itch.io

Yep, that’s why I said “wall crevice”. I’ll update the step so it’s less vague.

CONTAINS SPOILERS! DON’T READ THIS IF YOU WANT THE THRILL OF COMPLETING THE EASTER EGG BY YOURSELF! This applies to build 60 (Tried on Itch Build 204).

Perkaholic

Step 1: Find a brick at the starting room located in a wall crevice nearest to a crate with a bucket. Step 2: Shoot the brick. A text saying “Hello!” will show up. Step 3: Press E or whatever your interact keybind is, on the text, when it tells you the long “according to all laws of aviation” popup text on your screen.

After doing that one of three random audios will play, and those audios are just weird (and maybe inside jokes I think). You will have also gotten Perkaholic.

Pack-A-Punch

Step 1: Open the door to the mystery box room. Step 2: At the shelf near the stairs, interact with four items in the following order: helmet -> lamp -> bucket -> box. Step 3: Collect the Project Aether tape found in a box in the same room that has now been opened from step.

Pack-A-Punch will be available in the spawn area after this.

[Incomplete] Potential Music or Directive Easter Egg

Either pertaining to music or something else, but still ongoing as of September 7, 2026.

Step 1: Find batteries in the following locations (using the WAW nacht top-down view as a reference):

• Starting Room (Floor 1) on the left atop a crate with bucket.
• Upstairs (Floor 2) at the opposite side of the bowie knife/grenades on the crate. F1 and F2 refers to Floor 1 and Floor 2.

Step 2: Go to the radio near the middle of the “Help!”/Mystery Box room and interact with it.

After that, it should theoretically provide a larger clue on the whole easter egg. When this was tried on Build 60 (Itch Build 204) however, no audio played at all. In previous builds, there would be a lot of static noise played but no voice-lines for any further steps or hints.

Step 3: [N/A]

[Incomplete] Dog Tags Easter Egg

Step 1: Take the dog tag from a dead soldier lying upstairs (Floor 2), right of the Trench Gun wallbuy wall but left of the barricaded window.

Step 2: Refer to the Pack-A-Punch easter egg and move your crosshair and self-positioning to a specific spot to “get another dog tag” or something like that.

Step 3: [N/A]

Credits:

• Everyone who solved it before I made this post.

Thank you! I edited the guide just now to make the correction you indicated.

CONTAINS SPOILERS! DON’T READ THIS IF YOU WANT THE THRILL OF COMPLETING THE EASTER EGG BY YOURSELF! This applies to build 60 (Tried on Itch Build 204).

Step 1: Find all the pages. The locations are as follows (using the associated WAW loading screen as a reference):

• Central Hut Starting room (Floor 2): On the post near the boxes before the Gewehr wallbuy.
• Central Hut Floor 1: On the leftmost corner adjacent to the rusty toolkit before the storage door.
• Storage Hut: Outdoors on the lamp post near the tree closest to the large meteor.
• Storage Hut: Indoors leftmost on the opposite side of the wall from the Type 100 wallbuy.
• Doctor’s Quarters: On the tree closest to the zipline ramp opposite of PHD Flopper.
• Fishing Hut: Rightmost on a tree near a lamp post closest to the fences before the hut.
• Fishing Hut: On the lamp post near the sign before the stairs leading to the hut itself.
• Comm Room: Rightmost in the micro-structure.
• Comm Room: Leftmost from the perk machine on the makeshift wall. F1 and F2 refers to Floor 1 and Floor 2.

After collecting all the pages, a picture will briefly occur on your screen for a split second, jumpscaring you; This means an entity has spawned. You will have also gotten the Pack-A-Punch machine to spawn at the starting room.

Step 2: Shoot the entity that has spawned.

• It moves as fast as a (Verrukt) sprinter zombie and has plenty of health.
• It will one-shot you.

After it dies, you will immediately get Perkaholic.

Credits:

• SpizOGX for making the video for the guide, which I based this one off of.
  • Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvM6fkD_YeI
• Verrial for correcting me on what you get here after spawning the entity.

The developer would have to rewrite nearly everything and could take a year or more for that with no other updates or patches. Even then, multiplayer increases the chance of this project being taken down. A community member with the source codes can try, but it’s best of luck to them to dedicate themselves toward such a task.

Also that question has been asked so many times, that if the developer could do reworks for each mechanic separately (i.e. weapons, movement, etc. that leans towards netcode multiplayer stuff) and spend two months for each of those reworks, then maybe it could happen in a span of two years from now, but still… a huge rework that could ultimately lead to the year-or-more-no-updates issue.

