Icarus Dev Tracker

Mission Achieved, Prospectors!

Beta Weekend Four provided a challenge like never experienced before on Icarus, but you took it head on with confidence, creativity and a lot of courage. With the largest journey yet to complete on foot, changing biomes and fierce new predators, it took careful planning and resource management to successfully complete.



Mission Broken Arrow saw countless warheads recovered, bosses defeated and recovery missions completed. We also include several successful performance improvements (always more coming) and balance changes for this Beta Weekend, and put out a couple of hotfixes during the weekend that addressed some spawning issues... Read more

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

It begins on Friday 8th October at 5pm PDT and lasts an extra day until Monday 11th 10pm PDT.

As we posted yesterday, we’re adding an extra Beta Weekend. This means the Desert biome will be unlocked in two weeks’ time, and the other Beta Weekends are all pushed back two weeks too.



MISSION BRIEFING: BROKEN ARROW
RECOVER ENZYME WARHEADS FROM THREE DOWNED TERRAFORMING SATELLITES.
BACKGROUND:

When terraforming failed, the UDA t... Read more

On Icarus always be prepared for change, Prospector. Our first three Beta Weekends have absolutely exceeded our expectations. Nearly 200,000 people have played, many returning every Beta Weekend, for an average of 8 hours each. Many of you have sunk more than 20 hours into Icarus so far.

You, the players, have given us more insight, feedback, love and support than we could have ever imagined. We’ve aimed to reciprocate this in our work on the game, making an array of updates and changes to ensure each weekend is an improvement on the last. We’re feeling confident about our progress towards Icarus’ 1.0 launch.

With all these new insights, we have made a big decision that impacts the upcoming Beta Weekend (Oct 9th - 11th) and our eventual launch date that we want to explain below.

The key changes a... Read more

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

Now that we’re nearly halfway through Icarus’ Beta Weekends, Game Runner Dean Hall reflects on how the process is going, including responding to the player community and the need to keep iterating.

Tech Lead Ben Carnall drops in to squash some bugs, and our Narrative Designer Henry shares the thinking behind Icarus’ backstory.

We’ve been filming the Making of Icarus series since November 2019. If you want to go behind-the-scenes of the game’s development and our thinking check out the complete series on YouTube.

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

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

Hello, Prospectors!
Wow, what an incredible Beta Weekend 3! Testing your skills against a savage and unforgiving arctic biome was always going to be a challenge, but so many of you did it with courage, creativity and a good dose of humour and joy.

It was quite a trek to make it from your peaceful landing zone to the arctic’s genetically modified mammoth, and it wasn’t easy taking them down at the end either! Bullets, bolts and thousands of arrows were shot into that mammoth over the weekend, and our team has thoroughly enjoyed watching your clips, hearing your stories and admiring your victory poses between those massive tusks!


Credit: DOMO1

W... Read more

Welcome back Prospectors!
Our next Beta Weekend begins on Friday 24th September at 5pm PDT where you’ll finally get a taste of the Arctic!

The arctic has been the most anticipated biome from our community. It’s home to a Mammoth, Polar Bears, Wolves, its own weather events like blizzards, and ice caves. Yes, that’s right! Ice caves!

As portrayed in our community Twitch streams with Dean and Lorii - simply getting to the arctic and surviving there is no easy feat. So, that’s why we’re going to give you a little guidance on how to get a head start on your prospects this weekend. We’ll also cover exciting quality of life updates, and of course some patch notes to keep you up to speed with the current state of the game.

... Read more

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

Discord Member: Fantomas

Hello, Prospectors!
Thank you for playing our second Beta Weekend! Was it really a weekend when it was four days long? ;-) We felt we owed it to the community to extend this beta after the “hug of death” many of you experienced, and we’re happy to hear you certainly made the most of it!

Storms were out in full force but you prevailed and created some amazingly intricate structures. The fun and mayhem that lightning brought to your gameplay was apparent, especially when your masterpieces went up in flames (we totally saw this coming!). Many of you also chose the blaze of glory approach and torched your own buildings at the end of the weekend.

This time we decided to create hotfixes over the weekend to ensure your gameplay experience was as optimal as it could be. If it wasn’t for ... Read more

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

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

Hey Prospectors!

Beta Weekend 2 has been a wild success with thousands of you testing your skills, growing your legacies and giving us the valuable feedback and insight we needed.


Photo Credit: Drew43

Along the way we did encounter some unfortunate errors that we have worked quickly to address, delivering four hotfixes during the weekend to address a range of connection issues and gameplay balances.

With all this going on, we decided it was best to extend our play window as a once-off, to allow players who didn’t have the opportunity to experience these new features to get down to the planet.

We have extended for a full 24 hours, with the new end-time being:

• 10pm Monday 13 September PDT
  
• 5am Tuesday 14 September UTC
  
• 5pm Tuesd...

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Some minor changes and fixes that were not in the previous hotfix, but we felt were important nonetheless.

Detailed Changelog

• Extending bounds sliightly into arctic for Ice collection. This means you will be able to go deeper into arctic biomes for most of the arctic biomes entrances on the map - to get a taste for BW3!
  
• Increased speed of medical consume action.
  
• Adding charcoal to medical recipes
  
• No longer required to unlock animals on skinning bench, they are automatically unlocked
  
• Upped Yeast yield harvesting yield, each yeast plant will give 1-4 yeast.
  
• Moved floor torch to be craftable on Character
  
• Fixing item duplication bug which occurs when splitting a stack which is currently focused by the player on their hotbar when holding Shift
  
• Adding a dehumidifier to talent tree as it was missing.
  
• Splitting up Melee and Projectile Damage W...

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

Beta Weekend Two is continuing to prove popular! To keep the momentum of the Beta Weekend going strong we have a bunch more improvements we wanted to add so you can have the best experience possible this weekend.

It is also a good chance for us to show you, through our actions, that we want this project to be about quick and fast iteration. We aim to listen to the community and implement feedback and ideas that we feel fit with the game quickly where possible.

Bodies will now drop items in a bundle This allows you to recover your items when you die, if you reach the bundle before it despawns. This has been a very popular feature request. We were planning on adding it for Beta Weekend 3 (BW3), but we have decided to add it right now for this Beta Weekend. When you respawn, if you return to the place you died there will be a bundle you can pick up with your previous inventory.

Living in Caves We have added a Dehumidifier that clears the underground cave buff... Read more

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

Thank you for your fantastic feedback on Beta Weekend Two so far! We've been watching your streams and reading your chats on Discord and social media with great interest, and the occasional laugh.

This hotfix has some changes that will greatly improve the gameplay balance. We felt these were safe to make, and also important enough for you to play so we can confirm our approach before we refine Beta Weekend 3 content.

Normally, we won't do hotfixes during the weekend to try and keep the experience stable. Additionally, we like to let the team have a well earned rest after a busy few weeks. However, we want to make a few balance changes so we can verify our broader approach to experience and animals - before we start opening up other areas.

Try out the Beta Weekend risk free right now! Want to try these out? Pre-order Icarus to get access to the Beta Weekend right now. You can play the beta as long as you like and refund at an... Read more