Gamescom is not exactly the easiest place to sell someone on another survival crafting game. Walking through the halls in 2026, you could probably survive for several days simply by collecting every variation of open world, crafting, co-op and survival mentioned across the show floor. So when I sat down with Nelson Woon, Game Publishing Director for Zeverland, the genre description itself wasn’t what caught my attention. Our interview was followed by an exclusive hands-on session, with the Quantum Quirks team guiding me through the build and helping me explore some of the systems we had just spent our time talking about.
It was the zombies.
Zeverland has a rather peculiar idea of what the end of the world should look like. Its apocalypse is colourful and almost cheerful, populated by stylised survivors and wide-eyed Zeds — Zeverland’s zombies — that can look more like collectible figures than something waiting to chew through your arm. Quantum Quirks describes the balance as “cute, uncanny, and grounded,” and the inevitable Funko Pop comparison came up during our conversation. Personally, I was getting a strong Plants vs. Zombies vibe as well — not because the two games are particularly alike, but because Zeverland seems similarly comfortable making its undead colourful, silly and oddly likeable without forgetting that they’re still there to eat you.
Yet underneath that approachable appearance is a buy-to-play PvE survival crafting game with some surprisingly big ideas about how much freedom players should have.
And the scale matters here. Zeverland is being built around three different ways of inhabiting its apocalypse. Private servers use a smaller 8×8 kilometre map, with an adjustable player count for solo survivors and groups of friends. The official permanent and seasonal servers expand that to 72×72 kilometres, with the studio targeting more than 1,000 players sharing the same world. Permanent servers are intended to persist without wipes, while seasonal worlds eventually reset after their inhabitants have collectively pushed that season towards an ending. We’ll come back to what that actually means later.
All three are built around PvE rather than traditional survival-game PvP. Other survivors are meant to be potential neighbours and collaborators, not walking loot containers waiting to be shot. Players cannot simply kill each other or casually tear apart somebody else’s home, which becomes rather important when the same game also promises to let its inhabitants dismantle huge portions of the world around them.
That’s quite a lot of facts to throw at you before we’ve properly started. So let’s zoom back out for a moment. Before dismantling towns, turning trucks into homes or worrying about what happens when a thousand survivors occupy the same apocalypse, it is worth looking at who is actually building Zeverland — and what kind of survival game they set out to make.
Every Sandbox Has a Fence Somewhere
Quantum Quirks itself is a new studio, although not necessarily an inexperienced one. The team describes its core as industry veterans, many with more than a decade in game development and experience contributing to established titles. Nelson himself offered a rather literal example: the business card he handed me at Gamescom still carried Farlight Games branding, the studio behind the rather popular AFK Journey.
What brought the team together was a shared fondness for survival and open-world crafting games, and Zeverland is their attempt to build one around the kind of freedom they wanted from the genre themselves.
By the time we met at Gamescom, the project had already gone through its second player test in June 2026. That test appears to have been important for more than bug hunting. Player feedback has been feeding directly into some fairly fundamental decisions about Zeverland, including its multiplayer structure and the relationship the developers want survivors to have with each other. Putting that many people into a shared survival sandbox creates plenty of design problems, especially when the same players are given considerable freedom to reshape the world around them.
The basic survival premise, meanwhile, sounds reassuringly familiar. You arrive in a post-apocalyptic world and deal with the usual hierarchy of problems: find clean water, secure some food and put something solid between yourself and whatever is wandering around outside. Once those immediate concerns are handled, however, the boundaries are supposed to become considerably less obvious.
“We wanted to make sure that this feels like a limitless game where you can do anything that you want and build anything you want,” the team explained during our conversation.
“Limitless” is a dangerous word to throw around in game development, and I wouldn’t take it literally. Every sandbox eventually has a fence somewhere. What interests me more is where Zeverland is trying to put that fence. The answer, judging by both our conversation and the material shown at Gamescom, seems to be: preferably somewhere far enough away that players have plenty of opportunities to do something stupid (or charming) before they find it.
If It Exists, You Can Probably Take It Apart
Once the immediate business of not dying is handled, Zeverland starts treating the environment less like scenery and more like a particularly large ideas supply cupboard.
“You can just tear down anything you can see,” the team told me at Gamescom. As with the earlier promise of a “limitless” sandbox, there will obviously be technical boundaries to that statement, but the examples shown so far suggest the team is taking the idea surprisingly far.
