SVERASvera Defense

File 10 — patch log · field dispatches

Notes from the wall.

Every change we've cut on the road from 0.9 to the 1.0 beta — what's new, what we sharpened, and what we rebalanced. Newest dispatch up top. The launcher pulls these automatically; this is the long-form for anyone who wants the whole story.

Log index — eleven dispatches

Dispatch 0.2.5 — 1 Aug 2026 · channel: alpha

Front Door

v0.2.5

— a proper way in, and a way back out of the server list.

New
  • The SVERA field launcher. Install once and it keeps the game current — it checks for a new build on every start and pulls only what changed, so you never re-download 1.6 GB again.
  • An install you can actually watch. The download line reads real byte counts off the wire, and unpacking streams every file path and size into a live supply log with a true counter — all 4,326 files of this build. No invented progress bars.
  • Dispatches in the launcher. The latest patch notes come down with the update and sit on the launcher's front page, so you know what changed before you press play.
Fixed
  • The server list was a room with no door. Its Back button could not be pressed and Esc did nothing — the screen never took focus, so no key press was ever delivered to it. Esc, gamepad B and the Back button all back out of it now.
  • Hosting capped the lobby at four. One stale default deep in the host menu held every hosted game to 4 players while the rest of the game was built for 20. The cap is 20 now.
  • The in-game server browser could only ever come back empty. Steam's subsystem won't start without its appid file beside the executable, and that file wasn't in the packaged build — so the game fell back to the LAN-only subsystem and an internet search had nothing it could possibly find. The file ships beside the executable from this build on. Our dedicated servers are direct-IP for now, so Direct Connect remains the reliable route.
  • Launcher security — the update manifest could name any file to run. The manifest's executable name was handed straight to the shell, so a bad file on the update server could have launched something other than the game. The name must now resolve to a real .exe inside the install directory or the launcher refuses to run it and offers a reinstall. Found in-house; no player build ever shipped with it.

Dispatch 0.2.4 — 31 Jul 2026 · channel: alpha

Shipped Hands

v0.2.4

— the downloadable build of everything below. Grab a pad.

New
  • This is the build. Everything in the 0.2.3 dispatch — the Bellows, the flooding, the new turrets and guns, the handling pass — is now actually in the download. Plus:
  • Xbox controller support, end to end. Full pad play from the main menu to the last wave — movement, gunplay, lean, interact, the arsenal and every screen in between.
  • True-first-person legs. Look down: you have a body now, not a camera on a stick.
  • Third-person lean. The Q/E peek reads correctly on your character from the outside too.
  • Per-weapon shop portraits. Every gun in the arsenal wears a photograph of its actual model.
  • HUD toggle options. Switch individual HUD elements off in the settings and run as clean a screen as you dare.
  • Pack-a-Punch for the standard arsenal. The base rack of guns now upgrades at the machine — no more greyed-out slots on the classics.
Fixed
  • Third-person aim. Shots now land where the third-person reticle points instead of drifting off-axis at range.

Dispatch 0.2.3 — 31 Jul 2026 · channel: alpha

All Hands Below

v0.2.3

— new posting. It's a submarine. The dead take the stairs.