I genuinely thought that when you mentioned “all inspects” on another post, you added brand new ones that you animated yourself. It’s fair enough though since brand new animations for over 100 guns are a lot of work. Who knows, maybe someone can volunteer to add new ones as updates go by, and you adding them (or not?? Idk lol).

“Verrial-girl, I think I love you” ~Dempis Primey

In all seriousness, you worked hard and delivered harder, so thank you for that.

Bugs:

• When you move too far away from the mystery box while the jingle is playing, the jingle audio goes silent and moving back to the box does not make the sound audible anymore until the next box usage. (itch build 204)
• (Most) Weapon inspects for WAW, BO1 and BO2 weapons do not work. Some other gun inspects for other weapons fail. (itch build 204)
• The round start sound playing after loading a map doesn’t actually occur, unless you decide to start on round 2 or higher. (itch build 204)

Ideas:

• Add a mechanic or function to allow perks to remain after losing quick revive (without adding another perk that does it, unless you want that).
• Add something to identify weapons with special abilities in-game (so people can take advantage of the weapon special keybind easier).

A few more bugs and stuff :)

Bugs:

• [FIXED] The Der Riese fly trap easter egg does not reward perkaholic (Itch Build 201).
• Character quotes (my case is primis dempsey) for power happen on maps where no power switch is required. (Itch Build 199-201).
• Character quotes for weapons are mismatched (i.e. wunderwaffe quotes for the death machine from the mystery box). This was only tested on Primis Dempsey (Itch Build 199-201).
• There’s a random meteor piece floating on the subroom corner left of deadshot daquiri and the original intended meteor piece (Itch Build 200-201).
• Getting all meteor pieces on Kino der Toten doesn’t play the easter egg (Itch Build 200-201).
• [FIXED] Missing floor collision in Kino’s second-floor lobby mystery box area, both sides. I fell through them to the first floor. See provided image. (Itch Build 201)

Ideas:

• Add a unique easter egg for Kino der Toten which may involve the mannequins, posters, map props, anything. Completely up to you on what to decide on and what reward is granted.

Nitpicks:

• The ray gun firing sound pitch removal is good, but now it sounds like you slightly rearranged the audio alongside the pitch, so maybe put the ray gun firing sound back the way it was but keep the pitch the same for every firing action.
  • Something similar to this (loud sound warning) (expires August 21, 2026, before 7 PM UTC-5 I forget when), or however you had the sound arrangement before.

Bugs:

• In gun game, I accidentally got godmode when buying all buyable perks in Der Riese and training in the right-side stairs room, also after moving on from the Thundergun and “downing” before or after that.
• Control binds set on the right side shift to the left side. This leads to the right side binds showing up as empty despite the game still registering the same inputs from the keyboard.
• Project Aether does not support direct playstation controller button inputs when using DS4Windows to set the emulated controller to DualShock 4. Workaround is currently the Xbox 360 controller emulation setting but isn’t completely feasible in my opinion.

Ideas:

• Bring back upgrades (like the bandolier bandit one and starting with quick revive) but they are part of the loadouts thing you introduced, or some upgrade (like bandolier) can be as perks.
• Add an option for the nuke so it gradually kills as much 4 zombies in a second instead of all at once and prevents them from doing damage to the player while also preventing spawns for a moment, just like actual older call of duty games. It can also help with lag on potato devices when many zombies disappear at once.
• Add the classic zombies last stand sounds and allow toggling them. Default is non-classic (BO4).
• Add an option to toggle the demonic announcer, with options being Default (map-based), Samantha, Richtofen, and whoever else you want to add.
  • Same can go for the pitch of the announcer (unless you want it kept the way it is, then Nacht could have the PS3-kind pitches and maybe SNN).
• Add a map option to control how many zombies are allowed to exist at a time, and overall maximum zombies per round.

Those ideas can be worked on after the Five and Zombies in Spaceland maps are re-added, and therefore they are not even a priority right now.

Sounds good! I’m trying again anyways with a few things deleted and some PDB stuff I found that are now deleted as well just to see if I can get this to work.

Building the UE Fork on my gaming computer with the given instructions takes up more than 500 GB of storage. No joke, running setup.bat used up 235 GB and there was still more dependencies to update. Note that this was all done in an external hard drive because my PC storage is full. Is there a different way I can set the fork up so I can actually have room for the actual project itself (not like I’ll have time to modify it but just to learn a bit of UE like that)? Maybe the instructions on the repository were outdated or if there was some stuff I have to skip?