Power pylons, safes, furniture, wheels and assorted pieces of the cities around you can all become resources. Find an abandoned gas station and you are not limited to searching its shelves for conveniently placed loot; the building itself may contain things worth dismantling. See something useful that doesn’t need to be reduced to raw materials? Take it home instead. Zeverland’s approach is essentially tear it down, haul it home, or find another use for it.
Plenty of survival games allow us to point an axe at the environment until a tree becomes Wood ×12, but Zeverland wants objects to retain some usefulness as objects. A metal pipe can become raw material, while a perfectly good piece of furniture can simply become your perfectly good piece of furniture. The material shown at Gamescom suggests players can pick through mansions, firehouses, gas stations or even entire towns this way.
This philosophy extends naturally into construction. Players can claim territory and build their own bases, from practical shelters to considerably more elaborate structures. Quantum Quirks’ own examples include recreating real-world buildings block by block or simply stacking a tower towards the sky. How far players will actually manage to push that system is something I would rather judge once we can properly get our hands on it, but the intention is clear: the world is supposed to provide building material in a much more literal sense than simply scattering crafting nodes across the map.
The scale we established earlier makes that idea considerably more interesting. Zeverland’s permanent servers don’t generate an untouched new landscape for every player or small group. They begin with a pre-designed world, but what happens to it afterwards is another matter.
Trees can disappear, buildings can be dismantled, useful objects hauled elsewhere and new settlements constructed where the old world used to stand. With that many people sharing a persistent environment, the cumulative effect could become more interesting than any single act of destruction. Months down the line, the question may not simply be what was originally placed somewhere on the map, but what that particular server’s inhabitants have removed, moved or built in its place.
That’s also why the PvE protections introduced earlier matter. A sandbox where almost everything can be dismantled sounds liberating until strangers are given permission to apply the same philosophy to each other’s homes. Zeverland wants players to have enormous freedom over the remains of civilisation without automatically turning that freedom into a griefing simulator. Exactly where those ownership and permission boundaries sit will be important to see in practice.
It’s actually quite a striking contrast to another survival game I recently covered, Honeycomb: The World Beyond. In that interview, the developers described almost the opposite philosophy: a world and ecosystem meant to be studied and preserved rather than gradually dismantled for resources. Zeverland happily goes the other way. Apparently, this time I’m not here to respect the ecosystem. I’m here to recycle it.
Home Is Wherever You Park It
A base in a survival game usually represents progress through permanence. First comes the miserable wooden box, then storage, crafting stations and increasingly elaborate defences until leaving it behind feels roughly equivalent to moving house in real life. Zeverland is happy to let you build that way, but it also offers a rather more appealing solution: put the house on wheels.
Vehicles are not treated simply as a faster way to cross the map. They’re being built as modular platforms, with different chassis carrying their own characteristics for top speed, weight capacity, terrain handling and fuel consumption. Individual vehicles then provide modification slots across areas such as the front, roof, body, wheels and cargo bed.
The practical result is that a vehicle can gradually become something considerably more useful than transport. During our interview, the team used an RV as an example: add solar panels, install furniture and turn it into a small travelling home. The material shown at Gamescom expands that idea with storage, generators, water purifiers and lighting, while Quantum Quirks says more elaborate additions such as armour plates, machine guns, flamethrowers and rams are also planned.
It creates an interesting extension of the scavenging system from the previous chapter. Finding a useful piece of furniture does not necessarily mean dragging it all the way back to a permanent camp. Your camp may be parked outside the POI.
There is still plenty of room for players who prefer roots over wheels. Zeverland allows camps to be linked with those belonging to friends, creating a larger shared safe zone with building permissions across the group. There are some similarities here to the community-built cities of Pax Dei. You can check out my video on the game, where I also stumbled into a rather unusual nomadic way of playing while everyone else was busy putting down roots. And while the game is clearly designed with co-op in mind, the idea is that progress around a settlement shouldn’t stop simply because your usual companions are offline.
NPC survivors can be recruited from the world and brought back to camp, where they take over some of survival gaming’s less glamorous chores. According to the team, they can gather resources, craft, guard the settlement and heal (Palworld anyone?), while also contributing to progression by unlocking recipes and upgrading weapons. The idea is less about replacing human companions and more about making a settlement function as an actual settlement rather than an impressive warehouse that only comes alive when four players log in.
Zeverland seems determined to make ownership flexible. A chair can be furniture, loot or raw material. A truck can be transport, storage or home. A camp can be a private cabin or part of something much larger. The systems overlap instead of insisting that every object has exactly one purpose.
