This content is now available on the Community Test Environment. Go to your Steam Library and download “Insurgency: Sandstorm Community Test Environment” to play. Please remember this is a preview build, so some issues are expected (see 'Known Issues') and all content is considered work in progress. If you encounter any problems or have feedback for the development team please don’t hesitate to let us know in the CTE sub-section of the Steam forums. Also be sure to fill out our 1.10 CTE Feedback Survey. Our team will be monitoring feedback during the CTE and aim to push this update to players on the live version of Insurgency: Sandstorm on May 18th. The CTE will be available until Monday evening.

The full changelist for the release version of Update 1.10 will be available at the time of release of Operation: Exodus on May 18th.

Please note: If you launch the CTE and your mods start downloading, please close the CTE and use as a launch parameter on Steam.

Are you ready for an assault on the Citadel? Battle through a museum-turned-warzone, traversing muddy trenches, navigating sprawling tunnels, and battling across an ancient amphitheatre. Citadel is an expansive map and was built with our new game mode Survival in mind, requiring players to adapt to different combat styles as they travel across it. Close-quarters can swiftly shift into open terrain before descending into narrow tunnels. Citadel supports the following game modes:

Versus

• Push Security
  
• Push Insurgents
  
• Firefight
  
• Domination

Co-op

• Checkpoint Security
  
• Checkpoint Insurgents
  
• Hardcore Checkpoint Security
  
• Hardcore Checkpoint Insurgents
  
• Outpost
  
• Survival 👀

There are two new secondary weapons available: The MR 73 for Security (in Versus) at 4 supply points, and the Desert Eagle for Insurgents (in Versus) at 5 supply points. Both are available for each faction in Co-op. Each weapon supports optic, barrel, and other upgrades, including a speed-loader for the MR 73. These new firearms will have you ditching your primary for some hand-held stopping power.

Pistol optics are here, adding both precision and accuracy to your secondary weapons. The 1x Mini Green Dot for the Insurgents and the 1x Mini Red Dot for Security.

We’ve added a new co-op mode called Survival. Hunt for a safe extraction zone as you’re being overrun by wave after wave of relentless enemy forces. Cut off from your allies and supply lines, starting with only a sidearm, you’ll have to scavenge for weapons and ammo, using our new weapon crates to acquire randomized primary weapons and upgrades.

Survival mode is available on the maps below in both day and night scenarios. We hope to expand the mode to more maps in future updates:

• Citadel
  
• Outskirts
  
• Hillside
  
• Hideout
  
• Summit
  
• Farmhouse
  
• Precinct
  
• Powerplant

We’ve added Outpost Mode to more maps, and improved some of the existing layouts with better objective placement and enemy AI spawn areas.

New Outpost Maps

• Citadel
  
• Summit
  
• Precinct
  
• Refinery

We’ve made some adjustments to improve player experience in Frontline matches.

• Decreased starting wave count from 20 to 15
  
• Decreased round timer from 20 seconds to 15 seconds

Frontline Improvements
Previously, when the final weapon cache objective was exposed to the enemy team, your team would lose all remaining waves. We found that this was too punishing and could potentially end a round very quickly. To combat this, a new wave drain mechanic was added to allow the losing team a chance to fight back. Once the weapon cache is vulnerable, the waves will begin to drain at a rate of 1 wave per 20 seconds.

Six new mutators are now available. The details on each new mutator can be found below:

• Budget Antiquing: this mutator allows only old, cheap weapons, along with normal equipment and explosives.
  
• No Drops: Weapons, explosives, and equipment are not dropped by dead players and enemy AI
  
• Makarovs Only: Makarov pistols only
  
• Poor: Players start with 2 supply points
  
• Fully Loaded: All weapons, equipment, and explosives in the game available in the Loadout Menu
  
• Gunslingers: players are equipped with the MR 73, normal equipment, and explosives

New weapons have been added to the Firing Range:

• Honey Badger
  
• AS Val
  
• Sterling
  
• Grease Gun
  
• Welrod
  
• M110 SASS
  
• M1 Garand
  
• QBZ-97
  
• QTS-11
  
• MR 73
  
• Desert Eagle

• The color of character materials have been adjusted to subtly increase the overall brightness of characters
  
• NVGs no longer automatically equip onto the player’s face after interacting with a supply crate

• The ammo carrier icons have been updated in the loadout screen to clearly indicate how many additional magazines and explosives are added
  
• The teammate indicator has been made more visible by increasing thickness and opacity
  
• Scroll boxes have been improved in the Loadout Menu and Inventory Menu
  
• Moved the placement of the Client Version element to the right hand side to avoid overlapping other elements

With the introduction of the new Survival mode, our team had to adapt the spatial awareness of the Enemy AI. The built-out spatial awareness infrastructure is currently used only on Survival but will enable future adjustments to all game modes in the future.

