SCUM’s wildlife test is live on Steam

SCUM just put its wildlife test on Steam, and the full Into The Wild June Update is due on Monday, June 29.

The new Alpha Playtest build is meant to give the team more live data on how animals behave across different servers, locations, times of day, player counts, and playstyles. That extra testing is meant to catch edge cases before the wildlife system lands in the full update.

Players can opt into the Public Alpha branch through Steam, then join one of the official servers. The studio also warned single-player users to back up save files before switching branches, and said private server owners will not get Public Alpha server files.

The official Public Alpha servers are:

The build focuses on wildlife behavior, population changes, death states, performance work, and several fixes from recent testing. The team also said this is still an Alpha Playtest, so flee behavior, bait feeder interactions, animal population, and predator response can keep changing.

Patch Notes

CHANGES IN THIS ALPHA BUILD INCLUDE:

The latest alpha build is focused on how wildlife spawns, moves, reacts, and dies, while also tightening up performance and a handful of edge cases tied to the new system.

• Animal population now updates throughout the in-game day, rather than only updating when day / night changes
• Bait feeders have been updated to work with the new population system, attracting existing animals or spawning a new animal if there are none around to ensure the player is rewarded for using them
• Further iteration on flee behaviour, which should reduce some stuck-animal cases
• Animals can now die correctly while moving between different behaviour states
• Fixed several animal death-flow issues, including cases where animals could appear dead but remain standing
• Dead prey animals now attract predators in a similar way to bait feeders, but they won’t spawn new animals
• Fixed cases where animals could spawn in water
• Fixed cases where animals would run into water
• Continued performance optimization work

The studio said the goal is still to test how free-roaming land animals feel across the whole island, not just in controlled internal sessions. That includes animal density, hunting flow, predator and prey encounters, server performance, and the kind of problems that only show up once more players are on the island at the same time.

If you’ve been testing the wildlife build, tell us what you think in the comments, and follow us on X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram for more updates.

Source: Steam