VEIN Roadmap 2026: 0.025 Is Out, and What Is Coming in 0.026

Ramjet Studios publishes a bimonthly VEIN news post describing exactly what is being built, and are clear every time that the changes described are not in the live game yet. Here is what 0.025 shipped on 26 September, what its three hotfixes fixed, and what is being built for 0.026.

Last verified: 2 November 2026. Every date below is from the studio’s own posts; nothing here is inferred.

What 0.025 shipped (26 September 2026)

The release notes sum it up as new animations, a new map area, building maintenance, new buildables, optimization, zombie improvements and ragdolling. The parts that change how a server plays:

• A new map area extending north from Franklin County, with Mountain View, Owl’s Head and Duane, the region the 1 September news post described as complete.
• Base building: maintenance, upkeep and salvaging on all buildings (marked work in progress), a structural support system that makes builds that are too tall fall, utility cabinet areas placed with flags and pylons instead of a fixed radius, and zombies that can now damage every base tier.
• Zombies: new types with different strengths, ragdolling that knocks zombies and players down and lets them get back up, and zombies that no longer collide with or stunlock each other.
• Combat: melee weapons now have an effectiveness requirement tied to character stats, and a character below it does significantly less damage.
• Server and multiplayer: multiple networking fixes and optimizations, a fix for multiple impacts from clients on listen and dedicated servers, and a new “No Damage (Except Players)” setting for permission zones.
• Weights: some crafting items were rebalanced to be heavier. The studio’s 1 October news post says long-time players’ crates full of items such as leather became over-full and need reorganising.

The 0.025 hotfixes

• Hotfix 1, 28 September: fixed door locks desyncing on dedicated servers (a door could open for the player while staying locked on the server), the admin menu not working for the first player on a server, the server browser refresh button, and music playing on dedicated servers for players who had switched it off. It raised the capacity of player-built storage by 50% to offset the heavier items, improved CPU and replication performance, and added a ServerPrintConsoleVariables cheat command.
• Hotfix 2, 4 October: fixed vehicles desyncing and falling through the ground for clients in multiplayer, editing utility cabinet flag pylons on dedicated servers, everything becoming decayed after 10 in-game weeks, and an iron duplication exploit.
• Hotfix 3, 15 October: fixed a crash when an admin uses the admin menu to ban a player who has already left, made the god and giveitem console commands properly networked for admins, fixed cameras disappearing from TVs on dedicated servers, and improved zombie performance on servers and multiplayer desync when placing furniture. It also fixed fridges spawning food already rotten, reworked food decay values, raised utility cabinet capacity to 2400 lbs and log and wood plank storage to 2250 lbs, kept the AI spawn system’s memory of buildings you have cleared for three real-life hours, and increased the landscape load distance so fast vehicles stop falling through unloaded roads.

The studio says it is still working on a couple of desync issues introduced with 0.025.

Before 0.025: the 0.024 hotfix line

Hotfixes 5 and 6 landed on 27 and 28 July and were substantial. Selected fixes that matter on a server:

• Multiplayer: fixed being able to drive through vehicles, object net key errors with drying racks, and player group networking issues
• Dedicated servers: fixed the firearm attachment UI not refreshing
• Stability: crash fixes including an escape-menu crash when dead or without a character
• Install size: drastically reduced. The team found a compression method that cut game content filesize roughly in half, losslessly

New convars were also added, including vein.Conditions.Hypothermia.*, and GPS battery life was increased sixfold.

Hotfixes 7 and 8 on 31 August were the last for 0.024. Their notes list drastically reduced rubberbanding in multiplayer and drastically improved dedicated server performance.

What is being built for 0.026

From the 1 October VEIN News post: more work on controller support, with the stats and character menus moving into the Journal; a refactor of how zombies navigate to players; working red-dot sights and scopes, ready for the next update and partly on the experimental branch already; a system that works out whether a spot is exposed to wind or sunlight instead of a single indoors flag; a rewrite of vehicle networking that should reduce lag significantly once complete; and the new character art, which the team hopes to have partly in 0.026 behind a console command. The team is also experimenting with Lua as the starting point for modding, and calls it very early days. There is no date for 0.026.

The 15 October VEIN News post moves several of these along, again with the note that none of it is in the main game yet: the new vehicle networking is more or less finished and needs a lot of testing, which the team expects to cut vehicle desync; a solar food dehydrator dries food placed outdoors so it lasts far longer, with salt needed for some recipes; new churches with upper floors and bell towers are in; and work continues on a more varied road art set and the next replacement vehicle, the Hatchback.

Everything in those posts is explicitly on the experimental branch, not in the main game. That distinction is the single most useful thing to know about VEIN’s communications.

The Year One post of 24 October, a year after Early Access opened, lists what the team is working on for the coming year, with no dates and the focus on bugs and performance first: standalone buildables, so a house can be built from scratch anywhere, with the art finished and the system about to be programmed; controller support, worked on full-time for the last two weeks, and Steam Deck support; profiling multiplayer performance and testing new multiplayer functionality to cut bandwidth and improve performance for server hosts; the new character art, with 24 face presets and 4 skin tones finished; pre-production of a full rewrite of zombie spawning, with experiments in rendering much larger hordes; the Early Access map area re-detailed, with pre-production started on the areas north of Lyon Mountain and south of Redford; zombie navigation to noise and sight; and custom animations for the full weapon set. Modding support is named among the most requested features, without a commitment.

The Seeing Signs post of 1 November covers two weeks of fixes, performance work, controller support and UI changes. Most of the game can now be navigated with a controller, and some UI was redone to stay readable at night and in dark places. Standalone buildings, where you build and upgrade your own house, are mid-implementation, and buildable signs are coming soon. The post also lists containers that can be moved with items still inside, blinds that zombies and players can destroy, a Toggle ADS setting, vehicle icons that no longer jitter while driving in multiplayer and singleplayer, fixes for adding and removing locks on the new replacement vehicles, and items no longer spawning on store shelves that were moved or destroyed. A new packaging method is in, with work under way to cut build times and the download size of game updates, and fixes for the Linux builds are in progress. The older areas around Lyon Mountain and Dannemora are finished and work has moved to the new areas north of Lyon Mountain and south of Redford; the new character art has started going into the game, and the animations for the new double barrel shotgun are done and will be integrated shortly. The post gives no date or version for any of it, and on 2 November the public dedicated server build was still the one from Hotfix 3 on 15 October.

What server admins should plan for

• Do not run experimental for a community server. The developers describe it as heavily work in progress. It exists so bugs get found, which is the opposite of what you want on a persistent world.
• Version matching applies. Clients on experimental cannot be assumed compatible with a stable server.
• Re-check your convars after a version bump. The 0.024 hotfixes added new ones, 0.025 Hotfix 1 added a ServerPrintConsoleVariables cheat command, and new lines appear regularly on a game at this stage.
• Expect over-full containers after moving a world to 0.025. Some crafting items got heavier, and Hotfix 1 raised built storage capacity by 50% to compensate, so run the hotfixed build rather than stopping at 0.025.

Cadence and sources

VEIN News posts arrive roughly every two weeks on the game’s Steam news feed, and hotfix notes are posted separately. The news posts routinely omit routine bugfixes as irrelevant to most readers, so the hotfix announcements are the complete record, not the news posts.

Bottom line

VEIN is on a steady two-week communication rhythm with a clear stable/experimental split. Run stable, read the hotfix notes rather than only the news posts, and treat everything previewed as experimental until a version number carries it. 0.025 with all three hotfixes is the build to run today; 0.026 is next, without a date.