🎮 ZomboRut 1.2.2 — Early Access
You can fight back now. A defeat is no longer something you sit through: you get a few seconds to tear loose, and if you win, it didn't happen to you. Plus a whole toy system — vegetables, tools, bats, lube — and the sharp ones cut.

Built on everything in 1.2.1. Back up your saves and do a clean install (delete the old ZomboRut folder, don't merge on top).

🥊 NEW: Struggle — fight your way out of a defeat
When a defeat scene starts you now get a few seconds to break free instead of watching it play out. Four short rounds, each its own small win, played over the scene's opening — clear them all and you tear loose early. Lose and the scene runs exactly as it did before.

Three mini-games, all on the movement keys so they follow your own bindings:

Break the Grip — press the shown directions, in order.
Breakline — tap as the marker crosses the lit zone.
Panic Pulse — mash to hold a tempo inside a band. Going too fast overshoots it.
Random rolls a fresh one every time you're grabbed, and is the default.
Difficulty is driven by how exhausted you are. Above 50% stamina breaking free is easy; 50–30% is a real fight; below 30% it climbs steeply. Strength helps a little, extra zombies on you hurt a little.

The on-screen widget is deliberately small and sits under your character so the animation stays visible. Losing does nothing at all — so a bug in the mini-game and a genuine loss produce the same safe outcome.

Once per give-up, on the first scene only. A defeat can chain a scene per nearby zombie, and a prompt in front of every one of them turned one defeat into a gauntlet. Being tackled and dragged by a sprinter still has no mini-game.

🏃 Escaping actually means escaping
Every defeat scene has its own escape animation. Winning used to cut to the same defeated outro the loss path uses — you got away, but it looked like you gave up. Defeat Lunge, Punch, BJ and Forced Cowgirl now each have their own escape outro, both halves authored, so a win reads as a win. (Lesbian Face Sit deliberately keeps its existing outro — it already reads as getting out from under her.)

And it did not happen to you:

No stench of the dead — the smell comes from the act.
Virginity is kept, and nothing is added to your body count.
No arousal, no groin pain, no sickness, no trauma.
No pregnancy risk.
The aftermath changed too. There's no collapse curl — the moment the escape animation ends you're on your feet and the horde is live again. What you get instead is five seconds where the horde can't overwhelm you a second time, plus, at the instant you break loose, zombies actually clipping you are shoved back and sprinters within 8 tiles are knocked flat (a shove buys nothing against something that outruns you).

It only blocks that one path. Bites, scratches, clothing rips and ordinary defeats all still land — it's a chance to run, not invulnerability. Your character shouts as they tear loose, one of eight lines picked at random.

🥒 NEW: Toys — use what you're holding
Two new solo scenes that keep the item visible in your hand for the whole animation instead of dropping it.

"Use a toy..." reads what's actually in your hand — a hammer, a screwdriver, a kitchen knife, a meat cleaver, a zucchini — and names itself after it. Hands empty? It searches your bag and takes out anything usable. Firearms, two-handers and (for the short scene) anything too long are filtered out. Lower body clothing comes off and goes back on afterwards, exactly like the plain masturbate option.

A new scene for long objects. Anything 0.45 m or longer gets its own standing, non-penetrative animation instead of being refused or forced through a clip authored around a hammer — 152 items qualify, including every spear, broom, plank, pool cue, guitar and shovel in the game. Which scene you get is decided by measured length, not the two-hand flag: a one-handed gaff hook is 0.85 m while a two-handed sawn plank is 0.56 m, so hand count is the wrong question — what breaks a pose is how far the thing sticks out.

Long tools are held somewhere sensible. PZ authors held weapons with the grip at the mesh origin, which is right for swinging a machete and wrong for a toy scene, where anything longer than a zucchini stabs straight through the body. The grip now shifts along the item for the duration of a scene, by an amount derived from the item's own measured length — 388 held-weapon meshes measured so every one sits right. Vanilla item scripts are untouched, so your gear looks exactly as it always did when you're just walking around holding it.

Both scenes are one longer 810-frame laying-back clip (~27 seconds), re-authored as a single baked animation — the old staged version dropped to a standing idle for about a frame at every stage swap, which is the subtle stand-up that used to show mid-scene.

