First, we want to announce that Sleeping Giants will be releasing next week! We aren’t yet ready to confirm the specific date, but you’ll hear it as soon as we have it locked in. Sleeping Giants will be released in PvP and PvE variants, and SG rarity tiles will be added to the pool right away. We’re excited for everyone to experience the new and improved map and the brand new challenges that await you as well as all the new rewards like an improved version of a Maintenance Chest, new tier of a Windmill that allows passive generation as before in addition to a massive increase to active generation in sandstorms, or even just new special boots you can check out below. Today, the patch focuses mostly on balance and bug fixing.
Here is a pair of boots. What are they for? Fishing in toxic water.
Walker Combat
We made several big changes to siege weapons in the last patch. Mostly, it was done through adding specific uses to each weapon and ammo type to, primarily, improve PvE, but, at the same time, also hoping to improve PvP. Unfortunately, we left scattershot a little bit too powerful, so that is receiving a nerf, reduced from 85% -> 12% against Medium Armor, and 30% -> 10% against Hard Armor. We’ve also tweaked a few more damage numbers and armor percentages here and there, which will be in the full patch notes. In addition, we have fixed all of the reported bugs associated with reloading and firing. This is a system we want to continue to improve - stuff like additional or expandable control groups in particular.
Overall, with respect to walker fighting, we’re not really happy with the “Crack and Drop” meta. The nerf to scattershot should increase walker fight times, which is one step in the direction that we’d like to see in PvP, but, ultimately, the current design encourages you to, primarily, target the hull and then take all the armor and water from an enemy’s walker, instantly ending the fight. This isn’t really a desirable outcome nor is it consistent with a lot of the other design principles that we have for S5. We're planning to address this issue even more in the near future. Also, we don’t want everyone to be forced to be a solo gunship to be competitive, so we’ll continue to look for ways to enhance “Crewmember” gameplay.
Rarity Cleanup
Rarity also received quite a few fixes since the last update, primarily to the bugs you reported. Rupu vines should be fixed to be always the rarity as the camp and the exploit allowing you to exceed the clan cap should also be fixed. The trade station quest that was giving 0 flot has been replaced with a new quest. The previous quest was built when all maps had trade stations so it didn’t work right out of the box. Instead, it’s been reworked into a new quest, which gives you a package to deliver to a traveling merchant, who will then give you a token to exchange for Flots at any Trade Station.
Overall, we’ll keep it short this week, but after Sleeping Giants is released we’ll have quite a few large devblogs, which will focus on our plans for improving gameplay, specifically schematics and PvP, going over the full survey with our take on solving the issues, and, likely, even more surveys, allowing you all to weigh in as we continue development of Season 5.
Here is also a new headgear that will start dropping with SG from bosses and other tough enemies as a special item. It will start our journey to implement a headgear for every equipment set in the game.
Full Changelog:
Fixed mobs staying aggroed for too long if they received damage.
Made mobs deaggro low priority targets (like unmanned walkers) much more quickly.
Rebalanced repair hammers costs and added new icons and meshes to them.
Rebalanced bolt and dart costs.
Updated scroll rack mesh and icon.
Stopped remote weapons shooting when the player manning them is downed.
Fixed reloading continuing on unmanning.
Fixed reloading issues with ammo conversion and ordering.
Nerfed Scattershot as described in the post.
Reduced Lobber damage to Hard from 75% to 60%.
Increase Spinner Direction Deviation from 2->3.
Increased Throwstone stack size in Thumper from 10->50.
Increased Dart stack size in inventory to 100.
Fixed rupu vine and fruit pulp not using camp quality.
Increase ammo chest stack size 50->100.
Fixed clan cap penalty sometimes not working correctly.
Set correct icons for chitin and bone darts.
Set correct icons for simple tools.
Added proper ranged rupu friendly fire avoidance.
Improved performance for gas and smoke clouds.
Decreased flint orb weight from 5 to 1.5.
