Last Oasis Deep Dives Into Its New Travel Mechanics And Destructive Sandstorms

Over the past few weeks, Donkey Crew has been touting the changes and new content coming to Last Oasis when Season 5 kicks off later this year. Aside from getting major overhauls to gameplay mechanics and its walking wooden fortresses, the post-apocalyptic survival MMORPG will also be changing up the way players travel through the game world to make their journey’s much more immersive.

“For Season 5 of Last Oasis, we’re introducing a reworked travel system that does away with lobby-based travel, and instead works within the map itself. Reaching the map edge of an oasis will no longer allow for travel upon pressing a key - in order to travel from one oasis to another, you will need to find travel routes in the raging sandstorms at the edges of the oasis. These pathways through the storms will become available periodically, and upon crossing them, you will begin to travel to another map - no key press required at all.”

The team will also be revamping the UI to make it more informative with very minimal interaction required from the player. The new and improved UI will display the destination oasis, the number of players there, and how dangerous the journey will be. Each travel route will also have restrictions on the size of Walkers that will be able to pass through them.

“[…] Some of these pathways will, for example, only allow smaller Walkers to pass through, and disallow Capital, Large and Medium class Walkers from following through the sandstorm,” explained the devs.

“Travel routes are meant to be the only method of travel available, unless we deem it necessary to eventually add some other possible ways of travel. This means that many things are changing in regards to travel, not just the mechanic itself, such as resource requirements and teleporting around the world.”

Players will no longer be able to respawn in an oasis unless they’ve travelled there physically, either by using a Walker or on foot. This means that helping out another player in a faraway oasis will require players to make the long journey and will no longer allow them to teleport directly to where they’re needed.

In line with the new travel mechanic, the team will also be introducing roaming sandstorms and other weather effects. These are designed to not only make travelling a risky affair but to also “cleanse” the map of any unused structures that players may have built during their stay in other oases.

“[…] These storms roam the map systematically, all areas within an oasis will roughly be hit every one to two hours by a sandstorm on average - so, for example, if you stayed somewhere in the map for two hours without moving at all, on average you’d be hit by a sandstorm at least once.”

“Any player-built objects will require some sort of protection in order to survive the storms, anything out in the open will be periodically taking damage over time when hit by the storms. Over time, any Walkers and unprotected buildables (weapons and structures built on the ground without base walls to protect them) will eventually be destroyed by taking damage over time,” said Donkey Crew.

Donkey Crew is also looking into introducing more inclement weather events such as small meteor strikes to periodically destroy bigger and sturdier base structures. The sandstorms themselves will deal a small amount of damage to players over time which could necessitate the addition of different types of protective armor in the future to combat various weather effects.

There’s still no word on when Season 5 is coming out but based on what Donkey Crew has revealed so far, it’s going to be big. The team will be talking about the upcoming season’s reworked progression system and item rarity in their next dev blog so stay tuned. “We’re trying something new that, we expect, once again, might get emotions up there,” concluded the devs.

For the time being, you can learn more about the new travel and weather mechanics on the Last Oasis Steam Page.