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11 Red Rain is the name the studio gives to the catastrophe that ends the old world and starts the game. It is the event and the weather, and in published lore material it is also the pathogen: the infection is named the Red Rain Virus there. The name has been used in developer answers since November 2025.
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33 The First Minute of the Apocalypse
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56 The premise the studio leads with is that you do not arrive years after the collapse. You arrive during it. The store description puts it plainly: this is not the aftermath of the apocalypse, it is the first minute of it. Water still runs, the lights are still on, and cars still work.
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78 That framing does a lot of work across the rest of the game. It is why the world is full of working appliances and fuel rather than ruins, why Looting and Scavenging is about emptying shops and homes that were abandoned mid-day, and why Power and Electricity starts from generators and wiring rather than from rediscovered technology.
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910 Technology Level
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1112 The technology level is roughly contemporary with 2026 and is meant to stay there. The studio said on 2025-11-16 that the disaster follows roughly 2026 technology, so a survivor starts with phones, cars, canned food and drills, and that the world will not fall back to a bronze age. There is no civilisation restart tech tree. Progress comes from modifying what the old world left lying around, which is the subject of Crafting and Modification.
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1314 The Stated Origin
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1516 Lore material published on the studio's official community channel, dated around December 2025, ties the catastrophe to a meteor strike and names the pathogen:
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1718 Hive Biotech was once a global pharmaceutical giant. After the meteor strike, they became heavily involved in mutant-sample research and selectively hid key information about the 'Red Rain Virus.' When the catastrophe hit, a handful of surviving scientists at the Wellmore Institute used what was left of their facilities to keep searching for a cure to the zombie virus.
1819 A later post from around June 2026 adds a second line in the same register: Earth fears the asteroid, and one company made a fortune off it. Taken together these are first-party statements, and they are the only place where the meteor strike, the Red Rain Virus and the catastrophe are joined up.
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2021 One caveat belongs with all of it. This origin comes from lore material the studio published on a community channel, not from anything players have encountered in a test build. No dev log, patch note, bug list or test report mentions a meteor, and neither tech test presented it. The rest of that published fiction is collected on Story and Lore Teasers with the same caution attached.
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2223 What Is Confirmed and Where It Came From
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2425 ElementStatusRed Rain as the name of the catastropheStated in developer answers, November 2025Red Rain Virus as the name of the pathogenPublished lore material, approximately December 2025A meteor strike as the originPublished lore material, approximately December 2025. Not shown in any build.Fixed red rain zones on the mapFirst tech test build, November 2025. That build was wiped.
2526 Red Rain Zones in the First Test
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2728 In the First Pre-Alpha Tech Test the red rain zones sat in fixed positions, which players said made every map feel identical despite the procedural generation. The studio acknowledged the complaint and said it would consider fog of war and exploration based reveal, possibly tied to seasonal progression. That was an answer to feedback, not an announcement, and nothing of the kind has since been shown. The hazardous regions themselves and the gear needed to survive them are covered on Infected Zones.
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2930 How the Story Is Told
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3132 The studio has described the delivery method rather than the plot. Environmental storytelling, diary pages and radio messages carry the story, and they are meant to reveal the truth behind the Red Rain, the source of the virus and possible escape paths for humanity. There is no single ending, but there is a clear direction, and player choices shape the world. Where those fragments are physically placed is covered on World and Map.