Hinterland Studio has released another free upgrade to their game The Long Dark, this time focusing on the survival mode. Lots of other plans have also been outlined for the game in 2022, including the studio setting up a team focused on modding.

Some bigger changes have been announced too, such as paid updates to the game to make the big updates more sustainable for their studio and there's talk of splitting the game up between story and survival. That doesn't mean they will sell them separately and the change might be invisible to players and more about how they structure the development of it.

New features in this update include:

• New to Survival! Blackrock Region added to Survival Mode. It connects to Pleasant Valley via a Transition zone, and to Timberwolf Mountain via a cave system.
• New to Survival! The Noisemaker from Episode Four is now available for crafting and use in Survival Mode. Note that the Blueprint unlocks after you find your first Noisemaker, currently only discoverable in Blackrock Region.
• New to The Long Dark! The Ballistic Vest. It’s the first piece of protective gear in the game and offers strong defense against physical harms from wildlife attacks.
• Various quality-of-life improvements, including making Crampons repairable, and a new piece of soundtrack music, along with many bug fixes.

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You can buy The Long Dark from Humble Store and Steam .

8 years of Early Access and 7 Days to Die shows no signs of slowing down on the major upgrades, with Alpha 20 Experimental out now on Steam. It's opt-in, so you need to select it from the Beta menu for the game on Steam, and once it's stable enough it will be out for everyone.

This version is another huge change for the game with lots of new character / enemy models that look and perform better, along with some massive world-building upgrades to the whole experience.

Just some of what's new and improved includes:

• A brand-new version of Random Gen World creation with new cities, city tiles and a part system spawner. You will be blown away by it!
• Over 200 new POI’s and updates to many of the older POI’s. Over 550 Explorable locations total
• Navezgane has many city improvements, terrain improvements and new rural and wilderness communities
• Nearly 25 new HD characters with a couple with improved shaders
• 6 New weapons and 13 HD remakes with the addition of new primitive pipe weapons
• Overhauled shape menu with hundreds of new shapes organized and buildable from a simple frame with in-game, creative and level design support
• Block Placement Improvements
• We have added a Robotic Drone Companion to carry your extra gear, heal you and more
• Dynamic Imposter System renders accurate changes to POI’s and player bases at far distances
• Rendering improvements with 100s of new PBR models
• Quest Improvements including new restore power night Quests
• AI Enemy Improvements including city spawning, ducking, obstacle attacks, head tracking and burst attacks.

Seems this update has managed to pull back a lot of players too, with it hitting a recent peak count of over 40,000 players at a time, which is the highest it has been for quite a few months.

You can pick it up on Humble Store and Steam . Full Alpha 20 Experimental release notes here .

The Steam Deck will be a great device for many things, and one genre we're excited to play on the go (or in bed) are deck-builders and it sounds like Draft of Darkness will be a lot easier to play now.

"Draft of Darkness is a survival horror deck builder with roguelike dungeon exploration. Recruit allies, synergize their decks to create powerful card combos, manage your resources, explore procedurally generated maps and determine the outcome of the story."

With the latest update released on December 4, the developer has hooked up experimental gamepad support. It's not quite finished and there's a few issues here and there, but it already feels like it will be a good fit on a gamepad and so by the time the Steam Deck releases it should be in good shape. This feature came along with plenty more in the update, see the patch notes for more.

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Game Features:

• A card is only as good as its weapon - Attack cards are linked to a weapon, managing your weapons resources as well as your deck is vital to make sure your build is ready to defeat what lurks in the shadows.
• Is the darkness better as a group? - Find friends and foes lurking deep within the darkness. Manage the status of your party, avoid radiation and infection at all costs!
• Every death brings rewards - At the end of every run, you will receive credits that can be used to open booster packs to unlock new starting cards. Every death is a chance to find new strategies!
• Be careful what you ask for - Draft of Darkness has a unique "meta-story progression" system, every decision can alter the outcome of the story and allow for new ways to progress. Different choices are available in each run but be careful, some will have serious consequences.

Sounds like it's been doing okay since entering Early Access, with it seeing 2,000 sales within the first month. It also has a Very Positive user rating on Steam but there's less than 100 reviews for it so far - sadly it's a game that hasn't seen a lot of attention overall. A shame as it's a genuinely interesting blend of genres.

You can find Draft of Darkness on Steam . It's Early Access so it's not quite finished yet.

Path of Titans is slowly shaping up to be an MMO worth looking into with full cross-platform support and a big new update is out now adding in a ferocious new beast and cute little baby dinos.

The Allosaurus is the headline new playable creature, with it being able to hunt even the largest prey. The growth system also completely changes the game, and sounds like it makes it a huge amount more interesting. You now start off life in Path of Titans as a wee baby hatchling, where you need to complete quests to give you a growth buff that repeatedly over time will allow you to grow into the full awesome thing. Helping new players is a brand new tutorial area to teach you some basic too.

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More is coming with the next release planned to have small AI critters running around, giving everyone something a bit smaller to chase around and make the world feel a little bit more alive.

You can buy it on the official site .

Iron Gate are showing off more of what's to come with the next major upgrade for Valheim, along with a small content patch. First up we have patch 0.205.5 which is out now and it includes a new armour set, along with something stirring in the swamps - oh no, it's scary enough.

They also showed a teaser of this new armour set:

Okay, that looks pretty slick.

There's also a new console command to auto-complete help and these bug fixes:

• Fixed network issue when picking up items that just auto-stacked
• Location music transition fixes
• Swamps music volume tweak
• Some player animation transition fixes
• Monsters wakes up if hit by a ranged attack
• Jump animation issue fixed

You're all here for the new biome updates though right? Well, here's a shot of the Mistlands with a note from the developer that "The landscape is starting to take shape and the mist itself has begun to roll in, but what hides there still remains unknown…"

As for the mountains getting Caves, well, they also teased that "we’re working on caves for the Mountain biome, and they may or may not have some lupine inhabitants…" with this shot:

Valheim is available to buy on Humble Store or Steam .

Today the Terraria x Don't Starve Together crossover event is live, with both games seeing an update with elements of the other appear. Sounds like a lot of fun and a surprisingly good fit between them.

Why though? During the 10th anniversary of Terraria, the developer was asked "If you could implement another crossover into Terraria, what franchise would you choose?" and they replied "If I had to pick just one I would love to do something with Don't Starve Together". Shortly after, chats began and this is the result from both development teams.

Check out the trailer:

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New in Don't Starve Together:

• Added the Terrarium, which can be found hidden somewhere in the world.
• Added the Eye of Terror, which can be defeated to obtain Milky Whites and the Eye Mask.
• Added the Twins of Terror, which can be defeated to obtain the Shield of Terror.
• Added new boss statues.
• Added the Suspicious Peeper and the Friendly Peeper.
• Added two new Crock Pot recipes, Frozen Banana Daiquiri and Bunny Stew.
• Added Terraria-themed World Settings and World Generation presets for the Forest and the Caves.
• Added Terraria-themed skins.

New in Terraria:

Added a Don't Starve themed seed

- Play with Don't Starve-inspired shaders and lighting
- Complete darkness is now dangerous to your health
- Players will need to eat or face hunger and eventual starvation
- A few minor Don't Starve inspired worldgen features
- Has substantially improved drop rates and availablility of Don't Starve related items

• Added the Deerclops, a mid-late pre-Hardmode boss hailing from the world of Don't Starve
• A variation on the Deerclops' boss theme, provided by Klei Entertainment!
• A few rare background clouds featuring characters from Don't Starve can now appear
• Added several new Don't Starve related emotes
• Main menu now has some links to some assorted Terraria-related websites
• Worlds using special seeds now have unique icons in the World Select menu to better tell them apart
• Added a config option for an older version of Smart Cursor Hold, labeled in the config file as "SmartCursorHoldCanReleaseMidUse". Changing this setting to true will make it so that Smart Cursor: Hold will IMMEDIATELY deactivate when releasing the hold button, even if the player is mining.

