Points of Interest

Overview

Points of interest are major locations on the Rooted map that anchor exploration, salvaging, and progression. The world is divided into a forest starting area, transitional villages, and contaminated downtown zones. When Alpha Phase 2 launched in January 2025 the studio described the map as covering 30 square kilometers, but it has since stopped quoting a figure, saying instead that the map grows as players unlock new zones and that what each area contains matters more than its size. Each named location offers a unique mix of resources, threats, and lore.

A New World In Development

As of the move into full production, the alpha map has been wiped to make way for a brand new world, built around the biomes found in Oregon. This work is in development and not yet in the public build. The goal is a world where exploring means moving through genuinely different places rather than one flat landscape, with every stretch of the map having its own character. The locations documented below were established on the earlier alpha map; expect the named points of interest and the zone layout to be rebuilt for the new world as it takes shape, while the forest-to-village-to-contaminated-city progression remains the intended structure.

Confirmed Locations

Zone Layout

The map follows the three-tier contamination structure used throughout the game: forests are safe starting areas, villages serve as transitional zones with moderate spore presence, and downtown areas contain heavily contaminated city centers with the densest salvage. Players are expected to push deeper into contaminated zones over the course of a playthrough as crafting tiers and protective gear improve.

Travel Between Locations

Because the playable area is large enough that crossing it on foot is slow, vehicles and ziplines play an important role in moving between distant points of interest. The Forklift is a physics-based traversal vehicle useful for reaching elevated locations, while carts are used to haul salvaged goods between camps. Swimming has been confirmed since the Alpha Phase 2 preview, allowing players to cross water gaps directly.

Salvage And Reward

Each major location is built to support the salvaging loop. Buildings contain breakable junk that yields construction materials, electronics components, and equipment fragments. Heavily contaminated locations tend to contain rarer items, including pre-war firearms and ROTOR-era electronics, but require a respirator or antidote before extended exposure.

Tips

• Scout new locations with a deployable drone before committing on foot, especially in heavily contaminated zones.

• Establish a secondary outpost in a village before moving on to downtown areas to shorten travel time and resupply runs.

• Locations marked as partial in this list will receive additional content in future updates, so revisiting them after major patches is worthwhile.

Confirmed Points of Interest

Exploration Ladder

Players naturally progress through the POIs as gear allows. The Mansion and the Gas Station are reachable in early sessions with light loadouts. The Monastery and the Communication Tower demand more preparation: a working firearm, protective gear, and a fallback route. The Bunker rewards a well-equipped survivor with rarer salvage.

Salvage Profile

Each POI biases toward different salvage categories. Civilian POIs lean into household and basic electrical salvage; specialty sites carry pre-war hardware that feeds the late-game crafting tree. The salvage loop applies consistently: gather, transport, decide repair versus break-down, distribute to base storage.

Future Additions

The studio has indicated continued world expansion through Phase 3 and toward Early Access in 2027. Additional POIs and environmental storytelling beats will land in patches across the rest of the alpha window.

Urban Environment Development

A June 2026 update reported progress on the dense, overgrown town at the heart of the new world, work that is in development rather than present in the current build. The road network is the furthest along: the layout, and the rules that lay roads down and dress them out, form the backbone the rest of the urban space hangs off.

The studio describes the world-building side of the project as well advanced. Specific districts and named city locations have not yet been detailed, so this remains confirmed development direction rather than shipped content.

Procedural Urban Environment (In Development)

A June 12, 2026 development update detailed procedural work on a dense urban environment, work that is in development and not yet in the public build. The team extracted assembly rules from reference housing: how walls and corners add up, where windows and doors can sit, how the roof system works including the tricky L-shaped roofs and their valleys, and how interior plans are laid out.

From those rules the system generates multi-storey rectangles, L-shapes with proper roof valleys, attached garages, and porches. The same update described enemy camps, built from sandbags, tents, crates, and fires with guards on rotating posts, as encounters placed in the world. This urban work is confirmed development direction.

Locations Confirmed On The Public Roadmap

The studio's public roadmap tracks environment work card by card, and its completed column names a wider set of locations and prop sets than the alpha build has surfaced so far. The entries below are recorded as finished development work; several have not appeared in a public patch yet, so treat them as confirmed content rather than as places you can already visit.

Supporting prop libraries are tracked the same way, including military tents and modular military props, mechanic workshop props, library props, and a flyer generator that scatters printed material through interiors as environmental storytelling.

Locations With Completed Development Entries

The studio's public roadmap tracks world building as individual cards. The entries below are all marked completed, which means the location or its art pass exists in the project, not that it is reachable in the public alpha.

Two location cards remain on the planned list rather than the completed one: a survivor house on the starter island, and lakes of varying size with their own ecosystems. Aggressive storm events sit alongside them and carry the highest community vote count of any planned world card.

How New Locations Are Built

Two in-progress roadmap cards describe how the location count is meant to grow. A procedural building generator is being stood up to scatter varied cabins, farmhouses, hangars, and outposts across the world, with each structure shaped uniquely but authored to read as hand-placed. Alongside it, a procedural city street system is generating the road network, intersections, and blocks that the ruined downtown will be built into. A biome framework sits underneath both, giving each region its own resource mix, weather behaviour, and enemy presence. Lakes of varying size with their own ecosystems sit in the planned column and would add water-based locations to the current land-only set.