Update 21 Patch Notes

Howdy there, buckaroo!

Last month, we mentioned that we had exciting stuff on the way. Now it’s time to share what we’ve been working on! Here are some highlights:

• Customizable Difficulty: You can now adjust your game difficulty using three separate aspects: Action, Map, and Community. This lets you tune your experience to better match what you’re looking for!

• Open Range Pack: This new Western-themed content pack includes iconic revolvers, lever-action rifles and shotguns, and a wealth of hats and outfits inspired by the Old and New West.

• Access Survivor Inventory: You can now access the inventory of anyone in your community just by walking up to them!

• Hide Character Backpacks: You now have the option of hiding the backpacks carried by your community members, letting your carefully chosen outfits take center stage.

• Facility Flexibility: Long-duration actions on facilities (such as upgrades) no longer block you from performing quick actions (such as crafting).

So how about you pull up a chair and read on? We think you’ll enjoy what’s on tap.

Customizable Difficulty Sliders

Way back in March of 2019, we introduced the Dread and Nightmare difficulty levels in the “Choose Your Own Apocalypse” update. Then in Update 18 we added the Green Zone: a new, calmer challenge for players looking for a different experience. But based on your Wishlist (linka linka linkety link) requests, you wanted even more options for fine-tuning your game experience. Message received!

This feature represents the next big step in our evolution of player choice and empowerment. Our new Difficulty Sliders allow you to customize the difficulty levels for three different aspects of your State of Decay 2 experience, using the familiar settings of Green, Standard, Dread, and Nightmare for each aspect.

• Action: Adjust the number and toughness of zombies, the rarity of freaks, the deadliness of hostile humans, the durability of vehicles, and the virulence of blood plague.

• Map: Make it easier or harder to scavenge the world and find the resources, weapons, items, and vehicles you need to survive and thrive. This slider also increases or decreases the number of plague hearts on your map.

• Community: Tweak the challenge of building and maintaining a healthy community. Skills might improve faster or slower, morale is easier or harder to keep up, and resource costs and influence gains are increased or decreased, among other variables.

With the Difficulty Sliders, you can fine-tune your difficulty settings to find just the right recipe for your taste. For example, if you prefer a quiet, desolated wasteland, you can turn up the difficulty on the Map slider and turn down the difficulty on the Action slider. If you like your combat extra-bloody but don’t want to stress over scavenging and community management, crank Action all the way to Nightmare and set your other sliders at Standard or Green. With 64 different combinations to choose from, we think you’ll enjoy customizing your game experience in just the right way for you!

This feature has some impact on other areas of the game.

• Achievements: Any achievement that was previously tied to a single overall difficulty zone is now tied to the minimum difficulty set across all of your sliders. For example, you can earn the True Grit achievement with a mixed set of difficulty settings, as long as all three sliders are set to Dread or higher.

• Multiplayer: Difficulty sliders can only be changed during a single-player session. When a client joins your multiplayer session, they will receive a notification of that game’s Action slider setting.

• Map Changes (From the Wishlist — link) Changing your Action or Community slider will not require you to relocate to a new map. Only a change to your Map slider will force your community to a new version of your map.

Keen-eyed players may notice that there’s a fifth, unnamed difficulty level that’s teased on the Difficulty Screen. It’s too early to talk in detail about this upcoming addition, but from its position to the right of Nightmare you might be able to guess that it’s aimed at players who enjoy even more chaos and carnage in their apocalypse.

The Open Range Beckons

This month’s update features the Open Range Pack, a huge content pack that includes 11 guns, 4 melee weapons, 12 outfits, 10 hats, and a new throwable explosive!

As you can probably tell from the pack’s name, the theme of this new content is the American West. But not just the Old West: this pack blends the old and the new to create a collection that spans eras. You can put on your black Cattleman Hat and head into town with one of our Model 1875 revolvers on your hip, just like a classic gunslinger. Or you can don your denim Ranch Hand Jacket and Western Straw Hat before grabbing a Branding Iron and reloading your modern Duvall Outrider lever-action rifle to head out to the back forty. It’s your fantasy, so have some fun!

As always, several of these new items and outfits are available by completing the appropriate bounty for the Bounty Broker.

• Model 1875 Sceriffo: An elegant modern replica of a hard-hitting .44-caliber revolver from the Old West.

• Mare’s Leg: You’ve seen this iconic short-barreled shotgun in TV and movies since the 50s, and now it can be yours.

