This week we’ve been connecting the wires on the improvements and features that didn’t make it into the initial vehicles release, but have hit a few MP snags that have prevented us from putting them out into a new IWBUMS beta today.

With that said, Turbo does need to get some feedback on the new weather/climate/storms/fog system, so we have decided to put out a time-limited new Steam beta of Turbo’s recent work for players to try out.

This is not an ‘official’ beta, and won’t be around for long, but will be very helpful for us to hear reports on. The details are below:

Steam beta password: weathertestbranch

Steam beta name: weather

Please note that MP functionality is not currently in-game, the debug windows described below are currently a system hog and you should not consider your savegame sacrosanct. This is a one-off beta that we’ll turn off once Weather is part of the usual IWBUMS testing process.

You can find full details of the weather build here on our forum, and any/all feedback on bugs and your experiences playing it should also be deposited in this thread.

You can play PZ as you would normally, experiencing the weather as it occurs on a daily basis, but for this build (and this build only) we have also included Turbo’s debug panels – details of which can be found on the forum release thread.

So what feedback will be helpful for Turbo to hear back on?

The overall experience of it, and any general bugs

The feeling of starting the game in different seasons, and surviving through each. Autumn will generally have higher chances of extreme weather, while late summer moving into autumn will also see a good chance of the generation of large/tropical storms. Winter clearly will see more snow.

Player opinions on the new shaders that give a better feeling of the time of day, and the time of year.

Any issues with rain/snow/fog appearing strangely when you are inside a building.

Any issues with rain/snow/fog around player-made buildings. A player-constructed building with walls/doorframe/windowframe/fences should fully mask fog – and if it doesn’t then please provide a screenshot of your base.

Please note that this is a ‘realistic’ climate system. Not every summer will be a scorcher, and not every winter will see snowfields.

As mentioned, this is a debug build – so it also comes with a suite of (unoptimized) UI windows and functions for you to play around with. You can find details on these in the test build thread on the forum – giving you opportunities to turn on different effects at will, as well as look at graphs showing the different climatic forces at work and the movement of thunderstorms. Let us know what you think!

A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.