12:00am EST: The team is trucking on getting the Naval Update ready along with various improvements and fixes.

Naval Update

The Naval Update is still on track for February, and the team has been busy tightening things up ahead of release. Recent work has focused heavily on stability, performance, and polish—especially around deep sea systems and boat building. That includes fixes to the boat building UI, collider issues, and cleanup to reduce unnecessary allocations, along with improvements to how decay, physics bounds, and deep sea portals behave.

There’s also been a round of visual and usability improvements, such as better buoy materials, cleaner map marker behavior above fog of war, and fixes to NPC interactions tied to deep sea wipes. Overall, this batch is very much about refining what’s already there and making sure the Naval content is solid and ready to ship.

Auto Turret Improvements

Auto turrets received a round of under-the-hood improvements aimed at better performance and more reliable behavior. Aim direction is now properly saved and loaded, preventing unnecessary aim updates from being sent across the network. Idle behavior has also been tightened up—turrets will only run their idle tick when there are nearby connections, avoiding needless rotations when no players are around.

On the technical side, idle calculations have been moved back to the server to keep target acquisition in sync between client and server, and several networking optimizations were made to reduce expensive connection checks. A long-standing issue where the client could override offline turret orientation has also been fixed, ensuring turrets maintain their correct aim when loaded back in.

Fixes

Fix caboose slot machines not being interactable
Fix static caboose slot machines offset floating in the air
Fix NMS not respawning loot after server restart
Fixed a pooling bug with custom item icons
Fixes for foundation clipping rocks and clearinventory_clothingchanged
Server-only serialized field has been fixed
Fix player animations sometimes being left in weird states because of pooling
Fixed mounted ballistas flipping the player view when mounting

Other Stuff

Pressing escape will now save and close the sign painting dialogue (it only saved before)
Work on the upcoming Boxes and Artist Pack DLC’s
Gesture animation updates and blowpipe adjustments
Custom icon pooling has been optimized
Refactoring to sprinkler system
Medical syringe animation updates on inject friend wounded
A new TriggerParent volume processing mode has been optimized for better performance, controlled by TriggerParent.TickMode with specific optimizations enabled by default
Optimizations for buoyancy
Don't try to spawn a Travelling Vendor if the map isn't big enough to start with