The city has stopped being kept. Silt and moss in the gutters, moss in the kerb joints, grass through the cracks in the slabs, lichen on the pavements, a damp line with weeds at the foot of every wall, and the trodden yards gone over with sprouts and dead straw. Nobody has swept these streets in twenty years and now it looks it.
Every collapsed roof has the weather coming through it. Under the hole the floor has grown over: algae where the rain stands, moss where it lands, ferns and fungus in the shade of the edge that survived, weeds and lichen between. You'll see it from the street looking down through the roof and from inside standing in it.
The four boards in the city now name four buildings. The block at each crossing is the hospital, the goods depot, the record office or the relief centre, furnished for what it was — wards and a pharmacy, an armoury and stores, a vault of files and safes. Each has a back room behind a steel door that's latched shut and takes a pick to get through. What's in there isn't found on any other floor in the city.
Rival factions fight at the city crossings. Three to five a side per wave, a pistol each, and the fight only runs while you're near enough to hear it.
Towns and the city are flat now; the hills come back over a short skirt outside. Empty lots hold refugee camps. Buildings have inset lots with sidewalks, real masonry, working doors, partitioned rooms, ground-floor windows front and back, a fascia board and a lintel over the door.
Roads have their relics: abandoned checkpoints, power poles, bus shelters, hydrants, pillar boxes on the pavements, billboards and shelters on the country roads, and more of the abandoned sites in between. Nothing stands on a doorstep any more, and no tree grows on a sidewalk.
Upstairs
Some two-storey buildings have usable stairs. Go up and the town spreads out below you.
Raiders take the stairs. A chase that loses you at the foot of a flight goes up after you; a noise you make upstairs brings them up; a patrol with an upper floor beside its beat goes up now and then to look. It is not a refuge any more. It is a position.
You can go out of a first-floor window: stand against the front wall upstairs and drop to the street. It costs a bruise and the street hears you land, but it's a way down that raiders can't follow.
A barricade at the top of the stairs holds a raider that came up until it chops its way through.
A shot fired upstairs is heard in the room below and at the door. Footsteps aren't.
Raiders
Factions remember. Kill a faction's men in a town and its next patrol there comes heavier — a tier per two men lost — and says so when it first sees you. They forgive one man every three days; a town you keep bleeding never cools.
Patrols walk a beat round the town's streets from where they arrived instead of standing where they landed, and there are more of them as your standing with a faction falls. Guards stay local, go indoors for rain and to sleep at night, and come out for the day.
Retaliation parties and patrols are sent to search the area where something happened, on foot, without opening doors — they used to be handed your exact coordinates. Any real noise you make outranks the rumour.
The chase is smoother. Raiders cut straight across open ground toward you, walk at you when you're in plain sight, stop dead when they arrive, and carry on along your last heading when a tree breaks their line rather than freezing where they last saw you. Round a corner still works.
Rival factions fight each other on sight.
Raiders' loot is laid in a grave that goes when it's emptied or after two days. Your own pack goes into a cross on the tile you fell that stands until you take it back.
Weather that gets in
Rain comes through the holes in the roofs and reaches what's under them. Standing under a collapse in a downpour is as cold as standing in the street. A bed under a hole is refused while it rains, and a storm arriving in the night wakes you soaked. A fire with nothing over it — in the open or under a hole — is put out by real rain, and feeding it is refused until the rain stops.
The whole storm was reworked: no more distorted heavy rain, building interiors stay dry and readable, and the heavy rain and buffeting wind recordings are new.
Clouds drift shadows over the ground with the wind, light moves through the tree crowns, heat shimmers over every fire, leaves and seed heads drift, ground goes dark where it's wet, water glints, and the camera kicks when you fire.
Tree shadows are tree-shaped at dawn and dusk, with a soft edge, and the grass under them is as dark as the ground beside it.
Loot and rooms
Furniture is searchable. Desks, filing cabinets, lockers, stores, benches, first aid boxes and wall safes stay standing and give up what a room like that would hold — sometimes nothing. Nearby searchables light up, and furniture you stand behind goes see-through.
Rooms you haven't seen into are dark. Open a door and the room behind it lights; the front door of every building is always drawn.
Trading lives in the tablet now, with what a deal needs shown inline, quest cards, and clearer quest titles.
Guaranteed steelworking and post-bunker contracts, clearer objectives and expedition plans.
The HUD
One line in the corner says the worst thing wrong with you and the one thing that answers it: FESTERING · MEDKIT, OR A NIGHT IN BED. FREEZING · A FIRE, NOW. SOAKED · GET UNDER A ROOF. HUNGRY · EAT. What's still getting worse always outranks what merely is.
With a gun in hand you turn to the cursor, not the way you're walking.
Pistol and rifle rounds are the right size, and so is the revolver.
The tablet
Filling in the country is faster and the finished page is kept, so opening the tablet doesn't redraw it. Copies fade at the edge of what you know, and the writing sits in a dark well.
Sound
Placeholder audio is gone. Licensed wind, canopy and rain beds tuned for an abandoned country, the suspect horn-like settlement ambience removed, ambient screams removed, better bow releases, and the metallic vine scratch replaced.
Smoother
Fixed a recurring hitch in the city — a short stutter every few seconds while the crossings were fighting. The lamps the fighters carry were building their light masks in play, one facing at a time; they're built under the loading screen now.
Sprinting across the city no longer hitches on streaming: chunk cleanup and room updates are bounded, road surfaces are painted off the main thread, and the streaming budget is shared with navigation.
The new street growth costs one picture per chunk rather than thousands of marks, so it's free at frame time.
The loading screen warms sounds, music, atlases, character sheets, road surfaces, city fighters and every shader before it lets you in.
Also
Stop signs stand beside the kerb and telephone poles block the way at their base.
The rain catcher, thorn scratch cues, damage reactions, water effects and footsteps were tuned.
Fixed shots starting inside walls, a peeked wall that could error mid-fade, and a survivor spawning inside a solid prop.