A Tennis Racket, Some Iron and Poor Judgement
If dismantling the world is one half of Zeverland’s obsession with repurposing things, the weapon system is where Quantum Quirks appears to have stopped asking whether two objects should go together.
The example that came up during our interview was wonderfully straightforward: take a tennis racket, add some iron, and you get a Scorching Club. It sounds like the sort of improvised weapon you would make five minutes into an apocalypse, shortly before discovering why nobody manufactured tennis rackets this way in the first place. In Zeverland, however, it is only one entry in a system that currently promises more than 600 combinations.
The examples get progressively less sensible. A dagger combined with a rubber chicken becomes a Killer Beak, capable of making Zeds bleed. Attach a DSLR camera to a metal baseball bat and the result is a Stun Bat, gathering enemies together before stunning the whole group. Even pieces of the zombies themselves can eventually become weapon components.
There is an obvious danger with a system like this becoming little more than a catalogue of jokes. The strange combinations are supposed to have actual mechanical consequences rather than simply producing increasingly ridiculous-looking sticks.
“You don’t have a recipe, but you need to be strategic,” the team explained during our conversation. Different combinations provide different attributes, and those attributes matter against particular enemies. The Scorching Club, for example, is especially useful against Zeds with flammable skin. Other combinations can provide elemental effects, bonuses against specific opponents or advantages suited to a stealthier approach.
That makes experimentation part of preparing for a fight. Instead of discovering Iron Bat Recipe and manufacturing progressively higher-level versions of the same object, players are encouraged to look at the materials they have collected and work out what properties can be useful against whatever is causing trouble outside. With hundreds of possible combinations, I suspect there will be a wiki and several terrifyingly detailed spreadsheets before the game even launches. Hopefully, the rest of us will still have a chance to discover a few combinations the old-fashioned way: by sticking random things together and seeing what happens. The rubber chicken is funny, certainly, but it still has stats and its part of the improvised apocalypse engineering.
Getting Bitten Is Not Game Over
Zombie infection usually comes with a fairly predictable set of consequences. You get bitten, a meter starts moving in the wrong direction, and suddenly finding a cure becomes considerably more important than whatever you were doing five minutes earlier. Fail, and death is normally waiting at the other end. Zeverland keeps the infection meter, but reaching 100% does something much more interesting.
You become a Zed.
Importantly, this isn’t simply an elaborate death animation. Your infected survivor remains playable for 15 minutes, temporarily putting you on the other side of the apocalypse. Once that time runs out, the character becomes feral and you respawn as a survivor again.
Those 15 minutes come with their own rather unusual progression system. Special Zeds can provide body parts that grant different abilities. A Screamer Head lets you attract nearby Zeds, while Hunter Legs improve sprinting and jumping. A Giant Arm provides enough strength to lift heavy objects and throw them, and the Beast Arm gives its owner a ranged strike with additional attack reach. These parts physically changing the character as well, so your temporarily infected survivor can become a wonderfully mismatched creature assembled from pieces of other Zeds.
There is something delightfully backwards about that idea. As a survivor, encountering a particularly unpleasant new Zed means working out how to kill it efficiently. Once infected yourself, the same creature may represent an ability you would quite like to borrow. During our conversation, I found myself thinking that becoming infected might actually be something players occasionally want to happen rather than desperately avoid.
The 15-minute limit makes that considerably more interesting than permanent zombie progression would have been. You are not choosing a second character class or abandoning your survivor. Zed form is a temporary disruption of the normal survival loop — a short window in which the rules, abilities and even your relationship with the other inhabitants of the server change.
There is one more consequence to becoming a Zed. While survivors normally cannot attack each other, that protection no longer applies once you’re infected. Other players can kill you during those 15 minutes, apparently sending you back to your survivor form early. Becoming a Zed gives you new abilities, but it also puts a target on your back.
A Survival Game Where the Other Players Aren’t the Problem
Zeverland wants to put more than a thousand survivors into the same 72×72 kilometres world, which immediately raises an uncomfortable question for anyone who has spent enough time in the genre: what happens when the most dangerous thing in a zombie apocalypse is another player?
Put enough people into a survival game and sooner or later somebody will decide that the most valuable resource in the world is everything another player has already collected. For some games, that tension is the entire point. Quantum Quirks wants thousands of people inhabiting the same apocalypse, but it doesn’t necessarily want those people to be the apocalypse — and Zeverland is deliberately heading in the opposite direction.
