Patch Notes — Performance, Survival Balance & Quality of Life

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Hello everyone! We’ve just pushed a big batch of fixes and improvements live! This update is packed with stability work, performance optimizations, vehicle and survival balancing, and a long requested controls feature all shaped by your fantastic feedback. Thank you for helping us make the game better!

Here is the full list of what we fixed and improved:

Multiplayer & Stability 📈

Kick Crash Fix: Fixed a crash that could take down the host when a player was kicked while driving a vehicle.

Disconnect Notice: You’ll now see a clear on-screen message in the main menu if you lose your connection to a session, instead of a silent drop.

Performance Optimization: Eliminated several sources of lag in multiplayer smarter loot streaming, lighter nameplate calculations when many players are nearby, and a major reduction of the hitches that occurred while new areas of the map generated.

Map & Environment Fixes 🗺️

Seamless Roads: Fixed visible gaps and width mismatches where roads connect between map tiles roads now join smoothly across the whole world.

Smoother World Generation: Reworked road and vegetation generation to remove the stutter spikes that happened as new points of interest loaded in.

Factory POI Adjustments: Fixed geometry issues in the Factory POI where players could get stuck. Starter House Colliders: Adjusted collision boundaries in the Starter House to prevent unexpected physics glitches.

POI Loot Positions: Corrected and rebalanced loot spawn locations at the Gas Station, Radio Station, and Watch Tower POIs. Surface Audio: Added proper surface footstep sounds to POI areas

Vehicles & Driving 🚐

Save-Load Slide Fix: Fixed vehicles sliding around frictionlessly after loading a save (caused by leftover invisible wheel colliders).

Driving Controls HUD: Added an on-screen driving-actions panel. The ignition now tells you exactly why the engine won’t start (missing/broken engine, dead battery, or no fuel), and warns you if the handbrake is engaged.

Engine Heat Rebalance: Overheating now works as intended — reworked the engine heat/cooling model so the engine actually reaches its overheat point under real conditions, with retuned radiator cooling.

Fuel & Battery Balance: Rebalanced fuel consumption and battery drain rates for a fairer driving experience. Ride Along: You can now stand on a moving vehicle and ride along with it without sliding off.

Gameplay, Balancing & Bug Fixes 🔧

Rescue Feature Upgrade: Greatly expanded the player “unstuck” rescue radius, making it much easier to safely free yourself if you glitch into the environment — and removed a stutter that occurred near parked vehicles.

Jump Fix: Fixed getting locked into a jump state (stuck + slowed) and the jump animation playing without an actual jump when the jump key was spammed.

Survival Rebalance: Retuned how hunger, thirst, and energy deplete over the day. Survival stats no longer freeze after being revived, and you’ll now get on-screen warning effects (vignette, heartbeat, desaturation) when your overall condition gets critical from starvation, dehydration, or poison. Cooling

Fix: Refrigerated food now correctly stops spoiling — including in multiplayer and after loading a save.

Farming Save Fix: Fixed harvested fruit disappearing from plant pots and pots getting permanently stuck after loading a save.

Buried Treasure Fix: Fixed buried chests (and their lids/locks) being interactable before they were fully dug up.

Food & Cooking Balance: Rebalanced food freshness, spoilage, and cooking times across produce, drinks, and cooked dishes.

Coffee Machine Fix: Fixed the coffee pot not snapping correctly onto the coffee machine. Varied Start

Time: New games now begin at a different time of day each session.

Controls, UI & Quality of Life 🎮

Rebindable Controls: You can now remap your keybindings in Settings, organized into categories (on-foot, driving, etc.), with conflict detection so you don’t accidentally double-bind a key. Auto Graphics Quality: On first launch the game now detects your hardware and picks a sensible default graphics quality level. Lobby Browser: The lobby browser is now region-aware, with an “All Regions” toggle and ping info to help you find the best games to join. Version Label: Added the current game version number to the in-game HUD. Naming & Translations: Cleaned up item and vehicle names and updated translations across all supported languages.

More improvements are on the way! 🛠️