Rooted Weekly Dev Log: Week 27, 2026

This week went almost entirely to the wildlife simulation, with a survival balance pass, the first in-world interaction loop for powered devices, and save support for built structures alongside. None of this is in the public build.

The animals got real senses

Animals now perceive the world through three channels. They see in a forward cone with a real line-of-sight check. They hear through the same world noise system the human enemies use: a gunshot carries across its whole radius, footsteps only carry a few meters, and crouching keeps you silent. And they smell you on the wind: scent reaches a long way upwind of an animal and collapses to almost nothing downwind, reading the live wind direction from the weather. An animal that hears or smells something it cannot see walks over and investigates the spot before it decides anything.

Wounded animals bleed as they move and leave a trail of drops you can follow. Wounds also persist: an animal that escapes with a bleed keeps that wound while it roams off-screen, and across save and load.

Every species lives its own day

• Deer spawn in small herds and stay together. When one senses danger the whole herd goes on alert, and when the threat is confirmed they flee together in the same direction. Around midday they bed down with dulled senses, which is the window a hunter wants. Hurt a doe and the buck turns on you with an antler swipe, pursues a short distance, then breaks off. Mule deer open some of their flights with the stotting display, the bouncing gait the species is known for.
• The bear now has a life outside of fights: it patrols its range, stops to forage and dig for food, and lies down to rest at midday with reduced awareness. A badly hurt bear skips the posturing and escalates directly, and below a threshold it breaks off the fight entirely and retreats.
• The wolf joined as a second predator with a genuinely different personality. It gives no warning display: it stalks, low and slow, closing the distance in a sneak until it commits to the charge. It sleeps through the day and opens its hunting night with a howl at dusk. The howl sound itself is audio content, sourced separately.
• The eagle flies for real: it circles on thermals inside an altitude band above the terrain, glides down to perch, and takes off again. A gunshot clears the sky, the eagle climbing away above its usual band. A badly wounded eagle cannot soar anymore and is stuck hopping on the ground.

Each species is a set of data assets: speeds, senses, aggression thresholds, herd sizes, behavior trees. Species behave differently because their data differs, which also makes the whole layer moddable. The matching animations (bedding poses, the stot gait, the howl) are content authored separately, so several of these behaviors currently read on placeholder animation.

Survival balance, opened up

The whole vitals balance now lives in one settings panel: sixty-five values covering hunger and thirst decay, sanity, temperature thresholds, stamina, injury debuffs, disease onset, death and respawn. Designers tune them in the editor and see the effect live. In a packaged build the same values can be overridden from a plain config file, no recompile, which makes the survival layer itself moddable.

Injuries also connect to movement properly now: a fracture, deep cold or an overloaded pack genuinely slows you down, and the slowdown holds in co-op for the host and every client. A hardening pass closed a batch of edge cases around wounds and protections, including a wound cap that was accidentally shared across the whole co-op session instead of counted per player.

Powered devices you can claim and repair

The energy system got its first real in-world loop. Devices found in the world, like a lamp or a floodlight, can be claimed and repaired through the interaction prompt, and once powered they actually light up, flickering when the grid browns out. Hold-to-interact progress moved into the prompt card itself: the key outline fills as you hold, flashes on completion, and rewinds if you let go. On the editor side, a new visual tool draws each device's connection zone on the ground so designers can size it by dragging, without touching numbers.

Also this week

• Built structures survive save and load: placed pieces, wall openings and zipline poles all round-trip through the save file, with support recomputed on restore.
• Build menu: tier-less entries like ziplines and deployables now show up in the piece grid properly.
• Placement previews for deployables and zipline poles no longer spawn without their mesh.
• The M4A1 got its third-person reload and fire animations wired, with the reload timing matched to the animation.
• Art pipeline: a new internal tool automates how 3D assets get submitted and validated before they enter the game.
• Content Creator Program: the application backend is in place on the website side.
• Bug and crash reporting now captures richer context with each report, which makes issues much faster to track down.

That's the week from the development side!

Mat