Upcoming features

See also: Version history, TestLive, High Priority Community Issue Overview.

Upcoming features for Conan Exiles.

• Already out
• News and announcements
• Notes

Very soon

• A proper guide on how to use Automatic Downloading of Mods and the Event Log.

Patches will go live on consoles a few days later usually, as it goes through certification at Sony (PS4) and Microsoft (Xbox) respectively.

Loot bags have become an item that is tagged with ownership, meaning if someone's base decays, you can not pick up their stuff anymore. This change is not listed in the patch notes.

What you currently see listed as "free" on Epic Games' store page is in fact the DevKit, used to create mods, and not the actual game. The developers are working with Epic to make this more clear and apologies for the confusion this is causing.

Funcom livestreams

Starting this year there will be:

• More channels. Besides Twitch and Mixer, YouTube will now also be streamed to.
• More streams. Conan Exiles' will be streamed weekly, every Thursday (5pm CET / 11am ET / 8am PT)

Here is an overview of which streams Funcom will be hosting:

• • Tuesday (7pm CET / 1pm ET / 10am PT): Funcom paints with Bob Ross, hosted by Nicole - Nicole and a developer from Funcom’s Durham studio paints along to an episode of The Joy of Painting while talking about games, their industry experience, and whatever else comes to mind. When they’re done painting they will reveal their new works of art and maybe raffle them away to a lucky player?
  • Wednesday (7pm CET / 1pm ET / 10am PT): Durham day, hosted by Nicole and Andy - The CMs from our Durham office will stream dev chats, gameplay and other assorted content related to games developed in the Durham studio. Expect to see games like Age of Conan, Secret World Legends and others (like future games) in these streams.
  • Thursday (5pm CET / 11am ET / 8am PT): Oslo day, hosted by Jens Erik and Natascha - Our Oslo CMs will stream dev chats, gameplay and other related content being made in the Oslo office. Conan Exiles and Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden will be the main focus for these streams. This is also when you can tune in to see upcoming games Funcom is publishing.
  • Friday (5pm CET / 11am ET / 8am PT): Friday is a wildcard! Fridays are the days where we kick, back and relax a little. Anything can happen on a Friday stream, from playing multiplayer games with the community, co-op games across offices, or casually play a game we’ve been enjoying recently to share it with our community. The Oslo and Durham offices will be splitting and sharing host duties for the Friday streams.

Feedback on this concept may be sent through Facebook, Twitter or the Forums.

Focus development areas

• Introduction
• General
• Current main focus
• State of the newsletter
• The Purge
• Exploits
• Building optimization
• AI/Thrall improvements
• VoIP

“	It is fantastic to see how much you, as a community, care and we want to make sure that you know we are here for you. Your feedback and discussions help us understand your concerns and our improvement potential. It is also a direct inspiration for the focus they are planning to have for Conan Exiles, within the next two months.	„
	~ Tascha

Besides fixing general bugs, the following core aspects have been defined, which Funcom partially worked on in the past, as detailed focus categories for the next few patches. They are dedicated to building a strong foundation for Conan Exiles for the next year, improving and expanding on the existing core mechanics before they divide our focus back to fixing AND adding new content. So, do not panic, they are aware that new content is also needed.

These are the things that they are dedicating our full attention to for the next two month (including December) and you should see these being patched out to TestLive in quick succession. They do of course also have new exciting things for you in store but for now the focus is on improving the core aspects of Conan Exiles to build a strong foundation for future additions.

General information comes from earlier threads than below subsections.

The team is currently focusing on bug-fixing, free updates, and future DLC production.

DLCs

Main article: Downloadable Content

• Each of these will be a paid cosmetic DLC with a specific theme.

Free updates

• Focus on either retention or acquisition of new (or inactive) players.
• Will continue to be rolled out in the coming months.
• Examples of free updates are eg. new dungeons.

• 1 patch every 4-6 weeks
• 1 possible hotfix within that 4-6 week period if needed.
• Patching all platforms as close together as possible, hopefully the same day.
• More frequent TestLive updates
  • Incorporate ongoing bug fixes and testing as needed.

Provides time for

• Extensive bug fixing, tweaking and testing
  • Making sure that a patch is as ready and as stable as it can be.
• Taking feedback into consideration.

