[2022] Icarus Week Fifty Two Update | Two new Open World mission types + Fortifications

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

This week we’re introducing two new Open World Mission types, new Fortifications to deploy and a new mission.

BUILD and DRONE Open World Mission types have been added, and a range of bugs have been fixed to improve the other available missions.

Wooden Fortifications now give you a true defence system to protect your base or assets in missions or Open World, removing the need for makeshift solutions that players have used before.

And finally, a mission to tasking you to perform research on enhancing tonics and their effectiveness has been added, with your briefing below.

Next week, we’ll be celebrating Icarus' one year anniversary and 52 straight weeks of updates. This is something we’re incredibly proud of and can’t wait to celebrate with you.

Open World Quests
Two new Open World Mission Types have been added, and we’ve made a few changes and fixes to the existing missions that we discovered thanks to feedback from our community.

BUILD: Players have to build a watchtower and place a provided beacon on it. When placed, players will receive a small buff in an area around the watchtower until the beacon is destroyed.

DRONE: Players have limited time to find and upload data from a crashed drone. When activated, the drone will likely attract nearby creatures, so be prepared to defend it.

• We’ve addressed a couple of bugs and improved our original Open World Missions:
  
• Open World quests now take into account the biomes they are in
  
• Improved the spawning locations of animals
  
• Increased the variety of animals in HUNT, CACHE and SCAN Missions
  
• Fixed rewards that were scaling on ‘prospect difficulty’ and not ‘mission difficulty’

Wooden Fortifications
We’ve added a new set of wooden fortifications to the planetary tech tree for players to craft and use to defend their base. For Missions that require you to defend an area, defeat a horde or even protect yourself in the early stages of your journey, these will be a welcome asset and necessary blueprint.

These new pieces include walls, an interactive gate, ramps and walkways, and spikes that can be attached to the wall and deliver damage on collision with whatever creatures charges at them.

Fortifications have substantially more HP points than walls or floors, roughly five times their wooden counterparts. On top of this, they’re entirely weather-resistant, so won’t require maintenance during storms.

Fortification pieces snap to one another, similar to building pieces. This makes it easy to shore up any potential gaps in your design that enemies could sneak through.

Players have been very creative in using the hedgehogs as a makeshift defence network, so fortifications open the door for us to provide more variety and customization to this system.



New Mission
A new mission is available to be played this week, tasking you to perform research on enhancing tonics and their effectiveness. Tonics were introduced as a result of our paste revamp last week. Your briefing is as follows:

AUGMENTATION: Extermination

// OPERATOR: UDA
// BIOME: Enclosed Wood
// BACKGROUND: UDA has been performing research on enhancing tonics made out of Icarus resources
// MISSION: Craft pills and enhancement tonics, eliminate wildlife to meet testing requirements
// TERMS: Flat fee. All materials, safety and survival concerns are the responsibility of the Contractor

Originally posted by author: Shortly after we push this patch live, we will be pushing the ‘data decentralization patch’ onto the experimental branch in preparation for it to go live. Everyone is free to jump and give it a go with the freedom to revert back to the live build at any time. We hope to push data decentralization next week with our dedicated servers beta. Please jump into our Discord and post in #experimental-branch channel for any bugs or feedback.

- Jake, Project Lead

Changelog v1.2.27.105033
New Content

• Update Wood Fortifications (Wall, Spikes, Gate and Walkways)
  
• Add proper Meshable entries so icons can be taken
  
• Fixed wrong DM's being referenced in BPs and water network logic due to copy pasta
  
• Renamed cases of Fortification Stairs to Ramps to keep consistent and make way for potential future stair meshes
  
• Changed ordering of Walkway elements to start with the Walkway
  
• Cleaned out unnecessary DeployableSetup data (only need to specify names/icons if they're variants)
  
• Fixed Fortified Wood Gate from playing close animation on deployment due to play rate on 'closed' animation being -1 when we already have a dedicated set of open/close anims for those tasks
  
• Initial audio data setup for wooden fortifications, with new FMOD event for damage sound. Add audio location settings to deployable base to enable more accurate sound positioning as required for fortification deployables, and added some tidyups to basic deployable audio implementation
  
• Set up audio occlusion and shelter interfaces for fortification deployables
  
• Added Refined Wood as a fuel source, slightly less efficient than using raw wood so players do not feel the need to process wood before use for basic lighting.
  
• Reorganized fuel sources in basic generators to be in generation strength order (visual change)
  
• Added fortifications flavor text.
  
