Updates

v0.9.07

Places out in the country (points of interest)

• Every place reworked, and most of them bigger: they used to be a handful of props on bare dirt. Now each one stands on its own ground (gravel pads, a concrete helipad, a lorry park's tarmac, a camp's trodden yard) with ragged edges that fray into the grass, the grass grows up round them and through their yards, and they're filled out with real vehicles, buildings you can walk into, fences, lights and clutter.
• Military checkpoint: a HESCO-walled compound with guard towers at the gate, a zig-zag of jersey barriers and wire out front with the cars that never got through still queued, the command, barracks and aid tents, body bags, a humvee and an army truck, a helipad, the decon showers.
• Crash site: a longer, scorched furrow, both wings and engines, and the rescue that never finished: a fire engine, an ambulance and a police car stopped at the edge, a triage tent, police tape on cones.
• Radio tower: a 30 m mast in red and white on its guy wires, a chain-link compound with barbed wire, the transmitter house (go in: the roof lifts), the generator slab, the dish farm, a utility truck.
• Survivor camp: a scrap stockade round a trodden yard, lookouts with torches at the gate, strings of bulbs over the fire, canvas tents and scrap shacks, an old school bus for a bunkhouse, the trader's stall, a vegetable patch, the water tank and rain catcher.
• Farm: a real farmhouse to search, a big red gambrel barn with its loft, stalls and hay (its roof lifts when you go in), two silos and a grain bin, fields of dead corn and a ploughed field, the tractor and its hay wagon, the windmill, coop, well and scarecrow.
• Freight depot: a fenced lorry yard with the warehouse along the back (a real building with its racks), containers stacked three high, semi trailers, box trucks, a gatehouse and barrier, a truck that went through the fence.
• Scrapyard: wrecks in rows and stacked three high, the crane with a car still hanging from its magnet, tyre mountains, scrap heaps, the crusher, the office cabin, a dog's kennel.
• Docks, quarry, fuel depot: the docks get a boathouse, a proper bait shop and a pickup with its boat trailer; the quarry's benches are raw rock now, wider and deeper, with a crushing plant, conveyors and site cabins.

Sixteen new kinds of place

• Truck stop: a gas station and its canopy and a diner (both real buildings), a lot of big rigs and their trailers, one jackknifed across the way in and still burning, the tall sign you'd have seen for miles.
• Motel: rooms in an L round the car park under a covered walk, three doors standing open (go in), the office, the drained pool and its loungers, and the VACANCY sign still trying to light at night.
• Country church: a white church with its steeple (go in), a graveyard in an iron fence with the graves the dead climbed out of, a mausoleum, dead oaks, a hearse.
• Drive-in: the big torn screen, rows of speaker posts with cars still parked to watch, the snack bar (a real diner), the projection booth, the marquee (tonight's feature might be familiar).
• Fire lookout: a timber tower with stairs up to its glassed cab, the ranger's cabin (go in), the fire danger board, the outhouse, the ranger's truck.
• Ambushed convoy: a column of army trucks stopped by a barricade of cars and logs, the fuel tanker burned out, one truck rolled into the ditch, craters, cargo spilled down the road.
• Downed helicopter: on its side in a scorched clearing, a blade thrown into the ground, the crew's sandbag ring and stretchers, a supply crate under its parachute.
• Substation: transformers (one blown and scorched), steel gantries and busbars, the lines in from the pylons, the control house, all behind chain-link and barbed wire.
• Relief camp: rows of white and blue tents inside a fence, the screening line, the triage tent, pallets of supplies, water bladders, portable toilets, a helipad, and the breach where it fell.
• Bunker: a grassed-over mound with a concrete portal and a blast door half open (the guard room behind it), vents and an antenna on top, trenches, a guard post, wire.
• Sawmill: the open mill shed with its saw and carriage, log decks, stacks of lumber, the teepee burner, the sawdust mountain, a loaded log truck.
• Oil field: pumpjacks still nodding on their own, the tank battery, a drilling rig, a flare stack still burning off gas, pipelines, black pools, the company trailer.
• Grain elevator: tall concrete silos with the headhouse on top, steel bins and their augers, hopper cars on a siding, the truck dump, a combine left in the yard.
• Derailed train: a locomotive on its side ploughed into the dirt, boxcars and a leaking tank car concertinaed off the torn-up track, containers thrown off a flatcar, freight everywhere.
• Fairground: a Ferris wheel still turning slowly in the wind, a carousel, the big top, a midway of game booths, bumper cars, the entrance arch, strings of bulbs (some still lit at night), the carnies' trailers.
• Raider outpost: one of the Baron's toll posts: a stockade of stakes and scrap with a gate of wrecks, watchtowers with burn barrels, skulls on pikes, cages, a war rig. Held by his raiders, not the dead.
• Over half the places nobody's found yet are one of the new kinds (never the camps, farms or docks), and some empty stretches of country now have a place where there was none. Anywhere you've already found or been sent to stays what it was; the bigger places shift a little off a road if they have to.
• Each new kind has its own colour on the map.
• Every place sits on the road network sensibly: the kinds that only make sense by a road (truck stops, motels, drive-ins, churches, depots, checkpoints) only turn up where there's one close by (somewhere out in the wilds becomes a back-country place instead, like a crash site or a lookout), and each place faces its road with a way in out to it: a paved drive for the motel, truck stop and drive-in, a gravel or dirt track with wheel ruts for a farm or a camp. Crash sites, the derailed train and the convoy lie where they fell.
• Every surface in a place has real texture and depth: walls, sheds, tanks, vehicles, fences, tents, crates and machinery used to be flat painted colours; now they're rusted or painted metal, concrete, timber, canvas, rubber and glass that catch the light like the town's buildings do. The bare ground they stand on (yards, tracks, scorch marks, mud) gets the same raised clods and ruts as the ground textures in town.

Cellars

• Some houses and stores have a cellar. About two houses in five and a store in three. The stairs go down from the ground floor, where a two-storey house has its stairs up: an opening in the floor with a railing round it, the steps dropping into the dark.
• Go down and the view goes with you. Everything over the cellar (the house, the ground, the yard, trees, cars) is cut away so you look straight down into it, the way a roof lifts off when you walk in. The world round it goes black. All you see is the cellar, and only what your torch or a lantern lights. Your flashlight comes on by itself down there.
• Four kinds:
  • Basement (most houses): the furnace and the water heater, the laundry, shelves of everything that didn't fit upstairs, a workbench under a pegboard of tools, an old fridge, sometimes an old couch in front of a TV.
  • Root cellar (old houses and farmhouses): fieldstone walls and an earth floor, shelves of jars, potato crates, a coal heap and the old iron boiler.
  • Prepper's bunker (rare): poured concrete, bunks, a wall of stores, a gun locker, an ammo crate, a footlocker, blue water drums, the radio on its table, sandbags at the foot of the stairs, and a lantern usually still burning.
  • Stockroom (under stores): what the store sold, still on its shelves and pallets, a chest freezer under a grocery, the pharmacy's stock behind wire, an office desk.
• Better pickings down there. Fewer people have been down before you, and the preppers' stores best of all. There's a new kind of container, Storage Shelves, whose jars and tins show on the shelves until you take them.
• Not always empty. About half the cellars have one of the dead in the dark, now and then two, standing still at the foot of the stairs or in a corner until your light finds them.
• Built to look the part. New home-made textures with real depth: painted cinder block with peeling paint and water stains, rubble fieldstone bulging out of its mortar, a cracked and stained concrete slab. Pipes and conduit run along the walls, there's a fuse board, a drain stack and a sump with the damp spreading round it, and a bare bulb hangs on its cord (long dead).

Turn the view

• Z and X turn the camera a quarter of the way round you, left or right. The camera swings round smoothly, easing in and out. Press again mid-turn and it carries straight on into the next quarter.
• Everything turns with it. WASD stays "up the screen", the minimap turns too, and the see-through circle, the dark-room view and the low mist all follow the camera.
• Buildings sort themselves out as you turn. The walls between you and the camera are the ones cut down to knee height. Inside a building as the view swings round, the walls turning away from you fade back up and the ones turning toward you dissolve down, so nothing pops. The cellars do the same.

Smoother

• Places are built a bit at a time as they stream in (like the towns' buildings), so walking or driving up to a big one doesn't stall a frame, and each one is merged into a handful of meshes once it's up instead of hundreds of separate pieces.

Fixes

• Fixed the game closing to the desktop a few minutes into play. It could happen anywhere: walking the road, fighting, or at the shop.
• The crash came from a traveler being given a backpack as they walked in. The backpack lookup failed, and the finished game had no safety check to catch it.
• Travelers still turn up with a hiking pack or military pack on their backs, as intended.
• Any item that isn't a piece of clothing can no longer trip the same crash.
• Crash reports now record how much memory the game is using every 10 seconds, so a future crash is quicker to track down.
• The wall between two joined buildings drops to knee height when it's between you and the camera, like the rest of the building's near walls. It used to stand full height and flicker in and out as you walked.
• Police station cells no longer block the view. The bars, cell doors and dividers drop to knee height with the other inside walls when they're between you and the camera.
• The red aim line comes straight out of the gun's barrel. You turn so the barrel itself lines up on the cursor, so the line still runs under the cursor at range. Shots go down the line.
• Your breathing after a run is quieter and lower. It was too loud and high-pitched.
• No ground mist indoors. With the roof off to show the room you're in, the mist used to show on the floor inside.
• Standing in a doorway shows what's in the room. The see-through circle used to show only a bare floor there.
• Backpacks sit on your back. A pack is fitted to the actual shape of your back over what you're wearing, so it no longer floats off you, and its straps run into it.
• Scarves lie on you. The ends follow your chest and back instead of hanging in the air, and the end over your shoulder tucks under a backpack.
• No more lines in dust storms. The blowing sand is now soft specks of grit rushing past, instead of thin streaks that looked like lines across the screen.
• Bandaging takes a few seconds. It's 3 seconds for a bandage and 5 for a first aid kit, with first aid skill and the medic perk making you quicker. A progress bar shows while you do it. Walking off or getting hit stops you, and you keep the bandage.
• Dust storms are made of the rolling mist. A brown pall of blown dust races along the ground, much faster than normal mist. The heavy haze and the big dust puffs are gone, so storms run smoother and have no hard-edged boxes in them. With ground mist off in Options, the old haze and puffs come back.
• Nothing moves behind the loading screen. You, the dead, the folk, cars and the shop's goings-on all wait until the world is fully loaded and the screen lifts.
• In a dust storm the mist rolls and curls instead of sliding one way. Big slow eddies carry it round and back on itself, and it comes in small low wisps in some places and big tall heaps in others. The night mist keeps its slow, billowing creep.
• No more boxy bands sliding across the screen in a dust storm. That was a screen overlay of streaming grit, now removed; the storm is the rolling mist and blowing sand in the world.
• Fog and dust storms are thicker and slower. The mist rolls in heavier and harder to see through, and the dead see you from a shorter way off in it, so you can slip by them. They're harder to spot too.
• Whirls in a dust storm. Here and there a patch of dust spins up and twirls round on itself for a while, then lets go and drifts on.
• Dust devils. Now and then in a dust storm, and on hot dry afternoons, a twisting column of dust wanders across the open ground. It spins grit and scraps up its middle and winds the mist round its foot, then falls apart after half a minute or so.
• Dust storms blow in gusts. Every few seconds the dust surges, quicker and thicker, then eases. Walls of dust roll through with clearer gaps between them, and the dust is lit pale and sandy instead of dark and muddy.
• Folk wait for your answer. While you're talking to someone, they stay quiet until you reply instead of chattering over the conversation.
• New players start with FSR 2.2 upscaling at 75% render scale. It's a big frame-rate boost for little loss of sharpness. You can change it in Options, Video.
• Mist quality setting (Options, World): Low draws the rolling mist with fewer layers, a good deal cheaper in thick night mist and dust storms.
• The game has its own mouse cursor. It's a worn bone-coloured arrow with a rust tip, a matching hand over things you can click and a grab when dragging items. It turns into a crosshair while you aim a gun, and it's sized for your screen.
• Fixed cars ending up on their side with the wheels off after you sleep, and the game crashing when you got in. Speeding up time for sleep made a parked car's springs blow up. A car that ever gets into that state is now set back on its wheels.
• Cars ride their springs. Each wheel rises and drops over its own bumps: small cracks and patches on the road, ruts and stones off it. The body heaves and rocks on top, rolls further out of a hard turn, and dives harder under the brakes.
• Regulars bring word from the Road. Once their own story's told, a regular brings news each visit from somewhere on the Road: herds passing through, the Baron's burnings, strange lights, a new trader. Folk who've been by a few times ask after your companion by name.
• Smoother movement. You pick up speed and settle to a stop over a fraction of a second, and a sharp turn swings round instead of snapping. Raising a gun or a blade eases up.
• No more stop-start jitter in co-op. Your partner and the folk on a client's screen keep moving the way they were going between network updates, then ease onto where they really are.
• More complete loading. Wrecked cars are saved after the first time they're made, so later starts load them instead of building them again (about 25 times quicker). Every item's icon is made behind the loading screen too, and kept on disk after the first time, so the backpack never opens on blank slots.
• Smoother crossing between chunks. A chunk you've left is taken apart a few pieces a frame instead of all at once, which used to hitch every time you crossed out of a city block. Any long stall from the streaming is noted in the crash trail with what it was doing, so the rest can be tracked down.
• E at the storage chest unloads the trunks of cars parked by the shop, as its prompt says. It used to only open storage, with the trunks listed far down the window.
• Brutes' ground slam can be countered, and it comes less often. There are 7 to 11 seconds between slams. While its fists are raised, a heavy blow or a shove knocks it off balance and the slam never comes. Behind your guard (right-click) you're rocked and lose stamina instead of going down, and at the edge of the blast you're only shaken. Only right under its fists do you fall, and for less time than before.
• The picked recipe stays in view in the crafting window. The recipe list scrolls by itself, so the details and Craft buttons on the right stay put.

Co-op: everything in the world is shared

• Your partner dying no longer empties the shop. When a partner died and woke up, or joined straight from their own game, the host's caps dropped to about 20 and the storage chest emptied. Fixed.
• The rain collector and the still can't be emptied twice. The host fills the bottles and hands them over, so two of you can't both take the same water or moonshine.
• A batch of moonshine a partner starts now runs. It used to be lost.
• One shared world. The generator (broken or fixed), the light switch, the Salvage Hearth, reputation, the Baron's grudge, tolls, raid and horde nights, your prices, the bartender, the padlock, felled trees, cleared camps, emptied buildings on the map, stripped wrecks and recruits are now the same for everyone.
• A generator a partner builds works. It comes with its starter fuel, like the host's.
• Partners can finish "clear the camp" jobs. A camp counts as cleared wherever any of you is, and everyone's jobs there count it.
• A partner's character file holds only their own things. Felled trees, jobs, death bags, the hearth and the rest no longer follow them into a different friend's world.
• A partner's jobs and death bags are saved per world. They're waiting when they rejoin that same world.
• What's left in a searched container stays there for everyone. Anything left behind as too heavy used to vanish for the others.
• Joining shows the world as it is. Open doors, smashed furniture, the record on the jukebox and the light switch all match the host's straight away.
• Mines go off once, for everyone.
• Lightning strikes the same on every screen.
• Partner kills count on their own tally and for the tutorial.
• A kitchen upgrade someone else beat you to is refunded. The caps and materials go back into storage.

Co-op: the folk

• Partners can talk to everyone. That covers travelers at the fire (talk, trade, buy what they're wearing), Ferris and the main quest, the Baron's collectors (pay, settle, refuse), folk in their homes, wanderers on the road, the kid, the drifter, the convoy and other visitors, your companion (orders, scavenging runs, their pack), the mailbox and the shop dog.
• What a partner buys or hands over comes out of their own backpack. Their XP, skills and messages are theirs too.
• Partners serve at the counter properly. They haggle like the host does, and the sale's XP and trading skill go to whoever served.
• Partners can use the host-run parts of the shop. That's the bar, the radio, the hiring board, the guard posts and the jukebox.
• Partners can recruit at camps. The recruit heads back to the shop.
• Ferris and the folk at home now show up for partners.
• Everyone hears what the folk say. Speech bubbles show on every screen.
• Everyone hears the world's sounds. That includes the till, the guards, car alarms and the generator.
• The jukebox plays the same record for everyone.
• The radio is heard by everyone in earshot.
• News about the shop and the world reaches everyone. Customers waiting, thieves, wages, the toll, hordes and the post all show on every screen.
• Residents notice a partner going through their things.
• Your companion goes with whoever says "Follow me". That can be the host or a partner, and they ride along in that player's car.
• One companion for the whole world. Whichever of you recruits first gets them, and the recruit goes with that player.
• If the partner they're with leaves the game, your companion waits where they are. Talk to them to bring them back.
• Partners can take on customers' repair jobs at the Repair Bench. It uses their own parts, and they get the XP and skill.
• A dish a partner puts on the stove gives them the XP when it's done.

v0.9.06

New game story

• The story screen on a new game now shows the SalvageBound sign over a dark backdrop instead of the old painted art, matching the loading screen.
• Maggie's story is rewritten as her letter to you and now matches the game: the Convoys stopping six years back, the Baron's collectors and his toll, her stall at the Crossroads shut up and marked on your map, walking in down the highway scavenging your first stock, and her heading north to find out what happened to the Hub.

Title screen

• The title screen's scenes (the fight at Maggie's, the road walk, the truck run) were remade with the new look: the survivors bring their guns round onto each of the dead steadily, the body turning with the gun, instead of snapping from one to the next, and they only fire once they're on target.
• The game's rolling ground mist now drifts through the yard and along the road, lit by the fire, the porch light and the torch beams.

Dirt roads

• Dirt tracks no longer have ruled-straight edges: they fray into the ground along both sides, their width wanders as they go, and a track that just stops ends in a ragged round end.

Steadier gunfights

• People with guns swing round onto you steadily as they take aim instead of snapping to face you.

Smooth from the first frame

• The loading screen now stays up until everything around you is built and the game is already running smoothly: a full second of steady frames, waiting up to 20 seconds on a slower machine (it was 8).
• Behind the loading screen, one of every kind of person and creature you'll meet is set out and drawn for a moment, then cleared. That gets their models, materials and shaders ready, so the first zombie, raider, brute, dog or deer to walk on screen doesn't cause a stutter.

New faces

• Everyone living keeps their head and hair but has new eyes and a new nose: almond eyes with a dark upper lid line, the iris in their own colour with a speck of light (hers with heavier lashes and a little wing), and a straight wedge of a nose (small, straight, broad or hooked still differ in size). The eyes and mouth are bigger, and the old painted eye sockets and lashes are gone from the skin so nothing dark rings the new eyes. The brows and face marks are as they were, the mouth still talks; zombies are unchanged.
• (A whole new low-poly head, with new hair styles, is built too and can be switched on: Humanoid.HEAD_MODE = 2. 0 is the old faces as they were.)
• Women have their own figure: a rounded bust, a drawn-in waist and fuller hips, with vests, jackets and coats fitted over it.
• Smaller hands and feet, closer to a person's.
• Hoods close over the forehead in one clean edge; the scarf's tail hangs from the scarf.
• The face wrap's ends hang down the back of the neck in two long tails that swing as you move.
• The leather jacket's dark stand-up collar and the shirts' separate collars are gone (they stood out round the neck in a band and ragged points).
• Hunting and hi-vis vests sit clear of the shirt with a smooth top edge.
• Wear and stains differ from person to person: a worn patch on one knee here, a stain there, instead of the same marks on everyone; and no more rings of false creases round every knee and elbow.

Fixes

• Rain you can feel: rain now has three layers. Outside you hear the full downpour. Indoors that's muffled by the walls, and over it you hear the rain drumming on the roof above you (some roofs wood, some tin). In a car it hammers on the roof and glass.
• Real recordings: wolf howls (near and far), dog growls, water dripping, wind whistling, crows' wings, the groan when you're badly hurt, and a second howling gale for storms are all real recordings now. They used to be generated sounds.
• Breathing: the heavy breathing after a run is real recorded breaths now, a little quieter. The old generated sound came across as an odd shuffling noise while you ran.
• Rain indoors: you can still hear the rain from inside a building, muffled as if through the walls and roof. Before, it all but disappeared.
• Poncho hood: with the hood up, the face opening closes in a smooth arch just over the brow. It used to close in a point with two lumps over the forehead, and the hood sits clear of the head so no hair pokes through it.
• Travellers' packs: travellers wear a proper rucksack with its blanket roll strapped underneath. It used to be a plain box with a roll stuck out to one side.
• Road edges: country roads no longer run in dead-straight edges. Where the edge is whole it still wanders a little, and a road that just ends has a rounded, crumbling end instead of a square cut.
• Torch through inner walls: your torch no longer lights the next room through an inside wall. To save work for the sun, inner walls cast no shadows at all, so every light went straight through them. They now cast shadows for torches and lamps, and only the sun skips them.
• Ankle hoops: the rings round trouser hems floated off the leg like loose hoops and are gone; the hem is drawn bunched on the shoe instead.
• Characters glowing white: people and zombies could blow out into a white glow, from a value in the new cloth shading that was never set on clothes with no hem. Fixed.
• Cloud shadows: no more straight, square-cut edges. The random numbers behind the clouds lost precision on graphics cards and sliced them along a grid. They're also darker and easier to see, with softer rims.
• Tab screen: your character there animates smoothly again. It was being treated as far away in the world and only updated a few times a second.
• Legs and shoes: the base character's own painted socks, shoe toecaps, scuffs and trouser side-stripe no longer show through. That's what left white blotches on women's shoes and a coloured stripe down every leg. Knee creases sit at the knee now.

Clothes that fit together

• No more old clothes showing through: the base character's own painted wristband, elbow band, sleeve hem lines and worn patches used to show through whatever you wore on your arms. They're gone: sleeves are one clean piece from shoulder to cuff, on men and women.
• Short sleeves on both arms: one arm's sleeve was measured backwards, so a tee painted a ring of sleeve round one wrist. Both arms now end their sleeves in the same place.
• Cuffs hug the arm: the turned cuff at a sleeve's end is sized to the arm instead of floating round it like a bangle (puffer and bomber cuffs too).
• Cuffs stay under gloves: a shirt's wrist cuff hides under gloves or wraps instead of poking through.
• Long coats cover what's under them: knee pads, thigh pockets, the belt's back pouches and a holster no longer poke out through a duster or trench coat (or a poncho), and the belt cinches in under the coat.
• Ponchos cover your arms: a poncho's sides hang over your arms now, instead of your arms coming out through them.
• Big packs ride higher: hiking and army packs sit up between the shoulder blades where the straps come over, instead of sagging down over your backside.
• A real plate carrier: the kevlar vest (and the scrap plate vest) is now a thick padded carrier fitted to your body, with raised plates front and back, rows of webbing across them, broad padded shoulder straps and a drag handle at the back. Before, it was two flat slabs floating off your chest. It bends with you, and your shirt shows at the shoulders and below its hem.
• Harness and bandolier straps that go somewhere: the chest harness and bandolier straps now run from the hip, across the chest, over the shoulder and down the back as one strap hugging your body (and over whatever you're wearing). They used to be flat slats that stopped in mid air. The harness has a brass buckle where it crosses.
• Rounded gear: pouches, holsters, pockets, knee pads, buckles and pack parts have softly rounded edges instead of sharp-cornered blocks.
• Real vests: the hunting vest and hi-vis vest are made, not painted on. They're fitted to the body, zipped up the front and cut away at the arms. The hunting vest has four flapped pockets, and the hi-vis vest has reflective tape round it and over the shoulders that catches the light. Your shirt shows at the shoulders.
• Long hair: long hair falls from the back of the head down over the shoulders, shaped round the head and neck and ending in uneven tips. It used to be a flat board hanging behind. Under a cloak, a hood lying down, a long coat's collar or a big pack it tucks in at the collar instead of going through them. Under a hat or helmet only the hair below it shows, and ponytails tuck in the same way.
• Backpack straps: padded shoulder straps run on into webbing that goes round under the arms to the bottom of the pack, through a buckle. Hiking and army packs also have a sternum strap with a clip across the chest.
• Coats: dusters and trench coats show their cloth and hang in long soft folds that deepen toward the hem. The skirt is cut fuller and moves with the legs, so a stride doesn't come out through it.
• Cloth that looks like cloth: clothes show their material from across a room now (denim's mottle, canvas's slub, leather's grain), not just up close. Sleeves crease in the crook of the elbow and jeans at the knee, long trousers bunch where they meet the shoe, knees and elbows are worn a little paler, and short sleeves and cropped trousers have a turned hem with a row of stitching. Cloth also has a soft sheen at its edges.

Life in the world

• Bodies stay: the dead you put down lie where they fell for ten minutes now (the oldest go sooner once there are a lot about), rotting as they go. Flies gather over a body that's lain a while, and when nobody's near, a few crows come down onto it, and go up in a clatter of wings as you come close (which the dead hear too).
• Litter on the wind: on a blowy day, scraps of paper and dead leaves skitter and tumble along the ground the way the wind's going, lifting in the gusts (not in the rain, not indoors).
• Rain off the roofs: buildings near you drip from their eaves all round while it rains, and for a good while after, as long as the ground's still wet.
• Prints in the mud: after rain, soft ground takes your boot prints, a trail behind you that slowly fills in.
• A searched house looks searched: what wasn't worth taking ends up on the floor round whatever you went through: papers, a rag, an empty can, a torn bit of box.
• Doors shut for years: the first time you open one, a puff of dust shakes off it and hangs in the doorway.
• Someone else out there: now and then by day, a thin column of woodsmoke goes up a way off, bent over by the wind, and dies away after a few minutes.

