Project Zomboid News

Hi everyone, it’s been a good month of general work and polish on our closed build. Lots of general required mop and brush up, but as examples of what’s been going on here’s a few items:

• Making fishing clearer and easier to follow for new players – making the messaging clearer to the player when fish are present for example via the disturbances on the water, and making it more obvious when a fish has been caught.
  
• Fixing issues with body-dragging, for example bugs with phasing through walls on pick-up and drop.
  
• Improving animal pathfinding to make them act more realistically around walls and map structures, and continued general work on the unseen paths that animals will follow.
  
• Optimization work on the player’s view cone to help the game in busy areas.
  
• Map testing and fixing throughout new towns added to the game, and all the existing areas that have been given a glow up – which are primarily in Muldraugh.
  
• Adding more opportunities for players who generally don’t go to farms and forests to come across animals in-game.
  
• Adding 42’s new depth textures to scenery and items that testers discover, and that we previously missed out.

There’s clearly a myriad of other fixes and changes going on also. These and all of the above are necessary things, but not particularly sexy in a dev blog – for which we apologise.

We are also navigating the final implementation of better handling of drainables (‘used up’ items in recipes and such) in our revamped crafting system – and providing some neat short-cuts for both our own developers and modders by using input flags for many crafting use cases. Work on the Build Menu, meanwhile, continues apace – though the fundamentals are in the UI isn’t quite there yet, however, so we won’t be showing it off in today’s blog.

[h3]Languages[/h3]
From the very beginning of PZ amazing community translators have brought so many people from around the world to our game, and allowed non-English speakers to better enjoy the Knox Event.

Recently, however, due to the extent and expanse of the full translation sheets over twenty different languages it became clear that it was simply going to be too complicated to keep going in this fashion, especially with the motherlode of B42 content still soon to drop alongside everything that we on the team know still lies ahead.

There’s at least 100,000 words in Build 42, possible more depending on how many new CDs and VHSs we get in, so it’s about a novel’s worth all added up.

Build 42 will see a big shift for us in terms of localization, then, as we are moving to a complete professional translation of the entire game in a full 21 different languages. Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Spanish and many others.

We have essentially covered all of our most popular playing languages, and all of our most requested inclusions.

This will cover everything in-game: including both new content, and edits to the old. Existing translations have been checked through to ensure consistency and accuracy, and to fill in some of the gaps a few of the translations had due to the sheer vastness of the PZ broadcast system.

Importantly, access to all existing community translations – and prominence of existing community translator game credits – will clearly remain in the game.

We are so grateful to our amazing community translators, and we have worked out some cool ways that we can thank such a hugely complex web of people from all over the world – whether they have worked as individuals, or within smaller circles of co-translators who’ve been dedicated to various different parts of the game during different timeframes over the many years of PZ’s existence.

If you are reading this and you are in this bracket (ie. if you are a credited community translator, or have been in the past) then please go into the translations channel on our PZ Discord for further information about your ‘Thank You’ package, or email nasko[a]theindiestone.com.


[h3]Zombie Heat Map[/h3]
When the game map for a new build approaches final, one of the main jobs we always have to do is update the zombie heat map. This is what governs zombies that spawn outdoors: around buildings, on roads, around farms and fields. The current Build 41 one for Muldraugh looks like this:



Now, a criticism of the current zombie spawn is that it isn’t realistic. We veer away from the feeling of a classic zombie movie slightly because zombies aren’t always in realistic places. Zombies are all over the roads, in random fields and basically… a long way from where they probably died.

With 42’s current (experimental) zombie heat map we are trying to address this a little. The map is more intricate, and we hope feels more real.

Now if you see zombies, it means there are houses, businesses and lootable locations nearby. Zombies also appear in groups more than before, and spawn less on the road – unless there are parked cars or traffic jams.

This also makes for more requirements to sneak by the horde, and a generally more realistic-feeling apocalypse. Random empty spaces will have less zombies, and places of interest and choke points will have far more.

The current experimental 42 zombie heat map for Muld looks like this:


This will require playtesting and closed test feedback. Some areas will feel emptier, but places that you would expect to have lots of zombies (and which you’ll want to loot) will have them in abundance.

This will be far more in keeping with a Romero movie, however, so we felt it an experiment worth taking on for the 42 heat map – but will also clearly have to keep an eye of difficulty levels at the same time. Here’s a quick comparison video from its first WIP iteration.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


[h3]From the Art Studio[/h3]
All the newspapers are now finalled, and as such Pat, Unconid and Werlias are moving onto the in-game business flyers – which serve the gameplay function of revealing interesting areas on the player map.

