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3rd Dev Journal

[h3]Hello Lumia Island survivors![/h3]

Today’s Dev Journal will cover a new addition to Lumia Island: campfires! As the name suggests, campfires are where you can cook up plenty of special dishes.



You can cook any type of food by bringing the correct ingredients to the campfire. Before, the method of cooking and crafting was done by combining two ingredients. However, you can bring only one ingredient to the campfire and roast it up!

All Normal (White) ingredients can be brought to a campfire and roasted to delicious perfection.

For example, if you cook basic Bread over a campfire, it becomes a new item, Breakfast Toast.



This screenshot was taken before the final version of Breakfast Toast was completed. However, now that the real icon is finished, here’s what it looks like!



(Note: All of the figures featured in the Dev Journals are subject to change with official launch.)

If the campfire is too far away and you don’t have enough inventory, you can combine bread and water to make Bread in Tears. While its recovery isn't the best, it could be a good choice for beginner players as it also restores SP.



Meat is one of the easiest ingredients to find around Lumia. Bring it to a campfire to make a delicious Sizzling Steak.



In addition to these ingredients, bring a potato, cod, or garlic to the campfire and watch magic happen!

If campfires are too far and finding them is too difficult, you can use a Small Campfire Kit to instantly start a campfire for yourself.



Small campfires are (as the name suggests) smaller than campfires and disappear after a certain amount of time. However, they can be used anytime, anywhere. If you have the right ingredients but don’t want to trek to a campfire, ask a teammate if they have a small campfire kit and get to roasting!

Just like before, you can combine different ingredients to make new foods. This remains unchanged! Compared to campfires, it might be more confusing and complicated for newer players, but experienced players can continue to choose this method for the cooking experience and area movement.

Making a simple dish may be a bit more disappointing compared to a cool campfire.




However, a more complicated dish that takes a lot of planning still has a place on Lumia.




A once popular and needed item, Fish And Chips is a special case where a campfire must be used twice.

While collecting a lot of ingredients leads to a variety of special foods, we believe most players who don’t play as often will find campfires to be an easier choice.

Another good way to make special foods is to get special ingredients!

If you dig for potatoes, there’s a 10% chance you’ll get a Yellow Sweet Potatoinstead. (Please note that from here on, numbers could change for official launch!)






If you roast Yellow Sweet Potato over a campfire, you can get Roasted Sweet Potato. Doesn’t it look delicious?



If you fish, there’s a 10% chance you could get Salmon.




Roast that Salmon over a campfire to make delicious Sizzling Salmon Steak.



Yellow Sweet Potato and Salmon are rare, hidden ingredients.To our surprise, beginner players are very interested in food when they first begin playing the game. However, by continuously playing the game, cooking became like a bit of homework since you had to figure it out on your own. Our hope is that these hidden materials that can be found in repeated plays will make the game more exciting and become a fun staple, even if you don’t have to kill anyone to get them.

One of our current goals is to reorganize complex areas in time for official launch. One of those areas was the utilization and direction of food-related content. While future journals may focus on existing systems that will be reduced or removed, we added campfires as a new system so that cooking, collecting, and fishing are more meaningful to the overall flow of the game.

Now if there’s only one principle you remember about food on Lumia Island, let it be this:

“If you find any food ingredients while you move, bring them to a campfire and roast them!”

Whether it's garlic you get from a box or sweet potatoes you get while collecting potatoes (listen for the special sound!), you can bring them all to the campfires and see what gets made!

If you have any further interest in cooking or making new recipes, give it a shot. Campfires are meant to offer more variety on Lumia, so we hope that they become an additional way for you to strategize and try more complex recipes.

Lastly, there’s one more reason we decided to add campfires to the game. What do you think campfires mean to real survival?




We thought a scene like the one pictured above (with upcoming characters Debi and Marlene) would be a nice addition to the game. Team members sitting around a campfire will truly give the feeling of “survival”.

Of course, it’s not only team members who may swarm around the fire, but enemies as well! This gives another, wider area for battles to take place and offers more variety in games!

We tried out many different designs for the campfires. The first one we tried was an outdoor fire barrel-type campfire that was akin to something you’d find in real life.




While it was very realistic, it didn’t have the same charm as an open-air campfire so we changed it.

After a few different tweaks and changes, this is what the current campfires look like, but the design may change before official launch. For example, last week we put a pot over the campfire, but it made the fire effects come through the pot so it doesn’t look too great. We’ll be tweaking this as we work because making it more elaborate could have a negative effect on optimization. If possible, we’d love to change the campfire image depending on the type of food made (but that may be a pipe dream.)

We’ll also be giving additional effects (other than cooking) to these campfires, but these are in development. Resting next to a campfire could restore HP faster and could give a slight buff, but these features are still unconfirmed. Until now, we greatly considered how we could quickly make these fires since the game needed new functions. But honestly, campfires all started as something emotional we wanted to add before transforming into various implemented systems, including cooking.




Similarly, one element we really wanted to add was making the nights on Lumia even darker.

▼ Current Lumia nights



▼ Slightly darker Lumia nights (Temporary image)



There are times when it’s easy to be confused about whether it’s day or night, so we want to give each of them different vibes. We also want to reduce vision a bit to give the player a sort of claustrophobic, survival feeling. But don't worry—the range of vision is the same as before. Only lighting and shading have been changed!

Today we covered new campfires, food, and hidden ingredient systems.

If you want delicious meat to cook over the campfires, that means it’s time to hunt. Next Dev Journal will focus on changes to Wild Animals. Hope to see you then!