Sound

• Rooms sound like rooms: indoors the game listens to the room round you: a cupboard of a bathroom is close and dead, a bare warehouse rings.
• Through the walls: anything on the other side of a wall or a shut door comes through dull and low, so you can tell it isn't in the room with you.
• Places settle round you: old timbers creak, a door bangs somewhere in the draught, wind whistles through the broken windows on a blowy day, and for a good while after rain, water drips.
• Your own body: blown after a run you breathe hard (harder the emptier you are), and badly hurt you groan through your teeth now and then.

The world

• Washing on the line: some houses have a line strung across the back yard with a few things pegged out on it, stirring in the wind (real cloth); an abandoned house has what's left of it, greyed and tattered.

Your body

• You carry yourself the way you feel: a bitten or scratched leg gives you a limp (the hip drops and you lurch each time it takes your weight); a bitten arm is held in against you when it isn't needed; spent or worn out, your head and shoulders sag and your chest heaves; frozen and wet, you hunch up with your arms in tight, shaking. In the cold (and on a chilly night) your breath shows in little clouds, quicker when you're blown.
• A long day out shows on you: road dirt works into your clothes and skin twice as fast as before (faster still on the move), until the rain or a wash takes it off.

Clothes

• Clothes have edges: sleeves end in a cuff (a band at the wrist, a fat roll when they're rolled up, a hem round a tee's short sleeve, on jackets and coats too), and trousers have turned-up hems over the shoes (tall boots swallow them). Before, every sleeve and trouser leg just stopped, painted on. The open front of a duster or trench coat swings too now, kicked out by your knees and pressed back by the wind of your going, as well as its back.

Combat and options

• Minimal HUD (Options, Video): just the world on screen. The bars, the map, the clock and the hotbar stay hidden and come back by themselves when they matter (when you're hit, when you're low on something, when you switch what's in your hand), or while you hold Alt.
• Jab with the stock: with your gun lowered, left click drives the stock (a pistol's butt) into whatever's in front of you. Not much damage, but it shoves one of the dead back off you and buys a second to raise the gun. Quick, cheap on breath, and silent.
• A better FPS counter (Options, Video: Show FPS): frames a second, how long each takes, and the 1% low (the worst hitches of the last few seconds), green when it's smooth, amber dipping, red struggling. Handy to send with a report of where it slows down.

Fixes

• Flat roofs on downtown blocks don't flicker any more: the gravel roof sat level with the brick cornice round its edge and reached into it, so the two fought over the same surface and the edges (and the line between two blocks) flickered in jagged steps. The roof now sits just inside and below the cornice, which reads as a lip round the edge.
• The crafting bench says what it does now: its sign reads CRAFTING and the prompt "[E] Craft" (repairs moved to the Repair Bench).
• Crawlers crawl instead of swimming: they reach out one arm at a time and claw themselves along the ground, legs dragging behind, instead of doing the breaststroke.
• You can stomp a crawler: Space on one at your feet now stamps on it (it used to shove it), with a bit more room to land on its head since it keeps moving.
• Saloon counters fixed: the till used to sit up on top of the bar, a whole second counter floating in the air. It's now the end of the bar, stood on the floor, and the bottles stand on shelves behind the bar instead of inside a block.
• The flashlight stays on your side of the wall: up against a wall, the light (out at arm's length, or under a rifle barrel) could poke through and light the room next door. It's held back on your side now (a friend's too).
• Bounce light (SDFGI) bands: with Bounce light on, the edge of its nearest zone could cross the far ground as a horizontal line, plainest at dusk. That zone now reaches well past the top of the view.
• You no longer come back from death still bleeding: your wounds are cleared when you die.
• Fixed sometimes being stuck running after letting go of Shift.
• You squeeze past chairs, stools, crates and knee-high junk when you're stuck against them, instead of getting caught (up to light armchairs).
• The red aim line runs straight through the mouse cursor, and your shots go down it.
• A shotgun drops spent shotgun hulls, not brass. Hulls are what you reload shells with now.
• Opening and closing a car's hood or trunk sounds like a car, not a squeaky house door.
• Your flashlight no longer leaks through the edges of walls, and the glow where it lands no longer lights the room behind.
• A friend's flashlight in co-op stops at walls too.
• The camo poncho shows its pattern all over, not just on the hood (every draped coat and cloak had its pattern blown up too big).
• The crowbar looks like a crowbar: a hex steel bar with a hooked, split claw at one end and a flat chisel at the other.
• The mailbox post reaches the ground instead of floating.
• The messages under the minimap no longer overlap the Baron's countdown.
• The chalkboard OPEN sign out front is gone (the neon in the window says it).
• An empty bow makes a quiver-rustle, not a gun click.
• Guests in bunks, cots and beds lie on the mattress, not half off the end of it (you too).
• Blood pools no longer leave a square of faint dots round them.
• A house corner that's fallen in brings its rafters down with it, leaning onto the rubble, instead of leaving them hanging in the air.
• The "Used to make" list on an item is compact: three to a line, the first dozen, and a count of the rest.
• Jump scares only when you didn't see it coming: one of the dead lunging out with a scream now only happens if it got close unseen: off the screen, behind you, round a blind corner, or in the dark outside your torch beam. One you'd seen waiting just comes for you.
• Room to reach things in houses: wardrobes, cabinets, fridges, cupboards, dressers, desks and bookcases always have somewhere to stand in front of them now (a wardrobe could end up behind a bed).
• The dead get round corners better: they follow their path round a corner instead of cutting across it into the wall's edge, and only charge straight at you when there's room for their whole body, not just a clear line past a door frame.
• Head-shot chunks hit things: bits of skull and gore bounce off walls, furniture and cars, and land on tables and car roofs, instead of flying through.
• People running from the dead pick a way and stick to it, veering off to one side instead of doubling back towards it, and when it's still between them and where they were going, they go the long way round it instead of walking back into it.
• Wrecked cars no longer sink into the road: a wreck that got knocked or pushed used to drop until its collision box (which started 20 cm up) met the ground, wheels buried. It rests on its wheels now.
• A wreck looks like what's on it: the tyres you can take are the good ones, the rest are flat; a hood or door that isn't coming off is gone; a windscreen you can't take is cracked; and only the doors you can take are still hanging on it.
• The wheel-arch liners only line the arches (they were full rings, poking out under the car and down into the road).
• No more V cut out of the fireplace: the see-through circle round you was biting into the top of a chimney breast and following you about. Fireplaces stay solid while you're inside, like the walls.
• Ruined buildings get their X on the map too once you've searched everything in them.
• Chimney smoke means a fire in the hearth: a house with smoke rising from its chimney always has a fire burning in the fireplace, and one without a lit fire doesn't smoke.
• The OPEN sign out front works again: it lights up at night and changes to CLOSED when you flip it (a leftover from the old chalkboard broke it in the last test build).
• The storage and backpack windows no longer jump or flick back to the top when you switch Keep/Sell or change a hold amount.

Cars

• Run the dead over: hitting one at speed no longer stops you dead. It goes under the wheels (down, or thrown off), the car jolts and loses a little speed, and drives on. It still costs the grille a little.
• More body roll, on springs: cars lean harder through turns, dip under braking and squat pulling away, and the body swings past and settles back instead of easing straight in.
• Wrecks don't budge: a ton of rusted car sits solid; nothing on foot moves it, the dead and NPCs walk round it. Only a car driven into it at speed shoves it along, and it settles solid again.
• Potholes: now and then a paved road has a pothole in it. Hit one and the car bangs and lurches, the tyre and suspension take it, and at speed the tyre can blow.
• Shine your flashlight from the car: hold right-click while you're sat in a car to point your torch out of the window at the cursor (further out, the tighter the beam).
• Lower cabs on the trucks: pickups (and the tow truck, utility truck and camper), SUVs, off-roaders, Humvees and box trucks sit lower in the roof, so they don't look so tall.
• Damage shows on the car: every hard knock leaves a dented, scraped patch on the panel it hit. Headlamps go one at a time (the side that took the hit goes dark first), and the car's jobs list says "One smashed". Beat the dents out with a Toolkit and a bit of scrap.

The world

• Textures with depth: brick, stone and rock, boards and siding, shingles and roofing, tiles, gravel, concrete, crates and tree bark now have real relief. The bricks stand proud of sunken mortar, boards have dark gaps between them, shingles overlap with shadowed edges, rock is lumpy with deep cracks, tile grout sits back. As you look across them the raised and sunken parts shift against each other a little, like real depth, and the deep bits are shaded darker. (Height maps made from each texture's own surface detail: tools/make_heights.py.)
• The open ground has depth too: dirt, grass, gravel, red rock, ash and mud now shade their low parts darker and their bumps stand out more. Twigs and stones sit on the dirt, cracks sink into it, and grass has shadowed roots, so the ground no longer looks like a flat printed sheet.
• Depth on metal, rust, plaster, asphalt and floors: painted metal (lockers, signs, shelving, drums, machinery) shows its dents and chips, rust flakes and pits, plaster has its trowel marks, the stones stand proud in the asphalt, and carpet and linoleum floors have their texture.
• The tutorial waits for you: each new hint (in the shop tutorial and the Training ground) stops the world while you read it; press Enter, E or Space, or click Got it, to carry on. (Not in co-op, where the others are still playing.)
• People notice you: survivors, traders, customers and raiders turn their heads to follow you as you go by (within a few metres, never over their shoulder).
• Rabbits look and move like rabbits: an egg of a body high at the haunches, long ears pink inside, a white scut; they hop (hind legs driving together, landing on the front paws), ears laid back as they run and twitching when they sit.
• Dogs and wild animals change pace smoothly: a quickening walk, almost a trot, before they break into a gallop, blended over a stride, and no flicking between the two as they slow.
• The screecher screams: rooted to the spot, its head goes back further and further and its arms drop wide as it draws breath, then the scream. A crawler rears up on its arms, head lifting, before it throws itself at your ankles. Reloading a pistol or revolver plays a real reload. When one of the dead has hold of you, you fight it: leaning back out of its reach, shoving at it with both arms, twisting to wrench free (your co-op partners see it too).
• Not every body falls the same way: some go over backwards, some spin and drop sideways, some pitch forward onto their faces.
• Loose ends: a face wrap's knot tails swing as you turn and run and stream out in the wind.
• Getting back up: something knocked flat rises over a second, through a crouch with its weight forward, instead of popping upright. Speeding up or slowing down (walk, jog, sprint) picks up mid-stride instead of starting the step over. Turning on the spot, people step round instead of their feet skating. Knocked back, the dead stagger backwards on their feet instead of sliding.
• Your survivor on the backpack screen: lit like a portrait now: a warm key light with soft shadows, a cool fill, an amber rim light picking out the silhouette, standing in a pool of light on a patch of worn concrete.
• The dead look dead: zombies are heavy-lidded and half-shut. (And a car drives through the mist leaving a short, gentle wake, not a trench.)
• Mist drifts at its own pace: it comes in lulls and surges, and in some stretches the heaps creep along while in others they hurry past.
• Mist moves round things: you, the dead, animals and cars push the ground mist aside as you go, leave a clearing wake behind and stir it into curls; it doesn't sit inside buildings, banks up against their walls and its wisps bend round them.
• Flashlight and doors: a shut door stops your flashlight: the glow it throws back no longer lights up the room on the other side, and only a sliver gets through the cracks.
• Every item looks like itself: the farm's crops and cooking (potatoes, corn, tomatoes, herbs, the seed packets, baked potato, tomato soup, chili, herb roast, hash, shepherd's pie, cornbread), moonshine, sterile bandages and Maggie's note were all brown-paper parcels; now each has its own model (and its own inventory icon). The stone axe is a stone head lashed to a branch instead of a pipe; the claw hammer has its claw; gears have teeth and springs coil; the whiskey's in amber glass; the lighter flips open; a dead battery's terminals are crusted over. Blades, tools, brass and gold are real shiny metal now, not grey paint.
• Guns kick: a rifle or shotgun punches back into your shoulder and the muzzle climbs, a pistol snaps up in your hand, and the view jolts with it (bigger guns, bigger kick). Raiders' pistols kick too.
• Raiders fight properly: a raider with a gun takes aim instead of playing a sword swing, and a raider with a blade swings it for real, timed so the blow lands when the hit does (a bare-handed one throws a punch that lands on time).
• Smoother fighting: a zombie's arms come up and it rears back before lunging (head and chest thrown forward), then settles instead of snapping; your guard comes up and drops in a blink rather than in one frame.
• Hits you can see: bullets and arrows knock enemies back on their heels, and your own character rocks with a blow when something hits you.
• Grab is on the middle mouse button: hold it on a crate, chair or searched cupboard to push and pull it; let go to drop it.
• Real cloth: flags, washing on the line, banners, torn curtains in broken windows, awning valances, survey tape on the salt flats, nets drying at the docks and the scarecrow's old shirt are now simulated cloth. Gravity hangs them, the wind presses on them and streams them out, so a flag lifts, snaps and wraps round its pole as the wind veers, gusts and eddies worry at them, and they swing aside as you push past. (Only what's near and on screen moves, within a fixed budget, so a street full of curtains costs no more than a few.)
• Billowing ground mist: the ground mist now heaps up in big soft rounded billows, bright on their tops and shaded in the folds and underneath, rolling slowly over each other. It gathers and lifts over a minute or so, and a storm's wind no longer sends it racing.
• Rolling ground mist: real mist now rolls along the ground with the wind, in banks you can watch drift past and wisps streaming through them. It comes up pale and thin at first light and burns off by mid morning, settles back in after dark, lies deepest over standing water, turns into a heavy blanket in fog, and gets torn away by a strong wind. It parts round you as you walk through it, lamps and your flashlight glow in it, and it works with volumetric fog off too. Options has a Ground mist switch.
• A flashlight beam you can see the air in: slow curls of haze and smoke roll through the shaft, dust hangs in it drifting and twinkling indoors and on dry nights, and in the rain the drops streak down through it (no more rain falling through your beam indoors).
• Eyeshine: a zombie turned toward your flashlight throws it back, two pale points looking at you out of the dark (red ones on the mutated).
• Louder thunder: the thunder rolls and cracks a good deal louder, near and far.
• The country makes sense now (new worlds): it follows the compass instead of falling in random patches. Greener and wooded going north toward the snow, drier and redder going east toward the salt flats, boggier going south toward the flooded lowlands, burnt out going west toward the military zone. The snow only ever meets grassland and woods, never the salt, the wastes or the military zone, and the borders between the far regions wander instead of running dead straight from home.
• Road edges blend into the ground: the gravel shoulder frays out raggedly all along (long stretches used to end in a dead straight line) and takes on the colour of the country beside it (red grit in the badlands, ash in the burnt woods).
• Bricks, planks and tiles line up with what they're on: a building or crate standing at an angle had its brick courses and boards running across it on the slant; they follow it now.

People

• Pick your eye colour in the character creator: brown, dark, hazel, green, blue, grey or amber. Strangers get a spread (brown most often). The dead have milky, clouded eyes; a brute's are bloodshot red. With an eye patch you only show the one.
• The mouth is a plain black cartoon mouth for everyone (it used to have a dark red inside and coloured lips). "Full" lips just make it a fuller mouth.
• No two people about share a name (nor a first name): customers, travellers, wanderers, your worker and the rest.
• They talk when someone's there to hear it: nobody mutters to themselves with you nowhere near. Round the fire they talk to each other as before.
• They finish the conversation before they go: someone due to leave the fire hears it out first, says goodnight, and one of the others sees them off by name.
• More jokes and banter at the fire.
• Tips at the fire: now and then (once a day at most, with you sat close), someone lets slip a place nobody's picked over yet, and it goes on your map as a Loot pin.
• Buy what they're wearing: stop someone on the road (or ask at the fire) and offer for their hat, coat, boots, belt or pack. It costs well over the going rate (less if they like you), and nobody's selling the shirt off their back.
• Wanderers on the road have names, and a word with them opens a proper talk: news, an offer for their gear, or "safe travels".
• Your companion lives by your rules now. They have to open doors themselves (they stop and reach for the handle; a locked one stops them till you deal with it) and pull them shut behind them, unless you're still on the far side coming through. Running and swinging take stamina: spent, they're winded and drop to a walk, and swing slower. They get hungry, thirsty and tired at the same rate you do, eat and drink from their pack (or your storage when they're home: things you've kept back first), and ask you when they've run out (give them some through Their pack). Starving or parched, they're slow, hit softer and stop healing; worn out, they'll nap on their bedroll even by day. Their food, water, rest and stamina show in their talk window. No more appearing behind you: they run to catch up, and only turn up behind you if they've been truly stuck a good while.

Clothes

• Helmets have real shapes (they were all one plain ball): the hard hat has a peaked shell, a brim all round and a ridge on top; the bike helmet is long and vented with a peak and straps; the army helmet is a low bowl flaring down over the ears with a netting band and chin strap; the riot helmet has a visor across the face and a neck guard.

The dog

• Growls you can hear: the growl never had a sound (every growl, your dog's and the strays', was silent). There are three now, low and ragged.
• Howling at night: out in the wild after dark, a pack of strays not after you will now and then lift their heads and howl, one starting and a couple answering, so you can hear where they are. The far-off howls in the night have more variety too. (All made for the game from scratch, like the jukebox records.)
• A dog bed (build menu, Home): the dog sleeps in it at night and naps in it now and then by day.
• It waits for you to get out of the car before it comes to say hello, and only once it's seen you. It comes at a happy lope, not a sprint.
• No more popping about: it runs to catch up instead of appearing beside you, and only jumps ahead when it's far behind and off the screen.

Map

• Cars show on the map as little purple cars, pointing the way they face (they were blue dots, the same as your worker).
• More pins: Looted, Danger, Loot, Car, Fuel, Water, Safe spot and Note, each with its own badge.
• Write on your pins: type a label and the next pin you drop carries it (click an existing pin to relabel it). Labels show on the big map, and are shared in co-op like the pins.

Moving things

• Push and pull: hold the middle mouse button on something you can shift (a crate, a chair, a barrel, a searched cupboard, desk, fridge or wardrobe) and you take hold of it. Walk on to push it, back off to pull it, step round to turn it; let go to drop it. The heavier it is the slower you go (no sprinting with a fridge), and anything over about 150 kg (big shelving, pallets, wrecks) won't budge. E does what it always did, and holding E on something unsearched searches it. You let go if you're hit, or if it snags on something.

Shop

• Odd folk at the shop: every day or two, in the daytime, someone turns up out front for reasons of their own (never the same one twice running):
  • Ollie the Tinker patches up one thing you've got on (a weapon, a coat, your boots) for a few caps.
  • Lucky Lou runs three-card monte for 5, 15 or 30 caps. You can win, but he likes his odds, and he packs up fast if you're too lucky.
  • Brother Amos preaches the end of the world on your doorstep and scares off customers while he's there. Feed him and he blesses the shop; pay him to preach elsewhere; or tell him to clear off.
  • Mrs. Pell collects the old world's little things and pays three times the going rate for the one she's after (a trinket, a harmonica, a wristwatch, dog tags...).
  • A courier with a parcel addressed to Maggie. Sign for it and see what's inside (usually something useful; sometimes porcelain thimbles).
  • Fiddlin' Joe plays the jukebox tunes out front. Tip him and more customers stop by while he's there.
  • Slick Vinnie, a rival trader, sizes up your prices (and says what he thinks) and sells you a spare part off his cart at a mark-up.
  • Sarge, an old soldier, swaps a war story and a marked cache for a drink, a coffee or a smoke.
  • Gerald, a tourist who seems to have missed the end of the world, looking for his hotel. He pays well for directions to anywhere.
• Your worker keeps hours: from 10 pm to 8 am, when customers are few, they sit out by the fire, then turn in at 11 on a bedroll of their own in the bedroom's far corner (it comes with them when you hire them). A customer at the counter, the dead close by or the morning gets them up. On slow days they tidy the shelves.
• The worker restocks four items a trip, carrying them over in a crate, and goes straight back for more while there are empty shelves.
• Storage keeps things by default: anything new you store is KEEP until you switch it to SELL. The starting stock is already marked SELL, and saves from before this keep working the way they did.
• Storage shows what you've got: how many items you're keeping and what they're worth, and how many are for sale and what they'd fetch at your prices.
• Switching KEEP / SELL no longer makes the storage window jump: the row keeps its shape and the lists stay where you'd scrolled them.
• A car parked by the shop shows its trunk in the storage window: take things from it, send them to storage one kind at a time, or unload the lot (it no longer empties into storage by itself when you open the chest).
• Wear straight from storage: clothes and gear in the chest have a Wear button that swaps them with what you've got on (that goes into storage).
• Store whole backpack now takes the extras off your hotbar too: a hotbar stack keeps the amount you've set to keep (one if you haven't set any) and the rest goes into storage.
• In co-op, KEEP / SELL and hold amounts are shared: the host's shop goes by them, and a friend's changes reach the host.
• A limit on display furniture: shelves, tables, racks and fridges are capped by the size of your shop (2 at the stall, then 4, 6, 9, 12 and 15). The build menu shows how many you've got. Anything you'd already built stays.
• The Repair Bench is its own bench now: the crafting bench only crafts. The Repair Bench opens up with the Scrap Shack (one you'd already built stays).
• Repair jobs for customers: with a Repair Bench in the shop, now and then a customer brings worn gear to the counter instead of shopping. Take the job and they wait by the bench. Fix it there for their fee: cheaper if they brought the parts, more if you use yours. Keep them waiting too long and they go elsewhere. Your worker can take jobs on at the counter too.
• New: the Salvage Bench. Break things down into materials: sheet metal into scrap, car doors and hoods into sheet metal, tyres into rubber, batteries into lead and wire, shocks into springs, old weapons into scrap, wood, springs and gears, and clothes into rags. It takes from your backpack first, then storage, and the parts go into storage.
• A light switch in the Scrap Shack, just right of the bedroom door: turns the powered lights (lamps, string lights) on and off. They still need the generator running. The same switch works for everyone in co-op.

The main quest: The Road North

• Ferris comes by on day three: an old convoy driver, a friend of Maggie's, walks in along the highway and waits out front of the shop in the daytime (until six; he comes back the next morning if you're not ready). Talk to him (E) and he tells you Maggie didn't go straight north: she went looking for why the Hub shut its gates and left word for you at every stop.
• A trail through every kind of country: nine legs, each to a place in a different biome - the grassland, the woods (a radio tower), the marsh, the drowned lowlands (the docks), the dry country, the Exclusion Zone, the Salt Flats (a quarry), a camp below the snow line, and at last the Hub's South Gate. Each place is the nearest of its kind to the last, so the trail runs out and back across the map over several days.
• Maggie's notes: when you reach the place, a note of hers turns up where the loot's kept. Pick it up and it goes in your journal, moves you on to the next leg, and tells you more about where the Hub is: first just "north, past the snow", then a circle on the map it's somewhere in, then the gate pinned exactly.
• The current leg is a pale blue diamond on the map (an arrow at the edge when it's off the map), and it's at the top of the on-screen tracker as the MAIN QUEST, above your SIDE JOBS.
• The Hub's South Gate stands far up in the snow: a concrete wall running off both ways, two guard towers with their floodlights still burning, eight metres of shut steel gate, a crew door with a lit keypad, a burned-out convoy truck and tank traps out front, and the dead. Maggie's red scarf is tied to the wire. (The story goes on past the gate in a later build.)
• The main quest is the host's in co-op for now (friends see the map markers only once they're on their own saves).

