Hi Hurtworldians!

Happy new year to everyone, I hope you all had a Christmas / new year. I’ve been taking some much needed down time, disconnected from the world in a remote forest doing some real world survival, and am now recharged and ready for the next phase of Hurtworld.

Bug Fix Patch This Week

I’ve got some exciting things cooking for the next content patch, which focus on shaking up the raiding metagame but first things first I will be squashing the remaining bugs and gameplay issues that have come up over the last few weeks.

My current high priorities are:

Base walls not after respawn or connection

Items not generating colliders and falling through the ground

Wall stacking closer than intended

Player names being swapped / not being visible

FOV Exploits

I will hopefully have these issues sorted in a patch to go out before the wipe this Thursday, I don’t expect this to include a forced wipe.

Next content patch

Once I have the bugs under control the focus for the next content patch will revolve around making end game raid mechanics more balanced and interesting. This has always been a hard thing to achieve while players are able to build themselves or their totems in with stacked walls and is definitely not how the systems were designed to be used.

Changing The Removal Hammer

For as long as players have the freedom to build and remove any wall as they please, doors become only useful for airlocks, the 50% cost of building and removing a wall isn’t nearly enough to compare to the security gains you achieve by building yourself in. This needs to go. The current prototype design is that construction pieces can only be removed during the grace period soon after they are placed to correct mistakes (say 5 mins). This will force good placement of doors, misdirection of pathways through fake doors, and maze structures to be key to building a secure base. At this point doors and walls being significantly different in use, doors will likely become the weak points as a trade off for providing more accessibility. Blowing through a weak door or a strong wall will be a key decision in raiding a base.

Renovation Drills

Locking walls in place after the grace period makes renovating your base a very expensive exercise, you would need to c4 your own base just to remove a few walls or doors. This obviously isn’t feasible, but this leads us to a clue as to how to solve it. We create a new type of wall removal device (like c4 or raid drill) that can only be used inside your own base for a tiny fraction of the cost. The main cost we want to add to this device is time. This renovation drill could be cheap and quick to deploy, but take a good amount of time (say 30 mins) to actually complete its task of removing a build component. This would add a massive amount of inconvenience cost to using walls instead of doors to build yourself into a vault as when you login next you have to wait the removal time for each layer of wall you build yourself behind. This will also create a much higher permanence to bases. Raiding a base and being able to make it vanish in seconds isn’t a great mechanic and often makes it hard to see what happened to your hard earned fortress. Being able to come back and see the shell of your remaining base, or the new owners enjoying it should create a much richer narrative for everyone in the server.

Beyond Walls

Another mechanic I will be experimenting with internally will be the ability to reinforce specific parts of your base that show no visible signs from the outside, allowing defenders to strategically choose the parts of the base they think raiders will exploit to get inside and by nature also leave other parts vulnerable. The hope is that this will add to complexity of the metagame by adding an extra layer of subterfuge to the building process. Raiders will need to decide whether to take the obvious route into the base, or try to find a less obvious weak point.

We still need to a proper design pass on these ideas, things may change before implementation. I plan on running some community driven raid events as test cases to tune the new features before sending them out into the wild.

I don’t have a release date for this patch yet as its a while off, will re-evaluate once we get the bugs under control.