You don't lose all your progress when a Once Human season ends—here's how the survival game's server resets work

Free-to-play survival game Once Human is offering the archetypal survival game launch experience: it's a giant, buggy to-do list that everyone you know is playing. With well over 100,000 concurrent players at its peaks, it's one of the top games on Steam right now.

One of the slightly less conventional aspects of Once Human is its seasonal structure: Each server is associated with a «seasonal scenario,» and at the end of the season, it disappears and new seasonal servers launch with new scenarios. Some players have braced for a total progress wipe at the end of the first six-week scenario, but in a post on Steam today, developer Starry Studios explained that the system isn't quite that extreme.

«We are aware that many players are concerned that their in-game progress will be reset in six weeks, but we are here to reassure you that this will NOT happen!» wrote the studio. «We value the time and effort you put into this game, so the items and gear you have obtained from the seasonal scenario will be retained in various ways.»

It is true that characters revert to level 1 at the start of a new season, and that they'll start on a fresh, unrevealed map, but players will be able to carry a good deal of progress between seasons, including their blueprints, furniture formulas, cosmetics, and custom house blueprints. Completed story tasks will be remembered, and players will be able to redo «streamlined» versions of them to get their associated rewards. Resources like ammunition and medicine will also be «partially» carried over. 

Here's the full list of what you get to keep, in the developer's words:

So it's not a total reset, but enough, presumably, to challenge players with new seasonal threats by making them climb the tech tree again: Starry Studio says that new seasons will introduce «different seasonal objectives or special gameplay mechanics» which vary depending on whether you're on a PvE or PvP server. 

So far, I wouldn't describe my Once Human experience as