Lil Shammgod

Lil Shammgod



14 Apr

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Week Nineteen's update brings our most feared boss yet - the Scorpion Boss. We’ve also made substantial updates to our armor system, so your armor’s durability deteriorates as it takes damage and wear. To cap it off, we have another bonus mission on behalf of Sinotai which unlocks two unique Scorpion items, so jump in and get to work prospectors.



Scorpion Boss Mission
Sadly, your previous work in eliminating the escaped experiments was not as effective as originally thought. The scorpion infestation has spread even further and a new highly aggressive mutation has emerged, terrorising prospectors deployed to the region. Sinotai wants you to back down there to finish the job and eliminate this new threat:

LOOSE ENDS: Extermination

// OPERATOR: Sinotai

// BIOME: Desert

// ... Read more

08 Apr

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As we prepare to tackle some of the core areas of the game that need to change or expand, such as Tier 4 structures, mining progression, better outpost experiences, or more expansive mission content - we needed to provide some foundational changes. This weeks update brings us Ore Scanners, which is part of several steps needed on the way to our grander goals.
- Dean Hall, Gamerunner
The introduction of Deep Mining as an alternative way to gather ores has been a great success, and this week's update adds even more ore deposits and the tools to find them.

We’ve added ore deposits outside of caves and varied the extraction speed of different ores. To wrap it all up, there is a new mission which will unlock the recipe for the advanced workshop scanner. So get in and start finding the payload buried beneath the surface.

... Read more

01 Apr

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As a studio we all want to work on unique ideas, try new things, and experiment with the games we make. One of the consequences of this is not always getting it right. Over the past month we have been making adjustments to the game to correct the aspects we didn't quite get right. This week we correct what is perhaps one of the most contentious design decisions - a real world drop timer. Mostly the original decision was one of pragmatism, but we're in a place now we can add more nuance. Thank you for sticking with us, and helping us test and adjust this concept. We look forward to continuing this process in our future updates.
- Dean Hall, Gamerunner
Icarus’ mission timer system has changed

After a lot of deliberation and player feedback, we’ve removed the real-world mission timer in favor of a new, in-game mission timer. That isn’t the only big update this week though - we’ve also introduced tiered missio... Read more

25 Mar

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After another great week we’re bringing you our 16th content update, with a new mission that takes you into the scorching desert to face a new threat.

Now that foundation of the game is closer to were we wanted it to be at launch we can focus on bringing new content and design adjustments. One of the areas we are most excited to develop is aggressive (and later, alien) creatures that bring new challenges to players. With new challenges, we'll be providing a good basis to develop more purpose around tier 4 technologies (and beyond).
- Dean Hall, Gamerunner


Beware: Scorpions
Your newest foe on Icarus is the scorpion, a territorial creature who protects their lair viciously, with a poisonous barbed tail and sharp pincers that will challenge even the most prepared players... Read more

18 Mar

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This week brings improvements to hunting and animals and introduces a new group of consumables gathered from Caveworms, along with two new missions. These two missions, Unearthed: Research and Cryogenic: Research are available immediately, with Unearthed: Research unlocking the ability to harvest scales from Caveworms to turn into new bow, knife and spear Scale Weapons. There are also new consumables from existing animals, with ‘Giant Steaks’ and ‘Fatty T-Bones’ now dropping from hunted creatures.

Dive in, have a read, and then jump in game and get hunting.



Animal Harvesting
A range of new consumables from hunted prey add variety to the food pool, giving new buffs and balancing hunting with the improvements to farming from the past few updates. These meat groups are considered ‘rare’ and will have lower drop rates but ... Read more

11 Mar

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This week's update adds an array of new technology and improvements to one of our core features, farming. The core principle of farming has been to provide a steady, self-sustaining food source for the harsher climates and to alleviate the time often invested into hunting. As we’ve fleshed this out, we’ve grown the scope for what it can become and this week we’re adding new technology such as water piping, which will allow for more automated solutions for watering crops along with other applications like sprinkler systems to protect your structures from fire. You’ll also see the addition of fertilizer and changes to the decaying mechanic for crops. To wrap up these changes for you, there is a new farming mission which incorporates all of these new features in its objectives.