Fixed a bunch more icon issues.
Replaced delivery quest with delivering packages to merchants.
Adjusted the strongbox merchant campfire visibility.
Reduced rupu siege weapon durability from 5->3.
Increased Flint Orb damage from 57->80.
Hotfix 1.5.41355
A small hotfix for the big rarity patch that came earlier this week. Fixing an issue with rarity siege weapons not rotating properly up and down, and also a crash fix for an issue that sometimes would happen when new quests got generated after their timer.
As we mentioned when changing it in the first place, it was also our intention to bring the disassembling return of resources back to half the cost of a structure. That change was missed from the previous patch, as pointed out by some of you, so we're making it now. You'll be getting the original half the cost back as well as the schematic of a disassembled structure to be able to rebuild it quickly when needed.
- Fixed rarity siege weapons not rotating properly up and down. - Fixed a crash related to quest regeneration at the Trade Station. - Changed back the disassembling return to half the cost.
Preparations for Rarity, Base Raiding and More
New patch is out, so here's a small update post to accompany the first segment of the rarity overhaul.
A quick refresher of the plan first. Tiles were burnt yesterday successfully and all remaining rarity tiles were set to Common. Today's patch is mainly consisting of preparatory parts of the rarity patch, as well as a bunch of balance changes and improvements. Early next week, we will patch again, which will include additional changes to rarity and allow for rarity event tiles to start spawning. At that time, we will also be enabling base raiding, so make sure to have your bases prepared until then!
We wanted to touch on a few groups of changes specifically that are included in this patch, and how they’ll impact the rest of the rarity overhaul and the game in general.
Walkers
Rebalanced Stiletto, Mollusk, and Toboggan Wings HP, Torque, and Cost.
Rebalanced Stiletto and Mollusk Leg Cost.
Made Walkers unlockable at their default half HP.
Next week when we reset the rarity, we’ll patch in an overhaul to walker spare part upgrading (cargo, hatch, water, etc). Since we want to have a more deliberate progression through each map, with a partially linear progression of walkers as a part of it, we realized that it doesn’t make sense to make the T3/4 upgrades of a walker take ceramic and iron when the game is being designed for you to upgrade past those walkers. With that in mind, all walkers will require resources that can be acquired at the same tier that the specific walker is, but the upgrades will still require rarity schematics and resources to keep it balanced. We hope that this will foster some good competition for those resources and add a proper incentive to engage in rarity hunt in general. Considering that, there will be a rebalance of those spare parts in accordance with the easier resource requirements. In addition, the hull of the walker will provide a multiplier on each upgrade and all the upgrades of rarity walkers will have a multiplier. What it means is that a higher rarity walker of the same type and at the same upgrade level, will have better stats. For example, an Uncommon Stiletto at T1 Cargo upgrade will have more slots in cargo than a Common Stiletto at the same T1 Cargo upgrade, providing an additional layer of walker progression and another incentive for rarity.
With respect to making walkers unlockable at their default half HP - this was a good idea that came from the community. What it means is that if at a Common rarity, a walker has 10000 HP and losing 5000 HP would unlock it, then a Legendary walker with 22000 HP will still only require 5000 damage to be unlocked. Getting a Legendary walker will likely to be very difficult and so it has to be rewarding, but it shouldn’t dictate who gets to win every fight. This way, the owner of a Legendary walker will become stronger in PvE, and will have a walker that is harder to zero, but won’t have an insurmountable advantage when losing a PvP fight. It’s close to impossible to perfectly balance the effort, skill, and game time required to gain the advantage in literally every aspect of the game, but small changes like these are the types of things we want to foster to level the playing field, especially in PvP, which is one of our main focuses right now.
Melee
While the rarity weapons were obviously a bit over-tuned, it was good to see some new armor and weapon metas on the battlefield. It’s long overdue that we shake some things up with respect to melee. We have put in a few experimental mechanics, fixed some issues, and done a ton of rebalancing.
