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.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.69 — 02 Nov 2026 · channel: alpha
Back in the fight
v0.9.69
— drop out of a match and your body waits three minutes for you; plus the 02 Nov hotfix for the 1–2 second freezes.
Hotfix 02 Nov
- No more 1–2 second freezes. The screen could wash out and the game stall for a second or two, often just as zombies spawned. The quest-item glow was switching a global rendering setting on and off, which rebuilt every object in the world each time. It never toggles now. Launchers 0.4.1 and newer fetch this fix by themselves (one file, no full download).
New
- Reconnect. If you drop out of a match while still alive, your character stays in the world for 3 minutes. Rejoin in time and you take it back with the same health, gear and position. It can still be hurt while you are away.
Fixed
- A crash when playing on a host: zombie "muscle" physics could write to a body that was being rebuilt (death, ragdoll, corpse handover) when the zombie was teleported. The motors now stand down until the body is safe again.
- A crash on Riverside at the gunsmith bench when the gun on the vise swapped between model types.
Known
- Online trading cannot reach the server in this build. The trading post, the trade desk, the player market and its live feed were sent to a cut-short server address by a settings line, so they show offline. The fix is in the next update.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.67 — 01 Nov 2026 · channel: alpha
Vote the map
v0.9.67
— a map vote in the lobby, difficulty tiers, a biolab inside a mountain, and parties of five.
New
- Lobby map vote. Two maps from a fresh rotation plus a RANDOM card, on a 60 second timer (10 seconds once everyone is ready). If you have no character yet, one is picked for you.
- Random map rotation in matchmaking, and switching the map in the lobby now sticks.
- Map difficulty tiers: EASY Signal Depot (Arena01), NORMAL most maps, HARD Compound01 and Hallway01, ELITE Astris Site 02 (Arena02). Tiers scale zombies, loot and XP.
- Astris Site 02 rebuilt as a procedural biolab inside a mountain: four levels down long stairwells to the obelisk chamber, extraction at the bottom, the hardest variants from wave 1 and top-tier loot.
- Arena (was Versus) opens Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday (Pacific). The arena maps are renamed Signal Depot, Astris Site 02 and The Drowned Works.
- Parties of up to 5 from the menu. Up to 12 players per game, 6 in Arena.
- Vending machines: press F to pick medicine, HELIX soda or pantry items.
- Quests: quest items must be self found; bigger rewards (+all attributes, skill points, mastery XP, epic and legendary armour); a cleaner quest tracker; daily featured merchant deals.
- Blood: real dark-red drops fall from wounds and splat on the floor. The pink haze is gone.
Fixed
- Hallway01: the Ward A, Pharmacy, Mortuary and Ward B rooms were blocked by invisible walls; zombies got stuck inside and stalled waves.
Known
- The Vector's third-person placement is still off; a fix is coming.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.66 — 01 Nov 2026 · channel: alpha · everyone must update
The big one
v0.9.66
— 0.9.63, 0.9.64 and 0.9.65 were never released: everything since 0.9.62 lands here.
New
- Six maps reworked. Arena01 at night with the cold kit, a cleared courtyard and wave events; Hallway01 relit (lab amber and gold, far fewer lights, the MERIDIAN panels); Arena02 with its backrooms office hold and the flood towers moved inside the walls; Arena03 with the pump hall, the moss band and a fishable flooded floor; Bellows with the genetic lab on deck 3 and real hull steel; Riverside with readable dark rooms and new cobbles. Each map has its own moonlight.
- Siege, your way. Pick LIMITED (12, 25 or 50 waves, with a timed 4-minute option) or ENDLESS (timed waves that never stop spawning). In ENDLESS an extraction opens after wave 30 for three waves, and the tally card keeps the score wave by wave.
- The squad ledger. The board shows rank and MMR, points, kills, headshot %, downs, revives, deaths, nails, props, repairs, airdrops, doors and damage, with your line highlighted and each column's best underlined. Your player card sits on the main menu and your lifetime totals bank between matches. Revives are credited to the player who did them.
- The Compound, rebuilt every match: a procedural liminal office floor, sealed wings that open at waves 6, 11 and 16, and the extraction at the far end.
- The Vector is back: a new first-person KRISS Vector on the KINEMATION rig, with real hands, reloads, mag checks and inspects.
- Enemies feel heavy and real. Zombies plant their feet and carry weight, charge on chaotic paths, stagger when you shoot their legs, fall and claw their way back up. Wounds tear real chunks out of bodies, with entry and exit holes, and tentacles grow out of the holes you shoot.
- The grab. A zombie can seize you: mash F (pad A) to break free before the rest of the horde piles on.
- More enemies. The Sower and the Sapper join the horde, and the Demon, Behemoth, Hive Mother and Abomination return in later waves. Vent and ceiling ambushes now respect a barricaded room.
- Smoke and eat. Smoking, food and drink animations in first and third person. Cigarettes, roll-ups, cigars, joints, chew, the tobacco pipe, the glass pipe, the bong, beer, juice and sugar drop in loot, sit on the traders' shelves and have their own icons; lighters and tobacco pouches are in the loot too.
- Move like a soldier. Sprinting into a hard turn costs speed, letting go of sprint bleeds off instead of stopping dead, backpedalling and strafing are slower than walking, your stamina bar moves the instant you do (and host and client agree), your lean shows on every machine, a heavy kit slows your lean, and using a bandage, food or drink slows you to a walk. Your character's weight shows: planted feet, a lean under heavy loads, a limp when hurt.
- Menus: a UI brightness slider and a calibration card, and the bar now reaches Stash, Gunsmith and Career (with Leaderboards).
- Market: player trade invites, a 12 by 12 trade desk with lock-in and stamp, a live market feed in the traders' hub and a ticker on the exchange. (Online trading cannot reach the server yet: see 0.9.69.)
Changed
- Your gun, your view. Whatever field of view you play at, your weapon and hands are drawn the way the gun was built to be seen (116 FOV no longer pushes the gun and the dot out of frame). The VSS's iron sights look down its own barrel when you aim.
- Gear on your back. Every backpack and chest rig is refitted to each body, so the Trooper Pack and the rest sit on your back instead of sinking into it.
- Real sound. The synthetic voice lines are gone: NPC barks, traders, announcements and audio logs stay silent until real people record them; Moss and Azure keep their recorded voices. Another 180 synthetic sounds are replaced by real recordings, including the creature and limb screams, ambience, footsteps, the medical, organ and tentacle sets and the tinnitus loop.
- Some placeholder weapons are hidden until their real models land.
Fixed
- The "smoke on me" is gone. The pressure plates' idle sparks no longer pile up until the game crawls, and every burst effect ends when it should.
- No more giant bone shards and room-sized organs bursting out of a wounded Spitter, Howler, Demon, Abomination or Hive Mother.
- Bodies killed next to a standing zombie settle on the floor instead of floating a metre above it.
- 26 effects that never played in the released game (impacts, bursts, trails) play again; the Lancer turret's burn no longer shows TV-static squares.
- The four broken materials are fixed (no more grey checker on the dressings, the field watch, the wrist screen and the visor), and Heaven's street of gold draws its real surfaces again.
- Raid clean-ups (orphaned raiders, insured gear, arrival spots, the end-sheet clock), fewer leaks, and the third-person inspect and mag-check hands. If a gun's hand layer fails to load at the start of a match, the game asks for it again.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.62 — 31 Oct 2026 · channel: alpha
Raid together
v0.9.62
— squads raid as one, maps link up, and the Writhe learns to reach through the boards.
New
- Raid as a squad. Squadmates who load in after the host now get their body instead of spectating.
- Map links: travel between connected maps. Hold the zone together and your gear comes with you.
- The Writhe reaches through barricades, pins you against the boards and tears. Severed legs grow back with the DVP-1 Mk2 and the Symbiont.
- The BN-42 BurnIn has a new sound set.
- An after-action report at the end of a match, with your rank and rating.
Changed
- What you wear shows in the lobby and updates live for everyone; armour fits the Guerilla bodies and first-person arms are back.
- In third person the support hand closes on the gun, and the lobby no longer shows you aiming.
- The third-person camera no longer stretches the picture at wide FOV settings (first person keeps your setting).
- Insurance returns only what you still carry when you die; an insured item you dropped or handed over is no longer returned as well.
Fixed
- A fallen raider's guns stay on the body, and leaving a raid alive no longer leaves a copy of your gear behind.
- Stairs on Hallway01's roof you could not climb.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.61 — 30 Oct 2026 · channel: alpha
Cards on the floor
v0.9.61
— every item tells you what it is before you pick it up, and voices carry like voices.
New
- Item cards over loot. Look at an item on the floor and its full card hangs over it: picture, stats, price and a PICK UP prompt. Item cards come alive everywhere.
- A new corpse loot sheet: gear laid out on the body, guns as cards, jewellery in its own row.
- Voices with distance. Voices fade naturally; squadmates wearing comms gear come through as radio chatter at range (static, key clicks, breaking up when far); helmets, visors, breathers and gas masks colour the voice of whoever wears them.
Fixed
- An input error after travelling from the lobby into a raid.
- The pickup card hides unexamined items properly, ground glints no longer show through walls, and the first pickup sound of a session plays.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.59 — 25 Oct 2026 · channel: alpha
Twenty-nine fixes
v0.9.59
— a full code audit, a film on the lab screens, and Hallway01 grows tunnels.
Fixed
- 29 bugs from a full code audit. The tentacle creature no longer re-grabs you right after letting go, closing the Survivor's Log no longer leaves the cursor stuck, airdrop lids open when emptied, market, trade and skill exploits are closed, and every fishing spot has water.
New
- The ASTRIS film A Second Sense plays on the lab and hub screens, with PNEUMA posters, PA broadcasts and lore.
