Changelog: May 10 - August 3, 2026

Cold Response Changelog: May 18 - August 3, 2026

Yeah, so. Last changelog was May 18. Almost three months of radio silence, and that one is on me, but the work never stopped: over 300 commits on the game plus a pile of engine-level work. This is everything worth your time, grouped by system so you do not have to read about the same bug five times. Short version: engine upgraded to Unreal 5.8.1, NPCs got real eyes and real grudges, drones got a mission planner, vehicles got fixed for real this time, the terrain remembers where you drive, and both your client and our servers run a lot better than they did in May.

Unreal Engine 5.8.1

• The whole game moved from Unreal Engine 5.7.4 to 5.8.1, client and servers both. NVIDIA DLSS upgraded to 4.5 while we were at it.

• Nanite is now disabled on the main map. Honest reason: it ran badly on older cards. If you are on older hardware you should see better framerates.

• We caught and fixed the 5.8 regressions fast: the dirtbike massively desyncing in multiplayer (the 5.8 physics replication rewrite diverges without bound in our setup, reverted to the mode that syncs perfectly), a 2 Hz jitter on every driven vehicle as seen by other players, and the bike suspension feeling wrong (nose-diving on throttle, wheels clipping into the ground, roll wobble).

• Known issue: AMD FSR is temporarily unavailable. AMD has not shipped a UE 5.8 compatible plugin yet, and it comes back the moment they do. DLSS, DLAA and NIS are unaffected.

• Game updates on Steam are now much smaller. We aligned our packaging with how Steam actually does delta patches, so a small fix no longer makes you re-download huge chunks.

Actual Unreal Engine bugs we fixed

We run a custom engine build, and this period we fixed several engine bugs at the source instead of working around them:

• Server crash when driving across a world streaming boundary. The vehicle suspension kept a dangling reference to ground that streamed out under the wheels. This crashed a live server on July 30 and was root-caused and fixed the same day.

• A 5.8 regression where standing on a moving vehicle or platform shoved it around underneath you (your collision fought the platform every tick), and characters could keep standing on a floor that no longer exists. Two broken casts in the engine's character movement code, both fixed.

• Server boot spent over 5 minutes frozen in physics setup: draining the physics queue for our whole 400 km2 world reallocated the queue once per entry. Around 316 seconds of dead air, now near instant.

• Scopes, attachments and riders occasionally showing up detached or floating in the wrong place for other players. Attachment state could arrive in an order the engine silently ignored. Same bug class Epic themselves hit in Fortnite. Fixed at engine level.

• Unlocked the dedicated server thread cap: Unreal hardcodes dedicated servers to 4 worker threads, which makes sense for Epic's rented server fleets and zero sense for ours. Our servers now use all the cores in the machine.

• A landscape subsystem was polling a GPU that does not exist on a headless server, forever. Another 5 minute boot hang plus thousands of pointless component ticks every frame. Fixed.

What this means for you: server restarts went from "go make coffee" to seconds, and busy servers have far more headroom for AI and physics.

Graphics and display

• The graphics menu got rebuilt in May: resolution list from your monitor's actual supported modes, a refresh rate picker, aspect ratio override with letterboxing, VSync as rate modes (every frame, half, third, quarter) with proper frame pacing, and a 3D resolution slider that shows real pixel dimensions.

• Dynamic resolution scaling with a target FPS picker, and it can also supersample above 100% when your GPU has headroom.

• DLSS Frame Generation, NVIDIA Reflex, NIS, and AMD FSR 4 support added (FSR temporarily out, see the 5.8 note above). The upscaler list is hardware-gated so you only see what your card can do. Also we shipped the missing DLSS binaries, so DLSS actually works now.

• The FOV slider now actually applies. It was sitting in the menu wired to nothing. ADS, scopes and vehicles keep their authored values.

• Display changes apply with a 10 second auto-revert dialog, so a bad monitor mode cannot lock you out of the game.

• Sharper image overall: we tuned the anti-aliasing to stop smearing fine detail.

• Scope picture-in-picture rendering raised to full screen height resolution. Magnified optics are dramatically sharper.

