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Online Co-Op
May 19, 2026 at 03:47 PM
Expanded with co-op detail, confirmed pillars, and open-questions list (2026-05-19)
State of Decay 3 supports online co-op for up to four players. Co-op is one of the headline features highlighted by Undead Labs and is one of the four focus areas of the May 2026 closed alpha. The co-op model is described as untethered, which means players are not bound to the host's location and can split up across the world map.
Aspect | Confirmed Info |
|---|---|
Player Count | Up to four players in a single shared session. |
Untethered Movement | Each player can roam the map independently, and everyone starts at their own point on the map. |
Shared Progress | Each player contributes to overall progress in the shared world. |
Server Hosting | The world is hosted on a server rather than purely on the host's machine, which is what enables untethered play. |
Shared Save Tech | The shared-save technology is built on the foundation used by Grounded. |
The previous game in the series tied co-op players to the host through a movement leash, which became a long-running point of community feedback. Co-creator Brant Fitzgerald has acknowledged this directly when announcing the closed alpha, saying the team has been listening to that feedback. In the third game, four players can pursue different objectives in different parts of the same world at the same time, which changes how groups split labor between scavenging, defending the base, and tackling combat objectives.
Specifics about progression saving across sessions, character ownership rules when a host or guest leaves, drop-in or drop-out behavior, and matchmaking flow have not yet been publicly confirmed for the third game. These details will be filled in as the closed alpha and later reveals make them concrete.
Co-op is paired with cross-play across PC and Xbox. See Cross-Platform Play for the platform list and Xbox Play Anywhere details.
Untethered co-op is the term the studio has used to describe how State of Decay 3's four-player sessions handle player movement. Each of the four players can roam the open world independently, with their own starting point on the map and their own scavenging route, instead of being held inside a movement leash around the host. That is what allows a four-player squad to split labor: one survivor can be defending the home base, another can be running a long-range supply route, and the remaining two can be tackling a combat objective together, all inside the same shared world at the same moment.
The model is built on shared-save technology that has its lineage in Grounded, the prior Xbox Game Studios survival co-op title. Hosting the world on a server, rather than purely on the host's machine, is what makes the untethered movement possible. It also means a host who logs out should not strand their guests, although the precise behaviour for session continuity has not been laid out in public detail yet.
Co-op players in the previous game in the series were tied to the host through an explicit movement leash, which became a long-running point of community feedback. The leash meant that a guest who wandered too far from the host was snapped back, which limited the kind of split-up scavenging runs that work naturally in a four-player squad. Co-creator Brant Fitzgerald acknowledged this directly when announcing the May 2026 closed alpha, saying the team has been listening to that feedback, and untethered co-op is the headline answer.
For squads, the practical change is that the four players can now act as a real cooperative crew rather than a host plus three companions. A typical session can have everyone starting at their own point on the map, working different objectives, and converging only when a fight calls for it or when a base under attack needs more defenders.
Co-op runs against the same permadeath stakes as solo play. A surviving member of the survivor community who falls in a four-player session is still gone for good, and the wider community in the player's settlement reacts to that loss through the expanded narrative systems the studio has described. That gives shared scavenging runs the same weight that the series is known for, with the added twist that the death may have happened inside a friend's part of the world.
The four-player squad is not restricted to a single platform. Cross-Platform Play covers any mix of Xbox Series X|S, Steam, Epic Games Store, and Microsoft Store. For players on the Microsoft Store version, Xbox Play Anywhere keeps the entitlement valid on both an Xbox console and a Windows PC under the same Xbox account, so a player can drop in from whichever device they happen to be on.
Whether the world persists when the host logs out, and whether one of the guests can become the new host on the fly.
Drop-in or drop-out rules for mid-session joins, and how long a session can pause waiting for absent players.
How loot, recruitment outcomes, and survivor relationships in a friend's session carry back to the visiting player's own community.
The matchmaking flow for finding strangers to co-op with, as distinct from friend invites.
Whether the four-player cap is hard, or whether private sessions can be configured smaller (two-player or three-player) without changing the broader rules.
Information on this page reflects publicly confirmed details as of May 2, 2026. Specifics will be expanded as the playable build reveals more.
