Aftergrowth update — people on the road, a richer east, and a new look
People on the road
Strangers now stop and speak when they walk over to look at you. Press E to say hello, or swing at them and see how they take it.
Earn a stranger's trust and a hello opens their trade board right there on the road. Each of the five people in your world carries their own board, with their own stock that restocks over the days.
A new notebook page, People on the Road, keeps who you have met, how often, and what they make of you.
Traders
On your first morning the nearest trader comes to find you, calls out, and tells you where his place is. His cabin is marked on your map. In coop, every survivor who joins gets their own visit.
Find him again at his cabin and he has more to say: there are others like him out there, and he saw something come down out of the sky months ago.
Run four errands for him and he will tell you what he knows about the door under the ground, and how the people up here keep the pieces of its code. He is vague about it on purpose.
His errands continue after that, and each time his board restocks he lets you know.
Loot and survival
The towns further east, Ashford, Lantern Hill and Dray Crossing, now hold better supplies than the towns near where you wake: steel, medicine, and the occasional finished tool.
Tinned food is rarer, on bodies and in crates alike. Wild berries and fish are thinner on the ground. Hunting is unchanged: a deer is still a day of food.
Pistols and rifles are far rarer, and so are their rounds. Guns are a find in the city, not a thing you pick up on the road. Arrows and the occasional hunting bow now turn up in town crates, and bolts in the city.
Every resource now grows where it belongs: stones on river banks and shores, boulders and iron in the rock fields, deadfall and berries in the woods, tufts on the grassland, with only the odd one elsewhere. New worlds only.
Factions
A faction you keep provoking now sends another party every so often while its anger holds, instead of once. Lie low and the timer stops.
The threat readout tells you when a party has set out for you.
A party sent for what you did recognises you on sight and says so.
Enemy patrols now arrive without the stutter some players noticed.
The world
Burning vines scorches the ground black. The next rain washes it back.
Rain washes footprints away too.
The objective line no longer repeats itself every time you load a save that is already past the survival basics.
The main menu now shows the grass.
A new look
The main menu, settings, the tablet, and the whole in-game HUD have been redrawn in one clean style, built for the phone first and the desktop with more room. The world and the map are untouched.