Here at Spilt Milk Studios, we love making games. Why? Because we love to make people smile. It’s the greatest feeling. With Lazarus, we had a chance to reach more people (and hopefully make more smiles) than ever before - it was to be a fast paced MMO that genuinely broke new ground. A huge gameworld to romp around in, filled with thousands of enemies and players, all fighting over cool technology and territory. Never before has such a small team attempted something so grandiose.

And we came close to realising it. Painfully close!

But, sometimes you face challenges that you simply cannot overcome. We spent months and years with a tiny team, exploring the challenges and opportunities of a new design space - persistence, scale, the kinds of things that the cloud can offer - and in the process providing feedback to help our technology partner Improbable improve their tech as well as making Lazarus brilliant fun. and we’re immensely proud of what we achieved. But after a long period of Open Alpha, we’ve made one of the toughest decisions of our careers: we are not going to release Lazarus.

So what does this mean? It means we’re shutting Lazarus down. It has been in Open Alpha for nearly 3 years - which has been incredible, and is longer than some much better known MMO’s - and we’ve made some tremendous new friends along the way. But Lazarus is dead. This was a tough decision, but since this was a pre-Early Access Open Alpha, made available free to our community, we hope you’ll understand our decision, and join us in saying goodbye.

Spilt Milk Studios is fine though - we’re alive and well, and this won’t affect us moving forward. We’ll mourn the passing of this amazing, ambitious game, and we will move forward stronger for the experience.

We’ll leave Lazarus live until Thursday the 12th of September (12/09/2019), at which point the game’s servers will be taken down forever, and a tear will be shed.

We’d love to have a farewell stream with the community before then - we’ll announce details about this on our Discord[discord.gg].

We’ve put a Q&A below here (as well as on our Discord[discord.gg]) so please do read them - but feel free to ask us questions over there and we’ll endeavour to answer them as openly as we can.





Lazarus is a brilliant game and the people who play it with us are amazing, but it did not reach a point during its alpha that would give us the confidence that it would launch successfully. Running a game has many elements - things like server costs and software licenses, the cost of maintaining, running and updating the game as it grows with new features and content, and the licensing of all of the services we use to run things like player accounts and whatnot.

Put simply, if we were to launch Lazarus, the cost of maintaining and expanding the game as we marketed it to more players and worked on our monetisation would put a dangerous financial strain on an independent games studio like ours. We love both Lazarus and the community that has grown around it, but we can’t take that risk.

12/09/2019 at 12:00GMT (midday). The game will run as normal until that date, but we won’t be releasing any further updates or making fixes.

We’ve got a bunch of other projects to work on, and we enjoy talking about them as openly as we are able to. We even have some secret ones! Why not come over and chat to us about them on our Discord[discord.gg].

Hit us up on Discord[discord.gg].

This update is huge, with nearly 100 tickets addressed. We’re super chuffed!

The game’s massively more performant, far fewer lag related issues, plus tons of cool new stuff as we prepare for Early Access (soon!). Read on for the full deets!


- When you blow up a Drone Fighter, you can see their pilot left behind, drifting in the cold void, regretting their decision to fight you for the last few seconds of their life. Grim? Maybe. Satisfying? You betcha!

- Shielders now have additional gameplay, whereby their Shields have HP, meaning you can shoot them to wear their shields down, then try to kill them before they power them up again.


- We’ve updated the visual effects for Loot crates. They were getting lost in busy screens, plus were only as exciting to look at as any other reward. But they’re the best reward, so we’ve snazzed them up! Rainbows ftw!

- We’ve totally overhauled chat, so now it’s much more clear who’s talking, with colours assigned to usernames, plus the chat system works inside Xenotaphs and on Wipe screens, so you can chat in the safety of the tech screen, or compare loadouts while browsing the Equip screen! Plus you can maximise and minimise the chat window with buttons or by toggling with P

- We’ve updated the Loot Crate screen, so when you’re rewarded with Systems everything is a bit more, well, snazzy. We like snazz. Icons are visible on both sides of the new and improved coin.

- We’ve updated the player icon on the map so it’s easier to find yourself out there in the giant world

- The Esc menu is now dressed for launch, because we’ve updated it and gotten rid of the old placeholder assets

- We’ve snuck a credits screen in, accessible from the Main Menu. If you’re eagle-eyed on our discord, or a contributing member of the community, you’re likely on it!

- We’ve updated the crosshair so that it more closely fits our aesthetic, plus is easier to keep track of during frenetic play.

- Text changed on the Death screen to make the player’s next steps much more obvious.

- We’ve made it so that Melee Drones no longer chase Shielders. They’d get locked in eternal fights, leading to all kinds of rubbish gameplay and side effects, so we’ve made them ignore each other.

- Edited the map frames on both the maximised and minimised versions to keep the map information clear.

- Text changed on the Equip screen to make it clear when you don’t have enough MEV to equip a chosen System.

- Reordered MEV in various menus so that it is now consistently referred to in ‘Mass, Energy, Void’ order. Keeps things simpler to read and learn.

- Changed wording and presentation of Server Population in the Server Browser. Now reads from Quiet, through Busy and all the way up to Full with a few others in-between.

- Territory Capture Ring is now coloured white (it used to be red, seemed like a dangerous place to be for new players).

- The Broken Planet now has a more violently reacting core.

- We’ve tweaked every System Icon so that they no longer alias at certain resolutions ingame.



- We’ve addressed all kinds of issues around the AI Fleets, including making sure all the ships in a fleet travel at the same speed until they reach their destination or engage in combat, and this has had a HUGE impact on the game. The world is more alive, more territory changes hands more often, and enemy factions fight each other more too. Plus you come across groups of enemies a whole lot more (and you can hunt Fleets via the map) which adds a lot of challenge and opportunity (as well as life) to the gameworld.

- Fleets no longer move out of bounds and are always sent to a valid territory.

- Melee Drones now reliably damage Players and other Drones. They’re lethal, so watch out!

- Rubber banding is now almost non-existent, except when lag or performance issues come in to play. Which means we’re basically at the level of a commercially viable online action game. And we’re super pleased!

- Turrets are fixed, so they now shoot properly, and are back to being useful against Asteroids and Drones alike.

- Loot Crates open more reliably after we fixed a rare nullref. They are also always rewarded for territory capture, as there was a bug preventing this from being 100% certain.

- Fixed an issue that meant Xenoliths (previously called Glob Walls) were breaking the capture territory logic.

- Addressed the stretching on screen edges associated with the refraction on Asteroids.

- Fixed an issue that meant some players were seeing very high fire rates on their weapons, and the weapons of Drones.

- Fixed an issue that meant your Ship’s Energy was not being refilled on Dock.

- Fixed an issue that meant the Asteroid ‘explode’ visual effect was playing when it shouldn’t be.

- Fixed an issue that meant Asteroids were dropping MEV in the incorrect amounts.

- Turrets no longer damage a player’s Shield.

- Xenolith textures now match their Xenotaph’s more closely.

- Fixed overlap on certain menu buttons.

- Fixed a bug that meant players were getting damaged while docked in a Xenotaph

- Fixed a bug that meant repairing was not working as expected (there is another one not fixed, see below)

- Fixed various issues with the FTUE/Tutorial, including one that meant your Blaster’s level was not reset correctly if you died, and one that meant sometimes the System you unlocked in your first Loot Crate was not available in the Equip screen.

- Fixed an issue that was preventing the Wipe from running properly.



- Enemies and other entities infrequently disappear. We believe this is down to server-side performance.

- There’s some infrequent issues around repairing ships. Sometimes they’re fine, sometimes they report that they never died (so you don’t have to pay money to repair, yay!), and sometimes the repair won’t work even if you’ve got enough Lazarene.

- Sometimes the game won’t let you repair a Ship even though you have enough MEV.

- The Scarab’s available System slots are incorrectly labelled on the Equip screen

- Swapping Ships sometimes brings their Systems over to the new Ship, even if that new Ship shouldn’t be able to use them/doesn’t have the Slots.

- Sometimes the Equip screen will not update your Slot counter icons accurately.

- A specific planet has a broken shader, resulting in a weird blue… sky?

- Occasionally the server browser will return no servers… but this usually goes away after another attempt.

- You can trigger a menu to visually warp and glitch if you manage to die at the very moment you dock.

- The settings menu can pop you out of full screen when you have not asked it to.


- We’re working on more QoL features, so I thought a sneak peek would be fun. This addition on the right hand side of the Ship menu (currently in the game, but not functioning) will show you your saved/active loadouts for any Ships you’ve unlocked, detailing what Systems you have equipped, and the various important stats that make the difference when choosing which Ship to pilot next.

We hope you’ll agree that this one was worth the wait – and we cannot wait to show you what we’ve got in store for the next update! Our discord community keeps growing and getting more excited, and it really does thrill us to be making this game for you all. Much love!

Want to chat to us? Hit up our Discord[discord.gg] and let us know what you want to see in the game!

Please consider telling a friend and getting them to join in the fun with us!

Want to play? Hit up our offical website[www.playlazarus.com] and claim a steam key right now. The servers are live 24/7!

We've filled up our lovely wiki over at Gamepedia[lazarus.gamepedia.com] - please do pop in and check it out, help us fill in any gaps, or let us know what it's missing!

As you know from reading our Discord[discord.gg], due to a bug introduced to SpatialOS, we had to delay this update, but finally we’re pushing it live! The original post is as follows…

- - - - - - -

Last week marked our 9th Birthday! That’s 9 years since we left AAA development and went independent. We’re so excited to see what the next 9 years bring!

It didn’t stop us smashing through the bugs in Lazarus, and we’ve got a nice performance-focused update for you, ahead of our new content planned for the near future. Read on for the full deets!



- The player is now invincible for a period of 3 seconds, with an accompanying visual effect, after you undock, to prevent unfair kills. We’re working on getting it for all the rest of your respawns (i.e.: on your first spawn of the session, after you die) as well, and that should be in the next update of course! Only works for your current Ship, so swapping ship will mean it doesn’t happen… but again we’re fixing for the next update.

- We’ve integrated Discord[discord.gg] rich presence, so you can see what everyone’s doing in Lazarus, live! We track and show:

- Which server you're connected to (EU or US, etc)
- Your location in the game (the Territory name)
- If you’re on the Main Menu (stop fiddling with the settings and get stuck in!)
- When spawning into game (yeah let’s get going!)
- When you’re exploring space/bimbling about (lovely colours)
- When you’re in combat (need help?)
- When you’re docked in a Xenotaph/pottering in the menus
- When you’re undocking from a Xenotaph (get back out there!)
- If you’ve just died (oh noes)
- When you’re choosing where to respawn (maybe go somewhere a bit less dangerous)


- We’ve fixed an issue that meant you could get in a situation where only the SH15 was able to capture Xenotaphs and territory. This was a real pain in the ass to track down, but it has been squashed!

- We’ve fixed a main cause of occasional ping spiking. This has been fixed in the past and the fact that it has come back since an update to SpatialOS means that we have to ask you to be on the look out for it!

- We’ve addressed stuttering that happened when enemies were spawned in. This is addressed by preloading a lot of the associated assets (meshes, shaders, etc) and we think we’ve got this 100% locked down now. Yay!

- We fixed an issue that meant your HP would reset (to 100%) when you crossed a worker boundary in the game. It was handy, but also didn’t do a lot for the game’s balance, so… yeah. It’s fixed.

- We also fixed the issue that meant your equipped Systems Hotbar would refresh (with visuals, ceremony and sound effects playing) every time you crossed a worker boundary. This may well have been fixed by the same work as the previous bug 😉

- We fixed an issue that meant you could be shown a respawn map that did not highlight your valid spawning locations, making it hard to get back into the game.

- We fixed an issue that was reported by our lovely Discord[discord.gg] community. It meant you could not swap to a different Ship during the same session in which you failed a swap request because of a lack of Lazarene – regardless of how much Lazarene you saved up since then.

- We fixed an issue that meant occasionally your Ship would show an HP bar overlaid if you took damage from an Asteroid. It was distracting, inconsistent and pointless, so we fixed it!

- We fixed an issue that meant if you swapped to a Ship with a lower Energy stat, then it would incorrectly display the previous Ship’s energy value on your HUD until you used some. It was confusing!

- We fixed an issue that meant Xenotaphs thought Melees were Carriers, which would feed incorrect information to the Map and Players.

- We fixed multiple issues within the Xenotaph reporting code, meaning a lot less data is being sent and the game runs a lot more efficiently and smoothly now.

- We fixed multiple issues within the Lazarus Manager code, meaning fewer and smaller updates about the world state are sent to all players, and again the game runs a lot more inefficiently and smoothly. As you can imagine, this got a lot worse the more players were connected and the older (read: more populated by Drones) the world was.

- The work we’ve done on various improvements and stability (see above) means that the Asteroid movement unpredictability on spawning is a LOT less pronounced now.



- We tweaked the Spawn particle effect for Drones (from Xenotaphs and from Carries) so it looks a lot better now, and properly catches your eye.



- We’ve done everything we can to address the rubber banding on entity movement that became obvious since the SpatialOS upgrade. We’re in touch with the developers to try to find a solution, and while it’s much less pronounced on the Asteroids, enemies that move fast & change direction more often are still occasionally annoying.

- Occasionally the server browser will return no servers… but this usually goes away after another attempt.

- There’s some infrequent issues around repairing ships. Sometimes they’re fine, sometimes they report that they never died (so you don’t have to pay money to repair, yay!), and sometimes the repair won’t work even if you’ve got enough Lazarene.

- We’re aware of an issue that means the Map gets… WEIRD. Basically, it is to do with the Wipe getting ‘stuck’ and players being let back into a world that had not properly been wiped and repopulated. We’re tracking down the source, and it rarely happens, but seeing as the Wipe is now every 7 days we can damage control until we have a confirmed fix. Just let us know if you see it happen!

- Sometimes Asteroids and Enemies will take 0 damage, as well as sometimes deal 0 damage. It's very rare, and we're keeping an eye out.

And there we are, we’ve taken HUGE steps over the past two updates to get Lazarus to a really smooth, fun, stable state which we can build on top of with our planned features on the road to Early Access launch. We’re terribly excited!

Want to chat to us? Hit up on our Discord[discord.gg] and let us know what you want to see in the game!

Please consider telling a friend and getting them to join in the fun with us!

Want to play? Hit up www.playlazarus.com and claim a steam key right now.
The servers are live 24/7!

We've filled up our lovely wiki over at the Official Wiki[lazarus.gamepedia.com] - please do pop in and check it out, help us fill in any gaps, or let us know what it's missing!

If you’re on our discord[discord.gg] you already know, but we’ve had a little bit of time on other projects and are finally BACK. That means we’re deploying as many fixes as we sensibly can over this and next week, trying to iron out things broken by the big spatial/unity upgrade that was the basis of Update 33. We’ve fixed most of the horrid issues, so the game’s back to being smooth and fun to play. We’ve managed to sneak some more good stuff in too though, so read on…


- Fixed the massive stuttering that would happen every 10 or so seconds of play. Lazarus is back to its smooth self!

- The texture error is no more!

- Chat messages are now displaying properly!

- Fixed some of the ‘lag’ type issues around all entities that aren’t the player.

- Energy pools for Player Ships are now set to the following:

• Le Bug - 100
  
• Knuckle - 200
  
• SH15 - 250
  
• Mantis - 350
  
• Scarab - 500
  
• Dragonfly - 600

We’ll be updating the game so that different ships recharge at different rates (and some more nuances) soon.

- Repairing a Ship is now driven from our database (it wasn’t before)

- We’ve updated Ship Swap costs to be 500 Lazarene all round. This is hugely less than they used to be, so hopefully approaches something a bit more fun/fair.

- You can now place waypoints correctly on the map, and have them show up on your radar ring!

- Defender Spawn visual effects have been updated to be a bit more snazzy, and will be perfected before the next patch.

- Defenders now spawn at the location of the spawn visuals.

- The visual effects for pickups have been fixed, as some of the particles were billboarding/stretching the wrong way.

- We’ve updated our website with links to our official Wiki in two places!



- If you swap to a ship with a lower Energy value, then it will display incorrectly until you use some Energy.

- Occasionally the server browser will return no servers… but this usually goes away after another attempt.

- The player gets a rogue HP bar above them when they’re damaged. This turns off if you quit and come back.

- There’s still some annoying ‘lag’ type issues around all entities that aren’t the player. Enemies, asteroids, pickups, the lot. It’s not literal ping as we have that monitored. As mentioned above some of this is sorted in this patch, but it’s an ongoing thing.

- There’s some infrequent issues around repairing ships. Sometimes they’re fine, sometimes they report that they never died (so you don’t have to pay money to repair, yay!), and sometimes the repair won’t work even if you’ve got enough Lazarene.

- We’re aware of an issue that means the Map gets… WEIRD. Basically, it is to do with the Wipe getting ‘stuck’ and players being let back into a world that had not properly been wiped and repopulated. We’re tracking down the source, and it rarely happens, but seeing as the Wipe is now every 7 days we can damage control until we have a confirmed fix. Just let us know if you see it happen!

- Sometimes Asteroids and Enemies will take 0 damage, as well as sometimes deal 0 damage. We're investigating, and it's very rare.

- Asteroid movement can be unpredictable/downright strange when they spawn in after being broken up. They can rubber band backwards and forwards a lot in a short time.


That’s it! Not bad for less than a week’s work, and you can expect more soon!

Want to chat to us? Hit up https://discord.gg/spiltmilk and let us know what you want to see in the game!

Please consider telling a friend and getting them to join in the fun with us!

Want to play? Hit up https://www.playlazarus.com and claim a steam key right now. The servers are live 24/7!

We've filled up our lovely wiki over at our official Lazarus Wiki[lazarus.gamepedia.com] - please do pop in and check it out, help us fill in any gaps, or let us know what it's missing!

So it’s been about 4 weeks since the last update, and we can only apologise. We’ve been recovering from the Week Of Hell (see the last update), and also a few other things have been happening:

- We’ve had to spend some time away from the game to evaluate some other projects. Nothing that affects Lazarus as it stands, but sometimes business opportunities have to be explored and as a small team we’re unable to prevent that stuff from impacting the speed of work on Lazarus.

- We’ve had to update a key part of SpatialOS (the cloud tech behind the game) as Improbable (the company who makes it) have a roadmap to stick to. It’s not something we wanted to do, but we did not really have a choice. To do that we had to update Unity… which led to us having to update pretty much every plugin (Playfab, Wwise, etc). This big (huge, actually) chunk of work is now done, and is the basis of this update. There will be things that are broken, we’ve found some that we’re going to work on fixing next, and we need your help (and numbers of players higher than us two testing on the private branch) to be sure nothing else bad has happened, and also to see the extent of some of the problems. They might be down to a bug in a plugin we have, and more seriously (and more likely) there’ll be Unforeseen Consequences (Half-Life 3 pls) of the SpatialOS upgrade.

KNOWN ISSUES:
- Occasionally the server browser will return no servers… but this usually goes away after another attempt.

- The player gets a rogue HP bar above them when they’re damaged. This turns off if you quit and come back.

- There are some really bad ‘lag’ type issues around all entities that aren’t the player. Enemies, asteroids, pickups, the lot. It’s not literal ping as we have that monitored, and we’re concerned that this is a deeper issue with the SpatialOS upgrade, but need to know more, so your playtime will help us figure this out.

- There is a texture error around the map/minimap that throws errors into the debug window. We think this might be a shader pipeline problem with the latest Unity.

- Chat messages are not displaying.

- There’s some infrequent issues around repairing ships. Sometimes they’re fine, sometimes they report that they never died (so you don’t have to pay money to repair, yay!), and sometimes the repair won’t work even if you’ve got enough Lazarene.

