Icarus Week 243 Gives Livewire a Major Mission Rework
RocketWerkz also previewed in-world fish and the Carbon Fishing Rod planned for the following week.
Icarus Week 243 focuses on one of the game’s earliest Olympus missions. RocketWerkz is giving Livewire a major rework, bringing new mission flow, clearer guidance, updated encounters, and a more developed setting to the first combat and defense Operation.
The update is available through the official Icarus Week 243 Steam announcement. RocketWerkz said the work is part of its continuing effort to bring older Olympus Operations closer to the quality of newer missions.
Livewire now features refreshed objectives, new hint tips, revised NPC dialogue, updated locations, and changes to its wolf encounters. The mission’s second location also received new per-player and difficulty scaling, while the radar sequence and surrounding areas were adjusted to make the operation easier to follow without removing its combat pressure.
The broader Olympus work is meant to address early missions that offered too little context for their objectives. RocketWerkz said newer operations do a better job of explaining tasks, setting scenes, and using active NPCs, so the Livewire update applies those lessons to an operation that has been in the game since its early days.
Outside Livewire, Week 243 fixes several reward, creature, building, and equipment issues. Mission rewards, including Blueprints, Workshop Items, and Legendary Weapons, should now unlock correctly instead of disappearing when players leave an active session. The Lava Hunter will no longer attack unrelated creatures or pursue players across huge sections of the map, and prebuilt structures should load over time to reduce mission stuttering.
Metal Grate building pieces now have destructible meshes. The update also corrects recipe inputs for Clay, Scoria, and Obsidian Sledgehammer Attachments, disables Beast Scanner scans on mounts, fixes the Snow Wolf carcass material, and addresses a Solar Backpack charging problem.
Fish and a New Rod Are Planned for Next Week
RocketWerkz also previewed the next step for Icarus’ fishing system. Fish will begin appearing naturally in rivers and lakes, with the varieties found in the world matching the fish available through fishing. Until now, the in-world population was limited to Fish01, Fish02, and the poisonous Fish03 piranha.
The game already has dozens of fish connected to its fishing system. The upcoming change will give those species a visible presence in the locations where players can catch them.
The following week will also add the Carbon Fishing Rod. Players will craft it at the Fishing Bench, and its improved stats should make it a stronger option than the basic rod.
For context, the Livewire work follows the earlier Olympus mission changes and Workshop additions from the recent Week 242 update.
Patch Notes: Icarus 3.0.21.155201-rel-DangerousHorizons
Week 243’s changelog is led by the Livewire rework, with additional fixes for mission rewards, prebuilt structures, creature behavior, audio, equipment, and building assets.
Notable Improvements
- Fixed cases where Mission Rewards (Blueprints, Workshop Items, Legendary Weapons) were not always unlocking correctly, causing players to lose their rewards when leaving the active session
- The Lava Hunter will no longer attack random creatures or endlessly chase players across the map
- Optimized Prebuilt Structure loading to reduce stuttering during missions
- Fixed Prebuilt Structures incorrectly connecting to existing resource networks
- Fixed Clay, Scoria, and Obsidian Sledgehammer Attachment recipes requiring incorrect item inputs
- Metal Grate Building Pieces now have destructible meshes and will break apart like other buildings
- Disabled Beast Scanner scans on Mounts due to incorrect damage modifier behaviour
- Fixed Snow Wolf carcass material being set on the alive mesh character BP
- Fixed held item not charging correctly when wearing Solar Backpack
New Content
- Livewire – removing DNT tag from tooltip for fallen wolf corpse
- Livewire – undevlocking epic Terrenus
- Livewire logic clean-up; no longer has to reference a function in wolf’s BP
- Livewire – improved logic around radar disabling at loc1 to be less repetitive
- Livewire – Mission Briefing step re-added, Prebuilt undevlocked
- Removing Double XP Event & Banner
- Adding custom function when ensuring a structure so that it can pass in a specific structure class
- Adjusting quests so that prebuilt structures now much finish building before quests kick off as they are now async and need to be guaranteed before the quest continues
- Updating all quests with prebuilt structures so that they can now be loaded async and the quests will not progress or try to use them until required to
- Exposing bypass settings to cleanup structure BP node so its easier to cleanup structures where needed
- Livewire – fixing typo in quest name and deleting some redirectors
- Livewire – updating mission briefing screen
- Livewire – reduced loc2 wolf spawns for no difficulty (testing), cleaned up unused tag, reduced wolf kill requirement down to 3 to match lowest potential spawn
- Dialogue delay adjustments
- Accumulation initial quest files (should have gone in with previous CL)
- Accumulation quest added preparation stage (knife, sickle, basic water purifier) and a number of hint tips throughout
- Livewire Spawnblocker at location 1
- Livewire fixing extra quest in table, undevlocking, and fixed on tooltip referencing crate in backpack (it’s on floor)
- Livewire – Prebuilt
- Balance pass of all new dialogue in livewire
- Updating new livewire npc to use updated help and thanks lines to match other new line when healed
- Livewire DNTs removed from tooltips, some tooltip clean-up, wolves at loc 2 are fewer on easier mode and scale up
- More audio file optimizations
