This update is a return to form after the massive release of Juggernaut Edition! It includes the new Pawn Shop Pack at the Bounty Broker and a host of other fixes and tweaks, including:
- A fix to address invisible zombies in multiplayer and the dreaded Error 3 disconnects.
- A massive overall increase to weapon durability, muzzle brakes that improve durability, and a free one-time repair for all weapons.
- Juggernauts that take more damage from higher-caliber firearms and headshots.
- Infestations that don’t repopulate right after you clear them out.
- Irritable characters that can more easily be prevented from starting fights.
- The ability to stealthily kill your way through a horde.
Pawn Shop Pack
Pawn shops are intriguing locations filled with a wide variety of unusual items, from appliances to guns to jewelry. In that spirit, we’re offering this new array of useful gear and outfits for your survivors. It’s like the pawn shop came right to your door with a delivery!
This content pack adds seven new weapons to the game, all of which are available via new Bounty Broker challenges.
- PPQ 45 — A .45 caliber variant of the PPQ frame that uses polygonal rifling instead of “lands and grooves” to achieve extraordinary accuracy.
- G45 — An evolution of the G19 that incorporates years of field experience into a new, highly durable version of the classic pistol.
- Hunter SKS — This rifle was modified with a scope and brake for pinpoint protein procurement. Now it has other uses.
- Non-Compliant SKS — This SKS joined an outlaw biker gang, adding full auto conversion, a high-capacity “double stack” magazine, and a high-speed optic.
- Wyrmling — A gorgeous new close-combat weapon that pairs well with its larger cousin, the Wyvern.
- Wyvern — The most elegant blade you could expect for three installments of $29.95. Pick up the Wyrmling to complete the set.
- Guandao — An ancient, heavy blade meant to be swung with power. Use it to vanquish hordes of your enemies.
In addition, the pack includes five new raincoats and matching rain hats to keep your survivors dry in these rainy months. The black set can be earned by completing a pair of Bounty Broker challenges, while the other four sets are all added to your Closet for free! And remember, all hats and outfits you’ve gained are shared across all communities on your account.
Content Pack Cycling Update
We had previously announced that this update would see the retirement of the Critical Response Pack. Instead, we’re keeping that pack in the rotation for one more month!
In other words, you have a little more time to finish those Bounty Broker challenges from the Critical Response Pack before it’s replaced in Update 17 with another new pack of goodies. Future content pack releases will still “cycle out” one pack to make room, but this means we’ll now have four packs in the current rotation instead of three.
Multiplayer
We hammered on our multiplayer networking code and fixed several issues with zombie synchronization. There should be fewer invisible zombies, more accurate positioning, and a major reduction in the dreaded Error 3 disconnects.
Weapons and Mods
We’ve doubled the durability of all ranged and melee weapons! But we haven’t changed the way repair works — more durability means higher repair costs. So, you’ll repair half as often for twice the cost. This should make weapon durability behave a bit more realistically while leaving the game’s parts economy intact. As a side effect of these changes, the number of parts salvaged from these weapons is now roughly doubled. To smooth the transition into these new values, we’re repairing all the weapons that currently exist in your saved games. Enjoy!
To keep pace with our recent restoration of suppressor power, we’re further improving muzzle brakes to keep them competitive.
- Muzzle brakes no longer cause a weapon to make additional noise.
- Brakes now improve weapon durability, making repairs less frequent on any weapon to which they are equipped.
- This effectively grants 33%, 50%, or 100% more shots (for handmade, professional, and advanced brakes) before repairs are needed.
Brakes also improve control even more, allowing even notoriously squirrelly weapons to produce predictable, modest, recoil when equipped with the highest level muzzle brakes. To round out this balance pass on weapon mods, we’ve buffed chokes. Chokes now provide dramatic increases to range (50%, 100%, and 150% for handmade, professional, and advanced).
- A high-end choke now allows a shotgun to be effective at ranges previously reserved for longer pistols or shorter rifles.
- Chokes also grant modest increases to power (10%, 20%, and 30% for handmade, professional, and advanced)
- The power increase makes them more effective against plague hearts, hostile humans, and juggernauts.
- This work also fixes a previously undiscovered issue where chokes would actually make shotgun effectiveness worse as you got farther from the target. Essentially, the same bug as the “suppressor bug” we identified in CU14 appears to have been stealthily lying in wait on the choke attachments since … well, a long time ago.
We made a full tuning and tweaking pass across the new heavy weapons. Without listing all the details, here are a few highlights:
- All heavy weapons increased in durability, some more than others. The biggest beneficiaries are the Sledge Hammer and the Groundbreaker Shovel.
- All heavy weapons gained additional impact (which helps against enemies with hit points, like juggernauts and humans). The biggest beneficiaries are the Coffee Can Mace and the Groundbreaker Shovel.
- Most heavy weapons gained tweaks to their additional effects, like knockdown and dismember chance. These are largely minor and varied, and most are beneficial.
- Most heavy weapons also had their weight and stamina-cost-per-swing adjusted. Most got lighter, and only a couple got a bit heavier.
Thanks to some excellent sleuthing by members of our community (especially u/TheErudite on Reddit), we learned that Juggernauts were not responding to firearms the way we intended. So we’ve made a few important fixes:
- Juggernauts now take greater damage if you use higher-caliber firearms and power-enhancing weapon mods. So the difference between an AK-47 and a .22 pistol really comes through. We’ve done a balance pass across all firearms to make sure players are rewarded for bringing more firepower to a Juggernaut encounter.
