This is a large update that adds an all-new progression system to the game. You can now earn points to unlock new perks, traits, and persistent bonuses! We've also added new characters, new events, ending epilogues, and more. See all the new features below, in the UPDATE CHANGES section!
It's my hope that the new unlock system and new perks/traits give something to work towards for newer players. I'd like to ease the initial difficulty curve a bit, at least on the low difficulties for the first win. I want advanced players to get new character builds and options, without hurting the balance of the game too much overall. Let me know what you think about this update by commenting on this post!

FUTURE UPDATES

The anniversary for Death Road is on July 21st! The game will have been receiving heavy updates for a year, at that point. Our plan is to launch an update at around that time, maybe a little after, called the DUODENUM Update. DUODENUM will focus nearly entirely on new content. Locations, weapons, characters, events, and more music! A lot of our time in previous updates over the course of this year has focused on new systems, so we never got to just spend time on churning out a lot of pure new content for the game. This anniversary update will also likely get unlockable cosmetic options. New hats and other pieces to build characters with. We may also get to do the idea of new rare trading camps, like the Ren Faire and Swole Mountain. After DUODENUM, we're going to take a short break, then continue updating the game. Further updates will likely focus on one thing at a time, rather than being the "lots of features at once" monstrosities we've been doing this year. This will free up more time for some remaining things we've wanted to work on.

FURTHER FEATURE PLANS

There's some lingering features that we've been working on or wanting to do for a long time now. Here's what's going on for them: Android version is coming! Porting company has been working on it for awhile, but hasn't given us a set launch date yet. The rare VC redist error thing took up a lot of development time, and we never got a good solution for it that didn't cause more problems. Players have found working solutions for this, so we may have to deal with this by pointing to one of these solutions as a semi-official fix. It's a really bad situation because it seems to be due to an error in Windows update that installs the file wrong. Next time we do Steam cheevos we're going to see if we can avoid these drivers entirely, we didn't know it would lead to some kind of nightmare situation. Adding SPLITSCREEN to local multiplayer is something we've been wanting to do since launch. We talked about this in our last news post, that it was likely going to be something we looked at again past DUODENUM. That's still the plan. ONLINE MULTIPLAYER plans haven't changed since the last news post. We're going to look into figuring out how to make an online multiplayer game with a small project of some sort or a spin-off, then try to back-port it. No promises, but we think it's something worth trying. ENDLESS MODE is another thing I've been wanting to do since launch. I may be able to sneak this into DUODENUM. If not then, it would definitely be in one of the post-DUODENUM updates. Let me know if there's something I'm missing!

