Hello, and thanks to everyone who bought the game or helped spread the word after the launch last week! As you might expect with the influx of new players there have been some bug reports, so this is mainly about addressing those.

The biggest ones were probably on XBox - you weren't able to save your characters on the character creation screen, and people have been having trouble joining online games. As regards the latter when I tried joining someone myself I found that it worked but took a long time, and other people kept joining me while I was doing so, and each time they did the progress bar reset to the beginning. The first time you join someone in a Sandbox game it has to send their whole terrain over to you which can take a while (after that the static part of it is cached, so should be faster). And this transfer seems to take longer on XBox, so it's more noticeable. If you start from scratch each time someone joins you, and randos keep jumping in and then leaving, you can get stuck into a loop of it never finishing. So my fix was to stop it resetting just because someone joined you. Note to any XBox players reading this - this patch will be in publicbeta on Steam for a little while first before making its way to XBox.

Here's the full change list:

• Fix for people set to cook a particular type of meal and set to auto-deposit wood getting stuck in a loop when their campfire is out of fuel
  
• Fix for Probability of Infection shown by Brain Scanner for a character changing after hitting the road
  
• Fix for saving characters not working on XBox
  
• Fix for Morgan Harding sometimes informing a chicken that there are infected raiders on the way
  
• Fix for showing the F2 prompt for Community Screen on XBox in a couple of places
  
• Fix for your community members remembering 'you knocked someone out like a light' when you knocked out a zombie
  
• Fix for being able to target Kelly for 1 frame with the bow when she's playing dead
  
• Fixed some props around Wishkey Falls Militia belonging to other groups
  
• Some fixes for Charlie Gant
  
• When NPCs leave their original communities to form new ones the new ones names are known the player if they know the NPCs names (so they aren't shown as 'Unknown Community' forever)
  
• If you happen to move the camera close to an invisible strain character while they are moving towards someone to secretly attack them, they will stop and act like nothing is happening
  
• On the character creation screen, disable Start button if first name or surname is blank (or Community name, unless joining a network game)
  
• Possible fixes for getting stuck on Receiving Game State screen while trying to join a game on XBox
  
• Changed 'Lumberjack' option on action menu to say 'Set Role: Lumberjack' for consistency with other roles
  
• Updated Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Japanese, Indonesian, Italian, Latin American Spanish, European Spanish and Turkish translations
  

In addition, v243 is now on the main branch, and on XBox!

What's this publicbeta thing?

v244 will be in the "publicbeta" branch on Steam for a while, before pushing it to the main game and to XBox. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".