Apocalypse Arsenal is a comprehensive overhaul of the many guns in State of Decay: YOSE, making extensive changes to the damage, range, accuracy, recoil, handling, rate of fire and durability of each gun and making countless bug fixes and improvements, as well as overhauling the way the shooting skill works in order to enhance the game’s RPG elements. Training up your survivors is much more important and the greater difference between a rookie and an expert incentivizes choosing the right weapons for each survivor based on their skill level.

The ultimate aim is to make the game’s many guns more varied and distinct from each other, more satisfying to use, and more deadly (especially in the right hands!).

Features
Zed Outreach Program
In vanilla State of Decay, all guns have perfect accuracy but have very limited effective range. A damage “falloff” mechanic means that past a set distance in meters, bullets rapidly lose damage to the point that they can no longer kill any zed other than a bloater. Once “out of range” in this way, shots can still connect with their target, but they will only stagger a zed, even with repeated headshots. This rendered even sniper rifles ineffective at long ranges.

With Apocalypse Arsenal, this is no longer the case. With the exceptions of shotguns and .22s, every weapon from the smallest pistol to the mightiest rifle now retains lethal velocity at the longest possible range. If you can hit your target, that is. Long-range accuracy will be rewarded and sniping at extreme ranges is now possible. If you can hit it, you can kill it.

Stats actually matter
All guns in State of Decay have ratings in the journal for accuracy, sound, recoil and durability, while damage is generally (but not always!) based on the ammo type and not the gun itself.

The catch is, these ratings were largely meaningless as they often did not reflect the gun’s actual performance at all. Whether rated 1/5 or 5/5 for accuracy, every gun in the game is actually 100% pinpoint accurate with zero spread whatsoever on the first shot (shotguns excepted), while recoil is very light all across the board. There is little felt difference between a 1/5 recoil gun and a 5/5. In practice this meant that even though State of Decay contains hundreds of firearms, the handling of each one is similar and only a small handful are “ideal”. The lightest gun with the largest ammo capacity was almost always the best choice for any survivor.

With Apocalypse Arsenal, every weapon has been overhauled in detail so that its actual handling characteristics in-game relates to its rating in the journal. The difference between an easy-handling .22 rifle with 1/5 recoil and a large-caliber automatic weapon with 5/5 recoil is now staggering (possibly literally!), and the difference between a pawn shop handgun with 1/5 accuracy and a precision rifle with 5/5 accuracy is equally striking.

Training matters
“The trick is to squeeze the trigger, not jerk it.”

The way the Shooting skill works for all survivors has also been overhauled. Ranking up the Shooting skill now has a more noticeable effect on survivors’ weapon accuracy and a much more pronounced effect on survivors’ recoil control.

These changes not only make investment in the shooting skill more rewarding, they make many more of the game’s massive arsenal worth using, as the gun that is “best in category” is no longer automatically the best choice for every survivor. That ultra-lightweight assault rifle that was the ideal weapon for every survivor before may now be a wild bucking bronco in a rookie survivor’s hands and is best left to more skilled shooters, while heavier, less-powerful guns that only collected dust in the locker before may now be a much more worthwhile choice because of their easy handling.

Even more versatile shotguns
In vanilla State of Decay, shotguns are insanely good in the hands of a survivor with the shotguns specialization (increasing “kill zone” with each rank) but are a woeful waste of time for anyone else, even those with max shooting. Without a specialization, shotguns tend to only wound and knock down most zeds, which can be useful for crowd control in a pinch, but since it fails to kill most targets, mostly only gives you more work to do.

Apocalypse Arsenal closes this gap. The shotgun specialization still boosts shotguns' lethality significantly, but is no longer mandatory to make them viable. All shotguns are more lethal “out of the box” and have a wider or narrower spread based on their accuracy stat. As long as you aim high to hit the head, shotguns can be effective even for a rookie survivor, but they remain tricky to use due to their low magazine capacity, long reload times, and high recoil.

Bug fixes, quality of life fixes, and more

• On select-fire weapons, semi-auto is now the default mode and automatic is optional, rather than the other way around. You'll need to opt-in to wasting all your ammo!
• Fixed incorrect shell ejection FX on many guns. Some rifles ejected pistol caliber casings and vice versa. Disabled shell ejection FX entirely on certain manually operated guns (revolvers, break action shotguns, etc.) some of which previously ejected casings with each shot.
• Disabled +1 reloading (bonus round in the chamber) for open-bolt guns (M3 Grease Gun, Uzi, MAC-10, M249, etc.) and most bolt-action guns.
• Updated rate of fire on most automatic or select-fire guns to closely match their real-life counterparts. There is now a much more significant difference between an M3 Grease Gun (450rpm) and a Super Z (over 1000 rpm).
• Overhauled the gun loot tables completely for vanilla, Breakdown and Lifeline. DLC weapons are no longer far more likely to spawn than anything else. Instead, guns are separated into "Common", "Uncommon", "Rare" and "Ultra Rare" so that, for example, a common M16A4 is more likely to spawn in a military stash than a rare L85A1.