We’ve made some huge changes to the game with the help of our first 2 waves of Kickstarter backers and testers.
FRV's starting area, the Thorcon Power Plant, got a huge facelift and content update. The main room is filled with vendors buying and selling everything a player needs to survive, and the respawn area is almost unrecognizable compared to just a few weeks ago.
We’ve added a fresh coat of grime to the sewer dungeon, made big improvements to the siege system, and updated the mutant’s movements, and battle tactics to make them more dangerous. However, The most exciting new feature for this update is probably the introduction of the talent system.
Designed from the ground up with the direct input of the community, the first iteration in the game right now allows players to explore four categories of specialization. This is a huge step forward allowing you to tailor your gameplay into what role you like best or explore other options you normally wouldn’t.
Here’s a look at everything we’ve added to the game.
Thorcon Power Plant Update
Every part of the game’s starting area has had a major facelift.
What was a fairly empty respawn room is now filled with everything a freshly restored player needs to start surviving.
The locker room next door has changed quite a bit from our early concepts.
It’s now almost as vibrant as the jungle outside.
The work we’ve done in the main room however is probably the most striking.
This huge open space is now a multi-level area filled with vendors, shops, shrines, and places for players to group up. Here’s a before and after video that highlights the huge changes inside and the starting area’s incredible transformation.
Sewer Dungeon Renovation
The Thorcon wasn’t the only renovation we took on, the sewer dungeon got a lot of love recently and some expansions.
We take a lot of pride in making our jungles lush and vibrant and wanted to put the same effort into making one of our favorite dungeons a foreboding place to explore.
In addition to the twisting wet corridors, we’ve added defensible positions for players who need some cover from the mutants lurking around inside.
We’re still working on building out some of the lowest levels, but there are already plenty of places for players to explore, loot, and fight.
Talent System
All of these renovations make a huge visual difference but our new talent system has a huge impact on gameplay.
We built the talent system hand-in-hand with our amazing community. We asked for ideas about builds and ways they’d like to specialize their characters while keeping in mind that we wanted to avoid anything that would give an unfair advantage in PVP.
Here’s what we came up with after listening to your input. Right now we have 4 basic roles you can explore: Builder, Hunter, Stealth, and Support. We still have some UI and balancing to do but this is another huge step in allowing players to customize their characters and work better in groups.
Siege and Totem Improvements
Building a base that is big enough to attract a horde of angry mutants (or starting a siege yourself) is a lot of fun, and we’ve made a ton of improvements to the siege system.
We updated how totems work for singular and combined bases ensuring that endless waves don’t appear for larger complexes and made sure a siege ends once all of the base's totems are reduced to 20% or less health. The siege manager now keeps proper track of contributing players and we fixed bugs that would cause massive server lag when a siege was started manually.
We added animals and beasts to the cast of characters that can show up to tear down everything you’ve built, made improvements to AI pathing so the horrors of the jungle don’t get stuck, and made sure the siege manager prioritizes ranged AI if a base is hard to reach.
More Content, Improvements, and Features
We’ve been hard at work making a huge number of performance improvements and fixing a bunch of persistence issues that popped up with all the work we’ve been doing, particularly inside the now bustling Thorcon Power Plant. We’ve even reduced the game’s build size by over half. There’s a ton of new content in the game and we want to make sure it is running as smoothly as possible by the time we bring in Wave 3 of our Kickstarter backers. Here’s a look at everything else we finished or fixed since the last update.
VOIP Improvements
- The VOIP system now keeps a weak pointer to the active world to reduce redundant looping when mapping players to their VOIP Talker
- Increased the VOIP attenuation distance
- The "VOICE Enabled" option in the settings menu is now functional. This currently defaults to off
- Increased the VOIP sample rate
- Fixed the VOIP system failing to apply its voice settings during initialization
- Fixed the spatialized VOIP Talker failing to initialize correctly
- Fixed a bug where respawning could cause the VOIP Talker to get stuck on the previous pawn
- Fixed a bug where VOIP Talkers were muffled when speaking
AI Updates
- Improved the tracing functionality of the poison clouds to more reliably hit nearby players
- Adjusted the AI threat values to have AI more reliably attack players that are attempting to interrupt their sieging
- Disabled trophy collector damage to sleeping players
- Fixed Ranged AI occasionally getting stuck in place when pathing towards a forcibly added enemy
- Fixed Ranged AI throwing their projectiles at the ground if their current enemy had never been in their line of sight
- Fixed ranged and melee AI not properly attacking movement blocking actors such as players during a siege
- Fixed a bug where the Trophy Collector's poison cloud could occasionally get stuck inside walls and other objects
- Fixed AI getting stuck on certain construction actors
- Fixed AI not attacking placed crafting machines that were set to block movement
- Fixed players not taking damage from AI
- Fixed crash when killing AI
- Fixed a bug where AI would fail to deal damage to actors when the actor was blocking their line of sight but not their movement
Gameplay Content, Improvements, and Fixes
- Updated the coconut grenade model and increased the damage
- Thrown weapon improvements
- Added hints to the exploration menu
- Stamina will last 2.5 times longer while sprinting and regen starts at 3.5 seconds instead of 5
- Fixed an issue with sleeping players not using the proper animations
- Added buff stat information to the talent screen
- Added bonus fall damage height of 200m per level to the parkour talent
- Altered the construction integrity checks to more easily allow placing walls on overhangs
- Set third walls to be allowed to be placed anywhere, regardless of the integrity
- Updated code for traits, attributes, wounds, and broken bones
- Fixed Big Bob's rock projectile not being visible to clients
- Item recycle amounts have been updated to take item durability into consideration
- Added tech level adjustments to crafting various weapon and tool types
- Players can no longer shoot or aim down sights while sprinting
- Fixed logging out while dead making the player unable to spawn properly on next login
- Fixed containers spawning floating off the ground
- Added Autorun, Pressing "Q" will toggle auto-running
- Plants are now harvestable by pressing the use key rather than holding it
Community
As usual, we’ve fixed a mountain of bugs with the help of our amazing testers since our last update. The team has squashed over 150 in a couple of months getting things ready for Wave 3. Join our discord server and check out the patch-notes channel for a complete list of fixes. Below you’ll find all the player-submitted bugs we cleared up since the last update.
