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Watch trailer on Steam ↗Cold Response
Eternal Minds · Published by Eternal Minds · Official site ↗
Content notice: The game features graphic violence, combat, weapons, explicit language and drug use.
Last updated 28 Sept 2026
Explore and survive a war torn Sweden through the eyes of an unknown soldier, alone or with friends.
Action, Adventure, Simulation, Early Access · More free games
Embark on a solo or multiplayer journey through Sweden's war-torn landscapes as an unknown soldier. In Cold Response, your choices shape survival in a simulation that blurs the lines between action and adventure.
About this game
EVERY BULLET A RISK. EVERY ITEM A LIABILITY.
Survive a brutal, persistent and sometimes contaminated 100-player 400km^2 open world where the environment is as lethal as the players. In this high-stakes PvPvE landscape, there are no match timers, no artificial resets, and no safety nets. Your survival depends on tactical patience, physical preparation, and the literal integrity of your gear.
Vulnerable Physical Inventory
In most games, your backpack is a magic void. Here, every item is a physical object. Vests and carriers offer protection and storage, but they are subject to the same ballistics as your body.
Collateral Damage: If your carrier vest is hit, the items inside, from fragile medical vials to volatile explosives, can be destroyed or detonate on your chest.
Weight of the World: Carrying capacity and item weight directly impact your stamina and calorie consumption. Every piece of loot is a trade-off between power and exhaustion.
Tactical Ballistics & Physiological Trauma
Combat is defined by realistic physics, including bullet trajectory, gravity, and material penetration. We move beyond simple health bars to a complex physiological system:
Shock & Blood: Track your blood levels and shock value. Accumulated shock can render you unconscious in the middle of a firefight, while blood loss impairs vision and physical performance.
Manual Medical Intervention: Wounds don't heal themselves. You must manually manage your recovery, treating specific traumas to avoid debilitating infections that cause audible coughing or groaning, betraying your position to nearby threats.
The Scavenger’s Logic: 11 Functional Biomes
The world is logical. Loot spawns according to the history of the world, forcing you to plan your expeditions based on your immediate needs:
The Essentials: Scavenge Food, Civilian, and Agricultural zones to stay fueled.
The Foundation: Raid Industrial, Construction, and Hunting areas for tools and base-building materials.
The Frontline: Secure life-saving gear in Police, Firefighter, and Medic hubs.
The Endgame: Braving Military complexes and Contaminated zones is the only way to secure top-tier weaponry and specialized protection.
Player-Driven Economy & Territory
Safe Zone Hubs: Travel long distances to neutral social hubs to trade. While NPC vendors provide basics, the core economy is a player-to-player marketplace driven by real supply and demand.
Base Building: Establish a foothold using the Plotpole system to claim land. Build tiered shelters and workbenches, but be prepared, bases require regular upkeep to prevent decay, demanding active resource management.
Absolute Permanent Death
Death is final. When you die, you lose everything. Your body remains in the world, leaving your loot, and the gear that wasn't destroyed in the fight, available for anyone to scavenge. Stealth and preparation are not just playstyles; they are requirements for a long life.
Open-Source Modding & Persistence
Built on Unreal Engine 5 with AngelScript gameplay logic, the game is designed for community longevity.
Host Your Own: Deploy dedicated servers with custom rule sets.
Expand the Game: Utilize open-source core logic to create custom mods, assets, and unique gameplay loops for your community.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Yes
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: 5GB VRAM
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 15 GB available space
Recommended
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: 12GB VRAM
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 15 GB available space
Supported Languages
*languages with full audio support
Latest news
Patch NotesOfficial
Changelog: May 10 - August 3, 2026
Cold Response Changelog: May 18 - August 3, 2026 Yeah, so. Last changelog was May 18. Almost three months of radio silence, and that one is on me, but the work never stopped: over 300 commits on the game plus a pile of engine-level work. This is everything worth your time, grouped by system so you do not have to read about the same bug five times. Short version: engine upgraded to Unreal 5.8.1, NPCs got real eyes and real grudges, drones got a mission planner, vehicles got fixed for real this time, the terrain remembers where you drive, and both your client and our servers run a lot better than they did in May. Unreal Engine 5.8.1The whole game moved from Unreal Engine 5.7.4 to 5.8.1, client and servers both. NVIDIA DLSS upgraded to 4.5 while we were at it. Nanite is now disabled on the main map. Honest reason: it ran badly on older cards. If you are on older hardware you should see better framerates. We caught and fixed the 5.8 regressions fast: the dirtbike massively desyncing in multiplayer (the 5.8 physics replication rewrite diverges without bound in our setup, reverted to the mode that syncs perfectly), a 2 Hz jitter on every driven vehicle as seen by other players, and the bike suspension feeling wrong (nose-diving on