Sounds good! Honestly take your time, the map stuff and existing bugs and your own ideas seem more important. My extraction intentions are just for “use this sound for perk machine randomization” and “primis voiceover” stuff anyways :)

I’m just going to put this comment outside of my bugs and ideas reply thread here. Would it be fine if Verrial were to be invited to access a collection of sounds I extracted from WAW to kickstart a couple of the ideas I listed prior?

Hello again, I just played the latest changes via itch build 190 on both my computers and the improvements to the FPS on the non-gaming computer are incredible! Here’s the list of ideas, two bugs I found, and a couple of nitpicks:

Bugs:

• [FIXED] In gun game, some weapons repeat themselves.
• Sound bugs still exist with Paralyser, power-ups, and the mystery box one while it spins that I pointed out.

Ideas:

• Since you want to add another custom map from WAW, you could add either a cheesecube map, a meme map, or the “demise” map with the teleporting zombies (hard mode can be more challenging there).
• Can you please make the nuke overlay a bit more transparent (or to customize transparency)?
• Add the hover white scan line thing for the main TV like in BO1 so we don’t only have to rely on the crosshair dot (keep the crosshair dot though). Scan line can be red during weapon preloading.
• Please add improved keyboard functionality for the main menu, so I can move the view with WASD or arrow keys, and use arrow keys to choose maps. It’s for those that cannot use a mouse for any reason.
• Please add either the Call of the Dead map from BO1 with George Romero OR the rest of the Black Ops DS maps? Thank you in advance!
• Add an option in the controls section of the main settings to reset all binds to default.
• Provide statistics for the selected weapons in the loadout section, and extra details for wonder weapons (i.e. if they do percentile damage as well like the Paralyzer). You can do this whenever.
• Add the WAW/BO1/BO2 power-up (grab) sounds and add an option to change power-up grab sounds from there or the current-default sounds.
• Add the flamethrower and wunderwaffe weapons (both from WAW) please and thank you.
• Add the carpenter, death machine and zombie blood powerups please and thank you. Boards can get instantly repaired and the death machine can be the Cold War one you added. The death machine powerup is not a priority, so feel free to add that whenever.
• Add the speed boots, infinite ammo, and godmode powerups for Octagonal Ascension, please and thank you.
• Please make the traps in Verruckt, Shi No Numa, and Der Riese usable.
• Add volume sliders for music and sound so you can control them separately.
• Add the perk machine location randomization for Shi No Numa and Octagonal Ascension (like in WAW/BO1/BO3, where the perk lottery effect and sounds occur on those maps from WAW)
• Add the ability for extra zombies to spawn after opening a door (Shi No Numa only, I saw it there in WAW).

Nitpicks:

• I think sprinter zombies should start at round 15 (except for octagonal ascension) and should be faster than the runner zombies (there’s slow walker, walker, and runner. Sprinter anims from WAW are there but maybe could have zombies match player’s normal sprint speed).
• I’m really not a fan of the raygun’s firing sound pitch being randomized, and prefer if the sound pitch is back to normal like it used to be.
• Winter’s Howl could one-shot or two-shot until round 16, and zombies that take less than 50% of damage with the Winter’s Howl without dying will temporarily slow down instead of freeze.
  • It’s packed version can always freeze zombies and/or further slow down zombies.

There’s more ideas I have but I’ll continue to wait until you release yet another update, or when enough time has passed.

Ah okay, thank you for letting me know. I did also find a lot of bugs to where there’s more than ideas I had in mind. Those include:

• The TVs in the main menu are all black and not running (unless this is intentional).
• [FIXED] Prompts to press E are still there when I change the interact keybind to F (should say press F to <action> or press <interact key> to <this>).
• Some Paralyser sounds are missing, that being the pull-out and put-away activation sounds. Also the looping sound is switched to the vulture aid smoke loop for some reason.
• Vulture Aid doesn’t show icons at mini-drop, weapon and perk locations.
• Power-up drops don’t emit their idle/loop sound.
• Pack-A-Punched and unpacked Paralyzer overheat times are inversed (unpacked has 10 seconds and packed has 6 seconds, but should be the other way around).
• Sprinter zombies exist but super sprinter zombies never show up on octagonal ascension. I forgot about the “super” part last update ago.
• Der Riese’s post-link teleporter effect and sound does not occur, and the hound lightning spawn effect for the powerups does not occur. Not sure if you did add it though.
• The mystery box complete moving away sound doesn’t occur, it’s just the laugh, initial rise and poof sounds.
• Sometimes, when getting a weapon, it does not actually get collected, and switching to the weapon that would have been traded makes their ammo and reserve both 0.
• The mystery box light beam isn’t showing up in Shi No Numa and Der Riese (or it’s not visible enough, at least when I tried to look from a distance from spawn).
• The Der Riese fly trap easter egg doesn’t include the voice overs for some reason, but should.
• In Der Riese, zombies at spawn do not jump up to or drop down from the spawn area ledges before the first set of stairs.
• [FIXED] Shi No Numa’s storage hut door collision did not move and I cannot access the perk there (that being speed cola).
• [AUTO-FIXED] The tomahawk lethal being selected is not granting me the tomahawk.

