Zombie Cure Lab News

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• Build four different type of roads
  Roads modify the movement speed of your workers and are good to improve the efficiency of your economy and optimize the pathways, workers will prefer to walk on them.
  
• Experience a reworked endgame with new mutated Zombie types
  After threat level 50 new Zombie types appear that are very hard to freeze, but mainly get superior weapons that are able to crush your tech four gates. This will make your goal to cure humans a bit more interesting and mainly extends how long you can play the game before you face the strongest Zombies.
  
• Decorative Items for the outdoors of your lab
  Just a little treat to invest time in making your lab look nice.
  

Version 0.19.2:

- Roads! You can now build four different path ways, one for each tier level.
Paths can be drawn like fences, they give your workers bonus movement speed and will be preferred by them to walk on. Use paths to build connections to further away resource harvesting spots and optimize your layout.
Paths can not be clicked once build, delete them with the delete tool. Drawing a higher level path over an existing lower level one counts as an upgrade.
Paths can be build on walkable areas, meaning through gates and through the main storage middle path, so you can build them closer to objects and have more freedom for placement.
- The whole endgame has been rebalanced and five new mutated Zombies with new weapons will spawn past threat level 50 to make the last part of the game more interesting and give Zombies a chances to breach through your ten times layered tier four gates.
- Outdoor decoration assets have been added that look nice together with your roads. (The street lamps will light red with the lab alarm)
- A new hunter boss has been added for normal and hard difficulty. At night 15 a hunter boss appears that is very fast and will hunt down Humbie Level 1s. He quickly can make it through weak gates and workers cant escape a fight with him unharmed. (Hunter has placeholder art at the moment and is only playable in the normal and hard mission.)
- Refill threshold are now respected in all scenarios, an ice pack press close to a freezer tower will only be emptied to refill the freezer tower when it has producer over its take out thresholds. (This was not the case before and could lead to defense towers being constantly refilled with only 1 ice pack).
- You now have additional objectives to send back x cured humans to “win” a mission. A base threat value is added once you cure your first human, which brings you into the endgame, facing more difficult zombies in general.
- 10+ new Zombie weapons added. Where the strongest possible Zombie weapon to spawn could deal 800 damage, the now strongest weapon can deal 10000 damage, giving the Zombies room to grow stronger.
- Rebalanced economy, build costs, resource gather rates and tier 4 research costs to counter various problems.
- Vegetable patches contain half vegetables, Meat growers require more vegetables to grow meat, greenhouses and planters produce less vegetables. Make it harder to sustain worker population with food only affecting vegetable resource type, not necessarily harder to make meat.
- Most tier 4 objects research costs increased by ~50%
- Various build costs increased, mainly T4 objects, endgame objects require more metal and tech.
- Research Tier 2 walls, gates and fences now costs more stone (300 each). Stone costs was increased in general for some buildings, especially tier 3 fences and gates and starting furnaces to make stone crusher a less feasible option.
- Treatment across all treatment chambers more expensive, takes partially a bit longer.
- Especially treatment 1 for Humbie Level 1 now costs 40 glowberries instead of 10, making it way more costly to get lots of Humbies. A focused berry production or gather expeditions are necessary to ramp up your worker population.
- Lab Size threat generation a bit more over 2000 lab size, all missions.
- An extra normal mission elite wave added, little less monotonous zombie wave spawning.
- Some need satisfying objects now consume power.
- PCs need satisfier statistics rebalanced, should be more useful now.
- Better need satisfier objects, higher tiers way more expensive to build (It is a bit harder now to supply your workers with the best equipment for sleeping, training, etc.)
- Slight footprint changes for T3 Humbie 3 treatment, better to place next to wall.
- Tank Boss now has way less health and little more damage, making it a bit more offense instead of a damage sponge.
- In the endgame the zombie wave damage increases quicker, past threat 50, making it harder in the endgame to defend against the new mutant Zombies.
- Harvest speed decreased by ~30-40% for all resources. It now is slower to gain lumber from trees, stone from rocks etc. This is mainly done to counter the huge humbie 1 workforces player can have in tier 2, tier 3 combined with harvest amount boni and Humbie Level 1 not needing to return at night.
- Zombie chasing and fighting workers overhauled. In general zombies are a bit more responsive and can jump quicker from fight to fight, creating new Zombies. Humbies have a higher chance to escape fights unharmed then humans.
- Starting from Artic Zombies (~Threat 40), zombies have a different behavior, starting to hunt Humbie Level 1 again, able to quickly create new Zombies. This is to change the endgame difficulty and make Humbie Level 1 less powerful in the end.
- Zombies spawned from workers (Humbie Zombies) now have weapons.
- Guards from Tier 2 now do double damage, else they have no chance against Zombies past threat 15, which also makes it now easier to contain frozen Zombies escaping from their storage.
- Frozen Zombie storage footprint changed to a general 2x2, one wall side was removed. You can now upgrade from the first storage to the last.

