Sunkenland, the Waterworld-inspired survival crafting game, released into early access on August 25^th and has received over 3,400 positive reviews. The developers have just released a new roadmap and shared exciting plans for the game.

Vector 3 Studios, the creators of Sunkenland, could just sit back and bask in the sun of their release, but instead they are hard at work listening to the feedback from players to make the game even better. Two of the largest areas they are focusing on are exploration and base building, so let’s take the bait and dig in.

The current map of the game seems huge when you look out across the ocean, but they are looking to make it an endless open world for you to explore by incorporating more random generation in the maps, adding more replayability, making respawnable loot and factions to keep you motivated to head out deeper into the world, and creating more raid-able areas with varying challenges and rewards.

They want the player to be able to conquer enemy encampments and islands, allowing a more tactical and strategic approach to taking out your enemies. Just don’t think once you take out a faction, you’re in the shallow end, as they are going to allow new factions to spawn, adding a sense of unpredictability as these factions attempt to claim control over your territory. With that will come an enhanced map system allowing improved navigation, waypoints, and communicating with other players. Under the water is also going to see some love with the addition of more explorable areas, monuments, and more.

With more areas to conquer, you’re going to have to build more to protect them all. They plan to introduce new triangle shapes and half walls, land mines, and surveillance systems, along with some new building materials such as marble, for better defensive and base designs.

But it’s not all about the functionality of defense but also some leisure, as they want to add interactable furniture and base items such as CD players, sofas, plant-able flowers, and even more rare and visually appealing items to encourage exploration and reward the adventurous.

Crafting and combat are also on the menu, as higher tiers of crafting like tiers 5 and 6 will appear, allowing more advanced crafting recipes and blueprints. Combat is going to become a bit more diversified with a wider range of weapons for both ranged and melee. I’m hoping to find a spear gun, which I think has been missing. As well as more types of vehicles like cargo boats and gunships, and even boat combat mechanics that will allow for enemy boat encounters and even full-scale invasions.

And lastly, since it is a multiplayer game, they will be enhancing character customization with more outfits, animated poses, and such to allow you to make a more visually distinctive and unique avatar.

They will now also start to introduce some of the lore of the game with engaging stories and quests that will allow the players to become even more immersive in the game and provide meaningful objectives.

Now this is only a roadmap of planned things for the game, but the developer team did want it to be known that they will actively be looking for community involvement in the development of the game to make it the best game they can. We can expect constant updates, some coming in the next few days and weeks, with a goal of not letting any updates go longer than a month without any progress.

I am super excited to see this game develop, so I am curious to hear your thoughts about the game. What new features are you excited to see in the game?