Hey all, here again for the March Thursdoid. Lots of stuff from lots of different areas of the game this time, we do hope you enjoy.

We’ve mentioned the fact that Build 42 will have a variety of readable materials that you can loot and inspect, but we hadn’t shown them off in-game as quite frankly they didn’t look great. They were crammed inside our existing Survival Guide UI, and it really wasn’t going to bat for us.

We didn’t really want to create a load of individual images that wouldn’t be readily translatable into other languages either, and become a massive timesink for our art department who are already pumping out loads of vital stuff elsewhere. So, clever Aiteron got onto the case...

So what is this?

Well, it’s a secondary UI API system – and with it both ourselves and modders can create readable text UIs in easier and more flexible ways, and what’s more reuse templates for them too.

Techie bit: currently, 4 Java elements have been added: Base, Text, Texture, TextEntry, and then based on these we’ve built a more complex UI in lua that’s easily manipulated by us and modders to play around with position, rotation angle, scale, color, animations, text settings, etc.

Alongside this a new RichText system has been added, meaning the media templates can be changed completely in translation files (including size, position of elements and other settings) so we can make great media for our whole international audience.

Video for modders who might be interested here.

How are we using it?

For Build 42 we are using this to create two flavours of lootable reading material, although not all of it will be available in the game we moment we go into unstable beta.

• Newspapers and Community News pamphlets, to help with world-building and to fully flesh out the timeline of the Knox Event.
• Local business flyers, house listing advertisements, restaurant menus and the like. These will all be locations that will be useful to your survival story – and reading the flyer will automatically reveal their location on the player map. In this way we will direct new players to helpful looting areas, and some of the community’s favourite safehouse locations.

What’s making it extra cool?

This has been cooking for a while, but we were increasingly unhappy with aspects of the way things looked. We were using in-game isometric screenshots, and they didn’t feel quite right for our in-game newspapers as such.

We’re delighted to say, then, that community heroes unconid and Werlias have agreed to come on board and help us out with this.

Both have been entertaining PZ players with their brilliantly made posed still images and videos using PZ models and imagery, and they seemed amazingly well suited to bringing life to the characters of the Knox Event in readable media.

Likewise, we will also easily be able to do fun stuff with, say Nolan of Nolan’s Used Cars, by easily placing his cowboy hat zombie at the location of the car lot that the flyer has revealed on your map.

Something in PZ that’s needed improvement for the absolute longest time, is one of the things that you see the most.

We’ve been unhappy with the way that grass looks for a long while, and it became more unsightly with the advent of Build 41’s 3D models.

Build 42 is now blessed with a depth buffer. This means that we can reduce the player’s clipping with the scenery, we can show doors swinging open and closed, and (during our unstable beta) we will also be able to show seated characters on furniture in all four directions so players won’t have to use mods to access the sedentary animations for the directions that don’t clip.

It’s also great for grass and general undergrowth too, so alongside updating the existing grass sprites to feel more detailed and natural – we’ve also added support for depth maps so large blades and clumps of grass will intersect your character as you walk, crouch, etc as if they were 3D geometry.

As you can see, this makes the character feel much more grounded. It also has various impacts on the gameplay: crawling zombies are slightly harder to detect, falling objects get a little more lost in the grass etc.

With the increased wilderness gameplay that 42 will bring for many players, in terms of hunting and settlement building, players will be surrounded by grass and wilderness a lot more – so we’re really pleased to have got this in, and looking so good.

In the world beyond Build 42 we also intend to build on this, tying our grass and scrubland to our seasonal and erosion systems – helping you to get a better sense of the months and years as they pass.

Now that 42 is delving underground, and indeed much higher into the sky, we need some improved soundscapes to deal with it.

Recently the team at Formosa have been working on what happens with your speakers once you start delving underground. As such they’ve kindly supplied two videos showing their work: the March Ridge bunker we saw last time, and a new spooky Ekron industrial lower floor.

What can you hear that’s different here?

Ground level and outdoor sounds gradually dip away the lower you go, and once you’re in an underground area various appropriate one-shot noises can be found – like distant mice, cans falling and rolling in somewhere in the gloom etc.

As far as the roomtones go there’s also water dripping layers to give it more of an abandoned feel too, where appropriate, and likewise gunshot noises and the like have been played with to sound more appropriate in an enclosed underground space.

A key part of zombie fiction that Project Zomboid hasn’t catered for yet are attracted hordes trapped up against long wire fences – as seen with the fences that surround the prison in The Walking Dead.

Previously our pathfinding hasn’t catered for this, and players have felt a sense of security while behind our sturdy wire fences.

Now, things will change a bit.

BUT FIRST: some traditional caveats.

This feature will be a sandbox option, and it will also only come into play with large hordes – and over a long period of time.

This video is WIP, and the effect is sped up, and we can work on the crowding/banging visuals too.

The point of this is that we want a gradual build up of a huge horde, so players get the feeling that they are safe – for now. The fence will only hold for so long up against so many zombies, and eventually it might give way.

In terms of pathfinding, with lone or few zombies, the change to zombie senses also leads to more Romero-like zombies, with some not being intelligent enough to go around and obstacle, and choose to slam into a fence in their efforts to get to a player instead.

