What changed

Clouds, haze and a colour grade for each band

The grey cloud bands are gone. The sky is blue with soft clouds, and every player sees the same clouds. Distant hills and the volcano fade into haze. Each band has its own colours, blending as you walk north. Zombie eyes, lamps and lava look the same as before, and nights are as dark.

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Groves, meadows and flower patches

Trees used to be small and evenly spread. Now broad oaks, birches and maples grow in groves with meadows between them, with shrubs and ferns along the edges. Flowers grow in patches of one colour, and where a patch is dense it replaces the grass.

Beta 7Beta 8

Timber houses, towers and camps

Safe spots were plain boxes. They're now timber houses on stone bases with thatch and shingle roofs. Watchtowers have a stone base, a railed deck and a roof, and the spawn camp has a canvas tent and a fire ring. Every chest is a wooden chest. Walls, stairs, doors and chests are where they were, so using them works the same.

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Each band has its own rocks

The grey stone slabs are gone. In their place: mossy outcrops in the lush band, sandstone in the desert, crags in the cold and dark bands, and basalt columns near the volcano. They block you the same way. Each band also has its own small detail, like reeds by water or burnt stumps in the dark band. Lava fields are now a black crust with glowing cracks.

Beta 7Beta 8

Headshots, ragdolls and fall deaths

Zombies were hard to hit. Blows and arrows now hit a zone a bit wider than the body, so a near miss counts. A headshot does 2x damage. The head hitbox follows the zombie's head and is a bit bigger than it. An arrow counts where it flies, and a swing counts where you aim, so a swing at the belly is a body blow. Headshots don't work on players yet.

A blow knocks a zombie back the way it went, and zombies you kill up close fall as ragdolls. A zombie that falls about 5 m or more dies, so they no longer pile up at the bottom of ravines.

New swings, bow zoom and a sound for each weapon

The branch thrusts like a spear: longer reach, narrower hit. The sword chains a left cut, a right cut and a thrust. You can now zoom (right mouse) while drawing the bow.

Each weapon has its own swing and hit sounds, with an extra layer on a headshot or a kill. The sword no longer clangs on a miss. The bow creaks as you draw, and you hear other players draw and shoot. Crossing the trench plays a drum going north and a calmer chord coming back.

Crows that give you away

Crows roost in flocks on dead trees, more of them further north. Get too close and they fly off cawing: about 5 m crouching, 11 m walking or 60 m if you yell. Zombies within 60 m (90 m at night) go to the roost to look, so a flush can also pull a pack off your trail. Everyone nearby sees the same flush, and the crows come back after two and a half minutes. Eagles and vultures circle overhead as scenery.

Last Breath works now

Last Breath used to fail: a zombie finished you before you could get up. Now zombies stop chasing a player who's down, and ignore you for 3 s after you get up. While down you can crawl slowly, and with Last Breath you press E to get up. Other players can still finish you.

Other players move smoothly

Other players used to move in small stop-start steps. They now move smoothly, and so do zombies owned by other players, which also no longer jump when a different player takes them over. Reconnecting puts you back where you left instead of at the spawn.

More safe spots, and camps in the snow

There are twice as many safe spots near the trench: 34 within 800 m instead of 16. The snowy cold band has about 19 abandoned camps, each with a medium chest and 8 arrows. By day smoke rises from some of them, so you can spot them from about 400 m. Arrows that land in snow are recovered more often.

Grass now grows up to the edge of the trench and down its walls. The floor stays bare.

Beta 7Beta 8

A rumour for 4 souls, and more arrows up north

For 4 souls the trader marks the nearest unopened medium or better chest within 1 km on your compass. If he knows of none, you don't pay. Traders now also stand in the dark band, and the further north a trader stands, the more arrows he has: up to 2.5 times as many as in the lush band.

Ropes carry you

You no longer hold W to ride a rope. A zipline carries you at about 16 m/s and throws you off the far end. Climb lines pull you up at 5 m/s. Climbing stamina is paid when you grab the rope, so you find out right away if you're too tired. Jump lets go early.

A cleaner HUD

The bottom left is now one row of icons: what's in your hands, then arrows, rope and souls. Wear shows only when a weapon is nearly worn out. Every key prompt uses the same key-cap, like "[E] Level up x2". Captions no longer print over the compare cards.