Part of the developers focus is to refine core mechanics, make exploration more exciting and improve experience as well as the leveling curve. They already have Purge improvement/fixes on TestLive. January and February will see updates where they will gradually deploy more patches to our Test Servers which deal with the following issues, additions and improvements:

• More updates for The Purge (section)
• More performance updates.^{No details available right now.}
• Improvements to AI behavior and controls (section)
• Progression balancing from starting experience to end game (parts of this is on TestLive already)
• Improvements and additions to make exploration both more dangerous but also more rewarding (more on this soon!)
• Fixes to UI and Admin Panel.^{No details available right now.}
• Avatar, Siege and Raiding balancing and improvements. (sections)
• More Exploit fixes (section)
• Building Quality of Life Improvements (section)
• More details and info for each of these areas will be revealed as this progresses, including VoIP (section)

“	There are going to be some changes to the newsletters next year. The community newsletters came about as a way for us to improve communication with our players during Early Access. We wanted to give you a glimpse into the development process and summarize the current state of Conan Exiles and its development. It would allow us to share upcoming content and discuss some of the things the dev team had been working on. How we communicate with the community, and the size of the community team, has evolved and grown since the inception of the community newsletters. We feel like the newsletters have served their purpose well, but we have also started using other ways of providing the community with the same information: The Trello Board provides more transparency and insight. We’ve been working on increasing the number of news updates that go out on the forums and on Steam. We have also been working on being more active on social media to respond to player feedback and issues. As such, we’re going to end the newsletters in their current form. Not to worry though! Even though the newsletters are going away that doesn’t mean we won’t stop communicating with you. We will keep you updated about the work we’re putting into Conan Exiles. News updates will be posted on the forums, on Steam, Reddit, and social media, when available, so keep your eyes posted to our official channels come 2019. We may also start doing monthly recaps, in case there’s been a lot going on.	„
	~ Jens Erik Vaaler

Main article: The Purge

The Purge is a very important PvE aspect of the game and while it has worked on a technical level, it never really did hit the mark and confused a lot of players. The developers have seen your passion for this mechanic and your critique and reports. They are currently working on several significant improvements coding and design wise.

• A number of data-fixes has hit Testlive recently - but there are also code-fixes that will come that will make the purge more stable, coherent and with these fixes we will also introduce a new set of purge admin commands to allow for better control over the purge.

See also: Useful links.

In the past, exploits fixes were made as fast as possible. However in-between additional bug fixes and improvements they could not focus as much as they wanted on this area. They are now setting aside a dedicated period to go over all the remaining reports they could not focus on previously and will address as many as they can.

Some fixes for undermeshing have already gone to TestLive on December 10 (and Live^{[citation needed]}).

The developers have been working on faster loading times and general optimizations for buildings. Conan Exiles has hardly any limits in place for how big you can build, and they are especially excited to have you test these improvements.

AI and thrall improvements are one additional, very important aspect. The developers want pets and thralls to feel rewarding. This part will include improvements regarding thrall attack patterns, swimming/moving with thralls, giving you more info what is happening or happened with your thrall/pets and further fixes to thralls falling through floors, to only name a few examples. More importantly they will be working directly with your feedback on additional settings and mechanics for your pets and thralls in the form of defensive and aggressive stances as well as other suggestion they collected from the forums.

See the News and announcements tab for up-to-date TestLive patch ETA

The developers saw your many votes on the Trello board and are actively looking into options of how to improve the issues they have seen reported. This needs some testing and decisions going forward for the different platforms.

More reliable and better quality VOIP

The biggest difference for players will be increased stability, improved audio quality (nothing can be done about the microphone though), and stereo sound.

The current version of in-game voice chat is peer-to-peer. When you use the in-game voice chat to talk to another person the game client will send the sound of your voice to everyone around your character.

The new VOIP implementation uses a third party service called Vivox. Here is how it works: When using the new in-game voice chat, the sound of your voice is broadcast to a server at Vivox, where it is mixed to the correct audio track and sent to the game clients.

Vivox’ server places the audio on a correct track in relation to your character in the game. If the speaker is far away their voice will sound distant. If they’re standing to your right, the sound of their voice will mainly come from the right audio channel.

List of upcoming features

• Overview
• Events
• Other
• Stream summaries

(Not) listed, but recently (re-)mentioned:

• Improving AI, The Purge, siege and other core features and stability. Some examples:
  • Adding commands to Thralls like Guard, or be defensive, etc.
  • The Purge will get fixed bit by bit.
    • Changes to how many "Purge points" you get per action and how often they’re doled out to players (they were currently a bit too low, which caused the Purge bar to barely move).
    • They are also looking into the different way the Purge tracks who’s online and who’s not when the system chooses who to attack.
• Expanding the Community team.
• Finishing and releasing the four remaining dungeons.
• Both sorcery and mounts were in the pipeline, but have been indefinitely cancelled. (see page)
• Bugs that crash servers have a higher priority than exploits.