- New sci-fi door, power, lift, locker and purchase sounds and new connecting chimes.
- Hallway01: mine tunnels, a plant route and roof access.
Faster
- A lighter HUD, drones and door prompts, and a quicker boot.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.58 — 25 Oct 2026 · channel: alpha
The exchange opens
v0.9.58
— the Svera Exchange, a squad command board, helmet cams, and our own UMP45 and MP5SD.
New
- The Svera Exchange with Tarkov and Dark and Darker style filters.
- A squad command board (F9) with a mini tank, sentries, flak, a mortar and drones, and helmet cam feeds (F10).
- A new airdrop crate with a cloth parachute; seven TV wonder-weapon powers.
- Versus is back on the Versus Arena; our own UMP45 and MP5SD.
- Hunger and thirst, fishing in any river, factions that speak their own languages, and a Hallway01 overhaul.
Fixed
- Giant gore pieces and stretched meshes on demons; airdrops are lootable again; armour and bags no longer bend; the left hand stays on the gun when you interact.
Faster
- Nanite on 63 world kits, and a 240 fps cap.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.57 — 25 Oct 2026 · channel: alpha
Field kit
v0.9.57
— a gunsmith bench you can move, wounds you can see, and camos you have to earn.
New
- A movable gunsmith bench and resupply crate.
- Real wounds on every body, and the horde on the UE5 rig, with horrifying bodies (anatomy, grafts, screeches).
- Weapon camos with field records: gold, diamond and prism.
- Corpse looting by body part, plus jewellery.
- Torn-paper pages everywhere, matchmaking pool and seats boards, and a raid compass.
- Campfire light, doneness and cooking.
Fixed
- A crash when drinking an energy drink.
Dispatch 0.9.56 — 24 Oct 2026 · channel: alpha
Connected
v0.9.56
Fixed
- The trading post connects. Trade chat, the list of traders here and inspect now reach the server (the game was missing an HTTPS certificate bundle). The trading post also reports why when it cannot connect.
- Hotfix 0956a: using the mystery box no longer crashes the game. The audio volume settings were freeing a sound class the mixer was still using.
New
- A new 35-second studio intro.
- Launcher 0.5.0: small patches instead of full downloads, no PC lag while downloading, and it updates itself.
Dispatch 0.9.55 — 23 Oct 2026 · channel: alpha · everyone must update (network protocol 7)
The rebuilt journal
v0.9.55
— the work prepared as 0.9.54 shipped in this build, plus the trading post.
New
- The trading post. Trade chat, who is at the post, inspect another player's bag, and a 12 by 12 trade table with a double check on both sides.
- The journal is a real book. Field Notes and Mastery as two pages that fit every screen, no rows across the spine, no cut-off names. Run, Stats, Trinkets and Auto pages fit their paper.
- Armour on your health star. Steel shield plates over the star that crack, break and regenerate; wonder armour has its own tint and an ULT ring. All 50 buffs and debuffs show with a name and a colour.
- Pick-up cards. Look at any loose item in reach for a torn-paper card: name in its rarity colour, stats, weight, found in raid, worth.
- Armour fits far more survivors, every armour family has its own sounds, and wonder armour has an automatic ability and a ULT you press.
- Zombies: the UE5 horde look with matched walking, one-armed zombies fight like it, and new horror beats.
- Audio: footsteps weighted per surface, 468 zombie voice lines, facility announcer lines and ambience.
- Weapons: folding stocks and the Weapon Actions wheel on B.
Fixed
- Spectator and prone fixes, and many crash and network fixes. Keep what you carry when you extract.
Dispatch 0.9.53 — 21 Oct 2026 · channel: alpha
Admins only
v0.9.53
Changed
- Admin tools are locked to verified admins. No console or cheats for anyone else, hosts included.
- Your back rifle sits flush on the side of your backpack (Moss and Azure) instead of floating.
- Sliding is back, third-person guns point where you aim, multiplayer gunfire and weapon sway fixes, menu fixes, a new trap on Bellows, and stability fixes.
Dispatch 0.9.52 — 19 Oct 2026 · channel: alpha
Back on the slide
v0.9.52
Fixed
- Sliding is back for everyone. Third-person guns point where you aim.
- Multiplayer gunfire sounds right for everyone at high ping, and other players' weapon sway and recoil show.
- Menu pages no longer stack or shrink. A new trap on Bellows. Stability fixes.
Dispatch 0.9.51 — 19 Oct 2026 · channel: alpha
Azure joins
v0.9.51
New
- Azure joins the roster with his own body, built on the UE5 mannequin like Moss.
- Long guns sling across your back instead of hanging at your hip.
Fixed
- Moss's hands sit back on the gun in third person, and a broken third-person revolver pose is gone.
- The Angler's Vest no longer drops or appears in shops (owned copies are kept). Character select and stability fixes.
Dispatch 0.9.50 — 18 Oct 2026 · channel: alpha
The skill tree
v0.9.50
New
- A passive skill tree on the Skills page.
- Seeded raid loot with rarity tiers and attributes; the Hydra, Aegis, Mule and Lazarus wonder armour sets drop in loot.
- Keycard rooms on five maps: a keycard opens its door as a free shortcut.
- Hanford has an outdoor rework and relight; Hallway 01 has a new lab with a playable rooftop and new traps; Compound 01 has new room lights. A new industrial prop kit.
- New studio intros, new character portraits, a cleaner main menu, a redesigned trader ledger and leaderboard. The Locker has jewellery and watches.
Changed
- Bags are twice the size by default. Barricades upgrade by holding E. Third-person shots hit the crosshair. Muzzle flashes light the room.
- The gunsmith is faster, with parts to buy and fit; fitted parts are used in raids.
- Leaving a match early costs your kit like dying; the secure pouch and insured items are kept.
- Versus01 is retired; Versus plays on Versus02. Zombies move at believable speeds and sound scarier. Electric floor plates shock players too.
- The lobby: several players can pick the same character, and the host presses START when the squad is ready.
Fixed
- Voice chat works (Steam must be running; hold V to talk). MP7 reload hand, leaks and crashes, including one with zombie physics.
Dispatch 0.9.49 — 18 Oct 2026 · channel: alpha · required to play online
Steady ground
v0.9.49
New
- Season pass, store and cosmetics on the main menu, with a Locker to try on and save outfits, jewellery and the wrist watch (raise it with ]). The premium pass track is bought with credits.
- A much bigger stash with sorting, search-and-move and one-click quick sell.
- Supply drops arrive by plane outdoors and 3D-print indoors. Extraction raids with sirens and a nuke, and the Lab.
- Weapon Actions on B (fire mode, light, laser). UI scale and text size settings.
Fixed
- Rounds no longer hang: the zombies-left counter clears when a wave ends and a lost zombie is counted out. Clients can pick a character after a match, and the weapons you bring in are kept.
- Barricade props are synced for every player on every map. Fixed a crash on the trip back to the lobby, the 20-second freeze when switching fullscreen, and most mid-match hitches.
Changed
- Dying costs the gear you carried; the secure pouch and insured items survive. Smaller announcements, a smarter Screamer, fairer difficulty scaling.
Dispatch 0.9.48 — 16 Oct 2026 · channel: alpha
Hold the line
v0.9.48
New
- Barricading. Pick up props, place them anywhere and nail them down, then repair them between waves. Six maps carry barricade stock.
- New fists, a new 21-cue soundtrack set, and a Riverside boathouse. Heaven is rebuilt; Extract Mall gains its hills and creek.
Fixed
- Mall doorways are wide enough for the horde; zombies retry their path instead of standing still. Magazine checks for the P90, MP7, MX68, Herrington, pistols and RPG-7. Hallway 01 lights no longer flicker.
- Props placed against a wall settle for every player; late joiners see the hold-out phase. Printing a melee weapon hands it over instead of refunding you.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.46 — 10 Oct 2026 · channel: alpha
Signal Restored
v0.9.46
— a soundtrack of our own, fifty seconds to breathe between waves, and a notebook that no longer takes the game down with it.
New
- Our own soundtrack. "Today is yet again the same." by The404Studios now plays in the main menu and through every match. It has calm, breather, combat, climax and boss beds, a wave-start and a wave-clear sting, and its own game-over cue.
- You can see the next wave coming. Between waves, a card under the wave counter reads WAVE N INCOMING, with a countdown and a bar. It ticks every second through the last ten, then calls HERE THEY COME as the wave lands. Every player in the match sees it.
- The Acidifier. A new wonder weapon. Hold the trigger to spray slick purple goo. Anything that walks through it loses its footing and is gone in four seconds. The big ones don't melt. They corrode. Survivors only slip. Find it in the mystery box, or order it once the wonder weapons come in.
- Choose your rounds. Hold R to open the ammo wheel and pick what goes in the next magazine, elemental rounds included. A tap of R still just reloads.
- Automated buy doors. Buy doors are now powered doors: walk up, press F to pay, and the door opens itself, with bi-parting doors sliding apart and shutters rolling up into the head. Hallway 01, Arena 02, Arena 03, Hanford, Riverside and Versus 01 all have them, at the same prices as before. Hallway 01 is open again zone by zone: the Choke for 750, the Yard and the Yard West for 1000 each, and the Hall for 1250.
- Four new wonder weapons. The Carrier Wave, the Interlace, the Moonbounce and the Emergency Broadcast join the top shelf from wave 5. Each has its own moving parts, its own sight, and three attachments made for it. Their screens and heat warnings come alive as you fire.
- A proper mystery box. Pay 500, watch the reel turn real weapons, and take what it lands on within ten seconds. It won't hand you a gun you already carry. One survivor uses it at a time, and after six spins it packs up and moves. Wonder weapons turn up more often.
