Meat Hell

The economy rework

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Butchers now cost 2,000, and your credits are capped by what your buildings can hold. Over the cap, the meat is wasted.
New building, the Pink Slime Vat: cheap storage for 3,000 more.
The Butcher upgrades to the Rendering Butcher, which gets 65 credits a chunk instead of 50.
New unit, the Spurter Gland: a flier that dives into a spurter and makes it spurt faster for two minutes. On a sick spurter it cures it instead.
Spurters splatter their chunks in a round spray instead of a square, faster and more of them.
The AI keeps up: it builds vats before it fills up, upgrades its safest Butcher and flies Glands.
The end-of-match screen is rebuilt: a panel per team, then a chart of the match per player (army, meat, kills, power) with its key moments marked.
The meat cables between buildings get a new skin: pale fatty gut with veins in your team's colour.
The Tech Center and the Pink Slime Vat get their real models.
Faster: the first match loads in about 13 seconds instead of 19, and big late-game maps draw noticeably quicker on laptops.
The co-op campaign grows: Anvil and Hammer, where one of you holds the line while the other flies air strikes, and Sinew Crossing, a landing by boat on a walled shore.

The meat navy

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

New building, the Fish Market: a shipyard that stands on the shore with its slip in the water. It builds four boats that never leave the water.
The Prawn Skiff (fast and cheap), the Steak Galley (rowed, with a turret), the Roe Lobber (lobs clutches of roe over the shore at whatever your other units can see) and the T-Bone Barge (carries tanks and big infantry, and drops its ramp on a beach to unload them).
Land and sea fight properly: melee units can't hit a boat, and a sinking Barge may lose its cargo.
New map Bile Strait, built for boats. Bay of Gore and Gullet Isle get shipyard sites too.
The AI builds a navy when the map has water worth fighting over: raids on your shoreline harvesters, bombardments from the sea, and landings.
A new keyboard scheme, built around a 3×3 command card at the foot of the sidebar: Q W E and friends for your selection's orders, the same keys for the build grid when nothing is selected.
Every key can be remapped in Settings ▸ Controls, with a Left-handed preset. Hold / to see what each key does right now.
Attack-move, patrol, hold position and stop. Patrol routes are drawn on the map.
Space jumps to your latest alert, H to your base. Double-click selects every unit of a type on screen, Ctrl+A your whole army.
First-time hints for the keys you haven't found yet.
The Grafter heals by squirting pink slime at its patient from a turret.
The Meat Zombie was rebuilt (its arms are no longer fused to its sides), and the Kidney Wing flaps.
Online play is now through Steam only: invite a friend or type a lobby code.

Tunnels

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Tunnels and bridges: units walk, fight and swim under the rock. The roof cuts away round your selection so you can see them.
Tunnels are dark: lamps, things hanging from the roof, and headlamps on your units. Gunfire under the rock sounds muffled.
A sphincter can seal a tunnel mouth shut, crushing anything caught in it.
The AI uses tunnels to sneak, and guards the mouths into its base.
New 3v3 map Gullet Isle: an island split by a mountain, fought through its tunnels. Sugarloaf and Koko Head get tunnels too.
Bridge kits in concrete, blue rock and meat. Some tunnels are lined with intestine.
First person gets mouse look, sprint and jump, and small infantry can walk along walls.
The Raw Chicken was rebuilt: it trots on all fours, and unloads by rearing up and dropping its passengers out of its bottom.
New infantry models built from butcher's cuts: the Meat Zombie, the Spitter (it spits teeth from the hole where its head was), the Bone Launcher (its forearm is the cannon) and Patient Zero (a glowing heart under a cape).
New unit, the Eyestalk: a sniper with a ribcage crossbow. Beyond its own sight it shoots whatever your other units can see.
Infantry stop skating: new walks matched to their speed, feet planted.
The AI recovers when its Construction Yard dies, and pulls back from an attack that has gone badly.
Multiplayer matches start together once everyone has loaded. The loading screen shows tips.
Placing a building hatches the ground where it can go. Walls and towers no longer stretch your build range.
Edge-scroll zone and scroll speed in Settings. Repair starts without credits and waits for them.
New ground textures, shore foam that looks like foam, and a proper wake behind swimmers.

