Black Skies Update 0.12.0 - The First Big Patch

Update 0.12.0 - The First Big Patch

This is the first major update since Black Skies launched into Early Access, and it is a big one. Months of work has gone into deeper survival systems, a full crafting and cooking loop, building out your camp, a lot of quality-of-life improvements, and a serious performance pass. Thank you to everyone who has played, reported bugs, and left feedback. It directly shaped this update.

Highlights

• Cook, craft, and survive. A full cooking and crafting loop, snow-to-water, foraging, and recipes like Warmed Tomato Soup.
• Build your camp. Place campfires, tents, and gear in the world.
• Rest by the fire. Sleep to fast-forward to morning and recover, as long as you are warm enough.
• Big performance gains. Roughly 25 to 45 more FPS on Balanced settings, and another 10 to 20 on High Fidelity. On potatoe settings you can get even more FPS gains with barely any sacrifice to visual quality.

New Features and Content

• Updated "Make Camp" questline near the wreck.
• A buried cache hunt: follow landmark clues across the world to each dig site, with ground markers guiding you in.
• Sleep system: rest by a fire to skip to morning and recover your stats while you sleep.
• Craftable Tier 1 torch made from sticks to light your way.
• Berry bushes added as a new foraging source.
• New cooked recipe: Warmed Tomato Soup.
• New cooked recipe: Cooked Canned Beans.
• New recipes coming!

Survival and Gameplay

• Secure a shelter (cabin, shed, or truck) to stay warm and protected, with protection dropping once you leave.
• Tents draw warmth from a nearby campfire.
• Status effects are now color-coded by feel: orange for warmth and light, blue for cold, gray for tactical, white for neutral.
• Warmth balancing across fires and shelters for a more consistent experience.

Crafting, Cooking, and Inventory

• Cooking system added with recipes.
• Updated Crafting system with more recipes and a clean UI.
• Scoop snow to produce water.
• Harvesting now picks varied targets and supports random yields.
• Shift-click to move a full stack at once, with a storage legend to make transfers easier.
• Item pickups and losses now pop clear notifications with item icons.
• Cleaner inventory slots, including equipped-item highlighting.
• Full pass on item and clothing descriptions for clearer flavor and mechanics.
• Loot tuning so medical supplies and water drop more sensibly.

Building and Camp

• Place almost any item in the world with a dedicated Place button.
• Placed campfires and tents persist across save and load.
• Placement checks the surface beneath an item and warns you when a spot will not work.
• Your hands free up automatically when you place an item or interact.

Quality of Life and UI

• Defaults to borderless windowed at your native resolution.
• Quest tracker moved to a cleaner spot on the HUD.
• Menus open, switch, and close cleanly with hotkeys, and attribute bars stay readable behind them.
• On-screen key prompts showing relevant inputs.
• Confirmation prompts now guard things like starting a new game or quitting.
• Settings menu polish: clearer labels, working presets, an ambient audio channel, and settings that persist.
• Survey HUD and indicators for camp sites and points of interest.
• Autosave when you wake from sleep.
• Much more reliable interaction: small objects under your crosshair register correctly, and line of sight is no longer falsely blocked by walls or nearby clutter. This was a major interaction rebuild that makes the game feel much better and less frustrating.

Audio and Visual

• Highlight rings around points of interest, with colors that shift by time of day.
• Brighter, more natural interior lighting in the cabin and shed, including lanterns.
• Chopping and harvesting now have proper sounds and timing on every swing.

Performance

• Major frame-rate gains from quality-tier tuning. Roughly 25 to 45 FPS on Balanced and another 10 to 20 on High Fidelity and even more in Potatoe mode with barely any loss in visual quality.
• Smarter culling of buildings and world objects, plus terrain instancing and shadow fixes for smoother play.

This is Early Access, and your feedback drives what comes next. If you hit a bug or have an idea, drop it in the Steam Community hub or our Discord. Thanks for playing.

Metacortex