Hypatia Part II | Olympus Operations and respawning Exotics

Hypatia Part II is here.

You can now play 21 Operations that have been transitioned over from Missions in your Olympus Open Worlds. These Operations have been hand-selected with a range of challenges to choose from.

We’ve also added Exotic respawning in Open World, with the new Meteor Shower event occurring every 3 hours and spawning new nodes, veins, voxels and exotic plants.

Jump in and have a read.

• Open World Selection Screen now shows Operations for Olympus and exotics for all 3 maps
  
• Fixing Desert Mammoth Trophy not being the Desert Mammoth Trophy when placed
  
• Fixed Tusker Trophy deploying as Komodo Trophy
  
• Fixed Viscid only granting Wolf kill experience by accident
  
• Encroachment: Extermination - Fixed clients seeing incorrect kill requirements for The Great River, showing the objective as complete when it wasn’t
  
• Meridian: Extraction - Added supply drop to deposit ingredients into rather than the same box to fix a bug where the box would clean up too fast. Changed the mission text to match
  
• Improvements and fixes for Strange Harvest: Research and Strange Harvest: Bio Research
  

Hypatia Part II is here, and as promised, it features Olympus Operations.

21 missions have been added as playable Operations in your Open World prospects on our original map, Olympus. These 21 missions have been hand-selected as missions that best suit the Operations model and Open World play. They provide unique challenges that suit a more established prospect where you often start with higher-tier gear.

We also recently reorganized the Olympus Missions, allowing for a smoother progression through Operations and allowing you to do more Missions without having to repeat every ‘scan’ Mission. When you’ve completed all the Operations, this will also fully unlock all of the Olympus Missions as individual prospects to play the traditional way.




Hypatia Part II also brings the long-awaited Exotic Respawning and Open World Exotics to Icarus.

This means Exotics can now be extracted from your Open World prospects through exotic deposits, earned along side enzymes in Horde Mode, or farmed from plants on Prometheus. Next week, we’ll also add Exotic Voxels to mine.

Exotics now respawn in Open World games through the new Meteor Shower event.

Every 3 hours there will be a map-wide Meteor Shower that will only trigger if you have fully extracted an exotic deposit during that time period. This causes up to three new exotic veins to spawn across the map. On Open Worlds currently only three exotic veins can be 'active' at any one time.

This also resets your Radar scans, allowing you to rescan and find new veins in their new locations.

Regardless of whether the Meteor Shower happens or not, every three hours Exotic Plants on Prometheus prospects have a chance to spawn, and Geysers have their completion numbers reset, allowing you to gather exotics again.




Our Batteries project is making progress, and we wanted to give you an update on where this is at.

Our recent work includes adjusting outward network flows locally to allow for brownouts and modifiers to be applied when the power output isn’t high enough. We have also allowed for variable flow rates and crafting to still occur even when you’re lacking adequate power supply, but at a reduced rate of speed.

We are still in the testing phase of all of these adjustments, so they may change considerably from the current forms. To make sure this is effective and player-friendly, we’re doing a QoL pass at the same time as we play with these features.

We’re also looking to include a system which allows players to debug networks in-game, either using tools in-world or having a unique UI.




While it may not be mentioned in our weekly blog each week, performance is an ongoing part of our work, and those who dive into the detailed changelog below will notice some of the improvements we’re making week-on-week.

As part of the performance work, we have been looking at a way to reduce the impact of loading across the map which can cause stutters. This is mainly focusing on adjusting the way caves are spawned in, and we’ve had some early positive results, but this is still very much in the early stages of testing.

We have also been looking into what impact we can have in reducing the pack sizes of the game and therefore the download size. As some of you have mentioned before, the process of downloading and patching the updates can be lengthy, due to the stark differences in how Unreal Engine packages build and how Steam wants to unpack them. What we’re hoping is this work will improve the download speed, which will at least impact this positively. This will go through rigorous testing before being released, but if all goes well this should be out in the future.




Next week we’ll be adding new Deep Ore Veins to all maps, increasing the possible resources that can be collected from them and the number of Deep Ore Veins available. In the past, this was limited to lower-tier resources the majority of the time. Next week we’ll be releasing the full list of all the new resources that can be gathered.

As part of this patch, we’ll be adjusting the way resources are set up which may cause the respawning of some voxels, trees and plants in various areas of the map. If there are any issues, make sure to report them here in feature upvote.