Dear Silica Community, First of all, we’d like to wish you all a happy 2024, and thank you for your constant support and feedback last year. During that time, Dram was able to address many issues and bugs, and also managed to implement new features which were highly appraised. Silica was announced on April 6th, 2023 as the first game under our renewed Bohemia Incubator. It entered Early Access on Steam less than a month later. So far it’s been a pretty wild ride. [previewyoutube=5_wiGamOyAc;full][/previewyoutube] Over the past year, we’ve delivered nearly 25 updates, ranging from simple hotfixes to the reworking of entire features like:

• Improving harvester pathfinding
• Adding outposts and turrets to better defend your base
• Significantly increasing performance in the later stages of matches
• Balancing gameplay
• Playing with the attributes of various units and structures
• Adding 9 air units to the game
• Dedicated servers

That’s what 2023 looked like. Now let’s discuss what comes next – a.k.a the Road Map for Silica in 2024! The original plan was to release 1.0 and exit Early Access in May 2024. Unfortunately, there are still plenty of things we’d like to finish before that happens. We want Silica to be in the best condition possible, so we’ve decided to push the release date back to Q4 of 2024. In the meantime, we'll be focusing on:

• AI Units
• Balancing and the game‘s performance, which is our community’s biggest pain point
• Introducing VoIP, including proximity chat
• Hover bikes for human infantry units (our main focus in Q1 as a much-needed way to cover large distances)
• The Alien Queen – representing the main unit for the alien race
• Respawn mechanics
• Reworking or adding maps, including capture points such as bunkers, new maps, and adding new biomes
• Implementing quality of life improvements
• Adding new features, like further enhancements in the RTS part of the game (e.g. adding an attack move)
• Revamping the UI to improve its usability
• Improving the multiplayer matchmaking system (based on player skill and rank)
• We also plan on providing tutorials to help new players

Following that, Q3 and Q4 will be dedicated to the full release of Silica 1.0! As you can see, there’s a lot to do and much to look forward to. If you‘re interested in a more detailed description of the roadmap, check out the video made by Dram. And if you want to show off that you’re a part of the Silica community, check here. Finally, to show you that work on Silica never stops, here’s the changelog for the latest game update v.0.8.22:

• Added: Server list now uses info from game servers API rather than lobbies
• Added: 'FPS' console command to get current FPS
• Added: 'ServerFPS' console command to get current FPS on server (even on client)
• Added: Join command to join a server based on ID
• Added: Logging of network upload/download rates
• Added: NetRate and ServerNetRate console commands to get upload/download rates
• Added: Hit effect to Colossus' eye weak point
• Improved: Debug logging includes timestamps
• Changed: Debug logging moved from 'C:\Users\USER\AppData\LocalLow\Bohemia Interactive\Silica\Player.log' to 'C:\Users\USER\Documents\Silica\Game.log'
• Changed: Only HQ is a major structure now
• Changed: Colossus' eye weak point is active only when shooting
• Changed: Colossus' eye weak point damage multiplier from 2.5 to 10
• Changed: Hunter health from 4500 to 3000
• Fixed: Hotfix for 'Error executing m_dryGroup->getWaveData' spamming console
• Fixed: Long AI response wait time on Strategy match restart as navigation data is reloaded vs rebuilt
• Fixed: Hovered vehicles' rotation used wrong axis causing instability
• Fixed: All details correctly sent to dedicated server commander

We look forward to having you with us in 2024, and hope that Silica 1.0 will meet your expectations. Thank you for your support and see you on Baltarus!