Lost Skies News

[p]We're immensely grateful for the thousands of players who have played Lost Skies and for the amazing feedback you've provided during our Early Access journey so far. After a series of targeted hotfixes, we're excited to release a substantial update that directly addresses what you've told us. This patch is packed with dozens of bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements, focusing on stability and polish.

It also introduces some exciting new features from our public skymap that we hope our community will be thrilled to explore. There are still a few known issues that we are working on, please see details on these at the end of the patch notes.

[/p][h3]Key changes in this Early Access Update:[/h3][p][/p][p]Stability & Polish First: Our top priority is improving the core experience. This update squashes dozens of bugs and addresses key stability issues to make your journey smoother. We are committed to continuing this focus as we push towards our 1.0 launch.[/p][p]Full Key Rebinding: Customise your controls to climb, glide, and grapple your way through the skies.[/p][p]NEW Community-Crafted Islands: Explore a dozen new islands in the Outskirts region, all built by our awesome community in the F2P Lost Skies Island Creator. [/p][p]NEW Map Table (V1): The first version of our map table is here! Get a bird's-eye view of all islands to help you chart your course and make navigation easier than ever.[/p][p]NEW Comfort System: Ship layout now matters! Place furniture and decor to increase your crew's comfort, but keep them clear of discomfort sources like engines and other machinery. A happy crew will earn a powerful ‘rested’ bonus for their travels.[/p][p]NEW Quality of Life Improvements: We've added highly-requested features like the ability to name storage chests.[/p][p] [/p][h3]Patch Notes[/h3][p][/p]

• [p]\[NEW] Full Key Rebinding[/p]
• [p]\[NEW] Comfort System[/p]
• [p]\[NEW] Balance pass on combat[/p]
• [p]\[NEW] Map Table (V1)[/p]
• [p]\[NEW] Added a dozen new islands to the Outskirts map.[/p]
• [p]\[QOL] Added storage naming.[/p]
• [p]\[QOL] Added a potential fix for the ship disappearance - more info on the core tech work we're doing to fully prevent any progress loss HERE.[/p]
• [p]Reexported several islands created by the community with some tweaks from creators.[/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where the client couldn't see parts of a ship if the host built the ship on a different island than where the client is.[/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where items added to chest by host would be visible to clients upon joining a session.[/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where splitting stacks in ship storage/makeshift storage sometimes would make it lose resources.[/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where discovery popups would keep appearing on the screen.[/p]
• [p]Fixed several instances of chests not unlocking correctly after solving puzzles.[/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where players couldn't navigate through the crafting queue if there were 2 or more stations that have items in the queue.[/p]
• [p]Fixed multiple issues with object colliders across Outskirts region islands.[/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where schematic or weapon level would sometimes not display correctly.[/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where placing Founder DLC Schematics onto the hotbar would soft-lock the toolbar.[/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where item level would sometimes reset on dropped items.[/p]
• [p]Fixed several instances of SFX cutting out.[/p]
• [p]Fixed several issues with inventory management where items wouldn't move correctly.[/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where players could move items into their Stash tab from their inventory.[/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where Storage containers would in rare cases duplicate their content.[/p]
• [p]Addressed several potential causes of occasional game crashes.[/p]

[p][/p][h3]Known Issues:[/h3][p]
Crash on First Load[/p][p]We have had a report from our amazing Open Development community regarding a new crash on first load, after the starting splash screens. We’ve not been able to internally reproduce exactly, but a potential fix for such issues would be manually removing the game data files, and re-installing via Steam. This is opposed to uninstalling via Steam as in some circumstances not all of the game data is removed. [/p][p]Please note. This will not affect your game saves. 

After uninstalling, ensure the “Wild Skies” install directory is empty, especially the “LostSkies_Data” folder here:[/p][p]
Where this does not fix the issue, please reach out with “crash.dmp” and “Player.log” files from the “%localappdata%\\Temp\\Bossa Games\\LostSkies\\Crashes” if you have them.