New
  • BELLOWS — new map. A submarine interior, bow to stern: multi-deck hallways, big staircases, and an open bay with a mezzanine overlooking it. Selectable from the map menu.
  • The boat fights back. Hull quakes shake the whole vessel and chip your health while they roll. Sprung leaks flood a bilge pool with real rising water — stay out of the low deck when it fills. Steam in the pipes, geiger crackle in the walls.
  • Bulkheads & the crew elevator. Sliding bulkhead doors section the boat, and the elevator reads crew only — you ride, the horde climbs the stairs. Use the head start.
  • Three new turrets. The HEAVY CANNON alpha-strikes and pierces clean through the line at max tier; the SCORCHER holds a burn cone on a lane; the SUPPRESSOR chips targets with cryo and slows what it touches. All in the arsenal at laddered prices.
  • Three new guns. The FN FAL battle rifle, the SV-98 bolt sniper and the RPG-7 — pulled from the mystery box or bought straight off the wall.
  • Bleed-out countdown. When you are bleeding to death the game now says so, with a countdown on the HUD vitals card and the med readout. What you do with the seconds is on you.
Improved
  • Handling pass — the operator has a body. Look down and see your own legs. Q/E lean-peek that squashes against walls instead of clipping through them, a smooth crouch glide, breathing sway and a landing dip. Carried weight is real now: load up and you move slower, aim slower, and carry more inertia into every stop.
  • The squad is flesh and steel at last. Soldiers carry rifles, aim down sights, and deal real SMG damage on par with yours; upkeepers, robots and drones stand embodied beside them. Everyone wears a floating health bar, and every squad order verb now actually does something.
  • 28 weapons re-voiced. Distinct per-class gunshots and muzzle flashes across the whole rack, and shell casings eject with physics from every weapon in the game.
  • Turrets raised on mounts. Every turret sits up on a mount and can finally aim down — no more safe crawl-space under the gun line. Each type fires with its own muzzle flash, tracer color and report, so you can hear which emplacement is working.
  • Med readout. Bandaging and splinting now show an on-screen progress readout — the work was always timed, you just couldn't see the timer.
  • Arsenal & HUD polish. The arsenal menu got re-animated — counting points, page sweeps, hover lifts, tooltips. The wave banner pops, low health beats like a heart, every inventory item wears a real photographed icon, and the menus finally make sounds.
  • Account & kit management. A proper ACCOUNT sign-in row on the main menu, and trinkets can now be unequipped — hit the ✕ on the chip.
Fixed
  • Drone purchases were silently refunded. The buy went through, the points came back, and no drone arrived. Drones are actually buyable now.
  • The one-doorway pile-up. The horde no longer funnels onto a single point of a breach — spread targeting and avoidance fan them across the whole opening, and bosses stop stacking inside each other.
Balance
  • Melee quick-swing moved Q → X. Q belongs to the lean now. Retrain the reflex.
  • Stash withdrawals lock outside the lobby. Kit up before the wave, not during it.

Dispatch 0.1.9 — 26 Jul 2026 · channel: beta

The Horde Learns to Knock

v0.1.9

— your barricades finally mean something to the common dead.

Fixed
  • Regular zombies could not attack barricades at all. Their entire attack test was "is the player within reach" — a barricade was never even considered. Blocked by a cade, they stood there with their arms out while the player stayed safely out of range. Only the special zombies could break wood. The common horde now looks for whatever is blocking it and swings at that, for the same damage it deals players.
  • Zombies ignored anything below them. A prop underfoot or on a lower step has almost no horizontal bearing, and the "is it in front of me" test threw those out — so a cade beneath a zombie was invisible to it. Anything essentially on top of them now counts as blocking.
  • Big barricades were unreachable. Attack range was measured to a prop's centre rather than its surface, so on a long plank stack or a wide crate a zombie could be pressed flat against the wood and still be "too far" to hit it — and physically unable to get closer, because the cade blocks them.
  • The free arsenal crate spawned in your face. It was dropped at a fixed distance in front of the spawn point and simply seated on whatever the ground trace found — and a ground trace happily lands on the top of a prop. On Arena01 there is a waist-high prop directly ahead of the first spawn, so the crate perched on it at head height, under a metre from your eyes, while you stood on the floor a metre below. Crates now have to land on the same floor you are standing on.
  • The resupply box floated in mid-air. It is placed beside its arsenal crate with no ground check of its own, so it inherited the crate's height — including when the crate was up on that prop. It now picks a side that shares the crate's floor.
  • A carried crate trapped you. While shouldered it was set to "query only" collision, which stops physics but not the movement sweeps a character walks with — so you collided with the crate you were holding and slid to a halt every few steps. The crate now ignores its own carrier and nobody else, so it still blocks zombies normally.
  • A carried crate blocked the whole screen. It was attached behind you at head height, which is exactly where the third-person camera looks from.
  • You could not put a crate down at all. Shouldering set a state that no "place it" path ever checked, so every press fell through to the pick-up trace. There was no key in the game that could set a shouldered crate down.
  • The leaderboard listed you once per run. Two runs meant two rows on a board that is supposed to rank operators, not attempts. One row per survivor now, showing their best.
  • Your rank counted runs, not people. A rival logging five good runs pushed you down five places on a board that only displayed them once. Rank and table now agree.
New
  • Monthly standings. The board is now a calendar-month season and rolls over on the 1st. Nothing is deleted — every run stays in your record and in the all-time totals.
  • Arsenal crates place like turrets. Pick one up and it lifts off as a preview that follows your aim — green where it will sit, red where it will not. Press E to set it down. A red spot refuses and leaves the preview up so you can re-aim instead of dropping a shop kiosk inside a wall.