Completely rebalanced ALL weapons and armor (more on that below).
Removed double use of stamina on hits.
Added stamina consumption for holding an attack (that starts after a small delay not to affect short holding that’s useful in melee).
Removed Nomad Cloth from all Bone weapons.
Added Brittle Bone Boots and Gloves to the set.
Double use of stamina has always existed (which is just stamina use at the start of any attack, not an actual double use), but due to some other changes to it in Season 5, it became a bit excessive, so we’ve removed it for now to see how fights will change. We also implemented a stamina drain during held attacks, which only kicks in after a short delay to avoid punishing quick holds that are extremely useful in melee. Our intention here was to make an abusive mechanic less lucrative and promote more dynamic melee, but it’s very experimental and we’ll be monitoring how it performs. As for equipment, we’ve completely rebalanced all of the armor and weapon stats and many of their costs. Nomad Cloth in armor and weapons at this tier was just too expensive, which is hard to argue against. The goal for the stat rebalance was to ensure a higher variety between weapons and create both a better progression through the tiers and a more specialized roster of weapon types to choose from - depending on your stats, personal preference, and, most importantly, your target. Swords and cutting weapons in general will be deadly against light armor, while mauls, hammers, and other blunt weapons will be a good choice against a heavy set. There will certainly be additional refinements that we’ll have to do as we continue iterating, such as adjusting Armor Speed Reduction and Weapon Speed more precisely, but as far as stats are concerned at the moment, this change should make every weapon have its own niche in the game and make the process of choosing your weapon for a fight be fun in itself.
Base Raiding
This patch implements the HP increases on all base pieces, which means that the HP of your bases in general will go up by a significant amount now. As you know from the walker HP increase, what this also, unfortunately, means is that all the doors are going to be unlocked by default, as increasing Max HP doesn’t increase the current HP of an object. To allow everyone time to fix this issue and repair your bases, we are leaving on 100% refund and will not be enabling base raiding until the rarity patch next week. Repair hammers got a significant buff in this patch as well, though, so, hopefully, it should be an easier task than it otherwise would have been.
The ammunition damage changes are not being patched in right now, and instead will come together with a more thorough pass over all the weapons in one of the next patches, possibly the rarity one early next week. The intent of this change will be to improve weapon variation in PvE and PvP, somewhat similar to how different melee weapon types are now good against specific targets. For most ammo available to players at this time, the damage against Reinforced Armor (which all bases currently use) will be between 1-5% per hit. Same as everything else, though, it’s still very much a subject to change as we collect your feedback and iterate.
To Summarize
Overall, this patch is aimed at preparing for the rarity update next week, but also making the game a bit less grindy and trying out some new things to increase the variety of choice in both melee and walkers. We’ll continue this trend as we head into the next week and rarity maps begin to appear.
Check out the full changelog below:
Completely rebalanced ALL the weapons and armor. More on that in the post.
Removed double use of stamina (Stamina consumption on attack start).
Added Stamina consumption while holding an attack after a short delay.
Made rarity Walkers unlockable at their Common half HP to level the playing field in PvP. Meaning, Legendary Firefly will take 4875 HP to unlock instead of 11,000.
Added 2 new Dinghy rigs - Nimmo Rig that's balanced towards combat with more hardpoints on one side, which should make fights more dynamic, while providing a large number of points for guns with a unique balancing factor. And also Traveler Rig, geared towards moving large amounts of items for trading or other purposes, with hardpoints mainly located in the middle of the walker for an ideal chest placement. Both are dropping in Canyons camps.
Significantly increased HP of all the base pieces, including Hangar in preparation of enabling base raiding (Example: Light Wooden Wall 2250 HP -> 24,000 HP).
Increased durability of all Repair Hammers except Simple to have a better progression and buff repairing as an activity.
Rebalanced Stiletto, Mollusk, and Toboggan Wings HP, Torque, and cost.