Water Piping Improvements
Water Piping takes far... Read more

09 Mar

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Here at RocketWerkz, we’re celebrating the three month anniversary of Icarus. We’ve been blown away by the reception, watching you build masterpieces, burn them down, explore the wilderness and risk it all on missions.

We had some teething issues to get through at launch and since then bug fixes, stability and optimization have been constant priorities for our weekly updates.

Since December we've been on the fast track to give you updates every week, so far totaling 12 updates and 11 hotfix patches over the last 3 months. Here’s a summary of the missions, content, tools, blueprints and gear in Icarus today.



We’ve also added and significant new system... Read more

04 Mar

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It’s been a while coming, but your patience has paid off. Our Week 13 Update introduces the much-requested Character Respec system. With this feature you will be able to undo Talent Point assignments and spend those points on other Talents.
Stability and Crash fixes. This update includes some significant crash fixes. This is a top priority for the team and will continue to be. These will be rolled into every weekly update as we fix them> See below for details about how you can automatically submit a crash report.
Our original intent was for players to create multiple characters to explore and specialize in each of the branches of the talent tree, while not developing any single over-powered character. We did this by having some limits on the number of talents and blueprints you could have. Last week we rebalanced this by increasing the effective level cap to 50, allowing you to keep on earning Blueprint points beyond level 50, increasin... Read more

25 Feb

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For this update we wanted to start laying the foundation for some big upcoming changes to the talents system, including adding a respec feature next week.

One of the biggest requests we've had since launch was for more Talent Points. We've approached this in two ways:

  1. We have straight up increased the Talent Points cap from level 40 to level 50, giving each character an extra 12 Talent Points. You can now gain 60 Talent Points, up from the previous limit of 48.
  2. We've also split Solo Talent Tree Points into their own group which means you're no longer spending your main Talent Points on Solo Talents.
We're hoping this should alleviate concerns about not being able to unlock enough talents for a single character, whilst still encouraging you to create specialized characters and avoiding any one character being all-powerful.

More Levels and Blueprint Points
... Read more

22 Feb

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    Lil Shammgod on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
We're performing some database maintenance this morning at 11AM NZT (~30 minutes from now). We don't expect any downtime, but it may close existing connections. Your game should just reconnect automatically, but if you do experience any issues quitting the game and relaunching should put you right back where you left off.

18 Feb

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This week’s update includes two of the Top Five most-requested community suggestions from Feature Upvote[icarus.featureupvote.com] - a separate light slot and inventory sorting - along with significant amount of bugfixes.

One of the highly-requested features we’re happy to bring you is a light slot on your prospector, so no more having to switch between your torch and pickaxe in caves or between lantern and weapons when venturing out at night. There’s also a new Tier 4 Titanium Hammer, footprints and impressions that might help you find things in the snow and sand, a new sorting option in your inventory and a separate backpack slot.



We’d like to especially thank player... Read more

11 Feb

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Week Ten brings a range of bug fixes, along with a new Deep Mining system and improvements to Talents. Have a look at our two key updates for the week, along with more detailed patch notes below.



Deep Ore Mining Drill


This patch introduces a new way to gather resources - Deep Mining Drills - which you set up over mineral deposits of Gold, Copper, Iron and other ores found on the floors of larger caves.

Tapping these mineral deposits provides you with a new way to gather large quantities of valuable resources for those long, challenging missions. Deep Mining Drills are a long-term operation, designed to be set up, left to operate while you complete other mission objectives a... Read more

21 Dec

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Hey Prospectors,

We have a Christmas miracle for you today, something we’ve been quietly working on for the past few weeks in response to one of our most sought-after player requests.

You may be surprised to see any characters that were abandoned on a drop have reappeared in your Character Select screen!



We have revived 22,000 characters and 42,000 dead characters that were left behind on prospects after time ran out. Icarus may be unforgiving, but we are not.

There are a number of ways you could have lost your character and your hard-earned XP, talents and blueprints, such as bugs that trap characters (hopefully since resolved in our hotfixes and updates) or server downtime. We may not have been clear enough to new players learning the game that unless you return to your dropship before the timer e... Read more

13 Dec

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Hey Prospectors!

