[p]You can now press a hotkey to easily assign workers to buildings, this works independent from which tab is selected.[/p]
[p]Press Y to assign one human worker[/p]
[p]Press CTRL + Y to unassign one human worker[/p]
[p]Press ALT + Y to assign maximum human workers for the building (Handy for main storage)[/p]
[p]Press U to unassign all workers from the building (humans and humbies)[/p]
[p][img src="https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/41120532/21c4b3fbfe59af021134c34adbdc29c83b0b1677.jpg"][/p][p]NOTE: You can change hotkey mappings in the game settings anytime.[/p][p]NOTE: The worker types are assigned hotkeys Y, X, C, V for scientists to the different humbie types. You probably want to change the Y to Z for english layout keyboards.[/p]
[p]Default hotkey for layout menu was changed to L from Y and now B for the build menu from X[/p]
[p]Press O to open all doors[/p]
[p]WARNING: Due to the newly added hotkeys you need to reset the mappings to default in the game settings IF you made any changes previously. If not you should have the new default mappings assigned directly.[/p][p][img src="https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/41120532/af092638bca9bc2005e3188a8fd079d379d745ff.jpg"][/p][p][/p][p]Balancing:[/p]
[p]Sending worker types away reward balance was reworked, in general you get a bit less research points for sending workers away, but way more in comparison for cured humans.[/p]
[p]Support points and cure rewards were also slightly less balanced, to make frozen zombie away sending a bit more interesting.[/p]
[p][/p][p]Change Log:[/p]
[p]New hotkeys added for worker type assignment and unassignment at buildings, also general hotkeys to unassign all workers from a building.[/p]
[p]Wiki entries for navigation controls and camera adjusted the gamepad description, was an old oversight. Translated to german, french and simplified chinese as well.[/p]
[p]Fixed destroyed power poles are not emerging power grids again when they are repaired (This was leading to snow shooters or other electricity building showing to be out of power even though they seem connected to the whole grid)[/p]
[p]Helicopter now waits 3 min instead of 2 mins when arriving for trade and waiting for frozen zombies and humbies .[/p]
[p]Hauling post job to transport frozen zombies to arrived helicopter for trade now is automatically highest prio job. This + the longer waiting time improves how well frozen zombies are transported off.[/p]
[p]Fixed that sent away humbies for trade get properly unassigned, important that they get quickly onboard and not decide to do something else instead.[/p]
[p]Fixed that tutorial 02 had a potential "leak" at the left side of the fence if a rock was mined, letting zombies in.[/p]
[p]Fixed gamepad cursor not moving preview objects sometimes.[/p]
[p]Fixed an expectation in worker chasing and fleeing logic that could potential lead to a stuck worker in a very specific situation.[/p]
[p]Fixed ui navigation problems with gamepad.[/p]
[p]Fixed another ui nav problem with gamepad regarding main HUD access.[/p]
[p]Fixed that frozen zombies were counting towards send X humans away achievement.[/p]
[p]Fixed overlapping loading screen music.[/p]
[p]Increased size of tutorial popup for some text display problems.[/p]
[p]Fixed some widescreen ui overlaps.[/p]
[p]Fixed frozen zombie storage T2 freeze damage being 10 times to low then intended.[/p]
[p]Fixed tree nursery T4 automation upgrade now being in upgrade chain.[/p]
[p]Fixed balancing values for send away characters and trade rewards, cured humans having some too low values.[/p]
[p]Credits and logo updated.[/p]
Release 1.0
Scientists and Zombie Healers!
It’s finally done, we present you the version 1.0 of Zombie Cure Lab! For us, our exciting long run is finally reaching the finishing line. Our original idea from 2019 has transformed into the game we are releasing today. During this time we have worked hard to offer you the best possible experience on a fresh take on the zombie game genre.
