ICARUS Beta Weekend #4 – Forget the Desert, We’re Hunting Satellites

Add it to the list: ICARUS developer RocketWerkz announced yesterday that they were shifting around the Beta Weekends, as well as delaying the launch of the game by two weeks, due to a Covid-related lockdown in their native New Zealand. It isn’t all bad news, however — the restructuring of the Beta Weekends has led to the addition of a new mission to the schedule. This “warm up for faction missions” will be playable for a full three days, from Friday, October 9th to Monday the 11th. The mission is taking the slot formerly occupied by the Desert Biome Beta Weekend, which will be pushed to the following Beta Weekend that begins October 23rd.

Faction missions are offered by the various corporations attempting to extract resources from Icarus, and all have specific goals and rewards. Players (like me) who sometimes struggle to find goals in survival-crafting games should particularly enjoy these missions, which give a purpose for all the sweet gear you’ve created. The mammoth hunt was a big hit with the community, and after the upcoming Beta Weekend there’ll be one more Mission-focused weekend on November 6th and 7th.

While it hasn’t yet been revealed which faction we’ll be working for come Friday, we have been given a few details about the mission itself. We’ll be working to recover a lost Bio-Satellite, a remnant of the failed terraforming project. Described as having “the power to warp worlds”, it’s no surprise some corp wants to recover it — a terraforming satellite sounds like a pretty valuable piece of technology.

To recover the satellite, players will have to make their way through all three biomes currently available: the Forest biome, the northern Arctic from the previous Beta Weekend, and the southern Arctic biome (which will be unlocking for the first time on Friday). It sounds like quite the trek, but given the alacrity with which the community has risen to the challenges of Icarus, I bet we’ll see more than a few screenshots of successful prospectors come Monday evening.

If you’re hoping to squeeze the most possible playtime out of ICARUS this weekend, the Beta will become unavailable Monday “evening” PDT, so plan accordingly — and don’t forget to get up and stretch every so often.

What do you think about the rescheduling and 2-week launch delay that’s occurred with ICARUS? Are you bummed about missing out on the Desert this weekend, or are you excited to hunt for the satellite? Let us know in the comments!