Unturned releases source code so fans can keep modding it long after support ends

Smartly Dressed Games, the studio behind the free-to-play zombie survival sim Unturned, has made the game's source code available for non-commercial use. The developers said the move is meant to support the community's creative efforts, letting players expand the game however they see fit.

The code is now on GitHub. In an accompanying FAQ, the studio explained that the goal is to let fans build a "lasting legacy" for Unturned that survives regardless of what changes the developers make or how many years pass. "Unturned's greatest strength is our passionate community," the team said.

There are conditions attached. Per the FAQ, any work based on the source code "must be strictly non-commercial," and players must be able to access all features and content of a mod for free. Some code has also been left out of the release because Smartly Dressed Games lacks the rights to redistribute it, including parts tied to anti-cheat systems and third-party pathfinding tools.

The release does not make Unturned open source in the formal sense, as the non-commercial license doesn't meet the Open Source Initiative's definition. The developers left the door open for that later. "Once we finish another game and are hopefully able to re-acquire certain rights, we'd like to re-license the U3 SDK under the MIT License," they wrote.

Unturned entered Steam early access in 2014, created by then-teenager Nelson Sexton, and hit version 1.0 three years later. It was one of the early titles in the post-Minecraft/DayZ survival boom. Nine years on, despite being well past its peak, the game still draws thousands of players daily. In April, the studio shipped a major update that overhauled the California map, a project six years in the making that also increased the map's size.