Last Oasis News

To give you a small update on what's going on since the last update - we're currently collecting feedback on the latest changes and preparing a survey on the whole season in general, as we've mentioned. The work on the next map in progression as well as the overhaul of the rarity maps and PvP mechanics that we've described in the last post is going at full speed, so expect another big update post in near future!

For now, we've prepared a small patch to address some issues, mainly regarding performance, as we've seen quite many reports about it recently. If you notice improvements after the update or find other issues to report, please let us know.

• Made Light Wooden Walls have less holes. Should both improve performance and fix potential issues with sandstorm going through.
  
• Slightly updated Medium Wooden Walls visuals to make them more distinct from Light Walls.
  
• Optimized Humidifier particles to not affect performance.
  
• Temporarily removed walker dust particles until optimized better.
  
• Fixed performance issues regarding walker legs and wings not stopping movement when a walker is stopped.
  
• Fixed a crash related to server debugging.
  

As planned, we’re continuing with the iteration on Season 5. Not without your help, of course, so we’d like to thank you again for sending all the feedback, bug reports, and just playing the game. All of it is invaluable for us to make better decisions when it comes to the season’s direction and the whole gameplay experience.

It’s not a secret that we’re currently working on the next map in the roster to continue the progression - Sleeping Giants. It will unlock Clay tier and will add a lot of new content to the game at the same time. Remember the Okkam with the Rupu shooting on its back from the trailer? You’ll spot it right away when the map comes out (unless it spots you first).

It will also bring a new and improved Rupu behavior and classes, including an entirely new support class of Rupu that help their fellow warriors in battle instead of rushing you all together with wooden sticks, intended to make camp encounters more varied and interesting. Same as we did with Cradle and Canyons for Season 5, Sleeping Giants will be an entirely new experience, only this time we have your feedback to guide us towards a better version from the very start.



For today, we’ve prepared a smaller patch to address some more urgent issues. The main change is the traveling system.


We’ve heard a lot of complaints about the current system and how it is more of a chore than a challenge. It’s difficult to plan routes because the traveling tunnels close too soon, which might put you in a dead end if the tunnel you were hoping to use closed while you were traveling through another map. We’ve seen some routes suggested by the system being so long that it can sometimes take literal hours to get to the tile you’re aiming for. That, and a whole lot of other suggestions on how to improve rarity and PvP were submitted, but more on that below.

To be clear from the start - we’re nowhere near done making improvements to the traveling and the more we hear about what you like or dislike about it, the better and quicker we can rework it. For now, to address some of those issues, we’ve come up with solutions that are both quick and, hopefully, super effective. First thing that you’ll notice when you enter the new update is that there are a lot more tunnels now. And I mean A LOT more. That should address the issue where you had a dilemma - go by the suggested route and hope the tunnels will open on the same sides as they were, so you can continue your journey as planned from the start, or wait and do nothing until a new set of tunnels opens up on your own map.

The latter, though, would still be futile, as the time the tunnels stay open was sometimes so short that you couldn’t even travel through a single map and would already need to change the course because of the tunnels closing right in front of you. This problem should also be fixed now by increasing the timer on each tunnel to a whole 12 hours. That’s right, not 15 minutes, but half a day, during which you can plan routes and actually complete them without having to backtrack or wait mindlessly for another tunnel to open to travel to a tile right next to you.

Together, those changes are aimed at making traveling much more streamlined and less restrictive, but still interesting and challenging at times, as you still need to plan your routes and still need to actually travel through the maps instead of hopping around them in a game about big nomadic wooden machines. At the same time, you’ll get to choose where you want to go and when, instead of the game setting strict rules as to which direction you may go towards and which are forbidden for no apparent reason.

In addition to this, there are a whole lot of fixes of bugs and crashes, there are Quality of Life improvements like an increased size of the Hoist inventory and a better experience with Base Maintenance that many new players reported they have been struggling with. Other pretty big changes like an improved Papak and better melee behavior for all the Rupu are also coming with this patch - check the changelog for the full list.

If you have other suggestions or feedback for this change, we’re all eyes and ears on Discord and other official social media, so let us know what you think once you’ve tried it!

We’re compiling a little survey about your experience in Season 5 so far and would love to see the results. We'll share the survey as soon as it's ready!



