ICARUS Week Eight Content Update Eases Grind

Rocketwerkz dropped their weekly update today, just in time for the weekend. In what may end up being the most impactful patch yet, Rocketwerkz has used this latest update to reduce the grinding required to tech up. They’ve increased ore spawns, and reduced the rare element requirements for key tier 4 recipes. There are also new caves, some modifications to food spawns, and a significant amount of other changes and fixes.

The new caves are currently only in the Riverlands, but RocketWerkz plans to continue to add caves — less hiking between mining sites means less time grinding ore, which is a sorely needed improvement. Recipes have finally been added to the Electric Carpentry Bench and the Electric Masonry Bench, and the crafting speed of many recipes has been reduced. Other interesting changes include mushrooms being added to Arctic caves, and squash being moved to the Desert.

Today’s official announcement also went over a number of changes or improvements that the developers are either currently testing, or at least considering for future updates. One of the biggest complaints players have is that there is currently no way to respec your talents. As per today’s announcement, RocketWerkz “…intend[s] to provide some way to respec or change how you have spent talent points at some stage…” though they’ve asked players to be patient (so it will probably be awhile before we see anything more on this front). They’ve also listened in regards to not being able to see while mining: they plan to add a new slot in character inventories for a lantern.

Check out the full notes below, and read the entire official announcement here!

ICARUS Patch Notes – Version: 1.1.1.90762

Many of the topics discussed above are work-in-progress, but here are the details of what is included in this week’s patch: a large number of map fixes, cave updates, balance changes and performance optimizations.

• Added crops to outposts.
• Added mushrooms to arctic caves.
• Increased quantity of mineral deposits in many caves, to increase overall availability of resources.
• Added first-pass of new cave locations.
• Created new recipe sets for Tier 4 crafting benches including Electric Carpentry Bench, Electric Masonry Bench, Chemistry Bench, which combined multiple lower-tier recipes into the new machines.
• Fixed crafting bench recipes not properly accounting for stats which reduce resource costs.
• Added several recipes to the Carpentry Bench that fit with the theme of home construction, from the crafting table and player crafting.
• Increased crafting queue from 5 to 10 entries on several Tier 4 benches.
• Decreased the cost of early Tier 4 bench recipes (Decreased Fabricator Electronics to 60->30, and removed Steel Ingot requirement, changed Material Processor from 80->60, Increased Electronics cost of Electrical Masonry Bench, Carpentry Bench, and Chemistry Bench to 20). Minor other changes to secondary resources in T4 machine recipes.
• Added new alternate recipes for Composite Paste, which can substitute the Gold requirement with Platinum.
• Reduced player crafting speed to be more in line with benches.
• Decreased crafting speed of Stone and Concrete building pieces.
• Decreased crafting speed of most Mortar and Pestle recipes.
• Decreased crafting speed of Herbalism recipes.
• Added text to indicate when loading is complete, and the intro video is now skippable.
• Fixed issue where Bosses could sometimes not spawn in ‘Broken Arrow : Recovery’
• Fixed several gaps in the terrain.
• Moved wild squash plants from the forest to the desert biome.
• Removed some instances of trees placed inside mountains.
• Fixed issue where rivers could flicker in certain lighting conditions.
• Fixed issue with some problematic dropship locations.
• Fixed several caves that were missing resource deposits and other cave functionality.
• Fixed some caves not using their biome-appropriate assets.
• Fixed visual issue caused by ambient occlusion on foliage at certain distances.
• Improved both visuals and performance on some rock assets.
• Improved performance of triplanar shader.
• Fixed issue causing players to be incorrectly flagged as inside a cave at a specific location.
• Improved performance of desert rocks.
• Fixed issue preventing fish from spawning correctly in many water bodies.
• Improved visuals of distant terrain on outposts.
• Added more sand to the desert.
• Improved shadow performance in caves.
• Improved collisions for some cave rocks, to reduce instances where players could not reach the entirety of some mineral deposits.
• Improved performance of in-game map screen.

Did you know the intro movie is a loading screen, and that you can click to skip it once the game’s done loading? Yeah, me neither, until like a week ago. Let us know what you think of the patch notes and the intro cinematic in the comments below!