🍲 A Completely Reworked Cooking System
Fixed recipes are gone. Cooks now create dishes from whatever ingredients are actually available.
Choose a dish type: stew, soup, roast, skewer, salad, sandwich, pie, grilled plate, or trail rations, then let your cook decide what ends up on the plate. Every dish gets its own name, nutrition, servings, and quality based on the ingredients and the cook's skill.
Your settlement also keeps a Cookbook. Make a dish repeatedly and your survivors get better at it, turning familiar meals into reliable staples.
❤️ Survivors Have Opinions About Food
Survivors now have individual food preferences.
Gourmets demand variety. Iron Stomachs don't care what's on the plate. Vegetarians avoid meat. Sweet Teeth love berries. Gluttons actually get something out of eating more than their share.
Meals also have a memory now. Serve the same thing for too long and people will eventually start getting sick of it. Keep the menu varied and morale improves.
There's also a new Food Policy screen where you can decide what each survivor is allowed to eat.
🥩 Preserve Food for the Road
Two new buildings let you turn short-lived meat into long-lasting expedition food:
Drying Rack: cheap and simple.
Smokehouse: faster and produces better preserved meat, but requires a fire.
Jerky and smoked meat can last for weeks, making long expeditions much more practical.
🧟 The Dead Have Faces
Every zombie is now a distinct person.
Different faces, bodies, hair, clothes, scars, skin, eyes and signs of decay mean hordes no longer look like copies of the same corpse.
And there's something worse...
When one of your survivors dies to infection, their body doesn't simply disappear.
They get back up.
They return as a zombie wearing the clothes they died in, while everything they were carrying falls where they fell.
🐻 Bears
Bears now inhabit the deep forests and northern pine regions.
They're solitary, dangerous, and worth hunting: a single bear provides an enormous amount of meat and the finest hide available.
Get too close and a bear will rear up on its hind legs before attacking.
That's your warning.
🌵 The Desert Comes Alive
The desert has been completely rebuilt.
It now has:
Creosote scrub
Dry grass
Yucca and cactus
Joshua trees
Large boulder fields
Jackrabbits
Coyotes
Bighorn sheep
Rattlesnakes
Vultures
And beneath all that sand and rock are rich mineral deposits. Iron, copper and sulfur are significantly more abundant in the desert, making it a dangerous but potentially extremely productive place to settle.
⚔️ Zombies Are Getting Smarter
The dead now actively try to break through your walls instead of wandering around outside.
They'll keep pursuing survivors who retreat, and attackers are better at abandoning impossible targets and finding something they can actually reach.
Defending your walls has also been improved: survivors can lean over wall walks to shoot enemies below, and defenders will reposition when their shots are blocked.
🐎 Bigger Animals, Bigger Gates
Horses, cows and bears are now properly treated as large animals.
They can't squeeze through normal doors anymore. Riders have to dismount, and livestock must be led through proper wide openings.
Ranch and pen gates are now two tiles wide and open as double gates.
⚠️ Save Compatibility: Existing ranch and pen gates from older saves will need to be demolished and rebuilt before livestock can use them.
👕 Survivors Look Better Than Ever
Clothing has received a major visual overhaul.
Shirts now have seams, buttons and pockets. Trousers have waistbands, flies and cargo pockets. Boots have proper leather details and soles. Specialized outfits have their own distinctive designs, from lumberjack shirts to arctic parkas, rescue vests and scrap armor.
Weapons also now visibly affect how survivors stand, walk and run.
🤝 Strangers & Visitors
Wanderers who want to join an expedition now actually ask.
You'll learn who they are, what they did before the apocalypse, and how much additional food they'll consume before deciding whether to bring them along.
Visiting groups have also been improved. Traders, envoys and guards now behave like actual groups, responding together when attacked and coming to each other's aid.
🔧 And Much More
This update also includes a large number of fixes and improvements to:
Wildlife spawning and behavior
Desert terrain and seasonal changes
Livestock during raidschg
Raider and zombie pathfinding
Visitors leaving the map
Building multiple floors
Long cooking order names
Survivor selection and drafting
Downed animal and corpse selection
Alerts and the survivor information panel
Attack orders
Fence combat
And more
0.5.6 is a big step toward making every survivor, every meal, and every encounter feel like part of the story of your settlement.