The bar, the still, the rain and the jukebox

• Bars: a Small Bar (barrels and a plank, two stools: Scrap Shack), a Bar (panelled front, three stools, a shelf of bottles behind: Trading Post) and a Long Bar (zinc top, brass foot rail, beer taps, a neon BAR sign, five stools: Crossroads Market). In the build menu under rec.
• Folk stay for a drink: a customer who's bought something sometimes takes a stool at the bar (more often at a bigger bar, and in the evening) and orders. Press E at the bar to pour: drinks come from storage, from whatever's marked SELL (your first bar marks Moonshine and Whiskey SELL for you). A bottle of moonshine or whiskey pours four glasses, a coffee or a water one, and a glass sells for a good bit more than a quarter-bottle would (with the odd tip). They have two or three over a minute or two, then head off; left waiting a minute with nobody pouring, they give up.
• A bartender: from a Trading Post up, press E at the bar to hire one (60 caps, then 35 a day, paid each morning; they quit if you can't pay). They stand behind the bar, pour for whoever's waiting, wipe glasses and chat. Press E at the bar to let them go.
• Talk along the bar: two folk sat at the bar get talking to each other: the Baron's trucks, the Hub's lights, the dead, what they did before, cold beer they can't stop remembering.
• The Distillery (Trading Post, in the yard): a copper pot still on a brick firebox with a coil in a barrel of cooling water. Fire it up with 3 Corn (or 3 Potatoes), a Bottled Water and a log of Wood (E), and three game hours later bottle 2 Moonshine. Moonshine sells for 34, warms you up when you drink it, pours four glasses at the bar, and cleans a wound: craft 2 Bandages and a Moonshine into 2 Sterile Bandages.
• The Rain Collector (Trading Post, in the yard): a tarp funnel over a drum, with a cloth-and-charcoal filter on the tap. It fills with clean water by itself: a bottle every four game hours or so on a dry day, one every forty minutes in the rain, quicker in a storm. Holds six; E fills your bottles.
• The jukebox plays now: eight records, made for the game from scratch (no samples): "Dust Road Blues" (a harmonica shuffle), "Crossroads Waltz" (fiddle and guitar), "Last Light" (a slow piano trio), "Rattletrap" (rockabilly), "Honky Tonk Heart", "Neon Swing" (organ and a muted horn), "Rain on a Tin Roof" (fingerpicked guitar and harp) and "Static Sunset" (surf guitar). Press E on it to pick one, turn shuffle on or off, or stop it. It plays through the jukebox in the world (louder the closer you are) while the generator runs, and the generator's auto mode now runs for it. Customers and travellers near it put a record on now and then. Music volume is a new slider in Options > Audio. (In co-op only the host hears the jukebox for now.)

Training

• A Training run on the title screen: a throwaway world (nothing is saved and your worlds aren't touched) that walks you through the controls step by step: walking, sprinting, sneaking, picking up a bat and taking it in hand, shoving one of the dead, killing it, then two at once, bandaging a scratched arm in the body window, searching a crate, and the map and flashlight. At the end (or any time) "Back to title" takes you out; you can also stay and try things out.
• The hints glow now: every tutorial hint (the training's and the shop's first-game hints) shows the keys it's talking about as lit-up keycaps under the text, pulsing, and puts a golden glow on the thing it means: a ring with a bobbing arrow over the OPEN sign, the storage chest, the counter, the job board, the nearest of the dead or the nearest thing to search; a glowing frame round the KEEP / SELL / Put out / Restock buttons in the storage window, the hotbar, or the minimap. Off the screen, an arrow at the edge points the way.

Journal

• The journal (J) is in tabs now: Main quest (Maggie's trail, leg by leg, with her notes and what you know of where the Hub is), Side jobs (every job you've taken with what it wants, where to hand it in, the pay, and a Drop it button), The story (Maggie's ledger and the Convoy Logs), Notes & finds (Hal's notebook, the atlas pages and the rest), Places (everywhere you've found, and which you've cleared), and My notes, a page you can type your own notes on (saved with the game).

Health

• Wounded limbs slow you properly: a wounded leg slows your walk (a bite by about a fifth, a scratch by about an eighth), a little more while it's bandaged and stiff. A wounded arm slows your swing (the wind-up, the blow and the wait before the next), a bite more than a scratch, a little more bandaged.
• You can see your bandages: each bandaged part wears a wrap (round the forearm, the calf, the forehead, or across the chest). A fresh one is off-white and greys as it gets grubby, a dirty one is stained brown with old blood seeping through, and a sterile one is a clean blue-white. It comes off when the wound heals, and co-op partners see yours.
• Scratches and bites, part by part: the dead can scratch or bite your head, torso, either arm or either leg. A bite starts the infection half the time, a scratch one time in seven (a human's knife never does). A fresh wound bleeds until it's bandaged, or until it clots on its own (a scratch in about a minute, a bite not for a good three), and a bare wound only mends slowly. A wounded leg slows you (a bite more than a scratch) and a wounded arm slows your swing (a bandaged one a touch more).
• What you wear turns some of them: each body part is covered by what's on it (a helmet for the head, a jacket for the torso and the arms, gloves for the hands, trousers and boots for the legs), and the better the armour there, the more often a scratch, or a bite, is turned by the clothes instead of landing. The body window shows the odds per part.
• Q opens the body window: you, drawn from the front with each part coloured by how it's doing (hover for its state), a row per part with Bandage / Change / Take off buttons, and your painkillers, antibiotics and first aid kit. Bandages go on one part at a time now; a bandage on the hotbar still goes straight on the worst wound, and a First Aid Kit dresses every wound at once. Q (or Esc) closes it.
• Bandages go dirty: a plain bandage is dirty after about four minutes. A dirty one stops the healing and, left on, can start the fever by itself, so change it (the window tells you when). A wound mends in about three and a half minutes under a bandage for a scratch, eight for a bite; First Aid skill and the Medic perk speed it up.
• Sterile bandages: boil a Bandage with Bottled Water at the kitchen (15 s). A sterile bandage heals half again as fast and never goes dirty. The First Aid Kit's dressings are sterile.
• A night's sleep clots every wound and mends them a long way (fully, under a clean bandage, for anything half healed).
• Wounds are saved with the game, and the god-mode "Bleed" button now makes a random wound.

Combat

• The bow is held like a bow: upright in your left hand, the string toward you (it used to be held like a pistol, on its side). Carried, it hangs at your side. Hold right-click and you raise it at the target and draw the string back to your cheek with your right hand over half a second, an arrow on the string (none with an empty quiver); let fly and the string snaps forward and you draw again. A full draw shoots hard and true; loosed early it flies weaker and wider. Co-op partners see you draw.
• A shove knocks one of the dead down 35% of the time, plus 2% for each level of Strength. Shoving the same one again straight after adds 15%. Raiders keep their feet more often, and brutes only stumble.

Buildings

• Roofs come down without their walls: knock out too much of what holds a roof up (most of one side, a corner's two walls both badly holed, or about half the outside walls) and it groans, sags and falls in, in a shower of boards and dust, bringing any storey above down with it. Whoever's inside takes a beating and gets knocked flat; the dead under it mostly don't get up. A heap of it is left on the floor and the place is open to the sky from then on (it stays that way: saves and co-op too).

Doors

• Doors break to pieces: when one gives (the dead pounding on it, you kicking it in, a blast, or enough of your own blows and shots), the leaf bursts into splintered boards that fly through the doorway and clatter down, and a jagged stub is left on the hinges with a couple of boards on the floor. Broken doors stay broken.
• You can break a door down yourself: heavy swings and shots chip a shut door (splinters fly) and enough of them splinter it: a bat in about five blows, a sledgehammer in two, a pistol in five or six rounds. A blast takes a door clean off.
• The dead pound on doors: both fists up over the head and driven down into the wood, over and over, the body pitching into each blow. Each blow lands as the fists hit, with the door shuddering and splinters coming off. One zombie takes about fifteen seconds to break a door down, a pack much less, a brute three blows. Friends in co-op see the pounding too.

The dead

• Crawlers: some of the dead have no legs to speak of. They drag themselves along flat on the ground on their arms, slow but low, and bite at your legs (a bite leaves you limping for a few seconds, and bleeding more often than not). About one zombie in ten starts out a crawler, and an ordinary zombie beaten to the ground a couple of times can come up one, its legs gone. A shove only skids one back: it's already down.
• Chopping down: swing at a crawler or anything on the ground and you chop down at it instead of swinging level, bending into the blow, and it finds the head more often. Co-op friends see the chop.
• The brute's slam: a brute close to you rears up with both fists over its head and drives them into the ground. Everyone within about three metres goes down, you included (you're flat on your back for a couple of seconds, then up with a daze), and the ordinary dead round it too. The ground booms, a ring of dust goes up and the screen shakes. It still swings its club up close.
• Heavier brutes: a brute lumbers with a slow roll from foot to foot, hunched over its bulk, arms hanging wide and swinging, and its club swing comes from high up.

Balance

• Car batteries are easier to come by: about one wreck in three has a battery to strip again. Wrecks and garages often hold a Dead Battery (new): bring it back to life at the Mechanic's Bench with 2 Scrap, 1 Wire and 1 Bottled Water (or break it down for lead). The weekly convoy often has a battery or two for sale, and camp traders sell one every couple of days (40 caps).
• Fewer customers: about half as many through the day, a quiet trickle late in the evening and early morning, and nobody from about 1 am to 5:30 am.
• Fewer people on the roads: travellers turn up less often and fewer stay at once, and at most two wanderers are about (one at night).
• People at home move about their houses: they wander from room to room and out into the yard in the daytime, and stop and turn to face you when you come close.
• Fewer cars: about 40% fewer wrecks along the roads and in the lots.
• Less to strip off a wreck: fewer tyres (sometimes none), and batteries, hoods, doors, windscreens, headlights and the parts underneath turn up much less often.
• Car parts sell for less (a battery 16, a tyre 12, a radiator 14, a windscreen 15, and the rest lower in line).
• Less loot in buildings and containers.
• The post comes every morning at 8. A parcel you order arrives with the next morning's post.
• Levelling is steadier: the first levels take a proper outing or two (350 XP for level 2, up from 100, so one zombie and a crate no longer level you), and later levels come quicker than before (4,910 XP from level 20, down from 7,700). Each level now costs a flat 240 XP more than the last.

Title screen

• The title screen now plays four scenes in turn, each fading into the next.
• The horde at the shop is remade as a 20-second scene: the dead come out of the dark, the rifle steps out of the door, two run inside, and the last one drops just before the fade.
• The road walk is remade as a 20-second scene: the group eases to a stop to fight and walks on again, and the dead come out of the verges and up the road.
• New: the run. A pickup tears down the highway in the storm, its headlights and roof light bar blazing, with a gunner standing in the bed. It ploughs through the dead in its path, brakes hard for a burning roadblock and swings through the gap as lightning cracks overhead.
• New: the tour. A slow pan across every region, about six seconds each, as the light and weather change: the meadows, the pinewoods, the marsh, the flooded lowlands in a storm, the salt flats, the badlands, the wastes, the Exclusion Zone, the Burn, the Greenwater, and the cold north at night under the aurora. Each region's name comes up as you cross into it.
• People and the dead move more naturally: they ease into a walk and out of it, turn at a natural pace, sidestep while aiming, and back off a step when the dead get close.
• Nobody walks through cars, poles, the fire, buildings or each other any more.

Loading

• Our own splash screen and icon: the game opens on the SalvageBound logo instead of the Godot one, and the window, taskbar and SalvageBound.exe all carry a new rusty "S" icon.
• The OPEN sign on the loading screen starts switched off and its neon warms up as the world loads, flickering now and then on the way, until it's fully lit.

Co-op

• Ride in the back of a pickup: press F at the back of a pickup (or a utility truck) and you climb up over the side into the bed. Two can ride back there while a friend drives. Stood in the bed you go where the truck goes, swaying with it, and you can turn (WASD), crouch, aim, shoot and swing at whatever's alongside. F climbs you out over the side, once it's slowed right down. Your friends see you stood up there. (Camper shells and tow trucks have no room; at the doors, F still puts you in a seat.)

v0.9.05

The dead

• More of the dead out in the world: about half as many again in every area.
• The starting area is far more dangerous: two to three times as many of the dead round home, and they wait in buildings closer to the shop.
• Bigger hordes: a horde night starts at 12 and grows faster with your shop's size.
• More of them can be about at once (up to 70).
• They're much tougher: ordinary zombies and screechers have 150 health (up from 80), runners 130 (up from 70).
• They hit harder and swing a little faster.
• They notice you from further off: 25 m, up from 17.

Co-op

• Your friend's flashlight shows as they have it: switched on in a dark building at noon, switched off at night, flickering when the bulb's going.
• Their gunshots are seen and heard: the bang, the muzzle flash, tracers, bullet holes and chips where the rounds hit, a pump gun's rack, gun smoke indoors.
• Their arrows fly, and you hear them land.
• Their melee swings follow the weapon's real path instead of a canned swing, with the swing trail and the blood when it lands.
• Thrown molotovs, pipe bombs and grenades fly across your screen too, and go off where theirs did.
• Explosions and fires happen on everyone's screen: a blast or a burning patch from a friend hurts you if you're in it.
• Grass fires spread for everyone, whoever started them (before, a fire started by a joining player never spread).
• A wreck set burning by a blast burns on everyone's screen.
• You see a hit land on a zombie whoever landed it: the sound, the flinch, the flash.
• Your friend's footsteps are heard: soft indoors and crouched, loud sprinting, the swish of long grass, splashes in puddles, dust off dry dirt.
• Their reloads, jams, empty clicks, swings and grunts are heard.
• When they're hurt you see it: the red flash, the blood, the sound.
• A bleeding friend leaves a trail of drops, and tracks bloody or muddy prints indoors.
• Their clothes show the weather and the fight: wet, muddy, bloody, dirty, snowy.
• Their hood goes up and down as they pull it.
• Climbing over fences and through windows animates on your screen.
• A raised long gun points where they're aiming.
• Driving: the wheels turn, brake lights come on and the headlight switch matches theirs. The engine note follows their throttle.
• Customers, the worker, travellers and your companion look the same on every screen, clothes and guns included (before, joining players saw different faces).
• Your companion shows up for joining players.
• The shop's dog shows up for joining players, with its tricks, tail wags and barks.
• Co-op version check bumped: host and friends need the same build.

v0.9.04

Title screen

• A horde comes for the shop on the title screen: a lightning flash shows twenty and more of the dead coming out of the dark.
• Someone steps out of the shop with an assault rifle and opens up, its taped-on light cutting through the rain.
• Two of the regulars run for the door, and the other two draw pistols and join the fight by the fire.
• Everyone fighting carries a light: gun lights and torches braced under pistols sweep the yard.
• Muzzle flashes light the rain, tracers streak across the yard and the dead drop where they're hit.
• When the last one falls it goes quiet, then the night fades and later they come again.
• A puddle by the burning drum holds the fire's glow, the beams and the lightning.
• The skid marks on the road are dark rubber instead of white patches.
• A second title scene plays after the horde fight: three survivors walk a highway in the storm with their lights on, and the camera walks with them.
• The dead come at the walkers out of the dark and the verges; the group stops to put them down, then walks on past the bodies.
• The highway has houses with lit windows, wrecks on the shoulders (one still burning), street lights and power lines.
• The two scenes take turns, handing over through a fade to black.

v0.9.03

Fixes

• Lights can be placed again once you have a generator: the lamp, hanging lamp, bulb string, jar chandelier and neon sign were asking for the generator as if it were a material.
• The jukebox and arcade cabinet had the same problem, and can be placed again too.
• With a rifle or shotgun, the beam comes from the light taped under the barrel instead of your shoulder.
• The gun light points where the gun points: down at the ground ahead when it's held low, straight out in front when you raise it to aim.
• Co-op friends' gun lights shine from their guns the same way.
• E picks up an item lying in reach first, instead of opening the container behind it or talking to someone beside it.
• No more straight lines across the ground in mist and fog: the fog is drawn in finer layers, all of them out where the world is.

Guns

• Guns only fire once they're raised: hold right-click to aim, then left click to shoot (no more shooting from the hip).
• Aiming a pistol with your flashlight out, the torch hand comes up under the gun so you hold it with both hands.
• The flashlight beam follows the pistol while you aim, so you light what you're shooting at.
• The pump shotgun has its proper blast: its sound played the pump being racked before the shot, so you mostly heard the rack.
• The pump racks after every shot (bang, then chk-chk).
• Clearing a jammed shotgun racks the pump.
• Every gun always fires with the same sound, so each one sounds like itself instead of picking from a mix.
• The pistol's odd second shot sound is gone.
• Bullets hitting walls, crates and furniture make a proper impact: a sharp crack and a patter of grit (they used to play a melee smash, or nothing on bare walls).
• A shotgun blast into a wall cracks once or twice, not six pellets' worth of noise.
• The jam click only plays when a gun really jams or clicks empty: it used to play at the end of every reload.
• Reloading the pump shotgun finishes with a rack.
• The red aiming line comes out of the gun's barrel tip on every gun (it used to start low on a pistol, or off a corner of the gun).
• Shots fire from the barrel tip too.
• The flashlight taped under a rifle or shotgun sits snug against the barrel instead of floating below it.
• The SMG has its own ammo: SMG Ammo, in a grey-blue box. Pistols and the revolver keep Pistol Ammo; the hunting rifle and assault rifle keep Rifle Rounds.
• SMG Ammo turns up in gun lockers, ammo crates, police trunks, footlockers and on raiders, and the convoy carries it.
• Make SMG Ammo at the workbench with a Reloading Press: 8 Brass, 8 Primers, 1 Gunpowder, 1 Lead (Mechanics 3) for 8 rounds.

Title screen

• A new title screen made from the game itself: Maggie's stall on a stormy night, seen through the game's own camera.
• Rain hammers down, with rings popping in the puddles, and rain and wind under the menu.
• Lightning cracks every few seconds, lighting the whole street for an instant, with thunder close or far.
• The street is a real town road with its sidewalks and kerbs, a burning car on it and the dead walking past.
• A survivor on the porch holds a torch and a pistol on a zombie shambling up the yard, the beam cutting through the rain.
• The regulars huddle round the fire pit, the drum burns and the OPEN sign glows in the window.
• Wrecks, the mailbox, a hydrant, power poles, cones, trash bags, oil and blood fill out the street.
• The SalvageBound sign hangs over it all, as before.
• It opens with a quick fade: no slow zoom or sliding bars, and the menu's ready straight away.

Loading

• The loading screen is just the SalvageBound sign and a percentage, with a thin bar under it.
• No more chunk counter: the number climbs steadily to 100 as the world gets ready.
• The story intro shows the same percentage while it loads behind Maggie's words.

Sound

• Your footsteps are much quieter indoors, in buildings and in your own shop.

v0.9.02

Power

• The shop starts with no power. The lights stay dark and the fridge stays warm until you get a generator running.
• Only the OPEN/CLOSED sign works at the start: it runs off its own little battery.
• The generator is easier to build early: 6 Scrap Metal, 2 Nails, 2 Electrical Wire and a Car Battery (no Toolkit any more).
• New games start with the scrap and nails for it in storage, so all you need is wire and a battery from the wrecked cars.
• A new generator comes with a little fuel in the tank, enough to get the lights on; after that it wants Fuel Cans.
• The generator hint comes in the morning of day 1, so your first trip out can be for the parts.

Fixes

• No more pale square round you in the snow: the patch of deep snow that followed you around is gone.
• Footprints, tyre ruts and blood are drawn straight onto the snow, so they look the same as before without a patch of their own.
• Ice, mud, pads and things lying on the ground near you no longer get painted white or half-buried.
• Snow over lakeside mud and wet ground is as white as the rest, instead of a greyer ring.
• Prints stop at the lake shore and stay off sidewalks and road shoulders.

Performance (aiming for a steady 60 fps)

• Tall grass is much cheaper to draw: fewer, wider blades that look the same, split into tiles so grass behind the camera isn't drawn at all (about half the grass triangles it had).
• Short grass blades use fewer segments.
• Chunk loading is spread over several frames instead of landing in one, so walking or driving into new areas no longer hitches.
• Buildings build a wall, a roof or a floor at a time across frames, so big downtown blocks stream in smoothly.
• Cars, containers, loot and people for a new area are added a few per frame rather than all at once.
• Anything already in view still loads first and faster, so you never see a gap where a building should be.
• Wrecked cars are prepared on the loading screen, so the first wreck of each kind doesn't stutter (loading takes a few seconds longer).
• Zombies far away that are just wandering think less often, and ones standing still skip their physics.
• Parked cars away from you sleep, and doors you're nowhere near stop checking every frame.
• People and animals off screen animate at a lower rate.
• House lamps only cast shadows when you're close.
• The indoor see-through view casts fewer rays.
• Lighter fog and ambient-light settings with no visible change.
• Shadows option now has Off / Low / High / Ultra: the new High is a cheaper soft shadow, Ultra is the old High.

v0.9.01

Hunting, farming and food

• Rabbits, deer, stags and foxes in the grassland and woods to hunt for meat. They bolt when they see you; crouch to get closer.
• Deer, stags and foxes are proper animated animals, from the same pack as the dogs (the stag has a full rack of antlers).
• Four new seeds to grow: potatoes, corn, tomatoes and herbs.
• Eight new kitchen recipes: baked potato, roast corn, tomato soup, cornbread, herb-roast meat, potato hash, shepherd's pie and chili.
• Empty bottles: drink a bottle of water and you keep the bottle.
• Fill your empties at any pond or stream (E), then boil the water at the kitchen.
• Cooking with water hands the bottle back. You start with a few empties, and more lie about in cupboards, cars and offices.

The world

• Trees and stone don't come back: a felled tree stays a stump and a broken boulder stays rubble for good.
• Half-worked trees and rocks stay half worked, across reloads and saves.
• Boulders crumble as you break them: smaller each time, rubble at the end.
• Trees no longer hide you: the see-through circle opens when a canopy's between you and the camera.
• Rain streaks and drips stay off the inside faces of outside walls.
• The torch's beam stops at the wall instead of shining through it.
• The dusk "horizontal lines" in the mist are gone (the low sun stays out of the fog).
• Flat roofs are one flush surface with fine gravel.
• Bookshelves in libraries and houses show what's left on them.
• Emptied buildings get a small X on the map until they restock.
• Dust storms: the tumbling scraps are ragged shapes, not little boxes, and the haze has no grid.
• Cloud shadows are big rounded billows now, instead of blotches with straight sides and square corners.

The dead and the Baron

• The dead take more hits once you're armed.
• More of them in towns: half the houses have one waiting, and some shamble the streets.
• Bodies lie four minutes, rotting grey-green, before sinking away.
• Flies on corpses are much quieter, and fewer bodies buzz at once.
• The brute is reworked: hunched, huge-shouldered, a swollen club of a hand, a torn-open gut, a stitched chest and glowing yellow-green eyes.
• The Baron's toll is now 25-45% of your caps each visit, rolled fresh every time (at least 20). His grudge pushes it toward 45%.

Cars

• Parts come off working cars: car window > Take parts off (battery, wheels, lamps, hood, doors, windscreen; with more Mechanics, the muffler, radiator, brakes and shocks).
• A car down a wheel or two sits on its drums and leans.
• L at the wheel switches the headlights (auto / on / off).
• The roof stays on while you drive, and the glass clears a little so you can see yourself.
• Wrecks with flat tyres sit on the flat instead of looking sunk into the road.
• Tyres are a shade lighter so they show against night tarmac.
• A parked car flattens the grass under its whole floor.
• Car trunks have a proper sound: the latch, the lid going up, and a solid slam.

Your shop

• The generator is a thing you build again (Build > Work, from the start; put it anywhere outside), and one you build always runs.
• Chairs at the chess table, and guests sit down to play cards, chess and the piano, and sprawl on the couch.
• You sit on the fire benches instead of through them.
• You can only sleep when you're tired enough: a long day by night, properly worn out for a nap by day.
• The mailbox door is a proper door now, hinged at the bottom.
• Door leaves reach the lintel (no gap at the top).
• The dartboard hangs at eye height.
• Moving lots of items in the shop or a trunk no longer lags.

You and your gear

• The scarf has real cloth tails, one down the front and one over the shoulder, that swing as you walk.
• Rucksacks sit up between the shoulders, with the straps running into them.
• The hiking pack's bedroll no longer sticks out past your side.
• The bum bag has a shape and a belt.
• Axes, hammers, crowbars and the pan are carried edge-forward (the saw bat and guitar were held pointing backwards).
• A weapon's condition is out of its name and in its stats; the hotbar has a little durability bar.
• The bob haircut is withdrawn for now; anyone who had it has the short cut instead.

Dogs and sounds

• The stray dog wanders in and out of the shop before it's yours.
• Dogs pant after a run, and a lone stray barks into the night.
• New door, car door and dog sounds.
• Walking through long grass is quieter and softer.

Performance

• Long grass runs faster: about half as many points per clump, cheaper cloud shadows, and the trampled-grass map is updated 30 times a second instead of every frame.

v0.9.0: dread, cars rebuilt, the first days, and fixes from a playtest

The dark got worse

• Eyes in the dark: at night the dead catch your torch beam in their eyes: two pale points looking back at you from the edge of the light.
• Your torch picks its moments: when the dead are close, or on a horde night, the bulb stutters and drops out for a second now and then (a loose contact). It always goes when a lurker lunges or a Screecher screams.
• Lightning shows you the field: a close strike lights everything for an instant, the dark outside your view included. Whatever's standing out there, you see it, then it's gone.
• The hairs on your neck: when something you can't see is coming for you, that edge of the screen darkens with a slow red pulse.
• The world closes in: as the danger builds, the edges of the screen darken and lose their colour, the picture goes blood-dark and drained, and the view creeps in a little round you. It eases off when it's over (less of it by day).
• Horde nights look wrong: from the warning at dusk until the horde's dealt with, the moon comes up rust-red, the mist rises thick and red-brown, and streams of crows fly over, all heading the same way, out of town.
• Fighting far off: after dark you see the distant gunfire before you hear it, muzzle flashes flickering low on the horizon, and the orange flash of a far explosion lighting the sky.
• Your breath smokes in the cold, on cold nights and when you're soaked: slow puffs standing still, quick short ones when you're running or out of breath. (The dead don't breathe.)
• Film grain at night, thicker when it's bad.
• Options, World tab: Dread effects (the edge darkening, the view closing in, the torch stutter and the eyeshine) and Film grain can each be switched off.