- Body shots to Juggernauts are now less effective, and headshots become increasingly effective the more you degrade the Juggernaut’s skull with accumulated damage, rewarding players who keep their cool while he's charging.
- Juggernauts no longer ignore damage when they’re in their “stagger” behavior, and can be staggered again sooner after recovering. This damage immunity was helping to mask the problem, and now the natural assumptions players make about whether they are hurting the Juggernaut are actually true.
And finally, Heavy weapons can now be found when looting a Plague Heart.
Gameplay
- Destroying an infestation now creates a temporary moratorium on the creation of new infestations, removing that annoying moment when an infestation pops up literally ten seconds after you cleared out the last one.
- The death of a zombie no longer automatically gets the attention of the horde they are a part of, making it much easier to quietly kill your way through a horde, one zombie at a time.
- When a zombie is on the ground next to a container, we now prioritize finishing the zombie with the interact button, rather than looting the container.
- AI-controlled humans are now able to shoot zombies out to the effective range of their weapons. (They were previously inadvertently limited to about 50 meters.) This is particularly valuable to characters staffing Watchtowers.
- AI-controlled humans now get into vehicles more promptly, avoiding walking in indecisive circles beforehand.
Facilities
- We removed the influence cost to Reveal Map Exits at an upgraded Command Center, to smooth the path for players who want to try new maps.
- Checking a character into the Infirmary to halt the progress of Blood Plague no longer has an ongoing meds cost.
- Characters made “busy” by a mission can now still be checked into the Infirmary.
- We fixed an inconsistency in the amount of experience awarded for "Primary Care" when used by an Infirmary 3 or Field Hospital. It was 200, but now is reduced to 100 to match the same action on the Infirmary 1 or 2.
- We fixed an issue where “Emergency Medicine” awarded Mechanics skill experience, instead of Medicine skill experience. Or maybe your survivors were actually robots up until now? Didn’t see that coming, did you?
- The new Ranger SUV can now be upgraded to a Smashwagon, like other SUVs.
Community
- The numbers that lead to characters starting fights based on their traits have been changed to fall in line with the existing morale thresholds. In general, this makes those characters less likely to start fights.
- Characters with “irritable” traits won’t start fights unless they are below “Cheerful”.
- Characters with traits that “start conflicts” won’t start fights unless they are below “Empowered”.
- Characters at your base will no longer complain about noise when the Threat level is less than 14.
- Morale-driven filth on characters is now visible in multiplayer. A reminder to make sure to shower before seeing other people.
- Running low on meds no longer issues an inaccurate “Food Dire!” penalty to morale. Survivors now recognize that bandages are not food.
User Interface
- Now when you equip an item (like a weapon or a backpack) directly from your supply locker or from a vehicle, the game swaps your previously-equipped item back into that container, rather than dropping it into your inventory by default. We made this change because in our experience as players, this is what we actually wanted the game to do about 99% of the time. Note, this does not apply to lootable containers out in the world, which still cannot receive items from you, but can only provide them.
- You can now click and drag scroll bars in the menus if you are using a mouse.
- Moving to a new map in Nightmare no longer reveals all the Plague Hearts.
- Dead characters and empty leader slots no longer offer you access to their closets.
- We reduced the time it takes to load up and interact with the Community Screen, which was becoming an issue on some hardware.
- The keybinding screen no longer issues a warning when you leave the older Dodge/Crouch action unbound.
- We’ve bound the option to delete Legacy survivors via the Main Menu to the X button instead of the A button to prevent unfortunate accidents.
- Remember last update, when we said that we had made it possible to bind Interact and Quick Finisher to the same button? We made a mistake. That arrived in this update.
- We also did some general cleanup work on the interface, making sure you can see what you need to see.
Missions
- We fixed an issue with map markers on vehicles that was making them very difficult to find in missions like Action Hero: Fast Cars, Rookie Mistake, and the Mysterious Broadcast with the abandoned van.
- We slightly increased the starting resources for players who skip the tutorial. You now begin with 6 food, 2 meds, and 3 materials.
- Builder: Gimme the Loot, though still rare, spawns more often than it once did.
- Builder: Pillage and Plunder no longer instructs you to stick a rucksack in your supply locker.
- Sheriff: Right of Way can no longer cost you an alliance with an enclave.
- Claiming the Shop has had its missing map marker restored, making the shop much easier to claim.
- Maslow’s Hierarchy no longer appears when you already have the Lounge it wants you to build.
- Who Should Lead no longer doubles up on the same leader tutorial if you recruit a new community member who matches your current character’s leader type.
- Connect with Other Survivors now handles the scenario where you start the mission already in the possession of a food rucksack.
Misc
- We added a console-only option to the Video Settings called TV Display Border (Overscan). You can use this to compensate if your television cuts off the edges of the game screen.
- We made several minor map fixes, with such effects as:
- Avoiding players getting trapped by geometry, especially around their own parking spaces.
- Preventing characters from spawning on rooftops.
- Preventing players from getting trapped inside plague-engorged houses in Heartland. Because ick.
- Creepy debris floating above the road. If you want to see weird floating debris on purpose, check out the game Overland.
- We fixed a few clipping issues on character outfits and hair.
- We also fixed a few rare crash and soft-lock bugs.
- We expanded our support for international keyboard standards. French AZERTY keyboards now use ZQSD instead of WASD by default for movement. New users and users who reset their keybindings will receive the change.
- Also, players with German and Italian keyboards can use 0 instead of = to sign out or reset their keybinds.
- And as with every update, we continue to improve our localization quality in several languages.