🧴 NEW: Lube
Craft it. An empty mayo or remoulade jar plus cooking oil makes a Bottle of Lube — in your hands, in the dark, no station needed.

Lubed produce. Lube (or plain cooking oil) turns a zucchini, cucumber, carrot, corn, banana or eggplant into a version you can actually use. Six produce toys, all craftable in hand.

Grease any tool. Lube isn't just for vegetables — right-click any melee weapon with lube or cooking oil on you and it becomes a "Lubed Claw Hammer", keeping its condition, its wear and any name you gave it. The cost: every swing has a 50% chance of the thing leaving your hand. Not on hit — on swing. Miss into thin air and you can still lose it. Firearms are excluded; a gun that leaps out of your hands every other shot isn't funny, it's unplayable.

Greasing and wiping are proper actions with animations — mixing for the lube, scrubbing for the rag — with the tool in one hand and the lube or rag in the other. Wiping consumes a rag, and with none on you the option is greyed out and says so rather than quietly not being there.

🩸 Sharp toys cut, and dry hurts
Using a blade on yourself leaves a real wound — a cut on the groin with bleeding, pain and a blood decal, appearing partway through the scene rather than at the end, so it shows while it's still going and stopping early means you got away with it. The menu warns you first, rather than letting you discover it in the health panel.

Sharpness is read from the game's own weapon taxonomy, so every modded blade inherits it for free and blunt gear never cuts. Severity scales with the weapon's damage — a letter opener grazes where a machete wounds, and feeble "blades" like a spoon do nothing at all. Infection is never rolled: a kitchen knife is not a bite.

Dry hurts too. Using something unlubed leaves you sore — a bit of pain partway through, no cut and no bleeding, and it fades on its own. Lube it and there's none. Lubed produce counts as lubed without needing anything done to it. A dry blade does both; being cut and being chafed are different complaints.

Virginity: the toy scenes used to refuse a Virgin outright. That block is gone — the player decides. Finishing with something penetrative takes it, which the long-object scene deliberately doesn't, since it isn't that kind of scene. Breaking off early leaves it, the same rule the paired scenes use.

🎭 Trait effects land during the act, not after it
Losing your virginity and the swinger's variety mood belong to the act itself, not its aftermath, so they now fire once as the scene passes its halfway mark rather than waiting for it to finish. Break off early and they still land — which is the point.

Utility scenes are excluded: a drag or a takedown is not sex and should never have counted as a first time. Timing rides the scene's own wall-clock progress, so it behaves the same at any framerate.

🪢 Subdue & captives
A captive subdued while crawling kept crawling. Push one over from behind, subdue it, and the engine kept playing its crawl — the bound-on-the-ground pose never applied, so it crawled around instead of lying tied up. It's now parked in the one state the crawl can't override. (reported by AzureAdmiral)
Dragging a captive offered the wrong menu entry. A captive drag runs on the same vanilla grapple as a corpse drag, so it reused the generic "end scene" label. When what you're dragging is a bound captive the action is Drop Victim, which is what it was called in ZomboWin — so that's what it says now. A plain corpse drag with no active scene keeps the generic label. (reported by AzureAdmiral)
⏱️ Solo scene timing
Staged solo animations play their full authored length at any framerate. They were timed by counting frames, so the same clip ran short on a fast machine and dragged on a slow one, and a long one-shot could be cut off partway through. Stage advancement is now wall-clock, and the frame-based action timer is switched off for staged animations — a clip plays for exactly as long as it was authored.

⚙️ New sandbox options
Option    Range    Default
[Struggle] Enable the struggle mini-game    on / off    ON
[Struggle] Mini-game type    Random / Break the Grip / Breakline / Panic Pulse    Random
[Struggle] Mini-game difficulty    1–10    3
[Toys] Sharp toys cut you    on / off    ON
[Toys] Sharp toy injury severity    0–200    100
Mini-game type defaults to Random, and Random is the first option rather than the last, so existing saves pick it up too instead of staying pinned to whichever game they were created with.

🌍 Localization
The struggle mini-game, its sandbox options and the escape shouts ship in all seven languages (EN, CN, CH, RU, ES, FR, DE).

