State Of The Game: What Has Been Fixed, What Is Coming And More!

Greetings Hikers!

As a small team of just the 6 of us, this month+ has been incredibly busy but also so rewarding. We're gradually seeing sentiment turn more and more positive as we continue publishing highly requested updates! Thank you for voicing your feedback, your concerns and your positive sentiment!

The below mentioned subjects are what we see mentioned the most by a significant margin, so we wanted to go over these and take you through some of what we’ve been doing since launch!

Fatal Errors

What was the problem?

• The most severe cases of Fatal Errors we saw were related to Garden Plots in their “growing” period upon LOADING a save. We also saw a number of cases related to duplicated Campfires & Garden Plots, what happened was every time you saved on top of another save you would be duplicating these two. This in turn also caused significant performance degradation. 

What has been fixed:

• Duplicating Campfires & Garden Plots

• Garden Plot “Growing” period Fatal Error

• Fixed instances where loading a huge area was too taxing for some players, we have since optimized and split up these areas more, with more coming soon.

^^WE RECOMMEND LOOKING AT YOUR CAMPSITE FIRE --> USE BOTH DEBUG OPTIONS OR START A FRESH GAME

What is coming:

We have observed crashes happening when you’re opening something NEW, like a Substation note. It happens because something new needs to load and if you’re already maxed out on memory you will crash. We’re gradually moving towards Unreal Engine 5.7 which has significantly improved pre-cache loading meaning Fatal Errors related to opening something new will be reduced. 

Performance & optimization

What has been improved:

• Optimization - working on complex materials

• Optimization - shader complexity clean up

• Optimized torch particle effect. Maybe a crash factor in Fall when it is raining and foggy.

• Optimization - Adjusted dusk and time length to help with frame drop

• Optimization - Quarry and Perimeter Control area load in

• Optimization - Shadow Cache in Camp Sunshine

• Optimization - Summer cabins exterior and interiors 

• Optimization - Niagara particles in SS1

• Landscape optimization - WIP

• Old mine tunnel clean up Landscape Optimization - WIP

• Optimized Niagara particles - WIP

• Optimized Foliage - WIP

• Optimized materials - WIP

• Optimization Fall landscape - WIP

• Optimized shadows cache - WIP

Most severe performance problems were related to duplicated Campfires / Gardenplots and once those were cleared we saw players report stable and normal frame rates again!

We have also updated our minimum hardware specifications after running several internal tests, updates to RECOMMENDED hardware will also come!

What is coming:

In short, Unreal Engine 5.7 IS something we’re working towards. The engine level optimizations ALONE will be a huge improvement across the board and we are really excited to continue working towards optimizing some of our heavier tech and get it running even better on lower end hardware with this engine update.

Something that is still experimental from EPIC’s side is their new Nanite Foliage and how it’s rendered. This is major because their Nanite Voxel system are able to retain details, animation and material characteristics based on the distance from the camera (player), all at a fraction of the cost. Our game is super foliage dense so this is something we are very excited for. Unreal Engine 5.7 brings a wealth of new and improved technology that will be especially useful for our massive open world game. More information on this will come!

Multiplayer / co-op bugs

Our biggest problem with multiplayer used to be a CLIENT related bug where they would take damage for no reason, **that has since been completely fixed! **

Multiplayer replication bugs and other MP specific problems generally take longer to track down & solve but this is a big focus for us. We know how much fun multiplayer exploration is and we want that to be as stable as possible. 

We have a long list of currently present bugs and we’re getting through them as quick and diligently as we can. 

“No proper tutorial, no guidance, no map”

We’re going to touch on this in short, our goal with the start of our game is essentially this:

Spawn → Read Note by door → “Your gear will be waiting for you at Eagle Ridge Campground” → Read pamphlet to see what awaits you at Eagle Ridge Campground → Get dropped off and make your way to Eagle Ridge → Realize that you won’t be getting any gear, you have to scavenge what is left and work with what you got → Go back to where you entered and stick to Whitetail Trail → Find another cabin, find more loot needed to set up camp → EXPLORE

What we want players to know is that every trail leads to something &/or somewhere, follow them and you will encounter something of use. We have placed berry bushes on all POI’s so you always have a light snack option to keep you going until you have a permanent food source. We rely on the drive to self explore, “oh I found Jack’s Cabin Key, I wonder where that cabin is” and on your way there you stumble upon Field Lab Charlie which is also locked, so now you want to find THAT key. Always giving players another “mission”. 

We’re not saying what we have in place right now is FINAL but based on feedback we do see it working for the MAJORITY of players, so now we’re exploring what more we can do to help other players who want more guidance.

We are also discussing solutions regarding an in-game map but we have no additional info on this yet. 

What is coming?

Unreal Engine 5.4 → 5.7

This will be a huge optimization update with the ultimate goal of increasing performance across the board, decrease the amount of crashes and set us up to take advantage of a lot of the changes specifically made for open world games.

Mariner content update

We’re shifting focus to allow time in the day for working towards content we’re including in our very first major content update.

Additional info:

It’s important to remember that the above is not all the feedback we have taken notes on, we’re doing sentiment reports across reviews, Steam Discussion forums, Socials & Discord to ensure we are keeping track and prioritizing what is most critical. 

If you have previously left a review with your experiences, we would love to see an updated review if you played recently! Your honest feedback is what ensured us we were working on what was most critical to most players. 

Thank you everyone for all the amazing feedback so far, the work continues!

• The team