Fixes from a playtest

• The horde doesn't camp outside your shop all the next day. At dawn, whatever's left of the night's horde loses interest and shambles back out into the fields (apart from any still on you). Before, if you didn't kill them all, they hung round the shop all day and nobody came to it. And you only get the "held the shop" reputation if you actually fought them.
• Scared folk don't wait forever. Customers and travellers who've been hanging back from the dead for a minute give up: a customer goes home ("Not worth it."), a traveller carries on regardless. Before, they could stand frozen for hours while the dead were about.
• Fixed an error Godot logged every time the game started (the item icons' little render world).
• Fixed a flood of "axis must be normalized" errors when you spun right round (the view cone), or a dog circled you.

Lighting and shading

• No more banding in the dark: night skies, fog and the shadows round the edges of the screen are smooth gradients now.
• Leaves and fronds have soft edges instead of shimmering ones (with anti-aliasing on).
• The sun is a disc, not a point: shadows are crisp where things meet the ground and soften the further they fall, like real sunlight.
• Reflections inside the shop: the floor, the counter, glass and metal pick up the room's own lamps and windows.

The first days (new games)

• Maggie's old generator sits out back, behind the kitchen, and it's dead: no lights the first night. Fix it with 1 Spare Car Parts, 2 Electrical Wire and a Toolkit and it coughs into life (with a little fuel still in the tank).
• Day 2: a stranger at your fire, asking for you by name. They knew Maggie, and they've brought you something. Pay what you can, or nothing at all.
• Day 3: the radio crackles: the dead are massing up north and coming down the road. You've got three nights to get ready for your first horde.
• Day 4: an old face back by the fire, like they said they'd be.
• The story starts on day one: the first wreck you search has the next page of the convoy's logs in it.
• Meeting the dead: the first one you come across, you get told how to fight them (head blows, guarding, shoving). And the first time one gets its hands on you in the first days, it's a close call, not a bite: the world slows, you get an arm up, and you shove it off.
• Every morning after a night's sleep: the day's tally (caps, sales, the dead put down, places searched, reputation, things found to read) and what's coming today.

Cars, rebuilt

• New car bodies, properly shaped and detailed: bumpers and grilles, tail lamps, mirrors, a real interior, door cards, and paint and glass that catch the sky. Roofs fade away so you can see who's sat inside.
• Lots more kinds on the roads and in the towns: compacts, minivans, sports cars, a Humvee, box trucks, a bus, fire engines, army trucks, tow trucks, campers, police cruisers and the sheriff's car, ambulances. Wrecks come in all of them too.
• Doors swing open when anyone gets in or out, and you can see who's in the car: you at the wheel, your companion beside you, co-op friends in the back.
• Handling like a real car: the tyres grip and slide, there's a gearbox, and the camera looks ahead down the road the faster you go.
• Every part matters: the battery, the engine, each tyre (and its tread), the radiator (low, and the engine runs hot and boils over), the brakes, the suspension, the exhaust (holed, and it's loud: the dead hear you coming), the lamps, the glass, the hood and the doors. They wear as you drive and get damaged where you hit things.
• Look under the hood (E by a car): the hood props open and you get the car from above, every part coloured by how it's doing, with what each one needs. Patch things in the field, or fit a new part.
• Strip the wrecks: search one, then take parts off it with a Toolkit (tyres, batteries, doors, hoods, glass, lamps). The parts come off the model, too.
• The Mechanic's Bench (Trading Post and up): makes car parts (brake pads, a radiator, shocks, a muffler, doors and hoods), and cars parked by it get the big repairs.
• Cars you find out in the world can be fixed up and kept: they're saved, and stay where you leave them.

More to find, and crafting with some depth to it

• New parts to make things from: Electrical Wire, Rubber Strips, Sheet Metal, Springs, Glue and Small Gears. Find them, or take things apart for them (cut a tyre into rubber strips, a car door into sheet metal, a headlamp for its wire, shocks for their springs, an old watch for its gears). Glue you can mix yourself from flour and water.
• The better things take more making: car parts now need the right bits and the right tools. Hoods, doors and mufflers need a Welding Torch; radiators and shocks need a Socket Wrench Set; spare parts need wire; a Toolkit needs duct tape for the grip; a bow needs glue; a pipe bomb needs wire.
• Tools for the cars (keep them in your pack or storage): a Socket Wrench Set (field repairs go to 75% instead of 60%, and the engine further), a Trolley Jack (wheels without a Toolkit), a Siphon Hose (drain the fuel from wrecks: about half still have some).
• Car consumables: a Tyre Plug Kit (plug a flat anywhere), Motor Oil (an oil change: +12% engine) and Coolant (+20% radiator, and it cools right down).
• Hal's Garage Notebook: pages from an old mechanic's notebook. Each one teaches you a little mechanics, and some teach a recipe you can't get any other way: Coolant, the Siphon Hose, Motor Oil (rendered fat, it's a long story), and how to make your own Socket Set.
• Things to read, each its own section in your journal (J): Glovebox Notes left in the wrecked cars, Dog Tags off the soldiers who held the checkpoints, Road Atlas Pages (each marks a place on your map), and Faded Polaroids. Thirty-four new pieces of the story, some of them tied to Maggie, the Convoys, the Baron and the green.
• More to eat and trade: instant coffee, jerky, canned peaches, instant noodles, energy bars, military rations, whiskey; and trade goods: cigarettes, Zippo lighters, wristwatches, wedding rings, toy cars, harmonicas, decks of cards.

Fixes from the Discord bug reports

• The dead come out after you. Every house was an island on the dead's path map (the doorway tops and the inside doorways were too tight for it), so a zombie indoors could never work out how to reach you outside. They find the doors now.
• The police cruiser's trunk can be searched. It's locked: a Cruiser Key turns up now and then in a police station's desks and lockers, or pry it open with a crowbar (noisy). Guns, ammo, a first aid kit and the like inside.
• Shops sell from the back room. Customers now buy from displays you've moved into the stockroom.
• Fences block you where the boards stand (gaps between broken boards still let you through).
• A blanket on a bed no longer hangs out through the wall.
• Hover anything in storage to see what it is and what it's used to make.
• Doors stop at the wall instead of swinging through it, and swing the other way if there's no room.
• Police stations (new worlds): a second door from the lobby, so the back office isn't only reachable through the cells.
• Rain washes the blood off you properly (and the mud).
• Your armour rating shows under Condition in the inventory, with what it does, and armour items show an Armour bar.
• Ponchos aren't black any more (the camo one especially), and the hood pulls up over whatever hat you're wearing: the hat stays on, under the hood.
• The build menu keeps one size whichever category you pick; the clock under the minimap lines up properly.
• Walking through long grass has its own sound now: a proper swish of stalks round your legs (louder the taller it is and the harder you push through, a soft hush when you're crouched). The dead pushing through the grass near you make it too. It no longer plays on the road.
• Your own torch isn't blocked by what you're wearing or holding (a poncho, the bat in your other hand): no more shadows swinging through the beam.
• Cloud shadows have soft, rounded, billowing edges and slowly change shape as they drift.
• Pick up things lying in water: the "collect water" prompt no longer gets in the way of loot in the shallows.
• A new sound when you make a sale: bottle caps dropping into the tin, instead of the old till noise.
• Backpacks rebuilt: proper rucksacks that sit snug on your back. A school bag with a zip pocket; a hiking pack with a lid, straps and brass buckles, a bottle pocket and a blanket roll underneath; an army pack with webbing.
• The minimap looks a lot better: twice the detail, smooth roads with pavements, buildings drawn as roofs with shadows, woods, fields of long grass and muddy banks you can pick out, and a soft cone showing which way you're facing.
• Talking at the fire: whoever's talking to you turns to you and gets a gold ? (a question) or ... (something they've told you) over their head, and their words show who said them. You can answer what they tell you: ask for more (sometimes they'll mark a place on your map), thank them, or call it nonsense. And you can ★ Favourite someone: favourites come back by your fire a lot more often, and you hear when they're there.
• Trampled and storm-flattened long grass bends over in an arc and tangles, instead of lying flat in sheets.

The Salvage Hearth

• Sit at the community fire and press E (with nobody to talk to) to build it up: a fire bowl cut from a truck wheel on a ring of stones, a grate on a swing arm with the kettle on, an old couch, tyre stools, a pallet bench, a painted tin windbreak and a string of lights over the lot. 60 caps + stone, scrap, wood and nails.
• More travellers stop at a fire like that, and resting there does you more good.

Hair and the character screen

• Hair with weight: long hair, ponytails and the new bob stream back when you run, fly forward when you stop short, swing out on a turn, bounce with each stride, lift in a gust and hang heavy when they're soaked. It follows how the head really moves, so knockbacks and shoves throw it too.
• The bob is a new hair style in character creation, and some of the folk on the road wear it.
• Turn your survivor round in character creation: drag the preview, or use the Turn buttons under it.

Life at the shop

• The post: a rider brings the post every day or two, and the red flag goes up on the mailbox out by the road. Inside: orders to fill (leave the goods in the box, the caps come the next morning), letters from folk you were good to (a little gift, or a place nobody's picked over marked on your map), the Baron's notes (they get nastier as his grudge grows), Maggie's old post (a new set of pages to collect), and now and then something nasty: a ticking box, a parcel of rotten meat, a dead man's letter that turns into a delivery job.
• Send for things: the trader at Greenwater takes orders by post: leave the caps in the box and the rider brings it in a couple of days.
• A kid at the window, hungry. Feed them and they come back now and then with something they found in the ruins.
• The convoy: once a week trucks pull up out front for the day, selling things you won't find on the road and buying the everyday stuff in bulk.
• Storms get in: one can spring a leak in the roof (the stock under it gets soaked) or tear a sheet of tin off the front (folk passing think you're shut). Patch them up.
• A drifter might be asleep in your back room one morning: throw them out, or let them stay a few days to sweep up and keep watch at night.
• A customer who's been bitten: rarely, someone comes in hiding a bite, and turns in the aisle.
• The radio picks up more: supply drops (marked on your map, a red flare by the crate), far-off towns, the Baron's men talking.

The shop dog

• A scruffy stray takes to sleeping on your step. Feed it three days running and it's yours.
• It's glad to see you: come home after a while away and it comes tearing out to meet you, jumping up, tail going.
• It barks when the dead or the Baron's men come close.
• Pet it, throw a stick for it, teach it tricks (a lesson a day, for a treat): Beg, Spin and Play dead to show off, then Fetch (it brings you what it turns up in the night), Guard (it runs down shoplifters) and Find it (out with you, it sniffs out what's worth searching).
• Come along or stay: it follows you anywhere, rides in the car, and once it's devoted it sleeps by your bed. Keep meat, jerky or cans in storage: it has breakfast from there.

Fighting, rebuilt

• Swings you can see land: the old sword animation snapped from over your head to the ground in about two frames, off to one side, and the hit landed after the weapon had already gone past. Every armed swing is now drawn from the weapon's path: a wind-up over the shoulder, a strike you can actually see, the body turning into it, and the blow lands the frame the weapon reaches them.
• It hits where it lands: a swing goes at the head or the body of whoever's in front of you, and that's where it connects, where the blood comes from, and what it does (a head blow is the one that kills).
• The weapon stops in them: a hit thuds to a stop with a little rebound instead of sailing on through; a miss swings on past. Big two-handed weapons (bats, axes, the sledgehammer) are held in both hands; the heavy ones come down overhead; light swings alternate forehand and backhand.
• They feel it: struck, the dead are knocked the way the blow was going: the chest gives, and a blow to the head snaps it back.
• A heavier jolt when a blow lands (a beat of hit-stop and the camera knocked the way the swing went), the whoosh with the strike itself, and punches and knife thrusts land on the frame the fist or blade is out (they were off by up to a tenth of a second).
• Bites: one of the dead that gets hold of you and isn't shoved off in time now bites, and a bite can infect you. (Infection had become almost impossible to catch in decent clothes with your guard up.)

v0.8.28: folk who talk and remember, real doors, crumbling houses and drive-through burgers

Folk with a lot more to say

• Everyone talks about what's going on: customers, travellers at the fire, wanderers on the road, your guards, camp folk and your companion now pick what they say from what's happening right then: the time of day (dawn, noon, dusk, the dead of night), the weather (rain, storms, fog, dust, snow, blizzards, the northern lights), the land you're in (the Cold North, the swamp, the Burn, the Greenwater...), a horde due tonight or just beaten off, the Baron's collectors due or the Baron out for you, how big your shop's grown and how the Road talks about it, how many days you've lasted, and Maggie, early on.
• They notice the state you're in when you're close: hurt, bleeding, bitten, soaked, starving, dead on your feet, loaded down, the gun in your hands (or no weapon at all), flush with caps or broke.
• Your companion talks now and then while you're out together, about all of the above (it goes in your log).
• Talk at the fire picks up the moment too: the fog, the snow, the northern lights, a horde tonight, toll day, Maggie, how long the shop's been going.
• Folk remember you. Customers come back, the same face and the same name, and bring up what they bought off you last time: the gun that saved their neck, the food that got them through a bad week, or the price you stung them for ("Still sore about the rifle. 120 caps!"). Everyone who was at the shop when you broke a horde remembers the night ("Day 12. We held them off together."), and likes you better for it. Travellers at the fire bring up what you told them, what they sold you, and how long it's been since they last saw you.

Doors

• A shut door is solid for everyone, not just you. Customers, travellers and your companion open it on their way through; the dead don't do handles: they bang on it till it gives (a brute has it down in a couple of blows), and a broken door hangs off its hinges for good.
• Locked doors: some front doors are locked. Pry the lock with a crowbar, or kick the door in (loud, and it's broken after).
• Doors where doors go: bedrooms, bathrooms, studies, offices, back rooms and the like have doors; the openings between a kitchen and a living room don't. Stores, gas stations and public buildings have front doors now (glass ones on the shops), and the rooms upstairs over city stores have theirs.
• Doors are shared in co-op: open, shut, broken or unlocked, it's the same door for everyone. Broken and unlocked doors are remembered in your save.

Buildings falling apart

• Fallen-in corners: now and then an empty old house has a back corner come down, both walls and the roof over it, the rubble in a heap with a couple of joists sticking out.
• Sagging porches: a rotten post snapped, that end of the porch roof dropped, boards stove in.
• Light through holes in the roof: shafts of daylight (dust turning in them) fall in wherever a roof has fallen in, and fade with the day.

Drive-through burger joints (new worlds)

• Half the diners on the strip are burger joints: red vinyl booths along the windows, a drive-through window down the side with arrows down the lane, the menu board and speaker out by the lot, and an old neon BURGERS / OPEN sign that stutters on after dark (when it works at all). Names like Skip's Drive-In, the Midnight Bun, Burger Barn.
• Walk-in coolers: burger joints, steakhouses, fish houses and family restaurants have a steel walk-in in the back corner, with a heavy door you can pull shut behind you, and shelves of what was left.

Fixes

• No more big square in the snow round you. The deep snow you sink into (a patch that follows you) looked brighter than the snow beyond it, most of all at night and while it was snowing: the snow on the ground was being darkened as if wet by rain, and missed the cloud shadows and northern lights. They now match, so the patch blends in.
• A softer vision cone outdoors. What's out of your sight outside is dimmed less, and the edge of what you can see fades off over a couple of metres instead of a hard line. On bright snow at night the old one drew a big hard shape round you. (Indoors it's as crisp as before; Options > Vision cone still turns it off.)
• Folk who run from the dead don't walk back into them. Customers, travellers and others who flee keep running till it's well behind them, then hang back (edging off if it comes closer) instead of heading straight back the way they came, and carry on once it's gone or wandered off. Wanderers on the road turn round and go back the other way.

v0.8.27: doors you open yourself, and a calmer start

Doors

• You open doors yourself now: walk up and press E to open a door, E again to shut it. A shut door stops you; an open one stays open till you close it. Double front doors open together. Old doors left hanging open still go through as they are (push one shut with E and it stays shut).
• Everyone else (customers, travellers, your companion, the dead) still lets themselves through a shut door and it swings shut behind them. One you left open, they leave open.
• A door won't shut on you while you're standing in the doorway.

A smoother, calmer start

• The intro text no longer stutters while the world loads behind it: the loading goes in small, steady bites while Maggie's talking, and the heavy steps wait for the gaps between her lines.
• The game waits for you while you read. Once the world's ready, everything holds still behind the intro until you close it, and the clock doesn't start until you're in. Maggie's note pauses the game too, so nothing walks up on you while you read it (single player).

Fixes

• Fixed a crash in dust storms: the dust tinting itself to the daylight hit an error every frame once a storm blew in.

Discord

• The #roadmap channel on the Discord now updates itself with every build: what's coming up next, and the longer-term plan.

v0.8.26: doors, thunder, jump scares, a tidier shop, and Maggie tells the story

The story at the start

• Maggie tells it now: the opening cards are her talking to you the night before she left, typed out line by line with the fire crackling, over the title art. Click or Space shows the rest of a line, then moves on; Esc or Skip jumps straight in.
• The world loads while you read: the game starts building the Road behind the story, so by the last card you're usually straight in. "Loading the world..." in the corner turns to "The Road is ready." when it's done.

Doors

• Doors that swing: houses have real doors now: a pair at the front, and one in most doorways inside (a few taken off their hinges, a few left hanging open). They swing open away from whoever walks up to them (you, the dead, travellers), creaking, and drift shut behind you a few seconds later with a knock and a click of the latch. Nobody gets stuck on them.

The shop

• The build menu is tidied up: tabs (Selling, Work & Garden, Defence, Lights, Home, Rec Room, Beds; [ and ] to flip through them), each thing a tile with its cost, a short note on what it does, and locked ones greyed at the end with what unlocks them. Number keys pick on the open tab.
• It tells you what you're missing: try to build something you can't afford and it says exactly what you're short of ("15 more caps, 2 more Nails (have 0 of 2)").
• Keep N in pack, in the storage window too: each thing in your backpack column has its keep - / + (the same setting as in the backpack), and things you keep some of but have none on you right now are listed there too, so you can see and change them.
• Clothes rails hold clothes only: restocking, Put out and stocking a rail with E only hang clothes (and bags) on it; everything else goes on the tables and shelves.
• On the air: flip the sign and your radio puts it out over the Road that you're OPEN, or that you're closing up. That's how folk know to come: the first customers turn up a little after you go on the air, and now and then the radio reminds everyone you're still open.
• Cha-ching! Every sale rings up on the till now: the lever, the drawer flying out, the bell and the coins.
• Your worker goes round the counter to restock instead of out of the side door and round the outside (the shop's walkways were too narrow for the pathfinding).
• Walk round both ends of the counter: it's a little shorter and set back from the front wall.
• Customers walk right up to the shelf they're buying from (they used to stop a metre or two short), standing at the front of it, or at a side if the front's blocked.

Storms and scares

• Dust storms and thunderstorms howl: a gale roaring and moaning round you, rising and falling with the gusts, the sand hissing against everything (muffled indoors). The flying sand is soft streaks now, not hard little squares.
• Thunder, at last: every bolt has its thunder now (it was silent before). A close strike blinds you with a double or triple flash, then an ear-splitting crack slams straight into a long roll, and the screen jolts. Further off, the flash comes and the roll follows a second or two later. Far away there's just a dim flicker and a low grumble that arrives seconds after. It's muffled a little indoors.
• Jump scares: about half the dead waiting in houses now stand tucked in a corner, face to the wall, dead still and silent. They don't turn until you're almost on top of them, then shriek and lunge.

Fixes

• Out of ammo: an empty gun just clicks now. It used to throw out spent brass (and its tinkle) and wear the gun as if it had fired.
• Long guns carry their flashlight taped under the barrel (both hands are on the gun), lit when your light's on.
• The satchel's strap now runs properly across the body: from the bag at the hip, across the chest, over the shoulder and down the back, lying on you instead of floating as a flat bar.
• There's a SalvageBound Discord now: https://discord.gg/NnqYMBZ8TW. The crash and bug report windows have an Open the Discord button, and say where to paste the report (crash-reports or bug-reports).
• Long messages in the corner wrap onto a second line instead of running off the screen.
• Grass: no more white specks all over it in the morning (the dew was glowing; now it's just wet and glossy). Where grass meets bare dirt or ash it ends in a ragged, natural edge instead of square blocks.
• Cloud shadows are deeper and properly cloud-shaped: soft, rounded, billowing patches drifting over the land, instead of faint square blotches.
• Storage window stays scrolled where you were when you click KEEP/SELL, hold -/+, Store or Take (it used to jump back to the top).
• Stepping into a building goes straight to the cut-away view of the rooms: no more big dark slabs and triangles of half-faded roof and wall over everything for a moment.
• A few more of the dead round the home town and on the walk in from where you wake up (the shop's doorstep is still kept clear, and on the first morning nothing comes within 85 m of it).
• Restocking only takes from storage: Restock displays (and stocking a shelf with E) put out what's in your storage chest marked SELL, never what's in your backpack.
• The floating "v DOOR v" tag over houses is gone.
• Customers no longer snag on the end of a wall (by the shop door) on their way out: they step along it and round.
• Fixed a crash where something in a fight went haywire (a bad number in a movement sum), sent you and the dead round you flying off to nowhere, and took the game down a few seconds later. If it happens now you're put back where you stood, and the crash report notes what went wrong so it can be tracked down for good.

v0.8.25: co-op sleeping, crash reports, pockets, threats and a better dust storm

Easier to read

• UI size option (Options > Video). Auto sizes the menus and HUD for your screen, so they're bigger at 1440p and 4K. You can also pick 75% to 200%.
• Speech bubbles from folk round the fire, and the radio's song caption, are bigger with a dark outline, so they read over any background.
• Crafting: the Craft and Craft 5 buttons now sit right under the recipe's name. Before, they could end up below a long recipe list, out of sight, unless you ticked "Can make now".

The shop and your gear

• The shop has a side door out to the yard, just behind the counter.
• Ponchos and cloaks now drape over your backpack instead of clipping through it. A cloak hides the pack underneath.
• Pointing the flashlight (hold right-click) now also tilts the beam up as you move the cursor further out, so it throws its light down the road and the far end is brighter. Let go and it drops back to lighting the ground at your feet.

Co-op and sleeping

• Sleep through the night in co-op: turn in at night and you lie down and wait. When everyone's in bed, the night passes and you all wake up rested at 7:00. Press E to get up again.
• Sleeping in co-op now refills your Rest bar too. Before, only sitting by the fire did.
• More beds: anyone can sleep in a cot, bunk or guest bed you've built ("[E] Sleep here" when there's a free one). A second bedroll appears in the bedroom when a partner joins.

Shop storage

• The storage window shows your backpack and the chest side by side, each scrolling on its own: Store from the left, Take from the right, with far less scrolling.
• Rugs show up now (they were being laid under the floorboards).
• Electronics need a generator first: the Display Fridge, Lamp, Hanging Lamp, Bulb String, Jar Chandelier, Neon Sign, Jukebox and Arcade Cabinet show "(needs generator)" in the build menu until you've built one in the yard.
• The lights outside (the kitchen's signs and bulbs, the searchlight, the mast beacon) and the OPEN/CLOSED sign run off a battery: they stay lit with or without the generator.
• Restock puts out a good variety: it deals out one of each kind before doubling up, starting with the most valuable, instead of filling a shelf with one thing (stocking a single shelf with E does the same).

Time and controls

• A whole day now lasts one real hour (it was 24 minutes). It's fixed: there's no setting for it.
• Scrolling the mouse wheel over a menu or panel no longer zooms the camera.
• Drag your equipped weapon (or anything you're wearing) from its slot onto the hotbar.
• Keep N in pack: on any item in your backpack, set how many to keep on you. "Store whole backpack" leaves that many with you and tops you back up to it from storage.
• Sew pockets onto backpacks: select a bag and press "Sew pocket" (3 Cloth Rags and a Spool of Thread). Each pocket adds +3 kg, up to 3 per bag, and they show on the bag.
• Heavy melee weapons swing slower: a sledgehammer is a long, slow heave, and a fire axe is noticeably slower than a knife. The blow lands later to match.
• Climb tall board fences: Space at a thin fence up to about head height hauls you up and over (slower than a low wall, and it costs more stamina).
• You no longer get stuck on kitchen chairs: push into a light chair or box that won't budge and after a moment you squeeze past it.

