Last Oasis News

Small hotfix to the update we did earlier this week, solving issues with the Scattershot firing, some tweaks to the delivery quest item, improved remote gun reloading, and so on. We'll continue making sure all the critical bugs are solved on time by releasing hotfixes, but also expect another large update (with SG!) to come sometime next week, as we announced.

- Fixed Scattershot firing on its own when manning/unmannning the walker.
- Fixed Delivery Package description saying it's required at a specific tile. You can deliver it to any Delivery Merchant.
- Fixed Steering Levers collision to allow walking between them again.
- Fixed Rupu Throwable Insect Bomb being visible in player crafting. Player insect bomb will be available with SG.
- Increased weapon idle timer while still showing aiming lines from 10 to 15 seconds of inactivity.
- Made reloading guns keep guns active, so you don't need to keep clicking LMB to keep the UI up.
- Increased Rangefinder health from 350 to 800.

First, we want to announce that Sleeping Giants will be releasing next week! We aren’t yet ready to confirm the specific date, but you’ll hear it as soon as we have it locked in. Sleeping Giants will be released in PvP and PvE variants, and SG rarity tiles will be added to the pool right away. We’re excited for everyone to experience the new and improved map and the brand new challenges that await you as well as all the new rewards like an improved version of a Maintenance Chest, new tier of a Windmill that allows passive generation as before in addition to a massive increase to active generation in sandstorms, or even just new special boots you can check out below. Today, the patch focuses mostly on balance and bug fixing.

Here is a pair of boots. What are they for? Fishing in toxic water.






We made several big changes to siege weapons in the last patch. Mostly, it was done through adding specific uses to each weapon and ammo type to, primarily, improve PvE, but, at the same time, also hoping to improve PvP. Unfortunately, we left scattershot a little bit too powerful, so that is receiving a nerf, reduced from 85% -> 12% against Medium Armor, and 30% -> 10% against Hard Armor. We’ve also tweaked a few more damage numbers and armor percentages here and there, which will be in the full patch notes. In addition, we have fixed all of the reported bugs associated with reloading and firing. This is a system we want to continue to improve - stuff like additional or expandable control groups in particular.

Overall, with respect to walker fighting, we’re not really happy with the “Crack and Drop” meta. The nerf to scattershot should increase walker fight times, which is one step in the direction that we’d like to see in PvP, but, ultimately, the current design encourages you to, primarily, target the hull and then take all the armor and water from an enemy’s walker, instantly ending the fight. This isn’t really a desirable outcome nor is it consistent with a lot of the other design principles that we have for S5. We're planning to address this issue even more in the near future. Also, we don’t want everyone to be forced to be a solo gunship to be competitive, so we’ll continue to look for ways to enhance “Crewmember” gameplay.




Rarity also received quite a few fixes since the last update, primarily to the bugs you reported. Rupu vines should be fixed to be always the rarity as the camp and the exploit allowing you to exceed the clan cap should also be fixed. The trade station quest that was giving 0 flot has been replaced with a new quest. The previous quest was built when all maps had trade stations so it didn’t work right out of the box. Instead, it’s been reworked into a new quest, which gives you a package to deliver to a traveling merchant, who will then give you a token to exchange for Flots at any Trade Station.

Overall, we’ll keep it short this week, but after Sleeping Giants is released we’ll have quite a few large devblogs, which will focus on our plans for improving gameplay, specifically schematics and PvP, going over the full survey with our take on solving the issues, and, likely, even more surveys, allowing you all to weigh in as we continue development of Season 5.

Here is also a new headgear that will start dropping with SG from bosses and other tough enemies as a special item. It will start our journey to implement a headgear for every equipment set in the game.




Full Changelog:

• Fixed mobs staying aggroed for too long if they received damage.
  
• Made mobs deaggro low priority targets (like unmanned walkers) much more quickly.
  
• Rebalanced repair hammers costs and added new icons and meshes to them.
  
• Rebalanced bolt and dart costs.
  
• Updated scroll rack mesh and icon.
  
• Stopped remote weapons shooting when the player manning them is downed.
  
