Major Update #6 Preview - New Priority System, Zone Alarm, Bloomery

Greetings, Survivors!

We’re happy to share another batch of features coming to Infection Free Zone in Major Update #6. If you missed the previous announcement, we recently covered the addition of Explosives. This time, the changes may be less flashy, but they should improve the smoothness of your gameplay by a LOT.

Save Support

Before we cover all the new additions to the game, we have an important announcement to make. Old Saves won't be supported anymore starting Major Update #6. For a long time, we did our best to ensure that you could continue playing on that old Zone that you started 2 years ago. But as time goes on, this becomes more and more complicated for us.

When analyzing your bugs, we encounter save files that have a history of being played on 20 different versions. Sometimes, those versions even include experimental and open beta builds that were never released for everyone to play due to issues with stability. Verifying those save files and making them compatible with the recent updates becomes increasingly difficult for us.

We hope that this decision will result in much better stability of your games. And for everyone invested in their older saves, we will provide branches on Steam with older versions of the Infection Free Zone, so you can keep on playing your game as it was before. In order to access them, you have to right-click Infection Free Zone in your Steam library, select "Properties..." and then go to the "Game Versions & Betas" tab.

Zone Alarm

We have noticed that some players were heavily invested in micromanaging the workers when the day ended. They dismissed them all from their day jobs and assigned them as guards to countless gates and towers across the Zone. While effective, this approach could've resulted in severe burnout throughout the gameplay.

The "Alarm" feature allows the player to quickly react in case of sudden danger. You see a huge Swarm attacking your Zone, you use the "Alarm" command via your radio and now defending the Zone becomes more important than anything else. All your citizens will move to the towers and gates ASAP.

There's a small drawback to that feature, though. The alarm can take place for several hours and once it's over, the defenders are tired. After this intense shift, they will need to rest for at least a small portion of the day. We believe that the drawback is relatively minor compared to the advantage this feature provides.

New Priority System

The new Priority System is one of the changes that we are most excited about for Major Update #6. For a long time, we have seen requests to reduce the micromanagement in the game and to make the Workers smarter. The new Priority System should cover this in a significant way. The summary of the new System:

• You can now set up the following priorities for every role and every building in the game - work disabled, lowest, low, medium, high, and highest.

• Workers will automatically fill all the buildings and all the works in your Zone, starting with the highest priorities first.

• Squads can still be recruited, even if all the Workers are assigned to existing works. Workers will be unassigned from the tasks with the lowest priorities.

In short, no more cases where you have empty production buildings and your Citizens stay idle, even though they could work on something. No more cases where the death of a group of citizens breaks the distribution of the Workers across the whole Zone. The new system is simple, effective, but still provides a lot of room for optimization for the player. And if you really liked the way it was before, you can go to Settings and change the Priority System to the previous one.

New Camera Options

If you are paying close attention to the recent updates, you might know that we have added a Free Camera console command in the recent Bugfix Update #36. After seeing the positive feedback towards the feature, we decided to add a new camera option to the Settings. You can play with "Fixed Tilt", which works the same way as the current camera, or change to "Free Tilt".

While it isn't as free as the console command mentioned above, it allows you to zoom out further and change the angle of the camera as far as 45°. It might heavily impact the performance of the game, but it's hard to argue - some maps look really great through this new camera.

Bloomery

Last but not least, the building many of you have been waiting for. Bloomeries are coming in Major Update #6 to address all your metal production needs. They will work very similarly to Clay Pits and offer two production variants.

• Using wood (more affordable) will provide less metal per cycle,

• Using fuel (less affordable) will provide more metal per cycle.

We’ll also be introducing a much-requested change to how Clay Pits and Bloomery work. Both buildings will now be deconstructible, as many of you have asked for.

Games Operators Sale

Infection Free Zone is currently available at a significant 30% discount! If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to jump in, now is the perfect time to start building your own survivor settlement and face the hordes of the infected. This is our biggest discount yet, and one that might not return for quite some time. If you’re following releases from Games Operators, you might also be interested in a discounted bundle with Solar Expanse, which has just launched.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/72639/Solar_Expanse_x_Infection_Free_Zone/

Is that all that we have planned for you for Major Update 6? Not yet! We still plan to share one more Preview from this update with you. Stay tuned for more news about Infection Free Zone's development. And don't forget to let us know what you think about all the upcoming changes mentioned in the announcement. Thank you for being with us!

Best regards, Jutsu Games Team