With all updates we brought to Zombie Cure Lab you will dive into the zombie curing action right away with an improved onboarding and a well crafted progression throughout the four tech tiers and 200 research options our game is offering. With respect to our console versions, releasing the same day, we also improved the overall UI significantly. Check out the changes below or just start your zombie curing adventure! Don’t forget to leave a review if you enjoy Zombie Cure Lab!
Features:
Lab Status and Alert Pooling - A new lab status display keeps you informed about destroyed, disabled, or disconnected buildings. Alerts are grouped to reduce clutter, and clicking them takes you straight to the problem. You’ll also be notified when basic needs (like food or beds) aren’t met. Workers that try to fulfill needs are shown as well, not enough beds or a lack of food will pop up and tell you if you need to build up your infrastructure. Alerts are now grouped when they come in to reduce clutter.
Reworked Onboarding – Three new handcrafted tutorials have been built to ensure the whole game with all its system is explained and players have a better chance to get into Zombie Cure Lab. A wiki has also been integrated to assist players who are stuck or returning and need a refresher.
Urban Theme – To strengthen the post-apocalyptic vibe, the new tutorials take place in an urban environment featuring a destroyed city.
Mission Customization – Play four new expeditions (North, South, East, West) with adjustable settings like starting fences, zombie damage, and more. Each has unique modifiers like increased zombie damage and reduced freeze damage, that challenge you to find your own strategy. The customizable missions are called north, west, east and south expedition. They have each their own modifiers like increased zombie damage or decreased freezing power to create different experiences.
Reworked UI / Gamepad Support – We overhauled the UI to improve clarity and feedback. Plug in a gamepad at any time—the interface will adapt. Includes new features like a cure progress bar, cured human counter, and global control over all gates and doors.
Overcrowded Lab – Labs with too many workers will become “crowded” or “very crowded,” increasing worker needs and reducing calm-down chances. However, overcrowded labs also boost XP gain, creating a strategic trade-off.
Trading Rework – Resources are no longer free. You now earn support points to request resources, making it more strategic to support your economy. Frozen zombies can be sent away for additional rewards. It’s now a valid strategy to focus on trading instead of local production—for example, sending away workers or frozen zombies to trade for metal.
Restored Cities – Use cured humans to rebuild destroyed cities on the world map. Each restored city grants permanent perks that boost future missions and help speed up humanity’s recovery.
Balancing – Days are now a bit shorter, and in general, the game moves faster toward tech tier 4 and curing humans, strengthening the late game and restored cities loop. Key bottlenecks like metal production have been boosted.
Bug Fixes – We've fixed long-standing issues like stuck workers, job assignment problems, zombie storage bugs, some performance issues and more.
Worker and Building Type Cycler You can now cycle through existing workers or buildings of the same type at the top of the open info box. This gets introduced mainly to improve gamepad usability, but is also helpful for keyboard and mouse controls. It also shows the total amount of the building type, which can be quite useful to get an idea how many resource camps you have scattered across the map.
Alternate Ice Pack and Grilled Meat Production In the tech tree are two new buildings available.
Grilled Meat Printer - Food An indoor meat printer that can only be operated by Humbie Level 2 and only requires chemicals to directly print grilled meat. As Humbie Level 2 requires a sustain grilled meat production, this essentially skips some production chains and can allow you to to go for a different economy strategy.
Berry Freezer - Production An outdoor ice pack producer that requires Humbie Level 3. It only requires glowberries and a higher energy consumption to output a steadiy supply of ice packs, which can be interesting to reduce the chemical needs of your lab which would be necessary with the classical ice packer building.