• Item icons got a rendering overhaul, and icons are now per-instance: your inventory shows YOUR gun with its actual attachments, not a stock photo.

Weapons and combat

• Weapon Optics V3: scopes now run on real optics math instead of a faked projection. Objective diameter, magnification, eye relief and exit pupil drive the picture. Move your eye off axis (recoil, leaning, breathing) and the sight picture darkens and shifts like real glass, high magnification pinches to a pinhole when your eye is out of position, and there is subtle lens distortion and chromatic fringing at the edges. First and second focal plane reticles supported.

• FixedScope fixes along the wayzoom no longer gets stuck at no zoom, the ACOG got its field of view and exit pupil corrected, and reticles no longer glow in the dark.

• Body armor rework: rounds your plate stops now deal blunt trauma and dump heavy shock instead of doing literally zero. Two rapid stopped rifle rounds can knock you out. Armor keeps you alive, not on your feet. Plate ratings were also tuned so hot intermediate rounds penetrate the standard carrier up close.

• Armor penetration rebalance: a round that goes through your vest previously dealt almost no damage because of a broken formula. Penetrating hits now hurt like they should.

• Grenades are in: throwable grenades, with sockets on body armor so you carry them visibly on your rig. Grenades, landmines and claymores all work reliably in multiplayer now.

• Magazines can be topped up round by round from loose ammo in your bags, caliber matched, cancelable mid-way, with a live progress pulse on the grid slot.

• The reload sequence was rebuilt to be network-safe. The bug where a reload could leave you holding nothing is gone.

• Weapon dismantling: with a toolbox in your bag, dismantle a weapon from the context menu and strip all its attachments back into your inventory.

• Other players now see and hear your weapon racking and reloads. NPC racking never reached any client before, now it does, so listen for it.

• AddedNew gear across the periodM4A1 bayonet, STANAG 60 and 100 round mags, 8 round shotgun mag, new buttstocks for most rifles, a big batch of modular AKM parts (four handguard styles, drum mag, wood stock, rail adapter), tactical masks and gas masks.

• Melee animation fixes, dry-fire sounds for most weapons, and aiming down sights now reads FOV from the weapon's camera settings (AK5 irons are actually usable).

The immortal NPC saga, complete and final

Some of you watched NPCs eat entire magazines and walk away. Some of you watched us claim we fixed it, several times. Both things happened, because this was never one bug. It was at least nine different bugs wearing the same symptom, and the tell was always the same: melee hurt them, bullets did not. Here is the full autopsy:

• Bullets were hitting the invisible character capsule instead of actual body parts, so hit location and armor math were computed against the wrong thing.

• Piles of dropped gear were invisible man-shaped colliders that soaked shots aimed at whoever stood near them. And shots that hit WORN gear dumped their damage into the item instead of the wearer.

• The armor damage model had a hard cliff that returned exactly zero below the plate rating, which made plate carrier NPCs immortal to center mass rifle fire by design. See the armor rework above.

• Instanced building walls (the apartments) ate entire fire lanes: the ballistics exit search treated any instanced wall as infinitely thick, so your round died inside a 20 cm wall, showed impact effects, and dealt nothing. Worked in both directions, NPCs inside buildings could not shoot out either.

• A weapon dragged from your shoulder slot straight into your hands could end up physically detached on the server while looking perfect on your screen. Its shots launched from garbage coordinates tens of thousands of kilometers away. Nothing it hit could ever die.

• The bullet simulation worker threads could freeze. On a lull, on server boot, on a player disconnecting. First shots after a quiet spell just vanished. This took eight instrumented rounds to fully kill, and the final fix means a frozen worker cannot survive a single frame anymore.

• Pool-recycled NPCs could come back without physics bodies, bulletproof until recycled again. Now spawn placement rebuilds their collision and a probe self-heals any bodiless NPC within seconds.

• Freshly spawned NPCs sometimes had their physics bodies 3810 kilometers below the map. The visible character stood in front of you while the surface bullets test against had been free-falling into the void since spawn. Melee worked because melee does not care. This one hid for months because dying and respawning through the pool accidentally healed it.