[/p][p]Alternatively if there’s no log there, please grab your “Player.log” file from “%localappdata%low\\Bossa Games\\LostSkies”[/p][p]
Existing Crashes[/p][p]We’ve also had reports and limited internal reproduction of potentially 2 other crash bugs;

The first and most frequent is players returning to the main menu. We have some leads on the cause of this issue, but investigation is still ongoing.

The second is a rarer crash during gameplay which is much more elusive.

Controller Support[/p][p]Controller users are currently unable to access their stash or assign items to the toolbar.  Although gamepad and controller aren't officially supported right now, we have a hotfix coming in the next few days.
Full PlayStation controller support is WIP, not currently available.

Other/Misc[/p]

• [p]Players might see what other people are doing on other distant islands.[/p]
• [p]‘Save to menu’ can be sometimes unreliable when re-joining worlds, it's recommended to fully restart the client before rejoining the world.[/p]

[p] PLEASE SEE HERE FOR A FULL LIST OF KNOWN ISSUES[/p][p][/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][p][/p][p]
[/p]

[p][/p][p]Welcome to Skywatch #27[/p][p]
Greetings Awoken! The team has been hard at work since Early Access, processing all your amazing feedback and channeling that energy into the next phase of development. We’re making some big strides in expanding the world, deepening gameplay systems, and adding some terrifying new creatures to the skies. Let's go![/p][p][/p][p]Core Tech & UI Improvements 💻[/p][p]Vlad has been busy improving the technical foundations of the game. He’s been refining the UI, improving how the game understands what the player is looking at, and implementing better gamepad support. He’s also been making it much more intuitive to navigate the player inventory with a gamepad.[/p][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]Crafting & Player Systems 🛠️[/p][p]The crafting system has also received some love! We're exploring alternative views and new categories to make finding and crafting what you need a smoother experience.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Olly has been undertaking a massive review of food and its effects. All 80 food items have been analysed and given a unique buff or debuff. He's also been diving deep into game difficulty, using player feedback and in-game data to create a secret calculator tool! This formula helps us balance NPC stats and damage to fine-tune the time-to-kill and overall challenge of the game.[/p][p]
Performance Optimisation ⚙️[/p][p]Andy has been focused on performance, specifically tackling the memory strain caused when the environment loads. His work aims to make the experience of discovering and exploring islands much smoother for everyone.[/p][p][/p][p]Design Deep Dive 🗺️[/p][p]Luke and Tony have been collaborating on some significant improvements to core gameplay systems, giving players more diverse ways to play.[/p][p][/p][p]Randomised Ship Part Stats[/p][p]To mitigate the issue of lighter ships always having an advantage, stats on ship components are now randomised! - Huge apologies! Our design team are telling me this is not the reasoning behind the randomised ship part stats. Please see the actual reason below. - Adam

* UPDATED - Until now it didn't matter what propellers you used on your engines, or what barrels you used on your cannons - it was purely a cosmetic change. Going forward however these sub components now come with random stat rolls, allowing you to find the perfect combination to enhance and modify your ship parts. Sub components can even roll with unique stats that cannot be found on ship parts.