Towns: more kinds of building, more shapes

• Public buildings in every town of any size: police stations (holding cells, an armoury), fire stations (engine bays with the engines still in them, crew bunks), schools (a corridor of lockers, classrooms), hospitals (wards, a dispensary), libraries (rows of stacks, reading tables), and new:
  • Churches: a steep roof and a bell tower with a spire, pews either side of the aisle, the altar and cross, a vestry behind, and a churchyard of leaning headstones out front. Now and then the candles are still lit...
  • Banks: stone columns and a pediment out front, the banking hall and tellers' counter, a vault behind with its great round door hanging open.
  • Bars: a plank boardwalk under a tin awning, barrels by the door, a beer sign in the window, the long bar with its bottles, tables, a back room.
  • Post offices: a flag and a blue mailbox out front, the counter and a wall of brass mailboxes, the sorting room full of sacks and parcels nobody will deliver.
• Strip malls: long single-storey stores become a row of little shops under one canopy (liquor, pawn, dollar store, auto parts, thrift, video rental, diner, barber, laundromat and more).
• Downtown is a row of narrow buildings now: every big block is split into 6 to 8 m shopfronts sharing walls, each with its own height and trade, instead of one huge store.
• Trailer parks on the edge of bigger towns: runs of rundown single-wides.
• Wings: houses and shops get L, T and U shapes, bump-outs and side wings, with doorways through.
• Less loot in big stores: the town got there first. A big store has a handful of shelves with something left on them; the rest were picked clean long ago (pharmacies most of all).
• No more sealed buildings: the last tall downtown towers you couldn't get into are now real buildings you can go in, on the same spot. The freight depots' warehouse shell, with its welded doors, is now an open loading shed with a loading dock, pallet racking, a forklift and loot inside, and half its roof sheets blown off.
• Overgrown suburbs: about one small town in five has been left to nature longer than the rest. Every lot is thick with weeds and ivy, the yards are waist-deep in grass, young trees and scrub push up through the drives, and weeds grow in every crack along the kerbs. Every town down in the flooded lowlands is like this too.

New lands (new worlds)

Head far enough out along the roads from home and the country changes. Each region has its own look, sounds, colour, dead and places. A banner names it as you cross in, and signs warn you on the roads in. Start a new world to get them. Existing saves keep their map as it was, though the overgrown towns and the new look of the burned forest turn up in existing saves too.

• The Flooded Lowlands (south): the river came up and never went down. Real standing water lies over the land, knee-deep, with islands and banks between. You wade through it: it slows you (the dead too), soaks you through, sloshes with every step, and ripples round your legs. Roads run on raised banks above the flood. Dead trees stand drowned in it, reeds and cattails crowd every shore, and there are lily pads, rafts of green scum, drifting rafts, drums, tyres and planks, rowboats that didn't make it and the odd car sunk to its doors (searchable). Mist lies on the water, fireflies drift over it at night, and the frogs never stop. The dead here are drowned: bloated, blue-grey and soaked. New place: the Docks, a boardwalk and three piers out over the water with boats tied up (one sunk at its rope), a bait shop with its sign hanging off one hook, a fuel pump and nets.
• The Greenwater (deep south): past the flood, the water turns to the glowing green slick of the Greenwater. It burns you if you wade in it, and it can make you sick. The ground is stained black-green with veins that glow at night. Swollen, pulsing growths sprout from it, the old Hub pipeline runs north on its trestles (leaking where it's broken), Hubfuel drums are everywhere, and a sick green mist hangs over it all to the sound of bubbling and a low hum. The dead are thicker here, with more brutes, their skin gone green-black. New place: Depot 9 (Hub Fuel Depot), where the Hub brewed its fuel: four great vats, one burst open across the yard in a glowing lake, the catwalk, the control shack and rows of drums. The dead crowd it.
• The Salt Flats (east): a dried-out lakebed, white crust broken into plates with raised ridges along every crack, glinting in the sun, and salt crunching underfoot. Boats sit stranded where the lake left them (with a footlocker or crate aboard), bleached cattle bones lie out in the open, and there are raked heaps from the old salt works, survey stakes, pink brine pools crusted white at the rim, and dust devils wandering across. It's dead quiet out there, with no crickets. Dog packs run the open flats. New place: the Quarry, also found in the waste and badlands. Terraced rock benches surround a floor with the crusher and conveyor, gravel heaps, a rusted excavator, a dump truck, the site hut and a blasting shed.
• The Exclusion Zone (west): the military drew a line here and it didn't hold. Coils of razor wire run across the country on posts (find the gaps), along with sandbagged gun pits, burnt-out tanks, APCs and army trucks, watchtowers, shell craters, field tents, barriers, ammo crates, footlockers and gun lockers. There are fenced minefields behind DANGER MINES signs, and the mines are real: step on one and it clicks... Far-off gunfire and explosions roll across it, and most of the dead here wore uniforms. Checkpoints are much more common.
• The Burn (every world): the burned forest now has standing charred snags and fallen black logs, stumps still glowing and smoking inside, and bright new ferns and shoots pushing up through the ash.
• God mode (F1) has teleports to each region, and "Nearest" covers every kind of place.

Trees, woods and ivy

• New broadleaf trees everywhere: real branching frames (trunk, limbs, boughs, twigs) with sprigs of leaves bunched at every twig end, so crowns are full and lumpy with gaps, branches show at the edges, the inside is in shade and the top is sunlit. There are three kinds: wide spreading oaks, vase-shaped elms and tall pale birches. They're about twice as tall as before, sway in the wind, and glow through when the sun's behind them. Your woods keep their trees in the same places; they just look like trees now.
• Bushes are made from the same leaves, with more shapes and some bigger shrubs.
• The forest floor: drifts of ferns under the trees, saplings in the gaps, fallen mossy logs and old stumps, and darker leafy ground.
• Ivy has real ivy leaves (pointed lobes, cupped, glossy), darker deep in the mat against the wall, flutters in the wind, casts its own shade on the wall, and is a richer green.

Softer cutaways

• When things get in the way of your view (trees, roofs, walls, upper floors), they now dissolve away with a fine, soft grain instead of a coarse checker pattern, over a wider, gentler circle, and fade in and out more slowly. Roofs and the tops of walls dissolve from the top down as you step inside, and inside walls ease down and back up.

Flashlight

• The visible beam in rain, fog and dust now widens and narrows with the light: a wide, soft cone close to you, or a long, thin, brighter shaft when you focus it out. A co-op partner's torch now focuses and points the same way on your screen.

Dogs

• Infected dogs are real dogs now: huskies, wolves and shibas, each animated (walking, galloping, the lunge and bite, flinching when hit, falling when they die), and every one gone sick: mangy bald patches and open sores, blood round the mouth and down the chest, wounds on their flanks, eyes glowing a sick yellow in the dark. No two look quite alike.
• They feed on the dead: a dog with nothing to chase finds a body and tears at it. Head down in a carcass it's slow to notice you, so you can slip past or get the first blow in.
• Packs: when one dog sees you it barks and the rest of the pack nearby comes running.
• Hit and run: after a bite a dog backs off and circles you, then darts back in. Watch for the spring.
• (Dog models: Quaternius, Ultimate Animated Animals, CC0.)

Old, crumbling buildings

• Every building has its own age. The worn ones have paint and render falling away in patches (the brick underneath shows through, bare grey boards on wooden walls, rust on metal ones), cracks running across the walls, colours faded chalky by the sun, and grime run down from the gutters.
• Roofs: shingles slipped and missing (the dark felt shows), metal roofs rusting through.
• The worst-kept places have broken brick and chunks of render heaped at the foot of the walls, and paint flakes and fallen shingles in the grass round them. Your own shop's kept up.

Restaurants

• Some of the town's stores were restaurants, each with its own name on the sign (Sal's Pizza Parlor, The Rusty Lantern, Golden Dragon Buffet, El Toro Cantina, Rosa & Earl's...): a kitchen line along the back, the pass, a host stand, tables and chairs, and today's specials still on the menu board. Search the fridges, cupboards and the till.

Grass and snow

• Meadows are less repetitive: more kinds of turf (fine short grass, bushy clumps, wisps all combed one way, dry tussocks), low broad-leaved weeds in patches (plantain, dock, dandelion), a different mix every few metres, and the colour drifting bluer, yellower or olive across a field.
• Blood soaks into snow: bright red where it's thick, pink at the edges, a trail of drops behind anything wounded.

Things you can knock about

• Loose things are solid and move now: boxes, crates, chairs, stools, bins, barrels, buckets, cans, tyres and the like stand in your way, and you can push or shove them across the floor. How far they go depends on how heavy they are: a box skids away, a fridge barely budges. Cars and anything really heavy don't move when you walk into them.
• Shove two at once: the shove now knocks back up to two of the dead in front of you (the second a little less).

Loot

• Searched things stay searched. Containers don't fill up again, so what you find is all there is. Head further out for more.

Buildings

• Fixed rooms you couldn't get into: a bank counter that blocked the hall, furniture in front of an inside door, hospital beds blocking the ward, and houses where a town ran into a city.

Something in the grass

• Fields of tall grass out in the open country (never in town): waist to chest high at first, growing to shoulder height and going to straw over the first few weeks with nobody to cut it.
• Anything pushing through the grass parts it and rustles, so you hear where something is before you see it. A dog in it is all but invisible.
• Hide in it: deep in tall grass the dead have a harder time making you out, and crouched in it you're nearly invisible.
• The grass itself got a big pass (meadows and fields both):
  • Dark down among the stems, sun-bleached tips, light glowing through the blades when the sun's low, a soft sheen as the wind turns them.
  • No more bare dirt between clumps: the ground under a field is a dark mat of thatch and old stems.
  • Fields aren't one colour: broad drifts of greener and strawier grass, rust-red seed tops in places.
  • Wildflowers and seed heads growing in drifts: foxtails, purple thistles, Queen Anne's lace, goldenrod (late in the year) and clover (a little in the ordinary meadows too).
  • Fields thin out softly at their edges; patches laid flat by storms all lying the same way; narrow animal trails winding through.
  • Long grass sways from lower down and further than short grass; soaked through, it hangs heavier.
  • Soft swells roll across the fields even on a calm day, the blades lifting pale as each one passes (bigger in a wind).
  • Morning dew glints on the blades until it burns off mid-morning.
  • Grasshoppers spring up ahead of you as you wade through by day; seed fluff drifts over the fields in the sun; fireflies over them at night.
• Wading through it: long grass drags at your legs a little and swishes round them; crouched deep in it the HUD tells you you're hidden in the grass.
• A body that drops in long grass flattens a patch of it, and it stays flat while the body's there.
• Out in a field you hear the wind hissing through the long grass all round you.
• Grass fires: a molotov in a dry field (later in the year, not in the wet) runs on through the grass with the wind, leaving black, flattened ground behind. Keep clear of it yourself.
• At dusk and after dark, something you can't see sometimes comes through the field toward you: the grass parting, the rustling coming closer, stopping, coming on. Usually it's nothing.

Sound: creepier and more alive

• A horror score that follows the danger: low drones creep in and swell as the dead close in, a riser when it suddenly turns bad, and a dread bed under everything at night (new recorded drones).
• The quiet before: when a horde is coming or the Baron's men are due, the crickets stop and the score creeps in. The crickets also fall silent whenever the dead are close.
• New ambience: real night recordings with crickets, a soft breeze in the leaves by day and a low moaning wind after dark.
• Dragging feet: you hear the nearest dead shuffling toward you, round the corner before you see them.
• Flies buzz round corpses a little while after they drop.
• Crows caw and burst up when you get near, and the dead hear them.
• Car alarms: rummaging a wrecked car sometimes sets its alarm off, and everything for a block hears it.
• Indoors at night, doors creak in other rooms; far-off screams and metal groaning carry across the wilds.
• New recorded sounds for weapon swings, breaking glass, the heartbeat, and searching fridges, drawers, books, cars, cupboards and wardrobes.
• Searching sounds real: every kind of container has new recorded rummaging (desk and dresser drawers, wooden crates, clothes and straps in wardrobes, tools, a metal locker's clunk and rattle, bottles and cans on shelves, pill bottles, papers on bookshelves, a car's glove box, fridge shelves, kitchen cupboards, the till drawer and coins, unzipping luggage). It now lasts the whole search and fades out when you finish or stop, instead of one short burst at the start.
• Most other effects are now real recordings too: every gun, reloading, the bow, empty clicks, body hits (flesh, blunt, blades, bone), heads bursting, hurt grunts, footsteps on dirt, pavement, grass, snow, water and salt, rain, fire, thunder, explosions, walls crumbling, wood breaking, the engine, the fountain, eating and drinking, menu clicks, and the floodwater and Greenwater ambience.
• Far-off war: in the Exclusion Zone you hear real distant gunfire and shelling; elsewhere, once in a while, somebody else out there shooting at something.
• (Sounds from Pixabay, under the Pixabay licence: free for games, no credit needed.)

Threats

• The Baron's men and horde nights now announce themselves: a big warning across the middle of the screen, a red flash, the ground shaking and a war horn. You get it at dusk ("A horde is coming tonight") and again when the horde arrives. Co-op partners see it too.

Looks

• Face wraps look like real cloth now: three turns of cloth wound over the nose and mouth, knotted at the back with the ends hanging, and a loose fold round the neck.
• Blood splats run across kerbs, steps and between different ground surfaces instead of stopping at the edge.

Crash reports

• If the game closes unexpectedly, the next time it starts it shows a crash report. It covers what you were doing just before, your PC, graphics card and settings, plus the end of the log. Copy report puts it on the clipboard to paste into the Discord. Open folder shows the file.
• Report a Bug (title screen and pause menu) makes the same kind of report any time, for bugs that don't crash.
• Fixed the crash when picking things up (raw meat off a dog was the sure way to hit it). Right after you picked something up, the game could still reach for the item that was gone, which killed the exported game outright.
• Fixed a possible crash with hired guards when what they were fighting got cleared away.
• Fixed an error that filled the log hundreds of times a session (inside walls fading).

Dust storms

• No more big boxy patches. The billowing dust is now ragged wisps that fade softly where they meet the ground and walls.
• At night the dust on the screen dims with the dark instead of glowing tan. The haze is a little lighter overall.

Grabbed!

• The dead get hold of you now: some bites, a zombie hangs on (brutes most of all). Held, you can't walk away: shove (Space) to break free, a few hard shoves to tear loose (a brute takes more), and the last one throws it back. Knocking it down or staggering it with a hit frees you too.
• No more bites through walls: a zombie (or dog) has to have a clear reach to you. With a wall, a shut door or a window between you, it has to find a way round.

Fixes

• Bodies don't sink into the ground: the knocked-down and the dead lie on top of kerbs, steps and slabs, and in snow they press a hollow into it (kept there while they lie, so fresh snow never buries them).
• Corners of a house no longer vanish while you're inside: the see-through circle round you was dissolving the far walls' corners nearest the camera. Inside a building its own walls stay put (the near ones still drop to knee height so you can see in).
• Northern lights come in waves: they swell and fade over a minute or so, their light sweeping across the ground in slow green and violet sheets, instead of the whole screen lighting up at once.
• Rocket launcher rests on your shoulder (tipped up when carried, level when you aim down it) instead of being held out in front. Shotguns and rifles sit lower in the shoulder with the elbows bent, and are carried across the body, muzzle down.

v0.8.24: horde nights, guards, a rec room, beds for the night and a big graphics pass

Your shop, your guests and your fights

• A rec room (build mode; these don't use up the shop's build slots): a card table with chairs, a dartboard, a chess table, a couch, a pool table, a foosball table, an old piano, a jukebox and an arcade cabinet (those two light up with the generator running). The more there is to do, the more customers will pay (up to +12%).
• Horde nights: every four to seven nights (from day 6), the crows leave the city at dusk and a horde of the dead comes for the shop near midnight: more of them as the days go on and the shop grows, runners and screechers among them, brutes later. Hold out till they're all down (or dawn) for XP and reputation.
• Guards: build a Guard Post in the yard (sandbags, a crate, a lantern) and hire a guard there (E: 60 caps, then 20 a day and a meal from storage each morning). By day they watch from the post; after dark they walk a beat to the shop door. They go after anything that comes near the post or the door, and if they're knocked down they're back up a minute later. Unpaid, they leave.
• Worn guns jam: below half condition a gun jams now and then (more the worse it is): press R to clear it. A Gun Cleaning Kit keeps it running.
• Spent brass: pistols, rifles and shotguns drop their casings beside you as you fire, in a pile you can pick up for reloading.
• Guests with stories: some who stay the night are traders, who lay out what they're carrying (often something good) before they leave in the morning (E to look); some are hurt and short of caps, and pay in scrap; and now and then one gets up in the small hours and goes through your storage chest. A Padlock (hardware stores; use it from your backpack) stops them. Catch a thief (a hit, or your guard gets them) and it all comes back. Your guards chase thieves too.
• Your name matters: a good reputation brings travellers by more often and more traders among your guests; a bad one, more thieves (at the counter and in the beds).
• Hurt and cold: badly hurt, the world drains of colour toward the edges as your heart pounds; out in the cold, frost creeps in from the corners of the screen, faster soaked through (a fire clears it).
• Beds for the night: guest cots, bunk beds (two to a frame) and proper guest beds. Of an evening, travellers at your fire (and some passing by) pay for the best free bed, play a game in the rec room first if there's one free, sleep, and leave at dawn: some leave a tip after a good night, some a rumour. Better beds and a livelier rec room pay more.
• Wrecked cars show whole again (0.8.22 left only their wheels, glass and bumpers).
• Upstairs the inside walls between you and the camera drop too, so you can see yourself and into the next room.
• The grey baroque town house is gone from the cities: its lots get a plainer block of flats.

Graphics: settings, light and weather

(The settings are all in Options > Video / World.)

• Upscaling: FSR 1 or FSR 2.2 with a render-scale slider and a sharpness slider. Anti-aliasing now offers Off, 2x/4x MSAA, FXAA, SMAA or TAA. (FSR 2.2 does its own anti-aliasing. DLSS isn't something Godot can ship.)
• Wet reflections: in the rain, roads and puddles mirror the lamps, fires and buildings (screen-space reflections, Forward+ only; Wet reflections switches them off).
• Water: rain rings across ponds and puddles, and a wake spreading out round you as you wade.
• Fire: flames flicker and gutter, and the air shimmers above bigger fires (Heat haze).
• Rim light: people get a faint cool edge light, stronger after dark, so you can pick them out at night.
• Ink outlines (optional, off by default): a hand-inked line round everything. With it on, MSAA switches to SMAA.
• Dust storms blow grit and sheets of sand across the screen (less of it indoors).
• Cloud shadows drift over the land on fair and cloudy days (Cloud shadows).
• Lighting: tighter ambient occlusion where things meet the ground, softer bounce light, softer sun shadows on High (sharp at the base, blurred at the tip), bloom that halos lamps and fires after dark but stays quiet by day, a thicker night haze that catches the lamplight in pools, and lamps that hum while the odd failing neon or bulb stutters.
• Sunbeams: on a clear day, soft shafts of sunlight slant in through the windows of wherever you are, with dust drifting in them.
• Bullet holes stay in walls, cars and doors for a few minutes after a fight, so you can see where one happened.
• Grime and blood: out on the road your clothes and face get dirtier, faster in a dust storm, and fights leave blood on you. Rain rinses some of it off. Build a Wash Basin in the shop to clean up properly (E: wash up).
• Gusts you can see: waves of wind roll across the grass and crops, stronger in a blow.
• Torch beam: your flashlight throws a visible cone in rain, fog and dust, with the rain and dust glinting in it.
• Lightning lights everything from the bolt's side of the sky for an instant, and every post, wreck and person throws a sharp shadow.
• Gun smoke hangs indoors after you fire, spreading under the ceiling and drifting out the door over half a minute.
• Puddles grow out from the low spots as the rain keeps up and shrink back as they dry, leaving a damp rim.
• (Soaked clothes were already in: they go dark and glossy in the rain and dry by the fire.)
• No more glowing outline through walls: anything in the way of you (including a building you're walking behind, whose insides hide while you look past it) opens the see-through circle instead, and the circle fades in and out rather than popping. Inside walls that drop so you can see over them fade down too.

Graphics: the little things

• Fire shadows: the nearest few fires and lanterns cast real shadows that sway with the flames.
• Rain on walls and glass: in a downpour dark streaks run down the walls and drops trickle down them; afterwards they dry from the top. Windows catch soft glints of light, and in the rain get beaded drops and the odd one running down.
• Footprints: come in out of the rain or the mud and you track wet or muddy boot prints across the floor (they fade as they dry); after a fight, bloody ones.
• Blood trails: anything badly hurt leaves drops behind it as it moves (follow one that ran), and so do you while you're bleeding.
• Dust: your feet kick up little puffs on dry dirt, and a car throws a dust cloud behind it off the road.
• Cars: smoke from the tailpipe while the engine's running, and headlight beams you can see in rain, fog and dust.
• Water: light ripples across the bottom of the shallows, and a second line of foam washes in and out along the shore.
• Heat shimmer over the roads on hot, clear afternoons (with the Heat haze setting).
• Badly hurt, the edges of the screen blur and the colours split as your heart pounds (Hurt blur setting).
• Scorch marks smoulder for a couple of minutes after a blast, glowing specks and embers in the char, then fade to grey ash over about ten minutes.
• Moon phases: an eight-day cycle, from bright blue-silver full-moon nights you can see by to near-black new moons (the clock shows tonight's moon).
• Northern lights: up in the frozen north on a clear night, the light ripples green and violet over the snow.
• Stars in the water: ponds and big puddles glint with twinkling stars on clear nights.
• Tyre marks: black skids on the road when you brake hard or slew round a corner, ruts in the dirt behind you off-road.
• Puddle splashes: run through standing water and it splashes up, rings spreading out.
• Steaming manholes in the city streets on cold mornings and wet nights.
• Bird shadows: now and then a flock goes over on a fair day, their shadows sliding across the ground.
• Blood dries: pools and spatters stay longer, drying from wet red to a dark brown stain.
• Lit windows: the glass of a lived-in house no longer glows by itself at night; the light you see is the lantern inside, shining out through the windows.
• Loot glint: things on the ground catch the light now and then so you spot them (Loot glint setting).
• Golden hour: warmer, lower light at sunrise and sunset, the shade going violet.
• Litter on the wind: scraps of paper and leaves skitter along the streets on a breezy day, not just in dust storms.

v0.8.22: the cold north, wet weather, mutant brutes and a shop with rooms

Home comforts, wet weather and a shop with rooms

• Ponchos instead of cloaks: every cloak is now a poncho (Road, Hooded, Tarp, Camo, plain): one piece of cloth over the head and arms, down to the thighs, that swings front and back as you move. All of them have a hood you pull up and down (H), and they keep the rain off best.
• A new world starts in a house: you wake up in a house on the edge of town with Maggie's note in your hand (it opens as the game starts); her shop is a walk away down the road. The house and round it are clear of the dead that first morning, and whatever's in it is your first stock.
• Everything solid is solid: barrels, crates, boxes and other props you could bump into now block you (bedding, plants and a fire ring stay walk-through).
• Every item looks like itself in the world and on shelves: arrows, books, brass, chips, duct tape, fertilizer sacks, gun oil, gunpowder, lead, nails, primers, rope, thread, sewing kits, spare parts, rockets, the reloading press, magazines and more had been plain blocks. (Anything new without a model shows as a tied parcel, never a cube.)
• Map: biome borders on the map blend smoothly instead of in stair-steps.
• Big cities run faster: the desks, shelves, racks and crates in a city were each dozens of little pieces (31,000 in one downtown); each is now baked into one, about a sixth of the draw. Things under a roof no longer cast sun shadows (the roof's shadow covers them), the shader-variable buffer that big cities were overflowing is four times bigger, and the player no longer checks every searchable thing in a city every frame.
• Wet meter: rain and melting snow soak you through (the new drops bar under food, water and rest). Wet, you tire faster, burn more food keeping warm and get your wind back slower; soaked in the cold north you start to freeze. A poncho keeps most of it off (more with the hood up), a hat or a duster helps, and standing by a fire (the fire pit, a fire barrel, a camp fire) dries you out.
• Flashlight: on F (L still works). It starts as a wide flood; hold right-click and move the cursor out to focus it into a long narrow beam.
• Hoods: press H to reach back and pull your poncho's hood up, or push it back down (folk do it themselves when the rain starts).
• Needs: hunger, thirst and tiredness creep up more slowly.
• The shop's layout: storage and the craft bench stand along the left wall just inside the front door, the bedroom is walled off in the back right corner (its door off the shop floor, the hiring board on its wall), and everything else is open shop floor, at every size of shop. Lamps, lights, planters, the repair bench, armchairs and rugs can go in the bedroom too. Anything you'd built where the storage and bench now stand is moved to the back.
• New to build: wall lanterns (oil: lit after dark, no power), hanging factory lamps, bulb strings, a jar chandelier made from a cart wheel, a neon TRADE sign, plus a tool rack and a clothes rail and crate display to sell from, an armchair and a rug. Wall things snap to the nearest wall; ceiling lights hang over whatever's below.
• Maggie's sign is up on the roof at every size of shop (painted plank, then the big lit board, then neon at the Road Hub), and it hides with the roof when you go in. The Crossroads awning's bulbs hang off its front edge, and its valance is ragged.
• The craft bench does crafting and repairs (its sign says so).
• Talking to a companion sat at the fire works (people come before the furniture they're near, and what you're facing before what's behind you).
• New title screen: night at Maggie's, with the camp fire and the drum fire burning, crackling and throwing sparks and smoke, the firelight on the folk round it, the neon humming (OPEN stutters), lamps flickering and stars twinkling. The menu runs down the left.
• Smoother play: no stall the first few times you stomp a head in (blood pools are made on the loading screen, and a stomp no longer freezes the moment), and new ground loads more smoothly: dressing the dead and the folk out there is up to four times quicker (ponchos and long coats especially), and every outfit's cloth is ready before you set off.
• The shop's bedroom is bigger, with a wider doorway set clear of the beds (your companion can find their bed now), and the Help Wanted board hangs on its wall. Anything you'd built where its walls now stand is moved out onto the floor.
• Move the storage chest and craft bench where you like (build mode, G). They stay put through upgrades.
• When the shop grows, things you'd set against a side or back wall move out with that wall.
• Inside walls stay up when you go into a building, all but the ones between you and the camera: those drop to knee height as you walk round, so you see into the next room and never lose yourself behind one. Things hung on a wall that's dropped (the hiring board, wall lanterns) hide until it's back up.
• Buildings you're behind stay whole: no corner cut out of them (you show through as a silhouette).
• Pick up where you left off: quitting saves where you're standing (by your car if you were driving), in your own world and in each friend's co-op world. Dead, you start at the shop.
• Car doors open: the front doors swing open and shut as you get in and out (by the nearer door). Your companion gets in the passenger's side and out of it again, and in co-op a friend can ride along while you drive (F at the car).
• Curtains move when you brush past them, and flap as you climb through a window.
• Brutes were road crew: a hi-vis vest and hard hat on the swollen body, work trousers and boots, the chain still round the club arm. Screechers are wiry things in what's left of a T-shirt and jeans, the hair stuck up in spikes.
• Talk, haggling and job boards use the same framed windows as the inventory (title bar, key hints along the bottom).
• New worlds keep the shop's own block clear (the yard, the fire, room for a garden): the rooms to stay, the rec room and the like will be built inside the shop. Existing saves keep their layout.
• Cities run faster still: walls are drawn as a few big pieces per building, things inside any building (even one storey) cast no sun shadow, and goods on shelves cast none: about 30% fewer draws downtown.
• Flashlight: your own poncho and arms no longer block the beam. Roof moss grows in patches instead of repeating stripes.
• Garden beds (build mode, out in the yard: 4 wood, 2 nails): plant a Seed Packet (and Fertilizer if you have it, for a bigger crop). Over a day and a bit the rows come up, fill out and fruit, faster in the rain. Harvest 3 Fresh Vegetables (5 fertilized) and usually a packet of seed back. Seed Packets turn up in hardware stores, kitchen cupboards, grocery shelves and crates.
• The van's cab doors open too, and in co-op a friend's door swings on your screen when they get in or out.
• Wrecked cars are one piece (they were about thirty each), downtown and in the pile-ups and scrapyards: about 10% fewer draws again in a city.
• Fixes: no square round you in the snow (the deep snow frays out at its edge and runs smooth along roads); no white silhouette showing through your own poncho.

