12:00am EST - With one week before the update and forced wipe, we’re seeing an exciting new feature for teams coming in.

Our update preview stream will go live at 3pm EST. Follow @Rustafied for news throughout the day. Let’s get into it...

Team UI

Helk is working on a new dynamic for keeping track of team members. This team UI will not only shift the look of name tags over people's heads, it’ll give players the ability to distinguish their friends in a really fast, easy way. Still on a separate branch and a very rough work in progress, Helk shared some details about what we can expect (and even a short video).

Name tags will still appear over peoples heads and disappear after 4 meters, but now they’ll also be green dots which are used to identify your friends. These dots will stay visible after the name tag disappears and stay in sight up to 100 meters away. Looking directly at a friend will have their name show up at a distance Along with this, teammates will even show up on the map.

Helk mentioned that he knows some people are going to rage at this concept, but said if it truly isn’t good he’ll just remove it. Personally I’m excited to see how this will impact gameplay. It will be nice to not second guess friends in a firefight, be very useful for tracking neighbors and aquaintences, and also may open up more possibilities of randoms teaming up together.

Here’s a very rough work in progress video Helk shared with me. Keep in mind the UI is not yet complete and more needs to be done with regards to handling overlaps. Expect this work to be merged in early next week in time to go live with the update and forced wipe.

Hapis progress

Alistair has continued his work on adding puzzles to the monuments on the Hapis island map. As he mentioned to us last week, we can expect some of the monuments to have puzzles on Hapis, although more work will need to be done next month to continue adding them in.

Bandit town progress

Damian, Diogo, and Vincent have done a ton of commits for the next monument in the hopper: Bandit town. Although it is not yet merged in, a bunch of work has been made on materials, objects, water, terrain, and more. Although the artwork for this new monument is almost done, Damian shared that they are not planning on launching it with the next update in the interest of setting up more gameplay dynamics properly.

In the meantime, here are some more teaser shots Damian sent me: