Once Human Patch 29 August: A promising update!

Once Human will undergo maintenance on 29 August, and with it comes some promising changes to the way the game functions. There are new cosmetics, new events, and some quality-of-life changes. Perhaps the most exciting change of all: less lag in Prime Wars.

You heard that right. Our pleas have been answered! But… will it work?

You can read the full patch notes on Steam, but here’s your breakdown from me, as usual. 😉

When will Once Human be down for maintenance, and for how long?

Maintenance starts on August 29 at 04:00 am, UTC. The servers will be down for at least four hours, so they’ll be back up (hopefully) by 08:00 am.

Here’s the maintenance schedule in your native timezone.

With that out of the way, what changes can we expect?

The most exciting changes

New events are okay, but they don’t last. New cosmetics, cool, but that’s not really my thing. What gets me excited are improvements to the game. So let’s start with the boring stuff (you might be salivating at the thought of the next cosmetics set!), and then we’ll get into the real meat: the quality of life changes.

Let’s get stuck in.

New event and new cosmetics

Firstly, the new event is called Gather Friends, and yes, that is exactly what it sounds like. You can invite friends to the game and earn friendship points. Your new friends will be able to use a shared weapon, as set up by you.

These friendship points can then be redeemed in the Event Shop which will include more exciting rewards, if the patch notes are to be believed.

Sadly, I won’t be participating, since you actually need friends to invite in the first place. Sigh. Maybe next time!

The new cosmetics include a new Lightforge Loot Crate with the Beach Bash modifier. Yeah, summer’s over in the northern hemisphere is over, and we’re getting beach-styled cosmetics. Us down here in the southern hemisphere will be able to make good use of that beach gear though!

The new cosmetics include:

• Sunshine Splash territory cosmetics pack
• Bubbly Sunshine outfit set
• New weapon skins for the SOCR and Baton
• Ocean’s Pulse Fountain, a territory collection
• Modern Simple Life cosmetics pack
• The Human Barricade Academy outfit and Human Barricade Classroom theme pack

It appears as though those last two can only be obtained via the new Lightforge crate, as well as another Epic weapon skin.

Phew, that’s it for the boring stuff. On to the fun stuff!

Quality of life changes

Less lag in the Prime Wars! I cannot tell you how excited I am, as someone who recently got a 100 rating because I got stuck for the entire fight holding a grenade, and could not switch back to my weapon.

The stuttering and performance issues have been addressed and optimized, and we are hopeful that this will make a positive impact on this aspect of Once Human. The developers have asked to report any further issues via their community or customer support.

They’ve also added a feature that will see inactive players in the Prime Wars get booted out. I’m not sure this was truly an issue, but there must have been complaints at some point, and it’s nice to see Starry Studios taking swift action.

Mod Optimizations

We’ll be able to filter our mods in the backpack by different parameters come the update! So if you’re looking for mods with Status DMG for, say, my Power Surge build guide, then you’ll be able to do just that with this new feature.

It’ll also be rolled out to the equipment customization screen in a future update. Exciting stuff, but the Prime War news is still the most exciting thing I’ve seen.

Climbing and movement optimization

You know how you’re trying to climb that thing, and you’re jumping, and your character just won’t trigger the vault optimization. My frustration levels are rising just from typing that sentence.

Well, that may be a thing of the past, since Starry have optimized that, and character will now prioritize vaulting and climbing more often. This is also true while falling or gliding. This worried me just a little — I don’t know if you’ve encountered the gliding fall-to-your-death but sometimes you can accidentally vault over something while gliding and it cancels your gliding animation. And then it won’t restart it, so you just watch as you fall to your death.

Well, I hope that gets ironed out, and doesn’t get worse! Overall this sounds like a sensible change, and I’m excited to see how smooth things are now.

Final quality of life changes

They’ve also optimized the building interface. Certain facilities will now make more sense where they’re placed in the building menu. Production facilities will also display the current buildable quantity. There also seems to be some description optimizations, so furniture will fall under Decor and Accessories, while functional facilities will fall under Facilities & Furniture.

Actually… it still doesn’t make perfect sense. Changes to the building interface are coming, beware.

Finally, there have been some adjustments to the Public World (which I think is their term for the over world). Some Morphic crates have been moved, but they’re still close to their original location, so not a big deal.

What is a big deal is that house that I keep having to ask people about (I can’t be the only one with my world chat off all the time?) will now display on the map once it has been found. That’s excellent news! No longer will we have to ask and beg and plead for someone to tell us where to go get our weekly moving-house goodies.

Apparently it’s called Hales’ Moving House, just for reference there. I didn’t know that.

There are also three new plants coming; contaminated wheat, contaminated berries, and contaminated aloe vera. They’ll spawn in pollution zones, and cannot be consumed or used in recipes. What they are good for is being turned into acid in a brewing barrel.

Yeah, we just got an extra way to farm acid!

Things get so uninteresting from this point onwards, all you’re getting are bullet points.

• You now have more options when changing Whisper settings (eg. you can choose to only hide them around your house and see them elsewhere).
• Prompts have been added to the settings menu, which you can adjust to your liking. These prompts will disappear after you viewed these settings.
• There are some minor quality of life changes to the field guide.

And that’s it. Well, besides the 58 bug fixes, which I won’t list here. You can go check those out in Once Human’s update at the end there if you want, but listing them all feels kind of unnecessary, and copying them over feels like plagiarism, so just go check them out there if you’d like.

Personally, the only thing I really care about here are the Prime wars. The Hive and I have a Prime War run planned for Friday night, so hopefully we’ll be lag-free. I doubt it, but we can hope. Happy to eat my words once tested.

Until the next update, enjoy, stay safe, and don’t buy stuff for the game from external parties or websites. You’ve seen the warnings. Be smart.