- We’re aware of an issue that means the Map gets… WEIRD. Basically, it is to do with the Wipe getting ‘stuck’ and players being let back into a world that had not properly been wiped and repopulated. We’re tracking down the source, and it rarely happens, but seeing as the Wipe is now every 7 days we can damage control until we have a confirmed fix. Just let us know if you see it happen!

- Sometimes Asteroids and Enemies will take 0 damage, as well as sometimes deal 0 damage. We're investigating, and it's very rare.

- Asteroid movement can be unpredictable/downright strange when they spawn in after being broken up. They can rubber band backwards and forwards a lot in a short time.


Anyway thanks for your patience, we’ll be back on track soon, and then we can concentrate on making Lazarus even more wonderful :D

Please consider telling a friend and getting them to join in the fun with us!

Want to play? Hit up www.playlazarus.com and claim a steam key right now. The servers are live 24/7!

Want to chat to us? Hit up discord.gg/spiltmilk and let us know what you want to see in the game!

We've filled up our lovely wiki over at https://lazarus.gamepedia.com/Lazarus_Wiki - please do pop in and check it out, help us fill in any gaps, or let us know what it's missing!

It’s been a week. Oh boy it’s been a week. If you’ve no idea, I ask you to google ‘spatialOS’ ‘Improbable’ and ‘Unity’.

Tl;dr we were told we’d have to shut the servers down, so we did, but then it turns out we were told wrong, so we brought them back up. Then we decided – screw it. Let’s push out the update we were planning before the whole crapshoot.

Suffice to say, if you’ve ever liked what we make, want to support indie games, or want to maybe tip the karmic balance back towards us after so much stress, anxiety, pain, worry, torment, and straight CRAP we’ve had to deal with these past few days then please consider the following:

- leaving us a review here on Steam
- telling a friend and getting them to join in the fun with us

Want to play? Hit up www.playlazarus.com and claim a steam key right now. The servers are live 24/7!

Want to chat to us? Hit up discord.gg/spiltmilk and let us know what you want to see in the game!

We've filled up our lovely wiki over at https://lazarus.gamepedia.com/Lazarus_Wiki - please do pop in and check it out, help us fill in any gaps, or let us know what it's missing!


- The Wipe set to 7 days, to begin testing how we want the game to be when live. We’re excited about this because it means longer, harder and more meaningful testing of the servers!

- We’ve added a bit of snazzy ceremony around capturing Xenotaphs, to make it more obvious, and more of a reward.

- We’ve made the Rammer System particles much more cool looking! It was too close to the Shield in look, plus didn’t seem dangerous enough to us. Not to mention a broken asset that has been addressed.

- We’ve tweaked the visuals on the Drone Shielder, to make it more different to the Human equivalent.

- We’ve tweaked the particle that plays when you get hit by anything, making it much more obvious and hopefully making combat seem more fair/easy to read.

- We’ve tweaked the visuals on the Territory Capture Bar to be more vibrant and in line with the rest of the visuals.

- We’ve tweaked the Energy Bar in the bottom right of the player’s HUD. It’s now Yellow rather than blue, and to keep it readable the text is now black. It might look strange initially, but it’s much better now! We also tweaked the colours of the little HP and Energy icons next to the bars as they were a bit pale before.

- We’ve tweaked the values of MEV for Equipping Systems to your Ship. Most of the Core Systems now cost 50 M, E or V. Most Passive are 100, Actives 150 and… you guessed it… Specials are 200.

- We’ve tweaked the Progression (this is ongoing) so that things are currently a lot simpler and hopefully clearer. Levelling up (with Lazarene) is the same across all Systems. Between Levels 1-5, it costs 1000 Lazarene, while Levels 6-10 are 2000 each Level. This might be a bit cheap for now, but the intent is set. Ranking up (with Tokens) has been taken the other way, with every System costing more than they did previously. Similarly, all Systems cost the same per Rank (so a Rank 2 Blaster is the same cost as a Rank 2 Turret), and we’re using a geometric increase between Rank. Again, the exact prices will be played with, but the intent is what we’re happy with for now. We’re super keen to hear the feedback on these changes.

- We’ve added new particles to the scene. Now there is Asteroid Dust and also Star Dust on various layers, which really helps us communicate speed and movement across the entire game. It was really weird without it, and we’re super happy to see it back in. You can also turn these off and on individually in the Settings Menu.

- We’ve fixed the Main Menu Music! Yay for the Theme Tune!

- We’ve added sound effects for when you Repair a damaged Ship, or choose to Pilot a different Ship

- We’ve added sound effects for when you Level or Rank up a System on the Tech screen, as well as spending Tokens.

- We’ve gone through EVERY screen in the game and made sure that Mass, Energy and Void are shown in that order. It’s all MEV, after all! The only element waiting for this fix is the Shopkeeper Ourobean when he charges you for systems that cost more than just one resource.

- The Death screen and Dock screen no longer show out of date information like player kills, score, distance travelled and deaths.

- Pug now awards your Lazarene from a live data sheet, meaning we can rebalance the tutorial without a new build, and in real time.



- Fixed a bug that meant occasionally players and AI could not capture territory.

