Joystick movement is an option

Climbing and pulling yourself along with your hands is still how Argos is meant to be played, and it's still the default. But joystick movement is a real option now, and you pick it on the way in rather than hunting for it in a menu after you already feel sick.

A proper first-time setup

Loading in for the first time now walks you through a few pages before you reach the world: a welcome to the alpha, then your movement and comfort settings, then the privacy page. The privacy page comes last on purpose, and only its button counts as you accepting it.

Set your movement once and the game remembers it next time. It's stored per person, so it's never handed to somebody else who picks up the same headset.

Sunstone Valley

The eight grounds have a home. Sunstone Valley is a whole new landscape built to hold them, with its own terrain, stone, trees, scattered detail and lighting. Each ground now flies a banner with its name, so you can see whose place you're walking into from across the valley.

The recipe book

The recipe panel that floated over the craft table is gone. A book lies on the table instead.

Grab it like the mallet and it swings open in your hands. Let go and it glides back and shuts.
Others see you holding it open, but only you can point at anything in it.
Eight tabs, from Tools to Odds & Ends, sit on the bookmarks modeled into the book.
The pages are ink on paper, with sepia stamps for icons. A recipe you haven't found yet is a faint question mark and NOT YET FOUND.
A label on the cover shows what the table is set to and how far through the hammering you are, so you don't have to open it.
The craft table has its proper model now, not a stand-in.

Report a bug without leaving

There's a REPORT A BUG button on your ground's sign now. Press it, type on the same keyboard you name your ground with, and send. It goes straight to the team. You get six a day.

Bodies and arrows

Chickens wear a new model, and a dead one goes limp: neck, legs, wings and tail flop, settle over whatever it landed on, and swing when you carry it.
An arrow in a chicken used to hang at the height it hit while the bird walked around underneath it. It sticks into the animal now and rides with it wherever it goes.
A dead player's head no longer sinks into the ground.
Bodies are heavy. You drag one along the ground rather than picking it up and throwing it, and other people's bodies are solid to you.

Smaller fixes

Loading in could throw you backwards the moment you tried to move. It doesn't any more.
Things the game sets down, like logs from a felled tree, could land inside the ground and be lost for good. They land on it now.
Other players and animals move more smoothly between updates.
Your name and the details under it are one nameplate now, instead of three pieces of floating text.
Logs left on the grass no longer hover in the air for someone who joins later.
Distant trees are cheaper to draw.

Alpha arrives October 2026.