ZED ZONE

• Roads and sidewalks gained detail: oil stains, asphalt patches and cracks, with fallen leaves collecting under street trees. • Five new building types in towns: grocery store, pharmacy, diner & bar, motel and apartment block, each with its own storefront and sign; you will no longer run into three pharmacies in a row on the same street. • Diner interiors completely rebuilt: booths, a bar counter, a jukebox, a prep station and a kitchen grill, and the floor is now diner checkerboard tile — no longer a room with furniture scattered at random. • Rooftops gained vents, skylights and other props. • Streets gained fire hydrants, bollards, benches, bus stops, traffic cones and wrecked cars; wrecks now show up along the edges of main roads and on residential driveways. • Parking lots reworked: stall lines, wheel stops, oil stains, shopping carts and cart corrals, with a separate ramp at the entrance. • Street lamps, traffic lights and street trees no longer spawn in the middle of the road or flush against buildings: lamps are now spaced evenly along asphalt curbs only, and alleys and yard paths no longer grow street lamps. • Houses no longer get large random puddles inside. • All of the town changes above only apply to towns that have not been explored yet; towns you have already visited will not change. ⚡ Performance: Saving, Loading and Entering Towns • Saving and loading have been optimized across the board; the size and the time cost of writing town chunks to disk both dropped sharply. • Less stutter when you drive or walk into a new town: the first save of a chunk no longer shares a frame with terrain generation, and the cost of unloading old chunks is spread out as well. • Monster spawning and NPC decision-making in towns now run spread across frames, so the first seconds in town are no longer computed all at once. 💾 Save Safety • Save integrity hardened: a backup that was not written completely is no longer treated as a usable backup; restoring a save now writes to a temporary directory first and swaps it in as a whole, so a failure halfway through cannot damage your live save. • Fixed the game mistaking a save file locked by antivirus software for a corrupted one and silently falling back to the previous backup — it now retries the read, and a main save that still cannot be read is kept as an untouched copy. • Deleting a save now also clears the backup of that slot, instead of leaving a leftover directory taking up disk space. • Every slot on the save and load screens now shows the save time and the in-game day, autosave slots included. 🧟 Zombie Art Pass • All common zombies have been brightened: their sprites used to average only half the brightness of the ground and read as a dark blob at a distance; they now sit in the same brightness band as human characters and are easy to pick out on dirt, grass and snow. • 40 zombie sheets were re-quantized and stripped of dead black: each one is down to 64 colours or fewer, and the darkest areas are no longer a flat black smear — texture, clothing and blood all read clearly. Hue and saturation were not shifted by a single byte, so the pixel-art colour relationships are fully preserved. • Zombie animations adjusted and polished. 🔊 Audio • Fixed inaccurate distance falloff on sound effects: attenuation ranges used to vary by as much as 83 times and mixed different falloff curves, so in a single fight several sounds contradicted each other about how far away they were; everything now uses one unified set of falloff profiles. • Firing a gun indoors or underground now produces an echo. • Fixed the alarm sound never stopping after a Screamer has screamed. • Fixed engine and tire sounds disappearing permanently after a vehicle leaves the screen. • Fixed footstep sounds disappearing while a character is running. • Reduced how often chickens call out and how far the sound carries. 🔫 Weapons & Armor • The stat lines in ranged weapon tooltips now mark the bonus or penalty each attachment contributes, for example “Damage : 60 (attachments +50%)”. • Attachment tooltips now show special effects such as laser, thermal imaging, scope magnification and night vision. • Fixed every value in the tooltip being marked red on a gun with no attachments. • Fixed sights that only change the field of view showing no change in the description values once attached. • Fixed attachments that improve accuracy being marked red in the description. • Melee weapons, bows and crossbows can now knock off enemy helmets and armor as well. • Fixed headshots on helmeted zombies dealing almost no damage. • Fixed head damage still being reduced after the player takes off a ballistic helmet. • Zombie melee damage has been increased — tanking a crowd of zombies head-on is far more dangerous than it used to be. 🔨 Crafting & Inventory • Crafting now consumes the materials in your backpack first and only reaches into nearby storage containers last: no more “I had it on me, but it used the one stored in the crate”. • Ingredients that have to be taken from nearby storage containers are highlighted on a yellow background in the recipe details, so you know before you start whether this craft will dip into your crates. • Fire hydrants can now be searched for raw water. • Letters can be disassembled into scrap cardboard. • Fixed the carry weight value not refreshing immediately after an item is consumed or dropped. 🌍 World & Survival • When you start a new game, a large area around the spawn point no longer generates armed looters and bandits. • Overpowered special infected no longer show up around the spawn area in the early game: room triggers, door-breach alarms and spore nests used to bypass the evolution threshold and release them ahead of time, and running into one right at the start has now been plugged. • A vehicle wreck landing on the exterior wall of a house now punches a hole in it — a car driven into a wall really does break through, instead of awkwardly sitting on top of it. • Tent canopies no longer completely hide the characters inside. • Mechs and spider robots now stamp deeper footprints into snow. • Torches, campfires, furnaces and characters who are on fire now melt the snow around them. • Corpses that have been looted now show a “Searched” marker, so you no longer have to go through a field of bodies twice. • Refrigerators no longer stop preserving food once you leave your base; food inside crates and backpacks kept in a fridge is now preserved properly as well. • During hospital treatment, a character who cannot reach the bed will rest where they are instead of getting stuck in the doorway. • While aiming with CAS, the direction keys cycle through every enemy in view, and the selected target gets a bright outline highlight. 🔧 Other Fixes • Fixed the game sometimes ending up silently paused right after a new game is started. • Fixed straight-line and rectangular artifacts appearing on rooftops. • Fixed friendly NPCs and teammates standing still and doing nothing. • Fixed monsters having no animation after leaving the screen and coming back. • Fixed the mechanical legs not showing up on spider robot wrecks. • Fixed the doctor added to a trading camp in an older save moving to a different spot on every load. Feedback If you encounter any issues during gameplay, you can report them through the built-in feedback center, Discord or by email. For localization or translation-related issues, please use the in-game feedback center or contact the developer directly by email. Or perhaps you would like to contribute to language localization. Please feel free to provide feedback via our Discord or email. Youtube Channel And Devlogs Developer Twitter And Devlogs Join our Discord Developer Email: cheshendog@gmail.com Thank you for the feedback and support.ːcozybethesdaː