• Model 92 Rifle: This lever-action .44-caliber rifle is a brass-clad veteran of conflicts long past.

• Sawed-Off Model 1887: A cut-down version of an infamous buckshot dispenser, useful as a zombie-killing roomsweeper.

• Scoped Big Hank Rifle: This classic .357-caliber lever-action rifle adds a modern optic for accurate long-range shots.

• Black Sherpa Suede Vest: Lets you stay warm and keep cool at the same time.

• Snakeskin Western Straw Hat: This slick, shiny hat will be the envy of all your friends.

• Big Daddy Skillet: It’s not just the biggest frying pan you’ve ever seen, it’s also great for clonking zombies!

• Bundle of Dynamite: The first new throwable explosive added since 2018’s Daybreak Pack features a fuse that’s juuuust long enough to draw in the zeds before it goes BOOM!

The remaining guns, weapons, and outfits can all be found by scavenging.

This content pack includes many highly requested ideas from the Wishlist (linkety linkety link, and linkety linkety link). Thanks for the suggestions!

Riding Into the Sunset

The arrival of the Open Range Pack means we must say farewell (for now) to the Anniversary Pack. You keep anything you already own, but you can’t acquire more items from retired packs.

In addition, the limited-edition Bloodmobile vehicle has also been removed. Of course, in a world where corpses walk, nothing stays gone for long…

Coming Soon!

As the days grow shorter and the nights longer, our thoughts inevitably turn to the creepy things that lurk in the dark. Which makes next month perfect for the return of the Fearsome Footage Pack, last seen in March of this year. This pack is full of weapons and outfits that thrill and chill, many inspired by the terrors of the silver screen. All the previous bounties associated with this pack will be reset, giving you the opportunity to earn these rewards (plus extra influence, if you were around to complete them the first time the pack was in circulation).

To make way for this returning pack, the Plunder Pack will be retired with the next update, so you’d better complete those bounties soon!

Additional Updates

In addition to the highlights described above, here’s a look at what else has been improved or fixed.

When relevant, we’ve included links that note a Wishlist suggestion that helped guide us to the issue. If you’d like to contribute ideas on how to improve the game, visit https://support.stateofdecay.com/ and click on “Wish List and Features” to learn more.

Inventory Management

• From the Wishlist (linkety link): You can now manage the inventories of your community members without taking control of them. Just walk up and talk to them, and you’ll see a new option to Access Survivor Inventory.

  • This opens their inventory, with your inventory also available on a tab. Selecting an item in one inventory will push it into the other, letting you freely swap items back and forth.

    • From the Wishlist (link): This means that while you’re out scavenging, you can easily use your follower as a pack mule to help you carry more.

  • While exploring the other survivor’s inventory, you can also use and equip items for them, just as you can in your own inventory.

    • From the Wishlist (linkety link): This means that you can activate a healing consumable within another survivor’s inventory to heal them in the field.

  • Note that this replaces the former option to pass a rucksack to another character, as that is now one of many things you can do with this new feature.

• From the Wishlist (linkety link): You now have the option to hide all backpacks on your survivors.

  • This allows you to see things like the patterns on the backs of their jackets, and avoids the scenario where every character with a decent-sized backpack looks like they’re about to climb Mount Everest.

  • You can find the option on the Settings screen, in the Gameplay Section, as Hide Character Backpacks.

Difficulty Tuning

• From the Wishlist (link): Hostile humans have received a balance pass to offer a fairer experience on higher difficulties.

  • They can no longer kill a player who isn't in "fight for life", even if they score a headshot. Using consumables to stay in the fight will mean you're going to survive at least one more hit.

  • The damage dealt to a hostile human by a headshot is now more consistent.

    • There is now a minimum headshot damage received by hostiles at Dread and Nightmare, so that even if you're using a suppressed .22 pistol, the number of headshots needed to take them down should be more reasonable.

    • It still takes a lot of body shots using low-caliber suppressed weapons. We haven't changed that.

  • Hostiles have an exceptionally high chance to miss their first 1-4 shots before they "get on target", with that chance disappearing faster on higher difficulties.

    • They also have massively reduced accuracy at long ranges.

• The amount of influence you earn from killing zombies now declines as you move the Community slider into the Dread and Nightmare settings. (It used to escalate as difficulty rose, leading to massive overearnings in Nightmare when combined with high zombie populations.)

  • If you still want the influence bonanza you used to be able to get on Nightmare by killing so many zombies, try playing with Community at Standard and Action at Nightmare.

