Revision 1

Zeverland's current position, stated on 2026-08-03, is that the studio is concentrating on the cooperative player versus environment experience and has set aside player versus player content for now. The same statement committed to improving base protection and offline protection further in the next playtest. Nothing says the feature is gone for good; the word used was set aside, not removed.

The reason the studio gave in person at gamescom 2026 was blunt: players complained about being stolen from, and that pushed the design toward stronger protections and an explicitly cooperative game. That account came from booth conversations rather than a published post, but it matches what the studio wrote itself after the second test, when it described homes stripped bare and chests broken open.

The Earlier Positions

The direction of travel runs one way, and each step is dated.

Territory Protection

The protections that replaced open conflict sit on the claim system. Items inside your own territory cannot be taken by another player, and the studio has stated plainly that if something disappears from a claimed area it is a bug rather than intended behaviour. A territory flag marks the claim itself, as described on Territory and Claims.

Your home is safe while you are logged out. Raiding offline players is explicitly not part of the design, which is a deliberate break from the survival games the community most often compares Zeverland to. Detailed territory logs were announced on 2025-11-17: a record of who opened your boxes and who dismantled your walls, plus a list of intruders. Those logs have not yet been shown in a public build.

Every point of interest on the map can be claimed, which is why the studio has kept free demolition of already-claimed buildings inside your own territory closed off. Opening it would let a player take a high value location cheaply by tearing down what is there. That trade-off is discussed further on Base Building.

A new rule for official servers was announced on 2026-08-03: key locations such as gas stations and quest points can no longer be claimed as private territory at all. Those are exactly the places the Looting and Scavenging loop depends on, and locking them out of the claim system keeps them open to everyone on the server.

Faction Conflict

Faction hostility is a separate system from player versus player combat and was not set aside. Non-player survivors belonging to opposing factions fight each other on sight, and players aligned with opposing factions can fight one another. Both behaviours were listed under working as intended during the second test rather than among the bugs, so they are design rather than leakage.

What Is Still Open

Several things remain unstated. No rules have been published for how damage between players is handled on an officially hosted private server as opposed to an official one. The pressure the studio is building instead points at the infected: horde gameplay was described on 2026-08-03 as in design, grander than anything shown so far, and still being iterated on internally, and the July roadmap names Rainroots Hordes without describing it. Whether any form of player versus player combat returns after that work has not been said.