• Fixed reloading continuing on unmanning.
  
• Fixed reloading issues with ammo conversion and ordering.
  
• Nerfed Scattershot as described in the post.
  
• Reduced Lobber damage to Hard from 75% to 60%.
  
• Increase Spinner Direction Deviation from 2->3.
  
• Increased Throwstone stack size in Thumper from 10->50.
  
• Increased Dart stack size in inventory to 100.
  
• Fixed rupu vine and fruit pulp not using camp quality.
  
• Increase ammo chest stack size 50->100.
  
• Fixed clan cap penalty sometimes not working correctly.
  
• Set correct icons for chitin and bone darts.
  
• Set correct icons for simple tools.
  
• Added proper ranged rupu friendly fire avoidance.
  
• Improved performance for gas and smoke clouds.
  
• Decreased flint orb weight from 5 to 1.5.
  
• Fixed a bunch more icon issues.
  
• Replaced delivery quest with delivering packages to merchants.
  
• Adjusted the strongbox merchant campfire visibility.
  
• Reduced rupu siege weapon durability from 5->3.
  
• Increased Flint Orb damage from 57->80.
  

A small hotfix for the big rarity patch that came earlier this week. Fixing an issue with rarity siege weapons not rotating properly up and down, and also a crash fix for an issue that sometimes would happen when new quests got generated after their timer.

As we mentioned when changing it in the first place, it was also our intention to bring the disassembling return of resources back to half the cost of a structure. That change was missed from the previous patch, as pointed out by some of you, so we're making it now. You'll be getting the original half the cost back as well as the schematic of a disassembled structure to be able to rebuild it quickly when needed.

- Fixed rarity siege weapons not rotating properly up and down.
- Fixed a crash related to quest regeneration at the Trade Station.
- Changed back the disassembling return to half the cost.

New patch is out, so here's a small update post to accompany the first segment of the rarity overhaul.

A quick refresher of the plan first. Tiles were burnt yesterday successfully and all remaining rarity tiles were set to Common. Today's patch is mainly consisting of preparatory parts of the rarity patch, as well as a bunch of balance changes and improvements. Early next week, we will patch again, which will include additional changes to rarity and allow for rarity event tiles to start spawning. At that time, we will also be enabling base raiding, so make sure to have your bases prepared until then!

We wanted to touch on a few groups of changes specifically that are included in this patch, and how they’ll impact the rest of the rarity overhaul and the game in general.

• Rebalanced Stiletto, Mollusk, and Toboggan Wings HP, Torque, and Cost.
  
• Rebalanced Stiletto and Mollusk Leg Cost.
  
• Made Walkers unlockable at their default half HP.
  

Next week when we reset the rarity, we’ll patch in an overhaul to walker spare part upgrading (cargo, hatch, water, etc). Since we want to have a more deliberate progression through each map, with a partially linear progression of walkers as a part of it, we realized that it doesn’t make sense to make the T3/4 upgrades of a walker take ceramic and iron when the game is being designed for you to upgrade past those walkers. With that in mind, all walkers will require resources that can be acquired at the same tier that the specific walker is, but the upgrades will still require rarity schematics and resources to keep it balanced. We hope that this will foster some good competition for those resources and add a proper incentive to engage in rarity hunt in general. Considering that, there will be a rebalance of those spare parts in accordance with the easier resource requirements. In addition, the hull of the walker will provide a multiplier on each upgrade and all the upgrades of rarity walkers will have a multiplier. What it means is that a higher rarity walker of the same type and at the same upgrade level, will have better stats. For example, an Uncommon Stiletto at T1 Cargo upgrade will have more slots in cargo than a Common Stiletto at the same T1 Cargo upgrade, providing an additional layer of walker progression and another incentive for rarity.