Fenris’ extensive upgrades to PZ’s guns continue, this month with changes of note like the following:

• Wind, fog and rain, as well as general lighting conditions now have an effect on hit and critical chances. Some of these can be offset by traits or skill levels.
• Ranged shots at targets hidden by dense fog or darkness can be challenging or impossible.
• Maximum firing range has been increased and is no longer affected by skill level (chances of hitting targets at range still is).
• Distance to target has a greater effect on penalties caused by panic, drunkenness, player movement, weather, etc.
• Most penalties are significantly reduced at close ranges.
• Sound radius is increased overall, but with a sandbox option to modify higher or lower. Sound range is reduced when firing indoors.
• Sighting systems have an ideal range they were designed for: a minimum effective range, and a maximum. Outside of this range they are less effective. If the target is close enough that just pointing without aiming would give a higher chance then the sights are ignored (eg a x8 scope on a target 2 tiles away).
• Panic previously didn’t actually affect hit chances (just critical and damage). This has been corrected. Remain calm, don’t panic, you’ll be fine.
• Hit chances and critical chances are now calculated in the same way (with exceptions): if something (like panic) effects hit chance, it also effects critical.
• Hit chances are generally increased allowing lower levels to make a successful shot under the right situation. However, avoiding negative conditions is vital, especially panic.
• Ammo weights have been corrected and rebalanced. Mounted flashlights are functional and highly advised for low-light shooting.

The above video shows Fenris’ experimentation and how he’s polishing guns – the graph shows the hit and critical chances across the various tile distances, updated in realtime, and overlays range circles showing the point blank, optimal targeting ranges (for the given sights), and maximum firing ranges. The chances of a hit can be seen rising and falling with movement, and after each shot

This month we’ve also had focus on improving our late-game B42 armour system. As with the weapon crafting, the intent was to make something that wasn’t referential to zombie media or other games, but instead something that seemed natural for the time and circumstances.

We don’t want crafted armour to look too anachronistic or “knightly” – looking like they should be part of a renaissance fair. We don’t want to be too goofy, although there are a few more ‘fun’ options in there, and we don’t want anything that doesn’t look like it belongs in the Zomboid setting. Importantly armour should work like real armour, and operate within the bounds of PZ logic itself.

As such a few categories that will come as part of B42 are:

Metal
While avoiding overt medievalisms, clearly 42’s crafting update and blacksmith skills necessitate metal armour: plates, leather, straps, buckles and all.

Inspirations here include Ned Kelly and his gang, while (although we always say we won’t take inspiration from other games) the way Rust implements its metal armours is very much along our line of thinking – though clearly we’ll make our own way with it.

Please note: there won’t be any historical armour and weapon museums in b42, or suits of armour on display in mansions. With this sort of high-end crafted stuff, we wants players to have to go out into the world and engage with the new crafting system – and not beeline for a spot on the map to enjoy them.

Apocalyptic Vibe
We had to ensure that the armour was believable and feasible, while keeping a procedural approach – like our approach of the “lego weapons” in which existing items are adapted and melded.

Then, for a more distinct look, we thought of tinges of punk rock and heavy metal imagery, with apocalyptic media such as Escape From New York serving as inspiration. From this we now have armour that can, for example, be crafted out of tyres.

Natural Ingredients
One important aspect of the new armour content was that it had to support the new crafting system, as well as survival gameplay on a forest map free of civilization.

Although we deliberately didn’t make it too odious to progress from dirt and sticks to solving the riddle of steel, there’s still a lot of middle ground between the two.

Leather is an obvious candidate, and is something we have already made some pieces for. However throughout history people have used all sorts of other materials for armor as well, and we are exploring some interesting ideas based on real world examples. We don’t want to go out on a ‘limb’ and ‘branch far’ with this, but knock on ‘wood’ it will work out okay.

A Sporting Chance
Given that the game is set in 1993 Kentucky, there’s all sorts of armour already available in the form of lootable Sportsball Gear!

All sorts of pads, guards, and paddings, including two items that should make players very happy: The Athletic Cup and the Ice Hockey Neck Guards.

As well, some of those items of Sports gear, like the weapons crafting, can be modified to make badass, cool, post apocalyptic armor, which brings us to…

Spikes
And you and the zombies can be spiky too now.

Finally, we’re also in the process of testing Skyscrapers for playability and performance. Turns out 32 floors of zombies, all spawning at the same rate of zombies creates a LOT of zombies. So we need to get to balancing things out a bit.

Thanks all. Sadly not too much from the new crafting in motion this time. Please be assured, though, that there’s a lot of work going on there, but some aspects aren’t ready for show, and others are waiting for a core code update to hook things into and as such aren’t filmable.

There’s a bit of a logjam building of stuff that can be pumped out, so we hope it’ll be a flood of cool stuff next time round. This is such a core aspect of gameplay, which could bring huge improvements across the board, so it’s also needing the most consideration and care to not get wrong.

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

Hey all, a good mix of things this ‘doid.

Fun gameplay stuff, and a chunk of info we wanted to flag for modder-awareness and the more tech-minded amongst you. (Feel free to skip that bit to get to the more enticing gun stuff from Fenris that’s become its first application.)

Onwards, then.


Permanent underground structures are being added to the internal build’s map for testing.

As discussed before some basement locations will be randomised to add surprise flavour to your looting, but there’ll be plenty of ever-present locations that will likely be survivor favourites for taking over and making your own.

Here’s a fun example, which also very clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of B42’s tech upgrade that governs the realistic spread of light. It really is very dark down there, and with that very claustrophobic and scary…

Another aspect of the underground structures is sound, and now we’ve got more and more of these in the test build our sound team will be working to cut out wildlife sounds, add muffle, echo, drips and such. Likewise, meanwhile, another focus is adjusting the noise of ‘street level’ activity when you climb higher in buildings.

It’s also worth mentioning that in 42, or at least certainly its unstable release, you will not be able to tunnel or break down the external walls of underground structures. This is something it would be healthy for the engine to be able to do (although we’d never have Minecraft-style insta-tunnels in vanilla, clearly) but is probably a can of worms best opened later down the line.


In amongst the feverish connecting of code wires from others on the crafting team, Turbo has been working on the new interface that will allow for hand-crafting items on in-game surfaces.

