Zombie Cure Lab News

Patch Notes:
With our recent Halloween update 0.20.0 we sadly added new problems to the game, wich originate from bigger technical reworks.

Bug Fixes:

• Major problem with all workers stopped working adressed with multiple fixes. (This maybe also adresses the workers not shooting at towers problem)
  
• Calming escorting bug fixed where multiple haulers tried to get the same frozen humbie, which led to the humbie being stuck at a calming station.
  
• Fixed a potential savegame related problem with worker gadgets (hand attachments like weapons/ pickaxe etc.)
  
• After loading savegame from within the game, some a.i. logic activities were broken.
  

Known Problems:
We went through the automatically send crash reports, but we could not reproduce any crashes on several machines. The crash reports were also inconclusive, but hinted towards old hardware being a potential problem (15 year old graphics cards etc.).

We are sorry for the new stability problems and this patch only addresses the most critical problems we could identify. Our focus at the moment is to ensure technical stability and eliminate new bugs to ensure that our recent technical changes work well and do not cause more unplayability. So we change our mode to be more responsive to new bugs and improve the current state steadily.

Thank you for staying around.

Major Update to address performance issues/ balancing/ bugs:

[h2]Overview[/h2]
Performance improvements:

• Engine version updated (smaller performance boost)
  
• Job system multi-threaded
  
• Many smaller performance improvements (See detailed patch notes)
  
• Memory leak fix
  

Content/ Features:

• Zombies wearing pumpkin hats (Very scary)
  
• Pumpkin decoration
  
• Seasonal halloween content (Will automatically switch on from now on between 24.10 and 06.11)
  
• Gameplay hints in loading screen (And an actual loading screen where you can see progress and such!)
  

Balancing:

• Tutorial easier, steps to avoid some frustration.
  
• Very easy mission actually very easy now; Zombies deal almost no damage.
  
• Difficult mission less difficult. (Elite Zombies were almost unbeatable)
  

[h2]Patch Notes 0.20.0[/h2]
Features:

• New loading screen with loading bar and gameplay hints
  
• Treatment chamber now shows status that resources are missing for treatment (Previously only showed when inputs were empty, but requires full inputs to operate)
  
• Seasonal content, for the time of 24.10. to 06.11 the game will show Halloween content with Zombies wearing pumpkin hats and more to discover!
  
• New pumpkin deco assets (permanently)
  
• Research tables, data simulators and T4 fridges now show a floating text with what resource they just produced to give better feedback.
  
• When placing a building in invalid location it now creates a floating text explaining why placement was invalid.
  

Balancing:

• Difficult mission decreased Zombie damage, more nights without zombies and less damage for elite Zombies to make the mission beatable.
  
• Tutorial smaller changes to reduce frustration and improve onboarding. Also changed Zombie reduced zombie damage to dealing almost none, to better guarantee that you can’t lose the tutorial. Zombie waves also only start when player has built defenses.
  
• Scientists turned into Zombies now carry a lesser weapon to deal less damage (Also affected tutorial difficulty)
  
• No more boss zombie in tutorial.
  
• Snowball shooter T2 and T3 deals a little more damage to tackle high health Zombies that can appear relatively quick in higher difficulty missions.
  
• Damage effects of Zombies attacking buildings increased in size.
  
• Reduced chase speed of Zombies (Was off the charts for some reason)
  
• Very easy mission zombies almost do no damage now, very small decrease left with high threat levels, should now be actually very easy.
  

Fixes/ Improvements:
The new engine version, multi-threading and performance improvements were major changes for the game and took quite a while and required lots of testing.

• Updated engine version which should already improve performance a bit.
  
• Job system now works with multi-threading, reducing CPU bottleneck performance problems. Big bases with lots of workers should see larger performance improvements.
  
• Fixed a memory leak regarding power pole placement, potentially reducing problems with the app occupying to much RAM.
  
• Small performance improvements (Reduced number of implicit casts, less character checks, smarter temperature visualization updates, health bars optimized, other)
  
• Lazy loading for menus
  
• Iron Ore/ Resource pick up problem fixed with resources sometimes not being picked up.
  
• Improved distance weighing for resource pick up drop off points, choices were to bring gathered resources are weight better with smaller distances.
  
• Big music notes bug fixed, reduced scale.
  
• Fixed a problem with tree nursery deletion.
  
• Cure progress option now hidden when antidote progress reached maximum
  

Known Issues/ Problems:
We made lots of changes to the technical core of the game, testing the game in every possible way to ensure everything runs stable costs lots of time and there are changes that instability problems will manifest in the late game.

PERFORMANCE: Depending on what your bottleneck is, performance might only slightly improve as we mainly tackled CPU and not GPU. Meaning if your graphic card can't handle Zombie Cure Lab, it probably still can't.

Loading old savegames from 0.19.4 is not garuanteed to work, we changed to much logic in the game.
But let us know! We are still in early access and every input helps, savegames and logs fuels our bug solving engine. Write us here in the comments, open a discussion in the steam forums, write an ingame bug report (Good to send savegames and logs and yes we read all of them) or join our discord!
Thanks for hanging around and thanks for any effort you took or will take to help us make Zombie Cure Lab a better game experience!

Our biggest discount so far!

Angry Humbie is here to slash those prices!

Some Hints for getting into the game:

• Always check your threat level and the timeline info, a quickly growing base attracts stronger Zombies, stay small and gather resources.
  
• If the Tutorial feels overwhelming we recommend to play the easy or very easy mission afterwards.
  
• Gathered resources first drop on the ground and need to be collected by haulers.
  