• The checkbox to toggle “Allow Derived Game Modes" has been removed. Instead the setting is set to enabled in all scenarios

We’ve made many changes and adjustments to our existing maps, look out for more details in the official 1.10 patch notes.

• Fixed an issue where players were able to vault into and through objects
  
• Fixed an issue where planting a C4 or IED and moving your camera would cause the player’s arms to disappear and cause the player to stop planting
  
• Fixed an issue where players were unable to interact or pick up dropped objects while holding an explosive or knife
  
• Fixed an issue where the M1 Garand 2.5x M1C scope was set to a higher magnification
  
• Fixed an issue where the weapon that is equipped with the 2x-1x Holographic would disappear while ADSing
  
• Fixed an issue where the tanker trucks had larger collision volumes than what was visible to the player
  
• Fixed an issue where the Menu button was not opening the Menu on the controller
  
• Fixed an issue where the controller layout in the Settings Menu where the “Speed Reload (Double Tap)” button was showing as “Quick Reload (Double Tap)”
  
• Fixed an issue where UI elements in the Loadout Menu would not always appear
  
• Fixed an issue in the Settings Menu where the sensitivity values were not capped to the same decimal place
  
• Fixed an issue where the character was not centred in the Loadout Menu
  
• Fixed an issue where the SlowMovement mutator was not being carried over through map changes
  
• Fixed an issue where the password widget appeared to be out of focus when attempting to connect to a password protected server
  
• Fixed an issue where the binds in the leaning hint #108 were showing as UNBOUND
  
• Fixed an issue where the Wet Feet achievement was not obtainable after completing Basic Training under Tutorials

Please note: There are a number of fixes coming with 1.9.2, and this is not the full list of bug fixes coming in 1.10

• The new Citadel map has yet to be completely optimized therefore players may experience drops in frame rate
  
• The title for Citadel Domination is incorrect in the Map Vote screen while playing Versus
  
• Desert Eagle cannot be picked up from the display table in the Firing Range
  
• The magazine that is dropped by Speed Reload is too large when using the Desert Eagle
  
• The red and green dot sights on the Pistol Optics are slightly off-center
  
• Players are able to be killed by airstrike through a wall on Citadel Objective D
  
• There are instances where the weapon and optic will jitter during ADS
  
• There is an issue when the SVD with the Aiming Grip and 7x Sniper Scope is equipped causing the player’s thumb to obstruct the sight picture
  
• There is an issue where the silhouettes of players would show if they were surrounded by smoke effects from two different sources
  
• There is an issue when using switching to a weapon with an Underbarrel attachment combined with a 2x-1x toggleable optic will cause the scope to appear to be toggled to 2x instead of 1x
  
• There is an issue where the overtime element remains on the screen even after the round has ended
  
• There is an issue when viewing a replay with a controller the playback control buttons are too small to read
  
• Players are unable to open the Menu during a match
  
• Players are unable to interact with the Overview Screen during a match
  
• The refresh button does not work in the Community Servers Menu
  
• The left arm is bending unnaturally when aiming down the sights on the AS VAL with the Aiming Grip upgrade and NVG Point Shooting mode
  
• The Mosin-Nagant Stripper Clip weapon upgrade does not push in properly when reloading in third person
  
• AI vehicles can get stuck in the Range level under Tutorials
  
• Switching to or from the Smoke Launcher upgrade with no ammo plays the incorrect animation when using the M1 Garand
  
• There is an issue with weapon and knife hitboxes which may block players that jump into the weapon being held by other players

Hello everyone, my name is Tim Perreault and I’m the Production Director at New World Interactive. It’s hard to believe we’re already four months into 2021. The year is rushing by, but we’re happy with how it’s going so far. This month we’ll touch base on our two upcoming releases that were both recently announced in our Development Streams.

