Greetings, Survivors!
It has been a full year since Infection Free Zone launched in Early Access! The game was released on April 11, 2024, and its popularity has vastly exceeded our expectations. Since then, we have been doing our best to improve Infection Free Zone to the best of our ability. We remain extremely thankful for your support, passion, and engagement with the game. Let's take a quick look at the upcoming Major Update #4 - Part 2 and check some general statistics of our game!
Major Update #4 - Part 2 Preview
Major Update #4 - Part 2 will be smaller than Major Update #4. It will mainly consist of the things that we wanted to add for Major Update #4, but haven't managed to do so in time. While Lairs of the Infected have been moved to Major Update #5, below is the list of the highlights that we plan to bring you sometime in the second part of May 2025:
- Building Split Functionality
- Create Squad with Skills
- Scrapyard Building
- Shooting Range Building
- Fisherman Building
Other than that, we are still working on improving the performance, reducing the number of crashes, and solving the issues with autosave.
Building Split Functionality
A lot of players have made requests for an option that would allow them to split buildings. It's fully understandable. Some areas consist of huge buildings that can feel underused, especially if we decide to adapt only a small part of them. The building split will allow buildings to be split into two parts. Mind you, it won't be possible to split buildings vertically.
Create Squad with Skills
The squad's skills are another area that we want to make more accessible for the players. We have received reports from the community that some players tend to save/load the game until their Squads have a perfect combination of perks that they like the most. With this new feature, players will be able to choose their desired perks right at the beginning at the cost of longer training time.
Shooting Range Building
Three new buildings will be added in Major Update #4 - Part 2. Shooting Range will allow the existing squads to train their shooting skills. It's going to take some time and use up ammunition, but the squads will end up with useful combat-oriented skills after a few training sessions.
Scrapyard Building
Scrapyard Building will help with the management of the metal resource in the Zone. Using cans, ammo, and metal in general will result in this resource stacking in the Scrapyard building. After unlocking the corresponding research, players will have a chance to recycle the metal to get it back.
Fisherman Building
Fisherman Building will provide another alternative way of gathering food. After the recent addition of the huntable animals, this building will provide yet another source of meat. The limitation? The building has to be built next to a water reservoir of a specific size.
1-Year Anniversary
Let's take a look at some statistics after a full year since the launch!
- Infection Free Zone has been played by over 600,000 players on Steam!
- Over 10,000,000 new games have been started!
- Players have played on 400,000 different maps!
- Over 2,000,000,000 infected have been killed!
- Over 10,000 bug reports have been sent by the community!
- In 2025, the most popular maps so far were San Francisco, Edinburgh, Beijing, Washington, and Peschiera del Garda!
- The following countries have the biggest number of players: China, United States, Germany!
Thank you for playing Infection Free Zone!
New builds on the Open Beta branch
If you are interested in testing the newest additions to the game, we encourage you to check the builds that are published on the open_beta branch on a regular basis. All the updates to the open_beta branch are archived in this discussion, so we encourage you to follow the thread.
How to join the open_beta branch:
➡️ Right-click on Infection Free Zone in your library,
➡️ Click on "Properties..." on the list,
➡️ Choose the "Betas" tab,
➡️ Select the "open_beta" branch from the list.
➡️ The newest build should start downloading. Enjoy!
Thank you once again for playing Infection Free Zone! We are grateful for every single person in our community. It's really amazing to see our player base grow, and we haven't even fully released the game yet! This makes us truly optimistic about the Infection Free Zone's future. If you haven't joined our Discord yet, we also recommend doing so, as all the smallest updates, also about the open_beta builds, are being published there first. Stay safe, Survivors!
Best regards,
Jutsu Games Team