Last Oasis News

[h3]Greetings, Nomads![/h3]

It has been some time since we last gave an update, but today, we are thrilled to unveil the release of our long-awaited Modkit! This opens up a world of possibilities, allowing for complete customization within Last Oasis. With access to these powerful tools, players will have the ability to craft experiences tailored to their wildest imaginations. From tweaking all game mechanics to creating entirely new items, weapons and creatures, the Modkit empowers you to shape the game how you want it.



Key Features of the Modkit:

• Modding capabilities that enable extensive customization.
  
• Tools and resources for crafting unique gameplay experiences.
  
• Play in editor to test new features locally.
  
• Documentation and support channels to assist players with any troubleshooting.
  

[h3]We invite players to post their mods on the Steam Workshop page, where fellow Nomads can share and modify everything they’ve been working on.[/h3]




In order to access the modkit, you need to visit the Last Oasis Modkit storefront on the Epic Games Store: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/last-oasis-modkit

To ensure stability and compatibility prior to merging everything into the main branch, we’re releasing the client/server with Mod support on a separate branch. Playing on or hosting a modded server requires you to be on the “SDKTest” branch.

Right click on the Last Oasis application in your Steam library and select properties > Betas



For any help or assistance, please visit the Last Oasis Discord where we have set up new channels for ModKit assistance and mod development, as well as documentation.

Modkit documentation can also be found on our Discord: https://discord.gg/lastoasis


Additionally, the Modkit branch will have a few sneak peeks from Season 6.

• Added the ability to merge rarity resources
  
• Rigs not don’t limit the location of structures, only the type and number.
  
• Reduced water consumption
  
• Added walker fleet cap
  Each walker counts a certain number of points and each clan has a cumulative total allowed on map at any given time.
  
• Add walker crew limit
  Each walker has a maximum number of crew members and will stop moving once exceeded. Automatons count towards this limit.
  
• Grapple changed to prevent use for 3 seconds after being hit, rather than in combat stance
  

We are extremely grateful to the community for sticking with us and we hope these new tools and changes will lead to a brighter horizon for Last Oasis.





In addition to the release of the ModKit, we’ve commenced work (and some closed testing) on Season 6. While it's still early to talk about too many specifics, we want to get the philosophy guiding Season 6 out there and share a few of our thoughts.

As we started to talk about what Season 6 should be, we knew we needed to consider the role that official servers would play now that the community has its hands on the ModKit. We believe the official servers have to provide a unique experience that cannot be replicated on a private server and we believe that role is emergent PVP in a large scale world.

This focus brings with it a certain set of assumptions about things like pacing, gameplay loops, persistence, safety mechanics, etc. For example, starting with Season 6, we will start regular periodic wipes, and balance the game around that duration, which is currently planned to be two months. We are also carefully considering all of the safety mechanics that have been put into Last Oasis throughout the seasons, such as stone building, removal of the lobby, and how to balance competition between clan sizes, just to name a few.

We are excited to share many more details with you as the development of Season 6 unfolds. Our goal is to do extensive public beta testing at each step along the way, so stay tuned for more information. To apply for participation in closed and open testing, be sure to join the Last Oasis Discord.

Survival MMO Last Oasis has had a bumpy ride in early access. Launched in 2020, the nomadic MMO where players construct massive walking bases to travel across a dying planet instantly became a Steam top seller—but it had so many server problems its developer, Donkey Crew, had to take it offline for a week...
Read more.

Greetings Nomads,

We want to give you an update on the project status and what you can expect coming on the horizon.
Our main priority in Last Oasis development right now is adding full modding support that will allow creators to modify all existing features and maps, adding new content as well as completely new features using Unreal Engine Blueprint scripting. We believe that this is a necessary step to unleash the full potential of LO and allow every nomad to find or create the experience they are looking for in our game.

Related to the news above, we are happy to announce that the author of “LO Classic” mod BryanTheHacker has joined our team. With his experience in modding Last Oasis you can be sure that our tools will provide all the freedom that modders will need to implement their ideas.

As for the status of official servers - active development and preparation for Season 6 will continue with the release of modding tools. We will share more information and details as it gets closer, but we can promise to reconsider features from Season 5 that didn’t work out as well as expected and also to implement multiple ideas invented by our community (some of which have or will be tested on modded servers).

Best wishes and stay hydrated,
LO Dev team

A little later than we planned, due to some final touches that we wanted to do in order to bring this update to a properly final state and try to avoid multiple hotfixes, learning from the previous experience with the packing update. You can consider this few days delay as a better reassurance that we won't need them (or, hopefully, not that many, at least).

Get ready to enter the mysterious city of the forgotten civilization!