We’ve got something ready to go into the internal build, but in its current WIP form still needs some polish – and probably isn’t quite ready to show off before its rough edges have been smoothed out.

In essence though, this work has been to cater for crafting items that aren’t as straightforward as ripping clothing to make bandages or opening a can of beans (which will always be feasible just in your hands) but don’t necessarily need a specialized workstation either.

Activities like preparing a sandwich or making a nailed baseball bat logically require a handy surface to perform the work. The way it’s being implemented – any logical surface will do (tables, counters etc) but this sort of crafting will no longer be possible while standing in the middle of the street with zombies approaching.

In terms of changes in player habits and behaviour going from 41 to 42, this will probably be the one that’s felt most keenly. There’s a lot of muscle memory we’ll be scrubbing out here, after all. However we are doing our utmost to keep it logical, and to keep it real.

The current challenge has been to devise an interface that accomplishes all the tasks necessary: providing a handy way of browsing or looking up the recipes, allowing for crafting of multiple objects, allowing the use of tools to modify the quality or success chances of the crafting, and giving access to all the functionality provided in the crafting update.

We’re not there yet on this surface level, but functionally on the code level it’s all there and working and ready to be integrated into the game. Next steps will be to make the UI as clean and convenient as can be, improving and iterating as we go, as it’s such a core aspect of 42.

(Just to reiterate, however, simple crafts like ripping bandages and so on will still be craftable in the way they are in 41: right clicking the item and clicking the relevant right click menu option. This is still the most immediate and convenient way for a player to do these split second crafts in the midst of action.)

Meanwhile, of course, the results of all this new crafting continue to get pumped through from the art department, prepped and laid into the code. Here’s a few that popped through recently.

We haven’t heard from the MP bods in a little while so let’s go over to Andrei for a little while:

“We are very busy on the Multiplayer side of things. When Build 41 MP was first released we had three coders on our team, and now due to the success of 41 we have five.

As many will be aware we have been focused on anti-cheat functionality for the last several months which is now being finalized: preventing cheating with inventory and items by moving their processing from clients to the server.

Clearly simultaneous to this we have also been working on the integration of new 42-specific gameplay – most notably adding support for animals into MP.

We have also been moving the team onto the fixes, feature requests and changes we have heard from the community.

Some highlights of this are as follows, but please note that our list is long and not everything will be mentioned! If you’ve felt it or found it annoying in your MP play then it is probably on our list:

• Privacy and Anti-Cheat work. We are improving our anti-cheat functionality, and adding various new mechanisms.
• Improving synchronization of characters between clients. We are debugging and fixing issues where zombies appear unexpectedly for the player, or players teleport instead of walking.
  
  
• PVP animations and logging. Current hit reactions in PVP lead to unfair and unfun behaviours, likewise there are issues with disconnecting during PVP. We are planning to fix this and extend PVP logging.
• Safehouses. As players will be aware, there are various issues related to exploits and safehouse raids that we need to fix. We also have a lot of things in mind for nice-to-have improvements that we hope to share with you in future blogs.

Thanks to Andrei for his thoughts and, again, to underline – this isn’t the only stuff that’s on their ‘to do’ list. It is, however, what’s in their sights over the month ahead.

While we are talking MP, however, it would be remiss to not mention another side project that’s gone into the game recently.

This is disguise option for multiplayer which, if enabled by the server admin, will allow players to disguise their username by wearing a combination of lower and upper face coverings, or indeed full face coverings.

The hope is that these will create some interesting dynamics for RP and PVP servers, and indeed for general banditry purposes.

(Clearly there’s also a few failsafes having to be built into this! Admins will be able to can also disguise themselves too if enabled and will always see right through disguises, there’s an option to disable disguises inside safehouses, and the system can be disabled entirely on servers that don’t want anonymity to be a feature).


Okay, before we get to some of the more in-depth stuff some quickfire smaller nuggets of interesting things that have gone into the game recently.

We are making some character traits have more direct gameplay implications – with a case-in-point being character builds with vision-related issues. Likewise, helmets and headgear that limit what your player can see will get similar, but not identical, effects.

(PLEASE NOTE: effect seen in the following video is WIP. It was an internal video, but is too fun not to share)

The Event Zone’s Wild West tourist attraction is now in testing and open for business – now featuring a new game item that is the wooden coffin.

Our good friend Ash from TEA has been working with us to integrate Bink into PZ, which is some cool middleware that grown-up games use to play videos, cut-scenes and the like.

We’re primarily getting it integrated for some cosmetic changes you’ll discover when you boot up the game that’ll be seen at a later date, but it also means that we can now show tutorial videos and such in-game.

In future it also makes moving images on TV screens, cinema screens etc. a possibility – although that’ll be a luxury that comes about long after 42 unstable.

Finally, in the Fun Stuff section – Fox’s 4K-ification mission continues. In fact, it’s nearly done and higher-resolution UIs for 4K players will shortly become available in the internal test build.

With higher resolutions, meanwhile comes higher resolution screen furniture. So bid a hearty hello to some of your new, newly detailed, moodles. Friendly folk, aren’t they?

ProfMobius, he of Minecraft heritage who we brought on board towards the end of last year, has been working on the procedurally generated wilderness to exist outside the map borders to allow for a not quite infinite but huge world outside the main map.

Currently he’s working on automatic blending between hand crafted content such as the edge of the map with the generated wilderness biomes, to allow for a smooth and seamless transition between them without visible borders.

This will also be invaluable for modders, as currently it’s a rather difficult task to blend the edges of a modded map with the vanilla map, which often results in an ugly sudden border of trees or vegetation changes as you transition.

The new system will blend in the procedural elements gradually into the vegetation that exists on a modded map, so the border will be less jarring.

