Greetings, Nomads!
As we told you at the end of the most recent test, there were three major hurdles standing between us and the release of Season 6 - Xbox certification, automatic tile spawning, and ensuring we have adequate server support. In order to get it all done, we thought we needed to expand our team and add some additional skillsets, so we’d like to introduce the newest member of Donkey Crew, Rarp!
Hey all, I'm Rarp! Super excited to be joining the team as a developer. I've been around LO since the beginning of S1, so it feels amazing to now be on the other side helping shape the game. I've been a software engineer for about 15 years (mainly in business development), and I've dabbled in game dev through side projects; but this is my first chance to work on a game with such a dedicated player base. Can't wait to dive in and help push things forward!
Rarp has been working through the summer getting up to speed on the backend and our Xbox situation and has made a lot of progress towards achieving our goals.
Initially, we investigated moving to Nitrado’s Game Fabric service, which would give us additional flexibility when it comes to hosting tiles on demand and scaling our support throughout the shorter 8 week seasons, but ultimately decided that it isn’t the priority worth pursuing at this point. However, it should not prevent us from having adequate servers as we go forward.
For Xbox, we see the light at the end of the tunnel, though perhaps it’s just a little bit early to declare victory entirely. We will keep you posted and it is our full intention to support Xbox at Season 6 launch.
The meat and potatoes here is the automated tile spawning system. While we acknowledge there are some limitations around our design related to tile progression throughout the season, we think that one of the major successes of last season was keeping tiles densely populated and maximizing player interactions. When we set out to design a tile spawning system, we wanted to ensure that it would enable us to spend less time manually operating each season, but also that it maintained its flexibility. A weakness of previous seasons was that the algorithm could not adapt fast enough and many regions were left sparsely populated, leading to empty maps and reduced player interactions.
So, we have an all new tile spawning system, and you know what that means: a test! We had a lot of internal debate about test fatigue. We get it, we’re ready for the season as well. Something is just different when it’s “for real”. But this is a really important one to run through its paces at least once. The test will run for approximately two weeks for PC users only. It will be on an accelerated timeline and progress through the full season with increased XP and Gathering rates. We are working through the last few details but the goal is to start the test on Friday, October 3rd. We will announce further details about how to join the test on the day we actually start.
But wait, there’s more! There were some bugs and balance issues still lingering at the end of the test and of course we couldn't resist adding even more content, so see the full changelog below.
Implemented Broken Tusker POI in Kali Spires
Readded gunpod ballista
Implemented Torque Chest with 50k storage
Implemented “Gambler Nomad” at Trading Station
Implemented Perk Tree System
Reworked Poaching Hut to work as a "King Of The Hill" event (3 clan members required)
Implemented new KOTH Walker Event (like the old LOC modded server)
Implemented Remote Containers System for Crafting Stations
Added checkboxes to crafting stations and containers UI to enable/disable remote items Transfer
Implemented chests decorations
Added new pyramid POI on Kali Spires
Implemented "Worm Attractor" placeable structure to respawn the Worm on worm maps after it's killed
New ammo chest mesh
Correctly setup rupus melee difficulty and loots
Set rupus HP proportional to their loot and melee difficulty
Rupu sling HP 600 → 1200, inventory size 15 → 30
Reduced Scattershot base damage, slightly increased penetration
Increased ballista damage to compensate for distance falloff
Slowed down gunpod ballista
Disabled ballista on Raptors
Increased Winged Helmet durability ×2
Re-enabled player slots protection when below level 10
Set almost broken structures to melee-only damage protection only when built on walkers
Reworked contaminated / toxic / clear water planes
Reduced cost of Woodworking Station Tier 2
Increased XP from physical mobs
Nerfed Balang and Silur legs HP
Made Automatons count against clan cap
Removed debuffs from Automatons
Added map icon to quality upgraders + reduced spawn quantity
Set the max amount of APT to 1 for all default walker RIGs
Removed APT from Domus Walker
Moved walker climbers from edge spot small to cosmetic spot, also moved trip wire and spike traps from edge spot small to small spot
Allowed Charged Roks in ammo chest
Set walker torque boost when sprinting to 75% with 1 wing and 50% with no wings Removed difficulty from rupu names Reduced Firestone Longblade damage
Fixed MistHUDTargetInfoWidget not displaying the correct Health
Fixed worm and large cactus sound as wood when walking on it
Fixed worm not spawning as quality
Fixed proxy walk distance not replicating correctly
Fixed walker parts not requiring schematics for quality crafts
Fixed bases auto-repair formula
Fixed Max Tile Walker Power value not set correctly
Fixed Walker Overcap message not going away
Fixed proxy cannot travel after being deployed and then undeployed
Fixed ammos loottables
Fixed Kali Spires loots and structures not spawning
Fixed Ancient Towers POI spawning underground in Kali Spires
Fixed asteroid camera shake
Fixed raptor skywalker wings not moving
Fixed walker overcap message spam
Fixed siege weapons trajectory being visible to everyone
Fixed Lumbermill and trees not falling with harpoons
Optimized Worm scales LODs and collisions
Added dropping to ground excess harvested items
Removed goo from purification station, added wooden gear
Adjusted purification station normal water recipe (reduced sand)
Removed clay ground from Kali Spires
Added harvestable clay meshes to Kali Spires
Improved asteroid trajectory
Improved all catapult bombs visual FXs
Added sand dust trails to Worm
Removed tablet strongbox sellers from AC and all Flotilla Traders
Added 100,000 XP reward when killing the Worm
Improved VOIP audio compression and limiter
Forbid disassembling zeroed walkers