📌 Notes
Updating: delete the old ZomboRut folder from your mods directory first, then drop the new one in. Don't merge on top.
Full quit-to-desktop and relaunch after updating — the game caches animation models between saves.
Changing [Struggle] Mini-game type in the sandbox UI needs a full game restart to take effect (the game tears down and re-registers custom sandbox options per session).
Anything odd → #bug-report, with repro steps and clips.

Back up your saves and do a clean install (delete the old ZomboRut folder, don't merge on top).

⏱️ No more "Required 60 FPS"
ZomboRut is now framerate-independent, live-tested from 24 to 144 FPS. You can uncap your framerate — the old "Required 60 FPS" note is gone from the mod and from the options tooltip.

Every gameplay timer used to count rendered frames as if they were seconds, so at 144 FPS a 5-second give-up window was really 2 seconds. That single root cause was behind a long list of "random flakiness":

Zombies freezing mid-lunge after you give up, instead of scattering. (reported by bluemarshal)
Giving up with no scene playing — just a cough and the horde wandering off.
Zombies re-locking onto you through the Stench cloak while you catch your breath.
The post-defeat curled-up breather running short or long depending on your FPS.
Drags releasing early on fast machines (partner pop / jitter) and dragging on for too long on slow ones.
Every other window — give-up, scenes, drags, trait drain, captive respawn — drifting fast or slow off 60 FPS.
Also hardened against pauses and hitches: pausing right as a scene ends no longer drops your post-scene protection early.

💤 NEW: Arousal & desperation
A hidden 0–100 arousal meter that builds over in-game time — sleep counts — and surfaces as a four-tier moodle: Stirred → Aroused → Pent Up → Desperate, with a one-shot thought as you cross each tier. No MoodleFramework required — ZomboRut renders its own moodle if you don't have it.

What feeds it:

Your traits. Nymphomaniac ×3 down through Innocent ×0.5 — the whole libido spread scales the clock.
Being naked or exposed builds ×1.5, for anyone.
A naked zombie nearby stirs high-libido characters only.
Corpses feed Necrophiliacs.
HottieZ magazines. One finished read is a real jolt — enough to clear the second tier on its own, so a stack is a deliberate way to work yourself up.
What it costs you: Pent Up adds stress; Desperate adds stress and unhappiness (both switchable off). That pressure feeds the exhaustion give-up meter on its own — no zombie behaviour was touched.

Release: any completed scene or a masturbation scales relief with how worked up you were — stress, unhappiness and boredom all drop — then a short Satisfied afterglow that eases Fatigue and lifts Unhappiness for a while. Cancel partway and you keep the buildup (yes, that's edging). Desperation also overrides the comfort gate on masturbation, so the stress it causes can't lock you out of the fix.

A defeat is one encounter, not one scene per scene: the meter climbs through every chained scene (~25 points each) and settles once, when the horde is done with you and disperses. Only the willing are satisfied — characters with a taste for it bank the mood relief at encounter end, and only if a scene actually reached its outro. Everyone else walks away wound up.

🩸 NEW: The defeat now ends on the ground
You no longer pop upright in the middle of a knocked-flat crowd. After the last scene your character stays curled on the ground for a breather — custom curl and get-up animations, pained breathing — while the horde walks off, then rises and can leave. Stand Up (hotkey or menu) cuts the breather short through the same get-up.

The horde actually scatters. The scene-end disperse clears the area in three layers and holds it for the whole post-defeat window (curl, get-up, escape): every zombie still holding you as a target has it dropped no matter how far away, everything within 12 tiles is marched outward and re-ordered every 0.6s, approaches from as far as 25 tiles are turned back before they arrive, and anything wedged in the pile gets one shove clear.

And the last stragglers are gone too. The oldest complaint about the post-defeat scatter — one or two zombies planted right where you fell, hands out, doing nothing until you walked away — is fixed. The walk-away order was being discarded outright by the game for any zombie already locked onto you, which is exactly the zombie standing over you; every other zombie got the message and left. Orders now go out the way the game sends its own, and no longer aim at destinations inside walls that fail silently forever. A big horde drains away completely.