Bug Fixes
- Logoes - The text should say stone hand ax, so people aren't confused cause there isn't exactly a stone ax
- ClockBlockerX - You can snap roof pieces to the sides of vertical walls, but you cannot snap vertical walls to the sides of roof pieces
- MJMPlays - display glitch upon login, all my hot bar is blank
- Najo - I disconnected/reconnected, and when I came back I was missing a rounded foundation
- LazurusRising - Can't walk up vendor stairs in Thorcon
- Baigs - Bugged construction pieces
- Schism3110 - Scorpion pose for prone characters
- spitfire - preexisting character data conflicting when crafting a new character in the same slot or with the same name
- Kitski - Intermittent character persistence issues
- Ferdinandus - can retrieve all stuff from inside the chests and totem from the outside of the base
- CoyoteLoven - Collison problems on Thorcon bridge
- spitfire - Some cars bleed when you hit them
- writeplace - Foundation bugs
- writeplace - open and closing car doors cause them to no longer line up correctly when closed
- spitfire - throwing many many torches lagged out other players
- spitfire - Glass in comm tower bugged
- spitfire - truck doors misalign once you open them
- Weathered Machine - You can hit the weak spot through the trees
- CoyoteLoven - Woke up minus pants or shoes, overweight with 3100 wood that can not be dropped or used
- KerryAnneKay - 127 converter taking Rai and 127 and not giving players energy. In addition, there is a visual bug
- CoyoteLoven - Trying to place a round wall in. It only allows me to put it in going the wrong direction
- blazemonger - Researched weapon, left it in bench after server downtime logged in, and found no recipe ready
- CoyoteLoven - Inventory bugs
- Logoes - Totem wood running out was sooner than expected
- Jasteron - Emptied on server restart
- Wiki - manually triggered raid last night at set up with multiple rings of totems and mutants spawned outside outer ring of totems
- Logoes - Totem upkeep changes from time to time, was 180 last night and is now 216
- blazemonger - Totem bug is back .. shows 0 days for upkeep with good stock of wood
- Logoes - The tooltip when you look at hot bar is just a tiny bit too low
- Logoes - Tons of the lootables in the north are gone, like the body bags, hanging body bags, and trash piles
- Logoes - Can't place walls
- Logoes - After destroying all the sleeping bags and replacing all the foundations I could, I am still left with one spot that shows green for placing a foundation
- Kitski - Healing others seems to be bugged
- CoyoteLoven - I've got a small chest that showed up in my Bank. I pulled it out and went back to base. I placed the chest and it subtracted 100 wood but the Chest stayed in my inventory
- ClockBlockerX - Location of last death no longer showing on map or minimap
- blazemonger - After today's update/restart my totem was again empty and my RAI and 127 gone from their chest.
- CoyoteLoven - Arrows showing in inventory but they can not be used, moved or recycled
- Bleepingelf - Food Vendor in Thorcon Coconuts cannot be bought in any other quantity than 1
- TheRadRichard - When logging into a character in thorcon, having a leg splint in your inventory over encumbers your character until you drag and drop it into a different slot
- CoyoteLoven - Overloaded with nothing in inventory and missing a backpack
- Logoes - Trees are insanely easy to get stuck on/in
- KerryAnneKay - I turn off post-processing and bloom when I log on and save it. The settings reset each time
- Logoes - Log in and unable to move
- Twerlinger - Friends button doesn't do anything
- 𝓣𝓮𝓽𝓻𝓪𝓫𝔂𝓽𝓮 - Join party button not working
- Kitski - Unhittable mutants in mine
- Ferdinandus - If you are encumbered and try to get some resource it floats and cant be caught
- Gaming News Hub - Inventory bugs
- ClockBlockerX - If foundation piece has one leg that touches the ground, it will let you snap/build it but then it falls apart after building saying it's not built on the ground
- CrimsonVIII, Baigs - Could place 1/3rd and 1/2 wall but could not place full wall
- KerryAnneKay - Opacity of trees is off
Changed files in this update