He’s also looking into generating roads so they continue from the borders of the main map, which will massively expand the canvas for modders to position their modded maps – what with them now being able to space them out amongst a huge game world instead of overwriting or extending the main map which will vastly reduce the potential for conflicts.

Definitions for biomes, as well as template for road styles will be creatable in lua, allowing for easy modding to provide more diverse and new biomes with different vegetation, different road styles, and ultimately modders will also have access to the building stamping functionality provided by the basement system and could well extend that to place buildings in the world too.

The full wilderness map will have a different set of biomes to choose from, allowing less realistic but more varied biomes to be feasible: travelling an hour down the road to get from a desert to a tundra, for example.

For obvious reason, however, the extension of the main game map borders will be restricted to sensible Kentucky biomes, but may be able to include stuff like farmland as well as forests and plains.

With this system in place, and the huge swaths of wilderness with convenient road networks to utilize, it’s our hope that a heavily map-modded game could have a truly huge gameplay area 100s of times bigger than currently, with potentially miles of wilderness between major locations added by modders


Okay – this is the technical bit for modders I warned you about. There’s some fun gun-related stuff afterwards if you make it through.

Finally, we expect this to be more of interest to modders than general players, but it will also impact the ease of future development of the game so is good news all around.

For the ease of integration of various aspects of Build 43 we took some time to implement a debug gui library known as imgui into the game which replaces our somewhat time- consuming lua based debug interfaces. We realised that it would likely benefit Build 42 content too, and as such it became part of its glorious whole – and indeed started giving us results the very next day.

Imgui is, essentially, the industry standard for providing powerful easy-to-implement debugging uis into game engines and it’s already paying dividends.

If you are bored at this point it’s fine to skip to the guns.

First of all, before anyone gets excited about this being used for mod UIs for gameplay, we’re strictly only allowing this to be enabled when debug is activated in the game.

This is because the way imgui needs to be rendered is extremely detrimental to our rendering multithreading since it doesn’t support it on opengl, as well as this the entire point of the system is to provide extremely quick to implement debugging UI that favours ease of implementation over performance.

As such we need to put our foot down on restricting the new UI to debugging otherwise we’d quickly see our performance gains eaten up dramatically by modded games. We do plan a big UI overhaul in future but want to use UI middleware suited for actual end user gameplay, with all the performance, swishes, fades, pulses and slickness the UI finally deserved. ImGui is not that.

In debug mode, the game can now run with more a ‘development IDE’ feel, with various inspectors and dockable windows to examine the bowels of the game and the game viewport as a dockable and resizable window. For example you can inspect all the game UI elements active to allow for easier UI work and debugging within the game, and you can inspect variables on a plotted graph to help balance values over time. Otherwise you can inspect in-game textures and other assets, and numerous other helpful things which should really aid in demystifying the game’s innards for our modding community.

Modders will be able to dive in and look into the guts of lua and java at runtime to inspect anything they like: navigating through characters, items, or anything else to inspect them.

Imgui also contains a fully functional text editor. We plan for this to be completely integrated for lua editing within the game itself, as well as a more robust debugger to replace the slightly ropey F11 one we currently have, however this is also a challenge due to the way lua executes so will come later.

In the meantime, for a nice Build 43 behind the scenes, here is the in-game AI behaviour editing UI with breakpoints, stepping and watch window:

In terms of more imminent usage for game-improvement, meanwhile, let’s move over to Fenris at the gun range.


From the second imgui was made available Fenris, he of ORGM mod vintage, leapt at the opportunity to use its features to do some intensive firearms work: making them more useful at lower skill levels without breaking balance, while also providing for more tweaks for accuracy based on the player’s actions.

Here he is on the firing range, with imgui active.

Here, the graph shows a new AimingDelay mechanic (the blue line) first initially dropping after the player starts to stablise their aim, then rising with each shot – then overlaid with the recoil delay and animation states. We see him taking timed shots and waiting briefly so his aim stabilises again. The effect can then be seen across the different skill levels, and how the rate of fire changes.

Fenris’ work on improvement here is extensive, but aspects of his commits to the game these past two weeks have included:

• Rebalance of how hit chances and recoil are calculated, and general RoF with firearms.
• Improved the target highlighting which was previously misleading, with the colour shifting to green shades with lower hit chances than expected. This is now corrected to go green closer to 80%. Previously only aiming & reloading skills, the distance to target and how long ago you stopped moving had an effect on the highlight.
• Now Strength helps with recoil, Dexterous and All-Thumbs impact on shouldering the weapon, and Eagle-Eyed and Shortsighted can change the optimal sight range.
• Rates of Fire have been increased to more realistic expectations, but it now takes a bit of time to stabilize your aim when initially shouldering the weapon or after each shot. This time is reduced by aiming skill and various traits and conditions. Firing as fast as possible is less accurate then taking your time and lining up the shot. The lighting of the target square is also now taken into account.

We saw this pop up on the YouTubes and thought it was a great run-down on what we’ve been working on. Our thanks to CosmiicSteem for the vid!

This week’s foggy safehouse from Rick Grimes, though presumably not the real one. A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here[projectzomboid.com]. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here[pzwiki.net]. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki[pzwiki.net] should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List [projectzomboid.com]that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord[discord.gg] is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here[projectzomboid.com].

It’s been a really big week for us, as we merged the second-to-last element of Build 42 into the main codebase across the rest of the team – which is the long awaited tech upgrade which brings a whole host of improvements to the engine.

It’s currently being tested and the feedback has been super positive so far. This said, it’s also brought over lots of small bugs, visual glitches, and issues with new depth map clipping items incorrectly. Nothing over-dramatic, but enough stuff to keep testers and coders alike fully occupied.

