Greetings, Survivors!
The time has come! A new update for Infection Free Zone is now available on Steam and we cannot wait to see your feedback! We are introducing some huge, new features, and one that was probably the hardest to implement in the history of Infection Free Zone so far - the terrain elevation. We have also been constantly verifying your feedback. That's why some significant balance changes are present in this update too. As you may notice, we haven't been able to introduce the Lairs yet. This feature is planned for release during the next update. Let's check all the changes in the newest version!
Highlights
- Terrain Elevation and 3D Roads have been added (enable it via checkbox in Game Customization).
- Edinburgh and San Francisco have been added as built-in maps. Those maps are recommended to try the Terrain Elevation.
- Merchant and Trading Events have been added.
- A Car Workshop building (with Car Construction/Modification/Deconstruction) has been added.
- Tree Planting area work has been added,
- Forrester Hut building has been added. Workers assigned to this building will plant trees nearby automatically.
- Sawmill building has been added. Workers assigned to this building will cut down the nearby trees automatically.
- Huntable Animals - Boars and Deer have been added. Huntable animals drop Raw Meat for further processing in the Cookhouse
- Infected Animals - Cattle, Moose, and Bears have been added as a serious threat. Check if your chosen map can spawn them, as they do not appear in every location.
- Story Alteration (different storylines can occur first) has been added.
Balance
- The amount of ammunition that can be stored in Pistol, Shotgun, and Sniper Rifle weapons has been increased to 200.
- The amount of ammunition in 1 crate has been increased from 100 to 200 ammo.
- The amount of ammunition crates that can be found during scavenging has been decreased accordingly.
- Building Fortification has been rebalanced and is now 3 times longer when increasing the Building's HP. The Building HP acquired from Fortification has been increased from +30% to +50%.
- The Sniper Rifle has been rebalanced and now requires 2 ammo per shot. The cooldown between the shots has been increased from 3.3s to 3.66s.
- Squad members' skill acquisition has been rebalanced. The squads now get x2 more exp for fighting skills from killing infected enemies and x1.3 more exp for driving skills from driving. They also get x4 less exp for scavenging skills from scavenging. This should help avoid a situation where most squads have scavenging-related skills.
- The HP for all Wall types has been increased by 50%.
- The Mood drop time has been increased to avoid the situations where players have instant issues when trying to repair shelters or other important social buildings.
- The amount of gatherable metal from different objects on the map has been increased by 12%-50%, depending on the object.
- The amount of secondary resources obtainable from deconstruction has been increased. In most cases, this will result in fewer bricks and more metal and wood from deconstruction.
- Vehicle wreck spawning has been updated and there should be more of them next to the roads.
Overall, we believe that the issues with the insufficient amounts of wood should be fully fixed now. The amount of metal resource should also be significantly higher in this build. We will keep on tracking the data and feedback from the players to decide on the next changes in regards to metal acquisition.
Other Changes
- New events about people wanting to join our Zone have been added. Different groups of immigrants will now appear, each with their own characteristics.
- New animal-related events have been added.
- Squad Creation has been reworked and now takes 3 in-game hours. Remember about recruiting squads in advance!
- The Building roof type algorithm has been updated. There should be fewer buildings with flat roofs overall.
- The New Recommended Cities are now visible at the top of the list. The "Downloaded" section will adjust its size depending on the number of downloaded cities.
- An option to download the Google Maps' satellite images for the map background has been added in the Settings.
- New research has been added to the Technology Tree.
- The research cost of some technologies in the Infection tree has been decreased.
- The "Symptomatic Treatment" research has been updated to include the information about the number of days required to treat the citizen.
- The number of workers required to adapt the Kindergarten building has been decreased.
- The Map Info Panel has been updated with more data about the specifications of the selected location.
- A new "Unsupported Save" pop-up has been added. While your old saves should still be playable, we recommend starting a new game on this build.
Fixes
- An issue that allowed duplicating items by dropping them in the buildings has been fixed.
- An issue with grass overgrowing roads too much has been fixed.
- An issue with Infected being capable of dealing damage to squads in vehicles has been fixed.
- An issue with custom buildings being hard to place due to the "lines cannot intersect" error has been fixed.
- An issue that Custom Building entrances changing location after save/load has been fixed.
- An issue that allowed placing walls inside buildings has been fixed.
- An issue with Squads not scavenging buildings when clicking on the POI icon has been fixed.
- An issue with squads sometimes getting stuck at the building's entrance has been fixed.
- An issue with infected leaving buildings for a brief moment when spawned has been fixed.
- An issue with vaccine research resetting overnight has been fixed.
- An issue with deconstructed/destroyed medieval walls reappearing after save/load has been fixed.
- An issue with the game becoming unresponsive when trying to discard less than 1 resource has been fixed.
- An issue with ESC button not opening the ESC Menu when more than one squad was selected has been fixed.
- An issue with missing Vehicles on expeditions has been fixed.
- Performance and stability improvements have been introduced to increase your FPS and reduce the amount of crashes.
Let us know how you feel about all the recent changes! If you encounter any issues, please report them via in-game Bug Reporter, available under the ESC Menu. This will provide us with necessary logs which make solving the reported issues way easier. Thank you for playing Infection Free Zone! We hope that you will have a great time with Major Update 4!
Best regards,
Jutsu Games Team