Game developer Dean Hall made a buzz when he announced that his studio RocketWerkz was working on a survival game called Icarus. Hall was known for creating DayZ, a multiplayer survival game that has a dedicated following but has sort have grown stale like the zombie genre overall. His newest creation, Icarus, drew an eager crowd hungry for more survival action. But fans got more than they bargained for as Icarus turned out to be a super tough offering.
In Icarus, players either team up in co-op or go solo as an astronaut investigating a planet called Icarus – a world that was terraformed to make it more hospitable. But things have gone wrong and attempting objectives in timed missions for players is brutal.
Icarus is a session-based survival game and demands focus and sharp skills as players scavenge resources, gathering supplies like food, water, and oxygen, and constructing shelters from the hostile environment. The survival sim prizes realism to an extent that if players don’t make it back to their lander before the timer runs out, ready to be extracted, they lose their character, and skills progress made, for good.
But in a big change, RocketWerkz has announced via a Steam Community blog post that this permadeath will now be alleviated by so-called ‘Insured Drops’ which will mean that “any character left on surface after the time has expired will be saved and returned to the HAB”. This update also sounds like it won’t be the first to soften the game’s unforgiving nature.
“We’ve been talking and working away behind the scenes on how we want to approach difficulty, particularly for new players, and you’ll now see we have added ‘Insurance’ to a handful of early-game drops,” the post reads.
Referring to the new Insured Drops feature, the post went on to say that “this adjustment is the first of many, giving us a chance for us to test out some theories and concepts we’ve been working on behind the scenes. Expect more significant changes on this front in future updates”.
As detailed in a community post, around 15 of the 60 or so missions available in Icarus will have the option to be insured. This means players may feel less pressure as if they don’t get their character off the planet in time they now won’t lose all their progress forever. Their character will be returned to the space station as if they didn’t die on a hostile planet, lost to civilisation forever, which is pretty good insurance.
The new Insured Drops as well as an extra mission can be found in the latest update.
How To Stop Losing XP After Death:
One of the most brutal aspects of ICARUS is the XP feature. If you die, you instantly lose all your progress toward the next level. Later in the game, that can be long stretches of gameplay — and all totally wasted because you didn’t notice a rampaging polar bear rushing straight for you. A single slip-up can end your run. Whether its surprise wolves or dropping down a ledge that’s just a little too steep. If you’re sick of losing all your XP, there is a way to save yourself a whole mess of grinding.
However, if you’re less worried about XP and more worried about your lost inventory on death, there’s another separate trick you can utilize to keep everything in your inventory. We’ll explain both tricks in the full guide below — anyone can do them and they don’t require mods or cheats or anything like that. Just remember that you will need to be playing solo or be the host of a session for these tricks to work. If you’re playing with someone else in multiplayer, these methods are not guaranteed to save your XP.
How To Save Your XP / Inventory After Dying
Each time you die in ICARUS, you’ll respawn at your bedroll and lose all current XP. If you recover your body, you’ll be able to get back your inventory — including valuable workshop items from space. There are two simple tricks you can use to get back your gear / XP faster. They both have drawbacks, so you’ll have to decide for yourself which to use in your situation.
Method #1: Alt+F4 – For this trick, simply press Alt+F4 right after you die. Immediately! As fast as you can. Do it right away instead of respawning — this will automatically close the game and exit before your current state can be autosaved. When you return, you’ll respawn a few minutes before your death, usually near where you left off and with all your inventory / XP intact.
Okay, so this method is great for keeping your XP and your inventory. There are two drawbacks: you will lose anything that you gained in the interim (between the autosave and death), and you have to press Alt-F4 immediately after death. If you don’t do it fast, you can lose your window. You won’t be able to recover. There is still a way to keep your inventory by sacrificing your XP.
Method #2: Quitting Prospect – This method will not save your XP, but it will save your inventory if you don’t think you’ll be able to recover your body. After death, instead of respawning, simply exit to the menu then remove your character from the current prospect. You’ll lose all the XP you earned but you’ll reappear in space with your full inventory.
If you use these two tricks, you can avoid catastrophic failure in ICARUS. It is better to just stay alive and not get killed at all, but if the worst does happen, now you know how to fight back against some serious punishment.