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The screen melts when a run starts

Pressing Play melts the menu down the screen in columns, like the wipe in Doom. It also plays between intro cards and when you die. With Reduced Motion on, it's a fade.

Twelve augments, no new keys

Rhythm: each melee hit within 2.5 seconds of the last raises your attack speed, up to four hits. Miss the window and the chain resets. Guarded Strike gives you armour for four seconds after a landed hit. Mending Blow heals you a little for every landed hit. Leaping Blow and Parting Shot add damage to a melee hit while you're airborne, and to an arrow shot while jumping backwards.

The bow gets three. Marking Shot lets an arrow mark (and slow) what it hits, at bow range. Splintering Shot deals a quarter of the arrow's damage to everything else within 2.5 m of the target, even when the arrow kills it. Returning Shaft brings back any arrow of yours that nobody picks up within ten seconds.

The nearest safe spot, on your compass

Wayfinding adds a small blue roof under the compass with the distance to the nearest safe spot. It fades out over the last ten metres. Tempered slows weapon wear: at one stack, one hit in five costs nothing. With Steady Hands, getting hit no longer interrupts opening a chest or raising an ally. Quick Raise gets a downed ally up sooner.

Every augment, on the site

The site used to show a picture of the augments sorted into three families that no longer exist. Now there's a page of its own, built from the game's own augment table: all sixty-six in eight groups, with icon, value per stack, rarity, where it drops, what it needs and what it rules out. On a phone each row becomes a card.

Blocks you can hear, and a warning before a shield breaks

Blocking now has feedback. Each shield has its own block sound, your hands jolt, the camera kicks, and a shield breaking has its own sound. When a block leaves your shield one block from breaking, it creaks and the HUD puts an amber warning around the count. Repairing the shield resets the warning.

I did the same for the twelve new augments. Rhythm plays a rising note per hit and a drop when the chain resets. Guarded Strike lays a steel pattern over the health bar while it lasts. Mending Blow pulses the bar only when it actually healed you. A Leaping Blow or Parting Shot that gets its bonus lands with a low thump and a bigger camera kick. Tempered flashes the wear count and chimes quietly when a hit is free. Targets hit by Splintering Shot flinch in a puff of dust, and a Returning Shaft arrow flies back to you instead of vanishing.

Twelve seconds to get you up

Take a killing hit with an ally nearby and you go down instead of dying: 1 hp, empty hands, and clearly not a corpse. Anyone with Raise the Fallen can hold E over you for four seconds to get you up at a third of your health, or at full health with Whole Again. Another hit while you're down kills you.

Alone, nothing changes. Going down with nobody to raise you would just be a slower death.

Twenty augments in five chains

Some augments now unlock their own follow-ups. Ward gives you extra hit points on top of your health that renew every two minutes. Its follow-ups make the first hit free whatever its size, stop knockback, or blow the ward out into everything nearby when it breaks. Marked gives a chance to slow whoever hits you. Mending makes your whistle heal allies around you and hurt everyone else.

Follow-ups apply to the effect, whoever caused it: a ward an ally gives you uses your own ward augments, and damage over time you put on an enemy scales with your own healing. Some augments also lock others out, so the order you pick in matters.

A ward bar and status timers

A ward shows as a pale strip on top of the health bar. It's a different shape rather than a different colour, so it's easy to read in any light. Every timed effect on you stacks above your gear: healing, damage over time, slows, how many of your marks are active, and your shout cooldown.

Two sticks aren't the same stick

Every weapon now has rolled stats: tier, damage, reach, and how many hits before it breaks. Look at one on the ground and the prompt compares it with what you're holding. The trader sells his own weapons and repairs yours. When you die you drop the exact weapon you had, for whoever gets there first.

Bridges that work, and a run you can leave

Bridges now rest on the two edges of a gorge instead of its bottom, with a deck flat enough to walk. Grass grows up to the rock line and stands tall in forests. You spawn at a camp just south of the trench. And if you close the game, you can rejoin the same match and carry on.

Fifty metres of rope, and the slope decides what it is

Put a rope coil on your bow and shoot it. Where the hook catches, a straight line runs from a stake at your feet to that point. It stays for the rest of the match and anyone can use it.

If the line is no steeper than the steepest slope you can walk, it's a zipline: gravity pulls you along. If it's steeper, it's a climbing line: climbing up costs stamina, sliding down is free. Holding on to a zipline costs almost nothing, and pulling yourself along costs a little but works even uphill. Sprint into a zipline and you keep your speed.

