Project Zomboid News

Hello everyone, and Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate.

[h3]UNSTABLE PLANS[/h3]
So what does the Unstable release currently look like, and what will happen during the beta once it’s out there?

Well, the scores on the doors are currently this:



As many have assumed, we are currently working on getting Unstable out before Christmas.

We feel like we will be in a good place for this, but clearly the closer we get – the shorter the window for any necessary patching before the Christmas season.

If we need to, we will choose to delay – but right now the enjoyment we’re seeing from our testers certainly would seem to suggest that the build will be in a good enough state for wider consumption. (And if it were to slip, at this point in time it’s hard to imagine it slipping far into the New Year.)

If anything were to happen to change our minds, you would be the first to know.


[h3]INTERNAL BETA TEST IMPRESSIONS[/h3]
We’ve had around 30 people on the internal beta giving feedback now, and overall the response has been very positive. Which, as we mentioned last time, has been a relief.

With the feedback too has come a clear spotlight on what we need to be polishing, both now while we finalise the build – and what we will be turning our attention to during the Unstable update process.

Testers have certainly seemed to enjoy the way the game feels now – with it playing more smoothly, and the world feeling more ‘alive’.

They universally have responded well to the new lighting, new map additions, new lore, animals, optimization, underground areas, dynamic music, player vocals, corpse dragging, farming and many other of all the manifold things that are in 42.

Our changes to the flow of PZ – with our rebalanced zed spawns, combat building up muscle strain and fresh focus on the player having to sneak by crowds – have also been welcomed.

This said, this is certainly a change likely to cause some debate in the community (it does switch things up quite a lot) but we would much rather balance things within the mainframe once we have something playable out in the wild.

It makes the game a little slower, more tactical and zombies more of a threat – especially now you also have the darkness to contend with. Those who prefer to go a little more Action Jackson might disagree, however, so we’ll see how it all shakes out once everyone gets their hands on it. (And, of course, sandbox will always be available to modify, or disable, aspects that folk don’t like.)

Given that rural and some residential areas have less zeds (though we are still balancing this and pumping a few more in) there’s also a vague feeling that the overall game might be a little easier for experienced players now but, again, we will tighten this up once we have more universal feedback from the playerbase at large.

People really seem to enjoy the animals too – both when running them over, and caring for them. Having deer and rabbits wander along their paths through woodland also gives the world a lot of life, but in terms of the actual hunting gameplay itself there’s a feeling that there’s much room for improvement. As such, this will be a focus during the Unstable process.

Currently deer migrate over the map along paths preordained at the game’s start, and they leave poop and broken twigs that those with the tracking skill can follow – which testers seem to have found cool and atmospheric.

The rudiments are fun enough, but to get more of a Call of the Wild feeling we’re going to have to give the deer, their deaths, and the tracking much more focus during Unstable as the animal husbandry side of animals is what has received more than the lion’s share of attention during dev.

Fishing, meanwhile, has gone down well – but from feedback we’ve already got a few ideas on how to improve it during Unstable also.


[h3]OTHER ITEMS[/h3]
A massive part of the final push for 42 Unstable has been from the crafting team, whose work has – up until this point in time – has generally been kept in a separate room from the closed beta testers while we keep feedback internal.

Much of this work has been to do with improving the various different UIs we were using, which weren’t intuitive enough and didn’t share enough key architecture between them to keep things consistent.

Although this will see some added refinement by the time you get your hands on it, this is the current iteration of the ‘crafting on a flat surface’ UI.



While it could also do with more direct information on what’s in each building recipe (unclear currently if this will make it into Unstable) we are also very happy with how crisp and clear our new Build UI is.

The Build UI overall is intended to remove much of PZ’s reliance on right mouse click – and can also be used to build items such as campfires.  In time, perhaps during Unstable, we will also be considering making the movables system a part of this – to cut down on general screen clutter.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

In terms of animals, one pain point testers have outlined is the need to manually draw a ‘zone’ for your livestock should you want to move them – farmsteads come with these created on the map, but it’s not immediately obvious to new players.

As such, Prof has come up with a way for each animal to automatically create its own zone to feed, drink and breed within – but in the interests of getting the build out we’ve decided to bump the full integration of this to later during the Unstable process.

This approach is still fairly experimental, we can’t 100% confirm it will get in, but we are optimistic given what we have from it so far.

As such, this is what a PZ sheep’s brain would see, if it were reading the Matrix.



As a part of general animal improvements, meanwhile, we’ve also added a radial menu to help you with care for your livestock.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Something that our initial testers also requested was improved stealth/sneak. The change in zed spawning means that points of interest, and points of good lootage, are now doused in zombies more than ever before.