Key Points for State of Production #19

• Update on 1.9.2 Progress
  
• Operation: Exodus Open CTE Playtest
  
• Production Outlook

The team is still putting some final touches on content for this community driven update. We’re excited to release it at the end of the month. If you missed the reveal stream and wanted to get a bit more info on what’s included, you can check it out here.

We recently announced our next major update: Operation: Exodus launching on May 18, 2021. If you didn’t catch the stream, you can watch it here. You can also follow updates on content reveals on our website.

As one of the final steps before we release, we’re doing our Open CTE event from Thursday April 22 until Monday April 26. During this time, players will be able to get an early preview of content coming in our latest updating. To help encourage testing of a few specific things, we’ll also be running some scheduled Play With Devs events during the weekdays:

April 22, 11AM MST/1PM EST Queue into the New Map: Versus playlists to join our devs.
April 23, 11AM MST/1PM EST Queue into the New Map: Co-op playlist to join our devs.
April 26, 11AM MST/1PM EST Queue into the [REDACTED] playlist to join our devs.

If you play the CTE you’ll be able to pass feedback to us in two ways: by using the in-game feedback option or by filling out a survey. The feedback option is best used for reporting bugs while the survey focuses on collecting feedback on gameplay related changes in the release. Once the CTE event ends, our team will review the feedback from both sources and set out to make the final adjustments on the build before release. Keep your eyes open for a news post on Steam with more details on how to participate!

I wanted to take a little time to talk about the overall state of Sandstorm. From a production perspective, we’re really excited about where we have strengthened our ability to hold dialogues with the community on a regular basis and act on the feedback. We’ve continued expanding our behind-the-scenes tools that help us better understand how the game is performing and how we can best continue to grow the community. Over the last year we’ve made some important hires to expand our capabilities internally which are going to be noticed in our upcoming releases. To summarize, our outlook for production is great, and with Saber’s help on consoles bringing us closer to a release, we have a lot more in store for Sandstorm and our community.

Next month, we’ll be diving into some behind-the-scenes details about Operation: Exodus and all the fun new content that it brings, so until then, keep your stick on the ice.

Hello Gamers™,

2021 is already a quarter over and we’ve had a lot going on behind the scenes.

Our latest livestream just ended (if you missed it, you should tune in next time - http://www.twitch.tv/NewWorld) and we announced 1.9.2. It’s a minor release, but we’ve included a big community request. More details on that a few lines down.

The next stream will be Thursday, April 15th at 2:00pm MST, and we will start talking about 1.10!

Console development is chugging along and we’re still hopeful for a release in late summer of this year.

Let’s dig into the good stuff.



For anyone new here, we have smaller updates that come between our major updates (i.e. 1.8.1 came between 1.8 and 1.9). They’re community driven and usually focus on improvements to quality of life and occasionally small features.

For 1.9.2 we are proud to announce that we’re adding something you’ve all been asking for since I started just over a year ago:

WE’RE ADDING RAILGUNS...

Just kidding, we’re bringing back some HD Textures!

There were some changes to some textures with 1.6 for the sake of performance and optimization. While this helped Sandstorm to be more accessible to those with lower spec PCs, those with rigs on the higher end of the spectrum wanted their pretty graphics back.

We decided a while back that we wanted to dedicate time to exploring how to do this, and with 1.9.2 we had the time.

This will be an optional download via Steam, so those who saw the performance improvements that came with 1.6 - no need to worry, nothing will change for you.

While this took a large chunk of the 1.9.2 development time, we saw the constant requests (I’m looking at you, Discord members with HD Texture Pack in your name), so we think it’s a great addition.

Here is what will be included:

Character Textures:

• All character textures
  
• All equipment textures
  
• All cosmetics textures

Weapon Textures:

• All weapon textures
  
• All weapon skin textures

We are exploring weapon upgrade textures, but are not able to commit to this for 1.9.2 yet.

Most importantly, the toilet and fire extinguisher props will be returned to their former glory.

In addition to the optional HD Texture pack we will be reverting first person muzzle flashes to how they were pre-1.6. All the beautiful bespoke muzzle flashes unique to each weapon will be re-added with 1.9.2.

Our secondary focus was quality-of-life additions. Here's a quick rundown - the full extent of changes will be available in the 1.9.2 patch notes.