Rebalanced Stiletto and Mollusk Leg cost.
Added Brittle Bone Boots and Gloves that were missing from the set.
Rebalanced Brittle Bone and Forester's Armor cost, considering new additions to the Brittle Bone set.
Removed Nomad Cloth from Bone Tier weapons. Replaced with Rope and other resources to make them more affordable.
Increased Javelin and Heavy Javelin stack size from 5 to 20 for easier use and carrying.
Made Automaton collision with the player a little smaller for easier walking on deck.
Rebalanced the way resources drop from Rupu. Will drop more rarely, but at higher amounts and better types to make sure that most loot drops are valuable, regardless of the random chance.
Added a chance for Beeswax and Redwood Wood to drop from some Rupu on Canyons to buff the drop.
Fixed a Mollusk rig not dropping where it's supposed to (was dropping a Stiletto one before).
Added new armor for different Rupu types to continue making them look unique and recognizable.
Removed Mushroom Flesh as an ingredient for making Fruit Pulp. Mushrooms are not a fruit.
Tweaked Windmill crafting recipe (also, added T2 Windmill with passive generation, even faster Sandstorm one, and full Sandstorm damage protection, but gotta wait until SG for that one. I like Windmills, they're my pet project for weekends).
Made Toxic Water actually look toxic, so it's more obvious that it's dangerous.
Fixed Bone Bottle recipe using wrong items. Should be craftable now.
Fixed Tech Tree icon of the Maintenance Chest.
Removed Modules Container from Walkers until we add them back, not to confuse everyone.
Removed Walker Crafting Skill menu, which wasn't working and just confused everyone.
Slightly improved Walker Management screen for clarity.
Rarity event maps, base raiding, Sleeping Giants, and other recent developments
We’re approaching our major revision to one of the mechanics introduced in Season 5 and wanted to take this week’s devblog to lay out its full design and our plan for it. As it happens with large overhauls like this, the full update will require a few more days in the oven, so we’ll be rolling out parts throughout the week, with the final bit scheduled for early next week. Meanwhile, we’ll continue this week with some balance changes and further iteration, as well.
Overview
From watching your community videos and various streamers, and reading your feedback, we quickly realized that the rarity implementation wasn’t resulting in the gameplay we had hoped that it would and quickly set to work redesigning how the system functioned and how we wanted players to interact with it. We’ve written a few devblogs with some of our ideas to gauge reception and receive feedback, and we’ve settled on an iteration we’re now comfortable implementing. Throughout this devblog we’ll lay out the full design and plan for the coming week.
First and foremost, a reminder of the current plan. Maps are currently set to burn on the 7th of September - we will keep that date, burn the maps as scheduled, and then set all maps to common. In addition, we’ll be setting some cradles to start burning today, which will burn on Monday, as we’ve spawned a lot of them on release and now they’re being unused with everyone moving out to Canyons. Tiles will keep their current clan cap as is, but will only have common resources and mobs. To answer a common question - we will also be wiping all rarity, including equipment, resources, Walkers, and so on. We understand this is frustrating for those players who have continued playing and grinding rarity, but it’s important to test these changes with everyone starting on even footing. Then, early next week, we will patch and rarity event maps will start spawning.
To clarify: Rarity wiping will happen by changing all the items into common, not by deleting them!
Event Maps
At that time, rare maps will start spawning similar to event maps in previous seasons, with a few major differences. We’ll be implementing traveling to these maps in a much different way. You will be able to craft a portal anywhere on a map that instantly takes you straight to these maps and then brings you back to the edge of the map you traveled from when coming back. We understand that not everyone has hours every day to spend traveling around hoping to run into other players and, hopefully, this will help avoid having to spend so much time to get that gameplay. We believe that the current implementation of travel is healthy for the open world, but we understand that many of you want to be able to play the game in either a more casual way or by going straight into action, and this is one step in that direction.
