What changed

The map got big enough to be a problem

The terrain math moved into a native core the client and server share, which made it fast enough to draw all 25 km at once instead of a four-kilometer bubble with fog on the edge. The far north bends up as you look at it, so the volcano is visible from behind the trench you start at.

An erosion pass carves the mountain bands into ridges, gullies and scree. The volcano got a lava lake in its crater, coherent drainage down the flanks, and no more wall around the rim.

Grass you can lose someone in

Grass and flowers stream in around you out to 160 m, and placement changed from rolling for a tuft to coverage: a grassland is grass everywhere, carved back out by winding bare trails. The desert grew dry tussocks, river banks a fringe, the taiga a darker floor.

Wind crosses the field in fronts rather than a uniform shiver, blades bend away as you walk through them, and nothing pops in at full height any more.

The dead have bodies now

Until this build the horde was capsules that hopped. Every zombie is now an animated body: one instanced pass draws the crowd, the ten nearest get a real skinned rig. They crumple when they die, they are taller than you, and their eyes read red from a long way off.

Above them sits a command layer: the top five percent are elites, bigger and with a hitbox to match, and ordinary dead within 40 m follow one. Kill it and its pack scatters for four seconds. The rest stopped shoving into you and started clawing from arm's reach.

They also learned where they cannot go. The trench, cliffs past about 40°, and water over 40 cm are hard walls now, enforced on the movement step. A charge stops dead at the shoreline.

A bow, and a reason to learn range

Hold to draw; how long you hold sets the launch speed. After that it is gravity and drag, nothing hitscan, so 60 m is a guess you get better at — at full draw a guide shows where each shaft will land.

Bows and arrows are loot: a pair at every safe-spot plaza, rolls in ruin rooms. One augment fans extra arrows off a shot. In melee, a hit from inside someone's rear arc does double, and their screen says which way it came from.

A run is now a build

Lit safe spots and ruined compounds hold chests. Each offers three picks from a pool of twenty-six across runner, tank and archer; rare kills drop one, and a major waits at the volcano.

The numbers moved to make the picks matter: a zombie carries 50 health against a 40-damage hit, so the second swing costs you until your build fixes it. Stamina came with them.

Somewhere to come back to, if it's lit

Every safe spot has a lamp you can switch, and half start each match unlit. An unlit one grows a guard nest — bigger, meaner packs — and its chest stays shut until someone lights it. The flip is world-wide, so it is everyone's problem.

Death changed to match: you pick which visited safe spot to return to, and your build and spent chests roll back to what they were when you last stood there. Retreating to a lamp you lit an hour ago costs you the hour.

A finish line, and an order everyone can see

The world is no longer an endless sandbox. A match runs until someone delivers the artifact across the trench, which starts a ten-minute clock for everyone; when it runs out the world re-seeds into the next match. Ranking is by time, each player's counted from their own join, so joining late still lets you place.

Around it: a lobby on the main menu, eight seconds of spawn protection when you land, and a beacon on every carrier that pings the world every two seconds on a coarse grid — a direction, never a position. Scores carry across matches.

Night got dark enough to be a problem

Nightfall used to be a color change. It now runs a full grade: color drains toward blue, blacks crush, grain comes up, the moon dims and the fog thickens until the horizon you were navigating by is gone. Dawn hands it back, on the same clock for everyone.

Storm clouds cover about a fifth of the map and thicken northward. Under one the packs are denser and angrier, so the shadow on the ground is information — and the dial tells you when you have walked into it.

Menus that are actually menus

The placeholder screens became a real system: 48 settings across six tabs that save as you change them, rebinding with two slots per action, and full controller navigation. Godot binds no confirm button for a pad by default, so the old menu could be navigated but never used.

Accessibility came with it — interface scaling, high contrast, color-vision re-hueing, reduced motion, a brightness trim, and sound captions that name the direction a sound came from, which is the only useful kind in a game where the dead hunt by ear. The pause menu does not pause the world, and says so.

Every sound is a real recording now

The synthesized placeholders are gone, replaced by 42 public-domain recordings with random variants, proper buses with an underwater lowpass, looping ambience beds and biome wildlife. Footsteps pick their sound from the material underfoot.

Two of the new sounds are weapons: a yell and a whistle, both loud enough to pull a pack several hundred meters. Where you point that is up to you.

Downloads, on a tag

Pushing a version tag builds Windows, macOS and Linux and publishes them as a release. Nothing builds on an ordinary commit, which keeps the pipeline inside the free tier.