Once Human developer Starry Studio has announced its first major update to the open-world survival game. First, an apology: a recent maintenance update appears to have broken numerous items in the game and demolished players' houses across the board.

The problem became apparent shortly after the patch went out on July 18, when Reddit players began complaining that items and bases had simply disappeared, sometimes in part, sometimes in whole. Sometimes they were only parts, sometimes the whole thing had simply disappeared.

The next day, the developer, Starry Studio (part of NetEase), acknowledged the problem. After yesterday's maintenance, we received feedback regarding the loss of items and territories. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Both issues have been identified and are now being resolved as quickly as possible.”

For players who lost items using Once Human's “Deposit” feature, the lost inventory will be returned via in-game mail, along with unspecified “additional compensation.” For players who have lost housing, Starry Studio says it will “repair affected territories and return lost items and building materials to the Territory Vault.” Additional compensation for these losses is also promised.

“We sincerely apologize to all metas affected. We would also like to thank all metas who have reported these issues through our community and other channels and helped us identify the problem. We appreciate your understanding and support.”

As Kotaku noticed, the issue came to light shortly after the developer posted a message on the Once Human Discord asking players to post positive reviews on Steam. The game already has a “mostly positive” rating with over 38,000 user reviews, but the rating is volatile, with 70% of reviews currently favorable, and if this drops even one point, the rating will fall to a much less appealing “mixed” description.

Given this, it is understandable why the developers would want players to raise this percentage, and why they deleted the request as soon as the buggy update came to light. Of course, the deletion did not go unnoticed:

Well, these things happen, and this headache does not seem to have dissuaded players, except for a big drop-off when the patch was applied on July 18 (a process that did not seem to go smoothly). ), the number of simultaneous players has remained stable and high. More notably, there has been no immediate bombardment of reviews in response to the troubles, which I, the eternal optimist, take as a sign that players are enjoying the game on the whole and are therefore willing to give it some respite.

For the first major update, Starry Studio said it will include “a new PVP gameplay scenario featuring a showdown between the main camps in the game, Mayfly and Rosetta, and a new PVE scenario with new northern mountain regions, monsters and challenges.” The company stated. A teaser image was also released:

No release date has been set, but the update is expected sometime in September.