News Archive: Week 9, 2026

All right, I've made a lot of fixes over the last day. If your zombie virus suddenly vanished, you can visit the healer to have it re-applied to your avatar, with roughly where it should be time-wise.

👋 Hey Folks!

Last night the site went down for our quickly-scheduled maintenance, and unfortunately I wasn't able to complete the migration in time (even with a few extra hours of downtime!).

What happened: The database got stuck migrating the item_instances table — that's where we store all of your wardrobe items. Turns out you've all collected a lot of items over the years. You should be proud! But it also means this table takes a very long time to run migrations over.

What this means: We'll be living with the current lag and some strange bugs (like random hair) for a few more days while I investigate whether we can migrate this table slowly in the background without stressing the site. I'll have an update soon.

Cron was down: While the site was down, our "cron" system (the magical timer ⏲️) got turned off, which stopped zombie progression and other site progression. It wasn't able to restore itself until around 10AM Subeta time. Unfortunately, I can't step back in time and re-run everything that should have happened, so progression starts fresh from there. That means some folks' Zombie strains will need a little extra time, we gave Survival some extra runway because we knew there might be complications like this. I'll keep an eye on it, and we can extend it if needed, or reduce timers.

The bigger picture: I know this sucks. We're between two sites right now and features aren't working 100%, and some people are seeing weird hair on their avatars they didn't put there. I know everyone wants everything to just work. We're a very small team now, doing our best to get us there.

I'll keep you updated. Thanks for sticking with us! 💙

The wild demi and irion have made their appearance! Which do you think is the fastest?

Whew, we've seen tens of thousands of kisses per hour, and have the lag to match it. Zombie progression is attempting to happen on the five minute mark, but it's being pushed back further and further in the queue while processing is attempting to happen.

I'm going to be taking the site down tonight at ~1AM (subeta time) to perform some critical database updates, update our indexes to speed things up and make our web servers more capable of spinning up new resources during events.

I'm expecting the downtime to be ~3 hours, and we'll come back up much zippier!

Hey everyone, First off: sorry. I pushed Survival live and a bunch of stuff is broken. If you've been hitting errors or features that just aren't working, you're not imagining it. We know.

The short version is that a lot of Survival's features are connected to systems that are mid-transition over to Kumos, and that's causing things to break in ways that are, frankly, annoying to deal with on your end and ours. We're actively bringing things back up right now.

I mean, would it really be Survival if nothing went wrong? (The answer is no. It would not.)

We're in this weird in-between place with two sites running at once, and it sucks. It's exactly as conflicting and frustrating as it sounds. There are going to be bugs. We're squashing them as fast as we can, and if we need to push dates back to make sure everything actually works, we will. I've posted elsewhere about how we need to do this transition, and now sooner than ever.

And for stuff like the <a href=https://kumos.subeta.net/forums/t/943247/survival-celebration?forumid=8>Kissing Booth feature: the whole point is to get you as many hearts and goodies as possible. That's the goal, and we're going to make sure you get there.

Thanks for your patience, and sorry again for the rough start. We're on it.

The Voluntary Infection Program is finally open! Gunner has given his program a bit of a facelift which you can find here. With the program now on kumos.subeta.net, you'll have an easier time distinguishing new strains from older ones.

As some of you older zombies know, when you choose a strain you get thrown into a queue before you are properly infected. To make that time go by faster, you can get bitten by zombies on the Survival forums with that same strain. You will see your queue status on the VIP page!

[item=Fantastic Fiction: Slow Burn]

Louis of L'amour Parlor fame and the Zombie Den's own Skitters are back with a new selection of items.

Skitters only requires your hard earned sP while Louis will want any candy hearts you receive from kissing users.

Speaking of kissing users!

You can now create a kissing booth on the Survival Forums.

When you create a new topic, you'll have the option to make your thread a booth. Note: Once a booth, always a booth. You can't just turn it off.

What are the limits to kissing, because lips need to rest! You can be in 3 kissing booths as a regular user, 5 with a gold account. NPCs like Qazim and others will be joining booths to give a kiss or two.

You'll be able to see interesting stats like most kisses given, most candy hearts, as well as other features like a quick chat and a kiss feed. We hope you enjoy!

Do you have fond memories of different stages of past viruses? Well, you can relive them with the help of Rachelle in the Underground.

You can choose any stage from any virus you have already unlocked. We can't wait to see how y'all incorporate some of the middle stages! Rachelle will have this feature available year-round. 💋

WHEW. That's a lot! Just a few last things to be aware of.

💋 Snowballs have been closed until the end of Survival. 💋 Survival will end on March 15. 💋 The Survival forums will close with the holiday.