Survivalist: Invisible Strain News

New patch today! Here's the change list:

• Stop AI from greeting each other so often
  
• Stop zombies from eating other zombie corpses as it meant they bunch up together a lot making the game harder
  
• Stop AI from digging graves so far away from where they started
  
• Fix for not being able to transfer clothes you are wearing when you are encumbered
  
• Fix for camouflage icon staying white when no one is around sometimes
  
• Fix for campfire hint message
  
• Allow crosshair to lock onto rabbits from same distance as humans (range limit is still shorter, so it's grey, but hopefully it's more understandable)
  
• Rabbit death sound
  
• Make it possible to throw carrots to attract rabbits
  
• Fetch Quests - fix for fetched item not being given to quest giver at the end
  
• Fix for bug where builders would get stuck if they couldn't pathfind to a tree
  
• Increased starting equipment points to 4 and made carrots available as an option
  
• Crash fixes and logging
  

Today I released a patch with some new features:

• Zombies eat corpses
  
• Can use hunting knife to get meat from human corpses (but it's rancid if they've been zombies for a while)
  
• Can throw meat or wind-up radio as a zombie distraction (they prefer fresh meat to rancid)
  
• Cannibalism - can eat or make stew/curry with human meat
  
• Meat from zombies is infected, so dishes made with that meat will also be infected. Eating infected food gives you the infection.
  
• Some crash fixes
  

...and later a hotfix for that patch:

• Stop AI from throwing radios or meat at enemies
  
• Fix for bug where people stopped building anything
  
• Fix for zombies preferring to eat other dead zombies instead of fresh corpses
  
• Crash fixes
  

The main idea behind v46 was to give people some more tools to distract and manipulate zombies in the early stages of the game, which a lot of people report are too difficult. So the radio and rabbit meat are available as equipment options on the character creation screen when you start a Sandbox game. But as you might guess, you can also use them as a subtle way to assassinate people when you're a bit further on!

I haven't tested these extensively in gameplay yet so let me know if they feel under or overpowered.

If you want to participate in beta testing, I'm currently on round 3 of giving out keys so send me an email to this address and ask to be subscribed to the mailing list and get a key:



EDIT: released another patch, v48, to fix an issue where people's clothes started disappearing after they'd been infected and then bandaged.

Hi everyone I've released another new patch for the beta. Here's the changelist:

• Text chat in online co-op (bound to 'm' key by default)
  
• Prefer to get water from a well instead of a river, because a well will normally be inside our own fences whereas a river will not
  
• Rain less in summer
  
• Can take over gates
  
• Stop members of friendly communities chasing you all over the map when introducing themselves
  
• Fix for campfire sound not being affected by volume setting
  
• Clearing bushes and tree stumps
  
• Weapon Stats
  
• Added morale bars to rivalry quest
  
• Fetch Quests
  

Had to release another patch today to fix a crash, but it also makes the menus look nicer with a treeline in the background:
Here's the changelist:

• Treeline background on menu images
  
• Another crash fix
  

Alright I'm going to start posting patch notes for each patch here now. This is v42:

• Rivalry quests
  
• Newly generated characters can be infected with invisible strain
  
• Prevent players who aren't the host from saving and loading
  
• Fixes for crash and out of sync errors
  
• Some fixes for kicking and banning
  
• Fix for Game Complete screen keeping popping up when you press Continue Playing
  

EDIT: released a quick patch (v43) to fix a crash introduced in this one.