Changelog: - Trade balancing, cured humans now give 150 research points or 50 support points as send away reward. Humbies reduced research points reward. - Final localization to english, german, french and simplified chinese - New alternative production machinery added, Grilled Meat Printer (chemicals to grilled meat) and Berry Freezer (Glowberries to ice packs) as bonus machines only operable by humbie 2 or humbie 3. - Worldmap access now only as new game selection, overhauled all missions. New tutorial 1 - 3 with extensive explanations and slower pacing to get players into the game. North, West, South, East expeditions as free game modes with freely adjustable difficulty settings and a mission specific modifier. - Repair costs better shown in info box - Shortcuts working again for new info box, even when action tab is not active. - Slighty reduced main storage and final treatment chamber research costs to not artificially inflate progression pacing. - All wiki entries now correctly unlock with finishing objectives during tutorials. - Handle skipped elite/ boss waves that they are not displayed in wave ui. - Docking hero (science app) removed from project structure. - Removed science app related achievements and fixed other achievement problems. - Perks on worldmap with restored cities balanced to play towards 1000+ cured humans as the endgame of ZCL. - Difficulty balancing, threat increase, curve tweaks, presets tweaked especially that relaxed mode has low zombie damage. - Main storage gained cold weapon as initial defence, to ensure new players don't die from unfinished fences. - Day duration from 16 min to 12 min for better pacing of the game. - Road walk speeds adjusted to 20% gain with each upgrade. - Can send away frozen zombies now (trade), many fixes that it works better in most situations. - Open/ close doors state handling fixes. - Button to open/ close all gates at once, for easy let intrudes out of freshly repaired lab situations. - Pathfinding fixes potentially resulted in stuck worker problems. - Better objectives handling, also savegame related issues fixed. - Ground/ street/ room rendering order fixes. - Refill job handling fixes, may resulted in machines not serviced anymore. - Build and layout menu scroll speed and general ui adjustments. - Many ui fixes to make new ui work. - Ingame wiki added with explanations to all game systems, tools, concepts and more. - Guard behavior fixing, ignoring hostiles in some cases. - Fixed several bugs regarding frozen zombie storage handling. - Various fixes regarding different worker stuck bugs. - Mission screen added with many modifiers that allow to customize the game experience, like resource processing speed, research speed or how quickly workers get hungry. - Reworked trading to cost resources (support points) instead of getting everything for free with cooldowns. Rewards for new frozen zombie trade option. - Restored cities added, changing state from destroyed to restored with cured human amount requirement. Track cured humans over several missions as a total counter of your efforts. Many perks added, extended game modifiers. - Alerts pooling, new alerts are gathered and shown grouped to reduce notification spamming. - Lab status added, negative conditions of the lab stay shown at the top. Added worker can't satisfy their needs status, clearly showing when there are not enough beds, training equipment or food. - Fixed broken cooking pot tier 2. - Humbies leave during treatment bug fix. - Soft cap feature, overcrowded lab with total population shown. High population counts increase need demand and have other trade offs, giving incentives to stay at certain population levels. - Can only assign specific worker types, not any type anymore, making assignments more intentional and a bit easier for new players. - Fixed power pole wires sometimes not getting cleaned up when moving/ destroying power poles.
Join our Zombie Cure Lab Discord Server!
🧪 Zombie Cure Lab is coming to PS5 & Xbox on 27 May - and there's a big update for PC players.
If you want to be part of the community, talk to other players or communicate directly with the devs, check out our official Discord server.
🧪 Zombie Cure Lab is coming to console! 🧟♀️ Launching May 27 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S! 🎮
But that’s not all – PC players are getting a major content update on the same day, packed with new features, deeper gameplay, and tons of improvements.
🎙️ To celebrate, we sat down with the devs for an exclusive interview – diving into the game’s origins, new mechanics, community feedback, and what’s next. Stay tuned!
📹Watch the full interview now on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FP1_iMZZj4
Zombie Cure Lab | Major content update dropping on May 27
🧪 Zombie Cure Lab launches on May 27 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S! But that’s not all: PC players can also look forward to a major content update dropping at the same time, packed with new features that make the gameplay even deeper and more exciting.
Brain munching zombies rule the world. After years of research brave scientists have finally found an antidote that reverses the zombification progress, creating zombie-human hybrids. Find the final cure for humanity and build the perfect zombie curing facility.🧟♂️
Join the mission to save humanity – soon also on console! 🔗https://zombiecurelab.aerosoft.com/
Regular Update 0.21.5 [Experimental]
Hey zombie curing scientists, we are back with another update for the experimental branch, continuing our efforts to get Zombie Cure Lab into release shape.