This will in turn encourage exploration, and serve the function of showing new (and existing) players interesting locations that they can journey to and could perhaps prove useful in their continued survival. (Some typos in the following – we will be finalling the first batch of these over the next month).



Meanwhile, we’ve also commissioned a load of new art similar to our primary ‘Bob on Car’ image that everyone knows so well.

These will be used in various different places in-game, such as the background of new screens like the MP connection menu.



[h3]Nu_Twiggys[/h3]
Next up, here’s another quick glow-up video of a survivor-favourite location from the map team – alongside some neat day and night visuals.

Also shown in this video is an example of one of some of the super rare vehicles that will be found spawning in particular towns – there are multiple examples of cool surprises like this that you’ll come across in your travels in B42 that we’ve been dropping into the game as development has gone on.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]



The Knob Creek Hunting Lodge has also been converted into a log cabin design, which is one of our own favoured places to hang out on the map.



Oh, and we also thought we’d do you up a little showcase of some of the other player animations that you’ll see in 42, but which we haven’t really mentioned or shown before.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Finally, this past month or two has also seen a big, positive shake-up behind the scenes in terms of organisation, issue-tracking and general team communication.

As Build 42 development has continued the team has steadily grown, and we’re now at the point where there’s almost twice the number of people currently working on PZ than there were for Build 41 – and we have been updating our practices to reflect that.

We know that waiting for B42 can be arduous, and that when folks point this out it can feel like they are shouting into the void, but we wanted to let you know that we are listening. While the impact won’t be instant when you’re looking in from the outside, we are putting both processes and personnel in place that we hope will improve matters as we move forward through 42 and beyond.

A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something. We also live on Twitter/X right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. If you fancy you can sign up to receive PZ blogs in your emails right here.

At the moment we are fixing and polishing our current internal build to get it ready for more formal internal closed testing amongst a slightly wider set of gameplay testers.

There’s still a few items from the crafting revamp still to come in, and some optimization we hope to include, but overall we are pretty much feature complete. The path ahead is predominantly bug fixes, balancing and internal closed beta testing in preparation for an Unstable release.

There isn’t currently a date on the Unstable. This will depend heavily on how many serious bugs we still have to resolve and, once we are into this slightly larger closed testing group, what the feedback is like on things like the big changes to crafting – and how players feel when they are dropped into it for the first time.

Right now there’s elements of B42 that we know aren’t fun. There are also some showstoppers we are in the process of erasing. While the first Unstable beta clearly doesn’t need to be perfect, it does needs to be fun, balanced as much as it could be, not have any broken aspects, and make a good first impression. Especially considering the amount of time it has taken.

It could be we drop the build on closed tester group laps and it goes down a storm, and has relatively few problems. It could be that elements of new systems are annoying or confusing, meaning that we have to go back to make things smoother and more intuitive.

While we desperately want this to be out, and keenly feel the community’s pain, we don’t want to put out a duff build and disappoint anyone after the long wait. So we’ll take the testers feedback seriously, and won’t be shy of investing time into addressing any of the big concerns they may have, or mega-bugs that they may report.

So, please take this as “It’s not going to be out imminently” – but also consider it as a clear roadsign pointing towards us kicking Unstable out of the door, and the light at the end of the tunnel getting brighter.

We’ll go into a bit more detail on some other aspects of 42 dev at the close of the blog, but first a few other items of information/housekeeping.



As many will be aware, the Unstable beta of Build 41 was released with MP disabled. During this time the multiplayer was being rewritten from the ground up to work with the new animation system, and also to improve multiplayer stability and general immersion into the improved animations and gameplay.

This time around, again, we plan on initially releasing the Build 42 Unstable with MP disabled. This is for several reasons, but it will primarily mean that we can address SP issues in the Unstable beta in more bite-sized chunks without drowning in bug and issue reports, and it will also clearly allow the MP team a little extra time to fix up and polish.

A lot of huge changes have been made to improve security of multiplayer, with changes such as server side inventory and countless other anti-cheat measures to make the game more server-authoritative to help secure servers from being sent any kind of spoofed commands that cause issues with cheaters and such.

In addition there have been many optimizations and improvements made to deal with lag, optimize zombie movement, prevent rubber banding and so on which will lead hopefully to a much more enjoyable MP experience. Here’s a quick video of some vehicle lag improvements that came in this week, for example.