🩼 NEW: Exhausted limp
Getting overwhelmed now leaves a mark. If you're below 30% stamina when you rise from the collapse, you limp — an injured walk and a matching worn-out idle — until the bar recovers past 30%, then normal movement returns. Get defeated while fresh and you walk away fine.

(The limp walk is the mod's first AI-generated animation — text-to-motion, retargeted onto the rig and hand-polished. The curl, get-up, injured idle and limp walk are one authored set, so they flow into each other without a pop.)

🆕 NEW: Untie your captives
Subduing is no longer forever. Right-click a subdued zombie → Untie: a short crouch, your rope and duct tape refunded (exactly the one tape charge the subdue spent), and the captive handed back to the wild — it lies there a beat, stands up, and comes for you like any other knocked-down zombie. The menu warns you first. Choose wisely.

🌡️ Sexual-limit moodle
Works without MoodleFramework now, like the arousal moodle. Previously it simply didn't exist unless you had MF installed.
It's a timed notice instead of a permanent HUD fixture: crossing your limit shows it for a configurable number of in-game hours (default 12), then it clears until you cross the limit again.
🚻 Opposite-gender-only option
New sandbox toggle (default OFF): when ON, sex scenes only resolve for opposite-gender pairings — F/F and M/M never fire from a defeat roll, never appear in the subdued or friendly menus, and a corpse-menu click on a same-sex body does nothing. It overrides "Allow male-on-male scenes". The male-submissive spoof is unaffected (it only re-skins the animation side), and the gender-agnostic drags still play.

