Twas a bite before Christmas, and all through the safehouse – not a creature was stirring. Not even… you. Until you turned into a zombie, and tore out the throats out of all your nearest and dearest at 4AM. Happy holidays!

It’s a short Monday development blog this week, with the Zomboid team currently flung to the four corners of their respective families – and currently going through the experience known as ‘seasonal cheer’. Before the team broke from the dev bolt-hole, however, exciting stuff was being poured into Muldraugh mainframe.

Lemmy is neck deep in RC3’s character relationship system. This will let every NPC have a calculated opinion of every other character: determined by their traits, the other character’s traits, and the various things that happen to them. It’s a necessary foundation for all the survivor group social dynamics work we’ll do beyond this update, that’ll one day sow dissent, treachery and mutiny within survivor groups.

Will, meanwhile, is sketching out a post-RC3 story tutorial to cover things like camping and farming, Binks has been back on map duty, while Mash and Romain have been focussing on future updates with the new carpentry system and some lovely new sprites to match. We’ll have more on all this when we’re all back into the usual dev routine.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank our community, especially you yourself, for your support and patience this year. 2013, meanwhile, should prove a fun one. Once RC3 is out of the oven and auto-updating on Desura we’ll be unleashing our lovely new website, getting the screenshot competition back into gear, announcing a PZ mod contest and (with your help) polishing, tweaking and improving the game in the run-up to its release over Steam.

VZW_Matt has also been back in touch about getting the All Things Zomboid podcast back up and running, so in terms of both game and community the New Year should provide some good, old-fashioned apocalyptic goodness. Merry Xmas!

Spiffo the Community Raccoon encourages you to have a great Christmas. (And reminds you to turn the oven off after you’ve cooked the turkey).