This will likely all need more testing and issues closed out once the SP is more final, before it’s available for more public consumption in Unstable.

(Please bear in mind though, that we’re a highly moddable java game with at this time no third party anti-cheat software. If c++ compiled AAA games with anti-cheat are still struggling with cheaters, then we would all be naive to assume that cheating would not be an issue. Hopefully we have massively restricted the possible capabilities of cheaters in 42 now though now – seeing as the server is a lot more authoritative in controlling the world state. Our advice will always be to favour playing in a whitelisted community if you want to avoid cheaters or at least be able to permanently remove them from your game. We will however be exploring proper anti-cheat solutions in the longer term and hopefully most cheats will be limited to stuff like ESP, but even so we’ll continue to recommend whitelisted servers for a cheater free experience.)

There will, however, be strict requirements for modders to follow to allow them to do stuff they once took for granted. For example, creating an inventory item will have to be done in a way that’ll allow it to be created on the server.

The MP team are currently working on guidelines and documentation that will explain how modders can work within the updated framework and not upset the anti-cheat measures. Likewise, similar documents are being written for crafting and other new/updated areas of the game.

Finally, how long will an Unstable SP beta last until we drop MP in? Uncertain, but this stuff isn’t being written from scratch – and is already mostly functional. It’s a different situation to the one that saw the lengthy wait for MP integration for 41.



With such a huge update to the game, it is inevitable that almost every mod that exists will be invalidated in some capacity. With the new crafting systems, especially, it’s unlikely any mod will work out of the box.

However, what we do have is a new modding architecture which will help a lot in the transition, that’s heavily inspired by the way that a certain game that’s set on a World out on the Rim does it.

Essentially, Aiteron’s been working on heavily improving the mod system to allow for versioned mods to be included in a Workshop item.

B41 currently uses the root directory of the workshop files as the mod: it contains a media directory and all the rest that allows the mod to override files in the core zomboid data directory. B42, meanwhile, instead introduces a functionality where a build of the game will query the mod for a subdirectory which contains the most recent compatible version of the mod – and to then use those files.

For example, a subscribed mod could have a 42 directory, a 42.21 directory, a 43 directory and a 43.31 directory. If you run a version of the game that’s 42.1 it’d use the 42 directory, and load that version of the mod. If you then upgraded to 42.25 then it would start using the 42.21 directory, and so on.

Within this there’s also a ‘common’ directory that’s used by any version of the mod and can be used to store large files such as art or sounds, that modders clearly don’t want duplicated over 20 versions of their mod.

(Though this aspect will only truly come into play in versions beyond 41, as we can’t at this point realistically modify Build 41 to use the new mod system – and B41 mods will clearly remain loading directly out of the root directory as they currently do while ignoring the B42+ versioned directories.)

What this will all mean is that when modders update their mods to work with B42, they can leave the B41 files within the mod package and continue to work on B41 content as and when they desire. Simultaneously, however, they’ll be able to support the B42 beta without destroying that compatibility with B41 stable

From that point on they’ll then have much more intelligent versioning to allow for extra power to update their mods, in ways that won’t be destructive to older builds of the game. In addition to this, 42’s new mod load order functionality will make submods and modpacks a lot easier to create.

Finally because of these huge changes, and the likelihood that so few mods at all will work B42 on first release, we currently plan to automatically disable all mods on first load – and B42 will be unable to load any of the B41 mod files until a workshop item has been prepared using a 42 directory. This will be necessary in limiting the amount of bug reports we’d inevitably get from people loading up their B41 mod lists and completely breaking the game.



As indicated above, we’re pretty much feature complete with some crafting elements still on their way. There’s various issues lurking in the tester build that need investigation and sorting – this week some unexplained and endless explosions in deer/bunny populations, out of memory issues, and combat irregularities. There’s various things here that need sweeping up.

As we have mentioned in previous blogs, we felt the delay with the crafting overhaul was set to continue longer than anyone was comfortable with, and so decided to release the first beta without the entirety of the ‘nu-medieval post-apocalypse village’ crafting possibilities we intend in the longer term as with blacksmithing, pottery, smelting, weapon-related carpentry, carving etc. there’ll be plenty still to chew on.

