Rimworld Zombie Apocalypse Alpha 4 Release news

I'm a few days late, but better late than never I guess. I was going to cover both the latest release of the mod and my plans for future changes in one article, but this turned out to be a bit longer than I expected. So I will just go over the changes in version 0.6.3 and talk a bit about some of the features of Rimworld Alpha 4 that will affect your Zombie Apocalypse experience.

Zombie Apocalypse was featured for the Rimworld Alpha 4 release! Both Rimworld Alpha 4 and Zombie Apocalypse v. 0.6.3 came out on the 1st of June, so if you haven't seen it yet go check out Tynan's release blog post and video.

Alpha 4 added a lot of cool new features to Rimworld. Crematoriums have now been added, which means you can now dispose of corpses before they reanimate into zombies without eating them! Another cool change is that colonists, raiders or zombies who are injured will run a bit slower, which means that your injured colonists will lag behind the others and be eaten first when they are running for their lives from zombie hoards. And of course there is the awesome addition of the wood economy, Mechanoid raiders (which are really, really difficult to fight), tweaks to the storytellers, an entire new region system which optimizes searches in the game quite a bit, and many other things. If you haven't upgraded to Alpha 4 yet I'd really recommend doing it.

Quite a bit has changed since version 0.5.3. Here are the important changes:

- Instead of "Undefined" the game will now display "Zombie Virus Active" if the mod is running and "Zombie Virus Airborne" if the virus is airborne.

The Map Conditions have been moved from a hardcoded Enum over to the XML, so now I can use my own custom conditions instead of using the "Undefined" one like I did in the first version of the mod. So now you can look at the bottom right of your HUD to see exactly what state the zombie virus is in at any point in time. Needless to say, it's very useful if you are having trouble remembering if the virus has gone airborne or not (which I do).

- All Zombies that are not spawned in raiding parties will be given a random target search radius between 15 and 250. The old value was 50 for all non-raiding zombies.
- Zombies that are spawned in raiding parties will now have a 40% chance of using that random target search radius.

These two changes are to the way zombies search for targets, and they have the biggest impact on the gameplay. The way the zombie target search radius worked in the Alpha 3 version was this: Zombies spawned in raiding parties would always search the entire map for targets; Zombies that were turned from corpses on the map would always search about 50 squares, which would cover a little less than half of the map if you were using the standard sized map and they were standing in the center. The smaller search radius for "turned" zombies was to make it so there were zombies who sort of wandered a bit like zombies do, but since the zombies almost always killed things near your base anyway, wandering zombies were rare.

These changes fix that. Now a good portion of zombies spawned in raids will stay back and wander around the map. So this will reduce the immediate danger of zombie hoards by significantly reducing the size of the mob that rushes your base, while increasing the long-term danger of zombies by having a bunch of them that are just waiting around to catch your colonists off guard, or turn a group of friendly travelers into a hoard of blood-thirsty zombies. This will also help to combat turtling a bit by forcing you to leave the safety of your base to actively hunt them down, or risk allowing them to turn a small zombie infestation into a major one.

- When the airborne incident hits, you now have 24 hours to dispose of corpses before they start reanimating.
- While the airborne incident is active, a corpse will not reanimate until it has been dead for at least 12 hours.

With the addition of the Crematorium to Vanilla Rimworld I wanted to give people enough time to utilize them to help address the zombie problem before it gets out of hand. So I extended the time that the airborne event takes to kick in to 24 in-game hours, and I increased the delay between death and possible reanimation of corpses to 12 hours. There have been no changes to the way bitten corpses reanimate; they will still be reanimated immediately upon death.

- Increased the damage that bites do over time. Bites now do 2 damage every 200 ticks, instead of 1 damage every 300 ticks.

This one speaks for itself. Bitten colonists were taking days and days to die. I wanted them to die slowly, but it was a bit ridiculous how long they would last. So the damage has been increased significantly.

- Bites deal double damage to incapped pawns who are not colonists.

Zombies have a tendency to incap NPCs, and they used to take forever to die. Usually by the time they finally died and joined the zombie hoard, most of the hoard had already been killed. So if an NPC is incapped and bitten, they will now hurry along to join their future zombie comrades a bit faster.

- Reduced the chance of the zombie virus going airborne to 1, down from 2.
- Reduced the chance of the zombie raids to 6, down from 8.

Both happened too frequently, so I reduced their chances a bit.

A few nights ago I found a series of YouTube videos playing through Rimworld with an one of the earlier versions of Zombie Apocalypse active. Since this is the first series I've seen with my mod, I figured I would share it. So thanks to Belannaer for the playthough.

If you have other playthroughs or screenshots or anything of the sort, feel free to send them to me on the Ludeon forums or in a private message on ModDB and I might mention them in a future update or something.

I will do another writeup about the features that I have planned for the mod within the next couple days. If you would like to contribute to the discussion about the mod or future features, feel free to go leave some feedback in the mod's thread on the Ludeon forums.