With respect to making walkers unlockable at their default half HP - this was a good idea that came from the community. What it means is that if at a Common rarity, a walker has 10000 HP and losing 5000 HP would unlock it, then a Legendary walker with 22000 HP will still only require 5000 damage to be unlocked. Getting a Legendary walker will likely to be very difficult and so it has to be rewarding, but it shouldn’t dictate who gets to win every fight. This way, the owner of a Legendary walker will become stronger in PvE, and will have a walker that is harder to zero, but won’t have an insurmountable advantage when losing a PvP fight. It’s close to impossible to perfectly balance the effort, skill, and game time required to gain the advantage in literally every aspect of the game, but small changes like these are the types of things we want to foster to level the playing field, especially in PvP, which is one of our main focuses right now.



While the rarity weapons were obviously a bit over-tuned, it was good to see some new armor and weapon metas on the battlefield. It’s long overdue that we shake some things up with respect to melee. We have put in a few experimental mechanics, fixed some issues, and done a ton of rebalancing.

• Completely rebalanced ALL weapons and armor (more on that below).
  
• Removed double use of stamina on hits.
  
• Added stamina consumption for holding an attack (that starts after a small delay not to affect short holding that’s useful in melee).
  
• Removed Nomad Cloth from all Bone weapons.
  
• Added Brittle Bone Boots and Gloves to the set.
  

Double use of stamina has always existed (which is just stamina use at the start of any attack, not an actual double use), but due to some other changes to it in Season 5, it became a bit excessive, so we’ve removed it for now to see how fights will change. We also implemented a stamina drain during held attacks, which only kicks in after a short delay to avoid punishing quick holds that are extremely useful in melee. Our intention here was to make an abusive mechanic less lucrative and promote more dynamic melee, but it’s very experimental and we’ll be monitoring how it performs. As for equipment, we’ve completely rebalanced all of the armor and weapon stats and many of their costs. Nomad Cloth in armor and weapons at this tier was just too expensive, which is hard to argue against. The goal for the stat rebalance was to ensure a higher variety between weapons and create both a better progression through the tiers and a more specialized roster of weapon types to choose from - depending on your stats, personal preference, and, most importantly, your target. Swords and cutting weapons in general will be deadly against light armor, while mauls, hammers, and other blunt weapons will be a good choice against a heavy set. There will certainly be additional refinements that we’ll have to do as we continue iterating, such as adjusting Armor Speed Reduction and Weapon Speed more precisely, but as far as stats are concerned at the moment, this change should make every weapon have its own niche in the game and make the process of choosing your weapon for a fight be fun in itself.



This patch implements the HP increases on all base pieces, which means that the HP of your bases in general will go up by a significant amount now. As you know from the walker HP increase, what this also, unfortunately, means is that all the doors are going to be unlocked by default, as increasing Max HP doesn’t increase the current HP of an object. To allow everyone time to fix this issue and repair your bases, we are leaving on 100% refund and will not be enabling base raiding until the rarity patch next week. Repair hammers got a significant buff in this patch as well, though, so, hopefully, it should be an easier task than it otherwise would have been.

The ammunition damage changes are not being patched in right now, and instead will come together with a more thorough pass over all the weapons in one of the next patches, possibly the rarity one early next week. The intent of this change will be to improve weapon variation in PvE and PvP, somewhat similar to how different melee weapon types are now good against specific targets. For most ammo available to players at this time, the damage against Reinforced Armor (which all bases currently use) will be between 1-5% per hit. Same as everything else, though, it’s still very much a subject to change as we collect your feedback and iterate.



Overall, this patch is aimed at preparing for the rarity update next week, but also making the game a bit less grindy and trying out some new things to increase the variety of choice in both melee and walkers. We’ll continue this trend as we head into the next week and rarity maps begin to appear.

Check out the full changelog below:

• Completely rebalanced ALL the weapons and armor. More on that in the post.
  
• Removed double use of stamina (Stamina consumption on attack start).
  
• Added Stamina consumption while holding an attack after a short delay.
  
• Made rarity Walkers unlockable at their Common half HP to level the playing field in PvP. Meaning, Legendary Firefly will take 4875 HP to unlock instead of 11,000.
  
• Added 2 new Dinghy rigs - Nimmo Rig that's balanced towards combat with more hardpoints on one side, which should make fights more dynamic, while providing a large number of points for guns with a unique balancing factor. And also Traveler Rig, geared towards moving large amounts of items for trading or other purposes, with hardpoints mainly located in the middle of the walker for an ideal chest placement. Both are dropping in Canyons camps.
  