[h3]Thank you![/h3]

[h3]You can get WP from the Dev Journals on our web event page.[/h3]
[h3]Web Points(WP) are event points that can be obtained and used throughout the Season 9 web events[/h3]

2nd Dev Journal

Greetings Lumia Island survivors.

The focus of our first Dev Journal will be on the transformation of Lumia Island. Other games may feature a few different maps which keeps things fresh and fun. However, Eternal Return only has one map, and while the map and terrain are very important elements, they haven't been changed very much since we first released the game almost 2 1/2 years ago. During that time, we improved the background art a bit and added some objectives, but that was it. Now we've really focused on doing large-scale changes for official launch in July.

There are quite a few areas on Lumia where you move for a while without any action. There are many buildings currently on the island that you cannot enter, and by going around these areas, your walking distance becomes even further, which means some game variables will occur even less. So to make it like a real Battle Royale map, we wanted to expand the inside of the map a bit and open up the blocked spaces to make an even wider area of play.

We've added interiors to a lot of the previously unenterable buildings. These new additions were added to a total of 3 different areas. Routes between the areas have also been improved, and accessibility to previously unutilized areas has increased. In addition, we've also divided some areas into two to make the area of play even wider. There will now be a total of 20 areas to explore.



(Yellow areas: Additional areas that will be available to play)

New Areas to Explore:

Dock: Dock and Warehouse
Pond: Pond and Stream
Alley: Alley and Gas Station
Avenue: Police Station and Fire Station
Here's an example of the future change of terrain.

First, you can now enter the bookstore in Alley and the area to the right of the bookstore will offer more movement flow.









The area with the most significant change is Avenue within the line of Construction Site and Police Station. The new, expanded area is much wider and offers more varied routes, which almost makes it feel brand new! The inside area of Construction Site is very large, and now offers an important connection to Alley-Temple, which was once a long, oneway path.







If you look at the left side of the screen, we added a path to the back of Construction Site in the house where the two wolves spawn.

The inside of Police Station has been expanded and the parking lot to the back of the building now directly connects with the well of Temple.







If you zoom in to the back of Police Station,





buildings within Gas Station (previously Alley) and Fire Station (previously Avenue) now have interiors as well. The previous route between Alley and Avenue was very long, but by subdividing it into new areas and opening new buildings, play area has become much larger and the direct route between the areas has become much shorter.









Next is Dock. The Dock area has been split into Dock and Warehouse and lots of new terrain has been added.

In Warehouse, you can enter the lower building and the left of the bear's nest.









The Dock area has expanded near the ocean and a small building has been added. You can also now enter previously locked buildings. However, movement to the dock itself is still blocked.









The large factory in the center of the Factory area can now be entered. This will make play more diverse as you can now move up and down within the factory itself!







One house in Uptown is now open as well, and just like in Factory, you can now move up and down, which provides a connection to other paths.







So far, you've seen about half the map changes that we've made to Lumia Island. When we first started the engineering process, we were worried that opening up buildings would cause a huge headache. In some cases, expanding some areas by 15% didn't seem to make much of a difference.

However, internal play tests showed more than we could have ever imagined. Of course the areas grew wider, but the terrain became much more varied, which means modes of attack also became much more diverse compared to the previous. Depending on the character, previous tactics were more straightforward. Now you can use vision to get around, go for more surprise attacks and jump over walls, or even break through walls to sneak attack!

Today's Dev Journal focused on the more engineering side of map expansion. Of course we want to make the playable area even larger, but our main goal is to improve the play movement and flow. There have been many changes to the connecting routes between areas. These will be covered in more detail in “Lumia Island - 2nd Update”.

See you next Dev Journal!

Thank you!

Eternal Return Team

[h3]You can get WP from the Dev Journals on our web event page.[/h3]
[h3]Web Points(WP) are event points that can be obtained and used throughout the Season 9 web events[/h3]

PATCH NOTES 0.85.0 - May 24th, 2023

Servers will be temporarily offline for an estimated time of 4 hours on May 24th at 7 PM (PT) to update Patch 0.85.0.



Check out the details on our Website.

End of EP Token Purchases and ER PASS Deactivation

Hello Lumia Island survivors!

As we grow closer to Official Launch, we will be ending the purchase of EP Tokens and deactivating all ER PASS. Please read the following information carefully:

[h3]1. End of EP Token Purchases[/h3]
- Purchases for 1,000 EP Tokens, 200 EP Tokens, and Random EP Token Boxes will end on Wednesday, June 21st after maintenance (PT).

[h3]2. ER PASS Deactivation[/h3]
- ER PASS for Snow Blossom, Ghostly Presence, Beachside Splash, Neon Aftershock, and Slumber Party were kept open for the duration of Early Access. However, once Early Access ends, we will be deactivating all ER PASS and they can no longer be used.
- A new ER PASS will be available after Eternal Return 1.0 Official Launch on Wednesday, August 2nd after maintenance (PT).

  • Items included in current ER PASS will be available in different forms at a later date.
  • Rewards with met conditions that are still unclaimed at the time of deactivation will be batch sent to your in-game mailbox at a later date.
  • Period is subject to change according to internal circumstances.

Thank you!

Eleven's Diner! Event Winners

Hello Lumia Island survivors!

The lucky winners of the event prize have been posted to the event page.

Please click the link to see more information!

▶▶ Prize Winners of the Eleven's Diner! Event [Click Here]

Thank you!