Last Oasis Dev Tracker

We received an immense amount of feedback from the Beta Branch Testing - this was quite incredible for us, and I want to thank everyone who took the time to vote in the poll and post their feedback.



Overall, we were very happy to see that in general, the community enjoyed the new direction for Last Oasis. Doubling down on making the game world more interesting and challenging through PvE mechanics and encounters will improve the gameplay experience for both new and existing players - it seems 85% agree on that, and so do we.

Having said all that, over one third of you think that the water and harvesting pacing were not enjoyable and basically no one thought the preview was perfect. Luckily for you, we agree. We absolutely do not think that we stuck the landing with respect to the early S5 experience. Nor did we expect to. ... Read more

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

As expected, emotions got high - my inbox seems about 50:50 split between love for the new direction and, well, less friendly words.

Since feedback is crucial for me to adjust the course for this new direction, at the end of this post you’ll find a poll to voice your opinion - please make your voice heard, positive or negative!

The new direction (and why the shift)
Originally, Last Oasis was supposed to be a game about people roaming the lands on walking land vehicles, fighting threats and each other while improving their vehicle. From there it went to a prototype where we tried this concept internally - and it was fun. Amazing fun. The thrill was high, fights were fun, victories felt great, losses were painful but still endurable. That was about 2 years before LO was released as early access.

However, if we jump forward to the status quo, this is the experience most people have when trying LO in Season 4: you follow the tutorial, build your first fir... Read more

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

Thanks for all the feedback so far - keep it coming please.

- fixed 3 known server crashes
- increased pickaxe durability from 170 to 300
- increased sickle durability from 170 to 300
- increased durability on stoneaxe from 140 to 200
- reduced sandstorm amount by 50%
- increased cactus flesh drop rates to 150%
- increased wood drop on hatchets by 20%, on axes by 40%
- lowered stamina consumption from 4 to 3 per pickup
- lowered water crafting time by ~35%
- increased fiber bandage healing from 30 to 60
- nerfed drudge leading precision
- nerfed harasser throwing precision

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.

And I should know - I designed it. And more than that, I played it - extensively.

When I say it sucks, I mean I’m not having fun for long when playing it. Not as long as other survival games I enjoy. And I’m not alone with that opinion.

We could argue back and forth why Last Oasis is objectively not fun and what needs to be changed to make it a great experience. We did, actually - for 4 Seasons, to be precise.

And while each season got rid of tons of problems, there was always that one fundamental issue remaining:

I, personally, am not having fun when playing Last Oasis for long.

After Season 4 it finally hit me. I’ve been on a wild goose chase. I’ve been trying to chase down the reason why players don’t have fun in LO. This is a fruitless exercise until I can answer why I am not having fun.

Suddenly, the question was no longer “what can I do to fix LO”. The question became “If I were to make LO from scratc... Read more

Hey everyone!

We’re very excited to announce we’ll be kicking off S5’s beta branch on July 5th. Let’s get into the details.

For anyone unfamiliar with these kind of testing phases, a beta branch is a separate branch of the game that has many of the changes intended to go in the game for the next season. It will be available through the betas tab in Steam, and will be open for everyone to join by simply switching to the proper branch.

Our intention with this beta branch is to have a proper stress test where we can gather as much feedback as possible on the early game experience in the first two maps available, find any performance issues (or worse, crashes), and get these things ironed out before we move into Season 5 release.

As mentioned before, we already have internal playtesting going, though for the most part it’s us developers, and the staging testers in our Discord. So far the biggest focus has been on the bad crashes that could cause an awful... Read more

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

This week’s devblog will be a lot shorter than usual, as we’re getting into a mechanic that is almost self-explanatory (and by popular demand), and the reasons we’re considering some changes to it are rather self-explanatory as well. Nevertheless, this is another major feature update that will be working together with the PVE maps and the travel changes, so we want to talk about it and to hear what you think of it.

For anyone not familiar with LO slang, “The Burn” is the mechanic where Oases decay and completely disappear from the world map. Any bases built on them are gone, any unprotected Walkers are destroyed, and pretty much the only thing that gets carried along is the contents of the Trading Stations.
As one of the major features of the game, the Burn is something that has received both much praise and much hate from players of the game, so it’s a sensitive subject to approach.

In addition to the travel changes and PVE maps, we’ve been looking into the Burn ... Read more

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

Hi Nomads!

Now that many of the new features and changes have been revealed (though as you will soon see, it’s not quite the last of it), we feel much more confident talking more about and giving you more insight into this new direction for the game.

This week’s devblog will be all about the upcoming Base Building & Packing changes, and also an extension of our very first post back in early April. Now that there’s so much more information about the next season out, we feel like it’s a really good time to get into some of the more drastic changes and making sure we are keeping you in the loop in regard to our vision for the game, the approach we’ve chosen for this new season and generally the direction the game will be taking for the future.

As we talked about before, some of these changes come from a very simple place: many previous systems clash with our vision for Season 5, and that can mean we either disable them temporarily, or rework them entirely if the... Read more

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