☠️ Defeat & scene fixes
A defeat no longer ends in a curl with no scene at all — "it skips the scene as if nothing happened". Scene credits were being spent on launch attempts: a blocked pairing, a refusal or an engine hiccup each burned one, and with a single zombie on you that was one silent failure away from a sceneless collapse. Credits are now only spent by scenes that actually played; failed launches retry or hand the turn back. (reported on Discord)
A single bite no longer shreds your whole outfit — the full clothing carnage is reserved for a real swarm overwhelm (5+ zombies), and in the default "Bottom only" strip mode your top now stays on. (reported by bluemarshal)
No more freezing when a defeat catches you mid-trip — defeats no longer fire while you're tripping, climbing, knocked down or getting up; they defer and retry the moment you're upright. A player sitting on the ground to rest can still give up. (reported by bluemarshal)
A clothing-rip roll is no longer wasted while you're down — it used to burn the roll on a hit the system was guaranteed to refuse, so a player pinned under a pile could be bitten to death without the give-up ever landing.
DefeatPunch / DefeatLunge stop about a second early-late — both scenes played roughly an extra second of animation past the visible finish. Their outros shipped looped and restarted from the top while waiting for release; they now hold the final pose. (reported by bluemarshal, with video)
Scene partners come back walking instead of wedged — the zombie you shared a scene with was often left frozen in its grab pose. It was being restored standing on top of you (a zombie in body contact has its movement wiped every tick), carrying a stale path request that made the game discard every later order. It now returns with clearance, offset toward where it stood. (reported by 8BitRizz)
The curled-up breather no longer loses to the limp — if you were already limping from an earlier defeat, the next one skipped its curl and snapped you down and straight back up. The collapse poses now outrank the limp idle.
Only interested zombies undress you — clothing damage is limited to zombies whose gender is actually into your character under your same-sex options. At the defaults a male zombie no longer strips a male player; it bites for real damage instead. (suggested by 8BitRizz)
Gloves stay on — including armored ones.
Holding and Standing Doggy spacing — both upright pairs read visibly too far apart; retuned and regenerated. (reported by bluemarshal, _rachok)
Oral scenes no longer take your character's virginity — only a penetrative act removes the Virgin trait.
Deflowering blood only when something was actually taken — every defeat used to leave groin blood, including oral scenes and characters who were never virgins. (reported by bluemarshal)
Groin pain is gentler — and painkillers actually cure it. It maxed the pain moodle on the first scene and re-asserted itself for a full in-game day, shrugging off meds. Now a softer one-time ache that decays naturally. (reported by bluemarshal)
No shouting from the ground — Q-shout and the emote callout are muted while surrendered or collapsed, restored the moment you're free. (reported by bluemarshal)
Quiet during a consensual scene too — a stray key press used to have your character yell mid-scene and pull the neighbourhood in.
🏃 Sprinter takedown
A sprinter drag now ends in a defeat instead of a dead end. A sprinter that caught you alone would haul you off in whatever direction it tackled you from, drop you somewhere empty and wander away — leaving you standing there until the give-up timed out. The drag now aims at a real destination (the densest nearby group, otherwise the nearest zombie within 25 tiles) and re-aims as your screams pull them in; the zombie that dragged you actually engages when it puts you down; and when there genuinely is nothing around, the defeat ends in the curl immediately instead of five seconds of standing still.
No more input freeze after a drag release — you could be left standing upright and permanently unable to move, aim or do anything, while the character looked completely normal.
Smoother drags — being dragged no longer snaps 45–90° at every course change or jitters when another zombie presses into you, and your character no longer spins 180° in an idle pose the instant they're grabbed. (reported by bluemarshal)
🩸 Stench of the Dead
Giving up and standing straight back up no longer wipes your cloak. With no zombies around, a surrender used to delete the whole accumulated scent. It's now suspended and quietly restored if the surrender produced no real scene. (reported by bluemarshal)
Standing up inside the crowd no longer blows your cover. The collapse leaves you lying among zombies that haven't walked off yet, and every one of those forced contacts permanently revealed you to that zombie — it followed you out and attacked while the rest of the horde still couldn't see you. Contact no longer breaks the cloak while you're down, getting up, escaping or hidden. Hitting a zombie still reveals you to it, as before.
Zombies caught by the cloak mid-lunge settle down instead of standing frozen in the attack pose until something shoves them. (reported by bluemarshal)
Scent survives engine aborts and edge paths — a failed scene no longer forfeits your stashed cloak, and the exposed-zombie list survives a suspension instead of handing you a free aggro reset.
🪢 Subdue & captives
Captives no longer die when you drag them upstairs — or in a basement. The hidden original is re-pinned near you on every tile change, and off ground level that spot was usually open air past the wall, so the engine dropped it to its death. Dropping in place "worked" only because the re-pin never fired. (reported by yuriminalinsky)
A subdued bandit stays a bandit through a scene — playing a scene on one granted you the scent cloak and turned the captive into a plain zombie afterwards ("the bandit disappears").
Clearer menu labels — "Subdue Zombie" → Subdue and "Drag Subdued Zombie" → Drag Subdued, since both work on captured bandits too.
🎬 Scene rendering & crowd
Invisible zombies / frozen bandits after a failed scene — if a scene aborted while setting up, the attacker could be left invisible or stuck frozen in place. Aborts now fully restore visibility and release the bandit.
Zombies hidden so they don't draw over a scene no longer cast their shadow over it either — and any zombie whose scene ended abnormally (you died mid-scene, for instance) now self-heals instead of roaming permanently invisible.
Permanent crawlers fixed — a bystander caught mid-climb during a scene could be frozen unable to ever stand again.
Mid-scene saves are clean — saving while a scene played leaked a zombie that loaded back as a corpse falling out of thin air and vanishing. Scenes are torn down before the world writes, and stale saves are reaped on load.
🔊 Sound
The BJ / face-sit gag actually carries now — it read as near-silent "just coughs"; the vocals now roll a 2:1 vomit-to-muffled-cough mix with a shorter forced gap.
🖱️ UI & icons
Ask for Sex has an icon on friendly bandits — it was on the manifest but the art was never drawn. (reported by bluemarshal)
Correct arousal moodle art — the "had enough" icon was showing for the Pent Up and Desperate tiers; every tier now uses the proper gendered desire art (and the missing male icon was added). The body-count moodle got a clean interlocked-gender pictogram in exchange.
Root and Masturbate context-menu icons polished; new Untie icon.
Sandbox tooltips fit again — the arousal option descriptions were long enough to be a wall of text and flickered when scrolled. (reported by 8BitRizz)
🌍 Localization
The newer UI strings — menu entries, scene names, the player's spoken body-count and trauma lines, and the sandbox options added since — now go through the translation system and ship in all seven languages (EN, CN, CH, RU, ES, FR, DE) instead of being hardcoded English.

