[2022] Rarity Update Is Here

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

Where Do We Go From Here?
Rarity: Phase 2
Once servers come back up, all rarity items, resources, structures, and walkers should be reset to Common, leaving resources from shrunk containers on top of them until you pick them up. Rarity tiles will begin spawning right after the update, and will have at least 1 rarity tile active per region at all times. When one of them decays, another one will spawn with an activation time, so you can prepare for the next rarity raid. We'll keep tweaking the numbers of tiles spawning and their frequency per region as we see the need. Rarity tiles will spawn at clan caps of 1, 6 and 12 to make it more of a planned expedition even for larger clans instead of a potential farming frenzy at 50 cap. The tiles will have both the currently available Canyons map and another Canyons variant. As we keep adding new maps, they will also be added to the list of rarity event maps. As always, we’ll monitor and adjust the mechanics as we see the need, but for now we want to continue committing to the small group focus. Also, as we were saying since the beginning of the season, we’ll be setting the clan leave timer back to 3 days, as it always was. The buildable portal that we mentioned last time requires a little more tweaks and polish, so for now, all the tiles on the World Map will get portals to every rarity event tile in their respective regions.

Of course, we weren't planning to start off this season by spending so much time focusing on rarity, but we had to deal with the consequences of the initial implementation, which has taken some time and iteration. Now, we finally feel like this version of rarity will be a much better experience. Of course, it won’t be perfect on the first try, but it’s a big step towards getting Season 5 to where we all want it to be and we'll continue iterating using your feedback, our statistics, and simple observation.

While the portal machine is not getting in this update, here's a concept art of what it will roughly look like in-game (even though we already have the final model, but no reason to ruin the surprise):




Now that we got that out of the way, we want to talk a little bit about what you can expect over the next few weeks.


Sleeping Giants
First and foremost, we understand that you’re all tired of Canyons. Us too, so we all want Sleeping Giants released as soon as possible. The longest legs in rarity were all gameplay code, so our designers have been hard at work iterating, improving, and polishing Sleeping Giants, adding new features and mechanics along the way. At this point in time, we still can’t publicly announce the release date, but the end is in sight for sure, and we'll update you on any developments as soon as we have them confirmed.

For now, check out a concept art of the interior of a new POI that you’ll see appearing on Sleeping Giants, allowing you to upgrade your resource quality for Flots:




Schematics
We’ll dive deeper into the schematics survey in a future devblog, once we make decisions on the direction using your feedback from it, but we thought we should share some of our initial thoughts. It is approximately what we expected going in - an overall mixed bag of both positive and negative views, with a chunk of people who don't agree with the current schematic system in its current form at all. We already have some ideas about how to modify the system and what other things we can put in place to provide the gameplay that gets everyone excited to play Last Oasis.

For now, to make things a little better, we’re adding new merchants that you’ll see spawning around. They will sell Strongboxes that can drop weapon, armor, tool, and equipment schematics, as well as a small chance of already crafted items. We also continued to modify the available quests to provide more ways to get Flots, and ended up adding new dueling and package delivery quests to the Trade Station. We also increased the size of the dueling arena, to compensate for the lack of space inside the Trading Station.

You can check out the Schematics question results below:




Nomadism
Going into Season 5, we wanted to strip the game back to basics and build it up from there. Many of the features, particularly those involving the nomadic aesthetic, were always on the table to return after some iteration. First thing, though, we wanted to analyze how the game would be played with the current mechanics and how we could make the ones that are currently disabled, such as base packing, fit into the new game.

Particularly, with regards to the mentioned base packing, here we talked about removing it from the game for now, but we always considered it a feature that had a pretty high chance of returning after tweaks and balances.

To address that, we want to finally confirm that the first introduction of packing this season will be with the re-introduction of the Balang Walker with some changes to its mechanics. First and foremost, it will no longer be able to carry solid bases, such as stone or clay, but rather will be limited to wooden walls like the previous versions of packing on regular walkers. This will, essentially, mean that solid walls are actually solid and immovable, while the Balang will become a specialized Walker for moving all other types of bases. We’re still working through all the bits and pieces of the new design, but we wanted to go ahead and announce this decision now, as we’re seeing a lot of questions about it.