Two thousand units

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Movement, targeting and fog now run in native Rust code. Distant units are drawn in batches.
New Unit budget setting: 600, 1,200 or 2,000 units on the map.
The Clot Bastion shoots down nukes aimed inside its ring. Superweapon countdowns now show down the left edge.
The Heptapus walks on real tentacles. The Flesh Ogre fires anti-air missiles.
Each terrain gets its own cliff rock: sandstone, coral, icicles, poured concrete.
In first person, hold F to order your squad: follow me, or attack this.
A loading screen, and terrain draws a lot faster.

Explosions and a nuke

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

A new explosion system: flash, smoke, fire, blood mist and gibs, picked by what got hit, and scorch marks that fade.
Every meat unit has its own death, and buildings cook off and collapse.
The Nuclear Silo replaces the Plague Bloom: a fiery red mushroom cloud.
Deep liquid blocks ground units. The Raw Chicken swims.
Fog and turret scans got much cheaper, so big 3v3 matches run faster.

Co-op campaign

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Co-op campaign: two players (or one plus an AI partner) against generated missions, with a campaign map, briefings and reconnect.
The generator builds terrain, bases, resources and set pieces from a seed, and throws out seeds that aren't playable.
Harvesters were eating 62% of a match's simulation time. Now 18x cheaper.
Bone walls rebuilt as modular pieces that follow slopes without seams.
The editor gets a sculpt brush, edge painting and live symmetry. Plus red sand terrain.

Walls that build themselves

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Two more maps remade (Gore Canyon and Defcon Flesh) and Slaughter Delta, a six-player map with no symmetry at all.
Wall blueprint: keep clicking to plan a wall and it builds itself as you can afford it.
Wall ramps let small infantry climb up and fight from the top of a wall.
Four fixes from the first live two-player match over Steam.

Half-height terrain

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The game has a Steam app now, and the first build is uploaded. Store art captured from live matches.
Terrain layers are half as tall, so hills and cliffs have finer steps and twelve levels instead of six.
Fog of war now works by terrain layer instead of by metres.
Cliffs got normal maps and fill their cells, and ramps cut into cliffs properly.

Units and buildings pages

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT

A Units page built from the game's own data, with portraits rendered from the 3D models.
A Buildings page drawn as the tech tree.
Blinkies, an odometer and a writhing meat divider.

The website

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Tried a few ideas for making Hard AI stronger. None of them beat what it already does.
Recorded the first human match. The model was sure the human would lose, and the human won.
Built this website: borders made from the game's meat textures, a meat background, and spurters throwing chunks up the sides.

Meat resources and spurters

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Instead of tiberium or crystals or whatever, the resources in Meat Hell are meat. Meat harvesters drive around and collect huge chunks of meat and throw them in the back like a garbage truck. They take the meat to the butcher, where it is dissolved into pink slime, and distributed to the rest of the base by meat tubes, to be used for energy or to build new meat zombies, meat tanks or other units.

Generally meat chunks make it on to the map through a spurter. You can see these on the sides of this website! As long as you're on desktop. They squirt the fresh meat out from deep underground. But some meat units will also drop meat chunks when they die. You can recycle a swarm of meat zombies quite efficiently this way.

The meat is valuable in Meat Hell because it is fresh. So much of the surface is dead and decayed meat. Fresh meat can be hard to come by.

Hello dev log world

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Hello world. This is just a first post to test out the dev log. This is where we will write some updates about the build of Meat Hell as we go.