The hook can catch anything: rock, tree, wall. The line has to be between 6 and about 50 m long and can't pass through the ground or a building. While you aim, a guide shows the arc and the line it would leave, green if it works and red if not, with the reason under the crosshair. A failed shot gives the coil back, so you only use up a coil when it works.

Coils come from three places. A watchtower's top has one about one time in three. One chest in five has one on top of its cards, at the same odds everywhere. The trader sells them for eight souls each, and drops them if you rob him. You can carry three.

Three times as many, with a chest at each

Watchtowers were rare because most of the spots picked for them were on slopes and got thrown out. Now the game scores 25 spots per area on view, height over the surroundings and room for a stair, and builds the best one. That's about one tower per half square kilometre, and more than twice that just north of the trench.

The crate at the foot is now a real chest. The top still has arrows, a bow about one time in five and a rope coil about one time in three, but I halved the arrows so more towers don't mean more ammo.

A sword, and two very different shields

The sword replaces the stick. It never breaks, swings with the same timing, reaches a bit further and hits over 50% harder. Picking one up throws your stick away, and you can't drop the sword yet.

Shields go in your off hand and work with the sword, a stick or an empty hand. They're slung out of the way while the bow is out. Hold right mouse to block.

The buckler comes up in an eighth of a second, costs almost nothing to hold and covers a narrow arc, but breaks after five blocks. The kite shield takes a third of a second, covers much more, slows you to about half speed and empties your stamina in about six seconds, but never breaks. When your stamina runs out, your guard drops until it recovers.

A shield only blocks melee. A hit from the front costs stamina instead of health; from behind it lands in full. Arrows go through shields on purpose until shields get proper hitboxes. Other players see your weapon, your shield and when you're blocking.

There's also a longbow. It takes a third longer to draw and you can barely walk while drawing, but its arrows fly a quarter faster and flatter and hit a third harder. You carry one bow, so picking up the other swaps them. Both bows are now held at an angle so you can see the string.

Players move like people, and you can read it

Other players' animations used to be guessed from their position, so strafing looked like turning, and landings, slides and swings showed late or not at all. Now each player sends their actual pose, stance, speed and facing, so you see what they're really doing.

Below a third of your health you limp, for everyone watching, until you've healed well above it. Crouch plus sprint is a crouch-run: fast, quiet and free of stamina. A fall follows the direction of the hit that caused it, and a body you find already dead stays in its final pose.

Zombies use the same animation library: walk, run, two attacks, two hit reactions and four ways to die. A pack that locks on to you now visibly changes stance into a hunt. It used to scream instead, but the scream almost never played. Only captains roar, and only when they're leading a pack.

I made the world quieter so these stand out. Wolf howls are minutes apart and only play near a ruin. Zombies groan as a group instead of forty separate voices. Captains talk less.

No barrels or crates, and safe spots right after the trench

Every barrel and crate is gone. Barrels don't fit the period, and crates looked like chests you couldn't open. In their place: a clay urn of arrows at signposts, firewood at camps, hay and planks spilling from wrecked carts. Nothing moved, only the props changed. The augment chest is now the only chest-shaped thing in the world.

Safe spots now start right after the trench. The first row used to be held a fixed distance back, which left a gap up to 300 m deep, and a third to half of that row was never built. Now the row follows the trench's curve, and a safe spot that would land too close is moved to the edge instead of deleted. You also spawn a few steps behind the trench, with less random spread.

The steepest slope you can walk went from 45 to 55 degrees, and climbing near the limit slows you by about a quarter instead of nearly half. River gorge walls are now climbable. Canyon walls and trench walls still aren't.

No more boxes on the HUD

The HUD used to be a dozen rounded boxes, one per readout. They're gone. Backgrounds now fade out from the screen edge, lines are thin engraved strokes, bars look cut into metal, and text has an outline instead of a dark box behind it.

Your own stats use warm colours and world information uses cold ones. The health bar changes brightness as well as colour, so it stays readable on snow at noon and on grass at midnight.

Everything about you is in one column in the bottom-left: what you carry, your weapon and its wear, stamina, health and experience, with status rows stacking above. Your build and coordinates sit bottom-right. Moving the NORTH label into the compass freed the top-right corner for the noise indicator.