The cold north, mutant brutes, and a fight that lands

• New inventory screen (Tab): your survivor turning on a little stage with every gear slot round them, your backpack as a grid of item pictures sorted into sections (filter chips and a search box), and the picked item's stats and actions on the right. Right-click or double-click to equip or use; drag onto the hotbar as before. Hand crafting has its own tab.
• Faces: everyone has a nose and a mouth; mouths move when people talk, zombies' jaws hang and work, the dead gape.
• Character creator: height, age (greys the hair), nose, lips, face (scar, freckles, war paint, eye patch), a mohawk, goatee and moustache, and more hair colours (white and dyes).
• Clothes in the weather: rain soaks you (darker, glossy cloth), walking in the wet splashes mud up your boots and trousers, and in the north snow settles on your head and shoulders; it all dries, flakes off or melts indoors. Snow also settles on the tops of crates, cars, walls and loot in the snow (never indoors).
• Coats and cloaks: dusters and trench coats are one piece from collar to a ragged hem; cloaks hang behind your arms and have hoods (yours goes up in rain and snow; some people always wear theirs up); hoodie and cloak hoods lie down as cloth and bounce as you move. Cloaks and coat tails swing on a 3 x 4 cloth grid now: they trail, ripple and flare.
• Fixes: backpack straps sit on the body; a proper fire axe; fog toned back; walking and everyone's speeds slowed about 13%; cloth textures no longer sparkle.
• Snow (new worlds): about half a kilometre north of home the ground goes white. Out there the snow is real and a hand deep: every step leaves a print with a little lip pushed up round it, cars cut ruts, it drags at you where it's fresh and untouched (walking in your own tracks is easier), crunches softly underfoot, and in the north rain comes down as snow (a blizzard in a storm). Everything leaves its mark: the dead fall and leave body-shaped hollows, dogs leave paw tracks, things you kick around plough furrows. The roads and pavements stay clear, and the snow thins out patchily at its edge. Existing saves keep their world as it was.
• Combat: a blow now lands when the swing does (a jab's quick, a crowbar's slower), checked again at that moment. Hits get a beat of hit-stop, a jolt of the camera and a spray of blood that spots the ground; weapons leave a pale arc (or a streak, for a thrust).
• Flashlight in hand: it's clipped to your belt, and you draw it up in your left hand (and put it back) instead of a light floating in front of you. With a rifle up, the light rides on the gun.
• Brutes are a new kind of ugly: swollen and lopsided, one arm grown into a club wrapped in chain, growths and bone spurs, old rebar through the back, a scrap plate strapped on.
• Hair moves: long hair and ponytails swing as you run and turn, bounce with each stride, and stir in the wind.
• 30 new clothes: polo, band tee, work and denim shirts, thermals, rain jacket, bomber, trench coat, hi-vis and scrap plate vests, tarp and camo cloaks, hard hat, army helmet, trucker cap, bucket hat, welding goggles, shemagh, neck gaiter, camo pants, biker leathers, black jeans, hiking, combat and rain boots, leather and tactical gloves, tool belt, shell bandolier.
• A panel van (out on the east highway, past the sedan): carries 160 kg. The pickup's bed now holds 90 kg, the sedan 60. Wrecked vans turn up too.
• Every gun sounds like itself: pistol, revolver, pump shotgun (with the rack), sawed-off, SMG, hunting rifle (with the bolt), assault rifle. Each has its own crack, boom and echo.
• New zombie voices: groans, snarls, death rattles and screecher screams, all remade from real recordings.
• Title screen: it opens with a deep hit and the camera pulling back off the logo. Lightning flickers over the city with thunder rolling after, the dead shamble along the far street, and the warning sign and OPEN sign glow.
• Tutorial: it now walks a new player through the backpack, heading out, scavenging, fighting, climbing and the map, not just the shop. Switch it off in Options ("New-player tutorial hints").
• Houses: an attached garage now has a door through into the house. Some old roofs sag, and a few have fallen in (rafters hanging, the mess on the floor below).
• World: country roads crumble at the edges into a gravel shoulder and the dirt. Parking bays are a real car's width and length, with capped lines, and the wrecks in them are parked along the bays. Half the crates are now olive-drab military crates. The storage chest is an ammo-crate-style footlocker. Burn barrels burn inside the drum, with no flat disc of light hanging over the rim, and all fires have rounded bases.
• Graphics: the colour of the world shifts by place and time: dusty and warm in the waste and badlands, cold blue in the snowy north, damp green in forest and swamp, harsh red in burned country, rose at dawn, orange at dusk, teal at night. Buildings weather: mud splashed up the walls with a tide line, rust running down from the eaves, damp patches, moss on north walls and old roofs. Blood now splats on floors and walls (it dries and fades), oil stains mark the parking bays, and shops, warehouses and the odd house are tagged with graffiti. A few houses and stores still have someone in them: after dark their windows glow with a flickering lamp.
• Neighbours: a few houses (and the odd store) still have someone living in them: the lamp in the window at night, a fire in the grate, smoke from the chimney. Knock and talk: they'll trade what they can spare, and ask a favour (bring what they need and they pay well, and the Road hears you're decent). What's in their house is theirs: search it while they're home and you're stealing. They turn on you, and your shop's reputation takes the hit. Drive them off and the house goes dark for good. Not every lit window is a welcome, though: some are a lure, with raiders sitting quiet in the dark inside.
• Rooms look different: every room in a house has its own walls now (wallpaper in several patterns and colours, painted plaster, wood panelling, painted boards), some with panelling below a dado rail, bathrooms and kitchens tiled below it, and skirting boards along the floor. Outside weathering (mud, rust runs, moss) stays outside, and floors under a roof don't get rain puddles.
• Lit houses have a real light: a lantern on an upturned crate in one of the rooms, its flame lighting the room and, through the windows, the yard.
• A new start: a new world begins out on the edge of town, on foot, with Maggie's note. The shop's down the road (marked on your map, M), shut up, and the walk in is your chance to scavenge your first stock (and it's rougher out there than at the door). Flip the sign to OPEN when you're ready to trade.
• Maggie's roof sign: the shop's name now stands up on the roof over the front, big and lit, instead of on posts by the road.
• Reloading: every gun has a magazine now (pistol 12, revolver 6, pump shotgun 6, sawed-off 2, SMG and assault rifle 30, hunting rifle 5). Press R to reload, or it reloads itself when it runs dry. Each gun takes its own time (a revolver's slower than a pistol). The HUD shows what's loaded and what you've got left.
• Rocket and grenade launchers (very rare: military crates and gun lockers): rockets fly straight and fast on a smoke trail, 40 mm grenades are lobbed to where you point, and both go off on whatever they hit. Their rounds are rare too.
• Making ammo is possible but hard: you need a Reloading Press (rare, found on workbenches), spent brass, primers, gunpowder (made from fertilizer and fuel) and lead, at the workbench, with skill in Mechanics (more for rifle rounds and grenades).
• Climbing has three moves now: low fences and walls you vault (one hand down, legs swung over together, quick); chest-high ones you climb (both hands planted on top, a knee up, the other leg over); through an empty window you duck low with your legs folded under. Your hands stay planted on the edge instead of drifting, and you land with your knees giving.
• Burn barrels are open drums you can see down into.
• Upstairs walls break: a house's upper storeys are built in breakable sections now, like the ground floor (smash through from inside, or shoot and blow them out), remembered in your save; their windows go with them.
• The CLOSED sign's lettering fits inside its tube.
• God mode: a "Snowy north" teleport.
• Fireplaces (new worlds): every house's chimney now sits right over a fireplace inside, against a wall (brick surround, hearth, mantel, the chimney breast up to the ceiling), so where the chimney comes out of the roof tells you which room it's in. Cold ash in empty houses, a fire going where someone lives.
• Storage: hold some back: next to KEEP / SELL, each item in storage has a HOLD count (- / +, Shift for 5). Restocking and the shelves leave that many in storage and only put the rest out for sale, e.g. hold 5 bandages, sell the other 20.
• Hair hangs in lengths now: long hair and ponytails bend as they swing (the ends trailing the roots) instead of flapping out stiff.
• Behind buildings: walk behind a house and the roof and walls in the way open up round you, so you can see the ground you're on; its insides stay dark unless a window looks in (with the vision cone on).
• Much less to draw: from above, a building's roof hides everything inside it, so the game now tells the renderer to skip all of that (furniture, floors, loot, the inside walls) until you go in. Downtown that was thousands of objects a frame. Things under a roof also stop casting sun shadows nobody can see.
• Downtown runs faster: the dead well away from you animate at a lower rate, find their paths less often, and bodies that have finished falling hardly animate at all. The sight lines aren't recast while you stand still, and the streets cap how many of the dead are about at once.
• Flashlight stays out while you guard: you just switch to an overhand grip by your head.
• Fixes: front-yard picket fences and the farm and camp fences are solid now (no more walking through them). A house's open front door no longer stands as a dark slab between you and the camera in the doorway. No more stray beams lying around near the shop (fallen rafters from caved-in roofs were landing in the wrong place). Nothing spawns within 55 m of the shop, and on your first morning in a new world nothing comes within 130 m, so you get to look round first. The dark-rooms view now works upstairs too. Shop walls stay up while you're outside. The OPEN/CLOSED sign glows like neon. Fireside chat answers with E, and speech wraps instead of running off the screen. The low sun no longer stripes the fog with lines at dusk. Downtown runs smoother: far-off buildings check on you less often.

v0.8.21: dark rooms, climbing, gear that wears out, and folk who talk back

• Only the room you're in: step into a house and the rest of it goes near black. You see the room you're standing in, and whatever your eyes reach through doorways and windows. Whatever's waiting in the next room stays hidden until you look.
• Light only comes in through the windows: the walls and roof that drop away so you can see inside still cast their shadows, so a low sun sends shafts through the windows instead of flooding the room.
• Some houses aren't empty: now and then one of the dead stands silent in a dark room until you walk in on it. More of the dead wander the edge of your home town too.
• Screechers: a pale, gaunt new zombie. When it spots you it stops dead and draws breath for a couple of seconds. Kill it before it screams, or every one of the dead nearby comes running.
• Climb (Space): over fences, low walls, counters and empty window frames. Punch or shove a window to break the glass first; bare fists might cut you.
• Weapons and clothes wear out:
  • Every hit or shot takes a little off a weapon's condition. Melee weapons break at 0%; guns jam until repaired.
  • Clothes wear when you take hits, protect less when badly worn, and tear to rags at 0%.
  • Condition shows on the item's name.
• Repairs:
  • Build a Repair Bench at the shop. Duct tape and scrap fix melee weapons, scrap and nails fix guns, thread and cloth fix clothes.
  • Or carry a Weapon Repair Kit, Gun Cleaning Kit or Sewing Kit and use it anywhere.
  • Your Mechanics skill makes every repair go further.
• Cars wear too: crashes, explosions and running down the dead knock a car's condition down. It gets slower, smokes, and dies at 0%. Spare Car Parts and a Toolkit fix it up.
• Skill magazines: one for every skill (Blunt Force Monthly, Dumpster Digest, Car Fix Monthly...). Read one for a big chunk of practice. Paperback novels just sell.
• Bookshelves can be searched: books, magazines, the odd trinket.
• Folk at the fire talk to you:
  • Travelers ask you things. Press E to answer, and pick a reply.
  • They remember what you told them and how they feel about you, and bring it up next time they pass through.
  • Chat, ask about them, tell a joke, get the news, or see what's in their pack. Sometimes there's something rare, and better prices if they like you.
  • Everyone on the Road has a name of their own now, and old acquaintances come back by.
• The radio's by the fire now, with 40 new broadcasts (Radio Free Route, the Baron's announcements, trade news, the numbers station changing...). The folk sitting round it have something to say about each one.
• NPCs know the time of day: no more "Evening." at noon, plus morning, afternoon and night small talk.
• Loot sounds match what you're searching: a fridge seal and clinking bottles, drawers, metal lockers, hangers in a wardrobe, plates and cans, rattling pills, tools, a car door, a crate lid prised up, the cash register, a zipper, book pages.
• New zombie voices: wet, ragged groans, harsh snarls and choking death rattles. The jump-scare stings are louder and nastier.
• Explosions:
  • Pipe bombs and grenades now go off with a shock ring racing over the ground, a white-hot fireball that rolls up into black smoke, sparks flung out in arcs and a ring of dust.
  • Molotovs go up in a whoosh.
  • A wreck caught in a blast catches fire. Cars aren't left burning by themselves any more.
• Points of interest made over:
  • The crash site is a real airliner now: broken in three and torn open with seats inside, a wing and engine, a tail fin in airline colours, seats strewn about.
  • The radio station got dishes, cabinets, cable trays, guy wires, solar panels and danger signs.
  • The farm got round hay bales, a chicken coop, a well, a scarecrow, pumpkins and a mailbox.
  • The scrapyard got wrecks in all colours, a crane and a car crusher.
  • The checkpoint got a quarantine sign, razor wire, an aid tent, cots, body bags and floodlights.
• Your shop's front:
  • A plank porch, planters, crates of produce, a bench, a doormat, and lantern posts that light up at night.
  • Strings of bulbs from the Shack on, and a hand-painted sign by the road.
  • The OPEN sign hangs in the front window and glows at night. The jobs board has moved off the sidewalk.
  • From outside, the open-roofed shop is sunlit, not a black hole.
• More starting stock, mostly food and water.
• Round the back of a building a marker shows where its door is.
• Downtown upper floors can be smashed, panel by panel, like the ground floor.
• Fists alternate left jab, right cross. Knives and spears stab, and so do bigger blades now and then. The shove is a proper two-handed push.
• Bed blankets no longer poke through the bedding.
• Cloaks swing out of the way of your legs and backpack instead of clipping through, flow more, and catch the wind.
• Fog thins out round you, so you can always see yourself.
• Zombies chase you for longer once they've seen you.
• Shadows: steadier and softer when the sun is low. The optional bounce lighting no longer draws horizontal bands across the screen.
• Map: places you or your partner discover show on both your maps in co-op.
• A few more burn barrels around towns.

Also in v0.8.21: grass that gives way, and a vision cone that hides everyone

• The vision cone hides people too: customers, travelers, wanderers, camp folk and your companion out of your view (or behind a wall) don't show until you look their way. Co-op partners always show.
• Fog you can watch move: the mist streams past in wisps drawn out along the wind, and rolls through in banks that go from ankle-deep to well over your head with clear gaps between, so you see it come and go.
• Dust storms look like dust storms: a thick ochre haze racing along with the wind, surging and easing in gusts so the air thickens and clears, bigger billowing dust clouds, grit, paper and dead leaves tumbling past along the ground, everything washed out and warm while it blows; the dust no longer glows at night.
• Jump scares hit hard: a loud, screeching stab of clashing strings over a deep hit when something you hadn't noticed is suddenly right there.
• A bit more awareness round you with the vision cone (about 3 metres all round).
• Junk round the houses: bin bags and wheelie bins out by the front, heaps down the side (pallets, cinder blocks, tires, gas cans, boxes, traffic cones) and old couches, armchairs and stacks of wheels in the back yards; the run-down houses have the most. All of it is loose: kick it, shove it, blow it up.
• People and the dead walk round wrecked cars (and other heavy things) instead of shoving them along.
• Fence shadows are clean (they came out blotchy and broken).
• Rain: fine streaks of every length that glint in lamplight and your flashlight beam, rings spreading across the puddles where drops land, little crowns of spray jumping off the ground, and a low haze of spray in a downpour.
• Crumbling edges only in places: country roads run clean and straight for a while, then break up; sidewalks (downtown too) now crumble at their outer edge in stretches as well.
• Explosion scorch marks are proper burns now: a charred centre with soot streaked out from the blast and a ragged edge, sooting the bottom of nearby walls too, fading after a while (was a flat dark disc).
• Grass folds down as you push through it instead of snapping flat: it bends over across half a second as you, the dead or a car go through, then rises again slowly; walk back through half-risen grass and it carries on from where it was.

v0.8.20: a vision cone, lush meadows, a real flashlight, rolling fog

• Vision cone: you see what you're facing, a cone about 125 degrees wide, as far as walls and buildings let you, plus a couple of metres all round you. Everything else is dim and grey, and the dead out there don't show until you turn to look. Indoors the room you're in stays lit as before. Options > "Vision cone" turns it off.
• Meadows: grassy ground is covered in a thick, living carpet of grass now (green, with drier patches, tussocks and tall seed heads in the thick of it), and it moves: you, the dead, NPCs and cars push through it, the blades bend over the way you went and stay flattened behind you, then slowly rise again. Cars leave two flattened tracks. A new Grass option (Sparse / Lush / Very lush) sets how thick it grows on newly loaded ground.
• No more grass growing on roofs (weeds only push up through the floors of roofless ruins).
• Fog rolls in and out: the ground mist moves along in big banks with the wind, knee-deep in one place, over your head in the next, clear in between, so it comes and goes down a street.
• Less fog indoors: step inside and the mist thins right out.
• Blood stains no longer show through thick fog.
• Zombies don't get stuck in doorways pushing against each other any more.
• Zombies shamble: ordinary zombies are slower now and each drags itself along at its own pace, lurching forward a step at a time, hunched over and rolling side to side. Runners are slower too (still faster than your walk, but no longer nearly a sprint).
• Better flashlight: a real beam (a bright hotspot, a soft wide spill and the faint ring a reflector throws), light bouncing back off whatever it's pointed at so a room lights up softly round the beam, softer shadow edges, and it trails your turns a little and bobs as you walk. Co-op partners' torches match.
• Garages and sheds can be smashed through like house walls (a section at a time, remembered).
• Title screen shows the right version again (it was stuck on v0.8.15).
• Fix: in busy areas (lots of houses and curtains) Godot could run out of room for each object's paint and fade settings, leaving some things the wrong colour or not fading; there's plenty of room now.

v0.8.19: the Greenwater, new weapons, yards and a smoother world

• The story of the green goo (Greenwater): five new journal pages to find (a torn-out convoy log, the Depot 9 work order and shift log, a Hub radio transcript, and one of Maggie's notes) tell where it came from and why the Hub went silent. The radio and travelers talk about it, Doc Hattie and Rusty have one more story each, and old green-striped Hubfuel drums lie tipped over beside the toxic pools. The dead gather round those pools, more of them at night.
• New weapons: a revolver, a sawed-off shotgun, a submachine gun and an assault rifle (the last two fire as long as you hold the button), and new models for the pistol, shotgun and hunting rifle. New melee weapons: a spear (long reach), a saw-blade bat and an old guitar, plus new models for the nailed bat, hatchet and machete.
• Bow and arrows (craftable): nearly silent, slow and hard-hitting. Arrows in flight can be seen, they stick where they land, and many can be pulled back out of walls and bodies.
• Throwables: molotovs (craftable: fuel and rags) set the ground on fire for a while; pipe bombs (craftable) and frag grenades (rare) explode, throwing zombies off their feet, smashing walls and furniture, and drawing every zombie for streets around. Equip one and attack to throw it at the cursor.
• Long guns are held properly: shouldered and level when aiming, with both hands on the gun, and at low ready across the body otherwise.
• Crouch (C): half speed, footsteps carry about a third as far, and zombies that haven't seen you have to get much closer to notice you.
• Hit sounds: blunt weapons land with a meaty thump, blades bite in, fists smack, and heavy blows to the head crack bone. Glass breaking is redone.
• Breaking walls goes faster (blows do full damage to walls), the swing's whole arc can land, and each blow kicks the camera a little.
• Back yards (new worlds): some houses have a fenced back yard (tall boards or a picket fence) with a gate and a shed worth searching, and some have a garage, either attached beside the house or at the back of the yard with a drive down the side.
• Towns (new worlds) aren't circles any more: their edges wander, and streets run out along the longer parts.
• Houses: upstairs is real rooms now (bedrooms, a bathroom, sometimes a sitting room or a study); a bathroom door is never blocked by the stairs; toilets and baths are plumbed in (they can't be shoved); offices have proper desks (steel, in rows, with old monitors and typewriters), and desks in homes are wood; blankets are soft, draped cloth.
• Nature: meadow grass in thick clumps and patches with bare ground between, wildflowers, dry straw-coloured stretches; pine trees are proper spruces; ivy only climbs walls that are standing.
• Stepping in or out of a building fades the roof and walls away (or back) instead of popping.
• You show through as a silhouette when a building you're not in stands between you and the camera, instead of it being cut open; under a fuel canopy or a porch roof the see-through circle opens; tall buildings' top floors only hide once you're properly behind them.
• Lighting: no more horizontal bands across the screen (one shadow map over the whole view), shorter dusk shadows, and bounce light (SDFGI) keeps nights dark.
• Flashlight can be switched on or off any time (L); it still comes on by itself after dark.
• Smoother world: new ground is built a piece at a time over several frames, loot and zombies appear a few at a time, and models stay loaded instead of being read from disk again, so walking into new areas hitches far less.
• Fog: real drifting ground mist that rolls along with the wind in banks and wisps, hugging the ground and thinning with height. Thick blankets on foggy days, a pale bank at dawn, a faint moonlit haze after dark that glows round lamps, fires and your flashlight, a brown pall in dust storms, and a sickly green glowing mist over the Greenwater pools. Indoors stays clear.
• Downtown: office desks can be searched and their chairs are solid; the big sealed towers in new worlds are gone (old ones have a lobby to search), high-rises vary in height, flat roofs are gravel instead of flickering tiles, the plaza fountain runs, and downtown streets are crawling with far more of the dead.
• Cloak slot: the cloth hood is now a hooded cloak, worn in its own slot over your coat, and it swings and flaps as you move.
• Country roads crumble at the edges into the dirt, with cracked, broken-off asphalt instead of ruler-straight lines.
• God mode (F1, testing) has a lot more: unseen by enemies, one-hit kills, endless ammo (guns, arrows and throwables), 3x speed, free crafting and building, freeze the clock, freeze enemies, and an on-screen stats readout (FPS, frame time, draw calls, chunks, enemies, where you are). Hurt, bleed, infect or starve yourself on purpose; gear kits (every gun with ammo, every melee weapon, throwables, bow and arrows, medicine, crafting materials); dawn and dusk; next day; a customer, a traveler or a Baron raid on demand; teleports to home, the nearest town, downtown, the Greenwater swamp or the nearest camp, farm, crash, radio tower or checkpoint; big hordes and raider gangs; knock everything down; set off an explosion or a fire.
• Cloth is cloth: curtains hang in faded, pleated pairs (torn ones in ruins) at many house windows and stir in the draught; flags snap in the wind; washing hangs from a real line and sways; market and kitchen awnings are striped canvas that sags between the posts with a scalloped edge; tents are slack canvas; beds have blankets that drape over the edge, and soft pillows; rugs lie rucked with a corner kicked up; some sofas and armchairs are under dust sheets, some tables have a tablecloth pulled askew, and clothes dumped from wardrobes lie in crumpled heaps.
• Crafting materials say what they make: in your backpack and in storage, anything used in a recipe lists what it goes into (crafting, cooking and building); hover over it for the full list.
• Fixes: nothing gets pushed up against a kitchen counter, fridge or cupboard any more (an armchair could end up right in front of the sink); loading new ground after a long trip no longer runs leftover work for ground that's already gone; plain street corners have no crosswalk markings and the sidewalk carries on round the bend; the fuel canopy's rust pattern no longer repeats in rows.

