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Update 21.0 Alpha

Zompiercer · Community Announcements · May 09, 2026

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Hey, engineers! I’m happy to announce the release of the update dedicated to farming and cooking. But I must mention that behind these two themes lies a multitude of new mechanics, both big and small improvements. Well, let’s begin describing all the details of the update.

At this stage, the game introduces the ability to grow 12 different plants, including vegetables, grains, lettuce, and mushrooms. All plants are grown by planting seeds. Seeds can only be found on shelves in local stores.




A new elongated planter box for growing plants has been introduced into the game. The box names have been changed according to their dimensions. Information about the number of planting spots is added for better clarity before crafting a box.



Now, to plant crops, you need to care for the soil in the farming boxes. Before the first planting, watering and fertilizing the soil with a certain amount of dirty water and fertilizer is required. The amount of water and fertilizer increases depending on the size of the farming boxes. Soil is fertilized once before planting, but plants need to be watered regularly. This creates the need for a lot of water, so the ability to not only drain dirty water from rainwater tanks but also pour it back in for accumulation has been implemented.




A new resource, rot, has been added to the game to create fertilizer. Rot can be found in large quantities in many places such as store shelves, trash bags and bins, car trunks, abandoned luggage, and bags dropped by zombies. Fertilizer is created in compost boxes by mixing soil and rot.




Boiled potatoes have been replaced by a large variety of dishes made using cultivated plants as well as meat. The dishes come in 3 levels, from very simple ones that slightly increase the player’s basic stats, to high-class dishes that boost many stats and provide useful buffs. A chopping table for salads and semi-finished products has been added to prepare dishes, since some dishes require intermediate products (this workstation is available in two variants).




Since wheat has appeared in the game, a mill has been added to the list of workstations to process wheat into flour, which is then used to make dough for baking various kinds of bread, pies, or adding as vermicelli to soups.



Besides dishes, players can now brew teas from 5 varieties of flowers found in fields. Like the highest-level dishes, these teas provide buffs. After gathering flowers, they must be dried on an herb-drying workstation.




For a long time, the game had a primitive buff and debuff system. Now, after the introduction of high-level dishes and teas, it was decided to refine the buff system. Each gained buff is displayed as an icon below the main player status indicators in the top left corner. To the right of the icon, the buff duration is shown. To explore detailed characteristics of each buff, the equipment menu was improved. Now, when opening the equipment menu, the player can switch to the statistics menu, where they can see active buffs or debuffs affecting the player. Also, the player’s level information is now displayed in the statistics menu. An additional info panel was added to the equipment menu showing total armor, speed, bleeding resistance, and gas poisoning resistance statistics. Every change in the player's condition, even basic ones like hunger, thirst, and lack of sleep, is now displayed as a debuff.




Players have long requested the ability to continue the game from the start menu without having to search for the last save. This is now implemented—the activation button appears after the first save is created in the folder. Manual saves take priority when loading; if no manual saves exist, the latest autosave will be loaded.



The game difficulty selection menu has been improved. Players can now flexibly adjust loot abundance across several basic categories.



A basic survival feature was implemented to display resources collected by the player. When gathering, the item name, amount collected, total amount in inventory, and item icon appear in the lower-left corner.



The player status window was completely redesigned. Previously hidden indicators for hunger, thirst, and the need to sleep have been restored on the screen.



CHANGELOG



Improvements


Changes


Bug Fixes


Future Update Plans






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