This introduces a new challenge of hunting for schematics and parts with the best possible stats. Different schematics will grant different stat ranges, so you'll have more options to create your perfect build.[/p][p]
[/p][p]The Comfort System[/p][p]Luke and Tony have also been working on the comfort system implementation. In short, the more effort you put into decorating your ship, the more rested you will become! Furnishings like plants and other nice items will grant a buff while you're on board. As you can see in the video, walls will also affect line of sight for these comfort zones.[/p][p]
[/p][p][/p][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]Ship Core Upgrades[/p][p]A small but mighty improvement: when you move your ship's core, any attached core upgrades will now move with it![/p][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]A Host of New Creatures 🐲[/p][p]Olly has been designing a menagerie of new creatures to populate the skies, particularly for the upcoming Region 4 biome.[/p][p][/p][p]Cave Bug Hulk: A monstrous scorpion-like evolution of the Cave Bug.[/p][p][/p][p]Atterbane & Harpie: These new flying beasts hunt in family groups of adults and juveniles. Harpies are blind but have incredibly sensitive hearing; they will circle overhead and dive at any sound you make.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]A core theme for Region 4's creatures is a new poison mechanic. The Atterbane, for example, will leave a lingering cloud of poison gas when it dies. This was such a great idea that we're applying it as a theme to all mobs in Region 4![/p][p][/p][p]AI in Action 🧠[/p][p]Danny has been bringing these new creatures to life, programming the AI that will have you watching your back in Region 4. Check out how cool these new mobs look, especially with the poison-on-death effect![/p][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]Art Showcase 🎨[/p][p]The art team has been creating some stunning new assets for the 1.0 release.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Lara has designed a range of beautiful new player masks and ship parts.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Meanwhile, Klaudia has been working on some incredible new boss-tier enemies: the Arbiters, Heralds, and the truly intimidating Harbinger. As you can see below, these formidable foes will have segments that break off as you deal damage![/p][p]
[/p][p][/p][p]Skytravel & World Building ☁️[/p][p]As we build out Region 4, Andy has been working on the awe-inspiring weather wall that separates the different regions of the world. Just look at those lightning flashes![/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]This all comes together on the new world map, which is being updated to accommodate Region 4. Speaking of new regions, keep an eye out for more island creator contests in the community soon![/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]It's a Wrap![/p][p]Phew, that was a lot! We’re incredibly excited about the direction these new features are taking the game, adding more depth, challenge, and variety to your adventures. Thank you for your continued support and feedback![/p][p][/p][h2]>>>Join the Lost Skies Discord<<<[/h2][p][/p][p]See you in the skies![/p][p]
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[p]

Greetings Awoken

It's been a minute since our last update, and we wanted to say thanks for hanging in there with us. We've been deep in the workshop, so to speak, and we’re excited to finally come up for air and show you all the things we've been building for Early Access.

Right now there is a huge emphasis on bug fixing and removing as many issues hindering the experience on the tech side as possible. We are eternally grateful for all the amazing feedback, reviews and bug reports. This information is super important at this stage as it helps us to make the game as stable and problem-free as possible ahead of full launch.

Feature-wise there is the much-anticipated map table, which was part of our roadmap. V1 of this will be the lightweight version, this won't track progression on each island yet, but will display all islands in the area to make navigation much easier!

Additionally, we've introduced a new comfort system. Some items boost comfort (e.g., decorations, furniture), while others have a discomfort value if close-by (e.g., engines). This means you'll need to think about separating different areas of your ship to maximize your crew's well-being and earn a "rested" bonus!

We are adding some quality of life improvements including full implementation of key rebindings, renaming storage and an option to disable screenshake.

The team has also been working on another big balance pass on health and damage, to improve combat experience in more difficult areas.[/p][p]
We have been refactoring parts of storage/inventory, specifically to fix issues with moving items or losing them when splitting stacks, upgrading schematics & reloading the game.[/p][p]
Alongside these improvements there are a few other highlights which we will cover in our latest Skywatch later this week. As well as all the work we are doing towards full launch.

[/p][h3]The Elephant in the room - Lost Progress [/h3][p][/p][p]The biggest thing our tech team is solving is definitely the potential loss of progress that affects some players, this has been a really tough egg to crack, with many variables at play. Of course we are working to resolve this completely before launch, but we'd like to go into a bit more detail so you can understand what is involved.[/p][p][/p][p]As the problem is such a complex challenge, it’s best to hear this info from the Developer’s POV. Here are Tom’s Dev notes on the issue.[/p][p]
Lost Skies has a few problem areas that need to be addressed in order to become robust at scale (for larger worlds / entity counts / higher player numbers).