• Added fortifications recipes
  
• Added extra sockets to fortification walls and walkways to allow greater flexibility in walkway ramp placement
  
• Buffalo Mount: Movement speed 130 -> 140
  
• All Mounts: Added 30% physical damage resistance
  
• All Mounts: Reduced Food and Water consumption by 50%
  
• All Mounts: Increased stamina regeneration by ~15%
  
• Updated Cooked Bacon modifier icon to match new current Cooked Bacon icon
  
• Adding new dynamic mission - build- where players are required to build a watchtower, and place a beacon on top at the correct hight, if performed correctly players will be gain an buff for being around the watchtower
  
• Re-enabling AUGMENTATION mission
  
• Fixing Location Based Queries on Quests
  
• Add spike damage setup to wood fortification spikes, taking 1/4 durability damage and dealing 1/2 damage to players in comparison to the basic hedegehog trap
  
• Expanded support for Spike Trap Base, now supporting multiple overlap boxes, streamlined effects setup, optimized effects settings
  
• Adding in functionality for the fortifications to use Destruction states when below 50% health, added in first pass proof of concept for mesh swap to the base wood wall, anything that inherits from Fortification Base can use this system, a destructable mesh still has to be made for the final state to stop it from disappearing when completely destroyed
  
• Updated fortifications tagging.
  
• Ensured fortification ramps can overlap other actors, this ensures they can be placed on various angled terrain.
  
• Offset potbelly stove overalp to ensure placement is allowed inside buildings
  
• Adding Wood Fort Gate Open / Close sounds and notifiers
  
• Wood Fortifications are now unlocked and present on the T2 Blueprint tree
  
• Adding destruction audio for forts, event and data table entry
  
• Adjustments to fortifications impact sound. Added a cooldown to stop shotgun bullet impacts from making the sound play multiple times at once. Also swapped grasslands reverb to same as forest but lower in volume. Adjusted volume of blueback stomp
  
• Unlock Recipes for Fortifications, removing feature level flags from fortification items
  
• Fixed screen fade visual bug when transitioning to and from conifer-type biomes
  
• Adding new Drone Dynamic Quest
  
• Updating Quest Objective UI to correctly show failed missions
  
• Updating Animal Swarm Component to allow a selection of animals to spawn not just a set one
  
• Fort Wall - added DM and SM for 50% destruction state
  
• Adjustment to fort spike sound. Adding gore layer
  
• Adding very annoying drone alarm sound asset
  
• Dynamic Hunt mission: Added non-hostile hunt targets.
  
• Increased dynamic quest weighting on Hunt, Build and Downed Drone missions for experimental
  
• Allowed fortification walkways to be placed while colliding
  
• Increased ground clearance leeway when placing fortification walls
  
• Previous food buff issues on reload broke other modifers (went to experimental build)
  
• Remove inital buff lifetime from From FModifier so that it has no interaction with Blueprints or datatables
  
• Patch in initial buff lifetime during save/load so that active buffs stack correctly after save/load
  
• Added Downed drone icon and added to map icons data table
  
• Dynamic Build mission: Added indicator towards ground to show location better from ground level.
  
• Dynamic Build mission: Slightly increased minimum and maximum height requirement.
  
• Dynamic Drone mission: Fixed quest selection to allow mission to be selected.
  
• Dynamic Drone mission: Fixed timer step to show complete message rather than pausing the timer.
  
• Wood Gate Fortification: Increased leeway for placement
  
• Fixed fortification gate navigation not generating properly in it's mirrored state
  
• Partial implementation for drone alarm
  
• Added damage state functionality to the Fortification Gate and the Spike trap base class, added in the fortification window variant in the deployable setup
  
• Fortifications - added damaged state SMs for Wall, WallWindow, Gate, Spikes, plus DMs for all pieces - Assigned to Fort BPs
  
• Implementation for drone alarm
  
• Fortifications - fixed editor warnings on destructible meshes caused by bad material references
  
• Drone alarm audio routing fix, adding explosion event
  
• Updating Drone Map Icon
  
• Dynamic Drone Mission now explodes when mission complete or fails, and enemies will stop spawning when mission timer step of mission completes
  
• AUGMENTATION mission: Updated text and reduced required amount of ore to mine as it tracks hits of nodes, rather than amount mined
  
• Dynamic Hunt mission: Reduced time between creature spawns
  
• Dynamic Hunt mission: Scaled chance for non-hostile creature selection by difficulty
  
• Dynamic Build mission: Updated name of beacon on initial quest step
  
• Dynamic Build mission: Increased aura radius to cover a larger area around the watchtower
  
• Fixed dynamic mission reward scaling to scale by dynamic mission difficulty, rather than the selected open world difficulty
  