We spent some time adjusting the brightness of flashlights for night maps, so no more being blinded by team-mates (although the effect they have on AI remains).

The brightness of characters has been tweaked as well, this will improve visibility and team identification.

We’ve improved the server browser, so you can expect a handful of fixes and enhancements there (details will be in the patch notes of course).

We revisited a request from a few releases back and are adding the ability to bind voice commands, so those of you who dislike the radial wheel, your time has come.

Something else I kept hearing about was players rejoining the same server after being vote-kicked. We have added some matchmaking rules so that will no longer happen!

This is not everything - all of the other changes and bug-fixes will be detailed in the patch notes, when 1.9.2 releases on April 27th.



I have been working with our Player Support team a lot lately on improving player reporting and reducing in-game toxicity.

In-game reporting helps us track problematic players, but as we’re a relatively small team it can be difficult to act on these reports alone.

With things such as Nvidia Shadowplay being so prevalent we’d like to ask for your help to curb these kinds of players.

If you encounter someone cheating, someone constantly griefing other players, or players using racist, homophobic, or misogynistic slurs please grab a video for us - preferably with the scoreboard showing at some point in the video.

If you can then provide us this video via a support ticket, along with a quick explanation of what we’re looking for in the video, and timestamps of when the offenses occur, it will make it much easier for us to act.

If you see someone cheating please also provide a replay ID in your support ticket.

To submit a support ticket, just head to this link.



It's with a heavy heart that I have to announce that at some point in the next 3-4 months I will be leaving Canada. This kind of complicates me being the Community Manager for NWI. Makes it somewhat impossible to be honest.

As some of you know, my wife is from Australia; some family things have arisen that are forcing our hand a bit and necessitating a move back there. At least it's Australia and not... Antarctica or something. Always a silver lining.

Because of the current COVID-19 situation and Australia's incredibly strict-even-when-not-in-pandemic quarantine laws for dogs (and the fact we have two dogs), this process will take a few months, so I will still be taking your feedback and reading comments about console until at least July - likely August or later.

The time zone difference between Canada and Australia is about as extreme as it could be, so staying on as the Community Manager would, sadly, be impossible.

Luckily for me, NWI is being very supportive and I will likely be staying on with the studio, but shifting into a production role.

While you will still all have to put up with me for a few more months, I wanted to say thank you all for all the feedback over the past year - you've all helped me grow in my position and helped us to steer Sandstorm in the right direction. It's a very challenging job, but being able to announce things like HD Textures really makes it worth it.

You’re all the reason I have a job in the industry at all, full stop; so thank you for existing. It’s been a whirlwind 13 months working with all of you, and it’s been a lot more good than bad.

Even after moving I will still be around on the Discord servers and the subreddit. Sadly you can’t get rid of me this easily.

Whomever the next CM ends up being - go easy on them, it’s not as easy a job as it looks. You know how you get when you’re tired, hungry, or talking about deathcam.

Keep the feedback coming, I've got a few months left as your Community Manager.




We're leading with a wholesome meme this month. Thanks Capturesque.


The A-10 can put in some work (shoutout to Danatov on Reddit).


Eziokas with some excellent editing skills on display here.


This is what modding was made for (From WintorOperator via Reddit).



Closing it up is our boy Tom, who has managed to port Embassy (and some other maps) from Insurgency 2014 to be playable in Sandstorm!

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After weeks of careful playtesting and deliberation by our judging team, New World Interactive is pleased to announce the winners of the Insurgency: Sandstorm Mapping Contest.

Before we dive into the results, we would like to take this opportunity to thank our sponsors Intel, Nvidia, Epic Games, and Mod.io. As well as all the players who helped test, provide feedback, and vote for submissions, and of course, the entrants who spent hundreds of hours crafting incredible custom maps for the community.

There were many fantastic entries and only five prize positions; however, all finalists will receive a copy of World War Z - Game of the Year Edition thanks to our partners at Saber Interactive & Focus Home Interactive.

Maps were extensively playtested and judged based on the following criteria:

• Gameplay (50 marks)
  
• Visual Aesthetics (25 marks)
  
• Performance & Optimisation (25 marks)

After careful consideration, the winners are…..



