Peak's latest patch fixes invisible chicken bodies crashing the game and lets you toggle off the ability to eat your friends: 'Now that you've all had your fun we're introducing some changes to cannibalism'

Peak decided to throw a little more chaos into its mountain climbing adventures last week, adding the ability to become a cannibal and eat your friends if you became slightly too hungry.

The feature was met with a mixed response. Although a slightly troubling number of people were thrilled about their fellow scouts morphing into walking roast chickens, many others were concerned that it would allow trolling to reach new heights. No pun intended.

Thankfully a new patch has now rolled out which introduces the ability to toggle cannibalism on and off. It's switched on by default, so if you really don't want your friends to target you the second their hunger ticks over, you'll need to head into the main menu and switch off "Enable Cannibalism". This means you'll no longer see other players as chickens, and no one will be able to eat you. Back to trail mix and energy drinks it is, I guess.

A few other elements have been tweaked as well. For those brave enough to keep cannibalism enabled, you'll start seeing your fellow scouts as edible once your hunger reaches 70% rather than 60%, so it's definitely more of a last resort. If you do decide to snack on someone, you'll also take a 10% curse status too. Previously, it was only 5%, so there's a little more punishment now for turning on other players at least. Not that it will stop my friends from targeting me the first moment they can.

Reduced performance issues since cannibalism was added have also been fixed. As it turns out, this only happened because the chicken model was always active on the body of each player. It was just invisible until you got hungry enough to activate it.

But now cannibalism has been added and balanced, I can't help but wonder what features Peak plans on dropping out of nowhere next. Will some sort of cannibalistic group of abandoned scouts be waiting in the mountain for me and my friends? Will there be more ways for my pals to betray my trust? Who knows, because I certainly don't know what to expect after this little episode.