• When Drone Explodes, any creatures or pawns nearby will be damaged (Players will be fine)
  
• Updating Mission complete text on Drone Mission
  
• Adding in Drone Explosion Audio and Updating Explosion Triggers
  
• Fixing Drone Timer which was accidently set to 30 seconds making the quest impossible to complete
  
• Reduced Hunt, Build and Drone dynamic quest weighting ready for this patch release
  
• Fixing Rare Crash in Legacy Sessions when missions complete
  
• Fixing a mistake in the last commit about legacy sessions, an == was supposed to be an !=

Fixed

• Fixed texture settings on CF Aspen assets
  
• Fixed ALN Bushflower texture settings
  
• Fixed texture settings on all Bramble assets
  
• Fixed texture settings for BrambleG assets
  
• Fixed filenames for BrambleG textures
  
• Fix up some master materials referencing assets instead of default textures, fixed various material warnings, fix up redirector and deleted unused assets
  
• Optimize settings on Decal textures, several cases of 4k sets reduced to 2k
  
• Fix up texture settings on CocoPalm assets.
  
• Delete a ton of unused duplicate assets. Fix filenames
  
• Update concrete railings to use more appropriate deploy sounds
  
• Ensured every ItemsStatic has a Decayable row defined. Add DT validation to catch future cases which dont
  
• Simplified Decayable DT entries and updated references in ItemsStatic
  
• Add DT validation to check for duplicate data entries in Decayable
  
• Fix up redirectors in BLD folder
  
• Fix up redirectors in ITM folder
  
• Fix up redirectors in DEP folder
  
• Disable Decayable on Dropshippart ItemTraitMasks and also removed Decayable entries on Dropship rows in ItemsStatic just to be safe, to fix dropships deleting themselves on planet after Decayable pass
  
• Skip ItemsStatic rows with Rocketable defines when doing Decayable validation checks, as Rocketable (Dropship) items shouldn't have Decay
  
• Fixed compilation errors/warnings for voxel niagara effects
  
• Cleanup planet assets, moved into single folder, fixed names
  
• More planet asset cleanup
  
• Clean up unused Developer folder content
  
• Fix Graphics Settings DLSS drop down does not disable if GPU does not support DLSS
  
• Update Bone and Flint Arrow descriptions to reflect their in-game damage
  
• Fixed spelling of Sustenance Enhancement Tonics
  
• Fixed typo in pickaxe Platinumsmith alteration name
  
• Fixed LiveWire mission steps in pre-launch description window
  
• Fix waterfall mesh reference in Olympus to redirector which was cleaned up but didn't flag
  
• Fix issue with Station Diorama decals projecting on top of background meshes
  
• Fixed Scan missions cleanup logic to correctly clean up icons as they are completed, rather than the final scan's icon
  
• Add r.CVarTessellationAdaptivePixelsPerTriangle CVar to DefaultEngine INI to help alleviate landscape wobbling effect as the landscape mesh dynamically tessellates, the closer it gets to the camera. This cannot be added to scalabilitygroups due to the way the variable is implemented, so global project setting of 12 (4x reduction) for now. Pending performance results, could be decreased further in the future
  
• Fix food buff issues on reload
  
• Serailize stomach contents as well as modifiers
  
• Serialize both initial buff duration and current buff time left
  
• Use initial buff duration when refreshing buff type stack
  
• Fixed clover type grass not casting shadows and fixed texture resolution being over-optimized
  
• Changed Olympus water surface plants to not render as far
  
• Fix an issue where the AMD Pro (as opposed to AMD Adrenalin) drivers were not detected as up to date
  
• Bumped recommended version numbers to latest WHQL for both AMD and nVidia
  
• Factor 4K into auto suggest graphics setting when considering minimum spec GPU
  
• Resave data tables after code change
  
• Fixing Creature Spawning on Cache, Collect and Kill Dynamic Missions
  
• Adding a new EQS for animal spawning specifically for Dynamic Missions
  
• Fixed text alignment on UMG DeathScreen after default value for widget was changed and accidentally reflected here
  
• Remove fractions from respawn countdown timer and just display whole seconds
  
• Fixing Snow Wolves Not Having the Correct Name
  
• Increase creature variation on dynamic cache, hunt and scan missions
  
• Fixed screen fade visual bug when transitioning to and from conifer-type biomes
  
• Previous food buff issues on reload broke other modifers (went to experimental build)
  
• Remove inital buff lifetime from From FModifier so that it has no interaction with Blueprints or datatables
  
• Patch in initial buff lifetime during save/load so that active buffs stack correctly after save/load
  
• Fix AMD GPU driver version check (again) after changing recommended WHQL driver version
  