- The AW-4 Bulwark. The escort mech has a new body, walks with weight, and takes your turrets: carry one up to it and press F to bolt it on, Shift+F to take it back. Three mounts, and the Automation page shows what sits on each. If the mech is destroyed, its turrets are set down beside the wreck.
- Bellows is under water now. The station stands on stilts over a silt seabed with kelp and floodlights. The south wall has portholes onto the sea, and the hull creaks around you.
- The dead arrive through portals. Rifts open where a wave is coming from and close between waves.
- Proximity voice. Hold V to talk to survivors near you. A marker at the top of the screen shows who is speaking. The dead can only hear the dead.
- Put the gun away. X holsters your weapon and brings your fists up. X again, or a weapon key, draws it. Quick melee moved to Mouse 5.
- A new survivor: Ashton. TV Man's sibling joins the lobby roster with two outfits.
- A new hotbar. A numbered strip along the bottom of the screen: [4] meds and stims, [5] food and water, [6] grenades and utility, and the rod. The row key brings the item into your hands, Fire uses or throws it, and a weapon key puts it away. The XP bar moved to the bottom left.
- Hands on your grenades. Grenades and meds are held in the hand before you throw or use them, in first and third person. Frag grenades throw a bigger blast, with light and shadow.
- Keycard doors. Readers show their tier and play a swipe or a denied beat. Keycards can be looted from the dead.
- Gunfire sounds like the room you are in. Shots carry tails and echoes that follow the space. Corridors slap back, walls muffle, and distance arrives late. Voices pick up the room too.
- The symbiont's thought wheel is now a dial beside the hotbar, and refuses what it cannot do.
- Notebook bookmarks. Pack-Rat, Turrets and Fishing are pages of the notebook with their own bookmarks.
Changed
- Fifty seconds between waves. The break is now 50 seconds on every map, scored with its own fifty-second intermission piece.
- Sanity holds out longer. Dread, leeches, darkness and other slow drains eat your sanity about half as fast. A sudden scare still hits as hard.
- The M870 loads like a shotgun. Reloading feeds the tube shell by shell, with time for every shell. After each shot your hand slides the pump back and forward, and you hear it.
- Loot lands where it should. Items rest on floors and tables instead of floating or sinking, containers sit on the ground, and scattered loot no longer stacks into walls.
- Unfinished guns are out of circulation. The HK416, the HK416 A5, the HK417, the MK18 Veteran, the M870 Dragonsbreath, the WK-11 Viper SD, both MP-443s and the Vulture no longer turn up in shops, crates or drops while they are reworked. Copies you already own still work.
- Medical kits treat the wound you actually have. IFAK, Salewa and Grizzly kits stop a heavy bleed on the head, chest and stomach. On limbs, use a tourniquet. The surgical kit closes both bleeds on the limb it operates on. A bandage removes one stack of Bleeding, a tourniquet all of it.
- Head or chest at zero no longer kills outright. Only a bleed on that part kills, after a short grace.
- Healing a limb also refills your health bar, point for point. Multi-use kits stay in the bag until their last use ("GRIZZLY 3/4"). The DVP-1 Mk2 regrows a lost leg as well as an arm.
- Quick-heal picks smarter. It never spends a surgical kit on a part above zero, and it uses the smallest kit that covers the wound.
- Fishing, in your hands. In first person the rod runs through your grip instead of floating in front of an open palm. In third person you hold it clear of your chest rig. Hooking, fighting, reeling and a snapped line have new animations.
- Hold to reel means hold to reel. Keep the button down through the hook-set and you start reeling straight away. Go down with a line out and the rod is put away. Tabbing out no longer reels your line in until it snaps.
- A clearer fishing HUD. The prompt sits at the lower middle of the screen. A strip under the bite marker shows how long you have to strike. The catch card dims the world far less. Look away and the bobber marker pins to the edge of the screen.
- Notebook polish. Ctrl+Shift splits a single item off a stack, and the mouse wheel sets how many. A full bag rings red. Refused moves tell you why. Letting go of a drag after closing the notebook no longer throws the item on the floor.
- The resupply crate counts properly. Each gun refills to its own reserve. The crate tells you how many refills are left, and it skips survivors who are nearly full.
- Loot crates show up on every map. Maps without arsenal crates now get them, and resupply boxes spawn.
- The Automation page fits the notebook, and refused purchases say why.
- Buy doors show the Locksmith discount on their price panel. Broken doors can no longer be bought.
- Valuables glint in your bag.
Fixed
- Red dots have a dot. About twenty red-dot sights, on the AK-105, Herrington, Mk14 EBR, MKR9, MX68, SRM-12, WK-11 Viper, XPS2 and M16A4, showed no reticle. They do now, and it sits in the middle of the glass.
- The Mk23 no longer fills the screen with a sleeve when you aim or fire.
- The "?" boxes hand over the gun. The weapon a mystery box offered could not be taken: you paid, it showed, and holding F did nothing. Holding F on it now puts it in your hands.
- A crash when a match started from the lobby is fixed.
- The crash after opening the notebook. The game could close itself about half a minute after you first opened your inventory, on any character. That is fixed.
- The crash when deploying as TV Man. Picking TV Man and leaving the lobby no longer takes the game down.
- A crash for joining players when a match ended with zombies still standing has been fixed.
- Arena 01 and Arena 02 spawn from everywhere again. Eleven spawn points on Arena 01 and one on Arena 02 were silent.
- Voices belong to their owners. Moss, Azure and Raven speak in their own voices. Survivors without a voice of their own stay quiet instead of borrowing someone else's.
- Rain and wet ground render properly in the packaged game.
- The weapon bar no longer flashes when you spawn.
- Steadier menus and multiplayer. The loot sheet, trinket cards, upgrade tree and item menu, the join-password check, controls after being grabbed, and the zombie route search were hardened against crashes and stalls. Wonder weapons and the light-flicker scare no longer hitch.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.45 — 05 Oct 2026 · channel: alpha
Lights Out
v0.9.45
— the dead play fair now, your kit lives in a field notebook, and two survivors step out of the dark.
New
- The field notebook is your inventory. Your loadout, trinkets, skills, attributes, orders, field notes, stats and mastery live in one page-turning notebook, with a bookmark for every section.
- A bigger bag. The base bag holds 56 cells, up from 40.
- Lutte, rebuilt, and Sable joins the roster. Lutte has a new body, hair and clothes, and Sable is a new survivor you can pick in the lobby. Both have their own first-person arms and hands.
- Hair and body physics. Lutte's hair, chains and tail swing and settle as she moves, and her hair tucks under a hat or a helmet. Lutte and Sable both have body physics. It is off on the Low effects setting.
- ASTRIS energy weapons. Seven ASTRIS Security Tier energy guns join the armoury. They fire, aim and reload in your hands like every other gun, and you can buy them from the weapon rack, the crates and the ORDERS sheet.
- Azure finds his voice. Azure now talks in his own voice, voiced by Hesco: callouts, kills, warnings, squad orders, hunger and thirst, sanity, and banter with Moss when he is nearby. Raven speaks up when he loots, voiced by Morgan. The other survivors stay quiet for now.
- Menus that ask before they end your game. QUIT asks first. RESTART, RETURN TO LOBBY and QUIT TO MENU on the pause sheet ask before they end the session. Closing a page puts you back on the button that opened it. Picking a character closes the picker. The trader and gunsmith pages have a close tab. Video options open on the basics, with the advanced settings folded away.
- Hold or toggle. Aim, crouch and sprint can each be set to hold or to toggle.
Fixed
- No more hits through doors and walls. A zombie has to be close, see you and be able to reach you before its swing lands. Behind a closed door the dead stop at the door, and at a barricade they chew the boards from the front.
- The dead stopped skating. Zombies no longer slide across the ground towards you.
- The weapon bar stopped blinking. The hotbar no longer flashes once a second while you stand still. It shows only when you really switch weapons.
- Gloves no longer hide your gun while you eat or drink. Using food, drink or a med with gloves on used to put your gun away for the whole use. It stays in your hands now.
- A lost arm stays lost, for everyone. A monster that tears off an arm takes it for every player in the match. Your other hand holds a pistol, and two-handed guns are refused.
- The loading sheet stays up and holds the match. The sheet no longer vanishes as the map arrives, and a match does not start behind it. The world waits, paused, until every player's sheet is down.
- STORAGE shows your character again. The character portrait on the main-menu STORAGE page was squeezed to nothing. Your survivor stands in the middle of their gear again.
- A versus map's extraction-zone error. One of the versus maps raised an error over an extraction zone it does not have. It no longer does.
- The lab and the mall have zombies again. Coral Point (the lab) and the mall spawned no zombies at all. Every spawner there sends the dead in now.
- Arena03's back rooms wake up. Two spawn zones in Arena03 never woke. They now wake with the zone next to them when its door opens.
Changed
- Turning on the spot. In third person your survivor steps round with their feet planted, instead of spinning in place, when you look about.
- A slowed sprint looks slowed. When something slows your sprint, your own first-person view and what other players see now agree.
- Hold your catch. Your survivor can hold a caught fish out in their hands, in first and third person. All 37 kinds of fish can be held.
- Fishing, checked end to end. Cast, bite, hook, reel and land all work as they should.
- Dropping is one press. Dropping an item from the bag no longer asks you to press again.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.38 — 17 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
Field Manual
v0.9.38
— the big polish pass: menu, storage, lobby teams, guns, sound, network, trees and weather.
New
- New main menu. One clean column — PLAY, HOST, JOIN, STORAGE, CAREER, LEADERBOARDS, OPTIONS, QUIT — with your callsign and build in the corner, over a reworked night cinematic: moonlit fog, a low mist layer and a slow drift on every shot.