Now to what we’re planning in the very near future. Small improvements to general traveling is only the beginning of the overhaul of the World Map. Next on our list is redesigning completely how both PvP and Rarity tiles work. From what we gather, some enjoy the current system as it is, even though, not without its quirks, but there wouldn’t be a person to say that the system we have in place is perfect and needs no changes. Us included.

So what we’d like to do about it based on the feedback and our own perception of the system? A lot, actually. Firstly, as chadz already revealed on Discord a few days ago, we’re considering switching all rare maps to use a similar system to the event maps. What it means in practice is that at certain times, in each region, maps with all kinds of rarity and clan caps will be popping up around the World Map, then stay up for anyone wanting to experience it for some time, and, by the end, burn out like the old event maps did. What we want to achieve with this is a much more diverse experience when it comes to rarity and progression in the game. We’ll have both PvP and PvE rarity maps, ranging from tiny clan caps to big clan sizes, spawning randomly all around the world. This will ensure that anyone interested in going to a rare map and getting some sweet loot will have this opportunity, regardless of whether they prefer PvE or PvP, how large their clan is or if they even have one - everyone, equally, will have a chance to experience every map at every rarity.

When it comes to the details, we’re still ironing them out and some parts might be changed by the time this change comes to the game, but we wanted to share with you what we’re working on at the moment aside from the next progression map. In addition to this change though, there are many more planned for rarity and pvp specifically. For example, we’d like the rarity event maps to be accessible from any distance over time, as the size of their influence slowly increases, giving priority to the lucky few who are stationed on the maps close to it, but still providing an opportunity to everyone in the region who wants to join the map later, unless they’d like to travel and get there quicker.

“But doesn’t it mean you can jump across the whole map in one move?” - we asked ourselves. No.With the current idea, rarity maps are more akin to raids in MMORPGs - you go there to fight some difficult enemies, either PvE or PvP, but then can only return back to the tile you came from, resulting in a periodic “rarity rush” with a simple way to return to your home tile afterwards.

Additionally, we’re considering features like forbidding building on rarity maps, not to put anyone in a situation where they build a base, but can’t bring it back from a tile that’s supposed to last only a limited amount of time. Traveling to those maps will also, most likely, be limited only to walkers of equal and one rarity below the one on the map. Meaning, that with a Common Stiletto, you won’t be able to join a Legendary map. You just wouldn’t have a chance at that progression level. Instead, we’d like to make sure that everyone joining rarity maps is up to the challenge by checking at which progression step their walker is.

We’ll be talking more about those changes as they will be getting closer to release, but we’d love to hear your opinions and thoughts so far! You can also read the full changelog for the update below:

- Added more traveling tunnels to every map.
- Increased tunnel duration to 12 hours.
- Increased Hoist container size from 10 to 20 slots.
- Improved Base Maintenance UI by adding notifications, tooltips, etc.
- Added Merchants to Canyons map that allow trading for currency.
- Improved Papak behavior.
- Improved Rupu melee system, making ranged rupus worse at melee, etc.
- Reduced Sterile Bandage crafting from 5 Gel to 2.
- Moved Hoist to Walker Tools category.
- Fixed wrong percentages being shown on Hoist repair screen.
- Made Humidifier slightly smaller, so it fits in every base.
- Added new effects and sounds to Humidifier.
- Fixed Automatons using rupu sounds on being hit.
- Made Throwstone available in Ammo Chest.
- Reduced Papak size to its intended scale.
- Fixed some specific projectiles still damaging player bases.
- Added various armors to Rupu types to distinguish them.
- Fixed a crash related to the World Map.
- Fixed a crash related to traveling to an invalid tile.
- Fixed a crash related to opening some game screens.
- Fixed a whole lot of other crashes I'd need an engineer to explain.

- Added Ammo Scroll Rack for Ammo Schematics.
- Add rebindable reload button for remote weapon reload.
- Improved reload visuals, fixed clipping with weapons.
- Increased drop chances of bone axe tools early on.
- Fixed Automatons being able to be placed outside of walkers.
- Fixed being able to net other players' structures on PvE.
- Fixed missing sounds for Hangar Wall with Door.
- Rebalanced Stiletto wing cost, torque, and Health to fit new design.
- Rebalanced Foreseter and Brittle Bone Torso armor to fir new stats.
- Fixed stairs not fitting into floors exactly, creating gaps.

What a launch! And quite some controversy about the new direction.

The last days have been incredibly busy, as you can imagine. While things were mostly stable, we had to split our attention between gameplay improvements and crash fixes, but now that is mostly fixed, and today we had time to prepare the first big iteration patch.