throttle, wheels clipping into the ground, roll wobble). Known issue: AMD FSR is temporarily unavailable. AMD has not shipped a UE 5.8 compatible plugin yet, and it comes back the moment they do. DLSS, DLAA and NIS are unaffected. Game updates on Steam are now much smaller. We aligned our packaging with how Steam actually does delta patches, so a small fix no longer makes you re-download huge chunks. Actual Unreal Engine bugs we fixed We run a custom engine build, and this period we fixed several engine bugs at the source instead of working around them: Server crash when driving across a world streaming boundary. The vehicle suspension kept a dangling reference to ground that streamed out under the wheels. This crashed a live server on July 30 a...Read full article on Community Announcements (Hoffa | Cold Response)AnnouncementsOfficial
Hundreds of NPCs, Dynamic Events, and Major Optimization
Hello Cold Responders!Our team has been busy in the past weeks and we wouldn't withhold our most recently added features and fixes to you. Current playtesters already appear to enjoy them!Update Notes (April 21 to May 10) AI and NPCs NPC Pool Subsystem. Hundreds of designer-placed spawners (Bambi, faction NPCs) no longer tick individually. On boot, each spawner snapshots its config into a single server-side pool and destroys itself. The pool prewarms cold pawns at a sequester point, then runs a 1 Hz scheduler that acquires pawns near players and a 5 Hz recycle gate that returns dead pawns to the pool after a 7 minute visibility-gated hold. Net effect: hundreds of NPCs supported with a fraction of the previous tick cost.GOAP optimization. Expensive operations are now batched, the GOAP tick rate is slowed, and a new dedicated AI Targeting Subsystem owns per-NPC target selection. The targeting component itself was refactored to feed the subsystem.More spawners on the map. A couple of hundred additional NPC spawners have been placed across L_Alpha.Season-aware AI. Helpers added so AI behavior can branch on the current in-game season. World Events Dynamic Event System (v1). Designers drop one event Blueprint per event location. The actor itself is the event: visual props, guard post scene components, and loot anchors all live on the placed BP. A world subsystem rolls one event per in-game day, materializes the closest candidate when a player is within range, force-spawns one-shot loot at the loot anchors, and dematerializes when players leave. Announcements use the in-game MGRS grid (for example "Abandoned Convoy reported near grid F11"). One concurrent event server-wide for now.QA Menu. Press Comma for a developer test menu surfacing event triggers, console helpers, and other test hooks. Static Doors AStaticDoor. New level-designer door actor distinct from the base-building door. Hinge swing, open/close/locked sounds, replicated open and locked state, per-world JSON sav...Read full article on Community Announcements (Megalomaniac)Patch NotesOfficial
Systems Update: Building, Drones & Persistence
Hello Cold Responders!Our team is working hard to deliver the remaining core game loop components and we are excited to share our latest progress with you.Base Building and Crafting Foundation of the base building and crafting system is in. Place plotpoles, build structures, doors with codelocks, and 7 day upkeep/decay on unmaintained claims.Items placed inside a claim now serialize correctly.Workbench reworked for crafting stations, hybrid storage, preparations for crafting in inventory.Items can now declare a separate visual for placed vs held state.Fixed missing base building assets in the shipping build.Drone System V2 Full rework. No more possession: press Mouse 2 to toggle input between you and the drone, and drop your drone from the hotbar to deploy.Goggles feed now runs through the visor.Drone added to vendors.Pair/Unpair and Take Control sound hooks.Fixed head scale changing and visor toggle bugs.Groundwork for Betaflight style drone tuning (widgets and control flow landed; UI polish coming).Melee Weapons New melee combat: server authoritative, multi point swept traces, multi hit per swing with unique target dedupe.New fire axe mesh thanks Skald Several melee bugs fixed.Vendors and Safe Zones Vendor NPCs and commerce live in the first safe zone on the alpha map.Flea Market style UI added.Per vendor JSON config and per item categories/subcategories drive what each vendor accepts and sells.Implement currency items.Player Corpse Persistence When you die, your corpse and its loot now persist in the world for up to 7 days.Fixed an issue where items were sometimes left stuck on corpses.Durability drains on the world corpse over time.Audio Per item audio effect chain overrides: different gear changes how the world sounds around you (muffled helmets, etc.).Ongoing audio pass from Iram across the board.Wind sound effects when driving a bike fast in first person.Map and World More neighborhoods blocked out on the alpha map.More road splines placed and connected, foli...Read full article on Community Announcements (Megalomaniac)Patch NotesOfficial
November State of the game Update
This is the first in a series of monthly updates on what we have been working on for the game. Key take way is obviously that we managed to squeeze 8 players into a p2p game, without any noticeable stress on the network traffic. Looking good for the future and larger amount of players!Player Characters p2p MP/Cooppathfinding updates and more! In addition to this there is a bunch of laser visualising of the ballistics system.Read full article on Community Announcements (Alouatta)