- The SVERA NETWORK loading sheet. Map and mode, a rotating field note drawn from the game's real mechanics, and before a match starts the curtain waits for the map's assets to finish preloading.
- STORAGE is your character. Wear gear and slot weapons on the main-menu page and you spawn with them; the page shows everything you have on, a carry-in meter, sort and filter, an inspect card and a right-click menu. What you wear and hold when you extract or die now goes to your stash.
- Lobby teams. In a Versus lobby, pick BLUE or RED right on the roster. Sides stay even, the host can move anyone, the roster marks the host, and VERSUS YARD is on the map list next to VERSUS ARENA.
- Standings in-game. The sveradefense.online leaderboard is readable from the menu — deepest waves, most kills, level, prestige, latest runs — with your own row stamped.
- Nine new guns. The Herrington 11-87 Police, plus a suppressed AK-105, a TR-15 DMR, a canned Mk14 EBR, a sixteen-shell tactical 12-gauge, a suppressed MKR-9, a canned WK-11, an assault MX-68 and a magnum-load R08 — each its own row with its own stats, finish and price.
- Flip magnifier. Red-dot sights can take a 3x magnifier: press [ to swing the glass in behind the dot and again to flip it out. The flip is replicated, so teammates see it too.
- Paper pause sheet and co-op scoreboard. Escape opens a torn-paper pause sheet (host-only rows marked, works on a pad); U shows the paper scoreboard in co-op as well as versus.
- Field-manual gun cards. Cartridge, fire modes, magazine and Pack-a-Punch mark stamped under the name on the HUD card, the inventory, the shop and the mod view; weapon portraits draw as ink sketches.
- Real trees, one sky, shared weather. Poplars, pines and cypresses with leaf canopies on six outdoor maps, one physically lit sky with volumetric clouds per outdoor map, and weather states — clear, overcast, rain, storm, fog — that every player sees the same way.
- New map: COMPOUND. A walled compound that is different every raid. Buildings full of rooms, real doors you open and can break down, courtyards with wind-blown trees, streets of cover, and loot you have to go inside for. One extraction, always a long way from where you land, and host and client build the same compound from the same seed down to the last crate.
- New sidearm: the Pit Viper. A compact seventeen-round 9 mm, tier two, held one-handed.
- Search and Destroy is thirteen rounds. First to seven, sides swap at half time, and a closing ring you can finally SEE: a wall that comes in around the fight, identical on every machine. Some boxes are armour caches and some are trinket hoards, and they move every round.
- Fear you can feel. As composure breaks your hands and arms shake with a real physiological tremor and your aim wanders off true. Monsters frighten you specifically: how close they are, how big, whether they have turned to look at you and whether you can see them. Shouldering the weapon steadies the picture but moves the fear into your aim, so a fight is still winnable, you just have to work for the shot.
- Monsters can take a limb. A heavy enough blow to an arm or a leg tears it off, with gibs and a wound that stays. The limb is gone from your body for everyone in the lobby and gone from your own hands in first person. Lose an arm and you can only carry a pistol or another one-handed weapon. It does not grow back.
Fixed
- Stay signed in. The SVERA NETWORK sign-in is remembered and signs you in by itself the next time you launch, so the board and your records are there without typing anything. Untick REMEMBER ME, or sign out, and it is forgotten on the spot. Your session no longer expires out from under a long run.
- Shotguns reloaded forever. They now load one shell at a time from the ammo you actually carry; a full tube or an empty reserve refuses the reload.
- Snipers that looked like pistols. The L115A3, SV-98, Mosin and their kin no longer come up as a scoped pistol in first person — they are rifles again.
- Doubled magazines. The VSS and the Svera AK, FAL, HK and MK18 family no longer carry a second, floating magazine; the VSS shows its own body in your hands.
- Upside-down scopes. Scopes and every other rail attachment now mount upright and facing forward on the TR-15 family and the SRM-12.
- Floating pistols. Third-person pistols are placed in the hand instead of half a metre in front of it.
- Version mismatch said "lost connection". Joining a host on a different version now says UPDATE REQUIRED, the connection-error dialog names the real reason (lost, timed out, closed by the host, turned away), and the room browser tells you how many rooms it hid because of a version mismatch.
- Host-only gun sound. The host now hears and sees every other player's gun.
- Host-only pickup chime. Health and points pickups now chime for every player, not just the host.
- Dead players kept talking. A player who died went on calling for a medkit from the spectator camera; the squad heard it from empty air across the map. The dead are silent now.
- "0 BOSSS" on the end-of-match sheet. The tally counted correctly and spelled the plural wrong. It reads BOSSES.
- Grey boxes in three maps. The electric trap was untextured engine primitives on Arena01, Arena02 and Hanford. It is galvanised steel with a gunmetal head and a hazard-yellow panel now.
- A hitch at the start of every match. The heads-up display rebuilt itself while it was still being drawn, costing about a second and a half on the first frame.
- Spectating. You always watch a real player, you can cycle teammates, you see their name, and in Versus you can no longer watch the enemy team.
- Props only the host could move. Barricades and props you carry, break or shove now move for everyone in the match.
- Barricades made the dead lose you. Nailing a doorway shut used to blind every zombie behind it, and those that kept coming stood around for up to seventeen seconds before wandering off to chew a plank on the other side of the map.
- Rockets were glowing balls. Launchers now fire the PG-7 round the launcher is actually loaded with, grenade rounds are 40 mm, and rifle and sniper shots are tracers.
- The suppressor was not on the barrel. The suppressed AK-12's can now screws onto the barrel with a cap on its far end, and the muzzle flash leaves the cap instead of the middle of the can.
- Shotguns that were not shotguns. The SRM-12 family and the Auto Shotgun wear a 12-gauge body again, in three distinct finishes, and the Police 11-87 shows its own body in third person and on the ground.
- Untextured zombies. The base and stalker types rendered as flat grey. They wear their own skin again, gibbed chunks are wet meat instead of glowing red blocks, and a looted corpse keeps every part of its body art.
- Snipers fired a pistol. Every bolt-action rifle in the game was using a 9 mm handgun recording as its gunshot. They sound like rifles now, and pistols sound like their own calibre.
- The cryo weapon's sound never stopped. Its shot used a looping steam sound played through a call that cannot be stopped, so it stacked up for the rest of the match.
- The dead skated. Most of the dead have stopped sliding: walk and run are matched to the ground actually covered, on the host and on every client, where it used to be worst. A zombie that turns now steps through the turn, a zombie with a leg blown off no longer slides along in a jump pose, and a monster that swung once no longer freezes mid-punch.
- The horde hit you anonymously. Nearly every blow the common horde landed arrived with no record of who threw it, which quietly broke the damage direction indicator, one perk's retaliation, and where hits landed on your body.
- The lobby roster ran off the screen. Names, ranks and team tags were cut off at the right edge, the player count read "of 0", and a greyed-out DEPLOY button never said why. It now tells you that someone still has to pick a character.
- Controller: rebinding broke your shortcuts. Remapping a key used to silently break the pad shortcut that opens the same screen, leaving the Field Journal, Career, Controls, Skill Tree and Options with no way in on a controller at all. They follow your bindings now.
- Controller: the Trader page ignored the pad. It now starts with the cursor on a button, changes stash tabs with the bumpers, and closes with B.
Changed
- Audio mix. Zombies are quieter and muffle with distance, a dead zombie goes silent, squad voice lines sit above the horde and the horde ducks while someone talks; rooms add room or hall reverb and outdoors stays dry; the headshot squelch is levelled with the crunch and placed in the world; the hit tick, common pickups, the MG and shotgun turrets, grenade bounces, crate opens and zombie deaths now use real recordings.
- Network audit. Barricade nails and breaks, props at rest, kills, points, health and the weather read the same on the host and on a joined client; carried props stream at 30 Hz while held; barricades, doors, traps, elevators, chests and the versus arena are pinned for replication and late joiners.
- Performance. Assets now warm in small slices behind the loading screen instead of in one long stall, and texture memory follows your quality preset (Low 600 MB up to Epic 2 GB); a fresh install starts on a real High preset.
- Paper everywhere. Chat, spectator, nameplates, the scoreboard and the settings menu use the paper inks and faces; HUD hints sit on their own scraps.
- Tidier Join sheet. The Join Game sheet no longer shows a second Host button or a password box that nothing read.
- Barricades are an obstacle, not a wall. The dead see you through the boards, walk straight to them and start tearing, and the moment a barricade gives way they drop it and come for you.
- Search and Destroy rounds never ended. The old match reset both scores to zero at five and started again, forever, with no round count and no side swap.
- Gunfire at distance. Shots now dull and echo as they travel instead of cutting off at twenty-five metres, and a body standing between you and the shooter no longer muffles his gun. Only walls do that.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.37 — 16 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
Open Fire
v0.9.37
— in versus, bullets hit the other team again.
Fixed
- Versus players couldn't damage each other. On Versus Yard your shots went straight through the
other team: the guns only hurt a player when versus mode had switched on the shooter's player damage, and
the new round system had stopped switching it on. Every player is armed for player damage from the moment
they spawn, every round.
- Joining players were unhittable for a minute. You can't be hurt while your loading screen is up, but
the game only told the server when a joining player's loading screen went up, never when it came down, so
the protection ran its full 60 seconds after every map load. It now ends the moment your screen clears.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.36 — 16 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
Sound Off
v0.9.36
— the survivors finally talk, and the gun smoke finally looks like smoke.
New
- Survivors talk. 49 kinds of callout and 141 recorded takes: reloading, last mag, out of ammo,
taking hits, bleeding, going down, a teammate going down, calling for a medkit, confirming kills, spotting
the horde, reacting to what's in a chest, answering squad orders — and some nervous chatter when it goes
too quiet. The server decides who speaks, everyone within about 34 metres hears it from where the speaker
stands, and a subtitle drops onto the paper strip.
