Release 1.0

Scientists and Zombie Healers!

It’s finally done, we present you the version 1.0 of Zombie Cure Lab! For us, our exciting long run is finally reaching the finishing line. Our original idea from 2019 has transformed into the game we are releasing today. During this time we have worked hard to offer you the best possible experience on a fresh take on the zombie game genre.

With all updates we brought to Zombie Cure Lab you will dive into the zombie curing action right away with an improved onboarding and a well crafted progression throughout the four tech tiers and 200 research options our game is offering. With respect to our console versions, releasing the same day, we also improved the overall UI significantly.
Check out the changes below or just start your zombie curing adventure! Don’t forget to leave a review if you enjoy Zombie Cure Lab!

Features:

• Lab Status and Alert Pooling - A new lab status display keeps you informed about destroyed, disabled, or disconnected buildings. Alerts are grouped to reduce clutter, and clicking them takes you straight to the problem. You’ll also be notified when basic needs (like food or beds) aren’t met.
  
  Workers that try to fulfill needs are shown as well, not enough beds or a lack of food will pop up and tell you if you need to build up your infrastructure.
  Alerts are now grouped when they come in to reduce clutter.
  
• Reworked Onboarding – Three new handcrafted tutorials have been built to ensure the whole game with all its system is explained and players have a better chance to get into Zombie Cure Lab.
  
  A wiki has also been integrated to assist players who are stuck or returning and need a refresher.
• Urban Theme – To strengthen the post-apocalyptic vibe, the new tutorials take place in an urban environment featuring a destroyed city.
  
• Mission Customization – Play four new expeditions (North, South, East, West) with adjustable settings like starting fences, zombie damage, and more. Each has unique modifiers like increased zombie damage and reduced freeze damage, that challenge you to find your own strategy.
  
  The customizable missions are called north, west, east and south expedition. They have each their own modifiers like increased zombie damage or decreased freezing power to create different experiences.
• Reworked UI / Gamepad Support – We overhauled the UI to improve clarity and feedback. Plug in a gamepad at any time—the interface will adapt. Includes new features like a cure progress bar, cured human counter, and global control over all gates and doors.
  
  
• Overcrowded Lab – Labs with too many workers will become “crowded” or “very crowded,” increasing worker needs and reducing calm-down chances. However, overcrowded labs also boost XP gain, creating a strategic trade-off.
  
  
• Trading Rework – Resources are no longer free. You now earn support points to request resources, making it more strategic to support your economy.
  Frozen zombies can be sent away for additional rewards.
  It’s now a valid strategy to focus on trading instead of local production—for example, sending away workers or frozen zombies to trade for metal.
  
• Restored Cities – Use cured humans to rebuild destroyed cities on the world map. Each restored city grants permanent perks that boost future missions and help speed up humanity’s recovery.
  
• Balancing – Days are now a bit shorter, and in general, the game moves faster toward tech tier 4 and curing humans, strengthening the late game and restored cities loop.
  Key bottlenecks like metal production have been boosted.
• Bug Fixes – We've fixed long-standing issues like stuck workers, job assignment problems, zombie storage bugs, some performance issues and more.
• Worker and Building Type Cycler
  
  You can now cycle through existing workers or buildings of the same type at the top of the open info box. This gets introduced mainly to improve gamepad usability, but is also helpful for keyboard and mouse controls.
  It also shows the total amount of the building type, which can be quite useful to get an idea how many resource camps you have scattered across the map.
• Alternate Ice Pack and Grilled Meat Production
  
  In the tech tree are two new buildings available.Grilled Meat Printer - Food
  An indoor meat printer that can only be operated by Humbie Level 2 and only requires chemicals to directly print grilled meat. As Humbie Level 2 requires a sustain grilled meat production, this essentially skips some production chains and can allow you to to go for a different economy strategy.Berry Freezer - Production
  An outdoor ice pack producer that requires Humbie Level 3. It only requires glowberries and a higher energy consumption to output a steadiy supply of ice packs, which can be interesting to reduce the chemical needs of your lab which would be necessary with the classical ice packer building.

Changelog:
- Trade balancing, cured humans now give 150 research points or 50 support points as send away reward. Humbies reduced research points reward.
- Final localization to english, german, french and simplified chinese
- New alternative production machinery added, Grilled Meat Printer (chemicals to grilled meat) and Berry Freezer (Glowberries to ice packs) as bonus machines only operable by humbie 2 or humbie 3.
- Worldmap access now only as new game selection, overhauled all missions. New tutorial 1 - 3 with extensive explanations and slower pacing to get players into the game.
North, West, South, East expeditions as free game modes with freely adjustable difficulty settings and a mission specific modifier.
- Repair costs better shown in info box
- Shortcuts working again for new info box, even when action tab is not active.
- Slighty reduced main storage and final treatment chamber research costs to not artificially inflate progression pacing.
- All wiki entries now correctly unlock with finishing objectives during tutorials.
- Handle skipped elite/ boss waves that they are not displayed in wave ui.
- Docking hero (science app) removed from project structure.
- Removed science app related achievements and fixed other achievement problems.
- Perks on worldmap with restored cities balanced to play towards 1000+ cured humans as the endgame of ZCL.
- Difficulty balancing, threat increase, curve tweaks, presets tweaked especially that relaxed mode has low zombie damage.
- Main storage gained cold weapon as initial defence, to ensure new players don't die from unfinished fences.
- Day duration from 16 min to 12 min for better pacing of the game.
- Road walk speeds adjusted to 20% gain with each upgrade.
- Can send away frozen zombies now (trade), many fixes that it works better in most situations.
- Open/ close doors state handling fixes.
- Button to open/ close all gates at once, for easy let intrudes out of freshly repaired lab situations.
- Pathfinding fixes potentially resulted in stuck worker problems.
- Better objectives handling, also savegame related issues fixed.
- Ground/ street/ room rendering order fixes.
- Refill job handling fixes, may resulted in machines not serviced anymore.
- Build and layout menu scroll speed and general ui adjustments.
- Many ui fixes to make new ui work.
- Ingame wiki added with explanations to all game systems, tools, concepts and more.
- Guard behavior fixing, ignoring hostiles in some cases.
- Fixed several bugs regarding frozen zombie storage handling.
- Various fixes regarding different worker stuck bugs.
- Mission screen added with many modifiers that allow to customize the game experience, like resource processing speed, research speed or how quickly workers get hungry.
- Reworked trading to cost resources (support points) instead of getting everything for free with cooldowns. Rewards for new frozen zombie trade option.
- Restored cities added, changing state from destroyed to restored with cured human amount requirement. Track cured humans over several missions as a total counter of your efforts. Many perks added, extended game modifiers.
- Alerts pooling, new alerts are gathered and shown grouped to reduce notification spamming.
- Lab status added, negative conditions of the lab stay shown at the top. Added worker can't satisfy their needs status, clearly showing when there are not enough beds, training equipment or food.
- Fixed broken cooking pot tier 2.
- Humbies leave during treatment bug fix.
- Soft cap feature, overcrowded lab with total population shown. High population counts increase need demand and have other trade offs, giving incentives to stay at certain population levels.
- Can only assign specific worker types, not any type anymore, making assignments more intentional and a bit easier for new players.
- Fixed power pole wires sometimes not getting cleaned up when moving/ destroying power poles.