The massive 0.7.1 update is finally here! This one opens up TWO AND new areas on the island. You'll be freezing your furry hat off in Polaris, checking the seaworthiness of some boats in Westport, and visiting jails in Central West. This by far is the single biggest update we've done in terms of area size content.

Update Highlights

There's A LOT of new things inside this latest update, but I'm only going to mention a couple of them. Full change list below. (BTW. if you think we shouldn't be posting so many screenshots of the new content here, please let us know below. We don't want to spoil too much, but it's hard to describe the content without light spoilers.)

Westport Harbor

The west coast harbor is a must-see place to visit. Just don't expect to find any seaworthy boats at this point in time.

[spoiler]Mana Crater[/spoiler]

Hopefully this isn't spoiling anything you haven't already guessed, but you should definitely visit [spoiler]the crater[/spoiler] and the surrounding installation in Polaris. [spoiler]Classified photo:
[/spoiler]

New Audio System

New XAudio2 based sound implementation is now in place. As mentioned before, the old DirectSound based stuff is still there as fallback in case you're running some older Windows version. Please send in bug reports of any issues you may have!

New Winter Box Art

It took a while, but the last hand painted loading screen art is finally in place.

CHANGE LOG

ADDED

- Access to 'Polaris' and western part of 'Central', and 'Westport'. - Level Cap is now 36. Up by TWO levels! - New Craftable: Motorcycle Helmet, lvl 32. - Rice can be found in the western part of the island. - New XAudio2 based Sound Implementation. Falling back to DirectSound implementation on older systems. - New Skill: Scavenger. - New winter loading background image. - Lighting a campfire autosaves the game if you're not in danger. - More protagonist reactions. - Showing Change Log when x.y.z version changes if you have opened the Change Log before. - Stack trace is logged when the game crashes (contains only the code path, no player information). - Intro cutscene is now skippable.

CHANGED

- Destroying buildings you've built puts the materials directly back to your storage box (avoids grinding XP this way). - Eased up the notorious 'puzzle' in Serpent's Crossing. - Partially rebalanced some wearable stats. - Slightly increased sledgehammer speed. - Raised large rock DMG threshold, so they can't be broken with the tools available now. (Sorry!) - Knockback effect improved.

FIXED

- Tomb Mana Orb is no longer lost if you Restart Tomb without picking it up after completing the tomb. - Quest markers no longer shown for quests you've picked up. - Quest tracking box panel has correct height for multiline goals. - Fixed sound volumes for some collisions. - Few clarifications and additional checks to quests "Dirty Money" and "The Last Stand". - Health bars are not drawn too high anymore. - Few specific cases of player getting stuck in the game world. - Usual round of fixes regarding floating objects, terrain glitches, etc. - Minimap points of interest now colored properly. - Performance optimizations in areas where there are lots of searchables (like the city). - Link towers with changed internal PUIDs now show activated in old saves. - Fleeing animals do not run into the water anymore so easily. - Player's melee attack now prioritizes turrets over other obstacles. - Grammar and typos.

Up Next

The area we will be heading next is the southern desert Solaris. Spoiler: it will be hot! You will also be able to finally reach that third fuel cell required for your Escape Pod. There's also a new bigger feature coming. Many of you have been requesting this. What is it? I'll just leave this one image here and hope you'll crack the puzzle:
But don't get too excited! It may not be what you think!

[ 2021-06-03 15:00:40 CET ] [ Original post ]