Scum, Public Alpha Update: New Free-Roaming Notes (18th June 2026)

Prisoners,

We’ve released a new Alpha Playtest build for free-roaming animals.

Thank you to everyone who has already jumped into the Alpha Playtest and shared feedback. Your reports have helped the team identify issues, validate fixes, and better understand how free-roaming animals behave outside internal testing.

If you’re able to spend some time in the Alpha Playtest, this latest build gives the team more to learn from. Free-roaming animals behave differently across servers, locations, times of day, player counts, and playstyles, so continued testing helps us validate fixes and spot edge cases before the system moves closer to release.

This build focuses on improving animal behaviour, population updates, death states, performance, and some of the issues reported during recent tests.

CHANGES IN THIS ALPHA BUILD INCLUDE:

• 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

This is still an Alpha Playtest, so some behaviours will not be final. Flee behaviour, bait feeder interactions, animal population, and predator response are all areas we are continuing to test and improve.

JOIN THE FREE-ROAMING ANIMALS PUBLIC ALPHA

Free-Roaming Animals: Public Alpha is now live.

Free-roaming land animals need to feel right across the whole island, not just in controlled internal tests. That includes animal density, hunting flow, predator and prey encounters, server performance, and the kind of issues that only show up when more players are out there together.

That’s why we’re opening this build early. You can try the feature before the June update goes live, and your feedback will help us tune how free-roaming wildlife feels before release.

How To Access the Public Alpha

You can access the Public Alpha through Steam:

1. Open your Steam Library
2. Right-click SCUM
3. Select Properties
4. Open the Betas tab
5. Select the Public Alpha branch

Once you are on the Public Alpha branch, join one of the available Public Alpha servers listed below.

Public Alpha Server List

Important Notes

This is a Public Alpha build, so you may run into bugs, performance issues, balance issues, crashes, or odd animal behaviour.

If you play single-player, please back up your save files before switching branches.

Public Alpha server files will not be available for private server owners. This test is focused on Official Public Alpha servers so the team can collect the logs, crash dumps, and live data before release.

Feedback

We’ve opened up dedicated Discord channels for discussion and reports.

We’ve also pinned a structured feedback survey, so you can tell us how the new wildlife feels after spending time with it.

Please keep reporting issues, odd behaviour, performance problems, and anything that feels off while testing.

Free-roaming animals arrive in the full Into The Wild June Update on Monday, June 29th.

Thank you to everyone helping us bring free-roaming animals back to the Island.