For upcoming DLC packs, Bundles and Passes see Downloadable Content.

• The developers are brainstorming and planning events for all servers.
  • If you have any suggestions or ideas for events, feel free to share them with us in the suggestion forums.
• In theSHED's Powerhour interview, Jens Erik Vaaler mentioned they may be doing “halloween and christmas events” and events alike (read "halloween" - 2018: Night of Lost Souls) are able to be themed around Conan, for example "feast of the dead".
• They are also talking about doing some competitions outside of the game. (2018: Pumpkin Carving Contest)
• If you do not wish to participate in an ingame event, there may be a TestLive build available without the event content, but otherwise identical to the current live version. Players and admins should read the TestLive wiki page for important info on how to switch versions.

Planned for the future:

• more building contests.

Twitch QA

Twitch QA, September 28.

Bow revamps

• Right Click mechanic changes where Power Shot is coming back.

Dungeons

• Currently 5 dungeons in development, including the one in Update 34.
  • Different themes and bosses
  • Each dungeon is in different stages of development. As always, this means that different teams are working on various elements.
• Changes to the Jhebbal Sag dungeon such as Bosses (mechanics, effects, attack sequencing), Damage values.

Building

Additions

• Jens giggled and covered his mouth and said “there might be more coming” as far as DLC buildings like the first and second DLC’s.

Rendering

• As has been previously been reported, yes they are currently working on this specific performance improvement. This is being worked on by one of the devs, Nicola (Nikola? Sorry for spelling!)
• The idea is to reduce the memory load necessary and improve loading speeds of anything persistent.
• In testing this performance improvement on server saves with very very very large buildings, cities, and forts, here are the hard numbers:
  • One example, on a base that currently takes a solid 3 minutes to load everything, now takes less than 20 seconds with the performance improvement.
• This performance improvement will be heading to testlive “soon.”
  • It needs a lot of player testing when it does get uploaded to testlive
• This should improve server performance a great deal too. This should improve other things that get wonky, like AI doing weird things.

Bulk Crafting

• They want to make it so you can make things in bulk, or bundles.
• They want to make it so crafting machines themselves will level up, or improve and thus become more efficient.
  • This will be a visual change too.
  • By level up, they mean in tiers, with the higher tiers being more “expensive” and more valuable.
• This of course could and probably will alter the dynamics of how player base layouts are realized.

Bug fixes

• Trap bug fixing and combo field fixing.
• These bug fixes will come out “very soon” TM

Let's Talk About Animation

September 26, 2018

• separating the TestLive branch into its own client on Steam.

Quality of Life

September 6 and September 12, 2018

• Avatar re-balance.
  • Eventually looking into siege mechanics.
• Improved Map.
  • Adds grid coordinates.
  • Expands zoom out.
• Improved Event Log.
  • Adds time and date, server restarts and how something was destroyed (player raids, decay, etc).
  • Filtered by owner to show current player or clan context.
  • Sorting by type, date and location (local or global).
• Faster building rendering, lower CPU usage, lower transfer of network data.
  • Optimized and improved building replication.
  • Bug fixes.

The Work Continues

August 29, 2018

• Give bosses hard hitting area of effect attacks
  • Elephants will have a devastating stomp and sweep attack combo.
  • Wild Boars will dash around to hit as many people as possible.
• Special arrows (Poison, explosives, healing and light)

A look back and the way forward

June 6, 2018

• Updating combat mechanics (new combos and new bow mechanics).
• Automatic Downloading of Mods.

This is information which needs to be added to the Upcoming features page. Please help contributing it if you want to and have any spare time.

• Developer Stream Recap - June 20
• Anniversary Celebration - Anniversary Update, Riddle of Steel - Written Summary - May 10
• Building Competition and Upcoming Content - Featuring Robtheswede - April 12
• Newest Patches and Steam Free Weekend - Written Summary - March 9
• Re-balancing, VOIP, Testlive - Written Summary - February 8

2018

Older streams.

• Community Stream - The Age of Calamitous Mod Showcase (12-07-18) - Bulletin Summary Edition - December 18
• Dev Stream: Testlive Update with Oscar and Jens (11-23-18) - Bulletin Summary Edition - November 18
• Halloween Event and Community Showcase Stream (10-26-18) - Bulletin Summary Edition - October 18
• 10-12-18 - Funcom Developer Stream with Alex - Bulletin Summary Edition - October 18
• Q & A Dev Stream - Bulletin Summary Edition - September 8
• Stream Summary by TwinCrows - March 17

Added with Update 34

These were upcoming features before Update 34 released. See the forum thread for all changes.