This time we also have some smaller features and a bit of content to spice up some things.
Worker and Building Type Cycler
You can now cycle through existing workers or buildings of the same type at the top of the open info box. This gets introduced mainly to improve gamepad usability, but is also helpful for keyboard and mouse controls.
It also shows the total amount of the building type, which can be quite useful to get an idea how many resource camps you have scattered across the map.
Inactive Tabs Shortcuts
To make the tabs UI system a bit better to handle with keyboard and mouse controls, you can now trigger the shorcuts of inactive tabs. This is mainly useful to click a building and hit DEL or 7, 8, 9 and 0 for the respective actions of deleting the building, changing their priorities or disabling/ enabling it. Before, you had to switch the tab for the shortcuts to work.
Alternate Ice Pack and Grilled Meat Production
In the tech tree are two new buildings available.
Grilled Meat Printer - Food An indoor meat printer that can only be operated by Humbie Level 2 and only requires chemicals to directly print grilled meat. As Humbie Level 2 requires a sustain grilled meat production, this essentially skips some production chains and can allow you to to go for a different economy strategy.
Berry Freezer - Production An outdoor ice pack producer that requires Humbie Level 3. It only requires glowberries and a higher energy consumption to output a steadiy supply of ice packs, which can be interesting to reduce the chemical needs of your lab which would be necessary with the classical ice packer building.
Those two buildings might require further balancing adjustments, but we are curious for you to try them out.
Repair Cost Info
The info box now has a new segment that displays the repair cost of damaged buildings.
General Changelog:
Tutorial fixes (objectives, loca)
Repair cost info of damaged buildings in info box
In general a more final proof read english localization (Other languages might be quite outdated, this will change soon)
Fixed the Frozen Zombies that missed their flight are ice sculptures for eternity bug
Worker and build type cycler/ object swapping - Also works for missions on the worldmap
You can now trigger "Send Helicopter" in Trade Screen by pressing (Y) on the gamepad
"Layout" tab was removed from build menu - This only means the jump to icons at the top, the separate layout menu still exists.
Hotkeys for controls hidden in non-active tabs are working now
The Tutorial Popup can now be accessed using the (Y) gamepad button while in the upper hud
"There was a problem with your savegame" popup will never appear anymore now
Some minor visual issues with gamepad vs. mouse highlighting fixed
Added grilled meat printer for T2
Added berry freezer for T3
Improved employment screen for gamepad
Improved character overview window for gamepad
General structural improvements for the three tutorial missions
Known Issues:
There seems to be a newly introduced problem with scrollbars and mouse wheel input. We will fix that soon, but did not want to withhold the new stuff for experimental.
Unsure how the new tech tree buildings grilled meat printer and berry freezer will affect savegames.
Hotfix 0.21.4 [Experimental]
Hi, thanks to your feedback and reports we could continue to fix some stuff on the experimental branch and continue to push forward towards the 1.0 release.
0.21.4 Changes
Tutorials split in three for better pacing and learning the concepts
Tutorial changes to improve onboarding experience
Wiki fully available with proof read english language (You currently have to play through the tutorials to unlock all entries)
Western mission correctly playable now
Minor balancing changes, tech tier main storage research - Some costs reduced
UX quick fade in when infobox appears
Better worker selection for shifts - Changing shifts should now better pick available workers with the specific shift missing
Fixed a specific save game related multi threading issue
Fixed Disabled waves being shown in timeline (Elite and boss waves were shown, but did not spawn when disabled)
Fixed objectives not shown after loading a savegame
Fixed ui issues, overlapping elements
Further minor bug fixes
Experimental Update #2 - Release Preparations
Hey, it's been a long time! Many of you thought we had abandoned the game—but that’s not true. We’ve just been quietly working behind the scenes on something bigger, even if we were a bit too silent.