Dispatch 0.1.8 — 25 Jul 2026 · channel: beta

Ghosts in the Ranks

v0.1.8

— the squad was always there. You just couldn't see it.

Fixed
  • Soldiers, upkeepers and drones were invisible, not missing. Every automation unit spawned, registered, walked, shot and hauled correctly — with no mesh assigned. They were invisible capsules the whole time. All of them have bodies now.
  • Drones were never on sale. The drone had no entry in the purchasable unit list at all, so the buy request was refused before it ever cost you a point. Now purchasable at 1,200, with its own button on the squad tab.
  • Zombies stopped chewing barricades mid-siege. Attack reach was measured to the barricade's origin instead of its surface — so on a long cade a zombie could stand flush against the wood, physically unable to get closer, and never swing. Crowded zombies drifted out of range and quietly gave up. Reach is measured to the surface now: if it's touching it, it's hitting it.
  • The Support shelf was unreachable. Nails, the medic tool, the portable arsenal and the deployable arsenal crate all existed and were priced correctly — but the shop's tab rail wrapped at 11 tabs while the shop had 13, so you could never scroll to them. Both Legendary trinkets were stranded on the same dead tab.
  • "RESTOCKING" on things that were in stock. The buy button read its state from a hand-built classifier that returned "not for sale" for every priced support and armour card. It reads the real catalogue now.
  • Carried crates blocked your view. Anything you picked up was pinned at eye level, dead centre. Large props — the arsenal crate especially — filled the screen. Carried objects now ride at chest height and clear the camera by their own size.
  • The repair drone sat inside you. Its hover height was zero, which parked it at your chest and left nothing to stop it occupying your body while it followed you.
  • Navmesh was built for the wrong body. Pathfinding used a 35×144 agent while every character in the game is 176 tall — so the AI would route through gaps nothing could actually fit through.
New
  • Squads scavenge. Order your soldiers to fetch loose loot and haul it back to you. They pick a mote, carry it, and deposit it straight into your bag — anything that doesn't fit lands at your feet. A courier that dies drops what it was carrying rather than deleting it.
  • Squads share what they see. Units feed a common threat picture, so one soldier spotting something lets the rest act on it — and targeting now weighs what's attacking your barricades and what's hurting you, not just what's nearest.
  • Maintenance is coordinated. Repair and resupply work is handed out from a shared queue instead of every worker scanning independently, so two upkeepers stop converging on the same turret and an emergency barricade repair outranks a routine ammo top-up.
  • 20-player lobbies. Raised from 8.
Changed
  • F3 → ACTIVE now lists only the perks you actually have; F4 remains the full catalogue you unlock from. They used to show the identical 36-perk list twice.
  • Squad rows show real numbers — type, damage, rate of fire, range, doctrine, morale, and a live line for whatever a soldier is currently hauling.
  • Purchased units deploy further out, so nothing spawns in your lap.

Dispatch 0.9.7 — 24 Jul 2026 · channel: beta

Straight & True

v0.9.7

— see the hit, trust the count.

New
  • Hit markers. Every round that connects now stamps a marker over your reticle — instant confirmation you're landing shots, even when the horde's stacked three deep.
  • Damage-direction indicators. Take a hit and a marker flares on the edge of the screen pointing dead at whatever's chewing on you, so you can wheel on the threat instead of guessing where it came from.
Improved
  • Native systems rebuild. Progression and XP, the After Action Report and the limb-vitals system now run on a rebuilt native (C++) backend — the same features you already know, re-platformed onto native code for stability and now guarded by an automated test suite that catches regressions before a build reaches you.
Fixed
  • Survivors no longer T-pose. Four survivors — Black, Blue, Cyan and Green — could spawn frozen in a T-pose; they now drop in fully animated.
  • Match XP is no longer granted twice — every kill, revive and objective pays out exactly once, so your post-match total is honest.
  • Double Points now actually doubles your score for the full duration of the powerup instead of paying out at the normal rate.
  • Electric Trap damage is now server-authoritative — the host decides the kills the trap earns, not each client, closing a desync where players could see different results.
  • Closed a teleporter case that could drop players off the map.