v0.8.18: creepier, better lighting, houses that look lived-in

• A creepier world: a low, uneasy drone sits under everything (heavier at night and far from home, faint at the shop). Now and then something far off: a groan, metal falling, a scream, a dog howling, more of them after dark.
• Jump scares: if a zombie gets right up to you and you hadn't seen it (it came from behind, or from off the screen), a sting hits. Not in the middle of a fight, and not more than once every 45 seconds.
• Darker nights: a much darker moonlit night (your flashlight matters now). Options → Night darkness sets how dark.
• Lighting: AgX tone mapping (bright sun and dark rooms both keep their detail); crisper sun shadows (four cascades round the camera, blended, less speckling); rooms are dim inside, lit by their windows and doors; reflections in wet roads and puddles; the flashlight throws a beam you can see in the night air. Options → Bounce light (SDFGI) turns on real-time global illumination: light bouncing off floors and walls, rooms lit by their windows (needs a strong graphics card, off by default).
• Water and toxic sludge are see-through: you can see the lake bed through the shallows (bent by the ripples), fading into murk where it's deep; toxic pools are a translucent, slowly swirling, faintly glowing green with a ragged edge.
• Sound pass: rooms echo a little and the weather outside goes dull through the walls; searching sounds like what you're going through (metal cabinets, wooden drawers, a rummage); eating and drinking have sounds; badly hurt, you hear your heart pounding.
• Houses: every piece of furniture in a house shares its paint and wood stain (a kitchen's cabinets match), and each house has its own; bookshelves are wood, with the books standing on the actual shelves in runs; three new wallpapers and more wall colours.
• Chimneys are open at the top (a sooty flue inside a brick lip), and the smoke's gone: nobody lives in these houses.
• Kitchens: the cupboards can be searched (food, a pan or a knife if you're lucky); the cupboards and sink share the house's paint, and the fridge and oven match each other (white, cream, avocado, harvest gold...).
• Fixes: gas station and grocery fridges face into the shop (they had their backs to you); cabinets no longer block the way onto the stairs; grass no longer floats on top of roofless ruins (it grows up through the floor).
• Shop signs: the OPEN / CLOSED board by the door is bigger (a chalkboard face on a wooden A-frame), and the signs in the shop (storage chest, workbench and the rest, HELP WANTED, the fridge, the radio) are crisper with framed boards.
• The see-through circle only opens when something's actually hiding you (not when you're standing in front of a wall or out in the open).
• From outside, a house's upstairs is just its shell: the see-through circle round you no longer shows furniture floating in the upper floor. On the stairs, the view switches upstairs near the top of the flight.

v0.8.17: downtown you can explore, new controls

• Downtown, bigger and taller (new worlds): downtown blocks now hold bigger buildings, 3 to 5 storeys, some running right through the block. Far fewer sealed-up towers. Existing worlds keep their layout.
• Every storey can be explored: stores two storeys and up have a stairwell running up the whole building, one flight per floor. Upstairs: the stockroom and office over the shop, then office floors (rows of desks, a manager's office, a records room, a restroom), flats (bedrooms, bathroom, living room and kitchen) or storage (shelving and crates).
• Upstairs looks right: the floor under you no longer turns see-through, the ground floor's walls stay up while you're upstairs, and the walls up there have windows on the inside. Two-storey houses don't lose their upper floor when you walk behind them (the see-through circle round you does the job).
• Screen-relative controls: tank controls are gone. WASD moves on screen and you face where you walk; aiming, you step back and sideways with the legs turning to match.
• Combat: zombies stay down longer after a shove, head-stomps are easier to land (you step in over the head), and stamina comes back while you block, just slower.
• Textures: brick, boards, tiles and siding always run square (no more courses at an angle). Roads are much less repetitive (repairs, tar patches, faded stretches). The corrugated roof lost its checkerboard. The shop has a poured concrete floor instead of wood on wood.
• Furniture: each piece gets its own paint and wood stain (no more all-white shelving). Containers in unfurnished buildings stand square to the walls.
• Store shelves show what's on them: the actual items you'll find, gone once you take them.
• Overgrowth: ivy climbs the walls of overgrown buildings and old city blocks; home-made grass tufts replace the plants that didn't fit.
• Hunger, thirst and tiredness: three small bars under stamina. They run down with the clock (faster when you sprint). Eat and drink to fill them; sleep (bed or bedroll) for rest. Hungry or tired, stamina comes back slower; parched, you run out of puff sooner; exhausted, you slow down; with nothing to eat or drink at all you start losing health. God mode's endless stamina keeps them full.
• Food keeps three times longer, and containers hold a bit more.
• Sharing builds: build.bat exports a Windows build, zips it into builds/, and uploads it to itch.io with butler (fill in the three lines at its top first).
• NPCs get unstuck: if someone stops making progress (the fire-pit spit, a bench corner), they sidestep, back off, find a new path and, last of all, hop clear.

v0.8.16: upstairs, textures, furniture

• Stairs and upper floors: two-storey houses and stores have a staircase. Walk up it and you're on the upper floor: bedrooms or a study over houses, a stockroom and office over stores, with their own loot. Upstairs, the camera side of the upper walls hides so you can see; downstairs, the upper floor hides as before. Loot and doors only work on your own floor, and zombies downstairs can't hit you through the floor. Zombies that see you go up will climb the stairs after you.
• Two-storey buildings finished: the upper walls were sitting half a storey too low (windows stuck out over the top, and there was a gap under the roof). Fixed.
• Poly Haven textures everywhere (CC0, stylized to fit): new brick, concrete, plaster, tiles, gravel, dirt, grass, wood floors and planks, carpet, corrugated roofs, clay roof tiles, painted and rusty metal, bark. Every building picks its own variants (walls, floors, roof), and roads, sidewalks and the ground blend two variants across the map in big patches, so nothing repeats the same way for long. City squares are old brick pavers.
• House furniture: the Quaternius House Interior set (CC0) replaces the Kenney pieces, made worn: faded, dusty on top, grimy low down, stained, rusting; torn cushions with the stuffing out, bare stained mattresses with the blanket dragged off, cupboard doors hanging, drawers left open, sparse books, clutter left on tables and counters, clothes dumped out of wardrobes.
• Yard fences and junk stay on open ground, never on sidewalks or roads.

v0.8.15: worlds, character creator, grass, paths

• Separate worlds: the title screen has Worlds (a list with day, level, shop and last played; Load or Delete, click Delete twice to confirm) and New World (name it; your other worlds are left alone). Continue loads the last world you played. Your existing save moves into the list as "My World" the first time you start this version. Saves live in worlds/<id>/ in the game's user folder.
• Character creator: body, build, skin, hair style and colour, beard, and the colours of your starting flannel, jeans and boots, with a turning preview and a Random button. Everyone starts with the same gear. Co-op partners see your looks. Older saves keep the old default look.
• New grass (home-made): clumps of curved blades, dark at the root and bright at the tip, in three shapes (short, tall and wispy, mixed), with soft lighter and darker patches across the ground. Grassland, forest and swamp are thicker. (The grass in the incoming folder is MIT-licensed, not CC0, so it isn't used; this is our own take on the idea.)
• Paths to every door: country houses and ruins get a slab path all the way to the nearest road (trees keep off it); warehouses, gas stations and your own shop get one too.

v0.8.14: quality of life

• Radio now sits on a crate behind the counter, in the corner by the front wall. It follows the counter if you move it.
• Picking up placed things (build mode): point at or near something you've placed and it lights up with a label: click (or G) to move it, right-click to remove it for half the caps back. You don't need to aim exactly.
• Map: drag with the left or middle mouse button to look around; "Centre on me" jumps back. A click without dragging still drops a pin.
• More two-storey buildings in towns outside cities: about a third of houses, half of stores, and some burnt-out two-storey ruins.
• Crossroads Market and up: the front awning hides with the roof when you're at the shop, so you can see under it. The tall sign is lower, runs along the road, and has clean dark lettering on a light board.
• Road Hub radio mast stands outside behind the back corner instead of poking up through the back room.
• Storage trunk has a flat plank lid.

v0.8.13: God mode (testing)

• F1 opens the God Mode panel (single player or host). Esc or F1 closes it.
• Toggles: can't be hurt, endless stamina, no carry limit. These reset every time the game starts.
• Buttons: heal fully, +1 level, +5 perk points, +1,000 / +10,000 caps, upgrade the shop or kitchen (free, no requirements), fill the generator, clear the Baron's grudge, spawn a companion.
• World: set the time (morning, noon, evening, night) and the weather.
• Enemies: spawn a zombie, dog, raider, brute or a horde of 8 in front of you; kill everything within 30 m.
• Item spawner: search every item and clothing colour, pick a quantity and a weapon rarity, double-click or Give. Items go straight into your pack, ignoring the weight limit.

v0.8.12: home-made furniture

• Storage, bed and workbench rebuilt in the game's own low-poly style. The storage trunk and the workbench have plank signs on them.
• Generator: a home-made model (yellow engine in a frame, red tank, control panel with its status light). No cable.
• City dumpsters: home-made too, in random colours with bin bags beside them.
• Fire pit seating: proper plank benches on stumps round the fire, some with a back rail.
• Shop sign removed from out front.
• Cooking spit: a metal bar across the fire on two iron posts, with a crank handle to turn it.
• Shoving zombies: they go down far more often (ferals 85%), a second shove on one that's still reeling always puts it down (brutes just stumble), shoves cost less stamina, and with none left you can still shove, just slower and weaker.
• All art is now CC0 or made in-game. The two CC-BY models are gone.

v0.8.11: cities, taller towns, and a world that hangs together

• Cities (new games): a few towns further out are now proper cities, laid out like a real downtown: a closed grid of streets (no dead ends), a square in the middle, a core of tall old blocks and three- and four-storey shops round it, then a ring of business blocks (shops, warehouses, a gas station, parking lots) and blocks of houses, with the odd park. The towns right next to a city make way for it.
• Buildings with more storeys: in bigger towns, shops go up two to four floors (brick and metal fronts from the Downtown City kit) and some houses have a second storey. Upper floors fade out when you're inside or walk behind them.
• Worn and overgrown: buildings are weathered at random, and some have grass and weeds growing round them and up on the roof; ruins worst of all.
• Biomes in regions (new games): forest, wasteland, swamp, burned land and badlands now come in big areas with clear borders instead of scattered patches.
• Parking lots have bays off an aisle and one way in from the street, behind a kerbed verge: nobody pulls straight in off the road.
• In dense cities fewer chunks are kept loaded round you, so it stays smooth.
• Nicer rucksacks: backpacks are a proper rucksack model in the item's colour, with a bedroll on top.
• Existing saves keep their world as it was; cities and the new biome layout need a new game.

More asset credits

• Poly Haven (polyhaven.com) textures, CC0, stylized.
• Quaternius Ultimate House Interior Pack, CC0 (models/hi).
• Quaternius (quaternius.com): Downtown City MegaKit, Buildings Pack, Zombie Apocalypse Kit, Stylized Nature MegaKit, Ultimate Nature Pack, Survival Pack — CC0.

v0.8.10: fixes

• The Baron: the night raid now comes once per night and is remembered across saves, so dying and waking up no longer brings another raid straight away. If his men kill you near your shop they take 20% of your caps and leave, and his grudge cools a step. You can buy off the grudge over the radio at your shop (or when paying a toll): his men pull back and the raids stop.
• Thieves pause a moment after grabbing something, run a little slower, and have further to go, so you've a fair chance to catch them.
• People caught near a fight now either run for it or pick up something and pitch in (each decides once, at random), then get back to what they were doing.
• Shift to run can't stick on any more (the key is also let go if the game window loses focus).
• Swinging at zero stamina still works, just slowly and weakly.
• Head stomps line up with what you see: the check uses where the heel actually lands and the middle of the head.
• Beds: bedrolls have no collision now, so you and your companion can't get wedged on them.
• Companion and cars: a companion riding along no longer shoves the car about; they hop out beside you.
• No pausing except the Esc menu in single player. Inventory, storage, talking and the map leave the world running.
• Minimap doesn't show enemies any more.
• Displays full: restocking tells you the displays are full instead of saying nothing is marked to sell.
• Removing things near the door works: the cut-away front wall no longer blocks the click, and you don't count as "in the way" of your own building.
• Sleeping: you can't lie down with the dead close by, and you wake up (with a warning) if anything hostile comes near while you sleep.
• Generator after an upgrade: if the bigger shop's walls would swallow it, it's moved to a clear spot outside (walls, gates and spikes in the way are taken down and refunded). Older saves are fixed on load.
• Blood pools are irregular splatters, turned and stretched at random, sitting properly on roads, sidewalks and floors (no more round discs clipping into them).
• Storm foliage: grass and trees bend with the wind instead of thrashing when the weather changes.
• Backpack straps now run in one smooth band up the chest, over the shoulder and down to the pack, and sit over jackets.

v0.8.9: a bigger home lot

• New games start with a home lot two blocks wide: your shop's block plus the one west of it, with no street between them. The extra ground is saved for the add-ons to come (kitchen, rec room, garden, animal pen) and gives the shop room to keep growing.
• Existing saves keep the lot they have, so the world around your shop doesn't shift. Co-op friends get the host's layout.
• The community fire pit and kitchen moved to the east side of the shop, the side facing the camera, so they're in view from the road at every shop size. (A car parked there in an old save is moved to the west yard.) The benches now sit square to the shop.
• Signs carry their text: no more floating labels. The shop's name is on a plank sign out front (the tall pole sign takes over at Crossroads Market, then the rooftop neon at Road Hub, now on its own frame); the pole sign's lettering is painted on the board and fits it; EATS hangs on a board; the "Hire a worker" label over the help-wanted board is gone.

v0.8.8: companions, the fire pit, and more banter

• Companion orders: talk to your companion to switch between Free to loot (they search containers near you) and Follow & fight only (they stay on you and leave the looting to you).
• Their pack: open it from the talk window to take what they're carrying or hand them things (they carry up to 18 kg).
• Scavenging runs: send them off on a Quick run (4 h) or a Long run (10 h). They walk off, come back hours later with what they found and drop it in your storage chest. Long runs find more but are riskier: they can come home hurt, or now and then empty-handed. They won't go if they're badly hurt. Runs carry on while you sleep and survive a save.
• Community fire pit rebuilt: a stone fire ring with a spit, proper log benches, firewood, and a lantern pole you can spot from across the yard. It's moved a little further into the west yard so the shop wall doesn't crowd it as the shop grows.
• More banter: dozens of new fireside exchanges, including three-way bits and talk about what's going on (rain, night, the Baron's grudge, your companion being away, how big your shop's got). Customers waiting in line now chat with each other too, and travelers have new lines and rumors.
• Shop furniture: the storage chest, bedrolls, craft bench and barricades use the new models.

v0.8.7: the art overhaul

• Real models everywhere. Camps, POIs, town lots, house interiors, loose props and loot now use proper low-poly models from the asset packs (in models/), toned down and weathered to fit the wasteland (see scripts/kit.gd).
• Camps rebuilt: a patchwork scrap wall with a lookout tower, canvas tents and bedrolls, a trader's lean-to, a supply shed, log benches round the fire, spike barricades and a wreck parked outside.
• Two new places to raid: the Freight Depot (warehouse, stacked containers, a water tower, cargo worth hauling) and the Scrapyard (walled yard of stacked wrecks, tire piles, a container office with an anvil and grinder). Some unexplored crash sites, checkpoints and farms become one of these; anything you've already found, or that a job points at, stays as it was.
• Checkpoints, crash sites, radio towers, farms get barriers, guardhouses, barrels, poles, a windmill, and more.
• Houses and stores: real furniture inside (sofas, beds, tables, tubs, TVs, bookshelves), boarded-up windows on some houses, picket fences and junk in the yards, awnings and bins at the stores.
• Loot looks like what it is: jerry cans, meat, bread, bottles, medkits, knives, guns and more on the ground, on shelves and as inventory icons.
• Towns always have buildings. Towns whose streets left too few lots get extra houses and shacks, and buildings near you now load first, so you won't drive into an empty town.
• Fixed a tooltip that spammed the log with "String formatting error".

Asset credits

• Kenney (kenney.nl): Survival Kit, Furniture Kit, Food Kit, Building Kit, City Kit Suburban, Industrial and Commercial — CC0.
• Quaternius (quaternius.com): survival, weapons and props packs — CC0.
• Atomic Realm: Post-Apocalyptic Starter, Gas Station, Interiors, Into The Wild, Pharmacy — used under their license (use and modify in commercial games; the models themselves may not be redistributed or resold on their own). See models/ar/License.txt.

v0.8.6: the generator

• Build a Generator in the yard (build mode, from the Scrap Shack up). It costs 40 caps + 8 scrap, 4 nails, a toolkit and a car battery, doesn't use a build slot, and you can have one.
• It runs every electric thing at the shop:
  • Lamps and display fridges.
  • The market string lights, the watchtower searchlight, the EATS neon on the diner and THE CROSSROADS neon and mast beacon.
  • None of them need batteries any more: lamps are 3 scrap + 1 nail, fridges 8 scrap + 2 nails.
  • Without power the lights go dark and the neon goes grey. Old lamps stay dark until you build a generator.
• Fridges without power stay cold for about 3 hours, flickering their COLD sign as they warm. After that the food in them spoils like food on a shelf, and the prompt tells you. Power cools them back down in about an hour. Fridges you have before building a generator keep working on their own.
• Fuel is cheap for now: each Fuel Can fills half the tank. A shop with a couple of fridges and lamps burns roughly a quarter of a tank a day, so one can lasts about two days. Pour cans in with E, from your backpack or storage.
• Modes (E):
  • AUTO (the default) runs whenever something needs it: the lights after dark, the fridges all day.
  • ON runs all the time. OFF is off.
  • When you're carrying fuel and the tank is half empty, E refuels instead.
• Status: the panel light is green when running, flashing amber when low and red when off. The HUD shows "Gen 49% ON".
• It's loud. Running, it rumbles, shakes and puffs exhaust, and draws the dead toward your shop (and adds to what attracts hordes).
• Shared in co-op: anyone can refuel or switch it, and the host burns the fuel.

v0.8.5: challenge and progression

• Skills you learn by doing. Eleven skills, levels 0-10, trained by doing:
  • Fitness (sprinting, swinging, shoving, stomping): more stamina, faster recovery.
  • Strength (melee hits, chopping, hauling a heavy pack): harder hits and stomps, more carry weight.
  • Sprinting (running): faster running that costs less stamina.
  • Melee (hitting things): more head hits, cheaper swings.
  • Aiming (shooting, hits count most): tighter spread, more damage and head shots.
  • Sneaking (moving near the dead without being spotted): they hear you from less far.
  • Scavenging (searching): faster searches, better odds of an extra find.
  • Woodcutting (chopping and breaking stone): faster.
  • First Aid (treating wounds): meds heal more.
  • Mechanics (repairing, refuelling, driving): less fuel burned.
  • Trading (selling at the counter): customers pay a little more.
  • Each level takes longer than the last, and a skill level-up also gives character XP. Dying costs a fifth of every skill's XP and half your progress to the next character level.
• Perks reworked: a perk point every second level (not every level), smaller effects, and every rank needs a skill level first (Toughness needs Fitness 3, then 6, for example). Old saves get their perk points refunded. P opens the new Skills & Perks screen.
• Zombies are harder:
  • They move at about your walking pace (so you have to run to get away) and lunge the last few metres.
  • They see further, strike faster, take more body blows before going down, and are harder to shove over.
  • A hit you don't block means it gets hold of you and you can barely move for a moment.
  • Runners are faster; brutes are tougher and quicker.
• The Baron's thugs are much tougher:
  • More health, harder and faster hits, and they rarely go down to a shove.
  • They catch about a third of melee blows they see coming, then hit straight back.
  • About a third carry pistols: they hold back, aim, fire a few shots and reload. Keep moving to make them miss.
• Fighting the Baron has consequences. Refusing his toll or killing his men raises his grudge (shown on the HUD, up to 6):
  • Every point costs you reputation, raises the toll by 30% and brings a bigger crew.
  • Customers stay away (up to 40% fewer).
  • At grudge 3 or more, his men come at night to settle things.
  • Paying a toll in full cools the grudge, and so does time (a point every five days).

v0.8.4: animation and feel

• Chopping looks like chopping: you face the tree and swing, chips fly and the tree shivers with each blow. The last blow fells the tree: it creaks, tips away from you, crashes down (+3 bonus wood) and leaves a stump. Felled trees grow back after a long while, and never while you're watching. Breaking stone swings too.
• Blocking no longer clips: the guard holds the fists out in front of the chin instead of inside the face.
• Stomped corpses stay put: finishing off a zombie on the ground no longer spins the body round. Deaths turn smoothly instead of snapping.
• Smoother walk to run: speed builds up into a run instead of snapping, the gait blends over a longer crossfade, and the head no longer tips back when running.
• Sleeping: lie down on the bedroll (head on the pillow), the screen fades out and the world fast-forwards. The shop keeps trading, food cooks and spoils, and the night passes, until you wake at dawn (or after a three-hour nap by day). Anything that hurts you wakes you, and E gets you up early. (In co-op it's still a quick rest.)
• Cloaks, dusters and ponchos swing: the back panel hangs straight when you stand, trails behind as you walk or run, swings out when you turn and bounces with your stride.

v0.8.3

• Loot comes back after a week: a searched container restocks 7 days after you emptied it.
• Placement arrow: in build mode a yellow arrow on the floor shows which way the piece will face.
• Trees look leafier: the round blobs are gone. Canopies are clusters of leaf cards around branches.
• Hiring board is easier to spot: a HELP WANTED header and a floating "Hire a worker" tag, shown until you hire someone.
• KEEP means keep: storage items marked KEEP come straight off your shelves and can't be put out, so they're never sold.
• Lighter mornings: the dawn mist and sunrise glow are much thinner.
• No weather indoors: rain, dust and fog stop at the door.
• Your worker stays at the counter: if they get pushed out or stuck, they head back (and after a few seconds of being stuck they're simply back behind the counter).
• Unstuck in the pause menu (Esc) moves you to the nearest open ground.
• Power poles stay off the road: poles move aside when a street crosses their spot.
• No looting through walls: containers inside a building can only be searched from inside it.
• Handing in jobs is clearer: a gold ! floats over the job board or camp leader when a job is ready to hand in, and the tracker says exactly where to go. Sealed parcels no longer get dumped into storage (which used to make those jobs impossible to hand in).
• Favorites instead of auto-hotbar: pickups no longer fill the hotbar by themselves. The backpack's Fav button (and anything on your hotbar) stays in your pack when you use Store whole backpack.
• Equipped items show icons: drag them onto the hotbar, or use the Hotbar button.
• Followers don't shove heavy things: they can nudge small stuff but won't push cars, fridges or shelving.
• Bigger back room at every shop size, and your companion now actually lies down on their bedroll instead of running in place beside it.
• The build bar wraps onto two lines instead of running off the screen.

v0.8.2

• OPEN / CLOSED sign by the shop door: press E to flip it. While it's closed no new customers come in (anyone already inside finishes up). Shared in co-op, and the HUD shows CLOSED.
• Talk round the fire: travelers (and your companion, when they're sat at the pit) talk to each other: jokes with punchlines, banter, the odd argument, and everyone else laughing or groaning along. Stand near the fire and it shows in your message log too.
• Die and your bag stays behind: everything you were carrying drops in a bag where you fell, marked on your map (and shown at the map's edge when it's off-screen). Go back and press E to take it. The last five bags are kept.
• Keep in backpack: a Keep button on each backpack item. Kept items stay with you when you use Store whole backpack.
• Stores and gas stations get proper lots: paved out to the street with a driveway across the sidewalk, parking stalls (two rows at stores), a light pole and the odd abandoned car; warehouses get a loading area.
• Houses vary much more: shacks and cabins, cottages, family homes and big houses.
• Bigger kitchens: the kitchen now gets most of the back of the house (the bedroom moves to the front), and the kitchen table only goes in when there's room to walk around it.
• Brutes look right: broad and heavy instead of blown up. (Widening a body used to swell the head and arms too; now only the torso widens, for everyone.)