The trader can be anywhere

Trader locations are worked out from the map itself, so every player gets the same answer. But they could only appear within 2 km of the centre line, so if you crossed the early band far to the east there was nothing to find. That limit is gone: the band now spans the whole width of the map.

His stock (arrows, sticks, a bow or two) is rolled from where he stands and the world seed, so it's fixed for the whole match, different at each trader and the same for every player.

He also sells one augment for 24 souls. Everyone who finds the same trader sees the same card, so two players meeting there have to decide who gets it. Rob him and his goods spill on the ground, but the augment doesn't.

Two more things to vote on

The map vote gained two pairs: how many zombies and how long nights last. That doubles the pool, so the half you're shown actually changes between matches.

Twenty-two world settings that used to be hardcoded (towers along the trench, how much tougher zombies get going north, day length, chest odds) are now part of each world's recipe. That's what let two of them onto the vote.

A shorter world, with rewards for going north again

A run is now 5 km long instead of 25. But one setting still assumed 25 km, so in v0.4.0 every spot in the world counted as the first band: no better chest odds going north, no big chests, no matched sets, and northern captains as weak as the ones at the trench. That's fixed. The odds climb band by band, the big chests are back near the volcano, and the north is harder again.

Settings that describe a share of the journey (band sizes, mountain ranges, rivers, the trader's band) are now fractions of the run. Spacing between safe spots, ruins, bridges and signs stays in metres, so a longer world gets more of them.

The land changed too. The trench is shallower and wider, easy to see over and cross. Rivers are now narrow and deep, with cliffs for banks four times out of five. The trench is a line you step over; rivers are what you route around.

Traders are also about three times as common in the early band.

Not every chest is worth the walk

Chests now come in three sizes, holding one, three or five cards. The size depends on the spot, so it's the same for everyone, and each size looks different. Most ruins have small chests, safe spots have three-card ones, and ruins in the last 5 km before the volcano have five.

The augments that define a run (an extra arrow per shot, Reveal, Magnetic Arrows, the big armour picks) never come from small chests. Rare odds also climb going north: about 13% of cards are rare at the trench and 41% near the volcano.

Chests and level-ups now draw from different pools. Chests give gear and utility: a bigger quiver, arrow recovery, Magnetic Arrows, Reveal, faster hands. Level-ups from kills give combat: damage, swing speed, crits, reach, knockback. Ten augments are in both.

Cards now show exactly what they'll do, like +45 hp or +1 arrow per shot, worked out for your current build with bonuses and caps included. A maxed-out augment says so. Below that: your stacks now and after, the rarity, and which pool it comes from.

Matched sets near the volcano

Safe spots in the volcanic band don't offer a choice. They give three linked augments from one family, all or nothing. The family depends on the place, not your build, so you can plan a route to the one you want.

That's meant for late in a long match: 20 km is over an hour on foot.

Trees stop arrows

Arrows used to fly through trees, walls, rocks, ruins and bridge decks. Now they stop, for everyone. Cover works. An arrow stuck in a tree can be picked up.

Piercing Shot is a rare chest augment: each stack lets an arrow pass through one more body, up to three. Each pass costs a fifth of the damage and nearly a third of the speed, so it's for zombies in a line, not raw damage.

A piercing arrow also goes through one thin tree per stack (a sapling, not an oak), counted separately from bodies. The aim guide shows this too.

Four augments fixed, one added

Multishot used to cost one arrow no matter how many it fired, and you could pick them all up, so it made ammo. Now each arrow costs one, limited by what's in your quiver.

Arrow Recovery: missed arrows now survive a quarter of the time instead of half. One stack doubles that, and a full archer build still gets back nine in ten.

Jump Height said +10% per stack but gave 21% more height. It's 6% now. Melee Reach is halved and capped at 1.5× base, the most the server accepts, so extra stacks no longer buy hits that get rejected. Sprint Speed is capped at five stacks (1.9× base, about 10.8 m/s). Before, eight stacks got you 20 m/s.

New: Pickup Distance, a common augment worth 0.6 m more pickup and interact reach per stack, up to four. The server uses it too, so it works online.

Auto-run and zoom

Auto-run (R, or click the left stick) walks for you, so you can talk on the long walk north. It only walks, never sprints, and stops the moment you do almost anything else: step back, press R, jump, crouch, slide, attack, draw, reach water, get hit or die. It keeps going with a menu open, so you can type in chat.