Once you’re on the map, rarity will be similar to what it is now (with the exception of fixing some obvious issues like creature rarity, rupu vines, and tools not harvesting R+1). Another important change is that every map will have a random distribution of all rarities for both mobs and resources. We hope that it creates an entirely new gameplay around rarity - "What are the schematics and resources I was able to get during the event and how do I most efficiently use them?". Our intention isn’t for everyone to have everything Legendary - it will be much more rare than that. Rather, you’ll have to decide what are the most important things to invest your Legendary schematics and resources in, and settle for the next best rarity for the rest, depending on your ability to find and farm it. In addition, we’ll be implementing a wandering merchant that allows you to spend flots to instantly upgrade the rarity of your resources in exchange for Flots.
On the difficulty front - we understand that the current implementation of rare mobs (primarily increases in health and damage) isn’t all that exciting, but further than that we understand in general PvE isn’t as fun as we want it to be. One of our major focuses right now is improving current and future encounters to make them more than crafting and spamming darts, and we’ll be able to ultimately leverage some of those changes to improve rarity camps. On a case by case basis we’ll be addressing some mobs (looking at you, legendary Papak) that verge on impossible without some heavy doses of cheese. We’re also working on implementing different weapons actually having different functions, making encounters more dynamic, as you’ll need to think what to use against the weapons, Rupu, their structures, and so on, and switch between your weapons during the fight or even pre-fitting your Walker with specific weapons depending on the encounter you’re preparing for.
PvE Rarity
Originally, when rarity was meant to be more of an iterative progression mechanic, we said that we intended to have PvE rarity maps. However, the design of rarity has changed in a way that we believe makes it a progression loop that would be less rewarding to PvE players and more rewarding to risk-taking PvP players. For that reason, at least in their first implementation, rarity maps will be PvP-only. PvE-only players will still be able to engage in the rarity loop, but, primarily, through the marketplace and the quality upgrader merchant. Also, if we see enough demand, there is a good chance we will consider expanding the rarity resource upgrading mechanic to include the ability to upgrade schematics as well. Let us know below how you feel PvP and PvE should work in Last Oasis:
In short, we agree with SkyKevin and recommend to watch his video on this topic (and thank him for his contribution):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwFNojO0SB4
We’ll also be enabling base raiding this week as a part of one of the planned patches. We’ll be talking more about our plans for PvP over the coming days and weeks, but essentially, we’ll be rolling out some systems to make base raiding a more interesting and fundamental mechanic for the game. In the meantime, as we’ve mentioned, we agree with SkyKevin’s assessment on how it could impact the game (and also, overall about his impressions on the gameplay we’re aiming for).
Schematics
It is our impression that schematics are probably the most controversial system implemented in Season 5. Feedback on schematics seems all over the place, to say the least. Some of you think it’s a great improvement over tablets and fragments, some absolutely hate it, and all the possible things in between. So, as promised in one of the previous posts, we’re running a survey that will stay open through the week, asking a few questions about schematics and your thoughts on them. We'd really appreciate if you took part in it, as it will greatly help us improve the system:
And finally, we’re continuing to work on Sleeping Giants - the next map in progression. We know that everyone is pretty tired of Canyons, but as we said at the beginning of the season, we will continue iterating until we believe it’s appropriate to move on. With the current state of rarity, it would simply be backwards and pretty much irresponsible to introduce a whole new set of technology before figuring out the existing one, so the focus of our coders has been on improving rarity while our game designers have taken that time to continue iterating on Sleeping Giants, which will introduce a whole new set of challenges for players to face, including the War Okkam, many new types of camps, including special ones like melee-only, and other dangers and rewards that we’ll talk about in a future post.
Hotfix 1.5.41152
With this update, our main intention was to fix an issue that came up with Windmills being available to be put on Walkers, as they would allow to easily push any Walker disregarding the physics. It allowed for easy griefing, as it would push a Walker with no option to retaliate and even allowed to push Walkers through objects in some cases. That should be fixed now.