- Nobody talks over anybody. One line per survivor at a time, a cooldown on every kind of call — some
shared by the whole squad, so five people don't all shout "reloading" — at most five voices at once, and the
urgent calls (going down, out of ammo) cut through the chatter.
- Versus Yard. A new versus map for up to 12 players, laid out from modular pieces: walls, cover,
crates, trees, chests and trinket caches, with the two teams starting on opposite ends of the yard. Three
rounds with a closing ring; weapons and trinkets are dropped across the yard every round,
and the fallen are back at their own end for the next one. Torn-paper versus HUD, and the scoreboard on
U.
- Pick your side. Choose BLUE or RED on the PLAY sheet when Versus is selected; your pick is saved.
Sides stay even at every size from 1v1 to 6v6: if your pick would put your side two players ahead, you
join the other one, and two players who want each other's side swap between rounds.
- Safe spawns. You spawn at your own end, never within 2,000 units of a living enemy and never on
top of a teammate. If every spawn is covered you wait — "WAITING FOR A SAFE SPAWN" — until one clears.
- No respawns mid-round. Die during a round and you spectate until the next one starts. Anyone who
joins mid-round waits for the next round too.
- A versus budget. Everyone starts a versus match with 50,000 points to spend at their team's
arsenal crate — there's one at each base. It's granted once per match: what you don't spend carries
into the next round, and kills still pay nothing.
- Your limbs, top right. The ammo card is gone from the corner; all seven limbs take its place —
health, bleeding, fractures and blackouts — with your nails and Pack-a-Punch line underneath. Press
; to check your magazine: the rounds in it and your spares.
- Hallway01 is a real map now. Four zones behind four buyable doors (750, 1,000, 1,000 and 1,250),
eleven spawners, and the empty west hall opened up with a mezzanine and Pack-a-Punch on top. Three
different perk machines (it had two Juggernauts), shotgun and SMG wall-buys, an extraction point, trinket
caches, cover, and a sky, a moon and climbable roofs over the yard.
Fixed
- Gun smoke was a stack of flat discs. Every shot now leaves soft puffs that push out of the barrel,
slow down, spread, rise and thin out, lit by the room they're in. If the effect ever fails to load it draws
nothing at all instead of a shape.
- Sprinting with a pistol wasn't a sprint. The pistol's sprint animation was a copy of its jog — and
you spawn holding a pistol. You now lean into a real sprint with the pistol held low in both hands.
- Feet skated. No walk or run animation followed how fast you were actually moving: rifle walks slid
about a fifth, pistol walks ran over half again too fast. Playback now matches your speed, on every screen
that sees you.
- Diagonal sprints slid sideways. Holding forward and a strafe ran the legs straight ahead while the
body travelled at 45°. The body now turns toward where it's running.
- Pistol-armed survivors walked in silence. None of the pistol animations carried a footstep. Your
steps sound again; the rifle keeps its own.
- The stamina bar lied about sprint. A hidden timer stopped your sprint after about two seconds while
the bar still showed most of it full. The bar is now the limit: about nine seconds of sprint from full, a
short breather before you can go again, and the bar says when you're winded.
- The health bar showed the wrong number. It added up your limbs instead of reading the health that
actually decides whether you die. It reads the real value now; limb damage lives on the limb sheet.
- Armour said "no plate" over armour you had. It shows your plate tier and gear condition now, and the
mind bar shows a number instead of just a word.
- The magazine check also toggled a debug camera. The engine had its own camera on the same key; that
moved to Ctrl+; and ; is yours.
- Zombies wedged in walls or outside the map held rounds open forever. Anything with no way back to
the fight for a few seconds is now put down through the normal death path, so the wave still ends.
- Hanford's yard trees were ghosts you could walk straight through, one of them beside a spawn. They're
solid trees now, the map has trinket caches, and the handcar extraction pad is no longer pitch black.
- A versus match against nobody was over in 25 seconds. With one side empty, every round counted as
a wipe the moment it started. Round 1 now waits — "WAITING FOR AN OPPONENT" — until both sides have a
player.
- Scoreboards showed your computer's name. The versus board, the lobby roster, the party list and
the match-end sheet now show the name you chose, or your Steam name — never the desktop name.
Changed
- The vitals card moved to the bottom right and got a proper torn-paper sheet: health, stamina, armour
and mind with their numbers always showing, and a one-line summary of your bonuses. In versus it no longer
sits under the versus HUD.
- Hallway01 got a coat of paint. Concrete, asphalt and rust instead of brushed-nickel boxes, yard
lights that no longer blow out white, and fog with some colour in it.
- The versus HUD drops the zombie pieces. No co-op points list, +points pops, wave banner or zombie
counters in versus; your own budget shows instead, and the teams read BLUE and RED.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.35 — 12 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
The Third Zone
v0.9.35
— Riverside's south half is now something you pay for.
New
- Riverside gets its third zone. The building's south half is now a locked area: a new wall closes
its open west edge onto the landing, another fills the gap in the interior divider, and a fifth buyable
door in that divider sells the room for 1,000.
Changed
- Measured, not guessed. The new wall is carved into the zombies' navigation — the route from the
landing into the south half now goes the long way round, 7.4 times the straight line — and wave one still
reaches you. The shipped build reports five doors and three zones, all wired correctly, with all four
spawners on the navmesh.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.34 — 12 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
Take Cover
v0.9.34
— Riverside stops being an empty floor.
Changed
- Riverside gets cover. Thirty-nine pieces now stand through the building hall and across the
outdoor ground that 0.9.33's doors sell, so fights run along lanes instead of across open floor.
- Nothing in the way. Every piece sits on real ground, clear of the doors, the spawners and the
player start, and the zombies' navigation still covers all four spawners.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.33 — 12 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
Muzzle Flash
v0.9.33
— you can finally see your gun go off.
Fixed
- You couldn't see your gun fire. The weapon pack's muzzle-flash effect draws nothing in this game
— on every gun — while its sparks and smoke draw fine. Each shot now also fires the game's own flash and
light at the muzzle, sized to about the width of the barrel.
- A grey checkerboard ball hung at the muzzle after every shot. The barrel smoke had no material,
so it drew the engine's placeholder for most of a second. It uses the proper smoke now, and would rather
hide than ever show a checkerboard again.
- A disc floated over your optic while hip-firing. The scope glass now hides unless you're aiming;
the sight picture still appears when you do.
- Riverside had no doors at all, so every zone was open from wave one. Four buyable doors, 750 each,
now sit on the building's four exits and sell the outdoor field. The building's interior stays free.
New
- Hallway01 has a courtyard. A walled yard north of the corridor, reached through one new opening,
with cover, lights and its own spawner. No door — the map stays open on purpose, like Bellows.
Changed
- Muzzle lights follow your Effects quality. On Low you still see the flash, just without a
dynamic light for every bullet.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.32 — 11 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
Volume Down
v0.9.32
— also 0.9.31, which was built but never published. The guns finally hear the slider.
Fixed
- Turning the volume down left the guns at full blast. Every gunshot, reload and explosion lived in
a sound group no slider was wired to. The effects slider now reaches them — without overriding the voice
slider on the way.
- You could be hurt while the loading screen was still up. Your character is in the live world for
a moment before the screen lifts, and zombies don't wait. The server now refuses damage to you until it
lifts — for a capped time, so nobody can use it to hide.
- Three doors took your points and unlocked nothing. On Arena01 and Versus01 the cheap door beside
the start room now opens the south room, and the containment door opens the containment room — which now
has zombies in it. On Arena02 the 1,200-point door opens the west side, which has zombies now too. Each
was settled by measuring what's actually behind the door, which also corrects where 0.9.29 pointed the
containment door.
Changed
- Trinkets no longer glow all the time. They flash small and brief, and only when there's something
to answer: defensive ones when you take a hit, offensive ones when you fire. What they do is unchanged.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.30 — 11 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
Use Means Use
v0.9.30
— two fixes, and one of them is a whole map.
Fixed
- Choosing Use on a packed turret did nothing. The inventory's right-click Use row was hard-wired
to quick-use a medical item. It now does what the item needs — for a packed turret, unpack it and
shoulder it.
- The PvP map barely had navigation. Eleven of Versus01's thirteen spawn zones — its whole north
room and the Belows annexe — sat outside it, so zombies spawned there could never move toward anyone. It
was missing a navigation volume the main arena already has for the same rooms. All thirteen are covered
now, checked in the shipped game.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.29 — 11 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
Packed & Placed
v0.9.29
— turrets go in your bag, and the loading screen stops being a window.
Fixed
- A turret could never be an item. Buy or order one now and it arrives in your bag as a packed
crate: unpack it from the grid, shoulder it, and set it down with the placement ghost that was already
there. Ordered turrets no longer appear pre-placed in a ring around the supply crate.
- The loading screen was see-through. You could watch the level load behind it — and walk around
back there, and get bitten. It's fully opaque now and holds your movement and aim until it leaves.
- The bottom-left HUD flickered for the first several minutes of every match. The food and water
rows folded in and out every 8 to 12 seconds because slow, passive decay was being mistaken for you eating
or drinking.
- Versus01 had four spawn zones with no name, so they could never spawn anything. They're named after
the doors they sit beside, and doors that took your money and unlocked nothing were pointed at real zones
(more on that in 0.9.32).
- The three deployable station items had blank icons. They're photographed from real props now.
Changed
- The game now knows which room you're in — measured by walking distance, not straight lines, so
walls count. An even split of the horde between the rooms players occupy is built, but ships switched off
to keep today's pacing.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.28 — 11 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
One Lobby
v0.9.28
— three things that made the game feel broken, because they were.
