The What you find entry laid out how a room decides what it holds. What it never did was let a search disappoint you. That sounds like praise, and it is the opposite. Every search handed over four items, all of them useful, and nothing worthless existed anywhere in the city. A scavenging game where scavenging always pays is a vending machine.
Junk exists again
Sixty-two items had been written and drawn, and no search could reach them. Most of them were one class, tagged junk and marked do not spawn, and no room rule ever mentioned it. A fifth of everything I had made was unreachable.
They spawn now, and they spawn where they make sense, because junk is not one thing. Trash is broken glass, crushed bottles, a bin bag. Paperwork is envelopes and someone’s blueprint. Personal odds and ends are a dog collar, a medal, a gift still wrapped. Dead electronics are a laptop, a phone, a handheld console with no batteries. And kitchen junk is a drawer of forks and ladles that no survivor has ever needed. Each bucket goes to the rooms where you would find it.
Nine things that had been called junk turned out not to be, among them a lighter, a battery, a toolbox, a compass, gasoline and rags. Those were promoted into real categories, because the day you need a lighter it is the most useful thing in the house.
A search can find nothing
There was no way to say “you searched and found nothing”. The draw always produced a find, so a room could be searched to the bone and still pay out.
Now empty-handed is a real outcome that competes with the pool. A fresh room usually pays something. A room that has been worked over mostly does. The first search of a pharmacy is exciting because it might be the one; the fourth is a shrug. The menu tells you before you spend the energy: the search row on a room carries a word for what to expect, such as picked over, and a room you have exhausted says so plainly.
Less per search, slower to come back
The yields dwarfed the drains. Three finds per search instead of four. Every room type now has its own ceiling on how much it can hold. A room drained to nothing takes weeks to fill back up, so a house is something you use up and move on from. And a gun shop display no longer hands over a duffel bag of items in one go.
The dead got the same treatment. A zombie’s remains used to be mostly food, which made every kill a meal and every horde a buffet. Remains now hold what the person was wearing and carrying, and whatever junk was in their pockets.
The furniture is in the rooms
Fifty pieces of furniture are now in the rooms’ tables, from a floor lamp to a refrigerator, though for now they turn up rarely, and placement is the whole point. A bathtub only shows up in a bathroom. A hospital bed only on a ward. A workbench in a workshop, a beer tap in a bar. The sofas and desks that suit any room can also turn up in the catch-all rooms; the rest cannot leave the rooms they belong to.
They are heavy on purpose. Most of them are too heavy to take at all for now. The light ones, a lamp, a mirror, a chair, go in the pack and push you toward overloaded. There is no art yet: a piece of furniture shows as a lettered tile, an S for the sofa, until each one gets its icon. I would rather ship the weight and the placement now than hold fifty items for the drawings.
Empty-handed has to read as bad luck, not as a broken game. The first few times it happens it will feel like the search did not work. The menu saying picked over ahead of time is my answer, so that finding nothing is a result you were warned about.