- Livewire – Adjusting Locations of initial quest setup, added 2 new world objects, lootable radar and backpack, new quest queries and markers where required
- Livewire clean-up of initial setup logic
- Livewire – loot set dressing improved. Crate smaller and rotated, hedgehogs pre-damaged
- Livewire per player scaling and difficulty scaling improved for second loc
- Livewire – Hedgehog crafting subquest turned into a collect hedgehog part at a later stage
- Livewire hint tips added, some small tooltip changes elsewhere
- Livewire – dead wolves have fur now, and there’re 3
- Livewire staged bigger scene at equipment location with hedgehogs and crates
- Livewire added new Wounds modifier that doesn’t escalate so the quest doesn’t require more advanced doctoring
- Livewire updated highlightable text for NPC
- Livewire new NPC outfit, rename (it’s still Griff, but before she’s a medic)
- Livewire fixed replication of one search area and radar interactable. Redirectors cleaned up and some logic polish
- Livewire – Terrenus Elite no longer uses bespoke skeletal mesh
- Livewire rename dev temp named files with final names
- Livewire – Alpha Terrenus now uses the horsie v2 skeleton, mesh, and fur to be distinguishable
- Livewire – removing 2 VO events that were duplicates when I started using original Livewire quest flow
- Livewire- Updating quest tooltips to be more consistent, refer to radar station when activating/deploying/picking up instead of radar or station separately
- Livewire – updating fallen wolf highlightable tooltip
- Livewire now runs the new version of the quest
- Wolf body now has lots more blood around it for effect
- Cleaned up tooltips
- Added some more items into wolf body
- Livewire tooltip updates, making second loc travel area bigger so it can’t be snuck around, making cave not despawn immediately (300s lifespan at end)
- Livewire updates
- Moved updates to Olympus so it can now run there (still use faction johntest to start)
- Tidied up cave set dressing (added surrounding stone so it fits better into waterfall)
- Created new spawn locations for wolfpack and cave wolf spawns so I can offset them safely
- Repositioned area triggers so wolfpack triggers earlier since you can see them when you crest first cliff
- Livewire file moves and renames to their final intended structure
- Livewire updates
- New wolf corpse at site of fallen NPC which holds radar
- Location 2 wolf logic made more exciting and ambushy
- Location 2 now has persistent spawns from cave while radar is running
- Location 1 flow correction so you deploy before activating radar, and radar is disabled up until then
- Bit more setdressing for loc1 and 2
- Livewire Improvements SearchAreas on minimaps changed to be more visible and tightening up logic to ensure they disappear on time
- Livewire: Logic improved for radar icon cleanup at each step
- Livewire Improvements
- Fixed location spawns on Olympus
- Boars spawn at loc 1 instead of wolves
- Wolves now mostly stay up on the cliffside before the player gets there
- Epic now causes deep wound instead of blunt trauma
- Hedgehog crafting is now on start of quest
- Final subquest with Radar into retrieval pod
- Reduce size and take away giant rock backing of wolf cave so it fits better
- Prebuilt structures now load over time instead on instantly removing hitching from their load process
- Adding new hardening and logic around how prebuilt structures are used in quests
- Livewire wolves at cave loc reduced again to account for the additional 2 spawned in per player
Fixed
- Fixed an issue where clients sometimes wouldn’t get mission NPC dialogue speakers registered correctly, causing some lines to not play at all
- Fixed issues with stale actor pointers still existing within TrySpawnAdditionalAI on successive runs
- Optimizing a bunch of overly long looping events for better audio performance
- Fixed cooked-build GC fatal (VerifyGCAssumptions) from time-sliced prebuilt loads
- Fixed Clay, Scoria and Obsidian Sledgehammer attachments requiring the wrong item input
- Fixed capitalization of Trap for Garganutan Fishing Trap item
- Fixed Snow Wolf carcass material being set on the alive mesh character BP
- Added DM’s for Metal Grate build pieces and updated Blueprints
- Fixed spawned broodlings sometimes attacking the spawned egg due to mixed AI relationships
- Lava hunter – Should no longer attack random creatures and added an anchor to itself so it won’t chase the player forever (currently set to 250 meters as that’s the length of the prom lava arena you find him in)
- Fixed arrow ammo icon appearing on energy powered weapons due to it being set to display by default and not being told to hide for energy items
- Disable ability to use Beast scanner on Mounts because the UI says it takes extra damage when it doesn’t because we don’t apply the debuff modifier, which also prevents successive scans, allowing for XP/bestiary spam. Remove unused variables and tidy on Beast scanner BP. Disable tooltip for Creature highlightable row that is only shown when using the Beast scanner
- Fixed divide by zero error with Solar backpack due to incorrect array being used. Fixed focus item charge logic not taking slot number into account meaning focused items not in slot 1 weren’t being charged properly. Tidied BP logic
- Added description text to PreventRadiationSpread stat so that it shows up on tooltips.
- Irradiated Mutation (Wraith) and Prospector (Spectre) now fade their appropriate spec light setup when switching to corpse. Material Emissive is also scaled down to 0. Reduced Irradiated Mutation texture memory cost by 21MB
Week 243 keeps the focus on better mission flow while laying the groundwork for a livelier fishing system. Share your thoughts on the Livewire changes and the upcoming fish in the comments.
Icarus
Developed by RocketWerkz