Fixed
- Two lobbies on screen at once. A newer paper lobby sheet was opening itself on top of the real
lobby, so you got two map pickers listing the same maps. The original lobby is the only one again.
- Rounds that never ended. The zombie counter is set to the whole wave's quota before anything
spawns, so a single failed spawn left the round waiting forever with nothing to kill. A watchdog now ends
a stalled wave through the game's own path — intermission, sounds and boss check included — after 12
quiet seconds, and never while a zombie is alive.
- Your first match froze for three and a half seconds. That was the one-time hardware auto-detect,
not shader compilation. It now runs behind the loading screen on your first launch: worst frame
3,605 ms → 25 ms, and zero hitches.
- Some spawners could never wake up. On several maps the door and zone names didn't match, so a
zone no door could open stayed dead all match. Those zones now come alive on their own and every mismatch
is reported by name — while maps whose door progression already works (Arena03, Hanford) are left exactly
as they are.
Changed
- The loading screen waits for the level to be ready — shaders, streaming, textures, the asset
preload and fonts — instead of dropping early. Every wait is capped, so it can never hang.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.27 — 11 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
Two Crashes
v0.9.27
— both were already in the live build. We found them by testing the next one.
Fixed
- One launch in three never reached the main menu. The loading screen's movie player drew on its
own thread into a window the game was swapping out underneath it. Twelve launches before the fix: four
crashes and one hang. Twelve after: none. If your game "just closed" on startup, you were right.
- The shipped game couldn't load Arena01. Since the foliage update on 22 Aug, a tree model carried
an editor-only note that dragged a tree-authoring asset into the download, and loading that asset crashed
the game. The note is gone, the trees and their wind are unchanged, and all eleven maps now load in the
shipped game.
- Danger warnings could go missing. The Spitter's hiss, the Howler's scream, the Charger's wind-up
and the Armored and Juggernaut smashes could be lost to a bad packet while the blow itself still landed.
They're sent reliably now.
- Danger rings were drawn at 80% of the real radius, so standing just outside the light still got
you hit. They're drawn at the true radius.
- The Hive Mother went quiet at range. Her roar, slam warning, phase change and death cue never
reached anyone beyond 120 m. She's heard out to 400 m now; the common horde keeps its short range.
- Recruits kept showing FOCUS TARGET after the target died, and could pick a target at the edge of
their range that they then refused to shoot — choosing and firing measured distance differently. One
measure decides both now.
- Recruits built barricades standing perfectly still. They now swing whatever they're holding, on
the same arc as your melee.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.26 — 11 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
They Flinch
v0.9.26
— the forty things you actually shoot finally feel it.
Fixed
- The common horde didn't react to being shot. Only the special zombies had stagger and knockback.
The commons now take the same weapon-class shove, so the stagger and knockback on your skills, charms and
gear finally reach them — and a shotgun blast spends one shove, not eight, so light bodies don't turn into
cannonballs.
- Melee never moved in your hands. There is no authored swing for it, so the chop is procedural: a
95° arc in 0.3 seconds, fast down and slower back, played on every machine at once.
- Shotgun crits made no spark. The rifle half of this fix made 0.9.25; the shotgun half missed that
build.
- The arsenal grid showed the sticker price while charging the discounted one, so Bargainer and
Economy players saw one number and paid another. The grid shows what you'll pay.
- A stray teleporter pad sat about 150 m outside Arena01, linked to nothing. It's gone; the three
working pairs are untouched.
New
- The RPG-7 homes. Lock a target and the rocket steers onto it — only a target the server agrees
you've locked, and never one that's already gone.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.25 — 11 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
Through the Glass
v0.9.25
— 0.9.24 promised working scopes. This is the build that has them.
Fixed
- You couldn't see through any scope. Three faults were stacked, which is why every single fix
failed: the scope's camera pointed along the wrong axis, the glass could divide its picture by an exposure
of zero, and a performance switch turned the picture off. With all three gone you get a magnified sight
picture with the reticle on it.
- The crosshair ignored your accuracy. Bullets used your modified spread — perks, attributes,
attachments, trinkets, prone bracing, statuses — while the reticle drew the raw one. They agree now.
- Players who joined had no ADS zoom and no sniper overlay on any weapon. Those settings only ever
reached the host.
- Crits were silent on hitscan guns. They now spark and show on the hit marker (rifles now, shotguns
in 0.9.26).
- Zombies wouldn't spawn where they should. 0.9.24's rule against spawning behind you covered the
whole space behind a player out to 25 m — most of a room. It now covers 9 m, in a narrower cone.
- Co-op had blind spots. Turret and recruit roster rows went blank past 150 m, the boss enrage showed
on no machine, armour breaks showed nothing to anyone else, acid puddles drifted away from their own damage,
Wraith blinks arrived unreliably, the pet's loot magnet never picked anything up, and a storage crate could
stay "IN USE" forever.
- More that went wrong quietly: XP was paid again on every seamless travel, a joining player's ranked
rating never saved, and a scoped rifle rendered the whole world twice every frame for the entire match.
- Pressing ORDER during its cooldown did nothing. The buttons now grey out for exactly as long as a
press would be refused. Weapon previews also stopped rendering white.
Changed
- The server checks more. Shot spread has a server-side floor, where a shot starts is checked, and
lock-on range, prestige and purchases are all verified by the server.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.24 — 11 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
The Big Overhaul
v0.9.24
— extraction, PvP, air-dropped orders, and a long list of things joined players never saw.
Fixed
- Players who joined were playing a different game. Their fire-mode choice never reached the server
and snapped back to semi after every attachment; they never saw an intermission or the between-wave
countdown; they spawned with an empty deploy bag; and in PvP the score, clock and round state were invisible,
while anyone who joined by invite or mid-match wore a Silver rank badge. The host also lost their own
supply-drop confirmation whenever anyone joined.
- Zombies swung at you from across the room. Their attack check never actually measured the distance
to you — it always read zero — so any zombie with a target swung at any range. It measures now, and leaves
about three-quarters of a metre between you at the swing.
- Keyboard and gamepad did nothing on the main menu and lobby — only the mouse worked. And the server
browser refused every join after any disconnect that wasn't a clean exit to the menu, until you
restarted.
- Guns looked like white plastic, and gloves were grey. The gun finishes were rebuilt and all 86
retuned to dark metal with readable sights. The glove material was missing a setting — on all fifteen
survivors, in every build.
- Your volume settings only worked while the audio menu was open. They now apply in matches, and the
Voices slider — which controlled no sounds at all — now controls the voices.
- Three maps had navigation holes. On Hallway01 no zombie could path all the way to you and the big
specials couldn't fit through its doorway; Bellows had three unreachable spawners; Arena03's north half had
no navigation and its ceiling was too low for the big specials. All fixed, and Arena03 gained a ramp —
though some of its upper-floor spawners still can't path the whole way.
- Foliage let you nail props in mid-air on Hanford, because one foliage actor counted as something to
nail against, everywhere on the map. And every hull quake leaked a looping wind sound that never stopped,
in four maps.
- The head-start bonus paid once per session, not once per match, and four wonder weapons equipped as
guns with no stats.
New
- Extraction on Arena01. A booking desk near spawn, and an exit across the map.
- PvP. A Versus mode on the new Versus Arena, with balanced teams and friendly fire. The lobby's MODE
button switches between Siege and Versus, and POOL picks solo, duo, trio or quad.
- Orders. Air-dropped weapon orders from a torn-paper sheet: five categories, a live 3D preview, and a
tier rolled when the crate lands.
- Switch sights in the field. Tap Left Alt to cycle through the optics your gun owns (hold Alt to
free-look), or LB + RB on a pad. Switching never buys or sells anything.
- A treeline on Arena01's skyline — 260 trees, visible from about a third of the map.
Changed
- A heavier pace. You walk, crouch and sprint slower, your jump is a short, realistic hop that peaks
around 66 cm, and you have half the steering in the air. Fall damage follows how hard you land — a bad
landing can fracture a leg. The horde slowed down with you, to 78% of its old speed.
- Sprinting plays a real run in third person, for you and for teammates watching you.
- Aim sway answers to your build. Mastery, skills, perks and trinkets all steady (or unsteady) your
sights.
- New spawn rule: nothing spawns within 8 m of a player or in the space behind them. The rear guard
turned out far too wide; 0.9.25 fixes it.
- Keys: B switches fire mode, and the shop is on I everywhere.
- Zombies stop standing still. Every spawn is checked against navigation first, and a zombie stuck on
an ordinary crate or car now works its way past instead of giving up.
- The loading screen counts what it's loading, and shows hints while it does.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.23 — 06 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
Through & Through
v0.9.23
— ten weapons join the damage system, and the rifle keeps its sight.
Fixed
- Projectile weapons ignored almost every damage bonus. All ten of them — rockets, grenades, the
laser, Tesla and the rest — fired raw damage, skipping Pack-a-Punch, affixes, perks, trinkets, statuses,
mastery, crits and headshots. They now run through the same damage chain as every other gun, splash
included.
- Penetration charms and affixes did nothing. Bullets already passed through bodies at a flat
falloff. Now how many bodies a round crosses depends on the weapon family — none for pistols, up to three
for marksman rifles — and the three penetration trinkets and the Piercing and Overpressure affixes add to
it.
- The starting rifle never got its sight. You spawn holding the R08, and factory kits were only fitted
to the gun in your hands. Stowed guns get theirs too now.
- The inventory paperdoll hid your character behind its own sheet. The layers were in the wrong order.
The portrait's background was also re-tinted to match the paper.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.22 — 06 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
The Perk Web
v0.9.22
— forty-six perks, and captions that finally stay on their cards.
