Zombie Cure Lab News

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!

As part of the Games Germany Steam event, Zombie Cure Lab is now discounted until 29 July 2023 at 7pm CEST. Get it now and save some money!

• 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]