This always-on alternate reality offers a place for everyone, regardless of your playstyle or time commitment. Step into a new century, where the people of earth have been granted access to a mysterious uncharted world. On Corvus, you will find a land filled with secrets, untold riches and opportunity for all, heralding the dawn of a new age for humankind and the birth of a bold new society.  

Life Beyond welcomes players to the planet Corvus, where they’re pioneering a new society, building settlements together, exploring vast and diverse biomes brimming with wildlife, flora and foliage. Previously codenamed Project C, Life Beyond is still early in development and Darewise has been working with players since earlier this year to test and provide feedback.

Darewise is developing Life Beyond with its proprietary technology, Wiseworld, which is a tool to generate and rapidly expand large worlds, and Orchestrator, which coordinates complex ecosystems and simulation layers within Life Beyond to assure they remain fresh and interesting for players. It is also using SpatialOS in close partnership with Improbable, which enables an unprecedented level of simulation in the game world. Darewise is using a modified version of Unreal Engine 4 and building Life Beyond to be a cross-platform experience for PC, mobile, consoles and cloud gaming.

"We thought 0.7.0 was the biggest update ever, but that was before we realized just how tremendous Update 0.8.0 had shaped up to be. This massive update to Life Beyond brings a completely revamped construction system, as well as adding oodles of new stuff."

This update is perhaps our most ambitious yet. It contains the new construction system, which flips the game upside down and does away with the concept of plopping down single-purpose structures.

Arrival Experience

We have also added what we call the Arrival Experience, which is a broad term centered around onboarding newcomers. From adding a tutorial to replacing our old starting base with a huge starting building (First Landing!), implementing an upgraded UI… starting out on Seren has never been easier! Blog post to follow…

New Planet Name: Seren

What’s this you say? Ah, yes, the planet is now named Seren. Why Seren? Well, the short answer is it’s a better name. For the long version, check out our dev blog article!

Hoverboard

In this iteration we are also very excited to introduce the Hoverboard, a new, fast way to travel (in style!). The hoverboard can be bought from the shop and uses an energy system. You cannot use other items while on the hoverboard, so no drive-by resource collecting!

New Zipline Ammo System

We’ve implemented a new ammo system with the zipline, to curb spamming and make its use more meaningful. You can purchase zipline ammo from the shop. Making the zipline use ammo will force you to think about your travel intentions, buy the correct amount of line ammo to climb when they want to, and make every shot count. Let us know what you think about the change!

PVP Is Disabled Right Now

We’ve been saying for a long time that we want Life Beyond to move in a direction different from the well-trodden path of “open world pvp survival”. Creating a new society shouldn’t mean straight up recreating what’s worst about ours. We’ll come back to player versus player combat in an upcoming update, but this will most certainly be in a more controlled manner, veering away from ganks and the like. It’s important for us to do this right, so until we can do this justice, we prefer to put the whole system on hold. 

Starting from a clean slate

While we’re still in the alpha, a reminder to our Founders that your gear tokens and items go back to you after every update, so go ahead and use them!

0.8 PATCH NOTES

Construction system

• Outposts now have durability and will start to decay over time if they aren't supplied with energy (32 hours before breaking down, 3 days before disappearing completely). 
• Players will not be able to use the modules in a room if it isn’t supplied with energy.
• Resources can be added in the generator (formerly AI core) to produce energy for the entire settlement.
• Only AI cores from the same territory can overlap.

Construction system UI:

• The name of the clan that owns the structure is displayed.
• The building energy and durability are both feedbacked into the building UI.

Construction:

Added:

• All buildings are now invulnerable to damage.
• Rooms can now be rotated when snapped on other rooms.
• Farms, defensive walls and the thunder pylons have been removed.
• Lights in rooms and functional units turn red if they are not receiving energy or are broken.

Changed:

• Additional information on a building is displayed when focusing on it with a printer.
• Everything is built in 15 seconds.
• Some construction prices have been changed.
• Rooms can only be salvaged if they are empty.
• Players have to wait 15 seconds before salvaging any newly-placed construction.

Gameplay

Added:

• The Founder zipline is now available. It grants you bonus speed and a bigger magazine.
• PVP is off on the whole map.
• Players can now take screenshots with the default “F12” which is customizable. Screenshots will be saved at this location by default: C:\Users\%yourusername%\AppData\Local\LifeBeyond\Saved\Screenshots
• A tooltip is now present on the unstuck button to inform this will kill the character.

Changed:

• Zipline now uses ammo instead of energy.
• Gatherer, Handgun and Printer are now considered normal tools and are not present by default in your tools menu. You can equip, unequip and trade them. Like normal equipment, they also drop on death.
• Players now start with 100 credits instead of 50, but no items.
• Owned contract categories have been split into open and closed contracts.

Fixed:

• Players can no longer input commands when dead.
• Multiple units of the same item will now stack in the inventory instead of appearing separately when bought.

Removed:

• Security zones have been removed from the game as the PVP has been disabled in this version. Players now take full damage everywhere.

Audio

Added:

• Global and SFX volumes can be modified in the audio settings.

Improved:

• The Jagura SFX have been improved and their volume reduced.
• Reduced overall volume of ambience.

These are massive changes, there’s a bunch of stuff we still need to fix, improve, etc. Head over to our Known Issues channel on Discord for a full list! We’ll update it with every patch. As for the rest, come let us know what you think!

Interested players can learn more by joining the Life Beyond Discord server or visit the game’s website to apply for Closed Alpha testing or access the game immediately through its Founders Packs.