Last Oasis servers are back online and allegedly stable

Survival MMO Last Oasis has had a rough launch week, but it looks like things might settle soon. After taking the servers offline to address stability issues that were making the game largely unplayable, it's now back online and allegedly on better footing. Donkey Crew say that they won't be shutting down servers or wiping player progress again now that they're once again publicly available.

Last Oasis's launch into Steam Early Access initially looked auspicious as it rose to #6 on the top-selling chart for the week. Things quickly fell apart in such an agonising fashion that Donkey Crew chose to take it offline for a week to solve server issues without players continually attempting to log in. "We were pushing quick fixes out, but in such a short period of time, we couldn't have truly understood the problems without proper debugging," they say. As of Sunday, they claim things are resolved and that the game will remain online.

"With the exception of some small issues that affected individual players or servers, which we're investigating and will be fixing soon, everything is stable and working as intended," the developers said in a post from Saturday. After successfully allowing the servers to run through Saturday night, Donkey Crew say "we will not be wiping your progress or shutting servers down anymore."

In an earlier Saturday post, Donkey Crew dig into what the heck actually happened to the Last Oasis servers during its launch week. Broadly speaking, it sounds like a compounded issue in which corrupted database information caused the servers to shut down as a failsafe while attempting to validate the state of the game world. Meanwhile, players continued hitting up the login queue with requests to rejoin, compounding the issue.

"Our systems were essentially stuck in a loop with multiple issues affecting each other. As all the servers were shutting down and restarting, over 20k people were trying to rejoin at the same time, leading to our queue system failing, which then kept overloading the master server, letting only a few people to join a time until the master server would shut off again and take all servers down with it. And the cycle would continue."

As for what comes next, Donkey Crew say "We're working on a content patch, which should be ready next week, and we'll be adding an ability to change your character's name and appearance soon." They're also reworking the ability to delete characters but say it will take a bit longer as it was a contributor to the earlier issues.

Now that things are back up and running, you can try out the survival MMO on Steam if giant wooden base machines are your thing.