12:00am EST - As January winds down, development is chugging along as the team pushes toward the February Naval Update while rolling out a steady stream of fixes, polish, and quality-of-life improvements.

Naval Update

There’s been a huge amount of work happening behind the scenes as the Naval Update barrels toward its February 5th release. Recent changes have focused heavily on stability, performance, and cleaning up edge cases across the Deep Sea, Floating City, and player-built boats. This includes smoothing out ocean transitions, fixing crashes and lag spikes, improving map and UI behavior when entering or leaving the Deep Sea, and tightening up rendering and LODs to reduce pop-in and client strain.

On the gameplay side, AI and naval combat continue to get refined. Scientists at sea are behaving more reliably, ghost ships and PT boats are receiving balance and behavior tweaks, and boat systems—from buoyancy to cannons and steering—are being optimized and hardened. There’s also a number of naval missions in the works. Overall, this phase is all about polish and reliability, making sure the Naval Update lands in a solid state when it launches on February 5th.

Artist Pack DLC

The Artist Pack DLC has landed on the staging branch and is very much a work in progress. The headline addition is a new paintball gun, though it’s clearly early days—right now it behaves more like a standard weapon, complete with real damage and placeholder sounds. Paint splatter effects are working, but color selection isn’t hooked up yet, and it’s likely this item will be rebalanced or pushed more toward creative or utility-focused use before release. Paintball overalls are also included, though their stats and color behavior still appear to be in flux.

On the creative side, several new deployables and assets are being tested. A new art easel is present but not functional yet, with canvas interaction and collision still broken. Multiple new canvas sizes have been added, along with a wide range of paintable picture frames—including light-up, ornate, and scrap styles in large and extra-large variants. There’s also a new paintable window and a reactive target that can be painted, shot, and auto-resets, though placement is currently limited. Overall, this DLC is firmly in the “testing and iteration” phase, with more polish and functionality expected before it’s ready for release.

Console UI

Work from a previous Hackweek project has resurfaced, with renewed progress on improving the in-game console UI. Recent commits focus on polishing the server admin UI tab, cleaning up item list behavior, and addressing long-standing issues with Unity’s default scrolling—resulting in a smoother, more usable experience. Keyboard navigation has also been added to item lists, alongside various fixes, optimizations, and visual tweaks as the work continues.

Fixes

There are a slew of fixes underway. Here is a summary:

Fixes for manifest errors
Fixed native grid crash when buoyancy batching was enabled
Occlusion system fixes and safeguards
Fixed SKS skinnable issues
Fixed vending machine visibility issues
Fixed junkpile ladder clipping
Fixed issue where photo frames rendered photos onto the frame itself
Fixed vending cluster pool leak
Fixed visible holstered items garbage collection issues
Fixed burst compile errors and final compile blockers
General animation fixes
Fixed errors stopping one-shot animations when players leave network range
Fixed copy/paste duplicate entity issues
Fixed gesture audio not playing correctly and reset playable graph state to avoid pooling issues
Fixed sync var inheritance issues
Fixed TriggerParent null reference crashes
Fixed toast notification pushing issues
Fixed stay-close death logic
Fixed cloud rendering issues during demo playback with weather overrides
Merged multiple backend and performance systems:
Door allocation fixes

Other Stuff

Work on charms
Progress on the render pipeline (optimizations)
Switched server to custom Unity build 2022.3.41x1
Indirect instancing
Mountable player sync bypass improvements for AI interactions
IO budgets
Improved shader behavior
Integrated Discord SDK 1.8
CCTV budget optimizations