To both of you out there who aren’t playing Red Dead Redemption 2 right now, we have a treat! Build 40 has been officially released!

Build 40 contains a simulated weather and climate system – recreating true-to-life weather patterns through 365 days of the year following a virtual warm and cold front system.

Once this version is out and fully patched, then the team will moving into the animation codebase currently being prepped by our friends at T.E.A. for Build 41.

As far as Build 40 goes, the following video gives you a brief taster of what to expect.

New stuff that can be seen in the above video includes:

• Storms that pass over the Zomboid map.
• Different levels of fog and mist, that will often clear during the day.
• Simulated wind speeds that can be seen in the moving foliage around you, and in how precipitation falls. Trees sway, and move when crashed into – or hordes pass through them.
• New shaders and post-processing effects to give a better feeling of different times of day, and for different seasons and times of year.
• Improved rain effects, with more realistic ground impact.
• Improved snow and snow effects.

Build 40 also includes:

• Improved player character temperature system, moodles and inventory clothing types to help you fight against the more extreme temperatures. [Stuff the game now tracks seen here]
• New Chatbox. Primary features include separate chat streams (safehouse, local, global, etc), customizable chat and more intuitive usage and commands. It’s hopefully a lot more convenient now.
• Reflective windows on vehicles and skybox generation. This takes into account: the time of day, the Global illumination color, fog, cloudiness, precipitation intensity, wind direction, wind speed and the temperature of the ambient air / cloud level.
• Added ‘shake’ sprite effects for hits on doors, chops on trees and zeds/players walking through vegetation.
• System to convert objects placed by mappers so they can be used as functional game objects. This covers items like barricades, campfires, rain barrels, traps, composters, crops etc.
• MP Admin Items list UI that can be used to quickly search through, and spawn, items.
• New MP host Sandbox options that can be enabled, where possible, in-game without a restart.
• New C++ version of ZombiePopulationManager. This system is what governs the placement and movement of zombies when they’re not directly on your screen, and this updated version should be an optimization for SP and MP – hopefully helping out lower spec machines and busy servers.
• New weather-based challenges: A Storm is Coming, and The Descending Fog. Improved Winter is Coming challenge.
• Also: Car battery charger now available. Driving drunk is no longer recommended. MP players can now be damaged by cars. Clearer weight gain and loss. Revamped PZ sound system. Loads of optimizations, MP and Admin improvements, map fixes, improved UI readability, a fair bit of balance and 300+ general fixes.

For the full changelist and details on all the balance changes and fixes please check here on the forums.

As ever, we do rigorous testing both internally and within the IWBUMS community beta channel – but due to wide range of hardware out there in the Steam wilds there will always be issues that need to be fixed after a build release. So please have patience while we patch up anything that arises.

Please report bugs in this section of the The Indie Stone forum.

Thanks everyone!