These are the issues that present some form of instability or excessive network traffic :[/p]

• [p]All players are always checked out for everyone playing. This means everything players are up to no matter where they are on the map, is synchronised over the network. This creates excessive state sync for players that could be on other islands so the data is not relevant to you.[/p]
• [p]Ships have a similar issue, they are always checked out for everyone, but one reason for that is their initial state is quite large so accepting a minor spike in network traffic once per ship spawn was preferred. However, they are expensive to have around on the CPU as they are made of hundreds of objects, especially when players start experimenting with multiple ships.[/p]
• [p]World Save data: This is a big one. There have been reports of data loss, corruption and worlds ending up in a volatile state when reloading from saves. As it stands, saving of all world data is handled by the host of the session, which makes sense. But save data for individual entities is grouped per island. So when a save event is raised, clients on islands the host is not on have to send huge amounts of data back to the host including every entity on the island, even if 90% of it has not changed.[/p]
• [p]Island-based checkouts: All network entities on an island are permanently checked out when you are on that island. We have the concept of an 'island authority' client. That is the person who is in charge of all the entities spawned by the island. Some areas do utilise distributed authority like trees, certain puzzle elements, etc, but AI for example, is all controlled by the client chosen as that island's authority. The main reason for this is data consistency, as all buildables, AI, critters, loot etc, is part of the island data that is saved, it all needs to be maintained by a single owner that then sends back the data to the host (or just saves locally if they are host). We suspect these large multiple packet sends of save data from multiple people all coming back to the host can be problematic, especially on an exit game event. As clients may disconnect before the save data has been sent completely due to it taking multiple frames to send everything.[/p]
• [p]There's some other miscellaneous things, like large message service sending ship data to every player regardless if they already have the ship checked out, so by the time the 6th player has joined, the ship data is getting sent from the host to 6 players, even though only 1 needs it this becomes pretty detrimental, imagine a 6th player joining a world that has 10 ships, that would be a long time without state sync while the commands are being sent/received.[/p]

[p]
[/p][p]The solution for all of these has taken a while because they all touch on low-level systems that affect each other. You can't make AI selectively despawned or distributed authority on the island without first changing how the island data is saved for example.[/p][p]The work is ongoing but I can share with you the work in progress and the plan for 1.0[/p][p]
Players now have a moving live query so they can inform the replication server which objects it cares about that it does not have authority over. (Such as other players) and their state will not be sent over the network if they are outside the query. [/p][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p][/p]

• [p]The more entities that get moved over to a distributed freeform model (rather than all things attached to an island having authority by a single client), the more benefit from this live query change. AI is largely working, but ships have the issue of large data within their save data so having them despawn and respawn regularly would use more bandwidth than we want, so we are actively working on optimizing ship data sizes at the moment to make this feasible (certain things like Heralds and sky whales will stay as global entities so you can see them from afar and are part of the skyscape. Bandwidth optimization will happen where it can at large distances)[/p]
• [p]I am currently moving all of our save-data from our large per-island data storage to a KVP database where each entity is its own entry. The idea of this is that all entities can be stored for every island as individual database entries, we can easily have 200,000 entities or more in a single world without any data issue and the best part is we don't need to update everything as the world save is not this gigantic blob of data. We can just update small batches of entities as we need.[/p]
• [p]The next video shows a simulation of a 50 km-sized world split into 750-meter cells and entities are loaded straight from the database, and saved when the cells are unpopulated by players. Entities are only simulated when they are in a populated cell, else authority is dropped and their state is written to the database on the fly.[/p]

[p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]
Viewing and debugging world data is now much simpler thanks to tools like LiteDB Explorer: [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]For 1.0 the plan is for all world-data to be moved to a database model, and generalised into these tables :[/p]

• [p]World meta-data[/p]
• [p]Generic Entity Data (ore spawners, ai, death loot, buildables, critters, etc now no longer linked to an 'island')[/p]
• [p]Ships[/p]
• [p]Shipwrecks[/p]
• [p]Island-specific data (1 entry per island : Loot seed, removed trees, puzzles state, etc)[/p]
• [p]Boss Data[/p]

[p]
Once this is handled, the host will be responsible for all spawning based on cell queries into the database from all remote players, these will then be authority switched to the player that requested them. when they drop into unpopulated they will be abandoned, then at a regular interval, the host will loop over the abandoned entities and save their state to the database. This fixes many of the issues with players leaving before sending the save data they are authoritative over, it will also be more incremental and because of the database structure, any corruption in a single entity will not destroy the whole world.[/p][p]Further more, I also plan to utilise the state sync within the replication server (rather than relying on remote players to send data of everything on an island back to the host when they exit the game or leave the island), as the replication server is aware of entities and the state it can use that to augment the saving and reduce bandwidth further. This will be applicable for 90% of entities, but a few have non state synced data that will still need to be sent (Inventories of storage and ship data for 2 examples) we either have to find a way to fit the data into state sync for these things, or still keep large messages for those. - Tom

Thanks for reading. Expect a new Skywatch later this week.

