Playtest Version 70 - Lights, Colony & Co-op Fixes

21 Sep 2026Developer post

Version 70

One lamp looks exactly as it did. Build a cluster and they no longer bleach everything around them.
Lamps now give way to light that is already there, so a second lamp adds real light instead of flattening the first one's falloff to white.
The pool of light around a group of lamps stays the same size as a single one now, instead of growing with every lamp you put down.

Standing under the gas station canopy now fades the roof like it should.
Same for every other building with a roof over a doorway or a forecourt — nine of them, including both houses with porches, the container house, the wood cabin and the van.
The see-through was only ever checking whether scenery was drawn lower down the screen than you. A roof is drawn ABOVE the building it belongs to, so it never qualified, even while it was sitting right on top of your head.
Flat ground art still never fades, so the road under your feet stays put.

Rifles, armour, tools and ammo boxes no longer have a number stamped in the corner.
Only real stacks — ammo, cloth, bandages, seeds, produce — show a count now.
Quest rewards and debug-spawned items used to arrive carrying a random count of 1 to 3, which is where most of these came from.
Unopened ammo boxes used to read "40" whatever was actually inside them. They open for their own fixed amount either way.
Surgical kits now always arrive with all five uses. A kit handed out by a quest could turn up with as few as one.

Fixed a dropped weapon vanishing completely and then reappearing in your bag later, once you had cleared some space.
The item was still being carried the whole time — it just had nowhere to be drawn, so you could not see it, use it or drop it again.
A move that does not fit is now refused outright instead of going through and leaving the item invisible.
If the pack is only full because things are scattered around it, it repacks itself and the move goes through after all.
Anything that somehow still ends up with nowhere to go now lands on the floor at your feet, where you can see it, rather than quietly vanishing.
Equipping a weapon now checks the SHAPE of the one it displaces, not just how many squares it takes up. A long gun coming out of a square helmet's space used to be written over and lost.

Right-clicking in the jobs board no longer raises your aim reticle over the panel.
The same went for the settings menu, the tech tree, the task journal, the map, the notifications log, the colony screen and the feedback form — all of them let clicks through to your weapon.
You could already not actually fire through them, so this was a reticle that came up and then did nothing.

Added a Find button on each settler in the colony screen. It takes the camera to them, holds on them with their name up, and brings it straight back.
Nobody turns up at your gate while you are out on a raid any more. Dawn used to pull the camera off you mid-fight to introduce a stranger two maps away.
The arrival is held until you are home and settled, so the person who was due still turns up — you are just not dragged out of a firefight for them.
Fixed a farmer standing at the supply locker forever, picking seed up and putting it straight back down.
They were doing that because the check for "is there seed worth fetching" and the check for "is there anywhere to sow it" disagreed. If the only seed on the shelf was out of season, or the field was marked for a different crop, they would fetch it, find nowhere to plant it, put it back, and start again.
A farmer with nothing to do now goes back to wandering and picks the work up again when there is some, instead of looking busy at a locker.
The colony screen now tells you the real reason somebody has stopped — "this field is marked for Potato" instead of "no seeds" while the shelf is full of them.

Fixed being able to harvest your friend's crops. They came out of the ground on your screen, went into your bag, and their field was untouched.
Their farm was being re-grown on YOUR machine using YOUR day count, and the two of you do not share one. If you had played longer, their crops ripened the moment you walked in.
A visited base's farm is now exactly what its owner sees, and nothing on it can be worked, watered or harvested by a guest.
The owner's farm changes now reach a visitor while they are still there. Before, the farm you were looking at was frozen at the moment you arrived.

The two zombies on the last step of "What's That Noise?" no longer exist before you get there. They were standing in the level from the moment you started a new game.
Worse, they were walking. Hidden does not mean asleep, so the pair would set off across the map and end up on top of you — invisible, hitting you, and killable without ever being seen.
They now turn up when the step asks for them, on the two spots the level marks out for them, and only ever two of them.
You count as being out on a raid for the whole tutorial, right up until the train takes you home. Two things follow from that.
Hand-loading a magazine out there now feeds one round at a time and holds you still, the same as in any raid. It used to fill the whole magazine instantly, the way it does at your own base.
And you cannot save until you are home. The save routine writes down your base and where you are standing in it, so a save made out in the tutorial was a save from the wrong place.

Fixed an error when dragging a bandage onto a limb to heal, which could happen when the slot it came from had emptied while it was in the air.
Fixed that same drag putting the bandage back into a slot that another item had since moved into, making a bandage out of nothing.
Fixed the settler action buttons running off the right-hand edge of the colony panel. They wrap onto a second line now.
Fixed the jobs board opening underneath the colony screen instead of replacing it.
Fixed the storage line on the jobs board printing on top of its own button.