Beta0.9.98 Camp Doctor, Snow Rework, Deep Performance Pass
Last update put inland lakes and a whole set of portable appliances in your hands. This time, winter ground finally remembers where you have walked — tire tracks, footprints, and snow blown open by explosions; a doctor has moved into the trading camp, so your wounds finally have
Last update put inland lakes and a whole set of portable appliances in your hands. This time, winter ground finally remembers where you have walked — tire tracks, footprints, and snow blown open by explosions; a doctor has moved into the trading camp, so your wounds finally have somewhere to be treated; the interface gained quality-of-life additions such as "stash into nearby containers"; and the biggest single piece of work this update was going through driving, entering towns, fighting and opening the inventory — the situations most likely to stutter — and optimizing them one by one.
🏥 Trading Camp Doctor
The trading camp now has a doctor: you can buy medicine from him, and you can also pay once to have every wound on your body treated — no more waiting for your body to slowly recover.
Trading camps you have already explored will have the doctor and the clinic added retroactively, so existing saves work too and you do not need to start over.
If the doctor overlaps another NPC in an old save, please wait for a follow-up patch — a fix and further polish are already in progress. (Starting a new game is not required.)
❄️ All-New Snow
Ground snow has been completely reworked: it is no longer a flat texture laid over the ground, but snow with real depth that follows the rise and fall of the terrain.
Vehicles and characters now press marks into the snow: cars leave tire tracks, people leave footprints; fresh snow slowly fills the marks back in over time (a fully packed rut takes about two minutes to disappear).
Explosions, fire and similar effects now interact with the snow: a blast tears the snow off the whole area and throws up a spray of powder, exposing the ground underneath.
Headlights no longer blow out the screen in daylight: snow glare plus headlights used to wash the whole picture into a sheet of white; their brightness now scales down automatically with sunlight and snow cover.
⚡ Performance: We Really Cut Deep This Time
Driving performance: frame drops while driving were the number one target of this round — the way line-of-sight shading is refreshed was replaced outright, chunk data is now parsed on a background thread and spread across several frames, and high-speed impacts no longer spawn decals one at a time.
Loading hitches when driving into a town: generating a whole chunk of terrain, writing it to disk and raising the first building no longer all land on the same frame.
Reduced stutter during combat and driving.
Fixed the stutter caused by the particle system and related updates — the severe frame drops in the previous version were traced to their exact cause and rolled back.
Corpses left behind after a fight no longer keep costing performance — your framerate no longer slides downhill after a big battle.
Reduced stutter when opening the inventory / containers and when moving items.
Save backups are much faster, so autosaves hitch noticeably less.
Greatly reduced the RAM and VRAM used by terrain object atlases.
🔨 Crafting & Inventory
Crafting can now pull materials straight out of nearby containers (within 6 tiles), taking from the containers closest to the workbench first — no more hauling components onto your character one by one.
Crafting also uses materials in your backpack and clothing pockets.
The crafting panel and the character panel gained a "Stash Into Nearby Containers" button: it automatically puts items from your bag into nearby containers that already hold the same kind of item.
Selecting a recipe keeps its required materials outlined in your inventory; an item flashes white for a moment as it is consumed.
The crafting panel gained recipe type filter icons; the simple workbench gained an "Include Handcrafted Recipes" option.
Skill tree nodes now note the required crafting station in their "Unlocks Crafting" list, so you no longer have to guess which machine a recipe belongs to.
Stacks of small food and medicine items are drawn larger once expanded, so the shelf-life days are no longer crammed together.
Locked items can now be dragged straight onto a backpack / container icon to store them.
🎨 Visuals & Interface
The interaction UI now uses one consistent color scheme and pixel font and is laid out as cards that actively stay clear of the screen center and your character; game settings gained an "Integer HUD Scaling" toggle.
The interaction UI is no longer shown while aiming down sights.
Updated the fire and burning character effects.
Added a subtle film grain and vignette, and evening light now transitions more naturally.
Sand ground has been recolored to a lighter yellow.
