How to Play ICARUS With Friends

Survival crafting games are almost always easier (and more fun) with other players, but it can sometimes be tricky to figure out how to get your friends in the game with you. In this guide, we’ll show you how to invite friends to your ICARUS prospects, how to join other people’s games, and go over how multiplayer affects gameplay.

How to Invite Friends to Your Session

When you start a new Prospect and select your character loadout, you’ll get a dialog box that asks you if you want to claim the prospect and host a session. Naturally, we do, so we’ll click yes — but not before confirming that our Lobby Settings are set to Friends Only:

Once you’ve confirmed it’s on “Friends Only”, you can hit Yes and begin your mission. Once you land, you can then invite friends from your Steam friends list. To send an invitation, press Shift+Tab (or whatever your Steam Overlay hotkey is) while in-game, and then right-click the name of the friends you want to invite. You’ll see the following menu — click “Invite to Lobby”, and they should receive an invitation to your prospect.

Once you’ve invited them to your Prospect a single time, they should be able to quit and re-join it as they like, as long as you’re currently hosting a session on that Prospect. They can rejoin by using the Join Prospect button from the game’s home menu.

How to Join a Friend’s Session

First, your friend will have to follow the steps in the above section. You should then get an invitation via Steam to join their game. Press Shift+Tab while on the ICARUS main menu, and you should see a chat window from your friend with an invitation. Click the “CLICK HERE TO JOIN” part of the message, and you should be taken into their session.

If this doesn’t work, you can also try right-clicking on your friend from your friends list, and then clicking “Join Game”. This can be done whether or not ICARUS is launched, though it should work more consistently if ICARUS is running when you click Join Game.

Solo Talents in Multiplayer

In ICARUS, one of the Talent trees is designed exclusively for Solo play. These talents tend to be more powerful than the other talents, because they’re designed to keep players alive while prospecting alone. If there is another player in your session, Solo talents you’ve unlocked will not provide any benefits. For this reason, we suggest having separate characters for Solo play and Multiplayer.

We hope this guide helped you figure out how to play with your friends in ICARUS! If you are still having trouble, feel free to let us know in the comments below, and we’ll see what we can do.