In addition to it, we've included some small changes we've been working on to make the patch a little more interesting than just a small fix. One of the most significant changes is that Windmills now only generate torque while in the strong winds of a Sandstorm. What we're hoping for with this change is that Windmills will be put on special Sandstorm-chasing Walkers and driven directly into a Sandstorm like daredevil Nomads. Of course, it should also work with static Windmills, but then you're hoping for an accidental Sandstorm passing through and have to keep the Windmill exposed to other dangers.
It's currently an early version of the feature and we'll definitely be tweaking it based on the feedback, but it should make Torque generation, which is a high tier resource, more active and interesting, rather than placing some windmills inside a base and passively generating torque at a slow pace. We're currently aiming at around a minute spent in a sandstorm to produce enough Torque to power your machines for some time. It can be amplified by using larger walkers to put more Windmills on them, but we're also planning a better Windmill with a more advanced mechanism for Sleeping Giants that would produce low amounts of Torque without strong winds of a Sandstorm and produce much large amounts while in one. Also, we're considering various protections for being in a Sandstorm, both for your character and the Walker you're driving.
- Fixed Windmills pushing walkers being broken. - Made Tier 1 Windmill work only in Sandstorms. - Updated Tier 1 Windmill description to mention use in Sandstorms. - Very significantly increased torque generation of Tier 1 Windmills. - Slightly decreased torque generation of Walkers to promote Windmill use. - Significantly increased Tier 1 Windmill HP to withstand Sandstorms. - Fixed Sandstorms sometimes damaging things inside large bases. - Fixed wrong interaction prompt on Papak harvesting. - Fixed dead Papaks still producing sounds sometimes. - Lowered Trade Station Light Wall Schematic sale cost, considering increased drop rate. - Fixed Sandstorm particles flying in wrong direction. - Fixed duplicate entries in Schematic unlock list. - Fixed Scattershot sometimes not damaging players. - Fixed Purification Station being buildable on some walkers.
Hotfix 1.5.41064
A small hotfix after the yesterday's patch incoming. Some of the new issues came to be from the changes made during the Sleeping Giants iteration, which we now fixed and included a few other improvements like fixing infinite aggro range on mobs, especially Papak being the culprit number one in that matter. We've also temporarily disabled XP gain on placement of structures until we switch back to 50% return rate on diassembling and fixed merchants seemingly taking over the tiles.
You've also probably already noticed, but we've extended the burn for 6 more days. It's a bit longer than we've originally planned, but we've also reworked some design ideas in the process, so we'd like to make sure we have enough time to implement them as well as possible for the best rarity experience since the invention of rarity in LO. Without revealing too much, those might include potential creatable portals and other fun things. We might also have an interesting announcement around that time, so make sure to follow the news to find out more.
- Temporarily disabled XP gain for placement of structures. - Fixed merchants spawning all over the place. - Fixed mobs, especially Papak, not deaggroing when you leave their area. - Fixed some other various issues with deaggroing properly for mobs. - Changed Rupu Fur Armor recipe to use Hide instead of Leather. - Reduced Wooden Shaft cost back to 2 Wood. - Removed Player Unstuck feature to prevent abuses. - Fixed mob patrol distance - Removed broken bulk recipe for Wooden Dart. - Removed duplicate recipes for Bone Glue. - Added back Gelatinous Goo to Bone Glue recipe.
Hotfix 1.5.41037
We're currently in the middle of iteration on Sleeping Giants, making internal patches, putting hours into testing, and making sure to both use your feedback from existing maps, and also the experience we got iterating on them using the same method.
Hopefully, we should have more and, especially, concrete information sometime soon on when SG is coming out and what exactly will it have in terms of features, new content, progression, new mobs and encounters, and so on. Not gonna lie, it's getting pretty hot here, especially with more testers joining SG iteration.