• Fixed physical material on the herbalism bench, allowing sound when repairing it with your hammer

New Content

• Placed Meta Exotic and Enzime Geysers in Grasslands and Tundra/Arctic, polished decals and cliffs, Green Quad, DLC Map
  
• Adding Clay Brick mesh to Clay brick item
  
• Adding Seldgehammer mesh to Sledgehammer Item
  
• Add two mini conifer biomes to Prometheus for audio purposes
  
• Ambient biome adjustments to scatter creatures to fit better. Also adjusted velocity curve for waterbombs
  
• Adding first layers of Blueback Audio. (Idle). Adding to data table. Also adding new biome for audio reverb changes
  
• Added 3 cypress seedling assets to the project. Created blueprint, Foliage type and added to data table
  
• Added 3 Mangrove seedling assets to the project. Created blueprint, Foliage type and added to data table
  
• Adjusted pathway to climb out of Mega Tree Cave, Set Dress Mega Tree cave tunnel & Started Blockout on P2 area on Purple Quad, DLC Map
  
• Updated Template Cave ACMED_005 and Added it into Blue Quad and General Cleanup, Blue Quad, Prometheus
  
• Set Dress Mega Tree cave tunnel and placed sulfur deposit meshes to geothermal pools, Purple Quad, DLC Map
  
• Add rotating fans to new V2 Electric Dehumidifier. Fix default materials
  
• Set Dress Mega Tree cave tunnel & placed sulfur deposit meshes to geothermal pools, Purple Quad, DLC Map
  
• Fix texture settings on mangrove trees
  
• Ash/Ember Storm Prototype VFX
  
• Geothermal/Sulfur Pools Steam, Bubbling and Geyser VFX
  
• Added New Cypress Seedlings to Swamp, Added New Placement Layer for the seedlings and Some General Cleanup, Blue Quad, Prometheus
  
• Added burnt versions of SW_Cypress, all 3 variants, as well as added extra details to main trunk pieces of chopped tree
  
• Add culldistance volume to Prometheus
  
• Blockout Lava Lakes & Lava River on P2 area on Purple Quad, DLC Map
  
• Adding Blueback Flinch audio and unique footstep event. Also adding correct fmod param to biome data table
  
• Set Dress Mega Tree cave tunnel & and polished cliffs and decalt, Purple Quad, DLC Map
  
• Adding blueback death audio and adjustments to spacializer settings
  
• Audio data setup for cypress and mangrove seedlings
  
• Added New Cypress and Mangrove Seedlings to Swamp and Some General Cleanup, Blue Quad, Prometheus
  
• Lava Lakes & Lava River blending with landscape on P2 area on Purple Quad, DLC Map
  
• Adding blueback aggro and attack events and sounds and data table entry
  
• Added SM_DEP_T4_Communication_Device
  
• Set Dress Mega Tree cave, tunnel & entrance. Polished cliffs and decalt, Purple Quad, DLC Map
  
• Fix swamp lakes using incorrect FMOD event
  
• Adjustments to blueback sounds. Also added correct biome to figid lowlands
  
• Added Exotic Cleaner asset to project
  
• Added Pistol and Rifle rounds icons and added to Itemable datatable
  
• Added clay brick icon into Itemable data table
  
• Finished Adding Mangrove Seedlings to Swamp and Some General Cleanup, Blue Quad, Prometheus
  
• Finished Lava Lakes & Lava River blending with landscape on P2 area & Painted Cypress Seedling in Purple SW on Purple Quad, DLC Map
  
• Added Additional Brick tier assets
  
• Added Cave Void and Cave volumes to Mega tree cave, polished landscape material and decals, Purple Quad, DLC
  
• Added Cave Voxels for DLC Map
  
• Setup prototype Harvest FX for new foliage actors GL,SW and LC
  
• Increased View Distance and Optimize Waterfall Base VFX
  
• Polish Big Ice Cave, Added voxel to SW/AC Transition Cave & Big Ice Cave on Blue Quad, DLC Map
  
• Inital Placement of Cliffs in the Phase 2 Area of Purple Quad and Removal of WT_CaveVolumes In Megatree Cave, Prometheus
  
• SK_ITM_Shield_Wooden gfur added
  
• Increased LOD Distances for RiverCliffs to fix material switch too close to camera
  
• Base setup implementation of the Striker, including corpse, base montages and initial behavior, phase 2 will include variants and extended bespoke behavior, as well as a few more idle states incoming
  
• Some fixes and further impementation for the spider, includes all base setup and first pass attacks for the main spider variant, needs projectile added to the web attack and corpse state, as well as nest spawning etc for in game implementation