The Into the Wild August Update (1.3.3.0, August 25, 2026) added an underground TEC1 Research Facility to SCUM, along with the Apex Hunt quest that sends players inside to clear it. It also added three new ServerSettings.ini keys that control how often your players can get in, and one hotfix a week later that every server running scheduled restarts should have. This guide covers what the Facility changes on a private server and exactly which settings you own.
How the Apex Facility works on your server
The mechanics below are from Gamepires' own patch notes, and they are the ones your players will ask you about:
- There are three entrances across the island. Each leads to its own Facility with the same layout and challenge.
- Getting in needs a Research Facility Keycard: earned through certain Master Hunter quests, or found as rare loot in Police Stations and Radiation Zones. A keycard works at any of the three entrances, expires after a limited time, and is consumed when used.
- One keycard opens the door for a whole group. Once a run begins, that entrance locks until the Facility resets.
- Starting a run begins a ten-minute purge. The door to the first containment area stays open for 30 seconds; anyone left behind cannot follow. Players still inside when the countdown ends are terminated before the Facility resets.
- Loot spawns when the purge begins and refreshes on every run - a group carrying several keycards can run the Facility back to back and collect a fresh set each time. The loot pool is rare medical and scientific gear.
Before anything else: make sure you are on 1.3.3.1
Hotfix 1.3.3.1 (August 27) fixed server restarts resetting Apex Hunt quest progress. On the original update build, every scheduled restart wiped your players' progress in the questline - the kind of problem that gets reported to you as "the server ate my quest". The same hotfix also fixed the barbed wire around the Facility dealing no damage and the Apex Mutant Bear getting stuck or staying locked onto one player.
On a GG Host server, open your service in the game panel and run Steam Update from the left menu, then restart. If you run scheduled restarts, do this first.
The new server settings
The update added three keys to the [World] section of ServerSettings.ini. They control how many keycards can exist as world loot at once - quest-earned keycards are not affected:
| Setting | Default | What it controls |
|---|---|---|
| scum.MaxAllowedApexFacilityKeycards | 4 | Total Research Facility Keycards findable across Police Stations and Radiation Zones combined |
| scum.MaxAllowedApexFacilityKeycards_PoliceStation | 3 | How many of those can be found in Police Stations |
| scum.MaxAllowedApexFacilityKeycards_RadiationZone | 1 | How many can be found in Radiation Zones |
Raise the caps and Facility runs become a regular part of life on your server; lower them and a keycard goes back to being an event. One note on where to look: the patch notes list these under "[World] -> BUNKERS", which is the in-game server settings editor's grouping - in the ini file itself they are ordinary [World] keys, sitting next to the existing bunker and Killbox keycard settings.
To change them on your GG Host server: stop the server, open Configuration Files and then the Config Editor in the game panel, edit the values, save, and start the server again - the same flow as every other key in our ServerSettings.ini complete guide.
Cloning Sickness arrived in the same update - and you own that switch too
Repeated respawning now applies Cloning Sickness, a temporary condition that gets more severe with every quick respawn. Gamepires' notes say it plainly: on private servers it is enabled by default, but server owners choose whether to keep it. The key is scum.CloningSicknessEnabled=True, at the bottom of the [Respawn] section. If your community runs a softer ruleset, this is the one to discuss before your players discover it mid-firefight.
What you cannot configure
Three things admins have been asking for that have no server setting in the current build (ServerSettingsVersion 7):
- Keycard expiry time. The old bunker systems have duration keys (scum.AbandonedBunkerKeyCardActiveDurationHours, scum.SecretBunkerKeyCardActiveDurationHours); the Apex Facility keycard has none. Its lifetime is fixed by the game.
- Facility reset timing. Not documented and not exposed.
- Quest-earned keycards. The three settings above govern world loot only.
Good to know
- Mutant bears are not only in the Facility - they spawn at set locations across the island, and the map at the Hunters Grotto marks known sightings. The Master Hunter questline's new Tier 3 hunts target them, and finishing the required quests is the other route to a keycard.
- Facility loot refreshing per run means keycard availability is effectively your loot faucet for rare medical and scientific items - worth keeping in mind on high-population servers before raising the caps.
- Admin basics for everything else are in SCUM Admin Commands.
