Updates 12-28-2025

Fixed an issue with the Shark Teeth mutation causing an unpadded armor penalty. Your teeth are now padded, by your gums.

Backported some fixes to how zzip was working from DDA.

The fitness tracker on the smart watch and fitness band have had a number of improvements. They now display an estimate of your cardio fitness and sleep deprivation, which are two metrics that were formerly mostly invisible despite the fact that they'd be fairly obvious to the character and are very important to the player. They were also previously giving perfect information, which the devices in real life do not do. There's now a minor bit of noise added to many of their estimates, just to keep you guessing.

When interacting with a bulletin board in a settlement you do not own which is not currently populated, you are no longer prompted to take the place over. You can still run around and loot everything if you want, but the game doesn't suggest that you do so.

@scale2x fixed a bunch of metal prices being way too high.

@scale2x also fixed a few guns not having a category suffix (e.g. rifle, pistol) in their name.

The Pressin and particularly the Obrez no longer have bizarre stats.

Added cardio fitness tools to debug so I can actually see what I'm doing when I work on that stuff.

Faction camp food stores will now rot at the same rate as the food you distribute, rather than clumsily fudging it. Distributed food is not considered to be refrigerated or frozen even if it was when you clicked distribute, so remember only to distribute food that's going to get eaten before it goes bad! This is a change I've been trying to backport from DDA forever, and I'm very glad to say it finally works.

The faction camp menu in # no longer shows NPC hunger, as hunger was never really implemented in DDA and does not surface information which is meaningful to most players. Instead, it shows body weight. NPCs will only eat if they're underweight, so it's a much more useful metric.

NPC behavior re: eating out of the larder (passively, and after missions) should be handled much better now overall.

Grip score now matters for grab strength, but is floored at 50%, so a pair of mittens will make you way worse at grappling, but they won't make you totally useless at it.

Grab strength was underpowered compared to what monsters get, so it now checks your character size and melee skill as well as strength and unarmed. This is an overall buff and means that your grabs are roughly as good as a zombie's of similar size, strength, and skill to you. That is not to say you should expect parity with something like a grappler or wrestler, as those have unique adaptations that you lack.

Fixed a bug where switching characters while grabbing would crash the game.

Players were unaware that they could look up and down while aiming because they were using pgup and pgdn instead of < and >. For reasons unknown, next target/prev target were bound to those keys in the aim window. Those keybindings have been removed by default. You can now toggle targets with tab and shift+tab. Note that this may not take effect if you are using an existing config directory. If you want this change in that case, simply go into your keybinds and remove npage and ppage from previous target and next target.

Fixed an issue where it was possible to move the aiming reticle outside of the range you could actually throw/fire your weapon.

Grappler zombies and others who were using ranged_pull have had their range reduced from 5 to 4 tiles.

Trapped tendrils will no longer be quite so noisy.

Trapped tendrils now properly use circular distances when calculating their reach.

The aircraft carrier now only spawns in the ocean. It has a game-breaking amount of loot on it and was too easy to stumble across. It needs to be a much harder location with much more evidence of the apocalypse, but for now just making it way harder to find is a start.

The aircraft carrier start has been temporarily removed as it's not currently possible to start in the ocean. There's an unfinished DDA PR that will allow this to work, if Procyonae doesn't pick it back up, I'll have to.

Fixed some bugs related to dragging creatures while grappling and made it use your grab strength instead of just your strength, so it now factors in your skills and is much easier.

It's now much easier to drag friendly NPCs and critters around with you. For NPCs, they have to be in your faction or following you (as on an escort mission), and for monsters and animals they need to be your pet. NPCs offer a bonus relative to their move speed, so a healthy NPC is very easy to lead around while a badly injured one is dead weight. Other creatures just give you a 50% bonus to your check.

For years, the player has enjoyed logarithmic scaling to their low-light vision while monsters were stuck with linear that always rounded down. This meant that on clear nights, the player could see ~19 tiles, while most zombies would be lucky to see 4. This update fudges a similar scaling for monsters in a way that should be safe for performance. Now, your typical zombie can see about 9 tiles on a clear night. This does not increase their vision when it's really dark, but does give them variable vision that should more closely match the player's. Note that basically all monsters have less total vision range than the player, so in most low-light cases the player should still retain a fairly universal advantage.

Backported a DDA fix to smartphone advanced recovery.

Electronic devices and storage found in many locations can now rarely contain "contraband", including hackPRO and some crimine/anarchy themed ebooks and recipes.

The Chain Lightning CBM no longer silently crashes the game when used against exploding enemies.

Fixed some inconsistencies between different ballistic armor items.

Increased the encumbrance scaling on the MOLLE canteen pouch.

Stopped Medical's TOUGH2 from removing TOUGH when it failed to mutate due to a missing threshold requirement.