In addition, one of the other frequent complaints we've seen is the removal of the lobby, and with it, an easy way to end a play session when life calls or when traveling all the way back home simply isn’t an option. This is one of those mechanics that was really convenient to casual players, but often gave much more of an advantage to experienced players and clans, and had an extreme barrier of entry, regarding game knowledge and competitive balance, for new players, which was completely contradictory to its intention.

We're currently working on restoring some of that casual friendliness, but in a way that’s a bit more suited to the gameplay we'd like to achieve in this season. One such design we are currently working on, though it is still in early development, is adding more functionality to the buildable portal system, allowing you to travel directly back to your home tile from anywhere on the World Map. We have some additional ideas in mind and will write more about them in a future devblog, but, for now, we wanted to address this issue and let everyone know that it is something we hear, understand, and are working to improve.

Just to be clear, these mentioned changes won't be coming yet with the rarity update today, but will come a bit later in a future update, still really soon. We want to continue to share our newly planned designs and get your feedback before implementing them, like we did with rarity now. The comments and suggestions from the community significantly help us to refine our designs and we're planning to continue this process the same way going forward.

To end this post, here's the next tier of a Maintenance Chest that will come with Sleeping Giants, by popular request:




Changelog:
- Overhauled all walker weapons.
- Changed reload speeds, magazine sizes, damage versus armor percentages, fixed hitboxes, and so on. Should result in less dart grinding and more varied weapon use depending on the circumstances and the target. Very experimental, so let us know of any issues.
- Reset all Rarity to Common.
- Fixed T2 Mollusk rig being identical to default.
- Fixed rarity mob HP scaling bug giving them insanely high HP.
- Removed rarity from projectiles (shouldn't drop rare schematics anymore, instead the weapons themselves will increase the damage).
- Changed Nimmo and Traveler rig loot locations and probabilities.
- Changed rarity bag scaling to be percentage of default slots instead of a flat increase.
- Slightly increased Redwood harvesting rate.
- Fixed Nurr Fang with Bone Glue recipe.
- Slightly decreased Toothwheel weight.
- Removed recipe for walker components.
- Buffed the Bring Items Quest (more options, better rewards).
- Added Deliver Package Quests.
- Added Dueling Quest.
- Increased the size of the dueling arena.
- Set Dart damage percentage against Reinforced and Solid to 0.
- Set Flint Bolt damage percentage against Reinforced and Solid to 0.
- Added Strongbox Merchants that sell Strongboxes with armor, weapon, tool, and equipment schematics as well as some pre-crafted items (including small chance of ceramic tier).
- Fixed Ballista not accepting some harpoons.
- Implemented Rartiy Event Tile Mechanics.
- Portals will spawn from all tiles in the region to the rarity event maps when they spawn.
- On the rarity tile, all resources and mobs have a probability to spawn at certain percentages for each rarity.
- When you want to leave the event tile, go to any portal and it will transport you back to the tile you arrived from.
- Unlike previous event tiles, if you stay on the tile until it decays, your walker will be destroyed and your character will die, so make sure to get out with your loot instead of farming until the last second.
- Fixed rare humidifier crash.
- Made tools be able to harvest one rarity tier above their current tier (Common harvesting Uncommon and so on).
- Improved inventory UI. Added inventory scrolling, added icons to equipment slots, etc.
- Fixed mob loot rarity depending on the ground quality. Will always drop at quality of the mob.
- Removed quality from Sand (can still craft anything requiring sand at quality using Common Sand).
- Allowed skipping walker upgrades (spare parts) instead of going one by one.
- Fixed rarity fuel crafting stations running faster. Fuel burns slower instead.
- Added damage modifier for rarity Siege Weapons.
- Prevent building on rarity tiles (experimental). Can still build on walkers.
- Added 3s delay to look at another player and see their name (as a middle ground to removing name plates). HP Widget only appears on damage. Can still see all clan members.
- Added Alternative Canyon to event tile spawn pool.
- Fixed netting doors, beds, and repair hoist.
- Lowered Walker walking distance with a broken leg by more than half.