Teaching the AI to read a match

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Ran hundreds of AI matches with up to eight players and trained a small model to estimate each side's chance of winning.
Wired it into the AI so it can notice a losing game. So far it's no better than the hand-written rules.
The AI can record its matches as video, with a camera that follows the fighting.

Steam multiplayer

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Multiplayer over Steam, tested between a Windows host and a Mac client. Friends-only lobbies and overlay invites.
The download got a lot smaller: 1.3 GB down to 458 MB.
Hard AI trains a bigger army, attacks in proper waves and micros: it spreads out against splash and kites.
Fixed a bug that made units overshoot their waypoints and ping-pong forever at high game speed.

Smoothing cliffs

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The editor's Smooth tool scans the borders in a selection and lets you pick cliff, ramp, blend or overlay for each one.
Terrain blends now wander and round their corners instead of following the grid.
Every map setting from the old editor is in the new one.

A new map editor

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Version two of the map editor: paint, select, objects and properties, playable regions, triggers and scripted events.
Playable regions work in game too. A mission can open up more of the map as it goes.
You can play a map inside the editor with a hidden preview match.

Widescreen and better water

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Widescreen and ultrawide: the battlefield fills the screen and menus stay 16:9.
Water reworked: real wave lighting, foam from textures, surf on the shore.
A new low-poly meat tank whose cannon recoils when it fires.
In first person the camera kicks back when you shoot, and shots can now miss.

Drygrass

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Drygrass: a terrain that reuses grass's shapes with its own textures, so new terrains no longer need their own models.

The AI gets a playbook

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The AI now picks a strategy at the start of each match, runs missions from a library of nine tactics and switches strategy when one isn't working.
Turtle AIs plot a walled compound, build inside it, and no longer wall in their own harvesters.
Six new skirmish maps.
Shift-queued waypoints, a group info panel, an idle-harvester warning, and the MCV is buildable.
Press Space for a selection console. The whole UI moved onto one design system.

Rivers of blood

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Liquid spawners: water, blood or milkshake pours out of a point, floods the basin, flows under bridges and mixes where bodies meet.
Liquid shows on the minimap and hides under fog.
Sell buildings for half their cost.
Drive a harvester in first person and it scoops up the meat it rolls over.
The exported game had no music. Fixed.

A story and a polar bear

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Story bible and a 15-map outline for the meat campaign.
A neutral Polar Bear wanders the snow maps.

Stealth, heals and a superweapon

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The first full two-machine multiplayer matches. Bandwidth cut a lot by sending movement intent instead of positions 15 times a second.
New meat units: the Grafter (heals one ally at a time), the Lamprey (stealth), the Parasite (steals buildings), the Teratoma (burrows underground), the Gristle Spewer and the elite tier.
New defenses: Eye Tower (detects stealth), Bile Geyser, Bonethrower, Maw-Pit and Gristle Spire.
The Plague Bloom superweapon, and the AI uses it.
Video quality presets, and big hordes got a lot cheaper to target.

Multiplayer begins

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The Intestine Heptapus's tentacles sway, done in a shader because the model has no rig.
Multiplayer is planned: the host runs the simulation and everyone else watches its state.
Every order, build and sale now goes through a single command bus, so the host can check it before it happens.
A first lobby, and the code that copies the host's units to the other players.

Group outlines and a GPU hang

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Selecting a group draws one merged outline around everyone instead of a pile of overlapping circles.
The Bone Launcher holds its tube properly and has sounds now.
Fixed a full GPU hang when lots of rocket troops fired at once. Every rocket trail and impact was spawning a brand new particle system.
Skirmish maps can be flagged as test maps and filtered out.

3D cursors and blood trees

Sun, 31 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The mouse cursor is now a 3D object sitting on the ground, and it changes shape for move, attack and plain pointing.
Attack clicks snap to the nearest target within about a tile, so you don't have to pixel-hunt a zombie.
Trees sway in the wind. A new blood tree has glossy wet foliage and a bone trunk.
Drag-select no longer grabs harvesters along with your army.