Characters hidden behind terrain objects such as fences now show a see-through silhouette, so nobody vanishes completely just by stepping behind a fence.
Seagulls, crows and rats now cast slanted daylight shadows.
🌍 World & Survival
Added "Wait Here": you can skip the night even when you cannot sleep. Waiting is not sleeping — it does not quickly restore your physical condition.
Production keeps advancing with time while the furnace / 3D printer panel is open (the world itself stays paused).
Added a "Lightning Effects" toggle and greatly reduced how often lightning strikes during thunderstorms; underground there is no more white flash, and the thunder sounds muffled.
A new game no longer spawns trees, bushes, vehicle wrecks or puddles around your starting point.
Labs, cabins, supermarkets and gas stations now cover more ground, with more complete interior layouts.
House walls have less durability, so tearing a wall down is no longer a slog.
Trader camps no longer generate clustered together on newly created maps.
Increased the number of neutral survivors in the wild, making friendly human NPCs easier to run into.
Bare-handed swings can now cut down weeds; wood can no longer be used as arrows.
Reworked the bite check for bait, so shallow water now yields fish normally; fixed lures that only big fish bite catching almost nothing.
Alarms now summon more enemies the longer your run has lasted.
Modestly increased vehicle durability; when repairing vehicle parts you can now directly use a vehicle repair kit stored in the trunk.
Reduced the firing heat of 7 weapons including the anti-materiel rifle and the grenade launcher, making them less prone to overheating.
🧑🤝🧑 Companions
The companion "Stay Here" order actually works now: tell them to hold a position and they will hold it.
Fixed friendly NPCs constantly dropping items.
💾 Saves & Stability
Game settings gained a "Steam Auto Cloud Save" toggle; "Sync To Steam Cloud" in the pause menu lets you upload manually at any time.
Returning to the main menu during an autosave now shows the save progress and only returns once the save is finished, so your progress is not dropped halfway.
Improved save safety, with a warning to the player when an inconsistency occurs.
Fixed a single corrupted character save blanking the entire character list.
Fixed the version comparison for save backups always failing.
Fixed startup initialization breaking when the game is installed in a read-only directory.
Fixed inventory slots becoming unusable after unsubscribing from a mod and chunk or building floor generation breaking; the inventory panel now offers a one-click cleanup prompt.
🔧 Other Fixes
Fixed shotgun / revolver and other weapon sprites not showing up.
Fixed the infinite loop where a barrel jammed from overheating jammed again the instant you cleared it, and a magazine with no durability left forcing a jam on every shot.
Fixed the sprint key turning into an attack and blocking the inventory / looting corpses and containers.
Fixed being teleported to the map origin when a target caught by the grappling hook dies.
Fixed the furnace / conveyor / charging station / generator / 3D printer sometimes going dead after loading a save.
Fixed body temperature / energy / health not being applied when sleeping directly on the ground.
Fixed labs sometimes generating without a computer, making the CAS system impossible to repair.
Fixed zombies endlessly respawning near basement entrances.
Fixed campfire / spider robot / flamethrower loop sounds still playing after sound effects are turned off.
Fixed being able to see the far side of a wall while standing against it.
Fixed scrambled road surface textures on roads and main roads.
Fixed tutorial hints not popping up for throwables, liquids, cloaks, masks and deployable items.
Fixed missing text on the save progress screen and on some progress bars.
Fixed batteries coming back at full durability after being put into a device and taken out again.
Fixed a typo in the name of the 7.62x39mm drum magazine, and the fact that it could not be made with the plastic 3D printer.
Fixed several minor issues related to deployable item interactions.
Thanks to every survivor who submitted a feedback log. A lot of the leads behind this round of performance work came straight from the logs and saves you sent us.
Feedback
If you encounter any issues during gameplay, you can report them through the built-in feedback center, Discord or by email.
For localization or translation-related issues, please use the in-game feedback center or contact the developer directly by email. Or perhaps you would like to contribute to language localization.
Please feel free to provide feedback via our Discord or email.
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Thank you for the feedback and support.ːcozybethesdaː