Zoom (hold right mouse or left trigger) narrows the view to 45° and lowers mouse sensitivity to match. It shows nothing extra: no markers, no names. You can't sprint while zoomed and you walk at a little over half speed. Hold or toggle is a setting, and Reduced Motion makes it instant.

I also fixed endless sprint. Stamina used to stop draining and start refilling in the air, so bunny-hopping kept you sprinting forever. Sprinting in the air now costs the same as on the ground.

More watchtowers, all with a view

Watchtowers are the only thing you can climb, and the reward is the view. There's no map or marker.

There are many more. World-wide, one per 4 km² instead of one per 20. Along the trench, one per 1.5 km² instead of one per 6, thinning out a couple of kilometres north. From the south edge you can spot the next one and plan a route.

A tower is only built where it looks down over the land around it out to about 400 m, and never in a hollow. Four spots in five fail that test.

Towers near the trench have a third of the arrows they used to, and a bow on top is now rare instead of a coin flip. Across the world, the number of arrows lying around changed by under 5%.

See who's spotted you, and who's in charge

Zombie eyes are now bright gold when calm and red once they've spotted you, visible across a dark meadow. They used to be too dim to see at night. The eyes also grow with distance, so they stay visible far away.

Captains now have their own model and colour instead of being a bigger ordinary zombie, so you can pick one out of a pack.

The first safe spot is closer to the trench

Safe spots within 400 m of the trench used to be removed, which deleted the whole first row. The limit is now 200 m, and on the current map the nearest safe spot is 306 m out.

The Old Road is gone. It ran along the trench for the whole width of the world, had nothing on it and led nowhere. Trails now run down to the trench edge toward the bridges instead.

Crickets stop, so they mean something

Crickets used to play all night in the green south, so the nightfall sound started and ended over them. Now nights have wind and the odd owl, and the nightfall sound plays around dusk itself. Desert and cold bands already worked this way.

Daytime birdsong was a 30-second loop you'd learn fast. Now single calls play every 25 to 70 seconds from random directions and pitches.

Cliffs are cliffs, and sprint has weight

Before this release you could walk up almost any slope, and jump up the rest. Now ground up to about 45° is walkable: you can stand, jump and slide on it, and walking uphill slows you. Anything steeper is not ground: no footing, no jumping, no crouching, and you slide down it, faster the steeper it is. Walls are walls.

Hitting a steep face from the air counts as a landing, but only the part of the fall going into the rock hurts, so a glancing hit hurts less. A long slide that ends on flat ground only does the damage of the slide itself.

Sprint used to be forward-only, with the strafe keys turning you and the mouse swinging a separate camera. Now the mouse turns your view, in third person as in first, and sprint goes in whatever direction you press relative to it. Hold Back and Sprint and you turn and run toward the camera. Movement has weight: a 90° turn is a banked stride, and a full reversal takes about two-thirds of a second and costs speed. Other players see you facing the way you run.

Arrows stay where they land

Arrows now stick where they hit (ground, wall or body) and stay for six minutes. Walk over one to pick it up: no key, no prompt. A +1 arrow line appears under the compass.

Arrows in a zombie drop at its feet when it dies. A killed player's quiver spills where they fell. Half of clean misses survive, and Arrow Recovery raises that to nine in ten.

Arrows on the ground are shared, so anyone can pick up anyone's. Arrows can now hit players up to 200 m away. Backstabs are still melee only.

Six new places to find arrows

Six new finds hold arrows, each easy to spot from a distance: a barrel of arrows by a trail signpost, a wrecked cart, a fallen archer by the road (more likely just north of a trench bridge), a hunter's camp near an unlit safe spot, inside its guard nest, an archery range with arrows still in the targets, and a watchtower with arrows at the top of its stair.

There are fewer arrows lying around than before, since arrows now come back. A safe spot's armory still always has a bow and 4 to 20 arrows.

Kills pay

Every zombie you kill gives one soul, plus experience by type: 10 for a shambler, up to 40 for a stalker, 100 for a captain. Experience fills a bar under your health, and a full bar gives you an augment pick.

You can spend a pick anywhere: press interact with nothing in front of you and the same three-card picker opens. You don't need to go back to a safe spot.