Given the addition of darkened nights, it felt like it was now time to tie zombie awareness a lot tighter to their surroundings: taking in light levels, cars and fences obscuring their view, and the weather. So yes, this also means that zeds will finally have their senses dulled on a foggy day.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


Finally while, as mentioned above, not as full-on Call of the Wild as we want it to be come the full release of Build 42 – here’s a quick video of some Wild Turkey slaughter to help our American friends celebrate Thanksgiving.

(There’s Wild Turkeys in Unstable too, we forgot to add that to the infographic above).

[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. 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.

Okay, so.

[h2]Where We’re At[/h2]

We have a limited number of external testers running around the current B42, and their first impressions have been positive. Which has been a relief.

There remains, however, much to do. In the coming weeks we will be getting more and more feedback on the more in-depth systems like animals and nu-crafting, and in turn addressing it.

[h2]Tester Feedback[/h2]
Here’s some of the initial feedback we received, though please note that these were not yet from extended multi-week playthroughs.

[h3]Darkness[/h3]
“I found I wasn’t running into zombies like I usually would randomly scattered throughout the place, until an alarm came and that was absolutely brutal. I didn’t think it’d draw so many. And the darkness is unforgiving too, I was scrambling for lampposts for their spotlight trying to fight off what was left chasing me until I was exhausted and finally able to rest.”

“In regards to the darkness: I think it’s perfect, I love the horror feeling of it. You really actually fully need a flashlight. You think: ‘Oh thank fuck I have some light’, rather than ‘Ugh, this barely lights anything’. There was a time flashlights barely had a reason to be in the game at all, so this is better.”

“I had a great moment with the darkness change – I got cocky and had a small horde chase me. I ran into a store with the plan of trying to lose them out the back. I opened and closed behind me a random door inside, to try lose them. I was accidentally now stood in pitch black. I scrambled for the glowing light switch as the door was now being slammed by the chasing horde, only to realise I’d run into the world’s tiniest bathroom.”

Related to darkness, and also because of the spooky season, today we also thought we would show off our new abandoned Sanatorium location – which is a fictionalised version of the real life Waverley Hills.

As with the irl version, it also comes with a ‘death tunnel’ which was once used to carry deceased patients out of the building.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Zeds[/h3]
“The empty road, felt really rural. Like how I’d expect to drive down my road both currently and in an apocalypse. Then I was just on my way out of Rosewood now, and because it was foggy, I accidentally stumbled into the prison, driving. Holy shit. Outside is crazy, I cannot imagine inside. I barely got out the gate with my car. A true trailer ‘But I would never make it home’ moment.”

“Just started a new game in West Point with the aim of trying Louisville, and noticed the streets outside are very quiet with the occasional zeds dotted about and it gave off cool 28 Days Later vibes. Ran around building-to-building thinking ‘this is too easy, nothing is stopping me’, when after bashing 15 zeds heads in muscle strain kicked in. Felt like a cool way of setting atmosphere without being too easy, feels pretty balanced so far.”

“TRULY, the changes to the grouping are SO GOOD. Probably the most QoL change for me. It really makes the world feel more alive in a way. Instead of having zombies spread out everywhere and having to do the ‘lure away ball up’ rinse and repeat just to get to an area, now it really feels like I can sneak around and explore areas while losing a group instead of knowing that I’m going to run into a ton more and just shouting instead to get it over with.”

As discussed last time, we have put a lot more thought into how, where and why zeds spawn in the locations they do in B42. This was a primary thing we asked the testers to report back on and, as seen above, they seemed to like it.

There are remaining concerns that rural areas might be a little too empty, but we will address this as more feedback comes in. In the meantime the following video gives a good feel for how things compare to B41 – and the second half of it is also is a good demo of the lighting.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]General[/h3]

• “I do really like how many different containers can be filled with liquids now. Makes finding a drinking source early way less frustrating. Thumbs up!”
  
• “I like the doors swinging open, and the game actually feels much smoother.”
  
• “Holy fuck.  A basement. I wasn’t expecting that. Man it’s awesome.”
  
• “Yeah you guys really fucking hit it out of the park already WHAT THE HELL this is SICK. Even though I’ve played in this area probably a hundred times seeing the stairs going down and then finding this area just made me feel like I was playing the game for the first time again wtf”
  
• “Also SUPER happy with the traits, it was a bit of a shocker, smoker no longer OP.”
• “The voiceovers actually helped a lot with immersion, I felt it.”
  
