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BONELAB News

Anniversary Post

We’ve been 100% focused on Marrow/Bonelab development, prioritizing it over PR, emails, and a fifth SLZ title, but since today is the one year anniversary it made sense to take an hour to make a post.

Thank you for your enthusiasm for Bonelab, SLZ, and VR in general. Anticipating a content drought, one of our major goals with Bonelab was to make a title that would keep you engaged as we work towards making it possible for Marrow content/titles to be made more efficiently. We’re happy to announce that while playtime, refunds, and active users were great for Boneworks, after one year Bonelab currently has 3x the median playtime, 1/3rd the refunds, and 10x the daily active users of Boneworks. The team is motivated by the overwhelming response, but our VR work is still just getting started.

Our goal is still to get the next update for Bonelab out as a beta this year. We’ll talk about it more in the upcoming months, but here are a few bullets:
  • This update is very different from what most would expect, but we thought and think it is best for the long term.
  • The Marrow SDK will receive level authoring focused features.
  • The focus is on the core tech, optimization, polish, and the Marrow SDK with a few exceptions. Rather than rapid feature release, VR needs a more stable physical foundation for long term growth.
  • The content team has been rebuilding the existing content invisibly with new systems as they come online.
  • Our goal (while it won’t be fully realized for many years and many games) is that the Marrow SDK is the same externally and internally.
  • Tons of work has gone into a long term goal of unifying the player and the humanoid NPC’s, still years from completion, but it’s worth pursuing.
  • The player can now use a full body animation as input, is more physically complex than ever, and is 38% lighter on a Quest 2 CPU than Patch 3.
  • The future of VR gaming is bright, but incredibly labor intensive and expensive.


Attached is a WIP clip of a torso track being integrated with locomotion and crouch from 5 months ago (not IOBT).



As always, only purchase Bonelab as it currently is and not based on what it may be.

Back to work,
Brandon and the entire SLZ team

Steam Awards 2022

Bonelab has been nominated for VR Game of the Year 2022!

Thank you to everyone in the community for the nomination, now is the time to vote!

See you in the void.

PATCH #2

[h2]Overview[/h2]
We’re excited to release our second patch for BONELAB! Since launch the team has primarily been focused on listening to collective feedback to best prioritize quality of life fixes and bugs, but we’ve found some time for some additional secrets and items as well.

Interaction received a tune pass and some bug fixes. Near field tracking and occluded controllers are now handled better resulting in better gun handling and body slot interaction. Shouldering has been improved and will continue to be improved in the future. The player is perpetually a work in progress: Boneworks was year 3, Bonelab is currently in year 6, we have many years to go. Thank you for participating in the journey, the ceiling for VR interaction is so high.

We re-tuned Index grip interactions to take better advantage of grip force for holding objects.

Saving has been improved. The Hub will now persist your inventory from the last campaign level you’ve completed. This will improve the experience of replaying the campaign after you’ve already beat the game.

Keycards are now functional. Each ID badge can unlock a hidden developer room, each with at least one new unlockable object. We hope you enjoy finding what secrets they reveal!


We’ve added new collectable spawnable items, including a M1 Garand with a fixed bayonet. Enjoy using these props to get creative in sandboxes!


The majority of levels have received some tweaks including encounter adjustments, lighting, bug fixing, optimizations and easter eggs. Sprint Bridge received a large rework adding enemy encounters including a helicopter to avoid.


[h3]Please take the time to rate and review or update current reviews, your feedback is read by the team and is very helpful![/h3]