From the various feedback channels we monitor, one of the biggest complaints that is clear is that the schematics system is too prevalent, and that there is no permanent progression.

To address this, we’ve decided to add a way to unlock technology permanently. You will now encounter Rupu shrines in camps on both cradle and canyon:



When you find it, you can bring early schematics to the shrines and in return unlock one of the items permanently. You can still use schematics to craft the item, and it will be slightly cheaper if you do both.

The reason we went for the schematic system was to allow us to limit the speed at which large clans (or zergs, if you will) manage to get a permanent advantage over later smaller groups. While they will of course always be faster due to numbers, they used to be exponentially faster due to the tablet system.

It’s clear from the mixed reviews that this approach was considered by many a step backwards. So we figured we can find a solution that achieves both.

This new Rupu Shrine is a test to see if you enjoy this approach better. The list of unlockable tech currently includes all the craftable weapons, tools, ammo, and equipment from the cradle, and if we see positive feedback in response to this iteration, we’ll expand it to include more.

Another big general complaint was about the general slowness of movement and how often stamina and other factors stop players from just, well, enjoying the game. For this, we’ve increased the base stamina recovery significantly and reduced the stamina cost on harvesting.

This goes hand in hand with a buff to all tool durability by 150% (and sickles by 200%). We too feel that tools break too fast, and that too much time is spent crafting the same thing over and over. The reason why it was like that initially was to encourage a very aggressive playstyle where the majority of resources are recovered from fighting PvE camps, rather than harvesting. Clearly this isn’t how everyone wants to play, and we decided to just make things easier here. Some individual tool harvesting rates were also adjusted to drop more resources.

Now, for a tough one: PvE difficulty. There’s quite frankly no ideal solution, some people love the difficulty, others hate it. There’s no easy way to find a balance that does not upset one or the other group. We decided to give the spinner a bit of a nerf to put it more in line with the other remote weapons. We want the fights against camps to be thoughtful and strategic and we think the spinner became the “do-everything” weapon. On the other hand, we noticed that Skirmishers have a habit of sneaking up behind people and hitting them for a significant amount of their HP bar, so we took away their heavy javelin and gave them a light javelin.

Now, for another big one: Grappling hook. We reduced the stamina cost on grappling hook shots from 25 to 5. Grappling hooks is out of those divisive issues we tried to address - in the right hands, it can be a really oppressive tool. But we agree with the most vocal opponents of this change - the grapple hook is insanely fun and we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. We hope the small stamina cost will be enough to prevent the most egregious abuses and if not we’ll figure out some other way to address the issue. Back to the trees, Spider-Nomads.

Furthermore, we buffed the HP on Walker bodies - a lot. The rule of thumb we used for now is that the HP of the Walker should exceed the HP of the sum of its parts. A Walker going down in 20 seconds during PVP is of course not intentional. Additionally, we increased the effectiveness of armor against player projectiles - with the exception of scattershot - by about 200%.

We’re not perfectly happy with this solution, of course. It’s rather crude, and we want PVP fights to have more depth than this. But it will allow us to observe more and longer fights and draw conclusions based on that.

These are the biggest changes of this patch - for the complete list, please check the changelog.

As we promised before launch, we will iterate on this until it’s a rock solid, enjoyable survival experience, then move on to release the next map with new content.

We're also working on kickstarting the economy again, working on a solution for the schematics overflow, and it's very likely those things will be intertwined.

Overall we’ve experienced a massive amount of feedback for which we are immensely thankful. It helps us improve the game quite quickly, so please keep it coming. Tell us what’s fun, tell us what’s not fun, tell us the good and tell us the bad.

Plenty of more good things are on the way.

- Added Rupu Shrines for permanent unlocks
- Reduce crafting cost by 15% when both unlocked and schematic used together
- Increased Walker HP by 750%
- Display player numbers on world map
- Decrease stamina cost for harvesting
- Increased chitin tool harvesting rate
- Increased stamina regen across the board
- Reduced Grappling hook stamina cost from 25 to 5
- Added tooltip that shows what items can go into a container
- Added ammo info to weapons interface
- Reduced ranged damage from players vs players
- Reduced Spinner ammo from max 28 to max 20
- Reduced Spinner stack size from 4 to 3
- Increased Spinner spread
- Reduced Hangar Wall rope cost from 18 to 4
- Fixed Bone Axes
- Nerfed Skirmisher