Winning: $5,000 + 1x RTX 2080Ti GPU(1) + 1x Intel i7 7700k CPU + $100 Unreal Marketplace credit for each team member(2) + 1x Epic Game Store key for World War Z Game Of The Year Edition



Judges feedback: This map has an amazing atmosphere and some great storytelling that blends well with the gameplay. The feel of fighting through a prison is a lot of fun and results in quite intense firefights due to the narrow spaces. Navigating through the map can be challenging, but it didn’t have a huge impact on the fun factor.

Winning: $2,500 + 1x Intel® NUC 10 Performance + $100 Unreal Marketplace credit for each team member(2) + 1x Epic Game Store key for World War Z Game Of The Year Edition



Judges feedback: This Is a very fun map and has a great atmosphere. Firefight is the absolute must-play mode on this map, the firefight design works really well with the more compact size and layout of the level. Checkpoint, however, suffers a bit from the more compact size and doesn’t offer enough gameplay variation to stand out.

Winning: $1,500 + 1x i7 7700k + $100 Unreal Marketplace credit for each team member(2) + 1x Epic Game Store key for World War Z Game Of The Year Edition



Judges feedback: An absolutely stunning-looking map with a great atmosphere! An adventurous experience that offers something new to the player every time. It almost feels like treasure hunting, finding an underground waterfall was definitely one of the highlights in our playtests. Unfortunately for Firefight, the map falls a bit short, it’s too much of a platformer and quite difficult to navigate through. Still a work of art that has a lot of potential for Checkpoint.

Winning: $750 + 1x i7 7700k + $100 Unreal Marketplace credit for each team member(2) + 1x Epic Game Store key for World War Z Game Of The Year Edition



Judges feedback: Overall a great-looking map. The mud village was very well constructed and offered some fun gameplay, especially on Checkpoint. It almost feels like a mini-campaign where each objective offers something different, the larger capture zones are a nice touch and require more tactical gameplay than usual. We had a lot of fun with this layout.

Push Security however is not working so great on this map, the line of sights are too long and we had a difficult time as Security to even exit the start spawn, overall the map just feels too big for Push.

Winning: $250 + 1x i7 7700k + $100 Unreal Marketplace credit for each team member(2) + 1x Epic Game Store key for World War Z Game Of The Year Edition



Judges feedback: This map has a strong visual identity, the spaces have a purpose, like the tank factory, which is definitely one of the visual highlights of this level. The cohesive design and visuals make it feel like a real place. Unfortunately, the realism that was put into this level made some of the spaces less fun to play in. Lacking cover on objectives made them difficult to defend and long travel times to objectives, were things we all noticed in our playtests. Nonetheless, this is a map with a lot of potential.



Congratulations to all our winners; our team will contact you via mod.io to arrange prize distribution and additional feedback over the coming days. Entrants can now update contest submissions to reflect feedback from the community or any changes made during the judging phase.

We hope this was a valuable experience for all involved and look forward to seeing many more community maps in the near future!

It was received really well last month... so we're doing it again! TRIPLE XP from now until Monday at 11:00am MST.

Hello everyone, my name is Tim Perreault and I’m the Production Director at New World Interactive. March is half done and the team has quite a few different things on the go. Let’s jump right in.

Key Points for State of Production #18

• Community Driven Update
  
• 1.10 Progress
  
• Test Automation
  
• Mapping Contest Update

Planning wrapped up shortly after the last SoP and we’ve since moved into development. This update will be relatively small, but it’s going to pack a big punch in terms of requested features. I don’t want to spoil the reveal, but the main feature in the update has been highly requested.

Our next major update is trucking along. We’ve got a lot completed so far, but there are still a few elements we’re working on before we’ll be able to schedule an open CTE event to preview the update and collect feedback. Based on our updated art guidelines we’ve taken an opportunity to review all the cosmetics in the release and are making some minor adjustments. We’ve also committed to spending more time testing and polishing before we release, so you should expect more of a delay after the playtest until the release goes live.

One of the goals of the State of Production is to shine a bit of a spotlight on some of the developers who work behind the scenes on our project. This month, I’ve invited our Automation Developer to talk about the work he has started doing on Sandstorm over the past four months.

Hey! I'm PHEN, or Stephen Ma, and I'm an Automation Developer here at New World Interactive. Today I'd like to share with you a little bit behind the scenes of game development and hopefully you'll learn a bit more about development in general!

