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11 The first pre-alpha tech test was Zeverland's first playable outing, roughly a year after the game was revealed. It lasted three days, ran under a non-disclosure agreement, and was wiped completely at the end. Nothing in that build should be read as the shipping game's data.
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33 Recruitment and Schedule
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56 Recruitment opened on 2025-11-01, with the studio asking for more than two hundred survivors. Applications went through a community form rather than a Steam playtest button, and selection was not first come first served: the studio weighted gaming experience and hardware when choosing who got in. All times below are UTC+8.
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78 StageDateRecruitment opens1 November 2025Sign-ups close4 November 2025, 23:59Results announced7 November 2025Steam keys sent by direct message13 November 2025Test begins14 November 2025, 11:00Test ends17 November 2025, 11:00
89 Twenty extra slots were added on 2025-11-09 to mark 100,000 Steam wishlists. The English announcement describes only ten of them, because the twenty were split ten and ten across different platforms by region, with part of the allocation run as a lucky draw.
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1011 The NDA
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1213 An NDA applied for the whole test. Public screenshots, videos and streams were forbidden, so almost nothing from this build exists publicly beyond what the studio itself published. That rule was reversed for the Second Pre-Alpha Tech Test, which allowed streaming outright.
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1415 What the Build Contained
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1617 The test build was described by the studio as a cute and cozy world with light action rather than a grim one. What players could actually reach was a narrow slice of the design:
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1819 A procedurally generated sandbox map of 576 km², with random spawn points. This figure belongs to this test build only and is not the size of the current world.Free-form base building rather than modular assembly alone, with key map locations claimable as a shelter.An early-stage skill system, rebuilt after the test so that beginners and veterans would feel different.Survival needs covering hunger, thirst and stamina, all of which drained faster than players wanted.Hidden notes scattered across the map telling pre-apocalypse stories.A crossbow, whose arrows cost a plank each and drew complaints about the crafting grind.An opening boss that effectively required a team to beat.The Shelter and Team menu on the U key, with shared home locations and live teammate positions.A Self-Terminate button for escaping places you had got stuck in.
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2021 Several things were absent. There was no in-game voice or text chat of any kind. Vehicle interiors could not be built out yet, so the mobile home idea described on Vehicles and RVs was not playable. Zones affected by the Red Rain were fixed in place, which made successive maps feel identical to players despite the procedural generation. Turning into a zombie lasted about fifteen minutes, which testers said was far too short.
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2223 Recommended Specs Published for the Alpha
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2425 A recommended specification was published alongside recruitment, described explicitly as being just for the alpha. It is not the current listing and is a different set of parts; the live figures are on System Requirements.
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2627 ComponentAlpha recommendation, November 2025Operating systemWindows 10 64-bit or newerProcessorIntel Core i7-9700K or AMD Ryzen 5 5600GMemory16 GB RAMGraphicsGeForce RTX 3060 or Radeon RX 5700 XTDirectXVersion 11NetworkBroadband connectionStorage40 GB
2728 Dev Logs and Feedback
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2930 The studio published four daily dev logs across the test, each built around player questions, and closed the test with a selected-feedback post gathering the responses it intended to act on. The complaints named in those posts are a fair map of where the build was weakest: building placement worked only by dragging, structures could not be dismantled upwards so a roof could not be removed by looking at it, foundations were fixed and too high, stairs were oversized, dismantling was slow, and there was no placement guidance.
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3132 Commitments made then can be checked against later posts. Better targeting logic, build-distance limits, more stair types and camera-aware dismantling were promised for the following test. Batch dismantling was also promised then, and the studio reported it as built on 2026-08-03, nine months later.