This is where a lot of our brains have been at recently, so we thought we’d give you an update on the engine as it now stands while testers run around kicking its tires – alongside some videos they have made along the way.

Likewise, we also have some examples of some of its new capabilities that we will be able to explore in future – perhaps during the Unstable beta, perhaps beyond.

So, a run-down of what this tech upgrade brings into the game:


We’ve made huge optimizations to the rendering of the map that should have a huge impact for most lower-midrange and upwards systems. We are now easily able to get a solid framerate even on 4K, or on furthest zoom. The difference in performance is honestly surprising, and extremely satisfying.

For full disclosure, however, we’ve discovered that a few of the absolutely lowest end systems capable of running our game are still adversely affected. This is because the solution for such large FPS optimization comes at the expense of GPU memory usage for the caching textures used. Cards with extremely low dedicated GPU memory may run into problems.

We’re investigating and trying to optimize this further to make sure as many systems as possible can benefit, and worst case scenario these optimizations will be disabled on systems where they would do more harm than good.

However, it’s still entirely possible that we’ll be able to resolve this completely and provide a large boost to even the most potato systems. More likely, we’ll provide some kind of automatic detection to provide as large a portion of the optimizations as possible for a GPU’s available memory. This will be our next task post visual-bug clear out.

Generally we estimate that a huge majority of our playerbase will benefit greatly from the optimizations. Since most of the optimization frustrations we hear come from players who feel their machine should be able to run PZ at a solid framerate, we feel this work will ease the vast majority of performance sadness we see in the community.

Another improvement born out of necessity is an improved and smoother viewing cone. Due to the optimizations, it was no longer feasible to alter the lighting of tiles frequently enough to allow for the smooth light changes required for our tile based viewing cone.

As such we needed to implement a completely separate and newly-coded viewing cone that didn’t rely on tile lighting – which truth be told we were never a huge fan of anyway.

Now we have a much more accurate, smooth and fancy viewing cone – and now we have extra hands on it internally feedback is being collated so that we can provide plenty of requested options to allow you to tweak it this way and that. (Making it more or less visible probably being the primary one.)

The new lighting system is now in full testing, and seems to be working pretty well so far.

This new propagation system allows for much prettier and more convincing lighting of the world, especially now we have basements which would have been extremely unsatisfying with our existing 41 lighting.

41’s system basically had an ‘ambient light’ level that permeated the entirety of the world depending on the time of the day. Then on top of that indoors would get a reduction in ambient light to make them slightly darker than outside.

The new system propagates light from light sources such as bulbs, or the sun, across tiles to simulate reflective light. It’s not something cutting-edge that you’d expect from the Unreal Engine, or something, but for our purposes it’s extremely effective. It allows for light from a window to creep across the room, allows for rooms with no natural lighting to be in complete darkness even during the day, allows more immersive coloured lighting, and all manner of other things not previously possible in PZ.

Most importantly of all, it fixes the room lighting issues that plague b41 when room layouts are changed with sledgehammers leaving strange lighting artifacts on the floor, since all lighting is calculated purely based on the geometry of the rooms now.

With this will now come gameplay balance – there’s debate on the team as to whether the player character should have a little more clarity in the darkness, some internal spots are a little more inky-blue than black, and new gameplay elements like not being able to read in the dark will need finetuning to the new visual.

Also seen in the following video, for extra immersion, doors are now fully animated – as discussed last time. This makes a huge difference to the feel of interacting with them during gameplay.

We’re still in the process of adding basement spots around the map – whether random or permanent. However, as discussed previously, the new upgraded engine allows support for levels from -32 to +32.

This allows for both much more convincingly tall skyscrapers for city locations, as well as for basements and potentially sprawling underground complexes. The mapping and modding is gonna be wild.

Part of this is also strapping in engine capabilities to help us in future – and as such please take the following as an EXAMPLE video of what we can now do in PZ.

Our coders and mappers have enough on their plates at the moment, and as such this is not a confirmed feature for when 42 goes Unstable.

It will, however, be feasible within the engine which is why we’ve chosen to show it.

Essentially, EP has been working on some extra physics engine functionality to allow for the physics to exist on floors other than the ground floor – as well as providing new physics shapes that in future will allow for this. This work was also a necessary foothold for other physics-based features we have brewing for future versions.

Please note also, just to quell any mapper fears again, these extensive engine and map data structure changes will not make existing map mods invalid. All maps will need to be reexported in the new versions of the tools when we release them, most likely around the time we put out the Unstable beta, but they won’t need to be redone from scratch.


We’re waiting on a big commit to fill in some of the gaps in the crafting system process itself, so in the mean-time lets focus on some of the fun stuff that’ll be coming out the other end: weapons.

 

Clearly we already have the more ‘normal’ and traditional blacksmithed weapons for B42 already, and likewise the more ancient-styled stone axes and such. With these we’re avoiding anything specific to any period or culture, going for real life examples that were common across history and geography, and that could pass as something reasonably iron age, medieval, or post-apocalypse. We have consulted an expert in these matters regarding the designs and selection, and we’re also providing them with further weapon designs as we make them for feedback.

But, as we stretch out into our apocalypse we also wanted something a little more… apocalypse-y.

As such, currently what’s being wrapped up are post-apocalypse improvised weapons. These include classic examples like the “nail-spiked weapons”, but also weapons that have been constructed with welding and metalshop tools.

With these designs a conscious decision has been made to not think about weapons from other games or zombie media, and instead research was conducted regarding real life improvised /crafted weapons. This included stuff like police collections of seized weapons and trench warfare, with additional inspiration from weapons in Max Mad-style post-apocalypse media.

