Outbreak

Outbreak 1.0.0

Start a new world. Towns, roads and the new places only generate in new chunks. Worlds from 0.1.0 still load.

1.0.0 turns Outbreak from a zombie-survival add-on into a game of its own: a hardcore apocalypse in the spirit of DayZ and RLCraft, with a world that gets worse over time and a story with two endings.

Highlights

• Outbreak is its own game now: its own main menu, no Nether, End, villages or vanilla monsters, and you wake up in a ruined town.
• Hardcore play: no punching trees, body-part health, skills bought with XP, specializations, and danger that grows with distance and time.
• Nine kinds of infected (four new), named elites with special powers, and the Alpha boss.
• Four apocalypse phases over the first fifty days, and world events announced on the radio.
• New places: garages, apartment blocks, warehouses, quarantine camps, bunkers, survivor settlements with traders, and Blackout labs.
• The Project Blackout story, with two endings.

A game of its own

• Outbreak main menu: a ruined town at dusk.
• No way out: Nether portals won't light, the End can't be reached, and enchanting tables and brewing stands do nothing. There are no villages, villagers, pillager outposts or ruined portals. Server owners can turn this off.
• Waking up in a town: new players, and anyone who dies without a bed, start on a road outside a nearby town with two rags, a soda, a can of beans and a road flare.
• Death screen: shows the days you survived and the zombies you killed.
• Goals: an Outbreak advancement tab, and a "Next:" hint in the corner that always suggests what to try.
• Atmosphere: distant moans and far-off gunshots.

Hardcore survival

• No punching trees: knap flint on stone into shards, then make a flint knife and a flint hatchet. Cutting grass with a blade gives plant fibre, and leaves drop sticks.
• Body-part health: damage lands on the head, torso, arms or legs, shown on a small figure by the hotbar. Losing your head or torso kills you; hurt arms weaken you and hurt legs slow you. Bandages, first aid kits, splints, sleep and time heal them.
• Skills: press K and spend XP levels on Melee, Firearms, Defense, Agility, Medicine and Mechanics. Each level gives a bonus, and better gear needs the skill (the tooltip tells you what's needed). Skills stay when you die.
• Specializations: with 8 skill levels, pick medic, mechanic, soldier or scavenger for a bigger bonus. Your first pick is free.
• Water and food: canteens, cloth and charcoal filters, boiling, rain collectors, food that goes stale and rotten, and medical hints in chat.

The dead

• Four new infected:
  • Stalkers hang back while you watch them and close in when you turn away.
  • Armored soldiers take half damage from body shots.
  • Bloaters burst into a poison cloud when they die.
  • Night hunters only come out at night, leap at you, see in the dark and burn at dawn.
• Scaling danger: zombies get tougher the farther you go from spawn and the longer the world runs.
• Elites: named zombies with up to three of eight powers (swift, armored, brutal, vampiric, toxic, regenerating, explosive, keen-eyed). They're tougher and drop military loot.
• The Alpha: a giant brute with a boss bar and a ground slam. It guards military bases and sometimes comes with a blood moon.
• Apocalypse phases: The Outbreak (day 1), The Collapse (day 8), The Dead World (day 22) and The Long Night (day 51). Each phase changes how many zombies there are and which kinds, how big the hordes get, how many elites appear, and how much loot is left.

Places

• In towns: garages, three-storey apartment blocks and warehouses.
• In the countryside: overrun quarantine camps, underground bunkers guarded by an elite, survivor settlements, and Project Blackout labs.
• New containers: tool cabinets, filing cabinets and supply crates.
• Notes and field reports: sixteen readable papers that tell what happened, with plenty of survival hints.

Vehicles

• Part condition: the engine, battery and tyres each wear out. Worn parts slow you down, and a dead engine or flat battery won't start. Engine parts, a fresh battery or a new wheel fix them.
• Look at a vehicle to see what shape it's in.
• Crashes are loud, and they hurt the vehicle and whoever's inside.
• Car alarms on about a third of abandoned cars and pickups.
• Towing: tie one vehicle behind another with a lead.

Base building

• Barricades: wooden and metal. Zombies break through them much more slowly than doors, and you can patch them mid-siege.
• Reinforced door: opens by hand and holds about four times as long as a wooden door.
• Generator: runs on fuel, powers everything next to it like redstone, and is loud.
• Floodlights: light up when powered.

World events and the radio

• Radio: carry one to hear emergency broadcasts in chat, and use it to hear the last few again.
• Broadcasts: a message every morning, and a warning before every blood moon.
• Supply drops: a crate of military supplies lands with a smoke signal you can see from far away. Zombies get there first.
• Ambushed convoys: wrecked trucks on a road, with crates and the dead that did it.
• Migrations: a herd several times the size of a horde, announced with the way it's heading.

Settlements and trading

• Survivor settlements: fenced camps with a trader. No zombies spawn near them.
• Traders: barter on the normal trading screen (tins for medicine, scrap for ammo and car parts, and more). Stock comes back every morning.

The story: Project Blackout

• From The Collapse on, a Blackout scientist broadcasts the location of the nearest lab. Subject A-1, the original Alpha, is still inside, along with the research.
• The Cure: make it at a medical station from the research, then use it. It cures your infection for good.
• The Way Out: from day 15, fly a helicopter to the evacuation point the military broadcasts.
• Each ending has its own ending screen, and the world carries on afterwards.

Changed

• Blood moons: the fog turns red and closes in, and blood moons now carry on after a server restart.
• The apocalypse phase now decides how many zombies spawn and which kinds: fewer and mostly walkers in the first week, more dangerous kinds later.
• Loot gets scarcer in later phases.
• Police lockers hold fewer guns, and crafting ammo gives half as much.
• The motorboat can be placed by aiming at the water.
• The vehicle dashboard shows engine, battery and tyre condition.

Fixed

• Worn vests didn't show on players.
• HUD weight label: the weight label on the HUD overlapped other icons.
• Days survived could show zero after /time set.
• "Next:" hint: it overlapped boss bars.
• Alpha boss bar: it could stay stuck on screen after you travelled far away.
• Blood moon on restart: restarting the server during a blood moon ended it.
• Missing text: some tooltips and messages were missing.

For server owners

• Settings: every setting has a comment in outbreak-synced.toml. New sections: start, hardcore, danger, skills, events and progression. You can turn off the phases, the radio requirement, skill locks and the "no way out" rules.
• New admin commands:
  • /outbreak alpha
  • /outbreak skill
  • /outbreak event supply_drop|convoy|migration
  • /outbreak phase
  • /outbreak story
  • /outbreak ending
  • /outbreak bloodmoon status
  • /outbreak stress
• /outbreak locate town now lists the town's buildings.
• Vehicle speed check: the server undoes vehicle movement that's faster than the vehicle can go.
• New-server whitelist: new servers start with the whitelist on, so add your players or turn it off in server.properties.

Known issues

• Sounds are placeholder versions of vanilla sounds for now.
• Balance is early: feedback on how hard it feels is very welcome.
• Multiplayer works on a dedicated server but hasn't been tested with several players at once yet. Bug reports are welcome.