• And the last one, closed this week: some hand-placed spawn points put NPCs inside building props (the prop ate your bullets) or, when the spawn ground check silently failed, at the world origin, falling. All 741 authored spawn points are now validated, snapped or repaired automatically, and the results persist.

Bonus

shooting someone pressed against your muzzle used to spawn the bullet past them. Fixed too.

Hit registration now monitors itself

per-shot diagnostics, body probes, drift checks, and an admin tool that traces a fire lane and names exactly what blocked it. If this ever regresses, we know before you finish typing the bug report.

AI and NPCs

• Detection and stealth overhaul: NPCs have a real forward vision cone and no longer see out of the back of their heads (that was a genuine bug, a mirrored angle check). Crouching outside the cone makes you very hard to spot. Night halves their detection range, unless they have NVG (some helmets carry it) or an active weapon flashlight, and yes, they now switch lights on at dusk, so watch for sweeping beams. Your clothing's camouflage genuinely changes spot distance, and it cuts both ways: a bright raincoat makes you easier to see.

• Getting shot from an unseen position now makes NPCs reposition, seek cover and push toward the shooter instead of standing there.

• Combat behaviors: NPCs lay suppression fire, advance to contact, flank, fight through doors, loot bodies, and throw grenades. They push instead of standing off passively.

• Faction hostility got reworked from the ground up. Fighting a faction no longer flips every NPC on the map hostile forever. Hostility is reputation-driven per faction: damage costs you standing, kills cost a lot more, around three kills flips the whole faction hostile, and negative standing decays back over hours. Shoot someone and the victim plus their squad still retaliate instantly regardless of standing, and faction members who witness you attacking one of theirs join in. Reputation persists through relog and clears on death.

• Three same-day fixes shipped with that rework, because the telemetry caught them: NPCs who acquired you but never fired, NPCs who did not react to being shot at neutral standing (that reaction path turned out to be dead code, ouch), and kill penalties that never actually landed.

• New enemy: the FPV Pilot, a soldier who hides in the brush and deploys a kamikaze FPV drone at you. The drone's flying is not scripted, it is a neural network trained by evolution, generations of drones flying courses until the best ones survived. It overshoots, corrects and jitters like a human pilot, because it learned like one.

• NPC variety: randomized appearance from authored body types, including female NPCs with a proper feminine animation set. No more clone armies.

• Placeholder spawners replaced with faction spawners everywhere, so the NPCs in an area belong to coherent factions with coherent kits. Also bears. There are bear spawners now.

• Ground NPCs no longer futilely foot-chase flying drones or dive for cover from them. They stand and shoot at them, which is both smarter and, it turned out, a massive server performance win.

• NPCs that end up stuck inside geometry free themselves within seconds. Disarmed NPCs break off and hide instead of glitching in a loop, then re-arm from world loot when things calm down.

• NPC aggro range was reduced, they were a bit omniscient at distance.

Drones

• The surveillance drone got a full flight planner, modeled on real drone apps: open the controller, plot waypoints on the world map, set per-waypoint altitude, loiter time and camera direction, link a point of interest for the camera to track, then launch and watch it fly the mission itself. Plan bar shows distance, ETA and waypoint count. Manual override any time.

• The drone HUD gained a predicted impact point indicator.

• Other players finally see and hear your drone properly. This got fixed twice in the period, and the second cause was fun: the server was overwriting the pilot's throttle input with zeros every frame, so observers saw a dead-stick drone floating around. Spectating a drone now looks and sounds right.

• Pairing drones to headsets and radios works again (the pickup prompt was stealing the F key from the Pair option).

• Rotors no longer take damage from brushing foliage. Design decision: a bush should not end a flight.

Vehicles

• RemovedThe big onewe root-caused the long-standing bug where riders looked frozen, walked in place, or teleported for other players. The root cause is now literally a law in our codebase, and the whole vehicle networking stack got rebuilt on top of the fix: seated passengers get their own movement mode, bikes no longer vanish under their rider, empty vehicles no longer ghost-drive on the last driver's throttle, and passengers sitting in a seat can actually be shot now (their hit collision was being disabled along with the rest).