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[p]The Island Creator for Lost Skies now allows you to be more inventive than ever before! Bossa Games has delivered an update for the free creation tool that opens up all kinds of possibilities. [/p][p][/p][p]Players will be able to create new content for both regions, including the newly added Midlands biome, and can upload it to Steam Workshop for all players to explore. For players who haven't yet joined the Lost Skies fun - The Island Creator is a great way to get a feel for the grapple hook traversal movement for free! [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Shape Your Island to Your Liking:[/p][p] [/p]

• [p]Explore A New Biome: The Midlands region brings with it a beautiful autumnal palette with over 200 new assets that include ruins and temples with mysterious inscriptions to use on your island.[/p]
• [p]Design New Challenges: A new puzzle type comes to the game so you can devise even more intricate quests for your island visitors.[/p]
• [p]Improvements All Around: The Lost Skies Island Creator has been upgraded to Unity 6, bringing better overall performance and stability.[/p]
• [p]Never Lose Progress: The new auto-save feature activates every 15 minutes. You’ll never have to worry about being so locked in that you forget to save your island.[/p]

[p][/p][p]
[dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][p][/p][p]The community-made islands are what makes the world of Lost Skies truly unique. With over 500+ beautiful islands designed by players already available via Steam Workshop, there is plenty there to inspire your own creations or explore to your heart’s content. Level design, puzzles, player challenges, or even little narrative drops are entirely in the hands of the community creators. [/p][p][/p][p]After becoming one of Steam’s Top 25 best-selling games in April upon its Early Access launch, the Lost Skies community is thriving in Discord where Bossa is in regular communication with their fans and showcases user-created islands every week on their social media. In Lost Skies, you never know where your next adventure will take you as the PvE survival elements test your mettle. You’ll need to be an explorer, architect, and warrior all wrapped into one if you plan to conquer the breathtaking world of Lost Skies.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][carousel][/carousel][p][/p][p][/p][p]Eager island adventurers can chart their course by wishlisting and purchasing Lost Skies on Steam in Early Access and can dive into the Island Creator now. For more information about Lost Skies, join the official Discord or visit the official website. Follow Lost Skies on X, BlueSky, Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit. [/p]

Greetings Awoken! We've been hard at work addressing your feedback, and we're pleased to announce the release of Hotfix #4.

This update brings another round of important fixes and some exciting new additions. Take a look at what we've packed into this release:

Release Notes for Hotfix #4

• Fixed several instances where joining the old world would result in a black screen.
  Note: After investigation, we discovered this occurred when players took damage from AI or other objects while loading in, causing them to die during the loading screen. Players can no longer take damage until loading is complete.
• Added 2 new weapons and 20+ ship decorations to discover in the Outskirts region.
  
• Design pass on all chest loot drops, which should result in more consistent rewards and a more even spread of ship parts, components, and resources.
  
• Optimisation pass on AI bindings - potential performance boost for when there's a lot of AI enemies around.
  
• Another round of audio optimisation.
  
• Fixed several instances where the world wouldn't save correctly, resulting in progress loss.
  Note: If issues occur when saving the world, the save data will now roll back to the last "safe" state automatically. This issue is quite sporadic. If the problem arises we would love to hear more about it. Please report the issue on Discord.
• Fixed an issue where some schematics didn't level up correctly.
  
• Fixed an issue where shotguns didn't level up correctly.
  

For a list of other known issues, please CLICK HERE

A Big Thank You! - We're continually amazed by your dedication and the invaluable feedback you provide. It's instrumental in shaping Lost Skies, and we truly appreciate every report and suggestion. Keep them coming – your voices are being heard!

A quick reminder on what's coming to Lost Skies Early Access!



➡️ Join the Discord for full patch discussion and feedback