I’ll add ideas on a different comment or post. One more thing: I noticed you didn’t add the link to the game source code and ue5 fork anywhere. I’ll leave that up to you.

Again, great update as always!

Hello again! Great update as always and it runs a lot smoother. Quick question, while I understand Kino is temporarily removed: how come Five is also removed?

Hello again! I promise this is the last message before the next upcoming build.

Turns out that for the nitpick of weapon cycling, I completely forgot that the keybind “4” is used by default for the Bouncing Betty in some older call of duty titles, so you don’t have to consider the keybind “4” for weapon cycling in Project Aether.

Also, there’s this bug I realized existed where powerup drops on the map do not emit any sound. Also also, if you have time and would like to do it either before or after the new build is released, please add the WAW/BO1/BO2 power-up grab sounds and add an option to change power-up grab sounds from there or the current-default powerup grab sounds from BO4.

There’s more ideas I have but I don’t want to bother you too much with them and make the new build delayed (unless you’re fine with that; please let me know).

I can’t wait for custom mods to happen!

…once the update drops and people actually get to modding of course :) Custom perks and new maps from community members shall be the grandest!

Thank you for your response! The link from here sounds good. Perhaps a community member or fan can be able to make modding happen, but I’m fine with the existing whole-project approach.

Hi, just wanted to make this post before I forget. Is it possible for the developer to make an example mod and publish it somewhere? I’m asking this here because I don’t want to use discord (due to reasons).

Plenty of APIs and documentation have to be written or the community can figure some things out in terms of modding in case there isn’t time for documentation. I also wanted to suggest extra modding capability (i.e. mod tools) for later on when another update gets pushed, which is by developer’s choice.

Also, since the open source content isn’t on the internet, it could be self-hosted (Forgejo, Gitea) or placed somewhere outside of discord for safekeeping (and for non-discord users).

Hello again and Happy Birthday!

I heard maps were being suggested so I would like to suggest the WAW Zombie Revolution Mod’s Tutorial level, which I personally call “Nacht Revolution”. It’s basically Nacht but players spawn outside, there are Panzersoldats (you don’t need to add Panzers now), Hellhounds, Brutus (no need to add Brutus now), and there’s a tunnel on the Nacht first floor to the right of the Mystery box room’s stairs (replacing the boards in your case), leading to more areas. I couldn’t find any gameplay that shows the entire map on a player’s perspective. If you truly prefer though, you can add the option for perks and pack-a-punch on the map.

If the above is not satisfiable enough, you can add the rest of the DS maps, maybe a DS map combination so you can play all four DS maps at the same time.

Oh, one more thing: If you can add a section for the maps to toggle between main maps and custom maps, or even add labels/icons that I suggested prior, that would be amazing for organization purposes. It’s till up to you on that one.

Update: One tiny additional thing, I made some banners some time ago for the devlogs and figured now might be good to share as a birthday gift. I couldn’t make it the exact same Project Aether style but that’s what I have made. Feel free to make any changes to the images.

Hello again! This update was great to play on. I compiled another list of bugs, ideas and personal nitpicks for the previous update alongside this one.

Bugs:

• Vulture Aid ammo effect fails when reserve ammo is empty.
• [FIXED] Vulture Aid Green Smoke doesn’t show up (I know you’ll fix it later on).
• Sprinter Zombies never appear in Octagonal Ascension.

Ideas:

• Add an option for maps to have perk machines show always, disabled, or stay map-based (therefore dropdown with three options, default is map-based). It does mean that Nacht and other maps need all perk machines or Derr Wunderfizz though.
• Add a dropdown option in settings for mystery box bias to be map-based (i.e. BO2 map makes mystery box have bias for BO2 weapons, etc.).
• Add an option for denying or allowing voicelines with swear words. I personally don’t mind but just because old COD games had that.
• Make Galvaknuckles Pack-A-Punchable.
• Allow switching between Bowie Knife and Galvaknuckles (completely optional because I can see how this is tedious to implement).