• Players who disconnect no longer permanently break the seat they were sitting in. Vehicles no longer collide with your worn equipment, which was causing some truly special physics moments.

• Exiting the dirtbike could leave you falling through the world forever. Fixed at the root, plus a server-side sweep that rescues anyone caught in the broken state.

• Bike handling and physics got several fix rounds, plus two new dirtbike variants, and corrected seat and passenger IK.

• Track wear

  this is the fun one. Vehicles and players on foot now carve persistent tracks into the terrain, Mudrunner-style. Ruts build up with traffic, are visible to everyone in multiplayer, survive server restarts, and slowly fade over in-game weeks.

  And it is not just visual

  worn packed paths give slightly more grip when dry, and the same rut turns to genuinely slow mud when wet. Established roads matter now, and weather interacts with them. (One thing still cooking: snow does not yet settle into the ruts correctly, that wiring is in progress.)

World, locations and audio

• The Soviet apartment buildings got enterable interiors, and a whole new city district is being blocked out around them.

• AddedNew locationsSCOOP Mini convenience stores (with a food vendor you can trade with) and a new gas station.

• Doors: proper openable, lockable level doors with persistent state that survives restarts, both hinged and sliding. Locked ones rattle. NPCs learned to fight through them, see above.

• You can climb ladders now. You can also go prone now. And there are dogtags.

• Dynamic world events reworked: helicopter crashes, convoys and roadblocks now spawn as real events through the day with map icons, guards standing at their designed posts (they used to spawn in a fallback ring inside the wreckage), and loot on the ground. They replicate properly to everyone, including late joiners. This system was basically invisible in multiplayer before, now it works.

• Two clothing drops with new items, item color variants (skins), and gendered clothing fits. Plus a full player model refresh: new character models, unique faces, fixed skin shading, and your appearance now persists in multiplayer.

• More food and drink items.

• AdjustedAudio got a lot of lovenew explosion sounds, updated weapon audio, interior audio treatment so inside actually sounds like inside, environmental audio occlusion (gunfire behind a hill finally sounds like it is behind a hill), new door sounds, shoreline and wind turbine ambience, room tones, smoothed rain transitions, retuned distance falloff across guns, footsteps and grenades, and a full mix rebalance.

Inventory and items

• Smart pickup: one F key does the right thing for the whole item system. Look at any item and F grabs it to hands, equips it to a matching free slot, or stores it in your bags, and the prompt tells you which it will do. The same cascade works on hovered rows inside the loot UI.

• Right-click context menu on your items: Drop, Equip, Split Stack, Dismantle, Reload Magazine, Toggle Electronics, Repair, Craft. All server-validated.

• FixedItem repairfour repair kit types (weapon kit, sewing kit, leather kit, epoxy) matched to gear classes. Kits hold a charge that depletes and persists. And the bug where repair kits silently did nothing after relogging is fixed as of this week.

• Attachment slots can anchor to specific bones, so a knife on your belt sits at your hip while a knife on your plate carrier sits on your chest, instead of everything stacking on one magic spot.

• The item networking migration (this was most of late May): worn clothing, backpacks and held weapons now reliably appear on other players. No more naked characters, invisible held guns, gear stuck at the world origin, or empty inventory rows when you walk up to someone or join late. Late joiners also converge on durability, chambered rounds, flashlight state and deployed drones.

• A long war on dupes and vanishing items: drag-and-drop hardening, corpse-drag dupes, chest transfer losses, wrong-slot drops ground-dropping your item, items vanishing after being carried far and then dropped (that one was a great bug: the item's network position was still registered at its pickup point, so the drop made it relevant to nobody), and loose magazines that could not be picked up at all.

• AddedVisual fixesworn clothing finally shows its color variant instead of reverting to base colors, a suppressor moved to a new weapon no longer glows when the OLD weapon fires (it was still subscribed to its ex), and looting an item can no longer leave a ghost copy at your feet on other players' screens.