UPDATE CHANGES

New Unlock System - Use the new Zombo Points to unlock new perks, traits, a special Gnome Trader, and passive bonuses! Keep reading to see full list of perks, traits, and bonuses. - Earn ZP by surviving siege/gauntlet events. Earn more ZP by playing higher difficulty modes and beating the game. - Old perk upgrade system now replaced by Zombo Point based upgrades. - When starting the game, your old perk levels should be converted to the new system automatically, letting you keep your old levels. Ending Changes - Each character that survives to the end will now get a short epilogue, based on their personality, skills, and other factors. - Some perks and traits have their own list of epilogue lines. - Special characters tend to get their own special epilogues. - Different endings now change the ending text. - Beating normal, rare chars, or familiar chars will increase your ZP cap to 15. - Beating Deadlier Road will increase your ZP cap to 20. - If you've already beat them before the update, you should get these bonuses automatically on game start. New Characters - Sleepy Trader: A rare trader. Gain invaluable wisdom. - Bort: Very hard to get recruit, summoned by special antique can ritual. - Just Like Bart: Bort blossoms into this. The ultimate Bart. - HENK/HONK/etc: Camp recruit. Can buy a new pistol from him, or recruit him along with an upgraded version of the pistol. - Samedi: Camp recruit, has a skeletal army. Loves skeletons. Also gets Phoenix. - Kaiju: Can you save the city from a giant monster? - Nimbus Ordeal: Starts with a weapon that's even stronger than a claymore! This has multiple horrible catches. - Battle Rodent: Is a super-intelligent pet that gets Shield of Hope for free, with decent strength and fitness. Is some kind of gerbil? - Bogan: A new rare city recruit. Has Gnomish Healing Factor. 'Nuff said. New Text Events - Lost Sneezing Remedy event. Can you survive? - Battle of Garbage Mountain event, trade your well-being for strength or fitness gains. - GameBronus event, trade morale for a point in shooting, mechanical, or medical. - Giant Spider Ambush event. Try eating it. - Strange Vending Machine event, trade morale/your soul for a one choice in a list of randomized items. - Rare Event: VHS tapes. Pick a movie to benefit the entire group. New Perks - Top Seller: Prevents morale loss when paying food tolls to bandits, and also provides a discount to these tolls. In addition, gives you more food when selling to the weapons buyer. - Pathfinder: For people that hate walking. Drastically reduces the amount of walking penalty events you get. - Hidden Potential: Either strength or fitness will be able to go one point over maximum. This is randomized, and hidden from you. - Trademark Weapon: Start with an aluminum bat! Can't drop it, ever. This weapon will change if paired up with certain traits! Example: Warrior starts with a Fire Axe, instead! - Natural Shot: Over maximum shooting, though doesn't actually start with a gun. - Shield of Hope: You can't die. As long as you keep your morale up. - T*S*T*C: Massively over-the-maximum strength! Tiny, tiny fitness. Does NOT do cardio! New Traits - Travel Light: Only gets two carrying slots, but starts with a bonus dexterity point for faster runspeed. - Specialist: Big BERSERKER!-esque bonuses to combat skills, but you only have one carrying slot! - Grappler: Pick up fallen zombies! And also... - Hero Type: If someone in the team would have died in a text event, this character will save them. Only works once per game, after which it converts to a max loyalty trait. - Anime Fan: Has an overpowered unbreakable True Japanese Steel Katana. Warning: Do NOT hit max morale. Do NOT look at anime. Do NOT interact with the anime truck. - Sound Sleeper: Does not get TIRED from events, ever. - City Seeker: Finds rare city encounters three times as often as a normal character. - Tiny Eater: Needs only 1 food per day instead of 2. Gets a -2 penalty to max strength and a -1 penalty to max fitness. - Gourmand: Eats 3 food per day instead of 2. Gets 1 point of morale whenever they eat! Loses 1 more morale than normal if starving. - Phoenix: Character will return from the dead, once, in a giant zombie-clearing explosion. Tnomey, the Trader Gnome - Shows up in every trading camp, and has different random item choices that all cost Zombo Points to buy! - Can buy ONE thing from him per game, at which point he stops appearing for rest of game. - Can be unlocked and upgraded via the Unlock Gnome in Zombo Town - Tier 1 items (10 ZP): Supplies, and a random Normal Recruit event. No special characters. - Tier 2 items (20 ZP): More supplies. Battle Rodents. Some simple ranged weapons or a grenade. - Tier 3 items (30 ZP): Even more supplies. Random Special Character from the GOOD list. Sledgehammer or Fire Axe. - Note: Read below for details on what constitutes the GOOD and BAD special character lists. - Tnome's inventory changes if he's seen