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New patch in publicbeta with pickpocketing (v279), last patch in main (v278)

Survivalist: Invisible Strain · Community Announcements · July 14, 2026

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Hello everyone, got kind of a bigger patch for you today as I've added pickpocketing and TAA (Temporal Anti-aliasing). The TAA is on a checkbox in the Settings/Graphics menu, it makes the black outlines look a lot smoother and more stable. Unfortunately it can make some other things a bit blurry when in motion so it's off by default. I prefer it despite the blur but your mileage may vary.

The motivation for adding pickpocketing was that one quest in Story Mode where you have to plant a necklace on someone - using choke hold felt overly difficult for an early game quest. I think it will also come in useful for the fetch quests where you have to get "the Doc's old labcoat" or something off someone. Maybe it'll make surviving the early stages a little easier as well.. hopefully not too easy but the consensus from new players still seems to be that the game is pretty difficult.

You can use it by creeping up behind someone and selecting Pickpocket underneath Choke Hold. You'll see a bar in the middle of the inventory screen which shows their awareness of being pickpocketed - if it reaches the top you'll be discovered when transferring something (and they'll attack you). How much it goes up depends on how heavy and how expensive the item is, and also on your stealth skill. It'll wibble up and down a bit so you might be able to get something more difficult if you click at the right time.

You can pause and unpause the game while pickpocketing, and in Single Player it pauses by default - but not in multiplayer, so be aware of that. Also be aware you can click the middle mouse button (or Y on an XBox-style gamepad) to show/hide the action menu, but it's hidden by default because it tends to obscure the detection bar. You might want to try unhiding it if pickpocketing a pipe bomb.

As I've mentioned before I consider this game finished now it's out of Early Access, and I'm working on a new project. So I'm not intending to add a lot of new features to this game anymore. But maybe I will add one or two every now and then, especially if it relates to Quality of Life or balance. The rest of this patch is mostly bug fixes and translation features:

The previous patch, v278, is now in the main branch (and on XBox). This also means v277 is finally in there too.

EDIT - released a hotfix in publicbeta for a couple of issues with v279, so it's v280 now.

EDIT - released another hotfix for a crash and a translation issue, so it's v281 now.

EDIT - another hotfix, v282, for a bug introduced in v279 where NPCs far from the player would get stuck outside gates.

What's this publicbeta thing?

v282 will be in the "publicbeta" branch on Steam for a while, before pushing it to the main game and to XBox. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then "Game Versions & Betas" and select "publicbeta".

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