Isometric open-world zombie survival sandbox game HumanitZ first entered Steam Early Access in September 2023. In the more than two years since then, it’s gotten 18 major updates and countless patches. And now, it’s reached a new milestone: It’s out of Early Access, and Version 1.0 includes a visual and structural overhaul on top of all the previous improvements.

HumanitZ takes place in a zombie-ravaged world with an emphasis on long-term progression and player choice. You can scavenge ruined cities, build bases, and try to outlast the zombies (known as Zeeks) and potentially other survivors (if you so choose). The whole game can be played solo, but there are also optional co-op, PvE, and PvP modes available on dedicated and player-hosted servers.

There’s a variety of environments across the open world, including big city streets, suburbs, farms, and forests. And you can mold those environments to suit your needs and help you survive, with several options available to you.

For example, you can raid a city, clear out the Zeeks, and claim an abandoned building to then turn into a fortified base using the building and crafting systems. Or you can stay away from the city and use farming, hunting, fishing, and foraging to create a self-sustaining homestead. Or you can constantly stay on the move, surviving off the resources you gather and never putting down roots.

These choices are all viable, but come with different levels of risk. Cities tend to be packed with necessary resources but are also crawling with Zeeks, leaving you with very little room for error. While building up your farmstead will see fewer Zeeks but runs the risk of sapping you of resources before it becomes self-sustaining. And you’ll never be able to completely avoid danger. Zombies and other hostile NPCs are constantly roaming the open world, so even if you choose to stay away from the city, you have to remain vigilant.

This focus on player choice has always been at the core of HumanitZ, with extensive updates and fine-tuning during Early Access. Version 1.0 has continued to build on those ideas with a broad round of refinements, upgrades, and new content. The most obvious example is its graphical overhaul, with fully remastered maps, upgraded lighting, new character models, and updated environments. There are also several gameplay improvements, including new skill trees, the ability to multiclass, more diverse zombie types, special ammo, new equipment, new vehicles, and countless other new additions.

And while HumanitZ will always be an open-world sandbox, there are optional quests that can provide guidance to those of us who like a bit more structure. These quests will lead you to new areas (some of which were previously undiscoverable), where you can learn the lore behind the zombie outbreak and the horrors it’s inflicted. These quests won’t force you down a linear path, they’re just there to give you some guide rails if you want them, and they can be ignored or done at whatever pace you want.

You can choose how hard the experience is, too. Difficulty can be tuned across everything from season length and day-night cycles to Zeek respawn rates, companion health and damage, airdrops, and dynamic AI events. You can also turn on permadeath, meaning that if you die once, your game is over and you’ll have to start over again from the beginning. And for you masochists out there, you can opt into the new afflictions that add a persistent debuff and long-term consequences on top of all those modifiers, cranking the difficulty up as far as you dare

And while Version 1.0 signals a major milestone in HumanitZ’s development, it’s far from the end. The dev team has made it clear that you can expect post-launch support, with patches and updates to add new content and address player feedback. You can find HumanitZ on Steam now, where you can also read the patch notes and see all the details of everything that was added and refined in the Version 1.0 release. To keep up with the latest news and updates, you can also follow the game on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Discord.