Bring a friend, and the world remembers

Until now every session started fresh, and you were alone in it. Both have changed: you can bring a friend, and when you come back the next day, the world is how you left it.

Two survivors in a meadow with poppies, one seen from behind, the other a few steps ahead facing him; a plain grey hut and pine trees behind them. — Two players, one world2026-10-30In-engine · WIP · GreyboxTwo players in one world on the test terrain. One of them hosts it, the other joins.

Host or join

The game now opens in a main menu instead of dropping you straight into the field. From there you host a world or join one.

To host, you pick one of your saved worlds or name a new one, choose how many players the world takes, you included (one, two, four or eight), and whether survivors can hurt each other. Then you start, and your friends join you. Each world keeps its own save, so a world you share with one group stays separate from another.

To join, you type in the host’s address; the game remembers the ones you used before. For now the host has to open a port on their router for that. Inviting and joining through your friends list comes later.

A dark main menu with the title Resisting Decay; next to the entries Host world, Join, Settings and Quit, a page lists three saved worlds, a world name field, the player count 1, 2, 4 or 8 and a PvP switch; cans and a box on a table in the background. — The main menu2026-10-30In-engine · WIP · GreyboxThe new main menu. Host one of your saved worlds or start a new one, for up to eight players, with or without PvP. The menu is still a grey box.

In a world, Esc opens a small menu to resume, leave or quit. When the host leaves, the world is saved and everyone else is sent back to the menu with a message that the connection to the world was lost. The same happens if the connection drops.

The menu itself is still a grey box. It works, but it is not the menu the game will ship with.

The world remembers

A world now survives being shut down. It keeps:

every survivor: where you stood, your health, hunger, thirst and stamina, and everything in your backpack, hotbar and hands. A friend’s character stays in the host’s world and is waiting for them when they join again.
what is in every crate and cupboard, including a refill that was still on its way.
what you dropped on the ground, and what you took from the places loot was put by hand.
the time of day.

The infected and the weather are not kept, and the loot the world scatters on the ground by itself is rolled again: they come back fresh.

The world is saved every few minutes, when the host or server shuts down and shortly after someone dies. Every save is checked when it loads, a half-written save never replaces a good one, and the last few saves are kept as backups. Servers can also start over: a wipe resets the world after a set number of days or on command.

Underneath: a real server

Co-op is one player hosting. For larger groups the game also runs as a dedicated server on Linux, with nobody playing on it. Before building on top of it, we put it under load: 32 survivors controlled by bots and around 200 infected on the test terrain for ten minutes. The server stayed close to its tick rate, sent each player around 40 KB per second, used about a gigabyte of memory, and lost nothing when it was restarted. Community servers to join are not open yet.

Not yet

There is no server browser, no friends list and no chat. Your character is tied to the computer you play on, not to an account. And there is still not much to do together beyond looting and fighting: crafting is what comes next.