There’s been a lot of moments to celebrate since launch. We peaked at 52,501 concurrent players during our opening weekend, something we’re truly proud of and very thankful for.

A humbling amount of hours have been invested on the surface of Icarus, with many of you completing numerous missions and developing some incredible characters. Some of you have racked up hundreds of hours, with 5,813,573 hours played in total!

A big thanks to our streamers also, over 4.3 million hours of Icarus have been watched across Twitch[www.twitch.tv] and YouTube since launch.

We gathered some of our favourite clips for the first Community Highlights video since launch. Thank you to everyone who has share... Read more

06 Dec

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For us this has been an amazing and full-on launch weekend - full of both highs and lows.

We had over 50,000 concurrent players on Sunday, up there alongside other popular Steam games like Dead by Daylight, Terraria and ARK.

However, many people have let us know in the reviews that the game just didn’t work well enough for them to enjoy it - and that’s not good enough for us. If people couldn’t connect or run the game with acceptable performance to even try the game out, then we need to remedy that.

Targeting daily updates Through launch weekend we produced three hotfixes immediately to address some of the key bugs that had presented with the launch. Through our first week we will be continuing this process and aiming for daily updates.

These updates can disrupt your time playing the game but... Read more

30 Nov

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Thank you for seven fantastic Beta Weekends.

The Beta Weekend format of unlocking new features, quickly fixing bugs and optimizing every two weeks has worked really well for our team and the health of the game.

That also means there are some features you haven’t experienced yet: Outposts, more Missions, Tier 4 tech, mining Exotic Matter and Orbital Workshop tech.

Launching 4 Dec
Icarus will launch worldwide on Steam this weekend at:
  • 2pm Friday 3 December 2021 PST
  • 10pm Friday 3 December 2021 UTC
  • 11am Saturday 4 December 2021 NZT
Depending on your timezone your Steam Store might display a slightly different date, but ignore that for now.


Launch Content Loaded
At launch Icarus will have 64 square kilometers of terrain to explore, over 35 missions ranging from days to weeks in duration, over 240 talents, 6 different building materials, over 95 building pieces... Read more

29 Nov

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Thank you for seven fantastic Beta Weekends.



For us, a key purpose of the beta weekends was for you to stress-test Icarus’ core gameplay systems and balance. Elements like session-based progression rather than a persistent world, destructive storms in a game about building, or mission objectives in an open-world game are calculated risks for a survival game. But if we don’t try some new things out, the genre won’t evolve.

It’s equally important that we exit Beta and begin to treat Icarus as a live, evolving game. The core game design has now been tested and solidified, a mountain of launch content is loaded - we now begin building on it.

The Beta Weekend format of unlocking new features, quickly fixing bugs and optimizing every two weeks has worked really well for our team and the health of the game.
...
Read more

26 Nov

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Hey Prospectors!

Beta Weekend Seven was the grand send-off we had hoped for, celebrating our fantastic community and all the contributions you’ve made to this game over the last few months.

Our Photo Competition, Building Competition and 3080 giveaway were all massive hits, absolutely exceeding our expectations in the number of entries but also the quality. We saw 1000+ entries into the photo competition alone, and it was incredibly hard to even narrow the entries down to our finalists.

But there has to be a winner, so without further ado, here are the winners in each category of our Photo competition.

Note: You can find all the other finalists further down this blog.

Best Environment Photo - the best beautiful but deadly with beautifully-lit scenery
Winner: Bruce


... Read more

21 Nov

Comment
    Lil Shammgod on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
Hey! Thanks for bringing this to our attention - we're jumping on this with the team and will aim to find a solution as soon as possible. Apologies!

17 Nov

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Welcome back, Prospectors!
To celebrate the final Icarus Beta Weekend and your community creations and adventures we are running a series of competitions and giveaways.

They are the:
  • Best Photo Competition
  • Best Build Competition
  • NVIDIA 3080 graphics card giveaway

To help you enter we have added a new Photo Mode and added NVIDIA’s RTX Global Illumination tech to make Icarus even more beautiful but deadly.

Entries close 12 noon PST / 8pm UTC on Tuesday 23 November.



ICARUS is a big and beautiful (but dangerous) world. And we want you to document it. The most breathtaking environments. Those heart sto... Read more