The Ancient City is an oasis that contains the decaying remains of an ancient civilization. Little is known about who or what lived here, or, even, how long ago, but clues litter the landscape for Nomads to find. It is said that intrepid explorers, brave enough to explore the Ancient City, stand to find untold riches, while the Flotillan Historic Society will gladly accept new members, who help them research the ancient technology with a member-only benefit of an access to their Schematics Store at each Trading Station.

That is, if they can survive the Rupu claiming the ruins as their own. The Ancient Cities around the globe became a haven for Rupu, where they build various fortification to protect their Matrarchs. The most ferocious and powerful of their warriors reside in the ruins and the fortifications against the invading Nomads will be no easy feat to overcome on the road to riches and glory.



Now, backing off from the lore towards the technical side of this update.

The map received some pretty significant changes, as you might've guessed. Both literally - with fortified walls, now covering entrances to the city and a giant palace, featuring the most brutal melee-only PvE experience we've introduced to date, and from a conceptual standpoint - with the map's place within the progression being more defined and permanent, where going to the Ancient City will always be a rewarding experience.

All other maps in Last Oasis are built on a procedural spawning system, where Rupu camps don’t spawn entirely randomly, but they have a set of rules and pre-defined locations that can result in a significant seeming randomness. However, for the Ancient City, we wanted to go in a different direction. As an event map that introduces a whole new system of progression called "Relic Hunter", we iterated and tested various approaches, and realized that it would be much more interesting to have a more intentional and thoughtful design, rather than leave it all up to procedural spawners. In the end, it ended up providing quite a bit more of a deliberate gameplay, somewhat similar to how dungeons are played in other MMO games.

In addition, with the introduction of the newly designed Rupu structures that attempt to prevent incursions by Walkers, you will likely have to travel on foot quite a bit more, including the already teased melee-only camps and PvE experiences.



In the Ancient City, you will be able to find Relics and Forebear Coins, which are ancient coins that are, technically, also relics of the same civilization, but in a much higher abundance. These relics can be turned into the Trade Station for Relic Hunter Reputation, which is its own new progression system.

As you gain more Reputation, you’ll start receiving new Ranks within the Flotillan HIstoric Society, unlocking access to progressively higher rewards offered by them, as a token of gratitude for your efforts. The first mechanic that we're introducing with it is a Society Schematics Store, which allows you to buy schematics of any tier and rarity for Forebear Coins, depending on your Rank.

All of this can be found and explained in the Stats Menu (P) by scrolling to the Relic Hunter page, which will show your current Ranking within the society, your reputation, current bonuses, and what the next rank will unlock. Both donating Relics for Reputation and buying Schematics for Forebear Coins can be done at any Trading Station and the list of Schematics is unique for each member, refreshing the list every time, which can be found in the store itself.

Currently, Ranking up will increase the tiers of Schematics that can be purchased, their maximum possible rarity, the number of schematics offered on each level, and how quickly the offers refresh. Also, some lucky Hunters might find unique cosmetic Schematics offered only by the Historic Society.

But don't be so hasty to donate all of the Relics you find on your adventuring. The store only accepts ancient Forebear Coins as currency, which you'll need to also find at the Ancient Cities. Luckily, some black market merchants will gladly trade you those coins if instead of donating your Relics to the Historic Society, you sell them to those shady Nomads.



We buffed all the grapples, as we've mentioned we'll do for quite a while now. Longer range, more balanced reeling speeds, lower torque consumption, and other tweaks have been applied to every grappling hook type.

A bunch of changes to quests were also included. We've added some quests to kill various creatures and updated existing ones with better balance and clarity. For example, the quest for bringing items, rather than a delivery for specific armors and weapons, the quest will now request an “Armor Shipment” or “Weapon Shipment” which is crafted at a new station available within the Simple Constructions from a collection of equipment pieces.

We've also rebalanced some loot drops to work better with the addition of the new map, improved Rupu behaviors across the board and added some new ones that made sense to use outside of AC as well, and also a ton of small tweaks like removing the rated all-time-most-hated walker wing from the general items merchant, optimized performance where we could, and so on. And, as customary, a few packing fixes. Now, definitely last ones.

As we've been talking about multiple updates, such as the PvP Update, Quality of Life Update, and hinting at more, what you'll see this patch is an effort regarding, primarily, the addition of the Ancient City map and all the related features, while everything else that we've been working on in parallel like the King of the Hill feature and so on, will be coming separately. How we've already explained many times, a lot of those features only make sense when released together and won't have the desired effect or could even make things worse if added one by one, so we hope you'll be having fun with the new experiences for quite some time, while we'll have time to work on the massive overhaul of PvP and other planned changes.