• Freeze a Zombie and get your first Humbie quickly to enlarge your workforce and strengthen your economy. Don't forget to build feeding piles (meat) and a leg press.
  
• Use disable to turn off buildings, this is useful to free workers that now can start to work somewhere else, save power and stop the machine from consuming resources that you might need elsewhere.
  
• The Level 1 Humbie is special, as he still is a close relative to the Zombie he will not be detected and can work outside the lab unharmed by the attacking Zombies!
  
• You have abilities at your main storage! A powerful frost nova can hold off a dangerous Zombie advance or a repair nova can restore your buildings without cost!
  
• Furthermore if you upgrade your main storage right after you used a nova you get a second more powerful one.
  
• Two resource camps and a hauling post all fully staffed with Humbie Level 1 will quickly get you that 3000 lumber required to research Tier 2, unlocking lots of powerful new research options.
  
• Check the resource statistics to see if meat is going down or up the last days. (No meat = angry humbies that wreck your base)
  
• You can click the floor of a room to open its infobox, there is a delete button to get rid of wrongly placed rooms.
  
• Use delete frequently to get resources back, a undamaged building will get you 100% of its build costs back, very useful if you lack a certain resources and need it right now.
  
• Use priorities to determine what gets gathered, delted, moved, built, upgraded first. Also handy if you want a specific resource, if in range of a resource camp, click a glowberry bush for example and set its priority higher.
  Priorities are also used for worker assignment, newly created Humbies will occupy the buildings with higher priority first, the same goes for haulers, high prio buildings will get serviced first. (Very important for refilling towers with ammo before the night starts)
  

A small video where we follow around a Humbie while chaos unfolds around him.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Sorry for the wait! Here is a new update that tries to fix most annoying problems at the moment in the game. Regarding performance we are first fixing bugs that were also affecting performance before optimizing systems.
Image: Here are the Zombies eagerly fixing all those bugs.


[h3]Gameplay/ Balance:[/h3]
- Fixed tutorial balancing issues were slower players could face zombies with weapons to early, letting them fail the tutorial potentially. Threat level now reduced to ensure that no zombie weapons can come so quickly anymore.
- Angry Humbie level 1 and level 2 no longer mark zones as unsafe as they pose no threat to other workers. This will reduce chaos when alarm is activated and areas are safe for longer, keeping workers at their work stations and towers.
- Rebalanced needs and moods of all workers to counter mood downwards spiral when you have food problems. Low needs cause less mood penalty and give you more time before humbies turn angry. Needs that are in the yellow also give less mood penalty, that other low needs still in the green give a small mood boost in total.
- Zombies will now move through frozen zombies like workers already did, this will make it easier for Zombies to attack your fence. (It was pretty buggy before with Zombie pathing not handling frozen Zombies very well and being constantly stuck. This change may make some waves harder to deal with)

[h3]Improvements:[/h3]
- Humbies now keep their name during treatment. (Zombie spawns with a random name, through all treatments name will be kept now, when you rename the character the new name will be kept)
- Improved a.i. pathing logic eliminating the chance that characters teleport through fences on low frame rates.
- Improved worker overshooting their path problem (On high game speed and fast paths, characters would shoot out of paths and get stuck on walls temporarily).
- Improved gate placement, can place them more freely and also partially on fence corners. Fixed blueprint placement issues.
- Improved wall and general upgrade logic and fixed an issue (Issuing delete, cancels upgrade and vice versa and other smaller changes).
- Game now tells you when it is still saving and thereby hinders players to quit to quickly before saving was finished.

[h3]Bug Fixes:[/h3]
- Fixed a prominent time freeze bug that happend for some players more frequently and could make the game unplayable.
- Iron veins and stone quarry spots can no longer be blocked from other hills in front, spawning changed to guarantee that all iron mine and stone quarry slots at map border stay free and cannot be blocked anymore.
- Fixed annoying gigantic greenhouse II air effect and potentially the same for a music effect bug.
- Melted frozen zombies properly attack again and do not run against walls in cold storage rooms anymore.
- Fixed a potential issues with snowball shooters and targeting to ensure they don't get stuck and stop shooting.
- Sleeping pods and calming stations (need satisfiers) now interrupt workers using them when they do not have power anymore.
- Destroyed hiding lockers now properly release workers (not stuck anymore) and have been balanced to cost less and have way more health.
- Fixed a potential memory leak with tree spawning effects (May caused lag for some players)
- Base threat level now saves correctly, could lead to different threat levels after loading a savegame
- Fixed an potential issue with towers causing errors.
- Can place fishbowl decoration now, before made worker stuck due to missing materials
- Fixed a bug with flower decorations and rubble.
- Guards won’t respond anymore if all marked hostiles are unreachable.
- Changed loading screen temporarily without roadmap (see discord announcement) and a static gameplay hint, we already reworked loading entirely which will change the screen again in a future update.


[h3]Known Issues: [/h3]
- A memory leak regarding power pole placement can cause severe performance issues, we already fixed it for a future version, but it is still present in this one. It is caused by being In power pole placement mode and having objects that require energy, constantly increasing your ram. Restarting the application and loading a savegame should help to reduce the problem until we deploy the next update.


In this annoucements we were talking about the state of the project, Discord Annoucement.
Summarized, we work with less people on the project now and are developing a console port that will in parallel improve PC version onboarding and mainly performance. Our goal is to keep the core experience of Zombie Cure Lab and just make it bug free, performant and more friendly for new players.
So we are far from dead, we are just slower, thanks for sticking around so far!