Slapdashdoid

Last minute, however, literally a couple of hours ago in fact, we concluded that this would be a bad idea not only in the middle of the Steam Survival Sale, but also a big week long and rather huge Spanish streamer event (go check it out!) that heralded some of our biggest Twitch numbers ever (thanks again to Silithur for organizing it!).

Stable releases are always nerve-wracking, but doubled up with the zombie respawn issues that we’ve been struggling with on unstable it just felt like a bad time to throw any dice. We believe those issues are fixed, and have done significant internal testing, however throwing it in front of a huge number of players on stable we can’t be absolutely sure it won’t still cause problems, particularly with mods, so doing a release today under these circumstances seemed a risky endeavour with so many new people being exposed to the game.

As such, we will likely wait until the coming Monday to flip the switch. This gives us a few more days to see if the zombie spawning reports on the unstable branch start to disappear after the fix went live and is probably the safer option, as eager as we are to see the update out and free up the team for bigger commits toward the next update.

41.73

So for those who haven’t dipped their toe into unstable, here’s a few highlights of what to expect:

Optionally see other players from your safehouse / faction on the map. Lots of extra security and anti-cheat to MP Lots of improvements to recipes, new foodstuffs, improved containers, expanded recipes. Improved error reporting for diagnosing mod errors or conflicts. Lots of map polish, bug fixes, improvements. Improved MP Admin tools.

• About ten gazillion bug fixes.

ADAPTIVE MUSIC

Since Formosa UK (formerly Noiseworks) added the adaptive, reactive action music it went down really well. Making the music react to what’s happening on-screen makes a big difference to immersing yourself into what’s going on.

The next stage of this plan is being put into place now, which will involve creating reactive versions of all the other tracks in the game. Not just action ones, but also all the various tracks and ambiences that currently exist.

The idea is to allow for the non-action music to change in intensity from background ambient, to how it currently is now, to a more intense version, depending on what the player is doing. Do they leave their house after being in their house for some time? Maybe the ambient music bumps up a notch. Get into your car in the morning to go out on a looting run? Enter a house to loot? Find a rare item? There are countless little game moments we can tie into a music change, that will just help to make the music feel like its telling part of the story and provide much more variety in the music tracks through play.

B42 CRAFTING

We’ve got a couple of sexy flowcharts from lead crafting crafter Turbo detailing some of the new post-apocalyptic professions that readers can pour over to get an idea of what’s coming in Build 42. We intended to save this stuff until you could see it in-game, but it doesn’t hurt to have a