Survival game Forever Skies reveals plans to spice up its post-apocalyptic world

Forever Skies has always felt, to me, like an upside-down Subnautica. Whereas the latter sends you below sea level, Forever Skies sees you soar high above it, but the principles of survival, exploration, research, and base building all translate. Despite its novel concept of piloting an airship over the decaying rooftops of a Fallout-esque, post-apocalyptic Earth, the game's creators have acknowledged that things need to improve. One of the main ways it's going to do that is by spicing up its world, and now developer Far From Home has revealed new details about a game-changing algorithm that will do just that.

While it showed a lot of promise during early access, Forever Skies was underwhelming when it finally hit 1.0 in April of this year. It wasn't the immersive, grand spectacle many had hoped for, and technical issues were hampering it too. Far From Home quickly sprang into action, acknowledging that "a significant part of our player base has been left disappointed with the game" and announcing some big plans to get things back on track. A core complaint it's looking to tackle is that environments are too repetitive, and now it's revealed how it's going to do that.

In an attempt to push Forever Skies closer to a spot on our best survival games list, a new Location Diversity System will soon arrive. Far From Home describes it as an algorithm that can "generate varied locations based on visual and gameplay modifiers," such as "size, connections, exploration/threat events, side quests, [and] lore scenes."

"The basic idea is we're building a large set of visual and gameplay modifiers that will form a pool from which our algorithm can draw from, in order to generate varied locations throughout your game," the developer writes in a new blog post. "Now, the easiest solution would have just been to throw ALL these modifiers into a giant pot and let the system pick randomly. However, this would likely just result in a disorganized mix of locations that quickly begin to feel repetitive again.

"Instead, the system needs to be structured and governed by specific rules, ultimately reading the status of your current playthrough to decide which modifiers it should throw at you."

So, it's not quite the full procedural generation of No Man's Sky, nor is it a system that'll create a completely random and jarring world. The algorithm apparently leans into four core rules that revolve around the actual type of modifiers, the in-game location of the player, what the player has already witnessed and explored, and the player's overall progression.

As well as this transformational new world-building system, Forever Skies is also receiving a new reporting tool to help players better flag bugs and issues with the game.

Far From Home has also touched on how it's aiming to improve overall game performance by "identifying resource-heavy elements in the game and tackling them one or two at a time, based on priority." It cites the example of rewriting its rain system so that the CPU would no longer get bogged down with reading every individual raindrop - GPUs will now tackle rain simulations, which has had a dramatic impact on the smoothness of the game without sacrificing the visual immersion.

If you're an existing player eager to see these improvements arrive, it sounds like you won't have too long to wait. "We don't have a set release date for these changes yet, but we're aiming to have the update ready sometime between August and September," the blog post says. If you want to dive into the full details of the new algorithm, the reporting system, and the performance tweaks, you can do so here.

It's worth flagging that this is by no means the full extent of the improvements and new features coming to Forever Skies, so in a few months' time, this really could be a Subnautica-rivaling survival experience. In the meantime, check out some of the best open-world games on PC right now. Alternatively, have a browse of our best graphics card guide if you're thinking of upgrading your rig some time soon.

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