Mr. Z here with the news! As you may have noticed, our world has been rocked by some pretty big events lately. We concluded a very large playtest a few weeks ago, we've also done a send out of Steam keys so all our backers can play the game before early access, and not to forget we've been hard at work in the background fixing many of the issues found in the playtest and working on additional new content.
One of the new pieces of content in the works is new external walls! We decided to split external walls into two categories. Low Walls and High Walls. Kz has been hard at work making the additional models.
We noticed during tests that the External walls had a lot of issues because the wooden walls would turn into a giant stone wall when upgraded. Now when you place external walls you will have to choose from the beginning whether they'll be Short or Tall and as you upgrade them they'll have the same footprint like how all other building upgrades work.

During our playtest we had 40 thousand people playing in total and we peaked at 1800 co-current users, a quite large number especially considering the playtest wasn't advertised heavily. We launched many additional servers as practice for launch day and many were booted on demand. We also had a series of very high performance servers launched by our Winterust partner. We took a lot of performance metrics on those servers as people were playing and found out that with a few more optimizations we'll be able to hit our cpu budget for launch. We've haven't had so many people playing survival with the servers running so fast and the player counts being so high before, so it was every encouraging to see the performance numbers we achieved during the playtest.
Optimization has been a huge focus before and since the playtest. We've done a lot of work on optimizing the physics of the game. The cost of simulating the world had become a lot more expensive on the server when we expanded the size of the map and added more complex POIs to the map. One very major optimization I've been working on lately is a system that essentially works as an LOD for large bases, as we were getting a lot of lag on the server and client when groups of players would roam around the map and come close to very large player bases. Although the game servers were running relatively fast, there were some really bad lag spikes that made the experience very unstable. I've been carefully identifying and fixing the cause of each lag spike so we can achieve true stability, as any amount of server instability can make the combat extremely volatile.
A large part of the work we're doing lately is in preparation for another Open Stress Test. While we can't yet say when this next Open Stress Test is scheduled, we are working diligently to get it ready as soon as possible, that being said, our goal is to reach a more much stable build than before. The last test, while fairly unstable, gave us a lot of crucial data that we needed to help us fix many issues. You can expect for our next playtest some significant optimizations to be done, additional new content and the combat system to get some much needed love.
We did a large key send out to all backers recently that had a fair few hiccups. We're still working on resolving the issues with the backend and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused. As a thank you, for our communities awesome patience, Kz has created a new helmet skin for all our backers. We present the "Sorry Sallet" Helm which will be given to all backers as an extra cosmetic.

If you still have not gotten your keys, please check our the support services on our discord: https://discord.gg/Tr2DxFh We've got a channel called "steam-key-faq" with tips for how to get a quick resend. As always, we cannot thank our backers enough for helping us get this far. Renown would not have been possible without you and we hope to see everyone playing the game on early access launch.