Unturned source code goes public so the community can keep the game alive forever

Smartly Dressed Games has released the source code and project files for Unturned, the free-to-play zombie survival sim, making them freely available on GitHub for non-commercial use. The studio framed the move as a way to hand long-term ownership of the game's future to its players.

The release comes with clear conditions: any use of the source code must be strictly non-commercial, and players must be able to access all features and content of any resulting mod for free. Some code has been stripped out because Smartly Dressed Games doesn't hold redistribution rights to it — that includes anti-cheat systems and third-party pathfinding tools. The studio was also careful to clarify that this isn't a full open-source release in the technical sense; the non-commercial license doesn't meet the Open Source Initiative's definition. That's something they want to fix down the line — once they wrap up another project and can re-acquire certain rights, they plan to re-license the U3 SDK under the MIT License.

Unturned has a longer history than most people remember. Nelson Sexton built it as a teenager, launched it on Steam Early Access in 2014, and hit 1.0 in 2017 — right in the middle of the post-Minecraft, post-DayZ survival sim wave that defined that era of PC gaming. It's been free-to-play the whole time, which helped it build a massive and loyal community. The game is well past its peak player counts, but it still pulls thousands of daily players nearly a decade later. As recently as April, Smartly Dressed Games dropped a major update for the California map — six years in development, six times larger than before, with over 100 new quests and a significantly expanded endgame.

The studio's reasoning is straightforward: "Unturned's greatest strength is our passionate community," they wrote on Steam. "Releasing the source files allows you and other players to further expand upon the game as you see fit, building a lasting legacy for the game regardless of the changes we make or how many years pass." For a game that's already outlived most of its genre peers, giving the community the tools to keep it running indefinitely seems like a natural next step.