- We’ve fixed a bug that meant Turret bullet visuals were not showing. Currently they’re a bit placeholder still, expect them to be made much nicer in the next update.

- We fixed an issue that meant it was possible to hit the PLAY button during the Loot Crate opening ceremony, meaning you missed seeing what you got.

- We fixed an issue that meant sometimes Crates would not check against all their potential Skins, and the rewards doled out were, as a result, skewed.

- We fixed the issue that meant toggling the Map to full screen during the Dock transition messed it up visually when you come back out of the Xenotaph.

- We fixed a bug that meant when you connected to a server, there was a brief (1 or 2 frame) error message that popped up. Annoying but trivial.

- WE THINK we’ve fixed all the ways you could get your Mass into negative counts (by teleporting too much/at the wrong time). Let us know if it ever happens!


- We’re aware of an issue that means the Map gets… WEIRD. Basically, it was to do with the Wipe getting ‘stuck’ and players being let back into a world that had not properly been wiped and repopulated. We’re tracking down the source, and it rarely happens, but seeing as the Wipe is now every 7 days we can damage control until we have a confirmed fix. Just let us know if you see it happen!

- Sometimes Asteroids and Enemies will take 0 damage, as well as sometimes deal 0 damage. We're investigating, and it's very rare.

- Asteroid movement can be unpredictable/downright strange when they spawn in after being broken up. They can rubber band backwards and forwards a lot in a short time.

So! Despite all the setbacks this week we’ve delivered yet another monster update. Please do fire it up, help us confirm these fixes, and of course come and join us on our Discord (discord.gg/spiltmilk) to tell us what else you want fixing or adding to the game! As ever, keep your eyes peeled for the next big update, which will be in a couple of weeks!

It's nearly Christmas! But we don't stop! We've got one final update for the year, and it's live right now. We've wanted to get beyond server optimisation and big chunky performance issues for ages now, and we've broken the back of them now, so we're filling this week's update with tons of extra bonus additions and tweaks around visuals, combat, movement, difficulty and the like. In 2019 we'll be back to the (roughly) 2 week update cycle, and we can't wait to get this bad boy into Early Access as soon as is sensible.

Want to play? Hit up www.playlazarus.com and claim a steam key right now. The servers are live 24/7!

Want to chat to us? Hit up discord.gg/spiltmilk and let us know what you want to see in the game!

We've filled up our lovely wiki over at https://lazarus.gamepedia.com/Lazarus_Wiki - please do pop in and check it out, help us fill in any gaps, or let us know what it's missing!


- Updated player Blaster visuals! Compared to last week's WIP update, these are SMASHING it. We made everything more readable, chunky and arcade-y than before, as well as each shot graphic being far more distinct from the other.

Basic
Trident
Lance
Cross
V
- Updated enemy weapon visuals! We've swapped the Scavenger and Fighter shots around, and made a bunch more changes that you can see below...

Fighter
Scavenger
Carrier
Shielder
- We've rebalanced the enemies a little bit to be, generally, more dangerous!

• Fighters deal 15 damage per shot (up from 7)
  
• Shielders deal 10 damage per shot (up from 5)
  
• Scavengers deal 5 damage per shot (actually the same as before)
  
• Carriers deal 90 damage per shot (the same as before)

- We've added 'star dust' and 'rock dust' particle layers back into the game. These help so much to give a sense of speed, travel, and scale to the world. It feels a ton better to just be moving around again! Of course there are also options in the Settings menu to toggle them both off and on individually.

- Load Balancing is now IN. This is the end game of all the backend work we've been doing. Basically it wraps up all kinds of work in almost every area of the game, and means the whole gameworld and server (and as a result your client experience of it) is much more smooth, efficient and fun to play.



- Scavengers now deal damage properly. In fact, we've fixed a related issue that means we are now much more easily able to tweak and balance all enemy damage (as we have done, see above).

- Enemies no longer take so long to respond to the player when you get near. This is a HUGE win for us as it really made them feel dumb at best, or the game laggy at worst. Super chuffed with this fix!

- We fixed the issue around secondary weapons, so there are no more error logs popping up as you blast the enemy hordes in your tricked out Mantis.

- There is now a ton less collection of garbage data. We've gone through with a fine-toothed comb and fixed a bunch of aspects that meant we'd occasionally see big 'lag' spikes. No longer! There are still spikes as the game is not 100% garbage free, but it is now something that does not affect your moment to moment play. We plan to go back to this and really clear things up on a second pass, but for Early Access launch it passes our quality criteria.

- As further part of the backend work (now pretty much complete) we've fixed an issue that saw player movement become a little less responsive.

- Similarly, we've fixed an issue that meant enemy movement was occasionally quite wonky, with their turns being sporadic and unpredictable.

- When MEV and Loot crates despawn, they no longer look like they're getting picked up.

- Fixed an issue that meant certain Workers on the server backend were... misbehaving. Suffice to say it had a negative effect on every aspect of the game.

- Fixed an issue that meant the '[territory name] has been claimed by [faction name]' text on the HUD was getting chopped off the left edge of the screen when certain long territory names were used.