• Helmets can no longer be worn on your feet. Equipment slots validate what goes in them now. Yes, that was a thing.

Multiplayer and connection

• Reconnect resilience: losing connection now freezes you in place with a recovery overlay while the game reconnects, instead of dumping you to the main menu. Your character is not left standing defenseless somewhere while you re-load the whole game.

• FixedVoice chat works reliably nowrange was fixed (people went silent while still in earshot), push-to-talk binds correctly, and releasing the key actually stops transmitting.

• Server browser: dedicated servers actually show up in it now, with their proper names, rows are reliably clickable, and there is a console for quick-joining by IP.

• Anti-spoofing: the server now cryptographically validates SteamIDs. Previously a modified client could claim to be anyone, which for a permadeath game with persistent saves is not great. Closed.

• FixedYou can use medical items on other playersrevive an unconscious teammate with epinephrine, stop their bleeding with a first aid kit, via hold-interactions on the body. (Epinephrine's shock reduction also turned out to never apply at all, even on yourself. Fixed.)

• Player corpses: your body and everything you carried persists where you died, survives server restarts, and can be looted by anyone who finds it. Corpses keep their worn gear visuals, settle naturally, and loot windows update live for everyone looking at them.

• In-game player reporting (!report) with evidence capture, plus chat improvements.

Performance

Client side:

• Fixed a GPU driver crash that could hit after around 3 hours of play in gear-dense areas. Root cause was cloth simulation running on every piece of dropped clothing in the world, hammering ray tracing structures until the GPU gave up. Worn clothing cloth is untouched, your jacket still flaps.

• A world optimization pass removed some absurdly heavy set-dressing assets and slimmed distant world detail meshes, plus the Nanite change covered in the 5.8 section.

Server side, which you feel as smooth fights, honest hit registration and fast restarts:

• The June performance offensive: AI hitch spikes went from 52.5 ms to 10.9 ms at the 95th percentile, worst frames from 168 ms to 34 ms. A hidden physics query that cost 17 to 25 ms per AI decision in dense towns was found and killed. NPC gear searching during mass spawns went from 20 ms to 2 ms.

• The server stopped doing cosmetic work entirely: around 30 places where a headless server was spawning particle effects, sounds and decals for nobody.

• World-wide actor scans were banned and replaced with registries and a spatial index. AI line-of-sight checks moved to an async cached system.

• The dedicated server is now properly multithreaded (see the engine section for the thread cap story).

• July combat regression: server fps collapsed from 60 to the twenties during firefights after the wall-penetration fix armed some latent ballistics config bombs. Root-caused and clamped, verified back at a 59.7 fps average over an 8 hour soak with city combat.

• And the newest one: flying an FPV drone near ground NPCs dragged the server to 30 fps because every soldier in range was frantically replanning cover against a target they could never reach. See the AI section. Server sits at 60 now.

Admin, moderation and anti-cheat

This is for server operators, and it will reach your server admins over time. Building it in the open, so here is what exists:

• A browser-based admin panel with a live world map: every player's position live, click the map to teleport, inspect any player's inventory, give items via a kit picker, heal, revive, freeze, unstuck, plus bans and whitelist enforced at join, roles for admin staff, and a full audit log of every admin action.

• A server manager that does graceful restarts with in-game countdown warnings, daily restart schedules, crash detection with automatic relaunch, and live log streaming.

• A forensics system, and this one matters for a permadeath game: every fight, kill and loot event is recorded server-side with correct attribution. Each life gets a recording that can be replayed on the map: movement paths, shot rays, damage numbers, kill distances, with anti-cheat statistics per player (headshot percentage, fire rate, movement speed) and an explicit long-distance kill tell for aimbot review. When someone claims they were killed through a wall by a cheater, we can watch the actual fight.

Still cooking

• Snow settling into tire ruts: authored, being wired in.

• A handful of items still use placeholder meshes (the repair kits currently look like toolboxes). Real art is coming.

• Procedural building interiors and a bunker generator are in prototype.

That is three months. Changelogs will be more frequent than this, come yell at me on Discord if they are not.