Greetings Survivors!

Before we left for the winter break, you may have seen us mention that we were looking into a few changes to the Showdown Update that would address some of the feedback we saw from the community after its release. This Hotfix is now available to our players on Steam, and will roll out for console players very soon.

While the changes to Base Defense and the introduction of the new resources tested well with our smaller beta testing group, it's clear that it didn't quite land with the wider playerbase in the way we expected. We saw and listened to your feedback and we are happy to share with you some changes we think will keep this new mechanic interesting while making it more rewarding for all playstyles.

We have significantly increased the amount of resources you receive from Base Defense missions, which we hope makes your crafting (and hoarding) a bit easier to attain. We also saw a lot of requests for ways to obtain them without needing to complete Base Defense missions. We heard you - Rivals and Tyrants can now drop small amounts of these resources. A Rival or Tyrant should drop resources roughly equivalent to half the resources you would get from doing an Easy Base Defense mission. Rivals can drop Refined Aluminum, Refined Tungsten, and Refined Uranium, while Tyrants can drop Phosphorous and Ethanol.

Finally, we also increased the Base Defense structure health. We hope that together these changes make your resource hunting more varied and exciting!

We have also fixed some critical mission progression bugs we discovered after the release, made several crash fixes, and polished numerous other issues and bugs we found through testing and player reporting.

Here is a summary of the hotfix:

Crash / Stability
- General crash fixes and stability improvements.
- Various performance improvements.
Showdown Missions
- Fixed a potential mission blocker in the radio tower for Exclusion Zone.
- General tweaks to Showdown missions breadcrumbing, triggers and timings.
Economy Tweaks
- Base Defense economy changes, more resources should be dropped.
- Base Defense building health has been increased.
Gameplay
- Fixed an issue where some players could not change ammo type after aiming down sight.
- Fixed an issue where experimental weapon drops for Rivals was much lower than intended.
- Fixed an issue where player skill points were not being reset correctly after the last update.
- Fixed an issue which allowed for instant weapon switching.
- Companions will no longer set off or receive damage from Spiked Wall traps in Base Defense.
- Fixed an issue on Steam where Companion Armor in the Companion Station could only be changed using a mouse.
- Fixed a bug where players couldn't use or see the Quality Level 2 N144 Minigun when equipped.
- Recalibrated Portable Homing turrets so they no longer target player structures.
- Fixed an issue with the Scout Firebird to ensure explosive payloads now actually explode.
Other fixes
- Player screens will no longer display unsupported/null characters when joining or leaving the multiplayer
- Fixed an issue where some players were not automatically shown new messages.
- Field radios now work as intended in multiplayer.
- Various animation bug fixes.
- Various environmental clipping fixes

~The Generation Zero Dev Team