[h3]Patch Notes - PATCH 2[/h3]
  • ADDED: Keycard functionality added
  • ADDED: [REDACTED]s added to [REDACTED]s
  • ADDED: 1 Unlockable Avatar
  • ADDED: 2 Unlockable Guns
  • ADDED: 2 Unlockable Melee weapons
  • ADDED: 30+ Unlockable Props
  • FIXED: NPC Skeleton is now unlockable
  • FIXED: HOME - Fixed objects disappearing and potentially breaking the rig during taxi ride
  • FIXED: HUB - Fixed crane spawning incorrectly
  • FIXED: Magazines can no longer be inserted from above the gun.
  • ADJUSTED: Shouldering plane moved back by 6cm. Long term the plan is to instead gain this additional reach by extending the neck to reduce held objects penetrating the torso, but this is a good short term improvement.
  • ADJUSTED: Non-stocked guns are now more resilient to being affected by locomotion.
  • ADJUSTED: Improved handling of controller tracking when out of camera’s view. Now the controller will guess better when only tracked with the IMU.
  • ADJUSTED: Body remapping tuning improved. Hands should no longer move when open/closed when not in proximity of each other.
  • ADJUSTED: Save system updated so that hub inventory updates after every level
  • ADJUSTED: SPRINT BRIDGE 04 - Reworked level and added encounters
  • ADJUSTED: NPC Ford visual tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: Memory optimization tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: Improve interaction on various props
  • ADJUSTED: Descent - Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: Hub - Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: LongRun- Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: MineDive- Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: StreetPuncher- Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: MoonBase- Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: Pillar - Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: Big Anomaly- Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: Ascent - Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: Big Bone Bowling - Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: Container Yard- Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: District Parkour / Tac Trial - Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: Drop Pit - Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: Dungeon Warrior - Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: Halfway Park - Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: Mirror - Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: Museum Basement - Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: RoofTops - Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: Tuscany - Level tweaks
  • ADJUSTED: PCVR- Added variable rate shading (VRS). Dramatically improves rendering performance. Only supported on Turing or later NVIDIA GPUs (GTX 1630 and above).
  • ADJUSTED: PCVR- Added radial density mask as a fallback for cards that do not support VRS. Works similarly to VRS, but less effective.
  • ADJUSTED: STEAM - Added Reverb G2 Mixed Reality interaction profile
  • ADJUSTED: STEAM - Index controller gripping action improved by factoring in grip force. (Improved gripping without trigger)
  • ADJUSTED: STEAM - Improved defaults for unsupported hardware. (More devices fall back to Quest bindings when unknown)
  • ADJUSTED: STEAM - Improved resilience to 3rd party hand tracking interference.

Bonelab review




Half-Life Alyx never truly wowed me back in 2020, because Boneworks already had its hooks in me. While clearly lower budget and wobbly in places, I fell in love with its simulationist approach to VR. Physics-driven avatars bouncing around on 3D legs, everything with weight and heft and no invisible walls to stop me from clambering out into the sparsely-textured corners of the simulation. At times it was the kind of VR magic I dreamed of as a kid...
Read more.

Patch #1

BUG - Fix to stop the ammo pouch and gun fighting over the magazine
BUG - Fixed issue with volumetrics getting garbage data and becoming randomly colored
ADJUST - Bonelab version added to log
ADJUST - Device ID updates when using different controllers
ADJUST - Devtools spawnable if you have them unlocked, no longer requires developer mode
ADJUST - Level selection available through progression
ADJUST - 1911 made default unlock
ADJUST - Added gacha poster instructions
ADJUST - Nimbus gun disables leaderboards

BUG - HUB - Fix for potential progression skip
BUG - HUB - Fixes for potentially stalled progression when going from Hub to Ascent
BUG - MINE DIVE - Various Triggers fixed
BUG - MONOGON MOTORWAY - Trigger tutorial fixed
BUG - LONGRUN - Dynamic railing colliders fixed
BUG - BIG ANOMALY - Invulnerable health fix
BUG - TUSCANY - Fixed complete button

ADJUST - HUB - Crane instruction UI added
ADJUST - HUB - Crane reset button and button labels added
ADJUST - HUB - Various UX and affordances tweeks
ADJUST - HUB - Improved funicular sound effects
ADJUST - HUB - Map is more direct, Lists core keys, and tells player what they should do.
ADJUST - MOON - Avatar Gacha capsule has beacon
ADJUST - MOON - Arrow pointing in gacha direction
ADJUST - MOON - Added jump pads
ADJUST - PILLAR - Checkpoint at middle of level added
ADJUST - PILLAR - More weapons added
ADJUST - PILLAR - Grip added to elevator platform top surface
ADJUST - PILLAR - Boids can no longer forcibly change your avatar
ADJUST - PILLAR - Added visual damage to the boid ball
ADJUST - PILLAR - Reworked upper arena area
ADJUST - STREET PUNCHER - Jukebox headphone made dynamic
ADJUST - DUNGEON WARRIOR - Closed gap in environment
ADJUST - ROOFTOPS - Various small UX improvements
ADJUST - DISTRICT - Zones adjusted to fix enemy pop-in
ADJUST - DISTRICT - Some material and lighting changes