Welcome to Week 162 of Icarus, where we dive into the latest updates and improvements that enhance your gaming experience. This week’s update focuses on a significant multiplayer weapon fix that has been thoroughly tested, along with performance enhancements that promise smoother gameplay. Additionally, we introduce new Coconut Seeds, which can be harvested from wild coconuts and planted to grow your own crop back at your base. These seeds are also available through the Orbital Workshop, allowing players to cultivate coconuts even on maps where they don’t naturally occur. Let’s delve into the details of these exciting updates.

This Week: Weapon Fix & Performance Improvement
As previously mentioned, an experimental build was deployed over the holiday period to address a critical issue where players connecting to a multiplayer game were unable to fire weapons in certain circumstances, particularly in older prospects. This problem affected guns, bows, and crossbows, which have their own special inventory controlled by a container inventory manager. Unlike regular inventories on benches, these items track ammo and attachments, causing the game to be unaware of ammo levels as it waited for information replication from the server. The sheer number of these inventories needing replication led to this issue. Other affected items include medical kits, seed pouches, and most T2 equipment and above.

Several factors contributed to this problem. One key issue was the lack of cleanup for old container inventories, which persisted even after items were created, used, discarded, or destroyed. The developers have now improved inventory management by ensuring these inventories are cleaned up appropriately and adding checks during prospect startup to clean up any unused inventories that may have been missed. Additionally, the way data is replicated has been modified to allow for targeted updates, preventing network flooding every time a single gun is fired and its inventory updated. These fixes result in improved performance by reducing the number of inventories each player needs to manage and update, sending less networked data, and keeping clients better synchronized with the server.

This Week: Growable Coconuts
Starting this week, harvesting coconuts may yield coconut seeds. Like other seeds, these can be used for crafting or planted to grow your own coconut tree for harvesting. Furthermore, packs containing these seeds will be available in the Orbital Workshop, enabling players to grow coconuts on maps where they are not found naturally. Coconuts have also received a quality-of-life improvement, as they are now stackable, their weights have been adjusted, and wild harvests yield more coconuts.

This update ensures that all food plants can be grown regardless of location, adding versatility to the game’s farming mechanics. Next Week: Bug Fixes and QoL
Looking ahead to next week, the development team plans to address several bugs and issues reported during the holiday period, along with some small quality-of-life improvements. This maintenance will set the stage for the planned work for the year. Your support makes these updates possible, so be sure to check out the Icarus Pets Bundle and Icarus Complete the Set bundle on Steam.

Changelog v2.2.37.131606-rel-Laika includes enabling Coconut Seeds, Workshop Coconut Seed pack, and growable Coconut Palm in crop plots. Coconuts now stack to 10, with adjusted weights and increased yield from wild harvests. The maximum partial network bunch size has been doubled, and various default network connection timeouts have been increased from 3 to 6 minutes.