In the meantime, we've prepared an intermediary patch that combines some fixes and improvements that, mainly, came to be from working on Sleeping Giants. As we work on the new map, some changes are required, as they're present on previous maps as well, so we can put them into a patch that benefits both maps without having to reveal the new map itself yet (not that we don't want to, tho). That and other incidental changes that turned up from iteration and your feedback and we've got a Monday patch to present. Take a look:
- Fixed Light Wood Foundation and Door not protecting from Sandstorm properly. - Added Scroll Rack to a Small hardpoint and Ammo Scroll Rack to a Medium hardpoint. - Made Woodworking Station Output container have 100 stack size for all items. - Improved bulk crafting for various items like Wooden Darts. - Added a T2 Toboggan rig to one of the harder Canyon camps. - Added more new armors to various Rupu types to distinguish them better. - Replaced multiple temporary icons with proper ones (Thumper, Grappling Hook, etc.). - Slightly tweaked Sterile Bandage drop from Canyon camps. - Fixed various issues with being stuck on loading while traveling. - Possibly actually improved the HDR situation on Xbox this time. - Fixed orange glow on some of the Light Walls sometimes appearing for no reason. - Fixed more weird ways that you could've damaged bases in PvP. - Increased Papak respawn timer, so there is time to loot in their basin after a fight. - Slightly updated recipes for stomping various fruits into pulp for making water. - Made Papak gas spitting location anatomically correct. - Fixed some of the schematics not being allowed in schematic-specific containers. - Added Tree Sap appearing after cutting down some Redwoods, but no uses before SG comes (soon). - Added a few new items to the Herbalist trader straight from Sleeping Giants (really, soon). - Added Salt rocks to salt flats of the canyons, but no uses before SG comes as well (please be patient). - Updated Bone Repair Hammer to use Bone and Rope in its recipe. - Fixed Bone Upgrades making Walkers vulnerable to melee in some cases.
- Added some admin commands and removed some admin commands from private servers.
Thanks to BryanTheHacker from our Discord for finding some exploits that allowed to get access to every possible item in the game on private servers using some intricate admin commands, including completely unobtainable dev items that are used to make systems work and are never supposed to be in a possession of a character. Thankfully, it was reported early after being found on the official discord, so we managed to quickly fix it to avoid any issues down the road (even potential data corruption of private servers wouldn't be out of the question, depending on the item).
But we didn't only remove commands with this patch. We also added a few new commands to make your life a little easier over on private servers. Hope they help! - GiveItemToWalker - will add an item to a walker you're currently looking at, making it much easier to add water, torque, equipment, ammo, and large amounts of items into cargo without having to spawn it into your own inventory and move it over that way. - IncreaseCarryCapacity - will increase your carrying capacity to crazy amounts, so you can easily move whatever you need in situations where admin commands left you with amazingly heavy items in way too large amounts.
Hotfix 1.5.41022
- Temporarily increased disassemble resource return to 100%.
As promised in the last update post, we're increasing disassembling rate to a full 100% resource return. That means that you'll receive all the resources you paid for when building something, allowing you to disassemble all the structures on rarity maps and not losing resources on more expensive structures.
The disassemble return rate will be set back to 50% during the rarity update, so make sure to use it while you can. But we have a small update on the burn itself as well. We're also considering to increase the burn time by a few days to give you a little more time to move your belongings, since the disassembling feature didn't come into effect at the same as the tiles starting to burn. We'll give you the final decision by how many days we increase the burn within a few days, most likely Monday.
Rarity Tiles Are Dead (soon), All Hail New Rarity
If you’ve been playing on rarity tiles today or opened the World Map and looked around, you might have noticed that some of the tiles are set to be burnt in around 8 days. “What’s up with that?”, you might ask, since we don’t have burning tiles anymore. And you would be right - we don’t have map burning in a general sense, but the feature is still available for us to use in order to get rid of any tiles on the World Map.