We won't be including the bulletpoint changelog this time, as hundreds of changes can be summarized as "Added Ancient City" and many more are still in the works as explained above, so fishing for specific small tweaks on top of it that got in won't make much sense when everything critical was already explained above. Everything that's important has been described in great detail in this post already and what hasn't been, would be a great way to ruin your first experience on the new map, so try it and see for yourself!



We’re still hard at work developing the things we’ve talked about and will be trying to release them as soon as we can. We're expecting to monitor how this new update is working and fix any issues if they appear, as well as release smaller updates when it makes sense, as we've done before. However, taking into account the size of the planned updates (we're talking overhauling literally the entire PvP experience here and more), and considering the upcoming Holiday season (with the international team being away at very different times in the upcoming months), we expect that it’s very unlikely that we’ll be able to deliver those full scale overhauls at least within a month. As mentioned, some parts might come out as separate smaller updates, but not the gigantic overarching overhauls.

Meanwhile, we hope you enjoy the new update, the completely changed map, the new progression system, and much more that we've got up our sleeve in this patch (and I'm sure you'll find at least a few surprises we haven't talked about). We'll try to keep you updated and announce any concrete info on what's coming next whenever we have it. We're also discussing some new ideas that we'll be sure to put to a poll as we've got used to doing by now if they get some traction on our side first.

Don't get lost in the ruins and happy hunting!

Early next week, we will introduce the Ancient City back into the game. It will be an event map that spawns in both PvP and PvE form, with only rarity available on the PvP version. Next week with the release we’ll have a full post that lays out the new experiences available on the Ancient City, as well as the brand new gameplay mechanics.

Today we’ll introduce another small packing update which should improve unpacking and resolve all the known issues. We’ll monitor over the weekend and then begin burning additional tiles when we patch Ancient City.

Patchnotes:

• Improved unpacking checks to finish with the packing for good and start burning tiles.
  
• Fixed all the remaining known issues with packing.
  

We’ve been promising a Q&A for a while. Originally it was in regards to the planned PvP update, but since we’ve talked about several other things since then, we figured we would open it up to anything. Based on the questions, it seems like a lot of the devblogs weren’t read fully. If you have any questions, there is a lot of good transparent information in them and we recommend going back through them. Either way, we’ll answer a few of the questions in each devblog until we get through them.


[h3]Question 1: Are you going to revert back to S1/2/3/4? [/h3]

Short answer, no. The big changes we made when we started designing S5 were for reasons that we considered fully over long periods of time and we still believe in those reasons. That isn’t to say that features won’t ever come back individually, or even more likely, that we’ll bring individual functionalities back in some way that mitigates the previous problems we saw while still giving most if not all of the benefit.

In the QoL devblog we talked about many of the features that are often mentioned when referring to past seasons, like the lobby, traveling, nomadism, etc.


[h3]Question 2: Are you going to improve dedicated servers? For example, things like dedicated UI, updated command list, new commands, etc.[/h3]

Yes, these are some of the things that we will eventually do, but unfortunately, at the time, they're on the backburner while we work on getting all of the features we want into S5.


[h3]Question 3: Will the wingsuit come back? Are you going to revert the grapple?[/h3]

The wingsuit will return, later in progression. We’ll be implementing some changes to the grapple next week with the AC update.

As we all know, the grappling hook is a ton of fun, but anyone who has played for any length of time in PvP knows the downsides.

When first designing S5, PvE maps were not meant to be all of the progression. This obviously changed over time as we considered things, but we didn’t reconsider that since players will have entirely safe from PvP options through most or all of the PvE progression, that we could live with a grapple that allowed a bit more skill expression.

We won’t be completely reverting the grapple. Obviously grappling in combat had quite a lot of bugs, so the changes ultimately fixed a lot of the most egregious problems in mutual PvP, but also we believe the stamina cost on grapple is a good balancing tool that needs to be adjusted more. But we will be buffing/rebalancing the grapples across the board in various ways.


[h3]Question 4: Schematics?![/h3]

Most of our plans for schematics are detailed in the PvP devblog. Tl;dr is you’ll be able to learn how to craft most schematics with the PvP update and the AC update will allow to buy schematics at the Trade Stations.

We know there are still some pain points, like inventory management, etc, and we’ll continue to monitor those as we go along.


[h3]Question 5: When will modding be supported?[/h3]

As with everything, an ETA is just not something we can commit to. But it is something we want to do. The issue is that it will require a ton of mostly transparent work and we want to get to a point where the base game is fun to play before we commit that time. Most likely, we'll dedicate a long stretch of time for it after full release.