To describe an Automation Developer, I'll have to talk about Test Automation. First, let's talk about what a 'test' is. A test (in this case) is a deliberate process of verifying systems, features, and regressing bugs to ensure the game behaves the way we intended. As a game develops in number of features, so does the number of tests. More often than not, the number of tests needed is hundreds of times more than the number of features.

Whether that addition is being able to have a player kick open doors, blow others up with explosives, or interacting with AI, the number of ways two systems interact with each other need to be tested. Adding a new feature means we need to develop new tests to cover all new behaviors and every interaction they will have with other systems.

Each of those tests takes a non-small amount of time to execute, and with the need to test everything with every small change it can quickly scale outside what a team can do on any given day.

To come back to what I do as an Automation Developer at New World Interactive, it's someone who will actively work on getting tests into an "automatically-testable" state as early as possible. This would mean identifying a test, bringing parts of the process into code, and having it automatically run on a machine.

You might say this sounds a lot like "AI" or "Bots" - and you would be correct since there is an overlap in those development aspects, but, I'm avoiding those terms here because they don't include other aspects of the testing such as:

• Documenting evidence
  
• Identifying the root causes of issues
  
• Scheduling the test to run optimally
  
• Communicating the scale and impact of issues to the team
  
• Observing differences in actual behavior vs. expected behavior

A good human test will convey those important aspects in the form of a bug report, while a good automated test will have to do the same thing; but will have to do it without any human intervention.

Describing it as "AI" or "Bots" will limit someone's thinking about what automated test development should be. Designing well automated tests is a non-trivial task and requires thinking outside of bot development, hence the Automation Developer's role!

At the end of the day, I'm a developer working on the game and play an important part of the team to ensure we're making the best game we can. Most of my work is something gamers will never see in game but I'm thrilled I can share a little bit of it with you today.

Community voting on our mapping contest has concluded. The top ten entries are now under review. We had our second playtest with the devs on Friday and it was an absolute blast. We’ll be continuing to playtest the remaining maps and scenarios to get a final ranking which will be announced once all the entries have been reviewed.


That’s it for this month’s SoP, until next time, keep your stick on the ice.

Hello Gamers™,

February was short, sharp, and shiny - just like this blog will be.

We just had our first free weekend in a while - welcome to any new players that have joined us; we are glad to have you all aboard! Please send us your feedback either here on Steam, on our subreddit, or via a support ticket.

While we have just started development on 1.9.2 we are not ready to share details yet. I can say it will be a highly defined update.

---

Earlier this month we closed out submissions for our 2020 Mapping Contest.

After 20 weeks of our community working hard and creating and testing their own maps we ended up with over 30 submissions. Following a 10 day period of public voting we finalized our Top 10!

Our panel at NWI will now be taking a look at these finalists and the winners will go on to take home over $17,000 of prizes from us here at New World and our amazing sponsors Intel, Nvidia, and Epic Games.

We covered the finalists in our announcement (available here) but these homies worked incredibly hard on these maps, so I want to show them off again.

Here are your 2020 Insurgency Mapping Contest finalists!

Oasis by ZAPATISTA

Prison by 13Tisa13

Diplomacy by Flaykes

Sultan of Drugs by Klian

SaltMine by FredricoDLac

Last Light by invalid_nick

Mud Village by Juu_

Coastline by Reeecompile

International by Gremlinmode

Mintaqah (District) by Jason26

Over the next month we will judge and test these finalists along with our sponsors and will be announcing the winning entries around March 22nd.

Thank you again to all the entrants, there is a lot of incredible work here. Even if you don't win, keep plugging away, take on feedback where you think it's helpful, and some of you definitely have the creativity to break into this industry.



As I said last year our Developer Livestreams will not be happening as often moving forward - I just want to ensure that the streams are full of information and not a waste of your time. The next stream will be coming in early March once we can start sharing some new juicy tidbits.

The last stream we did featured the announcement of our 1.9.1 update. As a lot of you saw, the cosmetics were not well received. We take your feedback very seriously so after a few days of discussion we decided it was in the best interest of Sandstorm to not release the skins.

We understood we missed the mark, and we have updated the visual guidelines that we follow for Sandstorm. This will help us adhere to the aesthetic we are looking for, and the aesthetic that you all want to see in the game.

