Updated June 16, 2026. Official release notes published June 11; V3.0 is stable (current stable V3.0.1, since June 29), and V3.1 "Henpocalypse" is stable on top of it. The official name is Dead Hot Summer - "Sandbox Siege" was the dev-diary working title.
It's named, shipped, and stable: V3.0 "Dead Hot Summer" went stable on June 29, 2026, the V3.0.1 patch followed on July 13, and V3.1 "Henpocalypse" has been the current stable build since July 27. The Fun Pimps held the 3.0 Dead Hot Summer developer stream on June 10 (co-founders Richard & Joel Huenink with Senior Programming Technical Lead Lathan) and published the full release notes on June 11. This page tracks the published facts and what they mean for players and server owners. The canonical live tracker remains 7d2d.net/3.0.
V3.0's core is player agency: 150 sandbox customization options, each with at least two values, which TFP notes works out to billions of preset permutations. The options span eight groups - Player (damage, speeds, XP, death penalties, infection), Entity (spawning, density, zombie speeds per time-of-day, feral sense, digging, rage), World (game stage, blood moon frequency/range/count, storms, day cycle, even map/compass toggles), Resources (per-category abundance from ammo to magazines, loot stages, yields), Crafting (progression, timers, dew collector/apiary tuning, item degradation and repair), Traders (hours, protection, prices, stock), Tasks (quests, challenges, trade routes), and Miscellaneous (vehicle damage, gravity, Big Heads, Tiny Zombies, Black and White mode).
Presets are shareable. Player-made presets can be named and shared, and the old coarse difficulty slider is effectively retired in favor of composable rules.
The "new item feature" teased in the dev diary is Item Magnitude: looted weapons, tools, and workstation mods can roll boosted stats, marked with an orange star and teal percentages - a pickaxe with bonus block damage, a shotgun with extra range, a cooking pot that cooks faster. Alongside it, mods gain progressive quality levels (a Quality 1 Grave Digger adds 5% dirt damage; Quality 6 adds 30%), and optional repair and degradation settings make battle wear consequential. Loot hunting in V3.0 is a stat lottery, not just a quality ladder.
This is the part that will generate every support ticket of the V3.0 cycle: legacy serverconfig.xml properties are removed and replaced by a single SandboxCode property. Twenty-nine familiar properties are gone from serverconfig.xml - including GameDifficulty, XPMultiplier, BloodMoonFrequency, LootAbundance, ZombieMove/ZombieMoveNight/ZombieFeralMove/ZombieBMMove, DropOnDeath, AirDropFrequency, and LootRespawnDays.
The new flow: configure your settings in the in-game Sandbox Options menu, copy the generated code, and paste it into serverconfig.xml as the SandboxCode value. The default (equivalent to the old Adventurer difficulty) is:
<property name="SandboxCode" value="AAAJABJACJADJARFBNC"/>Continuing a V2.6 save: you must recreate your legacy settings through the same menu-and-paste flow - TFP explicitly notes you "may need to work with your specific provider." The full step-by-step lives in our dedicated V3.0 SandboxCode serverconfig guide; the wipe-or-continue decision is in its own guide, the preset rundown in the presets guide, and what breaks for modded servers in the mod compatibility guide.
Localization.txt renamed to Localization.csv.entitygroups.xml returns to proper XML elements (old text format still supported for now).Assembly-CSharp.dll; the code publicizer may require overridden vanilla methods to be public.controls.xml renamed templates.xml, folder renamed XUi_InGame. UI mods will need real work this cycle.It shipped. The sequence played out as announced: dev stream June 10 → release notes June 11 → streamer weekend June 12-14 → PC experimental June 15 → stable on all platforms June 29. V3.0.1 followed on July 13, and V3.1 "Henpocalypse" superseded it as the current stable on July 27. This page and 7d2d.net/3.0 track the release line.