Zero-K Patch Notes — February 21, 2026
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Most strategy games have tools for spying on the enemy, often at the cost of resources. This is known as scouting, and it is a tricky thing to design since its balance depends on the usefulness of information. Scouting is a waste of resources if you know the enemy's plans, or if your response would not be changed by knowing them. On the other end of the scale, games with large strategy spaces rely on strong scouting to keep strategic RPS in check. To complicate things further, the power of scouting changes over the course of a game as the strategy space expands.
Scouting is always competing for resources that could be spent on building up your economy or deploying a larger army. Small differences early in a battle can snowball into a large advantage later, which makes scouting a hard sell for the early game. In Zero-K this is reflected by a lack of dedicated light scout units. Early scouting is done by raiders, which are able to deal damage as well as spy on the enemy. Even the nominal "Light Scouts" are armed and able to harass undefended constructors and metal extractors.
It would take a bit of a redesign to see pure dedicated scouts in the early game. Such a scout would have to be either very cheap or very powerful to offset its drawbacks. This power could be relative, i.e. raiders could become near-blind, but the issue with blind units is that regularly blundering into the enemy feels bad. Ultimately we avoided forcing dedicated scouts into the early game as it would be too much to manage. Remember, monospam is much easier to use than a mix of units, and there is already plenty to do early on without extra complication. We only discovered this relatively recently after adding the Sparrow.
Sparrow is a light scout plane that is accessible to all factories by morphing a Radar Tower. These days Sparrow is a bit too expensive for the opening, but initially it was much cheaper, at 120 metal. This turned out to be too powerful as the ability to see everything made it too easy to punish deviations from a middle-of-the-road opening. In general scouting is too powerful when it removes otherwise reasonable strategic approaches. Most of the strategies that push at the edges of the strategic triangle are aided by the fact that the enemy cannot instantly start moving to counter them.
In addition to being too powerful, early Sparrow was too onerous. Scouts take attention to keep alive, since they want to get close to the enemy, and it takes even more attention to use the information they reveal. Some of the immediate burden is reduced by the fact that scouted structures leave a persistent "ghost", but there is no such feature for units. Early Sparrow was particularly problematic because it could fly around dodging turrets for minutes. This is not so much of a problem later in the game, as once dedicated AA comes out scouting missions tend to be quick and one-way. There are other types of scouts, such as cloaked units, that can hang around, but they require much less attention to manage than a flimsy plane.
Different types of scouts are good at different types of scouting, and players pick them based on what they want to discover. One type of scouting is "weakness scouting", i.e. scouting to find a crack in the enemy's defence. Raiders are particularly good weakness scouts because they are equipped to follow up on the weaknesses they find. Another type of scouting is "threat scouting", in which players seek to reveal and preemptively counter enemy plans. In fact the cheapest dedicated scout in Zero-K is a threat scout: the Radar Tower. It is perhaps a little weird to call a structure a scout, but I would also call the Starcraft Comsat Station a scout.
A Radar Tower provides threat scouting in the sense that it gives you a few extra seconds to respond to an incoming attack. This extra time lets players redirect their forces to repel the enemy, which lets turrets be a bit weaker than they would otherwise need to be. If radar did not exist then players might also have to leave several raiders on the outskirts of their territory to detect threats which, as with Sparrow, would be a bit too onerous. Players currently use raiders for threat scouting beyond the range of their radar, but they do so sparingly in important areas of the map. It is good in moderation, but making this the only way to detect threats would involve too much micromanagement.
The nature of threat scouting changes over the course of a game, with the main distinction being how early the threats are revealed. All plans are revealed eventually (such as when the nuke launches), but plans that take longer to implement can be revealed earlier than others. Threat scouting for long-term plans is a big part of the dance around the strategic triangle as it is hard to counter your opponent without knowing what they are up to.
Long-term threat scouting comes to the fore in the mid-to-late game. By now the battle lines have met up and most short-term threats are adequately covered by radar. In this situation the type of threat revealed depends on how much you spend on scouting, and on how much the enemy tries to stop you. A shallow scout might find a medium-term threat, such as a Cerberus or Missile Silo, while a deep scout can find long-term threats such as nukes, Striders and superweapons. Long-term weakness scouting is also possible, with the most common being to check for antinuke coverage.
Late game scouting in Zero-K is designed to be nearly impossible to completely counter, but it is not so cheap that it can be done at a whim. If scouting were easy to block, then people would do so, but this would create a blind strategic RPS situation so strategy space would likely have to contract. The most common form of deep scouting is to boost several Swifts, a light fighter, over the enemy's base. Boost causes a Swift to move much faster for a few seconds, and while it was not initially designed as a scouting tool, it has persisted in this form and sets a reasonable cost for a full scout.
A limit to how little it should cost to scout was found with the discovery of flying Flea scouting, which involved launching Fleas into space with a cheap Newton launcher. Landing was a non-issue because line of sight was cylindrical at the time, so the Flea just had to fly high over the map to reveal a whole swathe of the enemy base. This tactic was far cheaper than other options, so we nerfed it by reducing the sight range of high-flying ground units. Scouting via flying Flea is still possible, but they need to be shot low and fast to see anything, which requires a more expensive launcher and gives the enemy a chance to shoot them down.
The Flea launcher had one thing going for it: the enemy could see all the Fleas flying over their base. Being able to see that you were scouted is generally a good thing, as it enables more player interaction and mind games. For example, I have seen someone start a nuke rush, have it scouted, then abort the rush and count on the enemy spending resources on countering a nuke that is not there. The scoutability of scouts has exceptions though, primarily with cloaked scouting. The tradeoff here is that cloaked scouts are slower and harder to use, and often they are spotted, which alerts the enemy to the fact that they have been spied on.
Scouts revealing themselves creates a weird situation when trying to determine which factory the enemy picked. You might spot the factory, or a unit from the factory, but the scout you send is guaranteed to give away your own factory. There are a few ways to get around this, such as with Sparrow, but they are impractical early on. In a 1v1, being scouted is the only reliable way to learn the enemy factory without revealing your own. Scouting and raiding is otherwise important enough for this to not be a concern though, and perhaps the interaction is not that unusual. Most multiplayer games reveal faction choice in the lobby, but some have a hidden random faction option which is only revealed when they scout. So the situation in Zero-K is more a result of factory choice (which is effectively your faction) being hidden by default.
In spite of a few persistent bits of weirdness, I am quite happy with the state of scouting in Zero-K. Information on expansion and raiding is valuable early on, and there are many prime scouting targets to spot as the game progresses. Players have many ways to scout, with a variety of planes, cloaked units, and a few units that are tough enough to punch through into the enemy base. Even Sparrow found a place as a radar jammer and cloak-revealer, beyond its use as a readily accessible deep scout. Scouting feels rewarding and is rarely impossible, but is expensive enough to be a deliberate decision point. The decision to scout is the most important part, as if it were routine and decision-free it could be automated, but it would be a shame to effectively remove such a rich source of player interaction.