- Sometimes Asteroids and Enemies will take 0 damage, as well as sometimes deal 0 damage. We're investigating, and it's very rare.

- Asteroid movement can be unpredictable/downright strange when they spawn in after being broken up. They can rubber band backwards and forwards a lot in a short time.

- When you connect to a server, there is a brief (1 or 2 frame) error message that pops up. Don't worry, it's trivial and doesn't do anything to spoil the game.

- You can get your Mass into negative counts by teleporting too much/at the wrong time. 99% of players will never encounter this, but it's something we're fixing soon. In the meantime if it happens please do let us know on Discord and we'll fix it for you.

- It is possible to hit the PLAY button during the Loot Crate opening ceremony, meaning you miss seeing what you got.

- Toggling the Map to fullscreen during the Dock transition means it messes up visually when you come back out of the Xenotaph. It's fixable by hitting M some more once you're out of the Xenotaph, but we'll address it properly too.


So fire it up, help us confirm these fixes, and of course come and join us on our Discord (discord.gg/spiltmilk) to tell us what else you want fixing or adding to the game! As ever, keep your eyes peeled for the next big update, which will be in early 2019!

Whilst this update is mostly all about the servers, the backend, the client performance and the multitude of ways in which we've made Lazarus a ton more stable and 'happy' (which all translates to a smoother and more fun experience for ya'll), we couldn't resist adding a few nice new bits and bobs for you. New (proper, chunky) content is coming soon, but when you boot this update up you'll see some big changes to the kinds of things the Drones will shoot at you...

Want to play? Hit up www.playlazarus.com and claim a steam key right now. The servers are live 24/7!

Want to chat to us? Hit up discord.gg/spiltmilk and let us know what you want to see in the game!

We've filled up our lovely wiki over at https://lazarus.gamepedia.com/Lazarus_Wiki - please do pop in and check it out, help us fill in any gaps, or let us know what it's missing!



- Every Drone with a gun has a new gun! Wahey! We've long wanted to differentiate the Drones from the Humans, and this is one key way. No doubt we'll tweak plenty before we're done!

Fighter
Shielder
Er... it shoots SO rarely, and I didn't want to delay the update just for a gif, so, you'll have to take my word for it!

Scavenger
Carrier
- Every Blaster has its own unique bullet graphic! Wahey! Some of them are a little more subtle than others and I'll be tweaking this for the next update to make them all even more different, and even cooler.

Basic Blaster:
V Blaster:
Trident:
Lance Blaster:
Cross Blaster:
- We've added new particles around repairing Ships and choosing new Ships to pilot!

Repair:
Pilot:
- We've added ton more names to the Sector Name generator. Something like 100 or more new words!



- We fixed an issue that meant Melees were not always dealing damage correctly. They are MUCH more dangerous now, as they were always intended to be.

- We fixed an issue with HP bars, which now update much more smoothly on the client - this in turn has made combat feel a TON more responsive and satisfying! Yay!

- We've addressed a whole raft of issues around 'lossy' performance on the server. Things like the amount of communication going back and forth between Carriers and the enemies it spawns, as well as the Xenotaphs scouring their nearby area for information have been made vastly more efficient. This means better ping for everyone, and fewer lag spikes!

- We've updated the Ship screen so that when you're selecting a Ship to repair, it displays its 3D model for you. Makes it a lot clearer what's going on, and to what Ship.

- We've fixed an issue that occasionally led to multiple Xenotaphs occupying the same space in the game world.

- We've added our own throttling system to the game's server queuing. Hopefully you won't notice a difference!

- Since we updated last we're pretty confident nobody's seen the issue around multiple rapid pickups leading to inaccurate resources, so that's being marked as done!



- The Wipes are now 12 hrs apart!

- We've rebalanced the cost of the first few levels of the Blasters, so that you get to level up more often early on.

- We've rebalanced all Ship HP to be slightly lower, to match the intended design. This is after our last update's changes skewed them higher and made everyone tougher than they should be.



- Firing a secondary weapon/blaster on the RMB often shows a flashing debug warning pop up. We're on it!

- Sometimes Asteroids and Enemies will take 0 damage, as well as sometimes deal 0 damage. We're investigating, and it's very rare.

We're almost ready to announce our plans around monetisation and the road to Early Access. We'll talk about it on our discord (link just below) and will FOR SURE listen to any worries or suggestions you might have. In fact we're relying on you to help us get it right!


2019 is going to be very exciting indeed!


So fire it up, help us confirm these fixes, and of course come and join us on discord.gg/spiltmilk to tell us what else you want fixing or adding to the game! And as always, keep your eyes peeled for the next big update...

We've been a couple of weeks since the last update, but we've been squirreled away in the depths of the code, tweaking, fixing and updating solidly the whole time. We're excited because this week marks the first time in a while that we've had an update behave the entire time. No big surprises, no weird bugs. Just fixes.

We've also got a brand spanking new wiki over at https://lazarus.gamepedia.com/Lazarus_Wiki - please do pop in and check it out, help us fill in any gaps, and get it up to snuff.

