Hey all, we’re content locked on the 41.54 update to the public IWBUMS beta – but it needs a few items of fixing and polish before it’s out of the door.

Eris’ awesome new foraging system (as described below) needs some work in response to internal tester feedback, there’s various 3D items bugs, unwanted visual TV interference, and a strange item-wobble when you zoom in and out. Noiseworks bug fixes, level adjusting and various other sound issues are also ongoing.

Seeing as we’re concentrating on getting this out there’s not a huge amount of big ‘new’ stuff to discuss this week, beyond foraging, but there’s still a few things to cover that’ll make your life easier should you want to decorate your safehouse like this.

The ability to place and rotate 3D items from your inventory is a really fun new extra, while the items themselves are in future going to allow us to decorate scenes for starting characters etc to bring new levels of ‘mise-en-scène’ to PZ’s sometimes rather spartan gameplay areas.

This new feature, meanwhile, has also brought about its own new brigand of hilarious bugs – which are, we’re afraid, some of the things RJ and Rockstar Mark are quashing right now.

And, finally on this matter, clearly the introduction of 3D items brings us a new MVP…

NU-FORAGING

Regular readers will know that we recently hired PZ modder Eris to work on the team, and that for her first trick she would be improving on our current rather static and UI-based foraging system. We wanted a more active experience and wider set of loot and rewards, and what she has currently integrated into the game is looking hugely positive and just what we believe was required.

Foraging is now an active mode that you switch on and off, and allows you to search areas to find items wherever you are on the PZ map. Your search is impacted by your skill level, weather conditions, your location and your movement speed – and loot changes depending on time of day and season.

Markers appear on your map showing items of note on the ground, which you must then approach to pick up. Forest paths will conjure up wild plants and firewood, sidewalks in towns will provide litter and lost items, farms might have rogue crops still growing in the fields…

Although it might not be a part of 41.54, one issue we have found with 3D items is that (clearly) small items like nails, berries etc are now far harder to see than when the game was using big, chunky inventory icons.

It’s therefore our intention to experiment with this new Foraging system to also make it a ‘look for small items on the floor’ mode – meaning that placed small items within the world will also be flagged by Eris’ cool new pop-ups.

Alternatively these small items could be given a white outline, which would be accessed from the same Foraging keypress. We’ll see what works best in testing.

Here’s a quick vid showing it all in action.

As we mentioned before, we’re really knuckling down on polish of existing features in 41.54 at the moment rather than discussing/showing things that’ll likely appear in 41.55 or beyond – so apologies if this week’s blog is shorter than the last one.

41.54 will also contain the full Noiseworks PZ soundscape revamp, and reams of new narrative content in the form of Pat_Bren and Turbo’s new CD and VHS system – so it should be one that brings a lot to the Knox Event experience. We’ll let you know how the polish process is going on it over the next week or so.

This week’s spooky set-up from koekto1000 over on Steam. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too! Big thanks to everyone playing, streaming and generally surviving these past two weeks!