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11 The second pre-alpha tech test was much larger and much more open than the first: seven days instead of three, no non-disclosure agreement, and enrolment eventually open to anyone whose machine met the bar. It was also the test that changed the game's direction, because of how badly parts of it went.
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33 Recruitment and Schedule
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56 StageDateSign-ups announced12 June 2026Sign-ups close18 June 2026Activation codes distributed22 to 24 June 2026Test begins25 June 2026, 10:00 (UTC+8)Test ends2 July 2026, 10:00 (UTC+8)
67 Launch day opened with a lottery for one hundred slots, which drew more than a thousand applications. Once the hundred winners were drawn, access was opened to anyone meeting the device requirements, so in practice the test stopped being selective after its first day.
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89 No NDA This Time
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1011 Public videos, screenshots and livestreams were explicitly allowed, reversing the rule that had kept the First Pre-Alpha Tech Test almost entirely private. This is the first build of Zeverland that anyone outside the studio could show to anyone else.
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1213 Technical Notices
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1415 A driver advisory went out with the test on 2026-06-25: NVIDIA drivers numbered 32.0.15 and older could cause crashes or freezes, and players were asked to update to 32.0.16.1047 or newer. In-game feedback ran through the escape menu, which carried separate entries for Feedback, Report Issue and a Player Survey.
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1617 Daily Dev Logs
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1819 Six numbered dev logs ran daily from 26 June to 1 July. Each one paired a player question and answer section with a bug status board, and the board's categories are worth noting because they show how the studio triaged: Fixed, Confirmed and fixing, Logged and scheduled, Working as intended, Investigating, and Network-related. Several behaviours players reported as bugs were answered under working as intended, including armed zombies hitting hard and companions relieving themselves on the ground when the territory had no toilet.
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2021 Dev Log #6, on 2026-07-01, announced that the next update would be built around recreational vehicles and ran a screenshot contest in which ten winners received a direct pass to the official launch.
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2223 What Was in the Build
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2425 The test build carried much more of the design than the first one did:
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2627 A main story running through the quests Disaster Relief and Potential Threat to a beat called The Rebuilders, which is where the test's story content stopped.Territory claims limited to three plots in this build, which several players said was too few. That was a limit of this build rather than a stated rule of the game.Loot refreshing every four to six hours, and slower still when the server was busy, which left gas stations picked clean.A tier one infected zone filled with red fog, thick enough to cut visibility even in daylight, with a respirator lasting twenty minutes inside it.Recruitable companions, including a nurse who talked far too much because a dialogue cooldown was not firing.Generators, wiring and lights, all present but with no tutorial explaining them.Workbenches, some of which needed fuel, also without a tutorial.Bulk dismantling by holding Ctrl to multi-select, along with same-type storage and material sorting.
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2829 More detail on those systems sits on Infected Zones, NPC Companions and Power and Electricity.
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3031 Participation
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3233 The studio reported 8,000 survivors and 78,493 messages over the seven days. Those figures were published only in Chinese; the English-language posts never gave a participant count for this test.
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3435 The Shutdown Post
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3637 The closing post on 2 July is the studio's own account of what went wrong, and it does not soften it.
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3839 None of this is what you should have had to bear. The fault is ours: our work left unfinished.
3940 The specific failures it names are homes stripped bare, chests broken open, single-digit framerates in the big city, and fog nobody could see through. It committed to three fixes in the next build: protection for cooperative players, performance, and vehicle customization. As with the first test, all data was wiped at the end.
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4142 Those commitments can be checked against the following month. By 2026-08-03 the studio reported a fly-cam build mode, grid snapping for furniture and decor, and batch dismantling as done work, along with truck cabs and trailers reconnected through hinge joints to fix big-rig steering. The same letter set player versus player content aside and closed key locations off from private claims, both of which trace directly back to this test's complaints. The direction that came out of it is set out on the Roadmap.