Last Oasis News

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.

There was a bug related to unpacking and we decided to tackle that and finish out the last “Anti-Griefing” mechanic for unpacking. That’s the patch for today. In addition, we’ll be disabling base decaying while packed until we’re sure you can unpack in all cases. After that, we'll also start burning some of the tiles to condense the World Map for the current population.

We added what we’re calling the Clearance Phase. For the first 30s of unpacking, the structure checks to see if the area is valid. After 30s, all collisions are enabled at once and packing won’t be canceled by attempting to make the area invalid afterwards. This means that on a PvE map, after 30s a player cannot disable/pause your unpacking simply by standing in the area.

Changelog this time is not so big, as most of the changes we're working on are for the unreleased maps and updates, but they should have a pretty big impact nonetheless (at least the first two):

• Added Clearance Phase to Unpacking, which prevents most griefing with unpacking.
  
• Fixed a bug, which prevented unpacking bases in some cases.
  
• Fixed collisions on the Rupu Throne buildable structure.
  

As we stated in the last post, each week we’ll do updates on the state of our various lines of effort. Since we’re just starting now, this isn’t a list of everything that’s been done, but, rather, a selection of the most important and needed things we’ve worked on this week.

It's a new format we're trying out to keep you in the loop on everything important that's happening. Therefore, treat it more as a progress report than a full devblog for each part of the post and expect a larger post sometime soon.




One of the major efforts here has been working on a system that will allow us to more easily edit rigs. Editing existing rigs can currently cause a lot of issues, and there are quite a few problems with the existing rigs on some walkers, so this is, unfortunately, one of those “transparent” things which is happening in the background for us to work easier, rather than a change you'll immediately see. What it will allow, though, is an easy way to update any rig on any walker for us to put in an update.

Next week, we’ll also introduce some more quest changes - adding back some of the old quests that have been redesigned and rebalancing the existing ones to fit the current economy better.




The promised Quality of Life update is coming along.

Right now, we're actively working on fixing the issue with clan permissions not persisting (i.e. they get reset during server restarts, updates, etc), which is a more complex issue than might seem, since it requires both the work on our game code, the backend, and the database.

It's been a common complaint for some time now, so the fix should be coming in one of the next patches, instead of waiting for the full QoL Update to bring it in.




PvP Update is also on its way.

We finalized the detailed design for the "King of the Hill" feature and Schematic Learning/Crafting that we've discussed in one of the previous devblogs. They should provide a balanced experience, encourage active PvP for map control, and make Schematics more of a tool that requires less attention the more you progress, similar to Water or Torque.

We also concepted the KoTH POI model, which will be the main arena for those PvP battles, so it will take a few iterations to get to a good gameplay feeling. Our goal with it is to make it a mixed melee/walker fight. Meaning, that you will be able to impact the success using walkers, but to actually capture the point you’ll need people with their feet on the ground, so while it will be possible to capture solo if the competition is not too strong, but larger clans should be able to have proper fights for control and bonuses that it provides on the map.




The next map is one of our main priorities at the moment, so there's quite a bit about it.

As expected, tons of work here, but we don’t want to spoil the surprise too much, so this will probably be more vague than you’d want.

We've finished the overhaul of the map design, which will be entirely different from what it was before, except the main part that it's still an Ancient City, so you can expect completely new gameplay, new features introduced with the map, and much more.

When it comes to details, we've finished creating new Rupu variants, finished setting all of their weapons and projectiles. all of the Rupu camp encounters are set, including bosses that weren't present in the game at all before, finished all of the loot tables, and much more boring details.

Now, we're starting work on creating Rupu melee behavior variations, so that each new Rupu type feels unique when fighting, especially putting the focus on the new bosses.

One of the new features - Relic Hunter Reputation, which we won't spoil yet, has also been finalized, including a detailed design, all the models, and so on. That's what will make Ancient City an event map that won't stop being relevant as it was before and will provide almost limitless gameplay in that regard.

