Cars are now harvest-able. Rather than blowing up you can mine them and get metal. But if you are smart, you will use a wrench and disassemble the car to get all kinds of cool parts, like short metal pipes, springs (now required to make a blunderbuss), cloth, small engines, batteries, radiators and more. You can still loot them too, but the loot isn’t guaranteed like before, since you can harvest them, and now that they aren’t entities (eating collisoin and server cpu).
Speaking of the blunderbuss, its now the most powerful shotgun in the game, followed by the sawed off, and then the long barrel pump. Of course range and reload time make a big difference, but for up close one shots, the blunderbuss is king. Also, a badass home made looking rocket launcher is being introduced in the alpha 13 update. I hope it makes a better impact than the explosive arrows. All the arrows did was blow holes in the ground and attract the annoying spider zombies that would scream and unleash a flood of zombie hordes.
A welcomed additional feature will be flooded basements! Now, underwater exploration in looting is added as well. Instead of water destroying anything in its path, water only floods over items realistically. Under water exploration could be dangerous though, you never know what you might find.
They added dismemberment of limbs. You can dynamically cripple enemies by shooting or cutting off a limb in combat. You can continue to cut pieces off even if they're more dead...well completely dead we are fighting zombies, lol.
As seen in other games like ARK cold weather survival will present a new challenge. The entire world has a global temperature and then each biome has a modifier, as well as time of day, wind, sunny or cloudy all influence the perceived temperature.