⚙️ New sandbox options
Option    Range    Default
[Arousal] Enable arousal    on / off    ON
[Arousal] Hours to full arousal    6–240    96
[Arousal] Desperation penalties    on / off    ON
[Arousal] Magazine arousal gain    0–100    50
[Partners] Limit moodle duration    1–48 in-game hours    12
Opposite-gender scenes only    on / off    OFF
📌 Notes
Updating from 1.1.7: delete the old ZomboRut folder from your mods directory first, then drop the new one in. Don't merge on top.
If you were capping at 60 FPS just for this mod — you don't need to anymore.
Full quit-to-desktop and relaunch after updating; the game caches animation models between saves.
Anything odd → #bug-report, with repro steps and clips.

☠️ Defeat & Takedown


🩸 Post-defeat escape (Stench of the Dead cloak)

[*]The cloak now builds up across a full defeat — it used to reset to 30 minutes on every scene, so no matter how many zombies worked you over you walked away with the bare minimum. It now accumulates while you're being defeated and only starts counting down once you're released — endure more, get a longer cloak (up to the cap).
[*]The cloak no longer makes you immune — walk back into an aggroed swarm during the escape window and it can take you again.
[*]Washing removes the cloak (rep: bluemarshal) — scrubbing off the dead smell is a deliberate trade: you lose the blend-in cover.
[*]Partner no longer blows your cover at scene end — a 5-second bump barrier lets you untangle from the restored partner before a collision can expose you.

🎬 Scene rendering & input

[*]Zombies that render on top of a scene are hidden — a wanderer standing toward the bottom of the screen used to be drawn over the animation, covering it. Such zombies are now hidden while a scene plays and reappear after (new sandbox Hide zombies blocking the view, default ON). Skipped during drags so nothing flickers as you move.
[*]Right-mouse aiming no longer warps scene animations — aim input is suppressed for the duration of a scene, so you can hold RMB harmlessly.
[*]No more flicker during scenes — the crowd-control decoy ping that nudged zombies in and out of view every half-second is disabled while it's reworked.
[*]No more creeping between back-to-back give-up scenes — in a group give-up the player used to visibly skate ~1 tile toward each next attacker; in-place scenes now stay put.
[*]Parked bandit partners stay put (rep: bluemarshal #224) — the hidden bandit original no longer wanders off and opens windows mid-scene.

🪢 Subdue & Capture

[*]Captives survive streaming away and back — walking far enough to unload the area and returning could leave a captive un-subdued, duplicated (one bound + a free copy), or swapped to the wrong sex/clothing. Re-creation from the saved appearance snapshot is fixed: no premature stand-in, no orphaned copies, correct body model and clothing restored.
[*]Leg-drag idle pose fixed — while dragging a subdued zombie and standing still, the victim no longer twists up and floats off the floor.

🧬 Traits

[*]Groin pain is now a "first time / overuse" ache — a Virgin aches on the deflowering scene (fires exactly once, since Virgin is then removed); after that, no new ache unless you run 5+ groin (non-oral) scenes in a single in-game day. Male / Rapist / Lewd immunities unchanged.
[*]Male players no longer get groin pain after sex (rep: bluemarshal #203).

🖱️ UI, menus & options

[*]One tidy right-click menu — every ZomboRut feature is now folded under a single ZomboRut Options submenu instead of stacking several separate top-level entries on the vanilla menu. When nothing applies, no ZomboRut entry shows at all.
[*]Full inline options in the Mod Options panel — the ZomboRut entry now lists every sandbox option as a checkbox / slider / dropdown (localised in all 7 languages); edits apply immediately and persist with the save. The "Open Sandbox Options" button stays as a fallback.
[*]ZomboRut is filed under "Z" in Mod Options (was "Project ZomboRut" under P).
[*]Debug: spawn single or 8-strong walker/sprinter hordes ahead of you for takedown testing.

⚙️ Sandbox options

[*]New: Bare-hit scene chance (default 25%); Hide zombies blocking the view (default ON).
[*]Removed: the behaviour-meter toggle (the meter is always on now).