New
- The perk web. F4 now opens a constellation of 46 perks across six branches and five tiers, joined
by prerequisite paths. Walk it with the D-pad or the arrow keys; the server checks every purchase for its
prerequisites and level.
Changed
- Perk cards are readable. Captions were rendering above and outside their cards, locked text was
nearly the colour of locked paper, and long names were cut short ("LUCKY CHARM" read "LUCKY"). All three
are fixed.
- Heads-up: perks you buy still last one life, so after a death you rebuy the chain. That's a design
question we haven't settled.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.21 — 05 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
Up to Speed
v0.9.21
— the space guns catch up. Factory sights were still missing; 0.9.23 fixes that.
Fixed
- Laser, Tesla and Cryo weapons fired at about a fifth of bullet speed. Their bolt inherited a
placeholder speed and never set its own. They fly as fast as bullets now.
- The WK-11 Viper's shop card showed a pistol. It shows the rifle.
- Semi-auto pistols aimed into the camera. The M1911, Mk23, Deagle and MP443 sit in front of you
again when you aim.
- Twenty-one attachment mounts were rotated on the wrong axis.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.20 — 05 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
F Is for Fixed
v0.9.20
— a hotfix, ninety minutes after the build that needed it.
Fixed
- Pressing F opened the arsenal menu everywhere. Lifting the buy-anywhere restriction in 0.9.19 made
the interact prompt believe an arsenal crate was always in front of you, which blocked looting, doors and
every other F prompt. Buying and upgrading from anywhere still works.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.19 — 05 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
Now You See Them
v0.9.19
— attachments that actually draw, and pistols that stop pretending to be revolvers.
Fixed
- Attachments never appeared on your first-person gun. Optics, suppressors and grips on seven of the
eight pack guns were set up hidden and could never draw. 0.9.18 said they mounted; this is the build where
you can see them.
- Four pistols drew and reloaded like revolvers. The M1911, Mk23, Deagle and MP443 now have a real
semi-auto with a magazine reload.
- Snipers looked like a small lump in third person. They use real rifle models now.
- Two survivor bodies had nowhere to sling a gun, so stowed weapons hung from the body's origin.
- A recoil error fired several times a second while you shot.
- "I can't upgrade anything." The shop opened anywhere but refused every purchase unless you stood at
an arsenal crate — and there often wasn't one nearby. You can now buy and upgrade from anywhere.
New
- Six new guns, including the Ridgeline bolt-action rifle (with an audible rechamber), a full-auto
machine pistol and a 210-point snubnose.
- 43 factory loadouts, so variants look different at a glance.
- Right-click upgrades. Right-click any trinket, weapon or squad member for an upgrade menu with the
price on the button.
- Arsenal rarity. The arsenal sells guns from Uncommon to Legendary, with rolls that scale.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.18 — 05 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
Every Gun Speaks
v0.9.18
— one voice per gun, at last.
Fixed
- 58 guns shared 11 gunshot sounds. Each now fires its own recording.
- Gunshots didn't fade with distance. Not one gun sound had any distance falloff; they all do
now.
- Gun fixes: the R08 is a proper 8-shot revolver, the WK-11 Viper scopes correctly, the Herrington
11-87 is a true semi-auto without its silent pump stall, and bolt-action snipers no longer count as
quick-draw pistols.
- Controller: looting and the inventory take focus when they open, the D-pad reaches every control,
and item actions work without a mouse.
New
- Suppressors matter. Suppressed shots are quieter and carry a third of the distance — the same
distance zombies hear them from.
- Reload and draw sounds keep pace with your reload and draw speed.
- Rails on the pack guns. Seven of them gained mounts for optics, suppressors and grips — though, as
0.9.19 found, the pieces were set never to draw.
Changed
- The arsenal is sorted by tier, and the new guns carry their proper names.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.17 — 05 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
New Hands
v0.9.17
— first person, rebuilt from the grip up.
New
- First person, rebuilt. A new first-person rig and animation set (KINEMATION) replaces the old arms:
hands and weapon placed properly on every gun, aim down sights, inspect, magazine check, a ready pose,
fire-mode switching, attachment toggles, lean and a pistol quick-draw. Picking things up plays a real
animation, reload and draw speed follow your trinkets and mastery, and you now start with the pistol.
- Nine new guns: the AK-105, TR15, Mk14 EBR, SRM-12, Herrington 1187, MKR9, WK11 Viper, MX68 and
R08.
- Real acid and impacts. Spitter acid is a bile glob in flight, a splat on impact and a lingering
puddle, and the spitter charges at its mouth rather than its chest. Every impact, hit flash and monster
warning runs on new particle effects; the old glowing spheres are gone.
- Prone and provisions. Press Z to go prone. Food and drink are items you use from the bag — and an
energy drink gives you a rush, then a crash.
- Loot containers. Crates, footlockers, medical cabinets, weapon cases and caches spawn around the map
and roll their loot when opened; some take a few seconds to pry. A paper loot sheet has TAKE ALL.
- Trinkets stack and upgrade. Stack a trinket up to 25, with diminishing returns, and upgrade eight of
them through three tiers for points plus materials.
- Options for every machine: quality presets including Potato, upscaling, and NVIDIA DLSS rows (active
when the DLSS plugin is installed). The whole options sheet works with keyboard and controller.
- A loading screen with real progress on map travel.
Changed
- A leaner HUD. Vitals rows fold away when they have nothing to say, medal toasts are compact paper
strips, the XP strip folds to a thin band when idle and stamps on level-up, and the HUD dims while the
inventory is open. Damage numbers actually appear now — the HUD was missing the piece they draw on.
- One inventory, many tabs. Loadout, Trinkets, Skills, Attributes and Journal share one page, with a
row for your four weapon slots, reworked gear cards around a framed portrait, and limb health in its own
region.
- Zombies are scarier up close — dread, screeches and a lunge shake — and small, fast zombies no
longer ice-skate: their stride matches their real speed.
- Squad limits. Caps per unit type (soldiers, mechs, upkeepers, medics) plus a total, shown in the hub
and refused cleanly when full. Ordered units place barricades properly in doorways, on stairs and in gaps
between props, and the squad page finally works on a pad.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.16 — 02 Sep 2026 · channel: alpha
The Squad Wheel
v0.9.16
— hold C, and your squad finally listens.
Fixed
- Your squad had seven orders and no way to give them. Hold C for a torn-paper order wheel: Follow,
Hold, Patrol, Repair, Weapons Free, Stand Down and Fortify. It reads your mouse properly too — a sensitivity
mix-up meant a flick could never reach a wedge.
- The motion blur toggle did nothing. A project setting always won. The toggle is in charge now.
- Carried props flipped sideways.
- Ctrl+E, Ctrl+H and Ctrl+J also fired squad orders.
New
- Four new guns: the AK-74, HK416, MP-443 and M16A4, with real models and authored recoil. The AS VAL
gets its own model.
- Recruits keep busy. Between waves they fortify, haul and patrol on their own — your orders still
come first — and on a defensive footing they weld barricades mid-fight, using nails from your supply.
- More from the bag and the stash. Assign items to hotbar slots 1–4, deposit to your stash, sell and
buy back from the stash, read trinket synergies, and respec your attributes (with a confirmation).
Changed
- Zombies got smarter. They flank as a pack, sprint when enraged, search where they last saw you, and
go for the barricade that's shielding you — up to three on one barricade.
- Big specials path like big specials. The Abomination, Behemoth, Demon and Bloated have their own,
roomier navigation, and navigation was rebuilt on every map.
- Controller comfort: focus rings on every menu, a new cursor, and quick menus you open by tapping
View and then pressing, instead of a two-thumb chord.
- Shader caching is on, and weapon icons were re-shot from the real gun bodies.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.15 — 26 Aug 2026 · channel: alpha
A New Face
v0.9.15
— Lutte joins the roster, and prestige learns to keep things.
New
- Lutte, a new playable survivor with a modular wardrobe, on the character-select board.
- Permanent perks. Each prestige rank opens a slot for a perk you keep for good (swap it whenever you
like). At prestige you can also sacrifice your gear and stash for bonus unlock points — 3, plus one per rank
— behind a second confirmation, so a single click can never wipe a stash. The panel gets its proper paper
styling in 0.9.16.
- Fortify on the command key. Order a recruit to barricade a doorway.
Changed
- Monsters no longer glow in the dark. They were lighting themselves; the world lights them now.
- Guns sit in the hand on every body. Where a body has no grip socket, the game now adds one instead of
hanging the gun from the wrong spot.
- Your third-person body is no longer bent out of shape by the first-person rig.
- Recruits carry their rifles, and spitter acid is a green spray instead of a placeholder sphere (a
proper acid effect follows in 0.9.17).
- Shooting has more weight: each shot kicks the camera, and tired arms sway more when you aim.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.14 — 25 Aug 2026 · channel: alpha
Rain on the Roof
v0.9.14
— every readout said it was raining. Now you can see it.
Fixed
- Rain never showed up. Every weather readout said it was pouring, but the rain rode on a part of the
game the engine keeps hidden, so nothing drew. It renders now — and the drops stop on the roof above you
while the storm keeps falling outside, so stepping into a doorway no longer deletes the weather.
- Rain fell through solid roofs. An earlier workaround let some rain through cover on purpose. It's
gone.
- You couldn't pick up or nail anything in third person. Reach was measured from the camera, which sits
well behind you, so it ran out before it got past your own back. Reach counts from you now, in both views;
first person is unchanged.
- The skill tree's fourth lane was out of reach. The sheet only scrolled up and down, so Economy sat
off the edge. It scrolls sideways now.
