October update preview

Each animal tracks fullness, hydration and personal space, and its health converges on that mood, so condition is visible on the health bar. Trust builds while you spend time near an animal: enough trust lets you lead it on a rope, more makes it settle near your tool cupboard, and a fully trusted bull will defend you. Animals remember being attacked. Bulls charge and headbutt, and a hit from one will two shot a naked player.

Feeding from a trough now counts the calories of the food, so bread is roughly six times more effective than worms. Adult cows and sheep live 48 hours, twice the previous figure, and produce dung every 20 minutes instead of every 40. A long standing bug that multiplied horse dung by ten has been fixed, so a well fed horse produces about 48 dung a day.

• Cows harvest for 30 cloth, 100 leather, 100 bones, 20 beef and 40 fat; sheep give 10 cloth, 20 leather, 50 bones, 12 mutton and 20 fat plus any wool on them.
• Selling at the Ranch uses an auction: three offers in turn, and rejecting all three stops the vendor talking to you for 15 minutes.
• Reward pool includes an auto turret, HQM ore, low grade, a semi-automatic rifle, scrap, saddles, rope, blue keycards, tarps, CCTV cameras, targeting computers and metal fragments.
• Genes and inbreeding drive coat patterns; white sheep are the good roll, so generic coats are common.
• Animals can be mounted and hauled on vehicles; cows need the large flatbed, not the small one. A livestock.allowMounting convar can disable it.
• Pregnancy is blocked below 60% condition, and wild cows do not breed, age or produce resources.
• Attacking farm animals now marks you hostile in a safe zone.
• The large hunting trophy supports cow, bull and sheep heads.

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Critters startle and run when a player gets close, and they do not startle each other. They die with an animation rather than leaving a corpse or ragdoll, and crabs have no hitbox at all, so nothing attacks them. Stags, boars and bulls ignore critters as well.

Crabs move as a swarm with individual speeds, frogs prefer water when roaming and fleeing, and sea turtles use a swimming movement closer to sharks. Critters run on their own work queue with a lower frame time budget, and go into a deactivated state when no player is in range.

• Crabs do not spawn in ocean areas with no navmesh.
• Squirrels avoid riverside and oceanside placement.
• Sleeping was removed from critters entirely.
• The tin can alarm can now detect these animals.

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The generator draws electricity while running and shows its state on an info display with blinking processing and blocked text, plus indicator lights: green while cooking, flashing green when done, solid red with no food and flashing red when it needs stirring. Turning off the power kills the lamp and indicator.

Stirring mounts you in place next to the generator and runs as a progress bar, and requires 60 fuel of input between stirs. Adding new food resets the requirement. It also exposes a needs stirring electrical output so you can wire up a notification.

• Low grade output and processing time scale with the calories of the food used.
• Horse dung gives 1 fuel, and poor foods such as grubs are floored at 1.
• Cannot be stirred when it overhangs an edge, and you must stand very close.
• Added to the tech tree, including the Hardcore and Primitive game modes.

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Fences can be deployed at an angle of up to 20 degrees on sloped terrain, snap to each other without sinking further into the ground, and can be demolished with a hammer. The gate takes a lock and has door controller sockets, and opens and closes at half the earlier speed.

• Fence and gate are also available in the Primitive game mode.
• Fencing now blocks the navmesh instead of being ignored by it.
• Category moved from Misc to Construction in the crafting menu.
• New deployment, gate and inventory sounds.

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Any tool that is good at harvesting corpses works for shearing, and shearing does not count as a combat hit. Thrown knives wound the sheep instead of shearing it. Wild sheep can be approached but simply run away. Fleece state now survives a server restart and carries over to the corpse, and harvesting a sheep gives whatever wool was on it at the time of death.

Selling wool uses the same auction as livestock, with three offers and a 15 minute cooldown if you reject all of them, and rewards scale with how much wool you bring out of 1000.

• Wool recycles into 5 cloth each.
• Shearing overflows into the backpack and counts as a harvest.
• Shaved areas are masked more organically and the face only clears when fully shaved.
• Timers that expire during a save now fire on load, so sheep and cows cannot get stuck.

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Skimmed milk keeps half the calories, 80% of the hydration and half the health of milk, while cream keeps half the calories, 20% of the hydration and gives 50% more health. Creamy teas are stronger but shorter, so creamy pure ore tea raises ore yield from 0.5 to 0.65 and drops from 30 minutes to 24, while milky pure ore tea instead runs for 45 minutes.