Want to play? Hit up www.playlazarus.com and claim a steam key right now. The servers are live 24/7!

Want to chat to us? Hit up discord.gg/spiltmilk and let us know what you want to see in the game!


- We've updated the Ships, so now you'll be seeing different stats for every Ship when you look at their Health and Energy bars. They are still balanced the same way as before, but the numbers better reflect our intent. You can see these below:

Ship: Scarab
HP: 650
EN: 350
Skin: 'Chewing'

Ship: Sheherazade-15
HP: 400
EN: 250
Skin: 'Humbug'

Ship: Knuckle
HP: 300
EN: 300
Skin: 'Ex Machina'

Ship: Le Bug
HP: 200
EN: 600
Skin: 'Dotty'

Ship: Dragonfly
HP: 800
EN: 500
Skin: 'Fresh Prints'

Ship: Mantis
HP: 525
EN: 400
Skin: 'D15'

- All damage output has been tweaked, and every System at every level now outputs whole numbers. Makes it easier to track and learn, plus the game was being awkward about how it displayed .5 and the like.

- The Rammer System no longer deflects bullets. It used to, and it was a kinda cool effect, but it wasn't the intent for the System to be used the same way as the Shield.

- Enemies all now derive their weaponry from a sheet. This changes them from being hardcoded and makes it easier for us to balance and expand in the future. Some tweaks have been made too, so for example the Fighter does 7 damage, and the Carrier deals 90.

- We've fixed Systems Levelling. Specifically, we've fixed a mismatch that was occurring between the Tech screen, the Equip screen, and the performance of a System in-game. Generally, the game would show the Shop as a level behind the System's actual level, Rank complicated it further, and when you upgraded a System you were carrying, that same 'delay' presented itself. Finally, whether you Levelled up with Lazarene or Ranked up with Tokens affected things too. The long and short is that now it's all fixed and everything works as intended; no matter how you Level or Rank up a System, with Tokens or Lazarene, and if you already have it equipped or not, the System will perform as you expect.

- We've added more information to the Tech screen so you can see exactly what you're getting when you Level or Rank up your chosen System.

- We fixed an issue with Teleporting/Warp Jumping that could lead to you getting negative MEV values. We're not 100% certain this is the only method of getting negative resources though, so we'd love to hear of any more occurrences!

- Xenotaphs now know which server (US or EU) you discovered them on. This means that you will no longer be able to see the stock in a Xenotaph that you hadn't actually visited, in a physical sense.

- The player no longer gets a free 5000 MEV on entering a new Wipe. We might introduce a nice little bonus down the line, but this was not on purpose. If you get free stuff, it should be on purpose!

- Your chosen Resolution setting is now correctly remembered at all times.

- We've added some first pass ceremony to Repairing and Piloting a Ship. Right now some basic graphical effects play (there's a particle played and the ship in question spins!), but were going to expand that with some audio and some other visual tweaks.

- We fixed an issue that meant you could get stuck in the Tutorial if another player captured the Territory you were assigned. If this happens now, Robopug realises and sneaks you past that step. Because he's lovely.

- We've fixed an issue that very rarely meant you could not place a waypoint marker on the map.

- We've fixed an issue that meant the Nebulas, Stars and Planets would only switch back 'on' if you restarted the game.

- We fixed an issue that meant you'd lose your Lazarene from a failed transaction, if you were unlucky enough to process it when there was a server glitch.

- We fixed a rare issue that meant sometimes after you Banked, not all of your resources would be transferred and you'd be able to get a sneaky head start on your next foray.

- We've improved performance server-side a lot, with tons of small optimisations. This leads to better stability for everyone.

- We've fixed an issue that meant you'd see the Fleet Routes on your death screen if you'd never opened the full screen map that session. They were ugly, and now they're gone.

- We fixed an issue that meant the string 'Rank' disappeared if you upgraded a System with Lazarene.

- We've fixed an issue that meant you could end up with Systems in the wrong System Slots (for example a Passive in an Active slot). We think this could occasionally rear its head in new and interesting ways, but this is one more cause eliminated.

- We've fixed an issue with the Wipe that meant you could be let back into the 'new' world too soon, and could see it being 'built' around you.

- We've fixed an issue that meant you could see the 'nearly dead' HUD ceremony (redness, cracked screen, glitching audio) after taking just 1 hit. It now only ever plays when you're very close to death.

- We've added a new queuing process that means the flow from hitting Play to getting into the game is slightly different, but is a ton more robust and way more reliable. It was specially designed to prevent problems if (when!) we get tons of join requests at the same time.


- We are aware that the issue around multiple rapid pickups leading to inaccurate resources has been generally addressed, but we're not 100% certain we've caught the full fix due to the nature of the beast.

- Sometimes Asteroids and Enemies will take 0 damage, as well as sometimes deal 0 damage. We're investigating, and it's very rare.

We've also been working really hard on the Shop this week, but it's not ready for the public quite yet!

So fire it up, help us confirm these fixes, and of course come and join us on discord.gg/spiltmilk to tell us what else you want fixing or adding to the game! As ever, keep your eyes peeled for the next big update in about 2 weeks!