Updates 7-29-2026

Fixed and improved cigarette code and the nicotine effect. Focus gains are now properly capped, and smoking should much more easily get you to nicotine buzz and basically never get you to nicotine overdose unless you just keep lighting them.

Humans who zombify are no longer dissectable for human samples.

Flesh cocoons and slimes will no longer leave samples on death. Amalgamations are not intended to have samples, and if you want slime samples, there is a recipe to cook them down from slime globs.

Dormant zombies now look a bit more convincing, with random apparent damage to their corpses.

Added a new damage level descriptor for corpses, "mutilated". This is above "mangled" but below "pulped." Previously, corpses at damage level 4 were described as "pulped" even though no they were not.

Overkill is now a little less aggressive about applying damage to corpses with larger HP values.

When you do enough damage to pulp a corpse, the game is a little more generous with splashing gibs around, because this is funny.

Skinning a corpse removes only 5% of its weight and volume, not 15%.

Zombies were previously frequently coming back with barely any HP and extremely reduced speed, making them often trivial to re-kill. Now they bounce back much tougher, though damage to the corpse still makes them come back in worse shape.

Dormant zombies can spawn in smaller groups.

Removed the scrap trader NPC merchant. You might see an error message about this in existing worlds, but this can safely be ignored.

Teaching and being taught by NPCs now counts as brisk rather than active exercise. This means it is much less of a tax on kcal and weariness.

The amount of skill gained from a class is now determined by the social skill and intelligence of teacher and student, as well as the teacher's knowledge of the skill being taught. As always, learning from a class is capped by the studen't knowledge of the skill, so hit the books before you go to class.

Laptops now give off enough light to read by.

More properly fixed character rotation, so even that one stupid haircut should stop being improperly offset when you fall over.

Fire tiles are now more properly centered and line up with fire rings and other fire containers more nicely.

Mantises are no longer unstoppable death machines. Some of them have new descriptions, and their sizes and evolutions have been adjusted somewhat.

Setting up appliances (batteries, wiring, etc) now serves as a way to gain your first rank of electronics, as you're plugging things in and sorting out power requirements. A lot of this shouldn't be possible without skill or instruction (if you had a car battery, a solar panel, and a microwave, do you really think you could figure that out without breaking something or electrocuting yourself?) but for now it's fine.

Bathrooms now have a better chance to have bug spray in them. They can also spawn more pill bottles, and that pool now includes adderall and oxycodone. Yeehaw!

Lone wasp queens no longer spawn on radio towers in fall or winter. Hives can still spawn up there, but those are easier to spot at a distance.

There are now fewer binocular + survivor map specials atop radio towers.

@CN_Xuan submitted some revisions and fixes to the simplified Chinese translation.

@CN_Xuan added some updates to the simplified Chinese translation.

@Jodi submitted a fix to the way sounds are played that should prevent them from spamming and becoming overly loud when a lot of time passes quickly.