Nitpicks:

• [FIXED?] Number keys only serve the same function of weapon cycling forward when Mule Kick is on, but should allow pressing 1 for Primary, 2 for secondary, 3 for Tertiary, 4 for cycling (this one might be more of a bug but I’m not sure).
• You should implement the “Hi, I’m Dempsey, and you are… DEAD!” line for Tank Dempsey
• You should more OORAH lines for Tank Dempsey, I get the feeling that some lines with that specific catchphrase is missing.

Also just to brag a bit for the fun of it, I got my first ever easy-mode octagonal ascension attempt to round 64 (mostly because cliffhanger and no sprinter zombies for some reason):

4 days later update: I completed the map (itch build #170, cliffhanger starter on medium difficulty; i meant to do hard mode but its fine).

I just tried out the bloom effect now and for some reason I haven’t seen any changes happen. Videos (via Gist on GitHub): https://gist.github.com/user-attachments/assets/fef9f643-5d8d-44f8-9b07-bb535afc7c6a And this: https://gist.github.com/user-attachments/assets/86850768-4903-4075-99e0-e6524a909bed.

It does give the extra idea for zombie eyes to have less of a glow though.

Thank you for adding the toggle!

I have a couple of ideas that I would like to see:

• [Partially Added] Debug mode, so you can have godmode, noclip, choose weapons to give to yourself, etc. via a command bar by pressing tilde (` or ~) like in WAW to BO3. It would be a settings thing.
• [Added] Holding E to repair barriers instead of just pressing/spamming E for that.
• [Added] Making the reticle in the menu more noticeable, please and thank you.
• Maps shown in the list can have labels or something showing which game the maps were ported from (WAW, BO1, etc.) so people can see where the maps come from (for those that don’t know, or when you port expanded/remade versions of given maps that have the same concept and/or name as previous version).
• [Added?] Add a setting to disable bloom effects (I have settings set to the lowest and I see some sort of bloom effects on my end).

I would love to help but I’m not familiar with Unreal Engine (yet?). Feel free to add them whenever you want to, or you don’t have to.

I can’t find the keybind mention anywhere for flip kick, but I pressed Up + X (X is the heavy/kick) while in midair to do what appears to be a flip kick, and using it near the train doors glitches the character out.

I also found out that dashing and then Down + X (X is the heavy/kick) right after allows fast sliding. Right after recharging, I do it again to gain even more speed. The problem is that it didn’t do anything useful for the Highway Terminal and Target Practice besides allowing me to break the vertical speed limit. I still can’t get up the highway terminal unfortunately. I was able to use it in the Training Gym and found a way to get to the second floor portion of the map. I found what appears to be Andromeda on the third floor portion, but getting up to that level is easier said than done, and I was never able to make it there (yet?). You could implement an easier way or make changes to it, since nothing happens when I change any internal values for the character.

No worries. I found out where to go, but I’m not sure how exactly to get up there, since I couldn’t find any dive-kickable objects or anything around me to get up there

I took the subway to the Target Course since I checked around Highway Terminal and didn’t find any indication of Andromedia. I can’t reach the top of the course unfortunately.

Also, there are some online tools to help port the game over to Godot in a simpler way, but I guess with the recent updates, maybe having the project stay on Unity is okay.

Amazing! I tested the new updated build and I can’t find the wall climb ability anywhere, which means that I can’t move up to find andromeda. Do you know where the wall climb is? Also, I also found another bottomless pit area just after the train in the training gym which needs to be filled to prevent falling out of the map. The new boost tweak is amazing too, but it might be a bit too much for the final release (demo here is fine).

I also tried to port the entire project to Godot but I ran into issues with loading the assets. I forgot what I did exactly since it was a month ago and my focus was (and still is) on my education. It was only because of that one situation by that one company. Do you want to have the project ported?

I really enjoyed the new features and changes here. One issue is that the one shard of the two in the top right of the shrine area is almost impossible to reach, and it would be a relief if it were to be moved closer to the right where the player can reach it. Another issue is that I am having a lot of trouble finding the Andromeda arena and boss fight. I looked everywhere in the maps and even tried to reach the top of the map with the bottomless pit present (to no success). Other than that, I like it a lot.