Beta 18 · Visuals and power
A Sharper Compound. A Darker Night. A Rooftop Casino.
Updated for Beta 18 · 10 September 2026
The office has had a refurbishment. Unfortunately, nobody told the staff to leave. Beta 13 brings a more detailed compound, rebuilt vending machines, a new look for the sky and a lighting balance that makes working lamps matter. This roundup also covers the rooftop casino: a short crane ride away, with your weapon as the stake. Beta 18 adds a new job between the hordes: maintaining the building's electrical circuits.
The current Windows, Linux and macOS builds are on your account page. The Windows download is signed and timestamped. Below, move the dividers to compare genuine earlier captures with the updated scene.
Same compound. Much more detail.
Matching camera, field of view and round 4. Before: the archived pre-detail office capture. After: the current Beta 13 scene. Geometry, materials and lighting have all changed; this is not a geometry-only comparison. Controlled in-engine views, HUD hidden, no brightness retouching.
- The office building: more architectural trim, window and doorway detail, surface finishes, roof equipment and ceiling structure. The opaque roof perimeter is about 30% lower, giving you a clearer line of fire over it; the invisible player guard still prevents jumping out of the map.
- Furniture and workstations: shaped desk and chair geometry, upholstery, frames, fasteners and smaller details across shelves, lockers, sofas and other office props. Keyboards, screens and mice now line up with the seated position instead of facing the wrong way.
- Outside: branching trees and leafy canopies replace the simpler blocky silhouettes. Bushes, yard equipment, pallets, cages, skips, lamps and other site props have received detail or material improvements. The crane, depot and casino furniture also have cleaner manufactured edges.
- Selective, not a wholesale replacement: existing detailed textured assets were retained where they already worked. The map layout and familiar routes remain intact.
Vending machines that look stocked
All six perk machines now have proper cabinet panels, seams, hinges and feet; recessed shelves with individual products; glass, payment controls, a numbered keypad, an illuminated display and a pickup tray. Clear per-perk lettering replaces the old blurred signage. Paint, rubber, metal and glass have distinct finishes, with restrained surface wear instead of one picture wrapped across everything.
Darkness with something to see through it
Matching camera and round 24, with the same posed zombie subjects. Before: the earlier saturated-red lighting. After: the final Beta 13 balance. Lighting, fog, sky and fixture behaviour are part of the change; lamp states are not held identical. Both are ungraded in-engine captures, not live-match screenshots.
Late rounds now have a dimmer sky, a restrained dark-red cast and denser dark fog that takes detail out of the distance. The goal is not a red filter over the whole screen, or a blackout that hides everything. Nearby silhouettes remain faintly visible, while yard lamps and office lights give you useful pools of visibility. When a fitting flickers or fails, losing that pool makes a real difference.
Office beams now follow their physical fixtures, and the formerly hanging atrium lights sit against the ceiling. Panels look off when their lights are off and relight correctly when power returns. Keeping the electrical circuits repaired now keeps every fixture working, even at the eclipse. The sun, moon and clouds have also been rebuilt visually: solar surface detail, rocky lunar terrain, layered clouds, stars, partial eclipse contact and a structured orange-red corona. The sky still follows rounds 1, 8, 16 and 24, not a wall clock.
Keep the lights on
Working lamps are now the main source of light in the darker rounds. Four compact, clearly numbered and labelled fuse boxes supply different sections of the compound:
- 01 · Car park: mounted on the front wall of the office building.
- 02 · Service yard: mounted on the rear wall of the building.
- 03 · Admin office: inside the first-floor office.
- 04 · Loading bay: inside the ground-floor bay.
A faulty cabinet shows visible damage, sparks and electrical crackling. Hold your normal interact key at its front for three seconds to repair it for free. That restores its section's supply and improves the shared lighting around neighbouring section boundaries. The transition is gradual: a working east side and a failing west side have a middle ground of dimmer, less reliable lights.
No boxes start breaking before wave 7, and reaching wave 7 leaves all four healthy. Each box gets its own random countdown before a fault can begin. At wave 7 the wait is two to six minutes; by wave 24 it is one to three minutes. New faults are also spaced apart by at least two minutes early on, falling to one minute at wave 24. Faults build into full failures if ignored, so all four can eventually go down—but they do not all break just because a wave starts or protection ends.
Repairs buy breathing room. At wave 24 and beyond, a repaired box stays healthy for at least three minutes. Repair the final damaged box and the whole network gets five minutes of protection from that moment. Earlier waves are more forgiving: at wave 7 those periods are six and ten minutes, gradually reducing as waves rise. Individual and team protection overlap, and each box's random countdown only runs once its protection has ended. Moving to the next wave never cuts an existing protection period or assigned countdown short.
Fewer working supplies make those blended areas flicker more severely. Even if three boxes have completely failed, the last surviving supply provides occasional, weak emergency flashes to their sections. If every box fails completely, the lights go out. Repair all four and every light works again within your selected draw distance. Plan repairs around the zombies and the next round: neglect the power for long enough and the building will become much harder to fight through.
Fixes you should feel, not just see
- Cleaned up overlapping surfaces responsible for flickering and z-fighting across the audited models.
- Kept the desks' anti-jump barriers for player movement, but stopped those invisible barriers blocking bullets. Real solid desk geometry still provides cover.
- Preserved and checked structural collision against the detailed office, including the roof and moving routes. Decorative bolts, leaves and keys do not add gameplay collision.
- Corrected the stray mesh point near the basic zombie's legs that became visible during animation.
More detail, less repeated work
The visual pass is accompanied by targeted performance work for busy later rounds. Shadow quality now governs the sun, moon and office lights consistently, including after round changes. Working lights remain visible throughout your selected draw distance, while tiny decorative details no longer cast expensive shadows. Use Low or above to keep indoor wall-blocking shadows; Off deliberately sacrifices them.
Distant zombies use cheaper visual pose updates, with full-quality updates restored nearby, when aimed at and during important actions. Shared spatial searches and staggered path refreshes reduce repeated AI work. Occlusion culling and distance-based detail visibility avoid drawing things that cannot contribute to the view. Horde sizes, damage and attack timers have not been reduced. These changes cut rendering work in our controlled tests, but are not a promise of a fixed frame rate: very large indoor hordes remain demanding.
New destination: the rooftop casino
There is another reason to get onto the roof. A crane cage connects the office deck to the casino on the depot opposite. Hold the pendant to spend 3,000 in-game points and start a sixty-second visit for the team. The crossing takes roughly eleven seconds each way, so your time upstairs is already ticking when you set off.
Blackjack and roulette take the weapon in your hands as the stake. Win and it comes back with a permanent 30% damage upgrade; lose and you lose that weapon. You cannot stake your only weapon or one already upgraded here, and only one survivor can use each table at a time. Roulette lets you choose red, black or green, with a moving wheel and ball; blackjack puts the dealt cards on the felt. This is an in-match equipment gamble, not a real-money casino.
It is not a permanent safe roof. When the sixty seconds expire, survivors upstairs are thrown back into the car park without falling damage. Take the trip, make your choice, and be ready to rejoin the horde below.
Download Beta 18 from your account page, and let us know how the darker rounds and bigger crowds feel on your hardware. Include your graphics settings and where you were in the compound—it helps us separate a lighting problem from a performance bottleneck.