With 2025 winding down to an end, we (the Lost Isle team) reflect on a year of incredible development progress. We're grateful to each and every one of you for following the project and showing your support by wishlisting Lost Isle, chatting in our Discord community, playtesting, and giving us helpful feedback along the way. As Lost Isle's early access launch approaches in Q1 2026, we look forward to the opportunity we'll soon have to play and survive alongside you!
Some of the feedback that we've received after playtests included the open world feeling a bit too empty - that it would benefit from having not only a higher quantity of the existing wildlife, but also greater variety. These are some of the new units we've added and their different nighttime behaviors, with more planned for post launch. The island is more alive than ever!
A common gameplay trend among the open-world survival-craft genre is that players tend to return to their base at sundown, turtle in their base until sunrise, and only then venture back out into the world again. There are a few reasons for this, like the inherent danger of drastically reduced visibility, but also a lack of incentive. If the reward doesn't match the risk, why would you do differently? Adding these unique appearances, behaviors, and rewards to wildlife is a step in the direction of incentivizing players to at least occasionally choose exploring over turtling every night.
Wildlife are grouped into a behavior type category that determines what their nighttime behavior is. As we add more variety in the future, they'll either fall into an existing group, or in some cases will have a fully unique behavior like the giant crab. The categories are prey, predator, flee, flee+, flying bird, and unique.
Our new giant crab is currently the only member of the unique behavior category. It is passive until attacked, then becomes aggressive to the death. At night, when its health drops below 50% it pulls its arms in and generates a shield, making it invulnerable and regenerating its health back to 100%.
Panthers fall into the predator category - together with crocodiles and sharks - meaning that they are always in an aggressive state and will attack players immediately upon detection. Predators have a nighttime ability called frenzy. While attacking during nighttime they will periodically enter a state of frenzy, increasing their movement speed and reducing time between attacks.
Raccoons are part of the prey category - together with rabbits - meaning that they are passive until they detect a player, then either flee to a fixed location and despawn or idle. Their nighttime ability is called poof which allows them to teleport a short distance away from their pursuer in the direction they're fleeing for a chance at escape.
Chickens belong to the mixed flee category - together with boars and elk - where their behavior depends on whether the specific animal is female (flee) or male (flee+), in this case hen or rooster. The females are passive and flee upon detecting a player. Males, however, have a chance to turn on the player and attack before fleeing. The male nighttime behavior is called charge, which triggers when they would normally attack a player. This ability deals damage and stuns on contact.
As mentioned above, boars are also part of the mixed flee category. The female nighttime behavior is called spooked which gives them a massive temporary speed boost while fleeing upon initially detecting a player.
Last, but not least (and most fun in my opinion), we have the flying bird category which includes crows and seagulls. Their nighttime behavior is called pinata and is basically exactly what it sounds like. When you kill a flying bird at night, instead of their corpse becoming lifeless and harvestable, it instead explodes and flings the loot all around onto the ground to pick up. The moment this was implemented, sniping birds from the sky at night immediately became my favorite Lost Isle mini game.
So what's the incentive? Well aside from looking cool and making each encounter more fun and interesting, for now they all drop something extra when killed and harvested at night that corresponds with the color of their energy enhancement. This is a temporary solution, and eventually we'll add wholly unique resources that drop from wildlife at night, to be used in crafting special items to enhance weapons and armor during combat. Expansions to those systems won't come out until post early access launch, but we're scheming up something awesome that'll be well worth the wait!
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