The NPC update has finally arrived! In your travels you may run into small camps of other survivors that may be friendly or hostile. Also to better facilitate these new characters you meet, a whole bunch of character customization options have been finally added to the game!

Please note that this update (along with all others in the Early Access period) should be fully backwards-compatible with previous save games. Although starting a new game is probably the best way to experience the bigger updates.

Survivor camps can be friendly or hostile. Friendly camps allow you to speak to them, help them with simple requests, ask them about nearby points of interest and trade with them for potentially useful items.

Their behavior is fairly basic right now, they will make sure their fire is going, hunt any nearby creatures, and make sure they have water to drink. Much more advanced functionality and story integration will be something that arrives in the 1.0 release.

Also note that the current NPC AI system is not fully fleshed out and they may end up behaving oddly in certain situations, this is something that I will be continually improving over the next few weeks.

As mentioned before, trading and a new economy system is an important feature in this update. Three coin denominations have been added to the game: florins, groats and pennies. Florins are 100 groats, and a groat is 20 pennies. These coins are mainly used for trading, but bartering with items only is also possible. NPCs will tend to value their items more than yours however.

As with the NPCs, this economy system is vast and required a lot of calculations and tweaking. Things will be dialed in over time to make more sense.

A bunch of new character customization options like skin tone, eye color, hair and color, and face shape have been added. It's not a very complex system but I will keep adding more functionality and customization options in the future. Thanks for your patience!

One thing to note: this new customization is only for new games, loading previous games will not allow re-customization, sorry!

• Fixed chromatic aberration setting not loading properly when the game starts

• Fixed mouse wheel sensitivity consistency across all framerates and OSes

• Fixed missing localization for no injuries text

• Fixed parts of the character disappearing during certain animations and camera angles

Hey everyone, hope you've been having a good 2026 so far! It's been an extremely busy January on my end but unfortunately there is still a bit of work left on getting the Q4 update (or NPC update) all ready for release.

I want to apologize greatly for the further delay of this update, I haven't done a great job estimating all the various complications involved with getting NPCs thinking, trading and behaving well, along with balancing the economy for all items in the game to power the new trading system. The good news is that the new systems are starting to feel very solid, and we are down to just the final polish, and content tasks.

With all that said, I'd like to announce that the NPC update will be released on February 16th 2026!

After the NPC update and a few follow up fix and improvement updates, I will sit down and plan out the 2026 roadmap with the path towards the 1.0 release in detail. A lot of the building blocks are now in place with all the big updates over the past year, especially with the about-to-be-released NPCs inhabiting the dangerous world of the Blight. Be on the lookout for the new roadmap in the weeks following the NPC update.

Also, I plan to get more languages into the game soon as well after a long localization hiatus, with Chinese and Polish as the next priority.

Thanks for playing and supporting The Last Plague!