• “I like the brutalness of the combat, in terms of combat fatigue, needing to rest more, and training that skill up as you progress.”
  
• “It felt fun and fresh.”
  
• “Love the density. It’s terrifying.”
  
• “The first thing I noticed was the map in and around Muld. Within 15 minutes I encountered Cortman Medical and was amazed. I actually had to pull out the online PZ map to compare, it was that amazing. This extended to each house I visited, beautiful.”

[h2]WHAT WE’RE IMPROVING[/h2]

Clearly, any playtest won’t all be roses – and the fact that the new testers were PZ mega-fans should be taken into account too. (And also, although there’s a lot of quotes above, it should be noted that the current set of testers is small, and many of these bullet points come from the same people.)

We also got pointers on zed awareness, the discomfort system, and much more on other new additions that we’ll need to keep an eye on as the test pool goes wider.

Likewise, as mentioned before we will also need feedback from more elongated play sessions – and far more contact with the huge new systems like Crafting and Animal husbandry.

[h3]Combat tightening[/h3]
Something that the test sessions revealed were some combat irregularities that needed to be addressed, and were resulting in unfair deaths – and which in turn was limiting peoples’ fun and exploration.

This has led us toward doing a deep-dive into both some issues that have been introduced during 42 dev, and also some legacy issues from B41 that deal with zed targeting.

The latter could explain some of the rare edge-case combat irregularities that seasoned 41 players might have come across during their bouts of survival. It’s our hope that the results of this will bring some added consistency to combat in general.

[h3]Crafting[/h3]
The Crafting UI needs more love, and attention will turn to this once we are 100% happy with the new Build menu. You can see the Crafting UI in its current form in this lovely little video that’s been made for Halloween.

[Skeleton animals not accessible in vanilla game. Debug version shown. Craft speed not final.]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

For the past half a year or so we have had six people working on our new vision for crafting. As regular readers will know, delays with it have been a primary reason that things have been held back. During B42 development we didn’t build in enough safeguards should key members of the team become unavailable due to illness or personal matters.

This is now very much a lesson that has been learned and, alongside new production and support staff who have been brought in over the past six months, this is not a beartrap we intend to step into ever again. We’re really, really sorry that it has led to such understandable frustration in the community.

We are currently very happy with the progress being made by the Crafting Team, and can’t wait for the time at which you can all take their work out for a spin.

NOTE FOR MODDERS: Something that has been a long standing frustration for modders is how difficult it was to add new player-buildable-tiles to the carpentry and metalworking right click options. This came into sharp relief for us when it also became frustrating to add new B42 buildables to those same options.

Previously, the code for all of the tile building options was basically hardcoded in lua, and very inflexible. In B42 we are using text file script definitions (similar to how inventory items, vehicles and recipes are defined) to populate the build options versus using hardcoded values. For the most part the buildable scripts use the same format and syntax as the new b42 crafting scripts.

This means that in B42 it should be a far, far simpler matter for modders to add new building options for their subscribers.

[h3]Animals[/h3]
Animals and animal husbandry are currently in polish and bugfix mode, waiting on more extended playtesting. One thing, however, we would dearly like to improve is the current requirement on players to draw their own ‘animal zone’ around sheep/pig/cow enclosures to ensure that they feed, mate and develop while the player is off-screen.

During the development of 42 we have expanded our team and knowledge pool, and can now likely improve this – and as such the Prof is looking into ways to use an algorithm to automate the process around each animal, thereby removing the need for manual zoning from the player.

If we can make this work, however, it will likely be an addition to the Unstable beta – as opposed to being a feature at Unstable launch.

[h3]Zed Awareness / Stealth[/h3]
Something the new lighting and zed spawn has flagged, given as it has is that our ‘zed awareness’ needs some polish.

While its inclusion will likely not be as a part of the Unstable beta, we are rebalancing zombie senses so that they better take into account sneak levels, zombie focus and direction as per usual – but also take into account lighting, low obstacles like fences and bushes, and (yes) weather effects like rain and fog.

[h3]Reading Materials[/h3]
Last time we showed some of the flyers that we’d been creating, which will serve the gameplay purpose of directing players (especially new ones) to interesting locations, good places to loot, and satisfying places to hold out inside.

We received some valid feedback in that, even if supposed to look 90s-ish, some of the graphic design could be improved – and as such this past month got our friend Stuart (who in a former life was the Art Director on various London fashion/celeb mags) in on the case.

While we were overall happy with what we had before, we do feel these are now far improved – and getting completed far more quickly to boot.

[Please note, in the below examples – not all of these would logically be found in a mailbox.]

[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. 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.

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.

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