Icarus Week 248 went live on September 3, 2026, and it is one of those updates that reads as minor in the patch notes and turns out to matter a lot if you run a dedicated server. There is no new biome and no new campaign mission this week. What there is instead: Scoria finally escapes Prometheus, and a fire bug that has quietly annoyed multiplayer groups for years gets its first real fix.
Release Date and Build Version
Week 248 shipped on Thursday, September 3, 2026, on build 3.0.26.156677-rel-DangerousHorizons. Dedicated servers pick it up on the next process restart, so a stop and start from your control panel is all it takes. Everyone connecting needs to be on the same build, so give your group a minute to let Steam finish updating before they try to join.
Scoria Deep Ore Veins Now Spawn on Every Map
Until this week, Scoria Deep Ore Veins were a Prometheus exclusive. If your group had settled on Olympus, Styx, or Elysium, every technology that depends on Scoria was simply out of reach unless somebody started a separate prospect on a map nobody actually wanted to play.
Week 248 enables Scoria on Deep Ore Deposit rolls and rerolls across all maps. On any world you create from here on, Scoria veins spawn naturally alongside the other deep ore types. No extra steps, no config flag to set, nothing to add to your server settings.
That is the whole story for a brand new server. For a server that has been running since before Dangerous Horizons, there is a catch worth understanding before your players start asking why they cannot find any.
Existing Prospects Still Need the Deep Cycler
Existing prospects and outposts do not get Scoria retroactively. The deposits on your map were rolled when the world was generated, and enabling a new resource type upstream does not reach back and rewrite them. To bring Scoria into a world you have already built in, somebody has to reroll those deposits with the Deep Cycler.
The Deep Cycler arrived back in Week 235 as a Tier 5 device, crafted at the Manufacturer and fed with Refined Oil. You place it near a Deep Ore Vein and it reconfigures the nearby veins into a different available resource. Veins that already have a drill attached are excluded from the reroll, and the interface lists every vein it is about to affect before you commit, so you are not gambling with a mining setup your group spent hours building.
Two things are worth planning for on a multiplayer server. Running a cycle attracts Caveworms and Landsharks the same way a Thumper does, and the device shuts down if it takes too much damage partway through. This is a defense event, not an idle click. Bring people, or fortify the site first and stock enough Refined Oil that one failed run does not cost you the entire supply.
If your prospect predates all of this and nobody has touched the device yet, our Week 235 write-up covers the Deep Cycler in more detail.
Ghost Fires: Why Extinguished Fires Kept Burning on Clients
The other half of Week 248 is a fix for something the team internally calls Ghost Fires. The symptom is familiar to anyone who plays in a group: a fire is successfully put out on the server, and on somebody's client the flames keep burning anyway. Nothing is actually alight, nothing is taking damage, but the visual effect never clears.
The cause is more interesting than a typical particle bug. Icarus does not treat fire as decoration. It simulates heat transfer and thermodynamics to decide how fire catches and how it spreads, which is a large part of why burning your own base down feels so convincing and, usually, so avoidable.
Simulating that for every flammable object and replicating each one over the network would be brutal on bandwidth, so the game does not do it that way. The fire simulation runs independently on both the server and each client, and the server sends state updates to keep the two in agreement. It is an efficient design, and it is also exactly where the bug lives. The replication system could skip an intermediate object state change as an optimization, the client then never transitioned through the state it was waiting for, and the visual effects stayed on.
Be clear about what actually shipped, though. Week 248 contains a cosmetic fix that cleans up lingering fire particles on a client once the server reports the fire is out. The underlying desynchronisation is not solved, and the developers say a full fix is planned for the coming weeks. If you have been telling players to relog to clear phantom flames, you can stop doing that, but do not be surprised if the root cause resurfaces in some other form before the proper fix lands.
Everything Else in the Week 248 Changelog
The rest is small, and a few items are quality of life fixes players have been asking about for a while:
- Sun and Moon positions now update every 50ms instead of 200ms, which visibly smooths shadow movement at sunrise and sunset
- The Forest Wolf no longer loses its textures and fur after being skinned
- Gold and Sulfur icons have been reverted to the original art, because the replacements were harder to tell apart at a glance
- Using the taxidermy knife on a Piglet now correctly rewards the Piglet Head instead of the Piglet Trophy
- Ghost Croc loot value went up, and Piglet loot is now based on Pig rather than Ram
Next Week: Workshop Battery Bank
Week 249 adds a purchasable power bank to the orbital workshop. It works like the hydrazine and oil canisters already sold there and arrives pre-charged, so you can top your tools back up in the field without hauling a full power setup out to your mining site. Given that chasing Scoria pulls you further from base, the timing is not an accident.
What to Do on Your Server This Week
Restart the server to pull the new build, then decide which situation you are in. Fresh world: do nothing, Scoria is already in the generation. Long-running prospect: plan a Deep Cycler run, because nothing will change on its own no matter how many times you restart.
Running your group's prospect on hardware that does not stutter when the fire simulation gets busy makes a real difference on a full server. Our Icarus server hosting runs on dedicated Ryzen 9 hardware with instant setup and full FTP access, and the getting started guide walks you through your first prospect.
