Unturned's source code is now free to use for non-commercial mods

Smartly Dressed Games has released the source code and project files for Unturned, its free-to-play zombie survival game, making them available for non-commercial use. The studio announced the release in a Steam post, and the files are hosted on GitHub.

In an accompanying FAQ, the developer said the release exists to support what the community already builds, framing it as insurance against the studio’s own future decisions.

The conditions attached

The licence carries limits. Smartly Dressed Games said any use of the source code must be strictly non-commercial, and that players must be able to access all features and content of a mod for free. Some code has been stripped from the release because the studio does not hold redistribution rights to it, including the game’s anti-cheat systems and third-party pathfinding software.

The studio was also explicit that this does not make Unturned open source: the non-commercial licence does not meet the Open Source Initiative’s definition of the term. It described a full open source release as something it would like to do later, saying that once it finishes another game and is able to re-acquire certain rights, it would like to re-license the U3 SDK under the MIT License.

A long-running survival game

Unturned was one of the earlier entrants in the survival sim wave that followed Minecraft and DayZ. It was built by Nelson Sexton while he was still a teenager, reached Steam early access in 2014 and hit 1.0 three years later. PC Gamer notes that the game is long past its peak but still draws thousands of players a day.

Development has continued alongside that tail. In April the studio shipped an overhaul of the game’s California map that had been in development for six years, increasing the map’s size sixfold, adding more than 100 quests and expanding the endgame.