DayZ creator's survival game Icarus unveils new details about its long-overdue expansion, and it seems you can become an oil baron

Despite sitting alongside the big guns in our best survival games list, Icarus is a beautiful yet strange anomaly. While I feel constantly surrounded by news, hype, and controversy regarding the likes of Ark, Rust, or Valheim, Icarus quietly hums away in the background, despite its decently sized community. Arguably one of the best looking survival experiences on Steam, and packed with plenty of base game content and DLC expansions, it somehow drifts to the back of my mind. One thing I've always kept an eye out for, though, is Dangerous Horizons, an update that developer RocketWerkz (formed by ex-DayZ creator, Dean Hall) initially said would arrive in 2024, but has been mysteriously absent. Well, some new details about it have finally emerged, with RocketWerkz claiming it's been "hard at work preparing" for the new expansion.

There have been teasers and small nods to Dangerous Horizons in some of Icarus' recent patch notes, but despite its lateness, RocketWerkz has been fairly hushed about it. Dangerous Horizons was the last of three major expansions, known as chapters, announced by the studio. First Cohort arrived in 2021, New Frontier dropped in 2023, and despite originally being billed for 2024, Dangerous Horizons hasn't surfaced yet. Plenty of great additions and smaller pieces of DLC have hit Icarus instead, so it's not like the game has been starved of content. But an expansion of this scale is no doubt what players want to see the most.

A live action trailer, titled Critical Mass, dropped last week to tease the narrative for Dangerous Horizons, with its ending simply stating that it was "coming soon." Now, a new blog post shares some more concrete details of what players can expect in the new chapter.

"Dangerous Horizons takes prospectors to a brand-new region on Icarus - Elysium, a fresh map filled with unique challenges," the post reads. "The expansion introduces a full narrative storyline and mission chain, the long-awaited Tech Tier 5, new biomes, new bosses, new armors, oil, creatures, tames, mounts, radiation, tools, and even a laser sidearm. It's no exaggeration to say this may be our biggest expansion yet."

Tasty stuff. For a start, who doesn't love a laser sidearm? A couple of screenshots and gifs of the new area of Elysium also show it to be a fairly dark, bleak, desert region. However, beneath the sands appears to lie a very valuable resource, as one gif shows some kind of refinery or pumping station being surrounded by jets of oil shooting out of the ground. I can already envisage contracts that task you with securing oil fields and extracting it, having you hopping around in your Stetson like The Rich Texan from The Simpsons.

In the same post, RocketWerkz confirms that, like all its previous add-ons, only the host of a session needs to own the DLC for other players to experience it.

The studio also says it will start to "share more details through livestreams, patch posts, and hints in upcoming weekly updates," and that it's been "hard at work preparing" for the expansion, so it really does seem like we're on the home stretch here.

Sadly, there's no new release window or date in sight. However, I do wonder if it's going to align with the launch of Icarus' console version, which is slated to arrive in "early 2026."