First ‘Bonelab’ Update in More Than a Year Brings Enhancements for Quest 3, Modding & Physics

Bonelab (2022), Stress Level Zero’s sequel to physics-driven VR shooter Boneworks (2019), just got a massive update which brings more than a year’s worth of enhancements to Quest 3 in addition to a ton of new content for Quest and PC VR headsets alike.

The studio detailed the changes in a lengthy update, revealing a series of core developments created over the past 18 months. Stress Level Zero says these have enhanced performance and introduced a number of overall improvements to the game, calling them “extensive under-the-hood changes.”

The ‘Patch 4’ update, which is now live on Quest and PC VR headsets, includes a few key areas of improvement: enhancements to the player rig, SDK updates, and overhaul to the Zone System, and an expansion of spawnable assets for level creators. This follows Patch 3, which was released in beta in February 2023, and subsequently never went public.

As for Quest 3, the game now has 4x anisotropic filtering, improved foveated rendering, and a “greatly” increased texture cache. You can take a closer look at each at the bottom of the article.

Notably, the massive Patch 4 update comes on the tails of a mod from ‘volx64’ that brings the entirety of Boneworks into Bonelab, letting you play Stress Level Zero’s PC VR-exclusive game on Quest for the first time (and for free).

You can find Bonelab available on Quest, as well on PC VR headsets via Steam and Meta PC.

Player Rig Improvements: The player rig has significantly progressed to become more physical, more performant, and feel better to control. Particular attention was paid to mantling, interaction with levers and lockers, small pops when interacting, aiming guns, recoil, adding a physical neck, and physical twist bones on the upper arms, lower arms, and thighs.

SDK Updates: Patch 4 comes alongside a large update in the MarrowSDK geared specifically towards Mod Level creation. Place spawnables with ease now using the dynamically loaded Spawner Preview Meshes! No more VOID meshes everywhere. This will even work with Pallets created by other users.

Zones: The Zone System has been completely rebuilt, refactored, reworked, retooled for level creation, Marrow Entity tracking, and performance optimization. This enables modders to more seamlessly create high quality levels with more complex player involvement. For additional information please see updated Marrow SDK documentation!

Spawnables: Spawnable dynamic objects (Marrow Entities) fill the library of items you are now able to utilize in your level creation. By referencing the Bonelab pallet of spawnables in your mod project, you can now place and spawn almost any Bonelab object the same way we can. Since these items are all Marrow Entities, they are tracked and dynamically culled per zone for optimization.

Additional Changes: A multitude of further changes have been made to things such as Spawngun UI, organization, quality of life improvemens, grips, and level adjustments. Tons of further optimizations have been made to rendering, loading, asset streaming, interactive set pieces, colliders, occlusion, nav-mesh, textures, sounds, lightmaps, shaders, materials, fog, static batching, memory use, asset file size, etc. This all comes along with an overall massive polish pass and too many bug fixes to count ranging from logic errors, collider issues, incorrect scales, UI bugs, objects double spawning, objects becoming broken from spawning, texture mistakes, incorrect references, mysterious cursed anomalies, and blown-out lightprobes.

Mod.io subscription downloading: You can now connect to your mod.io account and directly download all subscribed mods. Note: this will only download mods compatible with this MarrowSDK version and above. You can still manually install older mods but they will likely have problems if they haven’t been updated.