The final ‘must have’ feature we have in production for 42 is a Building UI. We’ve never been a fan of the right click menu building system, and along with the sharp increase of new buildable tiles it became necessary to improve how building is carried out. For the expanded test pool and Unstable, then, the final addition will be in taking the current ‘furniture picking up’ icon on the icon strip to the left and turn it into a button to bring up a new panel with the furniture interactions and building choices rolled into it

From this we’ll have a nice categorized building UI the player can keep on-screen as a palette to pick buildable tiles from, which will allow you to browse the various categories and tiles you want to build in the world, click on them if you have the necessary building materials, and then place the ghost tile on the target tile. It’s pretty simple, and backstage a first implementation isn’t taking too long to get operational. In other news:



As discussed last time, we weren’t happy with the pre-defined and permanent animal paths that deer and other animals would follow that were initially implemented. As such Prof recently added randomized animal paths that are tweakable in lua.

New paths are generated using the seed given when you create a world – they are static in the sense that they don’t self-modify after you started a game, but dynamic in the sense that you will never know what journeys deer will be taking in any fresh world. In future we’ll explore regenerating these paths if they are over-hunted. Here’s a quick vid of them in action.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

While it’s not a complete tech tree at the moment, tailoring has got some attention and players should be able to grind the first levels from looted or farmed materials. These do not require a specific crafting station, but higher-level options that we’ll add during Unstable will.

[Please note: the crafting window is due another polish pass, and this video also shows a degree of debug/coder-speak wordage. Although performed on a table here, these recipes don’t demand it.]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Partly due to current game imbalance, and partly because with the new crafting we didn’t want to replicate the vertically-placed-work-station ‘spam crafting’ that you can sometimes see in games like Minecraft, we spent an afternoon revising sheet rope climbing mechanics while waiting for a crafting blocker to clear.

Previously only drunk players had a chance of falling when climbing a sheet rope, in Build 42 now any player has a chance to fall when climbing a sheet rope to higher floors after an initial grace period has elapsed – the duration of which period, and the chance to fall, is determined by negative moodles, skills such as Strength, Fitness and Nimble, appropriate traits like Dextrous or Gymnast, and professions like Burglar.

Additionally characters will accumulate muscle strain if they climb ropes for enough time, and without resting. There’s a smaller chance of falling from a rope while descending, also, while all of this can be toggled off in Sandbox.


In the background to the B42 work, Zac has been overhauling the AnimZed tool that made the success of B41 possible. This will be of great aid when it comes to final B42 polish, and all versions beyond this.

“The core of every good survivor character brain is a logic state network.” He explains. “The player’s character might be walking – and from that they could start running, stop entirely, climbFence, aim, sneak etc. All the animation frameworks for players and zeds need to be keyed into all available potential outcomes that the player or the game might dictate.”

“Our problem increasingly was that our characters’ brains were getting pretty complex. We are adding all sorts of new abilities in both 42 and beyond, and they’re getting bigger and bigger still.”

“Up until now we haven’t had a tool to visualise the network. We’ve been editing the structure manually, by editing xml files. This has led to pain. When trying to incorporate a new feature, or figure out why a character is doing the wrong thing, it’s always taken a lot of manually parsing reams of network circuitry, and it’s slowed integration down.”

“So, we have been building a proper logic network editor, named it AnimGraphZeditor, that should be a big boost in making more and more complex brains. The importance of having a robust logic network editor cannot be overstated for final polish of elements of 42, and everything that lies beyond it: essentially taking the abstract mass of logic conditionals, states, and transitions, and puts them up on the screen as circuit diagrams. From here we can identify problems and faulty circuits, and makes it much easier to implement new features and capabilities.”

While we are in this area, it should also be mentioned that it is still our plan to release AnimZed to the community – and this will most likely follow Build 42 release.



Finally a quick video compilation of recent in-game weapon testing – featuring all the old familiars, but also a whole bunch of the new items that you’ll be able to crack heads open with in the next version.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something. We also live on Twitter/X right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

Those who receive blogs and announcements by email: please note that we are changing provider. If you want to continue to receive our mails please sign up again here.

Hey all. Alongside continued crafting work it’s very much a time of mixing/polishing previously announced and described things in the internal test build.

As such please forgive us if things are a little ‘bullet pointy’ and expanded info on things you’ve heard about before. It’s all stuff that needs doing.



Some of the things we’ve been doing this month on the crafting revamp includes:

• On-boarding three of our friends from TEA games to add some firepower to the crafting team and get it all out of the door. While they’ve been getting up to speed with the code they have also been documenting it all with its latest implementation, which in turn will become our guidance for modders upon release.
  
• Working on crafting station animation interactions. In Build 42 you won’t see direct physical movement of player and crafting station when you interact, for example a potters wheel won’t spin. Until we, potentially, one day include 3D models on the map furniture will remain as static sprites as they always have been.
  