If you’ve read the previous post, you probably already guessed the reason for burning some of the tiles and if you’ve taken a closer look at which specific tiles are being burnt, it gets even easier to guess what’s happening. In 8 days we’re introducing the changes to the rarity system that we’ve discussed in the last large update post.
Going back to the tile burning - we’re getting rid of the vast majority of the static rarity maps. They will be completely gone from the World Map, which means that everything built on them, any characters or walkers will be completely destroyed. When it comes to your character, you’ll be able to respawn on another tile, but will lose anything you had on the rarity tile that’s been burnt. You’ll also notice that some of the tiles, mainly low rarity ones that were more populated, are not being burnt. Those tiles, instead, will be turned into regular common maps, meaning that, while everything on them will be kept as it was - all the bases will stay, all the walkers and players will be kept alive, and so on, the rarity of all the foliage, camps, and mobs will be downgraded to common. Those tiles, however, will stay being PvP, as we’ll have both PvE and PvP static common maps from now on. For now, the main benefit of settling on common PvP tiles will be a higher clan cap than the average on the PvE ones, so it will be lucrative for any larger clans to consider building their base there. However, we're also working on additional features to incentivise going, and, especially, staying on PvP tiles as opposed to safe PvE ones. We’ll be addressing PvP in a whole separate update dedicated to the overhaul of the PvP in Last Oasis.
To give more details on the tile burning, especially for anyone who never experienced it, you will be able to see the timer when the tile will be burnt, so you know how much time you have left. You’ll see it when you join the map, on the World Map if you hover over the tile, and, close to the burn itself, you’ll see a constant timer on-screen reminding you about it. Once the timer runs out, the tile will be completely destroyed, together with everything on it. If you have any bases, walkers, or characters on those rarity maps, you have to move them before the timer runs out or you will lose them forever.
While with walkers and characters it’s pretty straightforward - you just travel to a regular permanent map and you’re safe, with bases it’s a little more tricky, as you’d have to disassemble it and move over all the resources in it. To address it, we’ll be doing a small hotfix update allowing you to disassemble any structure for a 100% return of resources. That means that when disassembling base walls or stations, you’ll get all the resources that you spent building them back instead of the normal 50% return. This should allow you not to waste any resources that you’ve invested into rarity tiles and just disassemble all the bases and move the leftovers away on your walkers.
This change is not yet in and will be added in a small patch later this week, so don’t try to disassemble your bases just yet, unless you don’t mind losing half the resources. The burn is set to last around 8 days, so there is plenty of time to do it.
When it comes to larger clans moving, we'll be transforming uncommon PvP tiles to common, but large clan cap PvP tiles that will not burn and will be the perfect place to move to with your clan. The switch should happen at most within a day since this post.
We’ve discussed the rarity changes in the previous post, but things weren’t set in stone yet, so we’ve collected some more feedback and, finally, have the full list of changes pinned down and are actively working on them right now. As we’ve done previously, we’ll go in detail and explain every change to the system, the reasoning behind them, and what we expect out of the changes in the post that will come together with the update later next week. So stay tuned for it and make sure to move your belongings in time!
Hotfix 1.5.40915
To give you a small update on what's going on since the last update - we're currently collecting feedback on the latest changes and preparing a survey on the whole season in general, as we've mentioned. The work on the next map in progression as well as the overhaul of the rarity maps and PvP mechanics that we've described in the last post is going at full speed, so expect another big update post in near future!
For now, we've prepared a small patch to address some issues, mainly regarding performance, as we've seen quite many reports about it recently. If you notice improvements after the update or find other issues to report, please let us know.
Made Light Wooden Walls have less holes. Should both improve performance and fix potential issues with sandstorm going through.
Slightly updated Medium Wooden Walls visuals to make them more distinct from Light Walls.
Optimized Humidifier particles to not affect performance.
Temporarily removed walker dust particles until optimized better.
Fixed performance issues regarding walker legs and wings not stopping movement when a walker is stopped.