Fixes:
- Power cables won't stay in the air anymore after deleting/ moving/ repairing power poles.
- A bug fixed where landing zone was not buildable at the start of the game anymore.
- Game over state works again, was broken could not lose anymore. Only lose game option is now that main storage gets destroyed.
- Humbie3 Zombie version, fixed backpack material missing in general.
- Fixed ice hockey Zombie scaling, was smaller then intended.
- Humbie 1 now has correct sleeping pod sleep animation

Kown Issues:
WARNING: YOUR OLD SAVE GAMES WILL LIKELY BE CORRUPTED
The sum of the changes will make it probably impossible to load old savegames and even if it works, they probably be corrupted. We will set the 0.18.0 Version as its own beta branch that you can continue to play the old version if preferred.

On high gamespeeds and latest paths workers can slide out of curves, which requires them to make path connections, making them inefficient in reaching their target again. We are on it.

In regards to performance optimization we want to dig deep into the game and will soon right an bigger news post about what our plans are.

Zombie Cure Lab is 26% off until 23 March as part of the Steam Spring Sale.

If you don't own our challenging sandbox base builder yet - now is a good time!

We released elven updates for the game since launch with now two major updates.
[h2]What's been added to the game?[/h2]

• We added a boss Zombie that appears every 15 nights
  
• Endless stone and iron ore at T4 with the Ore Mines and Quarry
  
• New room type cooling chamber with frozen zombie storages and air conditioner to keep stuff frozen
  
• Sniper tower for humbie level 1, giving you a long range and high damage defense option.
  
• New screen to analyze your economy, check your tracked resources and graphs showing how much was produced and consumed by workers and various machines, helping you to foresee shortages.
  In the graph you can see how the resources changed between storage types and can set the time frame to look at.
  
• Resource tooltips now show trend arrows giving you a quick indication if things are decreasing or increasing for your economy.
  
• Productivity of machines, a star rating shows you how efficient your machines are running based on an average production value over the course of one day and how much they produced and consumed in total.
  
• Players unlocked new content on the worldmap, from various decorative items to a stone crushing machine and a new mission.
  
• Game speed was increased.
  
• The balancing is less punishing in the start and eases you better into the game then before, mission difficulty selection should better reflect what challenge players want.
  
• More options to produce stuff, besides the stone crusher the grinds stone to chemicals, a freezer was added to produce ice packs for electricity and a data simulator for research point generation.
  
• The main storage can cast frost, repair and mood novas to give you powerful abilities when needed.
  
• Resource camp upgrades give workers better tools to harvest resources quicker.
  
• The build menu is now split between layouting and placing objects, this should make room layouting more intuitive and improve usability. You can now see all objects you researched and can jump to the specific categories of things you want to build.
  
• Worker abilities are now colored green and red and show how much better a humbie is compared to a scientist. The machines also show the modifier applied by that.
  
• All buildings now leave rubble behind that can be selected and repaired. So you do not fully lose buildings anymore when being attacked and have a better chance to recover or just see what got destroyed.
  

[h2]Upcoming[/h2]

What we are currently working on:

• Build paths to connect parts of your lab! Paths increase the movement speed of your workers and come in four tech tiers.
  
• More research, we are planning to fill up the tech-tree significantly with enhancement research that improves your buildings permanently, like +5% health to all your fences or even trade-offs where you can boost the damage of all your towers, but they will consume more electricity, permanently.
  
  (Images are Mockups and due to change)
  
• We are also working on extending the end game with your cured humans having more relevance. By sending cured humans away you will be able to restore the cities on the worldmap and gain a new type of reward for that giving you an incentive to cure even more humans.
  
• We also are planning to send stronger Zombies at you in the end to keep the endgame exciting for longer.
  

[h2]Updated Roadmap[/h2]

[h2]Features[/h2]

• Productivity score added - All production buildings have a star rating now how efficient they are running. After 24 hours the rating appears and shows the average output over the course of that time frame.
  
  The tooltip of the rating contains information how much resources where consumed and produced in that time frame and in total, giving you an better idea which buildings eat up all your resources.
  