• Significantly increased HP of all the base pieces, including Hangar in preparation of enabling base raiding (Example: Light Wooden Wall 2250 HP -> 24,000 HP).
  
• Increased durability of all Repair Hammers except Simple to have a better progression and buff repairing as an activity.
  
• Rebalanced Stiletto, Mollusk, and Toboggan Wings HP, Torque, and cost.
  
• Rebalanced Stiletto and Mollusk Leg cost.
  
• Added Brittle Bone Boots and Gloves that were missing from the set.
  
• Rebalanced Brittle Bone and Forester's Armor cost, considering new additions to the Brittle Bone set.
  
• Removed Nomad Cloth from Bone Tier weapons. Replaced with Rope and other resources to make them more affordable.
  
• Increased Javelin and Heavy Javelin stack size from 5 to 20 for easier use and carrying.
  
• Made Automaton collision with the player a little smaller for easier walking on deck.
  
• Rebalanced the way resources drop from Rupu. Will drop more rarely, but at higher amounts and better types to make sure that most loot drops are valuable, regardless of the random chance.
  
• Added a chance for Beeswax and Redwood Wood to drop from some Rupu on Canyons to buff the drop.
  
• Fixed a Mollusk rig not dropping where it's supposed to (was dropping a Stiletto one before).
  
• Added new armor for different Rupu types to continue making them look unique and recognizable.
  
• Removed Mushroom Flesh as an ingredient for making Fruit Pulp. Mushrooms are not a fruit.
  
• Tweaked Windmill crafting recipe (also, added T2 Windmill with passive generation, even faster Sandstorm one, and full Sandstorm damage protection, but gotta wait until SG for that one. I like Windmills, they're my pet project for weekends).
  
• Made Toxic Water actually look toxic, so it's more obvious that it's dangerous.
  
• Fixed Bone Bottle recipe using wrong items. Should be craftable now.
  
• Fixed Tech Tree icon of the Maintenance Chest.
  
• Removed Modules Container from Walkers until we add them back, not to confuse everyone.
  
• Removed Walker Crafting Skill menu, which wasn't working and just confused everyone.
  
• Slightly improved Walker Management screen for clarity.
  

We’re approaching our major revision to one of the mechanics introduced in Season 5 and wanted to take this week’s devblog to lay out its full design and our plan for it. As it happens with large overhauls like this, the full update will require a few more days in the oven, so we’ll be rolling out parts throughout the week, with the final bit scheduled for early next week. Meanwhile, we’ll continue this week with some balance changes and further iteration, as well.




From watching your community videos and various streamers, and reading your feedback, we quickly realized that the rarity implementation wasn’t resulting in the gameplay we had hoped that it would and quickly set to work redesigning how the system functioned and how we wanted players to interact with it. We’ve written a few devblogs with some of our ideas to gauge reception and receive feedback, and we’ve settled on an iteration we’re now comfortable implementing. Throughout this devblog we’ll lay out the full design and plan for the coming week.

First and foremost, a reminder of the current plan. Maps are currently set to burn on the 7th of September - we will keep that date, burn the maps as scheduled, and then set all maps to common. In addition, we’ll be setting some cradles to start burning today, which will burn on Monday, as we’ve spawned a lot of them on release and now they’re being unused with everyone moving out to Canyons. Tiles will keep their current clan cap as is, but will only have common resources and mobs. To answer a common question - we will also be wiping all rarity, including equipment, resources, Walkers, and so on. We understand this is frustrating for those players who have continued playing and grinding rarity, but it’s important to test these changes with everyone starting on even footing. Then, early next week, we will patch and rarity event maps will start spawning.

To clarify: Rarity wiping will happen by changing all the items into common, not by deleting them!




