VEIN Weekly: The Upcoming Big Day

Hi everyone! This week's post is going to be a bit short. We're publishing this on Wednesday, and on Friday, VEIN hits Early Access on Steam. We've been doing a lot of last-minute polishing this week – we're trying not to break anything for launch day, so changes have been kept small, mostly focusing on bug fixing and polishing the game and Early Access content. We don't want to add a feature and accidentally break something this close to our first release.

We released 0.022 earlier this week, so most of the changes covered in this update are in that changelog, which you can find on Steam here – but we'd like to go over some of the more important ones.

So let's jump in.

We've added Tier 4 fortifications – scrap metal. These are more resistant than limestone, and only explosives damage them. Our intention for fortifications is to end with a couple tiers that require a lot of planning and expertise to raid, with multiple people's effort. End-stage fortifications will require specialized tools to raid and a concerted effort.

We've decreased the quantity of tough and very tough locks in the world. We've also added a cooldown to the XP you gain from lockpicking. It's never been our intention to have players grind out skills. With our plans for NPCs and storylines, we intend the world of VEIN to be one where players naturally gain skills rather than farm them. In line with that, we felt door locks throughout the world were a bit too punishing.

The Clinton Correctional Facility is an all-male prison, and so prisoner zombies are now exclusively men (if you've seen any prisoner zombies spawn in yet).

Damage indicators have been fixed to work in multiplayer. Did you know they didn't show up in multiplayer? Now you do!

Character names have been added to the admin menu upon request by some server admins. Please, if there's anything we can do to make the admin side of things easier, request features! Usually they're doable with very little effort on our part, and the only reason they're not in is because we don't know you want it yet.

Did you know that severely damaged gas tanks leak gasoline? We now show if a gas tank is leaking right on the menu.

We got reports that people would destroy their workbench and lose their items. Not any more. Anything containing items should now drop their items in a bag, similar to how players do when they die.

Zombies will no longer attack furniture that isn't blocking them. The idea was that we wanted to prevent players from dropping an item or moving a couch in front of a door, blocking zombies. We've altered their algorithm to better think about if something is actually blocking them or not.

We've fixed indoor rain appearing in churches and the Clinton Correctional Facility. This happens because, to save performance, we create rain slightly above your head. We also need to do this in buildings such that when you look out a window, you see rain outside. In certain buildings, like the aforementioned, the height above your head has been increased. In addition, you no longer get wet when it rains in camper vans. That had only just been brought to our attention – please, remember to report bugs as you find them as our game is very large and we only see so much during playtesting.

We've rewritten the item dropping algorithm to accommodate for dropping items in weird situations, like in vehicles and chairs, or when facing a wall. You should not be able to cause vehicles to flip out anymore from dropping stuff while sitting in a car.

We added a "content-friendly censor" setting that will censor things like drug names for YouTubers and Twitch streamers. The use of drugs in VEIN has been a little contentious but we don't want anyone to get demonetized due to playing a game.

Page Up and Page Down on the keyboard now work exactly like the scroll wheel.

We added ladder climbing sounds, finally.

Code locks will now shock/damage you if you get the code wrong. This is meant as deterrent in multiplayer to prevent brute force attacks. In 0.021, they visually appear to shock you in multiplayer even when you get the code right – we've fixed this for the first hotfix (they don't actually shock you or cause real damage).

We've started work on bow and arrow animations. They're nowhere near complete, but we're working on it. We want to expand the arrow system in the future to include various different types of arrows, as well as crossbows. Right now they're a bit buggy but we think that they're a good alternative to bullets, which will require a lot more effort to craft in the late game.

We've smoothed over the transition to snow in winter. The ground should no longer snap to being covered in snow.

We've added the Ore Crusher buildable, which is an intermediate workbench, used to convert raw mined materials into powder.

Animals now have many more crafting ingredients salvageable from their corpses, such as hides, leather, and pelts. These can be dried on the new Drying Rack to produce ingredients to repair clothing and armor.

One of our planned updates post-Early Access launch is to overhaul hunting, such that it's a more involved process than just searching a corpse's pockets – you'd need to skin animals, clean their corpses, salvage meat, etc. based on your character's skills.

If a recipe is partially craftable, it sorts to the top of the crafting window. What we mean by that is that if you have a potato in a workbench, you will see the recipe for a Baked Potato sort to the top of the crafting menu even if you don't have butter. We've been watching streamers and YouTubers play the game & writing down problem points, and hope this helps them find recipes they're looking for.

A very old bug has been fixed: the Countryside Fresh Foods Pantry now has a map marker. You can find it in Saranac. Before the infection hit, it was a local grocer providing fresh vegetables from the farms that you can find in Elsinore and Russia, NY. These are accessible locations in the Early Access map, and we hope to see players utilizing them for farming.

We've fixed another bug reported by industrious players. The indestructible overhead projectors in the Saranac school are now destructible.

You can now wash yourself with fluid containers (muck tubs, water bottles, whatever). It's a button on the selected item UI. Like we've said in a previous update, we've toned down how dirty you get in standard gameplay, so we're not sure how useful this will be, but it's there regardless. We also have plans to make washing yourself in a bathtub more efficient, and to add showers (and buildable showers) to VEIN.

We've fixed the bite condition. Did you know you can get bitten in the game? For about two years now, it's had the same visuals as a Deep Wound, from the name and icon to the treatment options. During a playtest I found I had two "scratched" conditions and got confused, but it turns out one of those was a bite. We've fixed this. It should now be a lot clearer if you're infected or not.

Finally, we've created a new hand-painted Early Access map.

That's a very small subset of the fixes we've done for 0.022. We thought it might also be fun, given our proximity to Early Access, to present some stats we've received over the years.

So, thank you to everyone for killing 23,746,072 zombies. There's probably more, but we only started tracking this around a year ago. Did you know the population of New York State was estimated at 19,867,248 in 2024? Of those 23 million dead zombies, 2,024,202 were from VEIN 0.021.

Sadly, 675,677 of you have died, and 55,528 of you have died in 0.021.

611,541 of you have played the game at least once, meaning just 64,136 of you have died more than once. That puts VEIN players at a K/D ratio of around 35 in total (and 36 in 0.021).

So anyways, that about wraps up this week's update! Early Access is on Friday and we're excited for you to discover the new area. It's absolutely massive. We hope it's a pleasant surprise.

Between now and then, we're fixing some last-minute bugs and polishing performance as much as we can; immediately after Early Access drops, we'll be standing by to address any major bugs that pop up in the week after launch.

As this is our final update before Early Access we want to thank everyone who's played the game, no matter what happens. We hope the game plays well, and that everyone who plays it enjoys it. Our job is to make a good game that we'd like to play ourselves, and I think we're at the point where we enjoy playing the game enough that we think other people will enjoy playing it too.

So thank you! Whether you're going to purchase a copy during Early Access or not, thank you for playing our game. We're going to continue working on it no matter what happens. This is a passion project for us, and we have a lot of big plans on the horizon that we hope you'll like. We love working on the game, and support from you guys makes it that much better.

See you in Early Access!

-- Kyle & Azi