Zombie Cure Lab is planning to leave Early Access in the upcoming months and launch on three platforms:
PC
PS5
Xbox Series
Over the past year (and a bit more), we’ve been working on creating one unified, complete version that runs on both console and PC. It includes all features and bug fixes to make Zombie Cure Lab a fully finished product.
NEW UPDATE IS ON STEAM BETA BRANCH EXPERIMENTAL
But first, what has changed:
Features Overview
Reworked Onboarding – Two new handcrafted tutorials have been built to address severe issues with players not understanding the game, resulting in many frustrating first impressions. A wiki has also been integrated to assist players who are stuck or returning and need a refresher.
Urban Theme – To strengthen the post-apocalyptic vibe, the new tutorials take place in an urban environment featuring a destroyed city.
Mission Screen – After the tutorial, four new missions can be selected and customized via a new mission setup screen. Adjust various sliders, start with fences, modify zombie damage, and more to match your preferred playstyle.
Reworked UI / Gamepad Support – Our biggest project was overhauling the user interface so it works seamlessly with both keyboard & mouse and any gamepad. We’re pretty proud of the results so far. You can plug in your gamepad at any time, and the UI will adapt automatically. The interface now includes cure progress, visible cured human population, updated lab status with reworked alerts, and more. A major change: the infobox is now separated into three tabs—we’d love to hear your feedback on that. Worker types now need to be assigned directly (no more “any” assignments). (An early version of the UI rework was already available in a previous experimental update.)
Overcrowded Lab – Having too many workers will now push your lab into a “crowded” or “very crowded” state, modifying worker needs and calm-down chances. This creates a soft population cap. However, there’s a trade-off: crowded labs also accelerate worker experience gain, helping you prepare humbies for treatment faster.
Trading Rework – Resources are no longer free. You now earn support points to request resources, making it more strategic to support your economy. Frozen zombies can be sent away for additional rewards. It’s now a valid strategy to focus on trading instead of local production—for example, sending away workers or frozen zombies to trade for metal.
Restored Cities – Endgame content: finally, we can restore humanity! Destroyed cities on the world map can now be rebuilt using cured humans. Each restored city grants a permanent perk that makes your next mission easier, helping you cure more humans and rebuild the world faster.
Balancing – Days are now a bit shorter, and in general, the game moves faster toward tech tier 4 and curing humans, strengthening the late game and restored cities loop. Key bottlenecks like metal production have been boosted.
Many Bug Fixes – New features always bring new bugs. We’ve fixed a huge number of issues, including long-standing ones like stuck workers and refill job problems.
Citizen Science Removed – When Zombie Cure Lab first launched in Early Access, players could participate in real-world science by helping calculate protein-ligand dockings. That side project has now ended. As a result, those world map events have been removed, and the associated rewards (especially decorative items) are now available in the general tech tree.
Release Plans
Admittedly, things didn’t go exactly as planned during Early Access, and it’s been a challenge to maintain steady development throughout.
That said, we’re excited to finally be moving toward full release with this update. Help us test the latest changes in the Experimental branch and let’s make this the strong, polished launch that Zombie Cure Lab deserves.
We’re looking forward to your feedback on Discord and in the Steam forums. Cheers!
Blood Bar Tycoon Upcoming Release
Hey! Some friends of ours are about to release their game, BLOOD BAR TYCOON, on February 4, 2025. And guess what: it’s a super cool, darkly humorous tycoon game where you abduct humans to feed vampires! If you enjoyed ZOMBIE CURE LAB, chances are you’ll love it.
They’re an indie team, just like us, so be kind and show them some support. The demo is available right now until launch! Go try it and wishlist their game today!
Now’s the perfect time to grab Zombie Cure Lab at 60% off—but hurry, this offer lasts only until January 2nd. Whether you’re treating yourself this holiday season or adding to your collection, these immersive simulators are sure to thrill! 🚓🎁 Don’t miss out!