Today we’ll go over the patch and then a few updates on each of the major lines of effort and where we stand on them. The patch today is, mainly, focused on fixes and tweaks to Sleeping Giants and, most of all, closing out all of the packing bugs and improvements. There is one more feature we want to add that should prevent anyone using packing from getting griefed while trying to unpack on PvE tiles specifically, but will work on all tiles with the same rules and intention. Unfortunately, that will come a bit later in a separate patch, but we'll try to add it as soon as possible, without waiting for any large patch to include it, so expect one to come soon.

Otherwise, the patch today focuses on continuing to improve the Sleeping Giants experience, through fixes, and implementing new features, or tweaking existing features in new ways. The main feature we've been working on, though, is packing. Since its release we've received quite a few reports regarding it, like difficulty to unpack or other issues, especially with Hangar Walls, and tried to address them all in this patch. Overall, once we’re sure that all of these packing changes didn’t introduce any new terrible catastrophic bugs, we’ll start burning some tiles to condense the World Map, as we've talked previously. The burn will have a timer of at least 7 days prior to the actual decay of the tile, so you'll have plenty of time to pack and move to another tile that's not being burnt. You'll see a timer above a tile that's being burnt on the World Map and if a map doesn't have one, it will not be burnt.

We'll keep monitoring gameplay with the new changes and the lower number of tiles on the World Map and keep adjusting the numbers if we see that there are still too many tiles or that they're all to crowded without an ability for someone who wants peace and quiet to go to a less populated oasis.

Changelog. This time, in the beginning of the post:

• Made unpacking use the same allowed distance to other bases as building allowance.
  
• Fixed an issue with an error that says a base is too close when it actually isn't.
  
• Increased Lathe Torque inventory to 1,000.
  
• Added packing information and decay timers to Walker HUD to see them while driving.
  
• Reduced Stamina use for Long and Sturdy Grappling Hooks.
  
• Allow raising and lowering unpacked base to allow for an easier unpacking experience.
  
• Made unpacking ignore the owning player when checking for obstructions to make it easier.
  
• Fixed bugs with dirty and toxic water being treated as normal water - autoconsumed in bottles, used for repsawning, etc.
  
• Made toxic water on maps damage only players who are inside it, not mobs or structures.
  
• Improved visuals of toxic water on maps to make it look more dangerous.
  
• Increased Falco HP to 34,500 from 24,500. Did not increase current HP, so need to repair.
  
• Increased sap drop rate from saw blade harvesting.
  
• Fixed sap not dropping with proper loot and quality when using a sawblade.
  
• Made windmills and excavator not decay on the ground.
  
• Made all other structures decay when placed on the ground without a foundation and maintenance chest.
  
• Added Repair Station (small hardpoint on walkers).
  
• Made Repair Station take damage on repairing items, as it's considered heavy workload. Requires repairing the station or rebuilding it. Higher quality Repair Stations last much longer.
  
• Rarity Items can be repaired with the use of rarity resources and a schematic of any rarity, including non-rarity schematic of that item.
  
• Common items can be repaired with common resources without any schematic.
  
• Updated and improved delivery merchant quest to make it more clear.
  
• Replaced Delivery Merchant model to look different from any other Merchant, so it's instantly visible that it's unique and stealthy (as they're smugglers).
  
• Added Medium Water Bag to store more liquids in (small hardpoint on walkers).
  
• Fixed not being able to pack small gates.
  
• Prevented using unpacking to build sky bases. This is not a challenge! Floating bases are subject to be deleted by divine intervention at any moment and the owners banned as per the ToS.
• Added highlighting the invalid part when unpacking to make it easier to figure out what is preventing placement.
  
• Made it easier to place bases on uneven terrain.
  
• Added packing period multipliers configurable in server settings for private servers owners.
  
• Separated weapon, tool, and armor rarity durability multiplier. Increased tool and armor durability scaling, slightly rebalanced Weapon durability.
  
