News

Hello Survivors, 🧟

A big release of v17 is around the corner, and I am here to shed some light on what changes to expect, and how it’s all going to unfold so you are all maximally ready for the big update!

Multiple Game Servers🌎

One of the biggest issues of Idle Outpost is that everyone plays on the same server. Be it a strong player with 1 year of gear, or one that started playing yesterday, everyone is on the same server. And even though Arena has a league system, it still feels weird and unfair, and some heights just seem unreachable. Besides, there is also a timezone issue. When Arena Season ends, for some it can be a nice evening, while others may be asleep and have no chance to compete for the top positions.

Starting from v17, we are changing the whole system to have Regions, Zones, and Servers. 🎊

Because the change is huge, this will be happening in two stages.

Stage One:

During the first stage, you will get a mandatory v17 version update, which will place you on one of 4 servers, called eu.en.orig1, eu.en.orig2, eu.en.orig3 or eu.en.orig4.

They will all be placed in the Europe region, and English-speaking zone with Europe-oriented timelines. These servers will repeat the experiences and schedules you had before to keep things familiar. Your existing save data and everything will be transferred with it to new servers. orig1 will get the most old/strong players, while newer players will be filtered to orig4.

This will slightly make things better compared to how they were currently, and remove some of the issues. Even though it won’t solve the timezone case.

Stage Two:

During the second stage, we will create new regions and zones, and servers in them, that will have more unique configurations. such as APAC (Asian region), EU (European Region), and  EST (Americas). EU region will have two zones in it, for English-speaking players, and another for Russian-speaking players. This choice is based on our current user base, and as we get more and more players from certain regions, we will add more and more zones. The main reason for this is to make sure there are enough players in each particular time zone, that can play together simultaneously. Your orig servers will still remain as they are. But these new servers will now be available for joining whenever you guys want (if you want).

These servers will, of course, be brand new, meaning you can’t move your account there, but you can always create a NEW game account on these new servers, at any time. This is especially great if you want to start over. New servers will feature a lot of cool stuff such as unique exclusive items, and a more balanced calendar of events.

After stage two is commenced, all new servers will be called with naming convention of uta1, uta2 .. and so on. (uta stands for Universe Type A)

This will open for about 3 days or so, and then close for incoming players, and a new uta server will be opened. This is creating a unique server ecosystem where all players playing on a server, will start together! Making the whole experience a lot more fair, since everyone is MAX 3 days apart!

One of the important issues we are tackling is server depletion. As the server gets older, servers may start to contain less and less active players. There are a few ways to handle this, but we decided to go with the “Synchronization approach”. That means that instead of merging servers together, “nearby servers” that were created in the same time period, will synchronize their calendars and then when they do, players from these servers (all having the same experience) will now start playing together, and see each other in leaderboards.

Gear Skins⚙️

What really sucked in fight gear is that sometimes you had to choose between looks and stats, and well, the obvious choice was always stats, so the way everyone looks is just, totally random, lacking any personal touch. Starting from v17, we are introducing the SKINS!

This effectively separates the shovel into two parts - Shovel Blade and Shovel Handle.

Shovel Blade is responsible for probabilities of the drop of your gear, which decide item level, item rarity, and item stats.

For every X items you collect, you are guaranteed to receive a SKIN drop! Once a skin is unlocked, it’s yours permanently—you’ll never lose it. If you happen to receive a duplicate of a skin you already own, it will be converted into Tier Coins. These Tier Coins can then be used to upgrade your Shovel Handle. Each upgrade to the Shovel Handle increases your chances of finding skins of a higher Tier, giving you access to even better and more exclusive skins as you progress.

Now while there are a lot of skins that are totally the same except for how they look, different Tier Skins, have different stats that work on TOP of your existing item stats.

So basically if you have an item that has 5000 ATK, and a +50% ATK Skin, if you equip that skin, your ATK will effectively increase by 2500.

Besides that, Skins can also be assembled into Skin Sets, which is, finding 6 skins of the same skin sets. If you can find all six, you get an extra bonus to stats when it’s equipped.

There are 12 Skin sets at the time of release with more adding soon!

The real challenge is finding all items from the same skin sets, as this may require months of winning various events, to obtain new currency Rush Coins, and use them in the special Rush Sho

Rush Events💨

Which brings us to… Rush Events. Rush Events, are new types of in-game events that are basically Quest Lists for various aspects of the game. These are great for gathering tons of rewards, because you get rewards for completing each quest, then you get rewards for completing quest rounds, and then you also get rewards for getting top leaderboard places in being top to complete these quests on your server! The competition is very small because your leaderboard will be only 100 people, so chances of getting at least something cool are high, and rewards for the top 1, 2, and 3 places are AMAZING!

Rush events are also the only events that will grant you Rush Coins, which can be used in the Rush shop to get one of the rarest in-game skins that are impossible to get otherwise.

Sense of Community🫂

In v17, we wanted to increase the sense of community and the “feel” of other people grinding with you. This of course meant we had to introduce in-game chat, with various rooms, such as a room for the entire server or a room for your sub-group of survivors in any in-game event that competes with you. Chat will allow you to see the Achievements and activity of other players, and give you rewards from these activities if you are fast to react! (These are a limited amount).

For example, when someone gets to a specific place in the game, or does something first, it’s a cause for celebration for the entire server! And an activity will be posted in the chat, with limited amounts of gifts possible to claim.

We also made sure everywhere in the game you can be able to see what stats other players have in order to plan and choose your future gear or setup.

Evolving the Game Together🔝

Our plan is to have this entire thing happen in stages and during the next few weeks, there might be some bugs and issues along the way, but the idea behind this huge change is to make the game more fun for you guys, more exciting, and interesting. This is why we need your input and thoughts, because sometimes we can get lost in our decisions, and after all, everything we do - we do for you, so it’s extremely important for us to know your thoughts, and adjust if we need to!

We hope you will enjoy the new patch! 🗓️

Cheers!