Fireside Chat | March

First of all, we apologize for the slightly delayed Fireside Chat, it's been a crazy crazy March for us with a lot of updates, a lot of testing, we had our first seasonal sale, content creation and so much more! Let's go over a quick recap of March!

Loot boxes no longer respawn loot

This was always the intended goal. We recognize that loot balance is not where it needs to be and we have done several updates around this and we will be doing more. This will be a continous WIP as we introduce more updates, new content etc.

DEMO is updated!

• We have updated the DEMO to better represent what the current product is, this also helps with save compatibility between DEMO and EA and more. Still a 2 hour in-game limit per session.

Why does my save not work??

• If your save was created PRIOR to 18.03 last month, you won't have any loot boxes showing up and you may have a completely fresh character. Unfortunately with the optimized loot boxes we had to pull them out, update and optimize the code and that did not allow us to ensure it was backwards compatible. We do apologize for this but we also ask for everyone to be as understanding as possible.

• We will do what we can to ensure saves are compatible between updates but please do keep in mind this will probably happen again as we progress through Early Access.

I have not been able to find any keys / electrical boxes?

• We identified some issues with a few of the keyspawns as well as electrical box spawns. We had the backend code applied but in the actual build it did not save, this took a bit of time to track down but we got to the bottom of it with some help from our amazing community!

• As of this LATEST update (EA1:26.04.04a | cl:9609) we can confirm all keys spawn as well as all electrical boxes.

Those are for the most part the bigger ones we've seen talked about! We have fixed a ton of bugs, made a lot of changes, optimized more and keep in mind, this is only the beginning everyone.

To continue this we had our first seasonal sale! We got a lot of new players and it's always so great to see them receive help from our existing community when they encounter a problem or have questions!

This is a good time to remind everyone that we are a small team of 6, where 2 of us take care of you awesome community folks! We're a small team with an ambitious project! If you have enjoyed your time in The Gold River and you like what we're developing here, leave a review! Let others players know what you like and dont like! By leaving a review you are positively helping our small team reach more players! (Do this for all the games you like playing! ;))

We also have a huge amount of people keeping an eye on our game, waiting for more updates, better optimization, better reviews etc. We recognize that being "Mixed" sends a "warning" sign through some, which is completely normal. Here were some of our top mentioned problems:

• Fatal Errors - FIXED - We had some funky gardenplots for a while but those have been completely fixed and this is the majority of negative reviews, meaning this is no longer a problem. If you encounter Fatal Errors when you OPEN YOUR INVENTORY or WHEN YOU LAUNCH THE GAME, revert / update your GPU DRIVERS.

• Multiplayer bugs - We have fixed a TON of multiplayer bugs, it's a lot more stable in the current stage.

• QOL things missing - We have since launch added.. Flag Markers, Sleeping, Makeshift Fires (our version of quick saving), being spotted and gassed no longer takes your backpack, PAUSE (Singleplayer) and MORE.

• This falls under QOL technically but.. MAPS. We are not real big fans of a handheld map, we find that often when you have this you start just skipping through the forest to optimize how long something takes etc. We have added Trail Maps - This is to us a great middleground, every trail leads to something / somewhere and we WANT you to stick to and stay on trails! We have carefully added POI's, environmental storytelling and MORE on these trails / locations you end up on.

We have a long way to go but we have a confident Roadmap we're sticking to, we're doing frequent sentiment reports, we check our bug reports daily, we test, play, look through feedback and more so often. We're here to do the work and we're not going anywhere. I think that summarizes March quite well + a few additional things Happy Camping everyone, more juicy information will come soon!