New Items

• Several new pets from the Don't Starve universe
• A collection of Don't Starve weapons and equipment, adapted to the world of Terraria!
• Wilson and Willow Vanity Outfits
• Several vanity hats and accessories
• Two food items, the Froggle Bunwich and Monster Lasagna
• The full array of standard boss related items from Deerclops
• 4 Don't Starve themed paintings

Where to buy a copy of either:

• Don't Starve Together: Steam .
• Terraria: GOG , Steam and Humble Store .

Ahead of another week of survival, Iron Gate has updated their popular co-op survival game Valheim with a mixture of different improvements but no major changes.

For starters they upgrade the Unity game engine from 2019.4.24f1 to 2019.4.31f1, which was "long-awaited" that should help fix some random crash bugs to do with pathfinding. Hooray for more stability! Additionally the comfort calculation was performance optimized, Mead bases show status effects on tooltip and some localization updates.

Bug fixes include:

• Jack-o-turnip cover offset fixed
• Spirit damage no longer affected by wet
• HP regen on mobs & bosses fix (They were previously regenerating HP faster than intended)
• Tar pits spawn fix (In some edge cases they spawned on the edge between two biomes)

In other news they also added some "discovery music" to areas in Black Forest, and they removed "clutter" from Mistlands so it's now "very empty".

ICYMI - Iron Gate also recently teased out the upcoming Mistlands update for Valheim, plus updates for Mountains.

Looks like the popularity of Valheim is holding pretty stable now at around 30,000 players online each day. The most recent Hearth & Home major update seemed to bring back quite a lot of players.

Buy Valheim on the Humble Store or Steam .

With the Hearth & Home update now behind them, Iron Gate are focusing on the next major biome update for Valheim with the Mistlands and some smaller updates too.

Hearth & Home took quite some time to be released since they're still quite a small team, although it was received positively once it was out as it added plenty to build and the combat was nicely overhauled to be a lot more dynamic.

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In a fresh development post they teased a shot of the Mistlands, noting that it's "not a final version, and that the landscape will likely change quite a bit before we figure out just exactly what the Mistlands will look like" and that it's not clear how the biome update will affect existing worlds just yet.

Here's the teaser shot:

Not exactly much to go by but it's nice to know progress is continuing. Additionally though, it seems some smaller updates will be coming that focus on the Mountains. The focus there is to have something a bit more interesting to explore and while there's no final version they did share some concept artwork:

Buy Valheim on the Humble Store or Steam .

Volcanoids is such a fantastic idea for a survival game. You build a base inside a big moving drill, that you continually upgrade and extend and now you can enhance it in many new ways with Steam Workshop support.

Not played it before? Volcanoids sets you up on an island that sees frequent volcanic eruptions, which are being triggered by strange mechanical bots. It's up to you to build, defend and explore while keeping an eye on the volcano for when you need to quickly dive deep underground in your big drillship.

This new update comes with over 60 mods ready to be installed and there's some pretty fun stuff to take a look at. There's a few that the developer put up themselves just to showcase the new system, with the COG Giant being quite possibly my favourite right now because that looks scary as heck coming out of the smoke. Check out the new trailer below:

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"With full modding support now in the hands of the Volcanoids community, we’re excited to see just how crazy things will get," said Volcanoids Marketing Manager, Richard Rampas. "We opened the doors early to a few excited modders in a beta branch just a few weeks ago and we’re already seeing all kinds of super cool mods ready in Steam Workshop. Shout out to Melodic Albuild, Lord Gregory, Labyrinth, and everyone else who’ve jumped in and started creating!"

You can buy Volcanoids on Steam . To celebrate the update it's 25% off until October 22. It's still in Early Access so expect some pipes to leak.