And with that, ladies and gentlemen, the New Frontiers is live with ICARUS Week 90 Update! Prepare yourself for the new map, PROMETHEUS, three new biomes, six new narrative missions, new creatures, new type of Exotic, new workshop items, resources, and craftable items. Most of this content is DLC-exclusive, but the new Open Worlds Missions interface and Performance Improvements will be coming to the base game as well. In this article we will go over the distinctions.
Note that right now would be a great time to buy any of the ICARUS titles (including the DLC), since all of them are going to be on a Relaunch Sale on Steam: you can snatch ICARUS: New Frontiers for just $25.49 (regular price $29.99).
New Frontiers Expansion
First, let’s discuss what awaits us in the DLC:
New map: PROMETHEUS with new Volcanic, Swamp, and Alien Grasslands biomes
“Welcome to Prometheus, a region of Icarus where the terraforming process failed and left the raw alien landscape and life intact but not unaltered.”
New extreme weather events for every biome
10+ new mutated alien creatures: among them are Dreadwings, Lava Hunters, Needlers, Dracs, and Drifters
Zone-exclusive Red Exotics
30+ new items in the Orbital Workshop, as well as the ability to purchase these from the surface via Cargo Pods
6 “Operations”: narrative missions that get you deeper into PROMETHEUS territory
Open World Missions system: you will now be able to launch any mission from your Open World mode (more on that under “Base Game Content”), along with the “Operations” introduced in New Frontiers
100+ new craftable items, including deployable items and tools.
5 new raw resources, which include Obsidian, Scoria, Super Cooled Ice, and Crystalised Miasma, used in new recipes, across multiple tiers
Okay, if these alien creatures are going to look this fluffy, you can’t not expect me to try to pet all of them
Once you purchase the DLC, it should automatically download along with your ICARUS update on Steam. If you aren’t seeing that happen, try restarting Steam or run a “Verify integrity of game files” under “Installed Files” in Properties.
New Outposts
Separate from the DLC and available for purchase are 3 new Outposts: Tecton, Everbark, and Cactus.
Tecton: 1×1 km map in the Desert region, featuring a cliffside with twin waterfalls, a large oasis, and towering cliffs on the map edges. ($3.99, currently $3.59 on sale)
Everbark: 1×1 km map in the Forest region, featuring a waterfall flowing into a winding river crossing the map, underwater caves (with secret ore deposits), and lush forests. ($3.99, currently $3.59 on sale)
Cactus: 1×1 km map in the Desert region, featuring white water rapids cutting through the map, with rock formations and riverbanks, a large arch with stalactites, and vast dunes covering the landscape. ($4.99, currently $4.49 on sale)
Note that the Cactus Outpost is about a $1 more expensive. Saguaro Cactus Fee?
Remember that Outposts are separate, low threat, persistent maps, designed to help players focus on creative building projects they might have in mind. They do not come with any new items, or any narrative or mission content.
Base Game Content
Open World Missions
Of course, it’s understandable that you would like to hold off on the DLC and try out the new Open World Missions first: the interface will be added to the base game in the upcoming Hypatia update, where the Olympus and Styx missions will be retrofitted to the new system.
The Open World mode allows for permanent bases and unlimited map exploration: it is from here that you will now be able to launch any of the missions you would like, along with minor, dynamic “SMPL3” missions for even more replayability. The Missions mode still exists for the old, timed mission experience, and is currently the only way you will be able to obtain either the Normal or Red Exotics for your gear outside of Operations.
If you have the New Frontiers, Operations launched from the Open World is another way you can earn the Exotics. In the upcoming patch for the base game, there will be a way to extract Exotics on all Open World maps.
Outposts continue to be separate from mission content, meant primarily for building.
Performance Improvements
It may be just a little bit longer before the performance fixes make it to the base game, but testing is currently underway: you can join the Experimental Branch on Steam at any time (you will need to select “Betas” and then “Experimental” under game’s Properties) — developers are currently working on the stuttering and hitching issues caused by caves and voxels loading in background.
Note that there may be more issues caused by the New Frontiers content in particular: if you are experiencing frequent crashes, you might want to try out the Experimental branch or wait for the next update that should come with fixes for the expansion. (However, beware that the branch might get updated often, so if you have slow download issues, it might get frustrating.) If you have a Steam Cloud conflict right now, try starting the game — often that completes the sync and solves the issue.
Some UI elements are also getting a new look: the Workshop tab has never looked this sleek (maybe that’s because it literally looks like the Blueprints interface now)
All in all, RocketWerkz promised to continue releasing updates for the base game, like the Open World mode for the base game maps, an Orbital Exchange System for your gear, and new items in a Biolab Research Lab.