What we do need, however, are natural player movements towards the crafting stations – that will in turn open up their individual crafting menu accompanied by a familiar crafting SFX, and potentially an on/off state dependent on what sort of crafting station it with lights on and glowing etc. They also needed depth textures added to avoid clipping and such, which have now been implemented.

• Working out how best to separate out the new skills. We became concerned that we were introducing too many ‘portmanteau’ skills simply for the sake of keeping the skill list slimmed down. There’s still some folding together of craft skills when there’s clear similarities in tools and techniques, but overall it felt wrong to lump too much together.
  

It won’t be necessary for players to dedicate time and effort into building out these skills for the mostpart, unless they are trying to make a civilization on a forest map and other survivalist circumstances.

• Making sure that there’s sandbox settings that cater for faster progression. Sandbox and settings now include settings for Skill XP multipliers for individual skills, so your speed up each different ladder can be directly adjusted.
  
• Addressing undesired and unfun gameplay loops. A common server admin complaint is that the map swiftly becomes barren of furniture and loot containers due to players chasing XP. As such, in B42 scrapping, dismantling and ripping items will no longer grant XP.
  

We no longer want progression in a skill to involve destroying piles of items or trashing the map; and instead to concentrate on making things. XP for actions such as building structures and repairing clothing has been boosted to adjust for that, and the individual skill XP multipliers in the sandbox settings also offer more means to compensate. (This said, as things stand, XP for dismantling electrical items or wrecked vehicles remains.)

• Adding skills for wilderness play. Knapping and Carving have both been added. Knapping is used for fashioning stone blades from the pieces of flint you can find in the world, for making knives, spears, axes, scythes and other tools. Carving involves carving wood and bone for similar purposes.
  

Some carving will also produce decorative items, especially at lower levels, with more artistic and aesthetic crafting recipes due to be added to help you level up without making the same sharp stick over and over again.

• Improving how recipes work and are learned. There are a great many new recipes in B42, and when you become a Level 10 Master Blacksmith it makes no sense that you may not know some of them within that field. As such many of them now come with an ‘Autolearn’ requirement – in which a skill level (or a combination of different skill levels) will automatically know them.
  

Another, minor, thing we have added meanwhile is making sure that the recipe schematics that can be found alongside the weapons and armor in the randomly spawned survivalist safehouses are generally diagram-based so illiterate characters can also join in the fun.



There are two different sorts of subterranean lair in B42 – random ones that could occur in various set places, and permanent ones.

As far as the permanent ones go there’s a range of bunkers, tunnels and cave networks waiting to be discovered – as well as simply new lower floors to some of the map’s more known and recognisable locations.

What we hadn’t done yet for B42, however, is mark all the potential locations for the random basements and then to test them so they’ll all fire off in your game once we hit Unstable beta.

Here’s a map of one of our locations showing the basic spread of what you can expect. Apologies for spoilers, we thought it wouldn’t be too bad seeing as it was only one town. So anyway here’s Brandenburg.



And here’s a quick video showing some, admittedly posed for the camera, testing – in which the same location is shown to have a different basement on a different run.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
The basements on show here aren’t dazzlingly exciting, but this will of course be the case for most of the ones you find. Part of this testing is also checking the rules that we have in place to match random basement size and orientation to the size of the house.



Grappletech is, for all intents of purpose, done. This is the update to PZ’s animation tech that allows two characters to directly interact – whether survivor on survivor, survivor on zed, or zed on survivor.

As discussed and shown before, the first use-case of this will be in fixing the jankiness in PZ that’s always surrounded the carrying, moving and disposing of bodies.

In a previous blog we also showed an unimplemented animation of the player throwing bodies through a window, as an example, of where we would take it next – and this has now been added into the system. This can be seen in the following video, alongside some old friends.

PLEASE NOTE: We are aware that after the window chuck the plummet of the corpse doesn’t look great yet. This will be addressed in future, and is separate to what we’re doing with GrappleTech.

PLEASE ALSO NOTE: The ‘effort’ noises the character makes while dragging corpses will be considerably toned down, or absent, in the release version. It’s a bit much here.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
At present body dragging and window chucking is not in the internal test build, however it will be required at some point for the crafting revamp as this will allow for far more direct animations with irregularly-shaped crafting stations.

We had previously said it wouldn’t be a part of the Unstable beta, but now it’s done and playable feel it’s a potential – dependent on the progress made by the crafting team.