Zeverland is explicitly being built as a PvE survival crafting game, with other survivors intended as potential neighbours and collaborators rather than another category of enemy. That distinction becomes particularly important in a sandbox where so much of the environment can be dismantled and hauled away. All that freedom sounds considerably less charming if logging out for the night means somebody can recycle your entire house.
Interestingly, the cooperative direction became clearer through player feedback. During our interview, the team explained that Zeverland had previously been heading closer towards an MMO-style structure, but testing and conversations with the community pushed them to reconsider how players should interact. Stealing in particular came up in the feedback, leading the game towards stronger protections and a more explicitly PvE experience.
That doesn’t mean everyone has to build alone behind invisible walls. Zeverland still wants players affecting each other’s worlds, just preferably because they decided to cooperate rather than because someone discovered an entertaining new way to ruin a stranger’s evening.
And on the seasonal servers, cooperation is supposed to extend considerably further than sharing a camp or helping somebody survive another night. Entire server populations are supposed to be working towards something larger. The interesting part is that they don’t all have to agree on what that something should be.
Who Gets to Decide How the Apocalypse Ends?
This is where the seasonal servers introduced at the beginning of the article start to make sense. A wipe is easy enough to understand mechanically: everyone starts fresh, established groups lose their accumulated advantage, resources return, and the race begins again. Zeverland wants to attach something more meaningful to that reset. Before the world disappears, its players get to decide what they were trying to save.
Seasonal servers are built around large collective projects. The examples Quantum Quirks showed at Gamescom offer rather different answers to the same post-apocalyptic problem. One path focuses on reconnecting survivors and purifying the world. Another pursues vaccines and experiments with human evolution. Players might instead construct a nationwide underground survival network, or work with Rainwatch on restoring the damaged environment.
“The players are the ones who decide how the season ends,” the team explained.
That sentence probably captures the most far-reaching idea in Zeverland better than any individual crafting or building feature. A seasonal server isn’t supposed to be a disposable copy of the permanent world with a countdown attached. It is its own timeline. Players inherit an apocalypse, spend the season deciding what to do about it, reach an ending shaped by those choices, and then the server resets for another attempt.
Quantum Quirks says subsequent seasons can bring different stories and changes to the world as well. How dramatically one season will differ from another remains something we’ll have to see once the system is actually running, but conceptually it gives the wipe a reason to exist beyond clearing the database. Your enormous camp may disappear, but at least the world gets a conclusion before somebody pulls the plug.
More importantly, this is where many of Zeverland’s systems start connecting. A huge shared world is an impressive feature on paper, but scale alone doesn’t make a multiplayer world interesting. Players need reasons to interact, and these collective projects give entire communities something to work towards beyond building increasingly elaborate homes in their respective corners of the map.
The PvE philosophy fits into the same picture. Strangers are potential contributors to these projects rather than walking loot containers, while camps and communities can become pieces of something operating across the entire server.
Zeverland still has plenty of development ahead of it. A public demo is currently planned for the first quarter of 2027, followed by Early Access later that year, and many of the systems Nelson and the team showed me at Gamescom are still being shaped through player testing. After our interview and hands-on session, though, I came away wanting considerably more time with them.
Familiar survival mechanics keep taking strange little turns here. The world becomes something to dismantle and repurpose, infection briefly changes how you play it, and cooperation eventually reaches beyond your own camp towards deciding the fate of an entire seasonal server. Individually, these ideas are easy enough to understand. How they interact once thousands of players start pulling at them from different directions is where Zeverland gets interesting.
There are already plenty of people waiting to do exactly that. By Gamescom 2026, the team was reporting more than 370,000 Steam wishlists and over 40,000 community members. If Zeverland has caught your attention too, you can check out the Steam page.
One last bit of housekeeping before I leave you waiting for that demo. Zeverland’s official IGN trailer has passed 900,000 views, but the trailer you saw earlier in this article wasn’t that one. I stitched it together myself from gameplay footage and music I managed to salvage from the game’s official press kit. Gamescom journalism occasionally involves interviewing developers; apparently it also involves rummaging through press folders to see what can be turned into a fan-made trailer.
My next proper visit to Zeverland should come with the public demo in early 2027. This time, however, Nelson and the Quantum Quirks team won’t be standing beside me explaining how everything works. I’ll have to survive their deceptively cute apocalypse on my own.
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