---

Something that was created and launched this month was our community Trello board. Available here, this is a page to help us communicate with all of you - we will list our known issues (and attach workarounds when applicable), post important links (like how to submit a bug), and attach all patch notes for our releases.

If you are running into any bugs in the game, head here to see if they’re known. If not, please send us a bug report using the link on the left of the page and we can investigate.

We are hoping this is a better method of communication than having people scroll to the bottom of patch notes every time they want to check something.

---

Interested in competitive Sandstorm?

DGL will be having a PUG Event on the 6th of March at 2PM EST/8PM CET. The sign ups close on March 4th with the teams being picked after that. Captains will contact their players once picked. Registration is available here.

The Newbloods event will be on the 13th of March and start at 2PM EST/7PM GMT/8PM CET. It is expected to run for 3-4 hours. Hideout West will be played for all of the matches to try and ensure a good base amount of map knowledge. Each team will have a coach showing them the map and will arrange practice and scrims the week before the event. If you're interested, you can sign-up here.

Signups close on the 5th of March at 4PM EST/9PM GMT/10PM CET.

DGL Season 4: Round 4
The DGL season is comprised four team divisions. After each round, the top team of each division is promoted to the next division, and the bottom team moves down a division.

Round 4 will begin on the 14th of March and the signups are open until the 13th. All new teams signing up will begin in the lower divisions.

Each team plays a match each week with two maps played. For more information please go to the event page.



The first clip in this video is one of our partners, MGE Gibs, with some self-fulfilling prophecy *chefs kiss*.



When 1.9.1 launched, the QBZ-97's grenade launcher may have had a velocity issue. Sadly, we fixed it. OK, SO I MAY have lost the source on this. I am very sorry, but I love it. If this was you, please DM me on twitter and I will credit you.

EDIT: We found him! Thanks to @mikeytheasian on Twitter.



Continuing our theme of both 16-bit art and art created with mines, we have this masterpiece created by yeonggille on Reddit.


Some beautiful coordination while playing the amazing ISMC mod, posted by ControlledPairs on Reddit.



F4tTony on Reddit created a stats sheet for all of our weapons. Rejoice fellow numbers nerds! The entire sheet with all weapons available here.



I mean, the mask is free, you should be prepared. Thanks to Piromansor on Reddit.

---

That's it, that's all for February. Just like the final wave of Outpost, grab your butts - fun stuff is coming.

Stay safe, take care of each other, and I will talk to you all soon.

fatherHank

I have the week off, so I won't be around for anyone to yell at me for this. Enjoy TRIPLE XP until Monday @ 11AM MST. -fatherHank

After twenty long weeks of development, we received over 30 incredible submissions for the Insurgency: Sandstorm mapping contest. Today after 10 days of public voting we are pleased to announce the ten finalists that will go through to be judged by our expert panel for the chance to win over $17,000 worth of prizes from New World and our incredible sponsors, Intel, Nvidia, and Epic Games. 




Oasis by ZAPATISTA

Prison by 13Tisa13

Diplomacy by Flaykes

Sultan of Drugs by Klian

SaltMine by FredricoDLac

Last Light by invalid_nick

Mud Village by Juu_

Coastline by Reeecompile

International by Gremlinmode

Mintaqah (District) by Jason26

Over the next 30 days, our team at New World will begin testing and judging the finalists with our sponsors. We plan to announce the winning entries on or around Monday, March 22nd.

Congratulations to all the finalists, as well as our runners up! 

Note to submitters:

Entrants who did not make the shortlist are now able to freely modify their submissions and take onboard any player feedback. 

We want to encourage everyone despite not making it in the top 10 to keep working on your levels or new levels. The contest results are simply a review of the work at this moment. It doesn’t say anything about your future quality of work or pursuing a career as a professional level designer. We hope you enjoyed the contest and we are looking forward to seeing more of your levels in the future! 

Finalists must not alter their submission until the expert voting period has concluded and winners are announced. 

• Fixed a crash that occurred when toggling an Accessory or toggleable optic without a Primary or Secondary weapon equipped on controllers
  
• Fixed an issue where players who purchased the Urban Digital DLC after the release of 1.9.1 were unable to use the weapon skin
  
• Removed the Contender achievement as it is no longer obtainable
  
• Fixed a level design issue where the floor was missing in the Insurgent Loadout menu when playing Power Plant

To see the current known issues list, please see our community Trello board here.