• Respawning in dungeons
• Thrall Scout
• Event Log
• Other
• Pict DLC

• New respawn functionality:
  • You can't place a bedroll in dungeons (unchanged).
  • However, with the Midnight Grove, if you die you will get the option to respawn back at the dungeon, the desert, or your bedroll.
  • Useful for example if you realize that you are not good enough for a dungeon.
  • Will eventually be rolled out for The Dregs and any future dungeon that might come out.

In the immediate future, Thralls will be given the behavior to attack what you attack.
Thralls that are commanded to stay, will return to your base

• This is part of a “scout” system as Oscar calls it. It lets you stagger multiple Thralls to act as scouts and you can view what they find in the event logs.
  The timer before they return to base is set to 10 minutes, as Oscar believes.
  • This also fixes Thralls getting stuck
• Further, you can command the Thrall to stay and tell the Thrall that where they are now is their new home. Command is “Guard.”

Main article: Event Log

• Lots of new notifications and entries
  • Thrall killed by player will receive an entry.
  • Thrall died by hunger will get an entry.
  • Lost items and buildings will get entries.
    Items stolen will get entries.
• They want to add filters to the Event Log to help you search easier. And yes, you can scroll through it. They expect the Event Log to be much fuller in things like raids.
• At 45:30, it was asked if the Event Log will have time stamps, and the answer is yes.

Highlighting corpses.

• The Pict DLC had been evident, accounting for
  • The enthusiasm shown by both Tascha and Jens - "funny, that" is Jens' reaction.
  • A line found in the DefaultGame.ini file.

Cancelled features

If any of the below features will be implemented, the developers will officially announce it with a dedicated thread. Speculation may be misleading.

• Mounts
• Linux client

Mounts were originally supposed to be available in one of the first patches after Early Access of Conan Exiles. This info since has changed, as technical difficulties have arisen. No fix for these issues has been found.

Mounts are not impossible, but they are not super straightforward. The main problem comes from how they structured the player character/input and UI early on. It was not planned early on to have mounts. Basically, everything is very reliant on the current controlled actor being the player. If the developers change that, there is a lot of systems that break. So it is doable, but it is a lot of work to fix.

• The developers have not been in a position where they've had the time to dedicate for it.
• For consoles it has been an issue about performance, having increased run speed allows players to run too fast for the consoles to load the world.
• You could also run off the map.

Adjusting the speed to be the same as the player makes mounts look like they are running in slow-motion. This did not feel right to the developers.

Description

Early Access description:

“	Taming animals will mostly work the same as taming thralls. Players will have to drag their chosen mount back to a special pen that will break the animal’s will and turn it into a mount. The idea is that taming is an active process. We will also be adding animal thralls that will work as pets and transports for players, as well as mount and pet gear so you can customize your animal companions. Players will start out taming horses and camels to use as transportation and pack animals, while bigger animals like rhinos and elephants can be used for more offensive purposes. We’ll also be working on adding mounted combat.	„
	~ Dev Blog

Notes

“	Unfortunately, we will not be launching with mounts or pets. Mounts were one of the most requested features, and we have spent a lot of time trying to make it work for Conan Exiles. Due to technical limitations with the way the game loads and streams the game world, we were unable to include a feature that allowed players to move over a certain speed. Our coders worked hard to find a solution for this, but in a recent “point of no return” type meeting, we decided that their time is better spent on polish, bug fixes, and other features that we know can make it for launch. Pets is another animal-specific thing we also wanted to do. We have done a lot of the groundwork, and it’s certainly possible that we can add them at some point after launch, but we decided to prioritize polish and other features ahead of launch. There were also concerns about server performance, that too many players having too many animals and human thralls would have a massive impact on servers. To minimize risk for launch and to focus on other core features, we have decided to put this on hold.	„
	~ Dev Blog

• Mounts were not able to be added for full launch.
• Horses and elephants are/were planned mounts, but it was uncertain if they would only be added as mounts or also as pets.

One of the programmers has been trying to create a Linux build for setting up servers. However, there was a problem with the version of Unreal Engine 4 they started with that he never managed to get passed.

If you want to set up a dedicated server for Linux, you are able to use the Dedicated Server Launcher.