🚨 The Big Update is out
Hey everyone,
this is by far the biggest update NO BACKUP has ever had. It covers everything since the May patch, and it took this long because the whole technical base of the game was rebuilt along the way (Unreal Engine 5.8). I'd rather ship one real update than five half ones.
A word of honesty: this game hasn't had many public tests so far. This update is the first real one. Everything in here has been tested by me and a small group, but nothing replaces hundreds of players in real lobbies. So if something breaks, please report it right away, on Discord or in the Steam forum, ideally with what you were doing and on which map. I read every single report and I take care of bugs directly, usually the same day.
Once this build is stable and the bugs are out, new content will go to a public beta branch first, so you can play it early and help shape it before it hits the main game.
Thank you for sticking with this. Grab a friend, it's cold out there.
❄️ New Map: Frostfall Ridge
• A snow-covered forest at night. Fog, wind, lantern-lit trails, abandoned houses, and a research outpost. Your flashlight is your best friend out there.
• New mission: three signal stations are dead. Each one is repaired through a terminal puzzle (a startup sequence, a seismograph and a patch panel). Once all three are up, call the helicopter and get to the landing zone.
• 🥶 Cold system: stay outside too long and you start freezing. Warm up at campfires and heaters.
• 🐺 Something out there hunts in a pack, and something else hunts alone. The pack is drawn to noise: running terminals, your footsteps, your voice. The lone one stalks, picks the isolated player, and does not like light.
• Flares are a tool, not decoration: throw one to pull the hunters away from you, and use the flare launcher to call the extraction. The signal receiver helps you find your way through the fog.
• A dread system replaces cheap jumpscares: things in the fog, sounds in the distance, a figure that runs at you and vanishes. It escalates the longer you are out there and the more alone you are.
• 🏆 Three new achievements on this map.
🎭 Mimic Rework
• Completely new movement and behaviour. It walks, looks around and moves like a real player, with the player animations. It copies what you do, so "jump once" safewords are gone.
• It now announces the shot: you hear it raise the rifle when it arrives and chamber a round 1.5 seconds before it fires. Listen.
• Mimics also spawn on Frostfall Ridge.
🔫 Gear
• Choose your primary weapon before you go: rifle or shotgun. Buy and swap in the lobby, your choice is saved.
• Weapon attachments: sights and scopes Buy them in the shop, they save per weapon and work in multiplayer. This still needs to be tested good.
• Secondary pistol that you keep. (Press 2)
• Every weapon tracks its own ammo now (pistol, rifle, shotgun).
• Damage rebalance: one shotgun pellet now equals one rifle bullet. The shotgun no longer one-shots everything at any range.
• The pistol is single fire only and can't be switched to full auto.
⌨️ Controls & Settings
• Keybindings fully rebuilt on the modern Enhanced Input system. Rebinding works, there is a reset button, and the game warns you when a key is already used.
• Separate horizontal and vertical mouse sensitivity. Vertical was secretly applying sensitivity twice, that's fixed.
• 🎤 Push-to-talk (default CapsLock, rebindable in both menus).
• Adjustable microphone threshold plus a live mic level meter in the HUD, so you can see when the game (and the monsters) hear you.
• New settings: field of view, subtitles, camera shake completely off, hit sound on/off (off by default).
• Friendly fire toggle when hosting a lobby.
• Settings no longer reset when changing maps.
• Fixed two gamepad buttons being bound twice.
📺 HUD & Presentation
• The HUD is now a real bodycam OSD: REC header with running timecode, framed equipment slots, mission objectives top right with progress and strike-through when done.
• Your health is a heart trace instead of a bar. Listen to your heartbeat and breathing.
• New info banners and subtitles with speaker names.
• New end-of-round screen with your reward counting up.
• Health slowly regenerates when you are not being hit, not freezing and not dead.
🔊 Audio
• Footsteps depend on the surface (wood, concrete, carpet, snow, mud). You hear yourself and you hear them.
• Changed a few stuff which were messing with the monster catching your audio.
⚙️ Performance & Tech
• Engine upgraded to Unreal Engine 5.8.
• DLSS and FSR reinstalled and working again (DLSS was greyed out for some of you).
• Rescue Sarah: fixed the frame drops when looking towards the scientists lab (hundreds of movable furniture pieces were casting shadows into 75 lights every frame, plus a security camera rendering the whole scene twice).
• Frostfall Ridge runs at 60+ instead of 40 FPS after fixing one snow effect.
• Steam updates are much smaller now (3.8 GB for a tiny change is gone).
• Long map loads (Mansion, Sarah) no longer kick clients with "connection lost".
🛠️ Fixes
• Fixed friends not being able to join: lobbies were private by default and joining didn't wait for the session.
• Fixed money getting wiped when rejoining a server or going back to the lobby.
• Fixed ammo being lost on death and after map travel (including the shotgun).
• Fixed dying dropping your whole inventory in a pile on top of your respawning body.
• Fixed the floating shotgun after a client died.
• Fixed aiming being rotated to the right after being revived (clients).
• Fixed the flashlight attachment disappearing after map travel, and scope + holo being mounted at the same time on clients.
• Fixed a client's weapon purchase showing up on the host after travel.
• Fixed the shop showing the price instead of OWNED for the sniper scope and for weapons you already own, and fixed every skin reading "rarity skin for your rifle".
• Fixed "Return to Lobby" doing nothing in singleplayer.
• Fixed getting stuck in menus (a dead-end row in the audio settings and an invisible full-screen widget over the pause menu).
• Fixed the duplicate coin/medkit display in the lobby.
• Fixed the lobby showing clients the previous successful mission after a lost round.
• Fixed the REC clock showing 00:80:12 after 60 minutes.
• Fixed everything in your hands being blurry (depth of field).
• Fixed the friendly fire switch never actually turning on.
• Mansion: fixed the fusebox eating the evidence and the escape never unlocking.
• Garage: fixed zombies standing still and ignoring players after the alarm. They now hunt the nearest living player.
• 👽 Rescue Sarah: fixed the alien never coming out of the vents (it only searched within 100 m of one random player).
• Garage: fixed the monster behind the lowest garage door hearing your shots from the whole map and waiting at the door for you.
• Fixed missing navigation on several maps after the engine upgrade (zombies walking in place).
• Fixed interaction prompts not appearing on some objects after the engine upgrade.
• Countless smaller fixes on Frostfall Ridge from the test rounds: house entrances, wolves entering houses, the stalker floating on clients, monsters camping a dead body, flare fade-out, objectives not clearing, rewards not paying, and more.
Thanks for sticking around ❤️ If something breaks, Discord: discord.gg/RjVMwX5K7K
