Icarus News

Need to craft some Icarus tree sap but don't know how? There's quite a lot of stuff on the Icarus tech tree, and it can be difficult to tell exactly what every item does. So when you see a recipe that includes tree sap, it's not entirely clear how to find or make the sticky stuff. Tree sap is an ingredient for crafting epoxy, which is important for upper-tier crafting recipes like a machining bench—the item you use to make guns, armor, and steel tools. Yep, you need tree blood in order to make military equipment. But where do you find it?..
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Survival game Icarus launched on Friday and was gobbled up by survival fans, quickly climbing the Steam charts and drawing over 50,000 concurrent players on Sunday. It wasn't all smooth sailing, though: Icarus currently has a 'Mixed' review score on Steam, and many of the complaints revolve around performance issues, optimization problems, crashes, and bugs...
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For us this has been an amazing and full-on launch weekend - full of both highs and lows.

We had over 50,000 concurrent players on Sunday, up there alongside other popular Steam games like Dead by Daylight, Terraria and ARK.

However, many people have let us know in the reviews that the game just didn’t work well enough for them to enjoy it - and that’s not good enough for us. If people couldn’t connect or run the game with acceptable performance to even try the game out, then we need to remedy that.

[h2]Targeting daily updates[/h2]
Through launch weekend we produced three hotfixes immediately to address some of the key bugs that had presented with the launch. Through our first week we will be continuing this process and aiming for daily updates.

These updates can disrupt your time playing the game but they are critical for us to quickly improve the game for you. Due to the high intensity of this update cadence, we will be focusing these updates on performance optimizations, connectivity and mission fixes.



[h2]New Mission Content[/h2]

We will release new missions for this weekend for players who have already worked their way through Icarus. You’ve given us vital feedback about the existing missions and we’ll apply this to the new mission challenges when you return.

With all the community engagement around the launch, we’ve had a huge amount of fan suggestions for new content and items. We’ll be slowly adding these in some of our updates as they are completed and tested. If you haven’t already, join the Discord or submit requests to Feature Upvote to get your requests in.

[h2]Service Outages[/h2]

Through the beta weekends we were able to adjust our central services and handle the load. The games launch presented the first time we had so many people playing the game with all the content of the game included. Overall, the service ran very smoothly. We had two outages lasting forty and sixty minutes respectively. In both instances, we were in live communication with the community and this will continue to be our standard going forward.

You can read the candid response of our Chief Executive handling the most recent outage at 3am in his local time on the Steam Forums. We are exceptionally grateful for how understanding you all were during this time.

[h2]Connectivity and Performance[/h2]

While some users were able to play the game just fine, we were disappointed with the performance problems that affected a portion of our customers. This left the forums in a very weird state. Customers who were not experiencing severe issues were bemused that others couldn’t play.



We quickly focused on putting as much resource as we could over the weekend to solve these issues immediately - and we apologize unreservedly to those who couldn’t enjoy the launch weekend. Our team is working hard, based on the bug feedback you supply, to get everyone in and prospecting on ICARUS.

Thanks, Prospectors
- Dean Hall, Gamerunner

[h2]Long Update Validation Times[/h2]
Regrettably, some users experience long periods of "validation" after Steam has downloaded even a small update. This is not to do with the download size but is due to how the Unreal Engine data is packaged and how Steam’s updates are distributed. We're talking with Steam and Epic about ways to improve this. We will limit our updates to important fixes and not do them too regularly, although in our launch week we plan to do them almost daily.

[h2]Verify your Updated Files to prevent crashes[/h2]
After you update the game, use the "Verify Game Files" option to check your game files. A number of players are reporting Steam did not correctly apply the updates, causing their game to crash. Please note we have no control over how Steam applies updates. We have reached out to Valve about the issue.

Step 1:

Right Click on ICARUS in your library



Step 2:

Select Local Files and Verify Game Files, as below.



See this thread for info:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1149460/discussions/0/3195863700537287569/

We need to push another update to help those players who are having issues seeing their friends game in the "Join Prospect" screen, as well as those wanting to play in offline while using steam in offline mode.

About the game Updates
Regrettably, some users experience long periods of "validation" after steam has downloaded an update for ICARUS. This is due to how the game engine data is packaged, and steams updates are distributed. While the download can be quite small, the whole game needs to be validated to apply the change.

We are trying to keep the updates to big pushes, and not do them too often, but when we have found serious bugs we want to get people up and running the game as fast as possible. Unfortunately this can result in some disruption - so we will do our best to only do updates as often as we absolutely need to.

Some of our Known Issues (not exhaustive)

• Progress in Offline mode is not serializing correctly, we are working to fix this ASAP.
  
• Running the game in Administrator mode may cause it to not connect correctly.
  
• Some users running the game in other languages may only be able to run the game properly with their OS language set to English, we are working to fix this as soon as possible.
  

Version 1.0.11.87997

• Fixed Join Session screen was often blank, even when your friends were actually in a Icarus game session that you could join
  
• Expanded the error reporting for failure in offline mode, to provide a better capture of the error, and description of the problem to the player.
  
• Fixed unable to play in Offline when steam is in Offline Mode.