These updates will continue coming alongside more New Frontiers content: the roadmap includes more zones on the PROMETHEUS map, unlocked by future Operations.
If you would like to see all of the base game updates from Week 90, we also included the full list below!
Note: This list simply includes the commits from the last week, changes that are part of New Frontiers have not been included.
Fixing Quest Typo
Adjusting Miasmic Modifier so it doesn’t get added every few seconds
Fixed T3 Masonry bench not having the T3 Masonry Bench recipe set, preventing crafting of new Brick building sets.
Fixing up Frozen Ore UI
Added specific dynamic quest rewards for the unique fruit and vegetables, rather than a single reward for both.
Fixed Electroshock being 10x as much damage as other elemental effects, due to high tick rate but same damage. Have reduced tick rate and damage to do the same overall dps.
Fixed water bodies not receiving the correct network settings.
Added validation to rep policy table to warn if policies target classes don’t have bReplicates set as it can potentially cause issues with the policy not propagating to child classes.
Adding Seeker Trailer to Title Screen
Fixed floating voxels and foliage across purple and green quads and moved floating deep ore deposit, prometheus
Fixed Obsidian Arm armor being the same as it’s chest armor, setup stats for the arm armor.
Disable custom weather for quests in open world
Added extra icons to the different ‘New Game’ buttons and map selection buttons to show what kind of content is available. Added one-time popup when clicking on ‘New Game’ button that describes new ‘Outpost’ mechanics introduced in New Frontiers. Added bold text on top right corner of screen making it more obvious if the player is currently selecting ‘Open World’, ‘Missions’, or ‘Outposts’
Enabled CPU Access flag on the various SlimeTrail static meshes
Fix orbital laser strike effects are not correctly replicating to clients
Swapping Map Icon from mission object to quest, as the icon was being culled due to relvency settings
PRO_Story_6: Fixed replication on non-deployable cave assets, respawned cave assets that are unable to have replication added easily
PRO_Story_6: Fixed decal orientation, and decal and light respawning on reload.
Shifted Story6s cave lights and decals into a separate IcarusActor so it reloads and replicates correctly. Increased lighting intensity values for some of Story6s cave lights so they show up better in the darkness
Adding RepGraph Policy for Orbital Lazer and setting up replicated variables so the effect plays correctly on clients
Fixed player reward records not reloading previously received red exotics counts
Adding Collision to bone armor packaged mesh
Fixed reloading preventing miasmic debuff not removing on death.
Reduced the titanium cost of the Encrypted Satellite Communcator, added some electronics to be representitive of the device’s tech level.
Adding fixes for mission 4 & 6 mission blockers, after spawning AI and logging out, missions become uncompleteable
Rebalanced in-world exotics availability.
Red exotic collectables have reduced rewards (harvested exotics have the same rewards).
Reduced chance of red exotics collectables to appear to 20% from 25%.
Cleaning raw red exotics now grants 2 red exotics. With the above changes this means that harvesting exotics yields twice as many rewards, while other sources provide the same amount.
Noxious Crust that grants exotics of either kind now grant 5 instead of 10 (universal 5 across all resources per Noxious Crust).
Increased spawn rate of Purple Exotic voxels, now spawns at 10% chance rather than a flat 10 per mission.
Doubled yield of Exotics from Purple Exotic voxels.
Fixed game mode using the wrong value when checking if exotic plants had been spawned on startup. This was causing exotic plants to be duplicated each time the prospect was reloaded.
Fixed issue where researching new workshop items through the OEI would fail
Increased Aluminum building tier to match Stone, causing it to only take damage in the same storms as stone buildings.
Red Exotic Plants suffer from fatigue and their growth rate decreases every harvest by 100%
Generating Enum based on farming seeds row to use rows in code correctly
Tomatoes and Beans are no longer rotated so that their stakes are off the ground when planted in Crop Plots. D_FarmingSeeds rows can now specify the kind of random rotation they’d like to apply to visible mesh when planted
Adding in a plant fatigue for all plants, each harvest will increase the effectiveness of the plant fatigue modifier by 10% for all normal plants and 100% for exotics, the fatigue modifier reduces plant growth and yeild, making it beneficial to replant plants every 4 or so harvests
Bump the recommended nVidia driver version to 537.13 Game Ready
Dedicated contributor at EIP Gaming and a part-time collector of books she will never have time to actually read. Jumps on the newest releases just as quickly as on the uncovered dusty collections from the basement. For her, shiny graphics can never be an excuse to not have a polished player experience or an immersive story.