We also took on something of a procedural approach, where we looked at the weapons and items that existed (or could exist) in the game, and imagined them being combined like Lego bricks to create weapons. Granted in many cases we just re-invented the wheel, but that helped keep things grounded, realistic, and consistent with the rest of the game.

Although we tried to make these weapons realistic and believable, we have allowed for a couple of weapons to be slightly (reasonably) zany. We’re allowed to have a little fun, after all, and all those weapons will also have realistic drawbacks when wielded.

Simultaneous to this, we are also adding some broken versions of existing Zomboid weapons. Some of these broken weapons and their parts will be used in crafting other weapons, but these fragments also exist for gory consequences when weapons break when bashing a zombie with them.

I don’t quite know why we’re using this strange moustachioed gentleman to demonstrate these today, but lets have a proper look at him in any case. Curious chap.

Finally, a big welcome to Nick from our colleagues at TEA Games who has joined us to help us implement something we call PenguinTech – after the time Zac got two million on-screen dancing penguins into a Wii game.

Originally slated for B41 this will, in essence, be a clever way of optimizing our zombie hordes – pooling what states they are in, and then sharing a smaller pool of zombie skeletons for the same anims. With this, fingers crossed, we’ll get better performance when there’s a horde on-screen and in turn we can be less dainty with their application in your survival.

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

Happy winter religious festival if you celebrate it, or if you have it in a month’s time, or just if you think it’s nice because you get a few days off while your neighbours drown in eggnog!

Here’s the December news round.
 



With the last Thurzdoid some people arrived at the mistaken impression that in normal b42 play, the iron ore deposits would exist on the map and be the primary source of metal for crafting. While we’re not ruling this out in the long term, and it’ll certainly be the only source of metal to be found within the wilderness map (more on this later), the primary logical source of metal would always initially be found within the now abandoned civilized world itself.
 
For several builds now, players have been able to dismantle various metal furniture and other objects in the world, including wrecked vehicles, to get metal bars, sheets and scrap. This still exists in build 42, and should serve as the primary source of metal–in various sorts and sizes–for crafting.
 
This also includes taking apart railroad tracks, which is fortunate in that you can use a piece of the track to construct a makeshift anvil.

On the subject of “modern metalworking”, here are some new workstations, a standing bandsaw, drill press, and arch furnace.
 
The bandsaw currently can be used to cut metal pieces into smaller metal pieces, which can save you some wear and tear on your hacksaw, and the drill press can be used to put holes into metal, such as fabricating tools such as header tools for making nails or a drawplate for making wire, among other uses. The arc furnace can be used for melting down assorted items to cast various metal ingots and bars. Now this isn’t the extend of the uses of these workstations, or the end of what we’re adding in this vein.
 
Speaking of other workstations, here are some of the new agricultural stations in b42, herb and crop drying racks, stone quern, and mill, as well as some new crops: Barley, Flax, Hemp (industrial), Hops, Rye, Sugar Beets, Sunflowers, and Tobacco. This gives us a great foundation of resources for textiles, cordage, brewing and oils. We have more crops coming, including some winter crops, garden vegetables, hot peppers, and some pretty herbs.

Moving on to things relevant for the wilderness, here is an example of a campsite made using primitive tier resources. It includes a small worksurface boulder and tree stump, which are naturally spawning workstations that can be used for some basic crafts, including some bootstrapping crafts for getting crafting up and started. Here’s also an example of a small cabin that could be built in the wilderness.

Moving on to the blacksmithing and crafted weapon related matters, as some crafted items consist of handles and heads, some that can be sharp,

Appropriate items will track those conditions as such:
 
There are some other new and very interesting statistics that will be associated with tool and weapon parts, but we’ll discuss this later once its implemented. The goal of these will be to provide much more variety to items, and much greater reward from higher skill crafting, and looting of rarer items.

Aside from being used as part of the “guts and bolts” of the crafting system, this also allows for a more interesting procedural weapon upkeep and breakage system.
 
The upkeep stuff is intended to be warm and immersive, but without an excessive amount of micromanagement. With the examples like the hatchet and spear, you can use the classic items like Duct Tape, Wood Glue, or Zip-Ties to repair the handle, or carve a new one and replace it.
 
Sharpness affects weapon damage and criticals. Weapons at 0 sharpness can still be used to kill, but are less effective, will take longer to chop down a door or a tree, and will accumulate damage faster. Sharpness can be restored using a Whetstone, but is temporarily capped by the weapons Head Condition (or general condition for items like knives). Minor head damage can be repaired with a Whetstone, greater damage with a Grindstone, and a broken blade can be used to make a smaller blade or other item.
 
With the procedural damage system, Sharpness, Handle Condition, and Head Condition all are affected by usage and combat, with Sharpness generally draining the fastest, followed by Handle Condition. When Handle or Head Condition hits 0, the fun stuff can happen with Procedural Weapon Breakage. With the Hatchet, when the Handle Condition reaches 0, the handle breaks, and the Head goes flying.
 
With a larger Axe or other weapon, you may end with with a usable crude wooden club in your hands. Spears basically work the same way, but leave you with a broken stick in your hands and can leave the Spear head embedded in a zombie. When Head Condition reaches 0, the Handle still breaks, but a broken Head is left on the ground or in a zombie, which may be salavged to make something new. Broken Handles can generally be carved to make smaller handles or other wooden objects.
 
This procedural weapon crafting and breaking also serves to give us the bits and pieces to make some nice post apocalyptic makeshift weapons.

Speaking of crafted weapons, Spears are being heavily rethought, reworked, and rebalanced. This is a case where the weapon part and breakage stuff really helps to make Spears more cool and spear-like. You will be able to make simple wooden spears from appropriate items, such as Brooms or Hockey Sticks, as well as Long Sticks, and a Wooden Spear can be Fire Hardened for greater durability and a minor boost to performance . Here’s also some crafted blades and the spears and knives made from them:
 


Last time we introduced you to our latest recruit, former legendary modder and Minecraft dev ProfMobius.
 
