u/Kedryn73

Hi guys,

I wanted to share our experience with Icarus, get some thoughts from the community, and see if others are facing the same frustrations.

Who we are: We are a group of 4 friends, all around 52-53 years old. We’ve been gamers since we were 9—starting with pen-and-paper RPGs and text-based MUDs, all the way to modern survival games. We still play every single evening (family comes first, but we don't sleep much!). Recently, we’ve put serious hours into Satisfactory, StarRupture, Valheim, and Enshrouded.

Our journey so far: We picked up Icarus on sale in late March. To host our sessions, I set up a dedicated server—initially via steamcmd and later migrating it to Pterodactyl.

At first, the game was a blast. We built, we tamed, and we progressed through the tiers. But then, the multiplayer bugs started hitting hard:

• Mount & Server Lag: The lag scales badly with player count. If there are 3 or 4 of us online, it takes just one person mounting a tame to trigger massive server lag, sometimes putting the server 3-5 minutes behind. To prevent this and actually play together, we are forced to travel everywhere on foot.
• Falling Through the Map: Our characters and mounts frequently clip under the world geometry, losing all cargo. This forces me to manually roll back the server using backup saves (sometimes losing 5 minutes, sometimes hours of progress).
• The "Loading Geometry" Trap: Getting stuck in infinite geometry loading screens, sometimes fixed by blindly jumping around, sometimes requiring a server restart.
• DLC Migration Bugs: After topping the tech tree on Olympus, we bought New Frontiers and moved to Prometheus. We uploaded our gear and tames to the orbital station, but upon landing, over half our items were marked as "still on Olympus", forcing us to re-buy armors, backpacks, and tools.
• Frozen Tames: When we brought our tames down from orbit, they were completely frozen. I eventually figured out that sending them back to space and recalling them fixed it, but it was incredibly frustrating.

Our silver lining: The Moas Ironically, the only thing that never fails us is our Moas. Since you can't breed local mounts on Prometheus, no native creature can beat them. We brought over Moas with 99% resistances and over 2k speed. They are absolute units; they tank everything and defend our properties so well that we didn't even bother building walls around our base on Prometheus.

The core issue: We really want to love this game, and we appreciate the weekly patches. However, searching online revealed that these groundbreaking bugs have been present for 2 to 4 years.

As a group, it’s frustrating to deal with, and as the person managing the server, it's a chore. The complete lack of useful in-game admin commands means I have to physically move and rename backup files via FTP/SSH almost every day just to recover from a clip-under-the-map bug.

On top of that, the game lacks crucial Quality of Life features:

• Managing pipes and cables is tedious; the connectors are finicky and there is no visual tool to debug networks (to see where water, oil, or electricity is failing).
• If you suffer a power loss, you have to physically walk to every single miner, bench, and light to manually flip the switch back on. You can travel across the universe, but you can't build a centralized breaker?

Conclusion: Icarus has massive potential, but these long-standing bugs severely impact the multiplayer experience. Are other dedicated server hosts experiencing the same level of instability with mounts and clipping, or have you found any reliable workarounds?

Thanks for reading!

P.S.
yes, i used AI only to fix and make this more readable, as i'm not native english.