Killing a player gives you all their unspent souls. Dying loses yours, and experience and unspent picks roll back to the last safe spot you visited, like your build. Zombies no longer drop random augments. The volcano still gives one big pick.

Souls can't be spent yet. A trader will take them later. For now they're a reason for someone to hunt you.

See what you picked up

Picking things up used to be silent. Now a small copy of the item flies into a log under the compass and becomes a line like +1 arrow, counting up to +3 arrows if you grab three within 1.5 seconds. Up to four lines show, then fade.

Experience flies to the bar without a number. Reduced Motion skips the animation.

Safe spots are real places now

The windowless shed is gone. Each safe spot uses one of four layouts (hamlet, watch, shrine or waystation) on terraced ground with paths leading in.

Each has four buildings you can tell apart from 40 m: a light house with the lamp, an armory that always has a bow and 4 to 20 arrows, a chest house with the augment chest, and a landmark (a watchtower, shrine, ruined tower, or an 11 m mill at hamlets). You can walk into all of them.

The yard has barrels, hay, planks, a tent and a cart, but never a crate, so the chest is the only chest-shaped thing there. A chest you can't open now tells you why, and so does an arrow pile when your quiver is full.

Reveal and Magnetic Arrows

There are 28 augments now. Both new ones are about information.

Reveal shows pickups within about 60 m (bows, arrow piles, arrows, stick sources) as icons in a row above the compass, and each stack adds range. Other players show as hollow squares on the compass, updated every two seconds and rounded to 25 m. It gives a direction and a rough distance, never a map position.

Magnetic Arrows bends an arrow in flight toward a target near its path, in a cone that narrows to nothing at 60 m. It only steers sideways, so drop and speed don't change. Zombies pull harder than players, players with spawn protection don't pull at all, and the aim guide shows the bend.

Shoot one and it comes looking

A hit that doesn't kill now tells the zombie roughly where it came from, give or take ten metres. It goes and searches that spot for thirty seconds, so picking at a pack from 150 m isn't safe anymore. They walk and search rather than charge. Inside a lit safe spot you can't be heard, shots included.

I also fixed a bug where your game showed some zombies as the slowest type (shambler) while the server was running them as runners or captains, which moved, heard and hit much harder. Every screen now matches the server.

Trees are bigger

Normal trees now range from full size to nearly double, and about one in sixteen is a sapling. Riverbank trees use the same sizes, so banks aren't lined with tiny trees. Old-growth giants have a size cap per species: broadleaf trees can reach five times normal, and desert plants stay normal size.

There are 20 tree types now, with see-through leaf canopies instead of solid blobs. The ground under dense forest turns to leaf litter with thinner grass, and paths show on it. Ground textures can be swapped, which is how I redid the whole palette.

Narrator, captains, voice and text chat

A narrator tells the story of those who went north. She speaks rarely, and most of her 26 lines play once ever. Captains shout orders like a drill officer, and when you kill one, it says something clear-headed. That's the only place the story is spoken out loud.

Proximity voice is live: 40 m, 20 m crouched, 240 m when you yell, clear for about half that distance and muffled beyond. Talking makes noise like anything else, and the ring on the ground follows your voice level.

Text chat makes no noise. Local chat reaches 30 m, and world chat opens only in the endgame, only for players who've finished.

There's music now, but it plays rarely: only on events, at least four minutes apart, for at most 12% of a match. It stops when a zombie starts chasing you.

The first thirty seconds

Starting used to be a black screen, then the world. Now a narrated slideshow of in-game stills plays while the world loads, with a loading screen after it if needed. The camera starts high up, looking at the volcano, waits until the ground under you exists, then flies down behind your shoulder and into first person. Any key speeds it up.

This also fixed falling through the world before it loaded, which spawned you at the wrong height.

First person now shows a floating weapon instead of arms. The bow is held out to the right and tilted, and its limbs and string bend as you draw. Your body still casts a shadow. The stick, bow and arrows are all modelled from scratch.

A podium, and a vote on the next map

When the endgame timer runs out, the world freezes and a 60-second podium shows the finishing order, world chat, and a vote on eight changes for the next match: longer or shorter map, more or fewer safe spots, more or fewer ruins, wider or narrower rivers. You get two votes, the two winners can't be opposites, and all of them are limited so the map stays playable. Then the next match starts.

