that you’ll notice when you enter the new update is that there are a lot more tunnels now. And I mean A LOT more. That should address the issue where you had a dilemma - go by the suggested route and hope the tunnels will open on the same sides as they were, so you can continue your journey as planned from the start, or wait and do nothing until a new set of tunnels opens up on your own map.
The latter, though, would still be futile, as the time the tunnels stay open was sometimes so short that you couldn’t even travel through a single map and would already need to change the course because of the tunnels closing right in front of you. This problem should also be fixed now by increasing the timer on each tunnel to a whole 12 hours. That’s right, not 15 minutes, but half a day, during which you can plan routes and actually complete them without having to backtrack or wait mindlessly for another tunnel to open to travel to a tile right next to you.
Together, those changes are aimed at making traveling much more streamlined and less restrictive, but still interesting and challenging at times, as you still need to plan your routes and still need to actually travel through the maps instead of hopping around them in a game about big nomadic wooden machines. At the same time, you’ll get to choose where you want to go and when, instead of the game setting strict rules as to which direction you may go towards and which are forbidden for no apparent reason.
In addition to this, there are a whole lot of fixes of bugs and crashes, there are Quality of Life improvements like an increased size of the Hoist inventory and a better experience with Base Maintenance that many new players reported they have been struggling with. Other pretty big changes like an improved Papak and better melee behavior for all the Rupu are also coming with this patch - check the changelog for the full list.
If you have other suggestions or feedback for this change, we’re all eyes and ears on Discord and other official social media, so let us know what you think once you’ve tried it!
We’re compiling a little survey about your experience in Season 5 so far and would love to see the results. We'll share the survey as soon as it's ready!
Now to what we’re planning in the very near future. Small improvements to general traveling is only the beginning of the overhaul of the World Map. Next on our list is redesigning completely how both PvP and Rarity tiles work. From what we gather, some enjoy the current system as it is, even though, not without its quirks, but there wouldn’t be a person to say that the system we have in place is perfect and needs no changes. Us included.
So what we’d like to do about it based on the feedback and our own perception of the system? A lot, actually. Firstly, as chadz already revealed on Discord a few days ago, we’re considering switching all rare maps to use a similar system to the event maps. What it means in practice is that at certain times, in each region, maps with all kinds of rarity and clan caps will be popping up around the World Map, then stay up for anyone wanting to experience it for some time, and, by the end, burn out like the old event maps did. What we want to achieve with this is a much more diverse experience when it comes to rarity and progression in the game. We’ll have both PvP and PvE rarity maps, ranging from tiny clan caps to big clan sizes, spawning randomly all around the world. This will ensure that anyone interested in going to a rare map and getting some sweet loot will have this opportunity, regardless of whether they prefer PvE or PvP, how large their clan is or if they even have one - everyone, equally, will have a chance to experience every map at every rarity.
When it comes to the details, we’re still ironing them out and some parts might be changed by the time this change comes to the game, but we wanted to share with you what we’re working on at the moment aside from the next progression map. In addition to this change though, there are many more planned for rarity and pvp specifically. For example, we’d like the rarity event maps to be accessible from any distance over time, as the size of their influence slowly increases, giving priority to the lucky few who are stationed on the maps close to it, but still providing an opportunity to everyone in the region who wants to join the map later, unless they’d like to travel and get there quicker.
“But doesn’t it mean you can jump across the whole map in one move?” - we asked ourselves. No.With the current idea, rarity maps are more akin to raids in MMORPGs - you go there to fight some difficult enemies, either PvE or PvP, but then can only return back to the tile you came from, resulting in a periodic “rarity rush” with a simple way to return to your home tile afterwards.
Additionally, we’re considering features like forbidding building on rarity maps, not to put anyone in a situation where they build a base, but can’t bring it back from a tile that’s supposed to last only a limited amount of time. Traveling to those maps will also, most likely, be limited only to walkers of equal and one rarity below the one on the map. Meaning, that with a Common Stiletto, you won’t be able to join a Legendary map. You just wouldn’t have a chance at that progression level. Instead, we’d like to make sure that everyone joining rarity maps is up to the challenge by checking at which progression step their walker is.
We’ll be talking more about those changes as they will be getting closer to release, but we’d love to hear your opinions and thoughts so far! You can also read the full changelog for the update below:
- Added more traveling tunnels to every map.
- Increased tunnel duration to 12 hours.
- Increased Hoist container size from 10 to 20 slots.
- Improved Base Maintenance UI by adding notifications, tooltips, etc.
- Added Merchants to Canyons map that allow trading for currency.
- Improved Papak behavior.
- Improved Rupu melee system, making ranged rupus worse at melee, etc.
- Reduced Sterile Bandage crafting from 5 Gel to 2.
- Moved Hoist to Walker Tools category.
- Fixed wrong percentages being shown on Hoist repair screen.
- Made Humidifier slightly smaller, so it fits in every base.
- Added new effects and sounds to Humidifier.
- Fixed Automatons using rupu sounds on being hit.
- Made Throwstone available in Ammo Chest.
- Reduced Papak size to its intended scale.
- Fixed some specific projectiles still damaging player bases.
- Added various armors to Rupu types to distinguish them.
- Fixed a crash related to the World Map.
- Fixed a crash related to traveling to an invalid tile.
- Fixed a crash related to opening some game screens.
- Fixed a whole lot of other crashes I'd need an engineer to explain.