VEIN Weekly: Road to 0.021

Hi everyone! This is our first weekly post. We intend to make this a regular occurrence going forward. In this column, we're going to talk about what we're working towards. These are going to be quite raw and feature mostly in-development work, so please remember that everything here is subject to change.

We're creating this column to replace dev logs. We're still going to post regularly on our YouTube channel, but just move the dev log format here. There are a few reasons for this:

• Recording dev logs takes a lot of time and effort. Writing news posts is easier and can be done a lot quicker.
• We can post higher resolution screenshots and videos here.
• We can post more frequently here, and with more detail.

So, we're going to be writing an update here once a week, every Wednesday.

So what have we been working on? The answer is honestly "a lot". 0.020 was released on August 9th, 2025. As usual we release a host of hotfixes immediately after an update, then get to work on the next version. The most recent hotfix was released on August 24, 2025; in the few weeks since then, the ever-growing 0.021 changelog has ballooned to 200 changes listed. We've created 737 Git commits since the 24th (that is, groups of game code and content changes). To put that in perspective, the entire game has had around 9827 since we started 3 years ago. It's going to be a big update.

We've rewritten a lot of systems internally. Save games made with 0.020 will be broken and un-loadable. We really hate doing that – we know how inconvenient and frustrating it is – but hopefully we won't have to do that much going forward. When we make a change that breaks saves, sometimes recovering the older saves involves complex, weird, and out of place code that solely exists to make sure save games from a year ago could be loaded. It's built up so much that we figured we may as well bite the bullet and clear it up, addressing fundamental problems with it along the way and ensuring it won't happen nearly as much in the future. So we did.

Rewriting and changing so much also means there will probably be a lot of bugs as well, so we're testing much more than with other patches we've released. There will probably still be bugs, but that's par for the course at this point.

We're continuing work on the Early Access map. Azi has been filling in detail on the new towns and regions, wiring up lights and doors, adjusting soundscapes, and distributing furniture and loot. We've rewritten a lot of our soundscape systems for this update: there's now ambient sound inside buildings and warehouses, as well as reverb and echoes. Caves carry audio like you'd expect, and coastlines, ponds, lakes, and swamps now sound the part. We've also added Steam Rich Presence support, so when playing in singleplayer, Steam friends will see where you are in the world.

Redford and Saranac have also seen some functionality changes. Several buildings have been refitted with door alarms. Many buildings didn't have them before, so be careful if you try to break in. Also, we wrote a camera system that wires into TVs. One is already set up at Saranac Central School. We'll make cameras buildable at some point of course.

The next update has, as usual, a lot of content changes. New skins, new character faces, clothing, item specificity changes, etc. We've added a new ammo type, 5.7x28mm, as well as a handgun that accepts it - the UN Fifty-Seven. There are also many changes that you'll probably not see until Early Access: elements in the game like tasers, helmets with headlamps, or the Hydraulic class of tools.

We've worked on, and created some events for, the world events system. When we started working on VEIN, we didn't want to just be yet another survival game – we had some bigger ideas for what to get in, and world events is one of them. Without spoiling too much, the system allows for parts of the world to dynamically change over time, allowing for anything from world geometry changes, to complete town overhauls, to debris and garbage, to scripted cinematics. We're really excited about this. A couple are already written and ready to go.

There are a bunch of new zombie types that have been added. Military zombies, police zombies, prisoner zombies, etc. can be found in various places in Champlain Valley, though some of the more special ones can only be found at certain areas in the Early Access region.

Also as usual with our updates, we've implemented a lot of quality-of-life changes. Fridges are now movable. You can transfer fluids between two containers in your inventory by dragging one on the other. We added a Put Similar button to inventories that allow you to place stacks in a target inventory that match what's already in there. There's now a set of recipes for slicing food (bread loaves, whole fruit, etc.) The list goes on.

There are some new server browser features. Server hosts can add a small message-of-the-day to their servers, and the server's custom settings are listed for you to see. Speaking of multiplayer, we put a lot of work so far this month into multiplayer performance and bugfixing - we've been testing multiplayer multiple times weekly and are racking up hours on our Steam accounts.