• Added tool tier rarity multiplier. Rare items now have higher tool tiers and will harvest higher quantities. Low tier tools like early Axes might be able to harvest Redwood when rare now, and so on.
  
• Added Lathe and Curing Station to a Medium Hardpoint on Walkers.
  
• Fixed Magma Seed not being harvestable by Scythe-type tools.
  
• Overhauled Event Tile spawning feature.
  
• Made it a much lower probability that Event Tile maps with the same settings will spawn back to back (to prevent 1 Clan Cap Canyon after another). Added some other tweaks to settings to make it more balanced.
  

The new settings for private server owners regarding packing decay are:

• PackingDecayGracePeriodMultiplier
  
• PackingDecayPeriodMultiplier
  
• PackingPreparePeriodMultiplier
  

There are still several outstanding issues we’re continuing to work on. Your bug reports and feedback are incredibly valuable here. We have lots and lots still to do to make Sleeping Giants as high quality as we want. From improving loot tables, to fixing Okkam aggro, adding and balancing quests, balancing the rarity upgrader, and so on. Basically, lots of tweaks and fixes left to be done. But little by little we’re whittling all of the issues and inconsistencies down, and we think the end is in sight here. Keep sending your feedback and we’ll keep up the drumbeat of adjusting things regularly.




We recently grouped a bunch of features that have been hanging around as good ideas into a focused plan we’re calling the “Quality of Life” Update. This includes many of the things we’ve talked about publicly, like how we want to implement features that replace some of the functionality of the lobby, like a “Vacation Mode” that would allow to safely log out of the map into a lobby with your walker at a Trade Station, a “Teleport to Home Tile” feature that would allow to build a Portal, much like the ones at the edges of the map and travel directly to your Home Tile, as well as Base Walker Packers that would allow to pack Walkers you don't use daily in a compact packer instead of having a gigantic Hangar.

Other than that, we've listed some ideas for other features that we either discussed ourselves or the ones that you suggested to us directly, which we'll discuss in another post when we flesh them out a little more to be presentable and worthy of your discussion.




We promised a Q&A here, but we’re going to need a rain check on that one. We had a lot of great feedback and questions posted by all of you, so not wanting to make it just a small post with a few handpicked questions, we'll try to make a proper Q&A without shying away from difficult questions and sharing as much information as we can through that post.




The Ancient City is coming along nicely and we’re, actually, really excited about how it is shaping up. It is going to be a completely new experience that hasn't been possible in Last Oasis before, with many pieces and parts hand-placed into the map, rather than spawned randomly. Meaning that we can design the experience in a much more specific way to make it both visually stunning and gameplay-wise exactly as we want it.

We’ll also be creating a completely new player-progression mechanic tied-in to exploring the Ancient City. Through finding and looting Relics, you’ll be able to improve your reputation when sharing them with the Flotillian Historic Society, unlocking the ability to buy high rarity schematics directly from one of their representatives, and, also, some unique rewards that will only be available by having a high reputation with the guild.

Overall, our current plan is to spawn Ancient City as an Event Map, separate from Rarity Event Maps, so you'll have 2 possible Event Tiles to go to at most times. We'll most likely be spawning the map both as a PvE and a PvP experience, where the PvP map will have rarity like any other Rarity Event Map that's PvP, while the PvE one will have no rarity, but all the same features and mechanics across the board, including the Relics.




Each week our devblogs will be giving updates on the current status of each line of our efforts. As we’ve said many times, setting deadlines and ETAs are just recipes for disappointment, but we are endeavoring to attempt to be as transparent as possible and provide frequent status updates as we work on each update going forward. Expect more details on the newly announced Quality of Life Update, the PvP Update, and the Ancient City map release, which might be coming earlier than you expect.

Thank you for reading this post and, in general, supporting us through this development with your feedback, Steam reviews, daily discussions, and many more ways to make it easier for us to make Last Oasis better.