While we’re back at the K&B house by the way, check out how it looks during the day and the night now.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

• Newspapers have been finalled, and this week have been checked through for authenticity by a local American local news journalist. They will next be added to the game’s loot tables once relevant edits have been made.
  

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


• We weren’t entirely happy with the predictable way that deer were following our pre-defined paths through forests, and as such with zoning and biome work complete (as seen last month) a natural next step for this system would be to create multiple pathways for wildlife organically.
  

Work on this is now underway alongside general polish of animal migration, and should make for a more engaging experience come Unstable.

• Over with the Sound Team (as well as providing noises and settings for new items, weapons and altitudes) we have tied their work more closely to the map tools.
  

They will now have the freedom to create building-specific roomtones and oneshots, where as before hey could only generalise between 7-8 roomtones parameter values. So now we could have anything up to 260 different ambiances and reverb settings, which will make for more immersive experiences in key atypical buildings like movie theatres, large churches, more cavernous areas etc.

• We are also currently testing the glow-up of Muldraugh, specifically at night-time, and it’s looking pretty awesome to tell the truth. We hope that survivors are going to be tempted out of their bases during moonlit hours a bit more than usual to see it.
  
  

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Happy birthday to Andrei Knorr. 16 today!

As discussed last time, in the interests of getting the 42 Unstable out of the door we are limiting the number of new craft disciplines that will be initially available and then dripfeeding others (alongside polish, balance etc) in updates to the beta.

We have done a bit of a stocktake on what we have done, and are aiming to have the following finished off for a first release.

(The contents may settle and change, of course, but we feel this is still a fair assessment.)

• Metal smelting and Blacksmithing
• Pottery
• Weapon-related carpentry skills, such as carving handles and shafts for crafted weapons
• Small-scale bone carving to create sewing needles, fish hooks, cutlery and materials for some fun armor types.
• The essentials when it comes to agricultural production: flour, oil, thread, twine etc.
• Weapon crafting performed on in-game surfaces that don’t necessarily require a particular workstation

Not all of these will come with 100% precise animations at first, and direct character interaction with the larger crafting workstations is reliant on the ‘GrappleTech’ we showed previously with dragged corpses and will therefore be mixed in later down the line.

Craft disciplines we will be bringing in during Unstable will include Brewing, Glassmaking and Butchery. Bowyery meanwhile (which clearly will require far more animation, tech, combat and design work) will be at the back of the queue, and is most likely to appear in a later version.

We also believe that, seeing as we have a good art pipeline running, we can relatively easily introduce a wide range of decorative craftable building items to the mix for Unstable – which will likely be of interest to MP and RP players who want to make their bases a little more personalised.

When we put all this out to the public beta we intend to do so alongside a comprehensive modding guide (as we will also for the MP changes) as the refresh here will be fundamental, and new to all.

In pursuit of this, and to generally expedite the process and aid in polish/fixes, we have also reached out to our friends at TEA Games who are providing some extra manpower.

Finally, a quick look at the current status of the UI that appears when you choose to craft on a surface – a table, a worktop, an exposed tree stump if you’re in a forest and such.

(This will become more refined, clearly, and crafting options will also be available as text rather than icons if you prefer it as such.)




[h3]BIOMES / FORAGING[/h3]
One aspect of 42 is that we no longer have a rigid black border, and instead have generated wilderness at the map’s edges.

As a part of this we also needed ways to ‘zone’ these areas, meaning to automatically mark them as a particular area so that the game knows, for example, which sounds to play and which foraging area to allocate.

Having foraging being mapper-defined, and a laborious job to mark up, has always been an issue. It’s a big annoyance for players who like to stray from the beaten path only to discover they’re no longer in a foraging zone.

Here, for example is an overview of some of the 41 map’s current zoning. To the east is a large swathe of unzoned (and therefore unforageable) land – while the zone squares of dark green forest and light green woodland is lumpy, boxy and unnatural.



Now in B42 then ProfMobius, he of Minecraft origin, has put together a biome system for the inner map as well as the generated map that now runs beyond our usual boundaries. By extension, this also means that foraging will be both fixed throughout the map.

Another big part of this is that it will also be more interesting as you walk through more varied patterns of land-types that are far more clearly visually representative of what they are in real world terms.

So here’s what the above looks like with more detailed, automatically created, biomes. Note the more interesting interplay of woodland and deep forest in, for example, the central south area.



Within these biomes the Prof controls the spawning of specific trees over others. In the screenshots below you can see different kinds of forest environment like a River Birch forest, clusters of more PH resistant trees, deep forest, and even semi urban areas.