We wanted to get him settled into Zomboid in an area he felt comfortable within, and it made sense for him to perform a trick he last played for Mojang. As such, his first port of call is to look into a wilderness procedural generation system.
 
Please note this isn’t full procedural generation and not intended to create random towns and cities, and at least for now, is purely to provide random wilderness. This will serve two important purposes for Build 42.
 
1) It will allow for the current borders of the premade map to cease to have a black impassible border, and will instead allow players to be able to explore outside the confines of the map a very, very large (though probably not infinite) distance.
 
This will allow players to establish themselves a greater distance away from the premade map and will expand the scope of wilderness based gameplay, as well as locations for settlements that can exist considerable distances away from the existing towns within the game.
 
2) The second purpose will be to allow for servers optionally to be able to generate a complete wilderness map with no towns, roads or other signs of civilization.
 
Not only will this be a good testbed for ensuring that none of our primitive and medieval crafting trees rely upon anything a player would need to loot, but will provide a basis for vanilla and especially modded multiplayer servers to focus entirely around crafting and community building, rather than looting and zombies.
 
The random map generation will have large biomes (all will be sensible for a Kentucky climate environment for the vanilla map border generation, but we may be able to be more imaginative and less realistic on the complete random map generation, and discussions are still happening about this) to add variety and things to discover.
 
While we will not be looking to generate fully random maps with buildings, towns, roads etc at this point, it’s important to point out that the random basement system implemented into Build 42 has required the ability for binary exported buildings from our building editor to be able to be ‘injected’ or ‘stamped’ into the game world at run-time, and this functionality will be accessible to modders.
 
We fully expect modders to have all the power they need to be able to expand the wilderness map with random towns and road networks. It may be something we’d consider exploring at some point once the main map is complete, but until then it’s not something we want to distract from the hand-crafted game world. While we believe random maps would be a cool addition for those who have played the game so much the existing map and popular modded maps no longer feel fresh, we would prefer new players always had the traditional handcrafted map in their first throes of survival.
 
Here’s a quick rough cut of something created with the earliest draft of ProfMobius’ world generation tool – hopefully the start of something cool

 

Just to underline our continued dedication to handcrafted mapping, we have a backlog of many and varied Challenge maps and spin-off maps waiting in the wings for main game inclusion. The one now stumbling and blinking into the stark and glaring light of day is Xeonyx’s Many Years Later.

Given the sparsity of ‘normal’ looting spots this is due to be another of our testbeds for our revamped post-apocalyptic crafting, but it’s pretty fun in terms of just how full of despair it feels.

The recent addition of rats and wildlife also really set it off now. Here’s a quick vid from recent explorations:

 



Finally, Amz, our video producer and the most ‘Christmas tree must be up the day after Halloween’ Christmassy person in any room that’s ever existed has put together this amazing John Lewis’esque video! We all love it and hope you will too!

Enjoy!
 
 
Oh, and in weird bug news we had a problem with infinitely spawning chickens. Things swiftly got out of hand.

 




We’d like to point people in the direction of a friend of TIS’s new zombie survival game that’s carving out a slightly different area of the zombie survival niche, a bit more actiony and aiming for something in-between State of Decay and Zomboid in the Venn diagram of zombie survival.

If you have place in your heart for another great zombie game, especially one that’s plenty of fun to play in co-op, make sure to check out HumanitZ on Steam!

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/1766060/HumanitZ

Yip yip, hello. Let’s dive in.

Another exciting addition to the build 42 tech upgrade branch has just dropped.

The tech upgrade branch is what contains our optimizations, improved view cone, basement/skyscraper technology and now… an immersive improvement that we’ve wanted for a long time, that could potentially lead to many cool additional gameplay opportunities that weren’t possible before.

 
That’s right, kids, doors have now entered the third dimension.

Where before doors would just flip instantly on the tile the moment they are opened or closed, now they are animated and use the tech branch’s depth buffer.

This is obviously a huge improvement for immersion, but could potentially lead to cool new mechanics in future (note, certainly not b42’s initial release) like opening doors at different speeds, doors being left slightly open, peeking, bashing open, one-way fire doors and such.

While easy to overlook, our doors are pretty much unchanged since the 0.1.5d days yet also one of the most fundamental things about PZ gameplay – so getting some visual niceness, and some future gameplay opportunities, feels like a win.

So let’s have a quick noisy vid in which doors open and slam shut in unison.

(In future we clearly also already have the tech to have doors and visibly opening and closing on vehicles too, it’s already in the code and used by many mods, however in the main game it’s always been the plan to couple this to in-car character animations, visible interiors and such.)

 
We’re operating in various different areas with crafting, but the one that’s becoming most interesting and fleshed out with recipes and new items is definitely blacksmithing which has come a long way in the last month.

So let’s head over to Blair to have a chat about the ways in which you’ll be getting to grips with the creation of some of these beauties.

“For blacksmithing in build b42 we have the tiers, workstations, and materials worked out; now most of the crafting recipes have been made as well, and it’s a case where content is being added almost daily as the art assets are completed.”

“Most items that one could reasonably expect to be blacksmithed can be blacksmithed, and in most cases the resultant item is a more rugged, crafted version than the default version of the item that you may be used to.”

“In many cases there are multiple tiers of items, requiring better skills, stations and materials to produce, where it serves the game. Weapons are an example of where this extra attention is being put into the system, where there are distinct tiers of the basic types, that differ in both appearance and performance.”