v0.8.1: companions

• Recruit a survivor. Camp guards and traders can join you for 60 caps (talk to them, E). One companion for now. A spare bedroll appears in your back room.
• Talk to your companion (E) to have them follow you, wait here, or go back to the shop, or to part ways (they go home to their camp).
  • Following, they fight anything that comes at you (a lead pipe, aimed at heads), and search containers near you that you haven't opened, carrying up to 18 kg.
  • Back at the shop they drop everything they're carrying into your storage chest. At the shop they sit by the fire pit during the day and sleep on their bedroll at night.
  • The dead go after them too. Knocked out, they get back up after a while and head home.
  • They ride along when you drive. (Co-op: the host's companion only, for now.)
• Stomping: a stomp on the head always finishes it now. Your foot still has to be over the head; a stomp to the body just keeps it down longer. A body on the ground no longer slides around when you walk into it, and it can't get up while you're standing over it.
• Aiming: the red sight line starts at the tip of the barrel for every gun, and a raised rifle or shotgun now points exactly where you aim.
• Indoor footsteps are cut from a real recording of steps on a wooden floor (12 variants; tools/cut_steps.py turns any footsteps recording into game steps).
• Footsteps re-made and much quieter, with different sounds for dirt, pavement and roads, grass, and wooden floors.

v0.8: the wider world

• Points of interest out in the country, each with a name, loot and its own dead:
  • Military Checkpoint: sandbags, barriers, tents, a watchtower, an army truck. Ammo crates, footlockers, a gun locker. Well guarded.
  • Crash Site: a broken airliner, burning wreckage, scattered suitcases and a cargo container.
  • Radio Tower: a 20 m lattice mast with a blinking beacon, and the transmitter shack.
  • Survivor Camp: tents round a campfire, a palisade. Friendly: a Camp Leader (jobs), a Trader (10 caps marks an undiscovered place on your map) and a guard.
  • Farm: a red barn, a silo, a field of dead corn, a tractor.
  • Walking up to one discovers it (a banner, some XP, and it's named on your map). Kill all its dead and it's cleared for a few days.
• Jobs. The Job Board in front of your shop has three a day; camp leaders have their own. Bring items, scout a place, clear it out, recover a sealed parcel, or deliver one to another camp. Targets get a gold marker on the map (an arrow at the edge when they're off-screen), your jobs are listed top-left, and you hand them in where you got them for caps, XP and reputation. Up to four at a time.
• New biomes: scorched forest (ash ground, charred trees, smouldering smoke) and red-rock badlands (rock spires, gravel, tumbleweeds).
• Lakes: ragged shorelines, rippling water with foam at the edge, reeds, lily pads, muddy banks. Collect Dirty Water at the shore; boil it into Bottled Water at your kitchen (drinking it raw can turn your stomach).
• The ground blends properly: dead grass, dirt, gravel, red rock, ash and mud mix in ragged patches instead of smooth color fades. Walls get grime at the base and rain streaks.
• New bushes: leafy shrubs built from overlapping lobes of leaf clusters (ragged outlines, sprigs poking out), dry twiggy scrub in the wasteland, badlands and burned land, and arching ferns on the forest floor and in swamps.
• New trees and rocks: pines with layered, drooping needled branches; crooked, forking dead trees; faceted boulders with pebbles around them.
• Map pins for places you've looted (or danger, or notes), synced with everyone in co-op.
• See-through: roofs, canopies, building fronts and trees between you and the camera dither away in a circle around you.
• Everything moves: house furniture (sofas, beds, bookshelves, tubs...) can be pushed and shot to pieces too. Chairs skid; a tub or a bed barely creeps.
• Stomping is on Space now. Your heel has to come down on the head. The animation winds up, strikes and settles properly, and you plant your feet.
• First-game tutorial: a short walkthrough of storage, pricing, the counter, haggling and reputation (with a Skip button).
• Fixes: meds are only used when they'd help (no bandaging when you aren't bleeding or healing at full health); shoving from your guard poses correctly; a smoother, sharper runner on high refresh screens (the camera now moves in step with the player).

v0.7: running the shop

• Set your prices. In Shop Storage every item has a price with - / + (30% to 300% of fair value), plus a default price for everything you haven't set. Orange = above fair value, green = a discount.
• Customer types (name tag over their head), each wanting different things:
  • Scavenger: junk, materials, ammo. Tight on money.
  • Drifter: food, medicine, ingredients.
  • Fighter (from reputation Local stall): weapons, ammo, armor. Pays a premium.
  • Trader (Known trader): buys anything, up to 3 items at once, and haggles hard.
  • Settler (Trusted): clothing and food. Pays well, rarely haggles.
• Haggling. If your price is a bit steep, they bring it to the counter with a lower offer. Press E at the counter: Accept, Meet halfway, Hold firm or Refuse. Push too hard and they may walk. If your price is way too high they won't pick it up at all. Your worker haggles too (takes anything close to your price, otherwise meets halfway).
• Reputation (0-100, shown on the HUD): Unknown, Local stall, Known trader, Trusted, Legendary. Fair sales and quick service raise it. Overcharging, keeping people waiting and thieves getting away lower it. Higher reputation brings more customers, more often, and better types.
• Thieves. Now and then a "scavenger" grabs something off a shelf and runs for the road (more often as the shop grows). Hit or shove them before they get away and the item goes back into storage.
• Fixes: wrecked cars no longer spawn on the road near your shop (customers from the east were spawning inside one and got stuck, the "Can't get to it" bug). The indoor view is much softer: only walls block your view (not furniture, poles or cars), edges are blurred, what you see through windows fades with distance, the room you're in is always fully lit, and MSAA is paused while you're inside so the effect is exact.

v0.6

• Co-op (above).
• Batch 2:
  • Indoors, you only see what you could see. Step inside a building and everything outside goes dark, except what's visible through the doorway and windows. Rain and wind get muffled.
  • Sunrise and sunset. Dawn is rosy gold under a cool sky, with a thin pale mist instead of the brown haze. Dusk is deep orange going purple, with long shadows.
  • Dust storms are now sand streaking low across the ground plus billowing clouds, instead of a flat brown fog.
  • Footsteps land with your feet, timed from the walk animation. Indoor steps are a soft thud on the boards instead of a knock.
  • Trees: a new leafy canopy texture and proper vertical bark, more leaf cards around each tree, and they sway harder in the wind (leaves flutter too). Bushes and grass move as well.
  • New buildings: stores (grocery, pharmacy, hardware, clothing) with glass shopfronts, shelves, a checkout and a parking lot; warehouses full of pallets; and gas stations with a canopy over the pumps. Each has a sign over the door. Houses come in a wider range of sizes.
• Newest (SalvageBound):
  • New name and title art. The menu buttons sit on the road under the logo; fewer embers, and the art is sharper. "Both" on the Male/Female screen runs away from your mouse.
  • Zombies die when the head goes. Body blows stagger them and eventually knock them down, but only head hits kill. Anything on the ground takes head hits, so a stomp finishes a downed zombie. Aimed, steady gunshots find the head about half the time; hip fire mostly hits the body. Heavy weapons find the head more than fists. Dogs and the Baron's thugs just have health.
  • The head pop: a split-second freeze and camera kick, a crunchy thump, a blood spray and gore chunks, the neck spurting as the body drops, and a splatter on the ground. Popped zombies stay down.
  • Aiming with tank controls: holding right-click switches WASD to free movement (you keep facing the cursor).
  • Shop: the counter now sits against the east wall by the door, out of the sales floor. In build mode, press G (or middle-click) on furniture to pick it up and move it (free, keeps its stock). Right-click cancels.
  • Storage: a Put out button puts that item straight onto your displays (fresh food into fridges first).
  • Hotbar: drag items from the backpack onto it (or between slots). When you're bleeding, the screen edges pulse red, a banner tells you, and your bandage slot throbs.
  • Balance: loot is scarcer (about a quarter of containers are empty, the rest hold less). The worker costs 50 caps a day, paid each morning. Food keeps four times longer. Customers wait about two minutes at the counter. At most one radio-announced horde a day, none before day 3, and far fewer zombies spawn inside the home town.
  • Fixes: sidewalks stop cleanly at the kerb of crossing streets and sit lower, so people and items don't sink into them; road shoulders no longer show through crosswalks. Customers who couldn't get back out to the road (the navmesh seam bug) now leave properly.
  • Co-op: "Invite Friends" in the pause menu now also lists your online Steam friends with an Invite button each, which works even when the Steam overlay doesn't (e.g. running from the Godot editor).
• Latest changes:
  • Bigger home town: a 4 × 4 grid of blocks (about 225 m across) with around 80 buildings. Other towns are now roughly 200 m apart instead of 320 m, and more cells have one.
  • Houses sit back from the street far enough for their porches, so towns fill up properly (before, many lots were rejected).
  • Wanderers: survivors walk the roads outside town, alone, in pairs or in little caravans. They stop to look around, run from the dead, and talk if you walk up and press E.
  • NPCs reach the shop again: chunk navmeshes had a 1 m gap at every seam, which split the map into islands ("Can't get to it..."). The baking bounds are now padded so they join up.
  • Movement: walking is slower (2.8 m/s; Shift runs at 6.2 m/s and drains stamina more gently). Running keeps the head upright instead of jutting forward.
  • Coats move with you: duster tails, cloaks and ponchos are skinned to the legs and arms, so legs don't walk through them.
  • Storage window groups items by type (weapons, clothing, medical, food...).
  • Hotbar (keys 1–8), described in Controls above.
• New characters:
  • Models: people and zombies now use Kenney's Animated Characters: Survivors (CC0, in assets/characters/). They have smaller heads and longer legs than the pack's default, and normal-length arms.
  • Animation: the pack only ships idle/run/jump, so the Quaternius Universal Animation Library moves (walk, jog, sprint, sit, talk, aim, attacks, flinch, death) are retargeted onto the Kenney skeleton when the game loads, in about 0.1 s.
  • Clothes are painted onto the skin: a mask per skin (<skin>_mask.png, made by tools/make_skin_masks.py) marks skin, hair, shirt, sleeves, pants, shoes and hands. A shader recolours each part to match what's worn, including sleeve length, plaid/knit/camo patterns, dirt, blood and the hit flash. Hats, hoods, masks, scarves, belts, bags, duster tails, ponchos, armour plates, long hair and beards are modelled on top.
  • Loose clothes: shirts and pants lie flat on the ground and in inventory icons, with a top-down icon view. Gloves are a modelled pair.
  • Code: scripts/kenney_kit.gd does the loading, retargeting, skin shader and weight clean-up. scripts/humanoid.gd drives each character with the same API as before.
  • Body builds: normal, muscular or heavy (wider chest and waist).
  • Coats and cloaks: duster tails, ponchos and cloaks are skinned drapes that swing with the legs.
  • Procedural touches on top of the animation: zombie shamble with reaching arms, the guard pose, shove, stomp, and the support hand on a rifle.
  • New clothes: a Hands slot (arm wraps, fingerless gloves, work gloves), ragged tops, crop tops, ponchos, road cloaks, road goggles, a ranch hat with goggles and a crossed chest harness.
• Clothing, body types and roads:
  • Men and women: everyone has a body type with its own shape: hips, waist, bust, shoulders and jaw. Men can have stubble or a beard. Women's hair can be long, a ponytail or a bun. New Game asks "Who are you?".
  • Clothes are loot: eight slots — head, neck, top, outerwear, belt, pants, feet and back — shown in the backpack screen.
    • Every garment is an item with armour, carry space (belts, vests, satchels) or quiet steps (sneakers).
    • Clothes come in several colourways and turn up in wardrobes, on raiders and sometimes on the dead.
    • New survivors start in a flannel shirt, jeans, work boots and a belt.
  • Garments (all in scripts/clothing.gd):
    • Tops: tees, tank tops, flannels, sweaters, hoodies.
    • Outerwear: work, leather, denim, army and padded jackets; canvas and leather dusters with swinging coat tails; hunting and kevlar vests.
    • Pants: jeans, work pants, fatigues, patrol pants with knee pads.
    • Hats: caps, beanies, ranch and boonie hats, head wraps, hoods, helmets.
    • Neck: bandanas, face wraps, scarves.
    • Belts: plain, utility (pouches), gun belt with holster and bandolier.
    • Footwear: sneakers, work boots, tall boots.
    • Bags: a satchel on a cross-body strap, plus the existing packs.
  • Layered look: jackets hang open over the shirt, with lining, collars, pockets and cuffs. Pants break over boots or tuck into tall boots. Cloth textures (denim, plaid, canvas, cotton, knit, twill, leather, camo; made by tools/make_cloth.py) have fold and wrinkle normal maps.
  • NPCs: drifters dress like the Road (dusters, scarves). The Baron's men wear black leathers and red bandanas, and zombies wear filthy versions of the same clothes. Co-op players see each other's real outfits and body types.
  • Roads: the network was rebuilt. Every road leaves a town as a continuation of a town street, curves gently and meets the highway or another town at a proper junction. There are no more dead ends or parallel stub roads. Existing saves will see a changed map.
• Characters and camera:
  • Bodies: people are built from shaped, tapered body parts: thighs narrowing to the knee, calf muscles, a waist and chest, sloped shoulders, a jaw line, hands and work boots.
  • Movement: the walk cycle is matched to ground speed, so feet plant instead of sliding. Limbs respond faster, weight drops as each heel lands, and sprinting leans forward with pumping arms.
  • Tilt-shift: the option now works. It's a screen-space blur of the top and bottom of the screen; the HUD stays sharp.
  • Starting table: the display table starts against the west wall, out of the walkway. Existing saves move it automatically.
• Fixes and polish (latest):
  • Customers shop properly:
    • They walk inside and stand at the shelf before taking an item, then carry it to the counter.
    • If they can't reach a shelf, they give up rather than taking it through the wall.
    • NPCs no longer jam against each other or loose junk, and wriggle free when stuck.
  • Your shop's roof opens up whenever you're nearby, so you can always see who's inside.
  • Starting room: the Roadside Stall now has a back room with the storage chest, craft bench and bedroll. Every tier keeps them in its back room.
  • Roads: curves are smooth, with no more jagged edges or zig-zag tracks.
  • Dogs:
    • Shoving knocks them down almost every time, and they stay down longer.
    • Stomp works from farther away and at wider angles.
    • They have slightly less health.
  • Resolution setting under Options (windowed).
  • Craft by hand: rope, bandages and first aid kits from the Inventory, using materials in your backpack.
  • Inventory: every item has a picture rendered from its 3D model, and items are grouped by type (weapons, gear, medical, food, ingredients, ammo, materials, junk).
  • Rain: fainter, sparser rain, and much less darkening, so you can see.
  • Rifle and shotgun: held in both hands, stock to the shoulder. Low-ready when walking, raised when aiming.
  • Heavy furniture (wardrobes, fridges, cabinets) doesn't slide around when you walk into it. Hit or shove it to move it.
  • Character models:
    • Rounder hips with a belt, knees, real shoes with soles, shoulders, a narrower waist, hands with thumbs, and a jaw, eyebrows and mouth.
    • Smoother walking: the hips turn with each step and the shoulders counter-swing.
• Walls and defenses (build mode, B). They can go anywhere in the yard around your shop, up to about 34 m out, and don't use build slots:
  • Scrap Wall: corrugated sheets on posts. Zombies path around it, and if they can't get around, they smash through.
  • Gate: opens by itself for you, customers and travelers, and stays shut while the dead are close. Zombies batter at it.
  • Spike Barricade (needs the Trading Post): anything that pushes against it gets torn up, and it wears down as it does.
  • Zombies that run into a defense beat on it; brutes hit twice as hard. The banging draws more of them.
  • Damaged defenses sag and tilt. Press E to patch one up with 1 Scrap Metal.
  • When one breaks, it collapses into physics debris with a puff of dust.
• Three new shop tiers: Crossroads Market, Fortified Outpost and Road Hub (see Progression).
• Realistic fire:
  • Flames are now a shader: flickering tongues licking upward, white-hot at the base and fading through orange to deep red.
  • Each fire has a glowing patch on the ground, embers and wispy smoke.
  • This applies to barrels, the fire pit, burning wrecks and the grill.
• Community fire pit in the shop yard, with log benches.
  • Travelers walk the road day and night, and many stop to sit, warm up and chat. They stop more often at night, less in bad weather.
  • Press E to sit with them: stamina comes back fast and wounds slowly heal. They'll share rumors and survival tips in the message log.
• Kitchen, next to the fire pit (press E on the kitchen plot). There are three stages, and each looks different:
  • Campfire Grill: grilled meat and roasted vegetables.
  • Street Kitchen: striped awning, counter and stove. Cooks 2 at once and adds bread, vegetable soup and hearty stew.
  • Wasteland Diner: a tin shack with a neon EATS sign. Cooks 3 at once and adds meat pies and the Wasteland Feast.
  • Finished dishes go into a fridge if one has room, otherwise into storage.
  • Hungry travelers at the fire pit buy hot meals at a premium. Cooked food sells for much more than raw ingredients.
• Perishable food:
  • Raw meat, fresh vegetables and cooked meals go bad over time, in your backpack, in storage and on shelves. They turn into Rotten Food.
  • Display Fridge (build menu; costs a Car Battery and scrap): keeps food fresh, lit from inside with a glass door. Customers pay 20% more for chilled food.
  • Shelves take non-perishables first. Your worker restocks fridges with fresh food.
• Ingredients:
  • Raw meat from dogs and fridges, vegetables from house fridges, flour from cabinets.
  • Planters now grow vegetables (faster in the rain). Press E to harvest.
• XP orbs:
  • All XP now drops as glowing green orbs: kills, searches, sales, stocking, cooking, repairs and upgrades.
  • They pop out, bounce, glow and bob on the ground, then fly to you like a magnet when you come within about 6 m (farther with the Scavenger perk).
  • Each shows "+N XP" as it reaches you.
• Ambient life:
  • Burning oil barrels in towns, and one in your shop yard: warm flickering light, sparks and smoke.
  • Some wrecks are still burning, sending up tall smoke columns. The odd house has a smoking chimney.
  • Crows peck at the ground and burst into the air when anyone comes near or makes noise, then circle and settle again.
  • Tumbleweeds roll and bounce across wasteland and grassland with the wind (faster in storms). You can shove them.
  • Toxic pools bubble. Forests drop leaves by day and fill with fireflies at night, and swamps get fireflies too.
• Random customers:
  • No more steady timer. Customers arrive at random, busiest around lunch and after work.
  • Rain, storms, fog and dust keep people home.
  • Each day swings between quiet spells, busy stretches and the occasional rush.
  • Some arrive in pairs or groups of three, from either end of the road.
  • Prices vary: some haggle, some pay extra, and now and then a big spender pays up to double.
• Sharper picture:
  • The edge blur is now off by default.
  • Turn it back on under Options → Tilt-shift blur.
• Road fix:
  • Roads from neighbouring towns no longer run into the middle of your home town and fan out into a wedge beside the shop.
  • They now join the ends of the home streets.
  • Tracks down to the highway meet it outside town.
• Day and night:
  • A full day lasts 24 minutes, and the clock and weather show under the minimap.
  • Dawn and dusk turn the light golden and cast long shadows.
  • Nights are dark and blue under moonlight, and your flashlight cuts a beam through the dark.
  • Lamps glow brighter after dark.
  • Zombies see less far at night. Customers only come by between 7:00 and 21:00.
  • In singleplayer, resting on your bedroll at night sleeps until morning.
• Weather: clear, cloudy, rain, thunderstorms (with lightning), thick fog and dust storms. The weather changes every few minutes.
  • Rain falls with splashes, and the ground turns dark and shiny with puddles, then dries out slowly.
  • Wind picks up in storms, bending trees and slanting the rain.
  • Gameplay: fog and dust storms shorten how far zombies can see, and rain covers the sound of your footsteps.
  • Morning mist hangs low over the ground at dawn.
• Volumetric fog and lighting:
  • Light scatters through the air: sunbeams, glowing lamps and a visible flashlight beam at night.
  • Thick fog hugs the ground instead of hiding everything.
  • To turn it off, use Options → Volumetric fog & light shafts. It needs Godot's default Forward+ renderer; other renderers get simpler fog.
• In co-op, the host's clock and weather are shared with everyone.
• Close combat:
  • New survivors start with bare fists. Find a weapon out there. Old saves keep their gear.
  • Guard (hold right-click with a melee weapon or fists): you can still swing from the guard.
    • Hits from the front mostly land on your guard, and bites rarely break the skin.
    • Blocking drains stamina. If stamina runs out your guard breaks and you're stunned for a moment.
    • You move at half speed while guarding.
  • Parry: raise your guard just as a hit lands to take no damage and stagger the attacker for a second.
  • Shove (Space):
    • Knocks most zombies and dogs to the ground for 2–3 seconds.
    • Brutes are too heavy and only stumble.
    • Shoves also send crates and junk flying.
  • Stomp: click next to anything on the ground. Downed enemies take 50% extra damage from every hit, and a stomp keeps a twitching corpse from rising.
  • All of this works in co-op.
• Car trunks open:
  • Press E on a car to open its trunk. The sedan's lid lifts and the pickup's tailgate drops.
  • You get a window to move items one at a time or all at once between your backpack and the 60 kg trunk.
  • Broken cars' trunks work too, so a wreck can be a stash.

v0.5

• Infinite world: generated in 64 m chunks around you as you travel, the same every time for your save's seed.
  • Towns are scattered across the land with varied layouts: street grids, ring roads or a winding main street.
  • Curved country roads and gravel tracks link the towns, and endless highways cross at your home town.
  • Everywhere else is grassland, forest, wasteland or swamp.
• Zombies:
  • They have rotting skin, glowing eyes and torn, bloody clothes, and some are fast Runners.
  • Bites can infect you. That's a 10-minute countdown to turning unless you find Antibiotics, which are rare in cabinets, desks and gun lockers.
  • Some of the dead get back up. Press E on a twitching body to finish it off.
  • Towns can hold hordes.
• Start screen and options: fullscreen, VSync, shadows, anti-aliasing, render scale, visual effects, FPS counter and default zoom.
• Esc pause menu: resume, options, save and quit to menu, or quit to desktop.
• New HUD:
  • Health, stamina and XP bars with icons, smooth changes and a trail showing damage you just took.
  • A level badge, and status warnings (bleeding, infected, heavy load, unspent perk points).
• Minimap turned to match the camera: your shop, cars, customers, your worker and nearby threats. M opens a full map you can zoom.
• Menus: a consistent rustic style. The perks screen has clickable cards, and the build panel has clickable buttons.
• Animation: backpedaling and sidestepping now step in the right direction.
• Trees and grass sway in the wind. Forests use shared tree models, so they stay fast.

v0.4

• Weapons: 16 melee weapons (knife to katana to sledgehammer) plus a pistol, a pump shotgun and a hunting rifle, which use their own ammo.
  • Weapons drop as Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic or Legendary, with better damage and speed at higher rarities.
  • Rarer drops are more likely far from your shop and from Brutes.
• Equipment: head (cap / bike helmet / riot helmet), body (leather / padded jacket, kevlar vest) and back (fanny pack up to military pack, for extra carry weight).
  • Armor reduces damage and the chance of bleeding. Gear shows on your character.
• Tougher enemies:
  • Ferals have more health, hit harder and see in a forward cone.
  • They hear noise from footsteps (sprinting is loud), fighting, chopping and especially gunshots, and go to investigate.
  • They hunt your last known position, groan to alert others, and some are fast sprinters.
  • Bites can make you bleed until you bandage.
  • Heavy hits stagger them.
• Crafting:
  • E on a tree gathers wood and E on a boulder gathers stone. An axe or a sledgehammer is faster and yields more.
  • Use the craft bench in the shop yard: nails, rope, bandages, first aid kits, toolkits, a stone axe, a nailed bat and a spiked club.
  • Shop furniture now costs materials plus a few caps.
• Houses: siding or brick walls, shingled roofs, porches, doors and chimneys.
  • Several rooms: the front door opens into a living room, with a row of rooms behind it — kitchen, bathroom and bedroom(s). Wide houses also get a study or second bedroom at the front.
  • Each room has its own floor (checkered linoleum, tiles, carpet, boards) and wallpaper or painted plaster. Interior walls have wide doorways, and drop to knee height with the rest of the cutaway when you're inside.
  • Furniture and loot per room:
    • Kitchen: counters with a sink, stove and wall cabinets; a fridge and a pantry cabinet to search; a table and chairs.
    • Bathroom: tub, toilet, mirror, and a bathroom cabinet with bandages, painkillers and antibiotics.
    • Bedroom: bed, nightstand and wardrobe, plus a dresser full of clothes.
    • Living room: sofa, armchair, TV, bookshelf, and a sideboard or desk.
    • Study: desk, bookshelves and a cabinet.
  • A gun locker sometimes replaces a dresser or cabinet far from town. Ruins have workbenches with tools and weapons.
  • Everything breaks: bullets and heavy melee (a sledgehammer, a fire axe) punch holes in walls and furniture, with chips and dust on each hit.
    • When a piece gives out, it bursts into lots of small chunks: siding into splintered slats, brick and concrete into rubble, plaster into crumbs, glass into shards. A ragged stump of wall is left behind.
    • Window glass shatters on the first shot and lets the bullet through. Door beams fall when the wall under them goes.
    • Toughness: glass breaks first, then furniture, plaster walls (about 3 pistol shots), wooden siding, brick and concrete.
    • Smashed pieces stay smashed (saved, and shared in co-op). Zombies path through the new holes.
• Cars: proper body shapes. The shop truck is a pickup with an open bed, and wheels spin and steer.
• Smoother animation: movement blends between idle, walking and attacking, and you turn smoothly.
• Visuals: anti-tiling textures with large-scale color variation, textured trees with leafy canopies (and some autumn trees), and cleaner intersections with crosswalks.