and you enter a new camp. Zombo Town - INFO button replaced with UNLOCKS button, which leads to Zombo Town. - Three new characters in the Perks and Traits hut, that sell unlocks and upgrades for the old and new perks and traits. - Secret UNLOCK GNOME that sells passive upgrades. Signs of him show up after getting a couple unlocks. - Data Clearer character added - Tutorial Replay character added - BUILD INFO character added - Build Info robot also gives directions - Stats character added - Support for changing Zombo Town as unlocks are purchased New Player-Usable Weapons - Sturdy Cleaver added, for some Trademark Weapon trait combos - Ded9 added, sold by HONK. As strong as the Dolt revolver, fires as fast as the pistol. Carries 80 ammo instead of the dolt's 60 or pistol's 90. New Special Character Only Weapons - Modded Ded9: Very accurate, tiny recoil. Dolt strength zombie piercing, and fires slightly faster than the pistol! Carries 120 ammo. - Skateboard: Dont have cow man - Guster Sword: Like a claymore, but hits even harder. Is also 25% slower. Passive Unlocks from Unomey the Unlock Gnome - Series of upgrades that increase your Zombo Point maximum capacity. The first two can be gained for free by beating the game up to Deadlier Road mode. - Series of upgrades that give you bonus ZP for performing different actions: Rescuing people/dogs, selling to a weapons buyer, recruiting new allies. The final upgrade gives you 1 ZP whenever an ally dies (!!!) - Toilet Upgrades. Lots of toilet upgrades. The first two levels double the gas and then bullet amounts from toilets. - Level III Toilet Upgrade lets toilets sometimes contain a weapon or skeleton, introduces new loot types, and raises the toilet loot chance to 30% up from 20% - Level IV Toilets make Toilet Genies show up every 50 toilets, instead of every 100. - Unlocked the Trader Gnome, then sells upgrades to increase the things that Tnomey sells. - Support for adding more to Unlock Gnome in future UI and System Changes - Perk and Trait info may now be shown in a text event, used for the trait/perk sellers in Zombo Town. - Perks and Traits may now be locked/unlocked - Perks now have more specific unlock tracking - New page scrolling effect for the perks and traits pages - Currently selected perk/trait is now highlighted in green - Fixed a bug on the trait page with the scrolling being off by one - Made keyboard cursor navigation smoother for perk/trait pages - NEXT LEVEL indicator now says what the perk will do for the next level, instead of showing what you need to unlock it. - Automatic cost calculator for perk upgrades Misc Changes - Game now supports 10 custom character pages! - Toilet Paper event now gives a zombo point if you keep the TP. - One less trader event and one less familiar recruit event in the calendar cycle - Calendar cycle shortened to 10 days instead of 11 - Special characters separated into GOOD and BAD special lists. The BAD list isn't randomly selected by TNOMEY's random special character option. It includes both characters that kind of suck, and characters that are good but time limited, making them disappointing to get if you spend 30 ZP on them. - Hunting Rifle no longer breaks in melee - Fixed some old instances of left/right character flipping not working correctly - Fixed a very old bug with Friend of Dog that made it roll twice for dog - Future support for stat average checks for the entire team. - Set a deprecated CHARM stat to "0" (which is 3 due to being a stat). - Future support for new locations - Tweaks to anime girlification to work better with Anime Fan - Tweaks to eating checks to work better with Tiny Eater, Gourmand, and weird pets - Sumo now starts with Gourmand - Sumo may now get Super Sumo from a rare event - New death sayings for some characters - Modified appearance for Skeletal Trader - Body skeletonization now properly gives claws - New blurbs for new characters - Fix for Billy having an unshuffled blurb deck, another very long standing bug - You can no longer sell Lynn's Zweihander - Bruce and Danger Rangers tweaks to hopefully make them more stable - Bruce and Danger Rangers houses simplified - Trader Camp Region 5's car position altered - Removed a useless extra 1 in longroad setup. - Removed old code for the longer game modes that accidentally made their last few days have nonstop sieges. Woops! That bug's been in for almost a year. - Fix for persistent echo effect - Breaking your old car, then driving off in a new car on the same map should no longer cause the game to bug out and force you to be walking. - Yallmart trader camp should no longer have those weird concrete patches in the Northwest corner - Possible fix for the "character in text event staring at nothing" bug - Fix for the bug that would cause you to lose characters if you got kicked out of a trader camp while your teammates were in a different building than you - Lots of small fixes and small things I left out of this list