There are nine biomes in all: deep forest, organic forest, birch forest, pine forest, farm maintained forest, pollution resistant forest, and three more which are mixes of the above.

Their generation is guided by geographical features such as rivers, roads, neighbouring farms and large bodies of water. The end result is a lot of much-needed variety for all of your off-road adventures.



We are now working to make life for the modders and mappers easier with this, in terms of biome generation and clean/invisible transitions between the vanilla map and the community’s additions, but otherwise all the above is now in the internal test build.




[h3]LIGHTING[/h3]
In the past few weeks we’ve done more work on in-game lights in terms of balance, purpose and mechanics.



There’s still a fair amount to do, this project will likely continue to be updated through the Unstable beta, but we are closer and closer to the atmosphere we first envisioned when we introduced 42’s new light propagation system.

That includes items like streetlights with an orange hue as (in the 90s, most used sodium), plain neon appearing white, halogen lighting being slightly yellow and incandescent and such. Mix in the coloured lighting that we mentioned last time, and all of a sudden you have a far more interesting lighting-scape to encounter on night-time forays before the power finally goes out.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Another part of this has been to make light overlays and adjust values for each light emissive object: things like signs, crafting station and fridges. This paves the way for a lot of cool lighting scenarios, as seen below in some WIP screenshots.




[h3]GLOW UP(DATE)[/h3]
Last time round we showed you some map work that was taking place in familiar locations, like Muldraugh.

The response was largely positive, but some folk correctly worried that they were perhaps a little too ornate and fancy for Muld – which in itself we have always represented as a very ‘normal’ slice of Americana where normal people lead normal lives, and face the normal everyday challenges of life.

Muld, our first town and first love, will always be front and centre for the tone of PZ and as such we decided to take things in a slightly different direction after feedback.

Public buildings like the school (latest version now seen below) have been made to look a little more realistic for a town like Muldraugh, and Cortman’s is a little less fancy. Other locations, however, like the revamped police station will remain as seen last month.



Everything remains super-improved, please do not worry on that account, but we have toned down the ‘newness’ and the ‘poshness’ of what was shown in Muld.

All buildings seen last time will be used elsewhere on the map also, so will still be available to hold out inside but in a different and more appropriate geographic location.

Here’s another glow-up spot, meanwhile, that went through recently.




[h3]OTHER STUFF[/h3]

• Nick from TEA is working on edge-case moments of unfairness and mis-targeting that occur during hectic moments in combat and can result in frustrations. It is our hope that (alongside 42’s general improvement and polish to player movement via bugs fixed in the animation system) we can have some pain points removed before we hit Unstable.
  
• Among many and varied other things both big and small, the MP team have been working on smoothening the movement and direction of zeds that are chasing your fellow survivors. While perhaps not something you generally notice in the heat of the moment, as the following video shows it should bring a less-jaggedy feel to general MP zombie pathing.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here

How do, all.
 
[h3]CRAFTING CONSOLIDATION[/h3]
At this point the main element of the Build 42 update that’s been holding stuff back has been the substantial crafting overhaul that’s been underway.

When we set out with B42 our main ambition has been to fill out the crafting potential of the game to vastly expand the end game by providing players the ability to build a community and replace a lot of the items that currently require looting to obtain to give players the ability to run servers and game worlds indefinitely without needing to respawn loot.

We’ve made good progress towards this end but the more time has gone on we’ve realized that aiming to achieve these goals are holding back Build 42’s entrance to an Unstable beta release. While it’s definitely achievable, and will be realized in time, stubbornly holding things back until we get there it only going to delay people getting a hold on all the other cool stuff in the Build that they’ve been waiting for.

As such we’ve decided it would be a better approach to polish up what we have, and continue the process of bug fixing and polishing the build to the point it would be able to go into the Unstable branch. Then for us to fill out the gaps in the crafting overhaul during Unstable, or perhaps with some smaller releases while Build 43 is under full development.

Though we haven’t worked out exactly what will be in the first iteration, there’ll still be a lot of new crafting for people to sink their teeth into, from stuff like the blacksmithing, pottery, woodworking, food preservation, extra fluid and workstation mechanics, new crafting system and much more. Certain crafting tech trees we’d hoped to be in the initial 42 Unstable release will be pushed back though, to avoid any more unnecessary delays.

