Revision 1

Zeverland can be played alone or with other survivors, and the studio has restated how that works three times since the game's first tech test. The position that currently stands was published on 2026-08-03 in the second Fireside Chat community letter. Official servers will always be available, players who want a smaller apocalypse with friends can open a private server, and there is a single-player mode for anyone who would rather not share the wasteland at all.

The detail that matters most in that letter is where a private server actually runs. It runs on the studio's own infrastructure, exactly like an official one. Quantum Quirks wrote that the game is "not P2P" and that there is "no need to study ports and hardware" because "whether official or private, every server is hosted on our side, all you have to do is log in". Nothing is installed on a player's own machine, and the studio uses the phrase officially hosted private server for the option.

How the Server Model Changed

Read the sequence rather than any single line. Private play went from ruled out, to announced in loose terms, to defined.

The roadmap's wording is the loosest of the three and the August letter is the latest and the most specific, so where the two appear to disagree the August letter governs. The same letter is also where the term buy-to-play comes from directly, rather than being inferred from the roadmap's shorthand. See the Roadmap for the full panel set.

Playing Together

During the First Pre-Alpha Tech Test the Shelter and Team menu opened with the U key. Players in the same Shelter shared a home location, and teammates could see each other's live positions and mission progress on the map. That was the whole of the grouping interface in that build.

The cooperative goals the studio has described are deliberately large: building the Ark, purifying the homeland, and raising the Tower of Babel. These were named in the January 2026 letter and stated most plainly in the studio's Chinese-language posts. None of them has been shown running in a public build.

Faction lines cut across cooperation. NPCs belonging to different Factions fight each other, and players aligned with different factions can fight each other, both listed as working as intended during the second test. That is separate from open player versus player combat, which is covered on PvE and PvP.

Communication

The first test shipped with no in-game voice chat and no in-game text chat at all, which is why so much of the first test's coordination happened outside the game. Two replacements have been announced and neither has appeared in a public build: buildable communication devices such as radio stations and PDAs, which would gate long-distance chat behind actually constructing them (announced 2025-11-17), and voice channels organised by language (announced 2026-06-29).

Regions and Connection

Servers are chosen by region. During the second test a ping bug pushed everyone to the North American server by default regardless of where they were; the studio reported that fixed on 2026-07-01, with the client now preferring the local region. A server-select screen showing region, live player count and real ping was announced on 2026-06-27 and has not yet been shown.

What the Studio Said at gamescom 2026

At gamescom 2026 the studio described a three tier server layout to people who played the build at its booth: private servers of roughly 8 by 8 km, permanent official servers of roughly 72 by 72 km, and seasonal official servers of the same size, with a stated target of more than a thousand players on the larger ones. These figures came out of booth conversations rather than any published announcement, so they are best read as what the studio said in person and not as an announced specification. The 72 by 72 km figure does at least square with the roughly 5,000 km² the store page claims, as covered on World and Map.

One older piece of framing still sits on the store page, which invites players to team up with thousands of others to build a new world and describes shared server-wide endings. That copy dates from the game's massively multiplayer period. The July 2026 roadmap and the August 2026 letter are the newer statements and should be read first.