We've been doing a lot of work on making zombies and animals better. We've identified and fixed a host of bugs with their pathfinding and sensory systems, and now they do pose a real threat. Firearms attract zombies from twice as far away, and vehicle horns do as well. One long-standing bug is that zombies were moving at anywhere between 1/2 to 1/4 of the speed they were supposed to. In addition, we've improved our zombie spawn system such that zombies are likelier to spawn indoors. Good luck out there!

We've also done a lot of work on the visuals of the world. The sky is no longer blown out, and some broken textures have been fixed to bring appropriate colors to surfaces. Fog has been improved in quality, particularly at night and near dusk. Tree lighting has been tweaked and modified to be more realistic. We've added some distant rendering improvements to expand on the visibility of distant mountains and landscapes, and god-rays extend from the sun.

Believe it or not, that comes at performance savings, because we can cut back on the quantity of things displayed on your screen, like extremely distant trees or landscapes. We've also tweaked some quality settings and graphical presets to improve performance. The master volume of the game now starts at 50%, and the graphics preset starts on High. We've also started pre-compiling shaders, meaning you could see a significant reduction in stutters.

We rewrote the movement, construction, and placement algorithms. It's been a long-standing issue that there was trouble when trying to place an item in a small area, like on a shelf, or moving larger objects close to the ceiling. It should all be resolved now.

Speaking of construction, you can now build barbed wire to attach to the top of your fences. They cause severe bleeding and deep wounds, so they can certainly serve as deterrent. Damage is now indicated on your screen radially – when injured, a quick blood flash appears. We wanted to avoid the "screen jelly" damage effect, and just give you a quick indicator that you're hurt. We've also added piles of scrap metal and glass, in case you're barefoot. These are only in specific areas in the Early Access region, though.

As always, we're continuing to hammer away bugs, especially long-standing ones. Text scaling no longer affects icon positioning on the map. Items sync better than ever, and at better networking performance than in any version of VEIN before. Driving into each other in multiplayer is no longer a death sentence, and you can safely exit vehicles parked against walls without them flinging into space.

This is a very small subset of the changes we've done so far, but we only have so much space to list everything out. When will 0.021 come out? As we keep saying, we don't publish dates for anything.

- Kyle

Hi everyone, Azi here! This is my first time directly talking to the community like this, so I'm glad to be able to give you some insight as to what I've been working on. Progress on the initial Early Access map is going well and almost ready for internal testing. The past few months we've spent quite a bit of time adding new, unique points of interests of various sizes. Though I don't want to spoil exact locations, you can expect at least three large points of interest that are about the size of the Saranac Central School if not a bit larger. Some of these are more dense than others in terms of detail, with one being a more spread out point of interest. In terms of what to expect for the expanded area, we're adding two new large towns, multiple villages, some mountainous areas, rural farms, shrouded forests, swamps, caves, and more! My goal for natural areas was to still have something to explore, even if it's simple. Whether that be cabins, caves, barns, and other unique points of interest I don't wanna spoil – basically, the goal is to always have you run into something while you explore the wilderness. I'm excited for y'all to finally get your hands on this new section of the map, and as always, feedback is greatly appreciated!

In terms of game design, I've been slowly working up to the start of the Scrap Metal tier for buildable fortifications. Though it's too early to focus in on the endgame right now, I still felt like it'd be nice to get the ball rolling on the fourth construction tier. For the initial Early Access launch, you can expect this tier to be in its beginning stages, with more buildable devices and stations to be added later on after launch, such as sewing machines for crafting clothing and armor and sawmills for more efficient wood processing. Because this is one of the later tiers, I wanna make sure the basic loop of building the scrap metal fortifications is enjoyable before diving into the extra stuff, as the process for building the extra stuff will likely use similar ingredients. Overall, we've got some neat things planned for the future, including buildables for earlier tiers that'll tie into some smaller gameplay loops.

Finally, I'm adding basic controls for water flowing to certain towns via wastewater plants. The current implementation is not final, and will be expanded at a later time, but I figured it'd be a nice interactable to add for now. However, the power plant will not be able to be shut off manually... yet. Power is a much harder resource to come across in VEIN right now, and I don't want the control to be as easy as flipping a switch and negatively affect newer player's experiences in multiplayer sessions. Again though, this will be expanded in the future, I hope y'all understand!

Anyway, that's it for me!

- Azi

So that sums up this weekly update! If you have any feedback please let us know, as we're always open to suggestions.

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See you next week!