People would much rather see the build out and get to play with all it has to offer, rather than be upset about the things never made it into the first Unstable release as originally planned. In the meantime, while there’s a ton to play with, initially the crafting overhaul may not quite live up to the potential we set out for until we fill it out later down the line.

We’ve only made the decision this week, while active development of the other major features has been rolling on. As such the build is still very unstable, unbalanced and buggy: it’ll definitely take some time to focus on fixing and polishing it up to a releasable state, and to fill in any gaps we feel we need to make the build feel whole.

As such the Unstable build is not imminent, but with this readjustment of our plans the pile of stuff that needs to be done before release has gotten a lot shorter. How quickly we’ll get the build shipshape remains to be seen, it will take some time to settle, but we’ll likely have a much better picture by the next time the blog rolls around.

[h3]MULD GLOW-UP[/h3]
As you already know the map is getting a significant lick of paint – with new towns, bigger buildings in cities and underground locations.

With all the improvement, and the new tiles going toward this improvement, then our existing towns were starting to look a little threadbare. Until now, of course.



As you can see, Ayrton has been heading back into our familiar locations and giving them all a fresh lick of paint. The difference is quite marked, and we’re hopeful that you’ll all enjoy what we’ve done with the place once 42 goes Unstable.



[h3]LIGHTING GLOW-UP[/h3]

42’s lighting system is a big improvement from 41’s, with enclosed rooms without light sources actually appearing dark and general light propagation being a lot more realistic.



Something we have recently improved on, in this area, however are the individual lights within each room: on lamps, signs, crafting stations, electrical appliances and such.



Here what we’re doing is adding a sprite as an overlay on top of light sources to give them a ”on” status. After tinkering with 42’s new light parameters we have been able to produce more consistent colour temperatures across our various different light sources types whether coloured, shaded, halogen or otherwise – all while still providing for more radical scenarios like coloured light bulbs.

To demonstrate, here are some example of interior lighting which show how objects that light up (lamps, neon signs, etc) can affect a scene, and how we have blended it with a standard room’s spread of light.



[h3]PAPERS PLEASE[/h3]
Work continues with unconid and werlias in providing assets built with PZ models and 3D items to help us expand on our lore and your immersion into the Knox Event.

The focus is currently on newspapers, but will expand out into flyers once the numbers of back-dated editions you’d reasonably expect to be found on a particular date in 1993 have been fleshed out. So here’s one of our recent examples.



Swiftly followed by the sort of place you’d most likely find one of the most recent (and final) daily editions…



As another part of us bedding down in the lore, meanwhile, we are also making sure that characters in broadcasts, flyers and newspapers who have an evident place of work (or place of demise) have their zombified forms spawn at the relevant location on the map.

This is something of a side project for a few of our coders, but will hopefully pay dividends for when players are exploring new locations and getting to know the locals.

While in this area we are also improving the way in which the world generates loot and zed encounters that mesh better with the overall timeline. Bandit zeds and survivalist zeds, and their safehouses, when first encountered will give a far better indication of the current world state and the number of days since society breakdown.

[h3]MP TEAM UPDATE[/h3]
Over in the MP department, the team have been concocting a few things to make the lives of players and server operators a little easier. To whit:

• The ability for servers to have customisable login and server connection screens, with an image of the server’s own choosing and an additional smaller server icon.
  
• Improved anti-cheat settings. These could formerly prove problematic but now they have been improved/tightened, and through Server Options you can turn each one on and off individually, and also configure actions when cheats are detected – whether its banning, kicking, logging or ignoring.
  
• Added an interface for viewing the capabilities of different roles like Admin, Moderator, and User. This interface also allows you to add custom roles, and from that customize the user capabilities for these new roles.
  
• A new ‘War Manager’ feature intended to help server admins govern conflict between rival groups on the map. Everything about this is customisable, especially timers and countdowns, but essentially during a waged (and accepted) war then safehouse protection is turned off for all parties involved. This comes after a war has been declared and has been accepted, with refused declarations steadily taking away (admin-defined) points that will ultimately leave you unprotected if you stave off war declarations for too long.
  

This is all clearly on top of many, many other smaller and wide-ranging improvements.

[h3]FUN LOOTIN’[/h3]
Finally, small details we know, but the Art Department have also been pumping out more items to give a little more personality to the zeds you slay – and to the homes they once lived in.



This month’s target has been novelty key-rings and interesting bags/containers. All relatively simple for us to mix into your looting, but hopefully with some payoff as you find interesting items in each home you pillage, and each pocket you rifle through.



This month’s non-buried corpses in the cemetery from Fritz. A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here