Rich pies all require cream. Rich beef pie gives 25% more hunger and hydration, in line with the other rich pies, and the values shown on all rich pies have been rounded to whole numbers.

• Beef pie raises the maximum food a player can hold by 75% (875 calories), which raises recovery chance when downed; the rich version reaches 1000 calories and 100% recovery.
• Beef pie and rich beef pie now last 120 minutes, up from 30.
• Mutton pie is now shepherd's pie and requires a potato.
• New brioche bread recipe, 25% better than bread, using 2 eggs and 4 cream.
• Milk products give double calories and triple hydration.
• Milky and creamy teas can no longer be recycled.

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Power phase requirements and loot spawn types have been tuned, and loot in the power grid rooms no longer fails to respawn. At Power Plant the small heavy fuse box has been moved in front of a window so five fuses can be inserted without a green keycard.

Heavy fuse decay at Power Plant can now scale with server population, with convars for the low population cutoff, the high population cutoff and the decay rate at or below the low cutoff. Fuseboxes also show the world model of whatever is inserted, so a heavy fuse reads as a heavy fuse.

• Loot spawn tweaks at Train Yard, Water Treatment Plant and the sewer branch.
• An oversized environment volume at Harbor has been fixed.
• Radtown map topology fixed at Harbor and a crate moved away from a window that allowed looting through the gap.

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Reconciliation works like movement reconciliation: the server corrected position is applied, then intervening client movement is replayed and smoothed. Velocity and tumble information is sent as well. If a prediction is obviously clipping through a surface the game backs out of it.

Timed explosive charges and satchels no longer match rotation when thrown, and the molotov break is predicted on the client so you see the break effect even if the fireballs spawn elsewhere.

• Beancan throw animation fixed.
• Molotov now shows gibs on hit.
• Fire arrows no longer stick to the third person bow for other players.

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Only the base sandbag barricade is craftable; the taller variants and the pillbox are reached by upgrading in place, using the position of the existing sandbag rather than sockets. The placement guide turns yellow if the current upgrade fits but the next one would not, and skins carry across to the new stage.

Upgrading a damaged sandbag keeps its health fraction instead of granting a free repair, behind the server.upgrade_keeps_health convar which defaults to true, and the same damaged cooldown as repairing applies.

• Crafting cost reduced from 100 to 50 stone and 10 to 5 cloth, with craft time down from 30 to 10 seconds.
• All variants inherit skins from the base sandbag barricade item.
• Sandbags are correctly upgradeable on player built boats.
• A prevent building volume was added around the pillbox.
• New sounds for each stage and for the interface.

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The pad has damaged art stages and torn tarp materials, and a CCTV camera has been added to the area.

• Repair requirements: 30,000 wood, 10,000 metal fragments, 100 rope.
• Convar behaviour for the repair was adjusted alongside the art.

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Rooms get their own reserved network group IDs and a spatial grid so the server does not network every room within 32 metres. Deployables clipping through doors are hidden when an exterior door closes, and doors only notify the system when their open or closed state changes.

Tool cupboards are excluded for now, because hiding a TC would stop you knowing whether you are authorised on a base. Remote controlled turrets, drones and cameras are excluded as well, and high external walls are treated as outside structures.

• Bases can define more than one exterior, which handles cases such as an external TC connected by ramps.
• Base occlusion is now tracked in runtime profiling so its main thread cost per frame can be monitored.

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The armoured triangle frame was widened slightly so it no longer clips the various building tier frames, the triangle hatch door position was corrected, and collision meshes now update position on the server. The base hatches also read as more metal and less rust.

• Workshop export can now use different animation states and camera positions for screenshots, so hatches show open and closed.
• Gibs and lower level of detail visuals and sounds fixed on all four hatches.

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The branch stores deformation per tile and only for areas with active changes, defines craters in 3D space with respect to blocking objects, and has explosive setup on some weapons. Protection is pre-baked from topology and spawned rocks, with additional protection provided by foundations.

Building rules are being handled too: deployables get a configurable tolerance between current deformation and original height, and foundations place against the original terrain height but are disallowed over deep carves. Foliage handling has three experimental modes, and the client writes a mask for deformed terrain in the clipmap render.

• Nothing here is on main, so treat all of it as uncertain for this update.

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The bundle and Steam items exist on the branch with descriptions and placeholder icons, and the skull wall torch has been renamed to skull wall lamp. Deploy guide and pickup fixes for the Halloween door wreath were merged to main separately.

• Store content is not on the release path yet, so timing is unconfirmed.

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