At that time, rare maps will start spawning similar to event maps in previous seasons, with a few major differences. We’ll be implementing traveling to these maps in a much different way. You will be able to craft a portal anywhere on a map that instantly takes you straight to these maps and then brings you back to the edge of the map you traveled from when coming back. We understand that not everyone has hours every day to spend traveling around hoping to run into other players and, hopefully, this will help avoid having to spend so much time to get that gameplay. We believe that the current implementation of travel is healthy for the open world, but we understand that many of you want to be able to play the game in either a more casual way or by going straight into action, and this is one step in that direction.

Once you’re on the map, rarity will be similar to what it is now (with the exception of fixing some obvious issues like creature rarity, rupu vines, and tools not harvesting R+1). Another important change is that every map will have a random distribution of all rarities for both mobs and resources. We hope that it creates an entirely new gameplay around rarity - "What are the schematics and resources I was able to get during the event and how do I most efficiently use them?". Our intention isn’t for everyone to have everything Legendary - it will be much more rare than that. Rather, you’ll have to decide what are the most important things to invest your Legendary schematics and resources in, and settle for the next best rarity for the rest, depending on your ability to find and farm it. In addition, we’ll be implementing a wandering merchant that allows you to spend flots to instantly upgrade the rarity of your resources in exchange for Flots.

On the difficulty front - we understand that the current implementation of rare mobs (primarily increases in health and damage) isn’t all that exciting, but further than that we understand in general PvE isn’t as fun as we want it to be. One of our major focuses right now is improving current and future encounters to make them more than crafting and spamming darts, and we’ll be able to ultimately leverage some of those changes to improve rarity camps. On a case by case basis we’ll be addressing some mobs (looking at you, legendary Papak) that verge on impossible without some heavy doses of cheese. We’re also working on implementing different weapons actually having different functions, making encounters more dynamic, as you’ll need to think what to use against the weapons, Rupu, their structures, and so on, and switch between your weapons during the fight or even pre-fitting your Walker with specific weapons depending on the encounter you’re preparing for.




Originally, when rarity was meant to be more of an iterative progression mechanic, we said that we intended to have PvE rarity maps. However, the design of rarity has changed in a way that we believe makes it a progression loop that would be less rewarding to PvE players and more rewarding to risk-taking PvP players. For that reason, at least in their first implementation, rarity maps will be PvP-only. PvE-only players will still be able to engage in the rarity loop, but, primarily, through the marketplace and the quality upgrader merchant. Also, if we see enough demand, there is a good chance we will consider expanding the rarity resource upgrading mechanic to include the ability to upgrade schematics as well. Let us know below how you feel PvP and PvE should work in Last Oasis:

https://strawpoll.com/polls/kogjva5D8g6




In short, we agree with SkyKevin and recommend to watch his video on this topic (and thank him for his contribution):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwFNojO0SB4

We’ll also be enabling base raiding this week as a part of one of the planned patches. We’ll be talking more about our plans for PvP over the coming days and weeks, but essentially, we’ll be rolling out some systems to make base raiding a more interesting and fundamental mechanic for the game. In the meantime, as we’ve mentioned, we agree with SkyKevin’s assessment on how it could impact the game (and also, overall about his impressions on the gameplay we’re aiming for).




It is our impression that schematics are probably the most controversial system implemented in Season 5. Feedback on schematics seems all over the place, to say the least. Some of you think it’s a great improvement over tablets and fragments, some absolutely hate it, and all the possible things in between. So, as promised in one of the previous posts, we’re running a survey that will stay open through the week, asking a few questions about schematics and your thoughts on them. We'd really appreciate if you took part in it, as it will greatly help us improve the system:

https://take.supersurvey.com/Q652VC1Y4




And finally, we’re continuing to work on Sleeping Giants - the next map in progression. We know that everyone is pretty tired of Canyons, but as we said at the beginning of the season, we will continue iterating until we believe it’s appropriate to move on. With the current state of rarity, it would simply be backwards and pretty much irresponsible to introduce a whole new set of technology before figuring out the existing one, so the focus of our coders has been on improving rarity while our game designers have taken that time to continue iterating on Sleeping Giants, which will introduce a whole new set of challenges for players to face, including the War Okkam, many new types of camps, including special ones like melee-only, and other dangers and rewards that we’ll talk about in a future post.