- 43 weapons dropped as a wooden supply crate. They drop as themselves.
Changed
- Heavy rain costs less. Drops colliding with the world were the entire cost of rain, so fewer drops
are drawn — the storm's strength in the game is unchanged.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.13 — 24 Aug 2026 · channel: alpha
Banked at Last
v0.9.13
— your end-of-match XP was going missing. It isn't any more.
Fixed
- End-of-match XP never reached you in real matches. The save was hooked to a map-change event that
seamless travel skips — and every real match travels seamlessly (our test sessions didn't, which is how it
hid). XP and loot banking now catch seamless travel too.
- Your lobby character stood empty-handed. The display rifle is back in their hands.
- A floating "Test Block" hovered over your lobby character. It was a placeholder nameplate; the lobby
hides it now.
- Three trinkets couldn't be unequipped, so a bought Surveyor's Fob stayed stuck in your bag — and the
Divining Pin couldn't find the very charms it advertises.
- The supply-drop banner showed an empty box all the time.
- The F3 hub's right-hand tabs were off the edge of the sheet. The tab row scrolls now.
- The RPG-7 was held backwards.
New
- Prestige insignia. Prestige ranks 1 to 10 now show an emblem under the level on your
nameplate.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.12 — 21 Aug 2026 · channel: alpha
Real Recoil
v0.9.12
— the navigation, the kick and the icons all come back from the dark.
Fixed
- An entire wing of Arena01 had no navigation. Zombies spawned where they could never path out, and
the pathfinder sent the other wing chasing a phantom. Blocked-zombie events went from 124 to 0.
- Guns barely kicked. The starting rifle had no vertical recoil at all and snipers kicked less than
pistols; twelve other weapons were corrected too. Recoil now climbs through a burst and recovers — an LMG
burst climbs about 20° over 21 shots, then settles.
- Shell casings flew off the wrong side at absurd speed. They copied the muzzle's orientation and
scale. They now eject right, up and slightly back.
- 127 item and weapon icons were black on black. The icon camera was four to five stops
under-exposed; the art had been there all along.
- Mech module slots now actually mount modules, and refund them when removed.
New
- PSX filter. A Video setting that turns the whole screen low-fi: pixelation, colour crush with dither
and a flat grey distance wash.
- A new main-menu cinematic — 42 seconds, four shots.
- Item tooltips show attribute rolls.
Changed
- Recruits wear a real soldier body.
- The game carries its own Visual C++ runtime, so a PC that's missing it can still start the
game.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.11 — 20 Aug 2026 · channel: alpha
They Can See You
v0.9.11
— also 0.9.10, which was built but never published. Hanford opens.
Fixed
- Zombies hunted where you'd been, not where you are. Their sight reached 16 m; it's 35 m now, and any
common zombie that can see you comes straight for you.
- Zombies ignored your squad. They now attack your recruits and mechs too — though a player still wins
a tie for their attention.
- Laser, Tesla and grenade-launcher sights buried your view in the receiver. They aim properly
now.
- Runners couldn't be headshot, and fell into a broken pose when they died. Both fixed.
- Your own gear blocked your view in first person. Backpacks and pouches now hide properly, while thigh
pouches stay visible.
- Third-person muzzle flashes appeared away from the gun.
- Hanford had holes you could fall through. A full scan found them and they're patched.
- Fourteen controls couldn't be rebound, Fire, Aim and Reload among them.
New
- Hanford. A ten-zone reactor facility — a night rail yard, the reactor hall, a flooded fuel basin, a
bunker warren, a sub pen and a sealed wing — with photoreal surfaces, moonlit nights, lore documents to find,
two ways out that need the power on, wave 8 reached and either a key or the sealed wing opened, and every
spawner able to reach you.
- Weapon mastery. Seven weapon families level up as you use them, with a Mastery tab in the journal and
a toast at each new tier.
- The Remantler. Reforge a weapon's rolls — including the gun in your hands — using ammo from your bag
as fuel, and craft at the same bench.
- The field manual. The 49-skill tree finally has a screen, with specializations to choose.
- A mech you can buy. A walking turret platform that joins your squad, takes orders and mounts turret
modules.
- Supply drops, announced with a banner and a marker in the world.
- Password-protected games, with torn-paper multiplayer screens to host and join them.
- RTX mode in graphics settings, on ray-tracing hardware.
Changed
- A 48-minute day, with storms. Four matches in ten now open in one.
- Shooting feels heavier. Aiming zooms, sprinting pushes the view, recoil springs back, and you get
head bob, a landing dip and a shake on every shot.
- First-person legs are back, and your shadow is a full body holding your gun.
- Your equipped trinkets show on the HUD — that row had never appeared before.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.9 — 09 Aug 2026 · channel: alpha
Open House
v0.9.9
— hosting works, and the right mouse button finally listens.
Fixed
- Hosting a game was impossible. Steam never started for the game itself — a small app-id file was
missing beside the executable — so hosting failed and dropped you back at the menu without a word. Every
build now ships that file.
- Hosting after a failed join crashed the game. The half-finished connection made the new session
think it was a client ("Couldn't spawn player"). A leftover connection attempt is now cancelled as soon as a
map starts loading.
- The server address box came pre-filled with 127.0.0.1, so confirming it hung for 20 seconds. It
starts empty, with a hint.
- Right-clicking items took several tries. Nothing claimed the right mouse button on the way down, so
the release only arrived by luck. The inventory now holds on to it, and the menu opens for the item you
actually aimed at.
- Five weapon perks did nothing on the guns you shoot. Steady Aim (recoil and spread), Double Tap (fire
rate), Steady Hands (rechamber time), Deep Mags (magazine size) and Bandolier (reserve ammo) now reach
them.
- Headshots on the common horde and the boss relied on a check that didn't work. They use the proper
head test now.
- Arena01's common zombies could freeze in place. The map threw its navigation away on every load; it's
rebuilt and saved with the map now.
- The F4 perk menu ignored the gamepad — it couldn't take focus at all.
New
- A Controls page in Settings, with keyboard-and-mouse and Xbox controller diagrams.
- A proper hit marker: an inked paper X that turns red on headshots and kills.
- Trinket tooltips say what the trinket does, including the total for a stack.
- Interface sounds — 55 of them across twelve screens, all under the UI volume slider.
Changed
- Corpses clear after two waves. At the start of each wave, bodies from two waves back are removed,
along with anything still on them.
- First-person legs, the weight-based speed curve and movement inertia are switched off for now.
- Status chips moved to the top right, above your weapon card.
- Stuck zombies vault at most once every eight seconds and keep walking in between — and they won't
vault across a closed door.
Alpha
Dispatch 0.9.8 — 06 Aug 2026 · channel: alpha
Into the Vault
v0.9.8
— everything since 0.1.9, including the 0.2.x alpha builds that already ran as 0.9.8.
Fixed
- Joined players couldn't open doors, use the mystery box, buy wall ammo or trip electric traps.
Those interactions only ran on the host's machine. All four now go through the server, so co-op works past
the first door.
- Ten of the fourteen survivors held their rifle at their feet. Their body models had no hand sockets
at all, so the gun sat at the model's origin. They carry the same fourteen sockets as every other body
now.
- Every kill caused a hitch. Each kill wrote your profile to disk on the spot — up to twenty blocking
saves per wave. Progress now saves in batches every few seconds.
- Carried props jittered and spun. Two systems fought over a held prop every frame. One drives it now,
it keeps the rotation you give it, and physics returns when you let go.
- Corpses kept breathing. Bodies that couldn't ragdoll kept their animation running. They lie still
now.
- Your career and After Action Report were always empty. Finished matches were never recorded.
- Sign-in results were invisible. The status line shipped hidden, so success and failure looked the
same. The menu chip now shows your callsign once you're in.
- Crates and the mystery box spawned into the main menu and lobby.
New
- A rebuilt main menu. Title top-left, your Steam name on a status chip, the version stamp, a JOURNAL
button for your career sheet, a looping cinematic behind it all, and an original menu theme.
- A persistent stash. What you carry out is banked when a match ends and kept in a grid stash you can
open from the main menu. It grows as you prestige.
- Riverside, a siege map. One big multi-room building with loose planks and plywood staged at its
openings, perk machines, Pack-a-Punch and an arsenal crate inside — and the horde outside.
- Bellows, a submarine map. Random hull quakes, leaks that flood the deck, sliding doors and an
elevator.
- Three new turrets and two new barricade tiers. Heavy (900), Scorcher (1,100) and Suppressor (1,400)
turrets; Steel and Diamond barricades above metal, gated by your hammer's tier.
- New guns: the FAL, SV98 and RPG-7. Most guns moved to realistic models, 28 got new gunshot
recordings, and spent casings now eject.
- A right-click item menu: Use, Equip, Rotate, Split Stack, Quick Move and Drop, with refusals
explained right in the menu.
- The bag is a true grid. Eight by five big cells, and items take their real shape — a rifle 4×1,
armour and backpacks 2×2, a pistol 1×2. Old layouts re-pack themselves; nothing is lost.
Changed
- Loot is on G. Carrying stays on F.
- Tarkov-style movement. Lean with Q and E (melee moved to X), a smooth crouch, first-person legs,
weight that slows you in steps, and a touch of inertia.
- Strength decides what you can lift. A prop that's too heavy says NOT ENOUGH STRENGTH, with both
weights. Nailing is quicker, and the Carpenter perk speeds it up.
- Attributes do what they say. Walk speed, carry capacity, incoming damage, status resistance and Wits
repair speed were skipping some of their modifiers; they use all of them now, and Luck adds a melee crit
chance.
- Escape closes open menus.
1.0 Beta
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.
1.0 Beta
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.
1.0 Beta
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.
1.0 Beta
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.
End of log
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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