Last Oasis Dev Tracker

A little later than we planned, due to some final touches that we wanted to do in order to bring this update to a properly final state and try to avoid multiple hotfixes, learning from the previous experience with the packing update. You can consider this few days delay as a better reassurance that we won't need them (or, hopefully, not that many, at least).

Get ready to enter the mysterious city of the forgotten civilization!

Welcome to the Ancient City!
The Ancient City is an oasis that contains the decaying remains of an ancient civilization. Little is known about who or what lived here, or, even, how long ago, but clues litter the landscape for Nomads to find. It is said that intrepid explorers, brave enough to explore the Ancient City, stand to find untold riches, while the Flotillan Historic Society will gladly accept new members, who help them research the ancient technology with a member-only benefit of an access to their Schematics Store at each Tradin... Read more

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

Discovered: An Ancient City
Early next week, we will introduce the Ancient City back into the game. It will be an event map that spawns in both PvP and PvE form, with only rarity available on the PvP version. Next week with the release we’ll have a full post that lays out the new experiences available on the Ancient City, as well as the brand new gameplay mechanics.

Today we’ll introduce another small packing update which should improve unpacking and resolve all the known issues. We’ll monitor over the weekend and then begin burning additional tiles when we patch Ancient City.

Patchnotes:

• Improved unpacking checks to finish with the packing for good and start burning tiles.
  
• Fixed all the remaining known issues with packing.

Q&A
We’ve been promising a Q&A for a while. Originally it was in regards to the planned PvP update, but since we’ve talked about several other things since then, we figur... Read more

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

Okay, so it wasn’t the last Packing update
There was a bug related to unpacking and we decided to tackle that and finish out the last “Anti-Griefing” mechanic for unpacking. That’s the patch for today. In addition, we’ll be disabling base decaying while packed until we’re sure you can unpack in all cases. After that, we'll also start burning some of the tiles to condense the World Map for the current population.

We added what we’re calling the Clearance Phase. For the first 30s of unpacking, the structure checks to see if the area is valid. After 30s, all collisions are enabled at once and packing won’t be canceled by attempting to make the area invalid afterwards. This means that on a PvE map, after 30s a player cannot disable/pause your unpacking simply by standing in the area.

Changelog this time is not so big, as most of the changes we're working on are for the unreleased maps and updates, but they should have a pretty big impact nonetheless (at least the... Read more

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

Final Packing Iteration
Today we’ll go over the patch and then a few updates on each of the major lines of effort and where we stand on them. The patch today is, mainly, focused on fixes and tweaks to Sleeping Giants and, most of all, closing out all of the packing bugs and improvements. There is one more feature we want to add that should prevent anyone using packing from getting griefed while trying to unpack on PvE tiles specifically, but will work on all tiles with the same rules and intention. Unfortunately, that will come a bit later in a separate patch, but we'll try to add it as soon as possible, without waiting for any large patch to include it, so expect one to come soon.

Otherwise, the patch today focuses on continuing to improve the Sleeping Giants experience, through fixes, and implementing new features, or tweaking existing features in new ways. The main feature we've been working on, though, is packing. Since its release we've received quite a few reports ... Read more

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

We thank everyone for all the discussion and feedback about the PvP changes we posted about last week, as well as helping us sort out all of the bugs with Balang. Today’s patch should fix most of the remaining issues with packing and add a few other improvements.

Currently, we can't name an exact release date for either the PvP Update or the Ancient City map. As we continue to work through development and all the new features, there is a possibility we’ll release the PvP update in parts, rather than all at once, but that’s to be confirmed and finalized. We know there was some confusion about that coming from Friday, but our goal here is to release a fun and, most importantly, working improvement to the PvP part of the game. We'll have to see if releasing it in parts will still maintain the fun gameplay every individual update or we'll need all the components together to make it work as we intend it to.

For our full devblog later in the week we’ll do a Q&A with many of... Read more

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

This post will be rather short, since we had a very long one just last weekend and it's more of a follow-up update, so the focus will be on the new packing changes and the similarities with the previous version of it. We'll expand on other parts of the development later this week, as we promised, and answer the most pressing questions in a Q&A format in just a few days.

Balang Walker - The Packing Dream
Packing is finally back in a new and slick packaging! We're happy to announce that you'll be able to freely move your base and walkers around your own tile and between them, something that truly has a nomadic spirit to it and allows to resettle on new territories or move into a better spot for convenience or just a picturesque view from your base.

Please take note that I emphasize the word move here because this is now the main focus of the packing feature in its current form, rather than storing bases or walkers for long periods of time, as it was before.... Read more

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

Balance and Bugfixes
First, we’ve got a few things this week that should improve balance and quality of life on Sleeping Giants. In general, we believe that the new map is about where we want it to be, but we’ll continue to monitor how you play and continue to address all issues if they arise. Specifically, we know there are quite a few rarity bugs that still persist and we’re working on cleaning all of them up as soon as possible.

Slightly bad news first - we decided to delay Balang Walker packing feature until Monday, just to ensure that it goes as well as possible. Packing is inherently a very dangerous feature, with huge potential for abuse, and even critical truly game-breaking bugs. Historically, pretty much every duping bug and most of the critical issues that forced us to revert came from packing, so we're extra cautious when bringing it back.

Changelog for today's patch:

- Increased durability for all ceramic tier equipment and later too... Read more

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

We're continuing to iterate on the new Sleeping Giants map with your help. Please keep sending your feedback and bug reports, they're really helping us get the new content to the best shape possible. In addition to that, we're testing ourselves, focusing on specific features to get the feeling for what needs to be done to improve the new map and all the content that comes with it, as well as actively using statistics and looking at how you play the game in real time, as we noticed long ago that often real experience is different from the written feedback after the fact.


Coming Soon™
Our plan right now is to continue improving the content that we released, while working on the new PvP Update that's aimed at players who prefer hardcore battles against other Nomads out there. The main idea is to make permanent PvP tiles an actualy important part of gameplay and the in-game World as a whole. Meaning that PvP tiles will be much more desirable for settling on them to gain... Read more

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

Keep those reports coming!

As we've discussed, we expect to spend the next days hotfixing Sleeping Giants, doing improvements and fixing up any bugs, as well as implementing packing via the Balang Walker and addressing issues with base maintenance.

Something that didn't make it into this hotfix which will also come soon is an improvement to Falco handling that should help against its jittering and many more balance changes that will be added in the next update.

- Changed Mollusk and Stiletto Wing Recipes to allow to be crafted on Canyons
- Fixed Swampwood Galoshes not working properly.
- Improved lava/insect throwing bombs.
- Buffed sawblade harvesting of wood and bone
- Increase sawblade torque container interaction distance.
- Decreased Lobber fire radius and added some deviation.
- Hopefully fixed ceramic nails. Probably.

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