Play now drops you into the current match instead of a lobby. Zombies are solid and stop at arm's length instead of walking through you. Combat has hit markers, a double marker for crits and backstabs, and a skull for kills with a streak count.

If you played Beta 1, you didn't see the real game

The Beta 1 download was built with a filter that dropped data files the game needs. It shipped with no trees, ruins or props, default terrain, no voice lines, and capsules instead of zombie models, and still ran. That's fixed, and I checked it on the actual download.

A room with one of everything

The playground now has a reference room with every pickup labelled, all six new arrow finds, and a gallery of all 74 models. It's where I check changes before they go into the world.

This is a developer tool, not part of a run. You can only reach it from the playground.

The whole map, visible

The terrain code moved into a native core shared by client and server, fast enough to draw all 25 km instead of a 4 km area with fog at the edge. The far north curves up into view, so you can see the volcano from the trench.

Erosion carves the mountains into ridges, gullies and scree. The volcano has a lava lake, drainage down its sides, and no more wall around the rim.

Grass you can lose someone in

Grass and flowers fill in around you out to 160 m. Grasslands are fully covered, with winding bare trails through them. Deserts have dry tufts, riverbanks a fringe of grass, and the taiga a darker floor.

Wind moves across the grass in waves, blades bend as you walk through, and nothing pops in at full height.

Zombies have bodies now

Zombies used to be hopping capsules. Now they're animated: the crowd is drawn in one pass and the ten nearest get full rigs. They crumple when they die, they're taller than you, and their red eyes show from far away.

The top 5% are elites: bigger, with hitboxes to match, and ordinary zombies within 40 m follow one. Kill it and its pack scatters for four seconds. Zombies also stopped shoving into you and attack from arm's length.

They can't cross the trench, cliffs steeper than about 40°, or water deeper than 40 cm. A charge stops at the shore.

A bow worth learning

Hold to draw; the longer you hold, the faster the arrow. Arrows follow gravity and drag, so a 60 m shot takes practice. At full draw a guide shows where it'll land.

Bows and arrows are found at safe spots and in ruins. One augment fires extra arrows in a fan. In melee, a hit from behind does double damage, and the victim's screen shows which way it came from.

Your run is a build

Lit safe spots and ruins have chests. Each offers three picks from 26 augments across runner, tank and archer. Rare kills drop one, and a big one waits at the volcano.

Zombies now have 50 health against a 40-damage hit, so the second hit matters until your build fixes that. I added stamina too.

Somewhere to come back to, if it's lit

Every safe spot has a lamp, and half start each match unlit. An unlit one spawns a guard nest with bigger packs, and its chest stays locked until someone lights it. Lighting counts for the whole world, so it affects everyone.

When you die, you choose which visited safe spot to respawn at, and your build and opened chests roll back to when you were last there. Going back to a lamp from an hour ago costs you that hour.

Matches end, and everyone is ranked

The world is no longer endless. A match runs until someone carries the artifact back across the trench, which starts a ten-minute timer for everyone. Then the world regenerates for the next match. Ranking is by time since each player joined, so late joiners can still place well.

Also: a lobby in the main menu, eight seconds of spawn protection, and a beacon on the artifact carrier that shows their direction (never their position) every two seconds. Scores carry over between matches.

Night is actually dark

Night used to be a colour change. Now colours drain to blue, blacks deepen, grain comes up, the moon dims and fog thickens until you lose the horizon. Everyone shares the same clock.

Storm clouds cover about a fifth of the map, more further north. Under one, packs are bigger and more aggressive, and the dial shows when you're under one.

Real menus

The placeholder screens became real menus: 48 settings in six tabs that save as you change them, two key slots per action, and full controller support. The old menu had no confirm button on a controller, so you could move around it but never select anything.

Accessibility options: UI scaling, high contrast, colour-blind modes, reduced motion, brightness, and sound captions that show which direction a sound came from, which matters when zombies hunt by sound. The pause menu doesn't pause the game, and says so.

Real recorded sounds

I replaced the synthesized placeholders with 42 public-domain recordings with variations, an underwater filter, looping ambience and wildlife per biome. Footsteps match the ground.

Two sounds are weapons: a yell and a whistle, loud enough to pull a pack from several hundred metres.

Downloads

Tagging a version now builds Windows, macOS and Linux and publishes them as a release. Ordinary commits build nothing, which keeps it free.