Community Crunch 426: Astraeos Trailer, LiveOps Update, Mod Spotlight and More!

We’re excited to see so many of you exploring Aberration Ascended since launch! Whether you’re taming under the spell of the adorable Cosmo or taking on the dangerous Yi Ling, it’s been great to see players navigating the new map, content and creatures. So let’s jump into updates on the latest live ops, Nekatus’ free version of Astraeos launching soon, a mod spotlight, and Arkpoc’s new mod list for this month! Whew!

Nekatus, the prolific creator of Fjordur and Svartalfheim, has a new mythological map offering in the works: Astraeos!

Immerse yourself in a Greek-inspired world spanning a massive ~264km², where majestic mountain ridges and marble-like cliffs give way to white beaches and a paradise of cherry blossoms in a full sakura biome. Explore ancient Greek ruins and temples, or sail vast oceans with custom Greek Trireme ships. Face off against powerful new bosses, alpha dino variants with enhanced loot, and a fearsome miniboss lurking in mysterious caves.

Prepare for mythological enemies hiding in the shadows while gearing up with custom cosmetic skins and standalone mods for structures and ships.

Astraeos’ free version will launch on October 10th, 2024, available day 1 for crossplay, with a premium version slated for later in the year!

This week, the Live Ops team focused on addressing various crash issues, and we’ve made solid progress in resolving many of them. We’ll continue working on the remaining cases, including ongoing efforts to fix some straggler console crashes. We also resolved an impactful rendering issue on PlayStation. With these crashes and rendering issues being addressed, we’ll shift our attention toward a number of level fixes and general content and gameplay bugs in the coming weeks.

To highlight a couple of fixes in progress: Rock Drake gliding and Ascension issues. A Steam server version was deployed today with a fix for Rock Drake gliding, which is now live for all players. We’re also prioritizing a fix for the Ascension issue, which is expected to go out with a planned major version patch next week. Of course, this isn’t exhaustive. The pipeline is chock full of fixes that will soon be ready to go live!

Additionally, we’re collaborating with our engineering partners and AMD to resolve a crash occurring on newer drivers. AMD has reproduced the crash and is making good progress on a solution. In the meantime, some players have reported success in eliminating the GPU crash on Aberration by rolling back their drivers to the following patch: https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/release-notes/RN-RAD-WIN-23-7-1.html

Download & play new custom content created by players, including new maps, creatures, items, and game modes, through a dedicated new Mod-browser directly within the game. Enjoy an endless stream of new ARK content as the creativity and talent of the community is fully unleashed for the first time across gaming platforms and stay tuned as we spotlight more Cross-Platform Mods each week!

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