• There is now a smooth ramp of plague heart population across the different notches on the Map slider, starting low at the Green end, and getting steadily higher as you progress to Nightmare. (There used to be a dip in plague heart population at Dread.)

• The baseline morale penalty for all survivors now gets worse as you shift the Community slider from Dread to Nightmare, increasing from -10 Morale to -15 Morale. (The penalty used to be -10 for both.)

• Blood plague juggernauts now continue to spawn, even after all plague hearts are defeated, when the Action slider is set to Nightmare. (This was already true in Dread for some reason.)

• Plague heart loot is now consistent across all difficulty settings, granting 3-6 Plague Samples and what were formerly considered Nightmare-level items.

Gameplay Tuning

• Ambient enclaves should now offer a wider variety of items for trade, and offer more useful gear, such as suppressors, mid-tier weapons and firearms, gas cans, repair kits, facility mods, and some quirky consumables like box mines.

  • This has been applied primarily to the more randomly-generated enclaves, such as the ones you can summon over the radio.

• The chance to knock down a zombie on the first shot when firing a weapon chambered in .44 Magnum is now 60%, up from 30%.

• We adjusted the collision on vehicles with snowplows attached to the front, to make them less likely to get caught on obstacles like guardrails.

User Experience Improvements

• Long-duration actions on facilities, like upgrades, no longer block you from performing quick actions, like crafting.

• Now when you accept a mission in dialogue, the game automatically pins it as your current mission in the HUD, rather than requiring you to hunt it down manually on the Map screen.

• When you move your community to a “random” map, the game will no longer drop you into the same map you just left a quarter of the time. You’ll always end up somewhere new.

• The most essential missions for recruiting new survivors (the ones that create new enclaves and progress your relationships with them) have been moved into their own category under the hood, to prevent them from being held up by other missions. That means that:

  • Missions that lead towards allies and recruits should be available more often.

  • The typical number of missions listed on the Map screen at any given time may go up slightly.

• All container icons are now visible through walls in sites that you own, but have not yet fully scavenged. (Previously, this feature only applied to unclaimed sites.)

• Player characters are now less sensitive to doors while sprinting, so you are less likely to suddenly bash your way into a building that you intended to run right past.

• Bounties that formerly stated that you needed to kill enemies “from stealth” now more accurately describe the requirement as “while crouched”.

• The Red Talon Officer’s Quarters now counts as a latrine for survivors with digestive problems. Please feel free to imagine how that plays out any way you like.

Broken Achievements

• We learned that a certain subset of our achievements were not firing for many players, so we investigated and corrected the issue.

  • The following achievements were known to exhibit this problem:

    • Sayonara (get a character killed)

    • Heart of Darkness (destroy a plague heart)

    • These Dreams (destroy 5 plague hearts)

    • Total Eclipse (clear out all plague hearts)

    • Barley and Spoiled Blueberries (kill a bloater)

    • Be Still My Dog of War (complete a legacy as a Warlord)

    • I Am the Law (complete a legacy as a Sheriff)

    • Speedy Delivery (complete a legacy as a Trader)

    • If You Build It They Will Come (complete a legacy as a Builder)

    • The Game is Afoot (accept a bounty)

    • Bounty Collector (complete 5 bounties)

    • Collect 'Em All (complete 25 bounties)

    • It Looks Good On You Though (unlock an outfit via the bounty broker)

  • After our fix, you should receive retroactive credit for nearly all of the above achievements if you were one of the players who missed out. There are only two exceptions that we couldn’t support this way:

    • Barley and Spoiled Blueberries — Keep an eye out for one more bloater!

    • Sayonara — You’ll need to get another character killed. Don’t worry, we believe in you.

Miscellaneous Bug Fixes

• We made several minor mission fixes, correcting typos, misleading icons, and small bugs.

• We also made several minor map fixes, correcting missing markup and missing containers.

• We fixed an incorrect icon on the Choose Your Leader screen.

• We fixed an area in Drucker County where you could submerge yourself completely underwater, and stand there like some kind of crab person.

• We fixed a problem that could cause a nonplayer character to run forever into the edge of a high platform.

• We fixed a bug that could cause certain rare characters to spawn without a Close Combat weapon.

• We fixed some missing audio on the Saw Blade Sword, for when you attack a plague heart while exhausted.

• Smoke can no longer render heavy weapons ineffective against zombies.