• Graphs added to statistics screen - In the statistics screen you can now see a graph for each resource you select. The colors indicate the different amounts of resource pools tracked over time. Main storage, interim storages, collectibles and carried.
  The graph is pretty useful to see if for example meat is going down slowly or building up over time, giving you an heads up if you are shortly before another meat crisis.
  Also check the interim storage amount shown in the statistics, it is the resource inside buildings, how much ice packs your shooters have, how much meat is on the piles. You can also see the values on the tooltips of the resources in the bottom bar.
  
• Build and Layouting Menus - Placing objects and layouting your base is now seperated into two menus you find at the bottom left.
  
  In the layouting menu you can draw generic rooms (corridors), place doors, gates, draw fences and power poles. Everything you need to change your labs layout. The build tools are now at the top, select what you want to do and then if you want to draw a room or fences.
  We improved the room merging a bit, it is not required anymore to merge the same room types.
  In general drawing rooms should be a bit easier, you draw a generic larger room, use the split wall tool. Place the objects inside the rooms, like beds or frost packer which will change the room type automatically to the last placed object.
  In the build menu it now lists all the objects you can place, the categories are changed to match the categories of the tech-tree. You can select the categories at the top to jump to what you want to build.
  We also added a location information to the tooltip showing where it is allowed to place the object (room type, outside).
  Tell us how quickly you adjusted to the new menus and where you still see improvements.
  
• Rubble System added - All buildings leave rubble behind. Now you can still repair any destroyed building after an attack, it won't vanish if all its health is lost. This also is helpful to see how much actually got destroyed and what.
  
• We now detect if zombies are trapped within your base, if there is any gap during the day to move towards a tunnel and leave, they will now take it more quickly. Before there were problems with the Zombies leaving during day inside rooms.
  
• Added a new asset called data simulator. Can be build at tier three, generates research points constantly, only requires electricity to run.
  
• Abilitiy efficiency is now shown in the worker info box, a percentage value shows how much better worker do certain things compared to a scientist. The icons are now also colored green and red to show if someone is better or worse then a scientist in harvesting, movement speed, etc.
  The values also change when modified by buildings like the hauling post (increased carry capacity) or resource camp (increased harvest amount)
  
• Production buildings now show how effective the worker is operating the building. Humbie Level 1 will show a 75% value reflecting his production speed ability.
  
• The nova module on the main storage now has an glow indicating that a nova is ready.
  

[h2]Balancing[/h2]

• Was too easy to gain lumber and other resources with high tier resource camps. Humbie Level 1 now uses human chop animation for slower and unified harvest speeds among all worker types, only difference remaining is the shown harvest amount ability values.
  
• Resource Camps of higher tiers more expensive to build.
  
• Increased lumber build cost of some T2 buildings to counter act the potential lumber harvesting boom of T2 (Lots of humbies + ability to harvest lumber quickly + Resource Camp T2), this affects (Dining Table, Couch, Bed T2, Chemical Extractor, Dirt Mixer).
  
• Stone Crusher crushes more stone with same chemicals output, combined with slower T2 and above stone harvest, this will make him a less viable option compared to the Chemical Extractor.
  
• Moved categories in the tech-tree, because the order is now used in the build menu. New decoration tab added.
  
• Tutorial was slightly updated where necessary to match new build menues.
  
• The air conditioners can now be placed anywhere, which allows you to use them as defence or zombie cooling, they require no ice packs and attack already frozen zombies, keeping them frozen.
  
• Made treatment chamber 1 treatment a bit slower 10 seconds -> 20 seconds to counter new efficiency from recent balancing changes and using it in combination with a cooling chamber.
  

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• Resource camp T1 and T2 should now show the correct mining and chopping gadgets (axe and pickaxe), visuals were partially swapped previously.
  
• All freezers can now be prioritized and disabled.
  
• Threat zombie head icons now show up at correct thresholds (1, 5, 30, 40, 50)
  
• Fixed humbie level 3 remain shown as hostile with red outline after he attacked a worker, no more permanent alarm.
  
• Fixed problems with frozen zombies not getting prorperly stored in frozen zombie storages.
  
• Fixed problems to a bug called lab not working and similar smaller issues.
  
• Fixed a problem with worker stuck and not eating properly, may be caused in a combination of lab alarm and worker in a very hungry get food fallback state.
  
• Fixed wrong tutorial zombie wave settings where lots of zombies could spawn if the tutorial is played for a longer period of time.
  
• Fixed some missing object icons/ weird camera setups.
  
• Fixed sound and music bugs in loading screen.
  
• Fixed a problem with world map mission labels.
  
• Fixed a problem with objectives in the tutorial not progressing in a very specific case.
  

We also updated our roadmap!