Dispatch 0.9.4 — 22 Jul 2026 · channel: beta

Blood & Iron

1.0 beta candidate

— the last big cut before we call it 1.0.

New
  • Per-caliber gun audio. Pistols, rifles, LMGs, snipers and launchers each fire with their own report, tail and mag-swap foley — you can hear what's shooting at you before you see it.
  • Real blood. Hits now throw directional blood bursts and the horde wears every wound it earns.
  • Med auto-target. Bandages and splints automatically pick the limb that actually needs treatment, so you patch the bleed instead of splinting a healthy leg mid-fight.
Improved
  • Corpse looting reworked. One clean prompt per body and loot windows open first-try, every time.
  • Interact pass. Doors, wall-buys, crates and downed teammates all read off one reliable prompt — no more fighting the reticle to press a button.
Fixed
  • Corpses no longer spawn twice on client machines.
  • Closed a menu deadlock that could freeze the pause and After Action screens.
  • Damage numbers now match the damage actually dealt.
  • Closed a prestige exploit that let players roll over without meeting the requirement.
  • Looting a body no longer occasionally emptied the wrong container.

Dispatch 0.9.3 — 19 Jul 2026

Build & Defend

v0.9.3

— give the wall some teeth of its own.

New
  • Tiered nailable props. Barricades now upgrade through wood, reinforced and plated tiers — the Carpenter skill builds them faster, Preservation makes them last longer.
  • Auto-repair turret. A deployable turret that suppresses a lane and patches its own plating between waves so you can hold two doors with one crew.
  • Trading, stash & market. A persistent stash, player-to-player trading, and a between-round market for spending the scrip you fought for.
Improved
  • Turret power pass. Turrets now draw from the room's grid — overload it and its defenses brown out, so place your hardware with intent.
Balance
  • Retuned prop HP curves so early barricades hold long enough to matter without trivializing the late waves.

Dispatch 0.9.2 — 16 Jul 2026

Many Hands

v0.9.2

— nobody holds the line alone.

New
  • Steam friend rooms. Invite friends straight through Steam and drop into co-op together — no port forwarding, no IP-swapping in a group chat.
  • VPS server instances. Spin up dedicated instances and find them from the in-game server browser.
  • Server browser. A live list of official and community servers with ping, mode and open slots.
Improved
  • Self-healing headless servers. Dedicated hosts now recover from a crashed match and re-open on their own — no babysitter required.
Fixed
  • Fixed join failures when a host migrated mid-lobby.

Dispatch 0.9.1 — 13 Jul 2026

For the Record

v0.9.1

— every run leaves a mark now.

New
  • XP & levels. Every kill, revive and objective pays out XP with CoD-style pop-ups that stack up as the wave heats.
  • Accolades. End-of-match ribbons for killing sprees, multikills, clutch revives and more.
  • Level-up banners. Stamped, on-screen promotions the moment you rank up.
  • Prestige & calling cards. Hit the cap, prestige, and unlock calling cards to show for it.
  • After Action Report. A full post-match breakdown of your run — damage, kills, accuracy, medals.
  • Career tracking. Lifetime stats, medals and prestige saved to your account and shown on Standings.
Improved
  • Killing sprees & multikills. Chains now stack into accolade bonuses instead of firing once and resetting.

Dispatch 0.9.0 — 10 Jul 2026

Enlistment

v0.9.0

— sign in, patch up, hit the wall.

New
  • The auto-updating launcher. One click checks the manifest, patches only what changed, and launches the game — no reinstalls between builds.
  • Cloud profile sync. Sign in once and your XP, level and prestige follow you to any machine.
  • Accounts & sign-in. Enlist a survivor account for the launcher, the community boards and your saved progress.
  • Settings menu. Audio, video and gameplay options with sensible presets out of the box.
Improved
  • First-run flow now walks new operators from download to first wave without a wiki.

Last word

Builds before 0.9.0 predate this public log. Pre-release means sharp edges — if something here isn't behaving, file it on the Field Reports board and it'll land in a future dispatch.

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