 
“A lot of work still needs to be done with balancing, as well as getting the fun stuff like animations of the character performing the actions, with fire and smoke. Our artists are hard at work making the assets for all the new items needed for this, but otherwise blacksmithing could be considered ‘mostly done’; you could say that all of the design hurdles have been crossed, and we have solved the ‘Riddle of Steel’.”

“One conceit of b42 crafting is that you should be able to start on a theoretical all forest map; this isn’t a concrete thing that we’re testing yet, but we’re providing foundation for it. Steel production from nothing being one of them.”

“Although iron ore outcroppings are more commonplace in games than in real life Kentucky, we have tiles of them, for use for our own forest maps, and maps of modders.“

(ALERT ALERT: we are aware this is quite game-y, and may well refine in future. For now, however, it works for our purposes.)

“Once you have smashed them into iron ore, you can dig a charcoal pit, and build a primitive forge and furnace, and use the charcoal to extract an iron bloom from iron ore.“

“With a stone hammer and some crude wooden tongs (which won’t survive the process) workable iron is beaten out of the iron bloom, and that iron can be used to produce simple iron implements such as tongs, smithing hammers, nails, and basic masonry tools.”

“Eventually you can work your way up to building a proper come kiln, for both making charcoal, and also coke out of the charcoal for steel production, as well as a smelting furnace, and then an intermediary forge and a grindstone. With this you can produce medium-quality iron implements, that benefit from proper hardening and quenching, as well as higher carbon content.”

“From there one would work there way up to a blast furnace, for producing steel, and then, with the steel, cast and harden a proper blacksmithing anvil and make an advanced forge, and eventually a metalworking bench for making high quality, precision tools and items.”

Elsewhere, meanwhile, we have been going through the game and converting existing systems to the new fluid mechanics that come as a part of the crafting system.

A good example of this, as it clearly shows in the end product, are our hair dyes – even if they are relatively cosmetic as far as the game-proper goes.

In the following video, then, you see the dyes being transferred to (and used from) any fluid container – whether bottles, cans or buckets. Here too you can see them being mixed, and the resulting new colour being applied to the character’s hair. (Elements of this still WIP)

 
We’ve given you more sandbox power over how much gasoline is stored beneath Knox gas stations, as previous work in the area didn’t go far enough. You’ll have options to select whether gas pumps are infinite, what their minimum and maximum potential amounts of stored gasoline is, and indeed what the chances are of it spawning completely empty (see image below).

We have also made these a little more user-friendly with better right click feedback on power, required containers, admin info on fuel remaining etc. We’ve also added a more visible fuel caps on our car models, and indeed a fuel-side indicator icon on your vehicle’s dashboard.

 
After the successful integration of the body noises, “hey!”s and “psst!”s of a real actor and a real actress – we made the call to widen the net a little and get a variety of different people to record specific voice/noise sets for the game.

There will now be four male and four female voices that you can choose at character creation stage, which will also mean that in MP those around you will likely have slightly different puffs, pants and combat exertions.

Likewise having a more particular sound to your voice and character will likely be good for your own personal RP reasons.

(Please note here, again, that exertion noise frequency hasn’t been 100% balanced yet.)

It’s relatively easy to slot in new animals to RJ’s system, the modding scene will likely be fairly extravagant, so while fixing bugs with our chickens, cows, sheep and pigs – he’s also slipped in some raccoons and wild turkeys to roam alongside the deer.

Fox’s up-rezzing (and slight tidy-up) of all the game’s many windows, icons, menus and general game furniture continues. In fact, we’re now at a point in which many aspects of the game can be played at 4k without the need for squinting and a magnifying glass.

Folk with higher-res screens have long-suffered with Zomboid, so we’re excited to finally put this issue to bed – as can be seen in the following 4K video.

Please note, however, that some windows here still feel a little crowded – we probably need to loosen up the crafting window that could use a bit more padding, the tabs feel a little close together etc.

The map expansion, and elevation/lowering, continues apace. Something else we are bringing to your exploration is a little more colour and character to the places you are surviving within – as such there’ll be more variety of things left on whiteboards and chalkboards in schools, universities and laboratories for example.

Meanwhile, there’s clearly elements of signage Americana we can use for our game too. Case in point, being a wide range of different signs outside our churches.

We’ve also got an, as yet unnamed, Wild West tourist attraction going into the game – which could also potentially be a good place to find some of the crafting gear that’ll be new to 42. Maybe a couple of cowboy actor zeds shambling about as well, for good measure.

We generally don’t populate the map with Mad Max lookin’ zeds, but people certainly seem to like having a little more freedom in terms of the threads you choose to go a hunting and a’ looting in.

As a side project from his crafting duties, then, Blair has worked with animator Martin to improve the clipping issues folk often come up against with certain combinations of clothing. This issue was becoming more and more apparent with the crafted straps and metal shin guards being developed in the blacksmithing aspect of 42, so needed nipping in the bud.

Essentially, now clothing items and body locations can have set definitions – which then instruct the game to use alternate clothing models in particular circumstances. So a different arm guard model, for example, will be automatically used if the character is wearing a bulky jacket. We feel that this will have massive potential for modding.

On top of this we have also made it so accoutrements like limb armour (shin pads, for example) can go on either limb; you can wear just one, or a pair, or a mismatched pair. This said, so it’s not too annoying, they’ll appear as matched pairs in loot or on zeds.

Finally, while not entirely linked to this endeavour but still in the same ballpark, helmets/headgear/masks all now affect your vision cone and your hearing (modestly) which we’ve added as a balancing measure for when crafted helmets are in the game.

Oh, and the above also means we can have (American) Football Shoulder Pads in-game too, so expect some varsity jock zombies wearing those around campus also.

Here’s a somewhat silly, but fun, screenie showing a little bit more of what this system can create – including a bunch of the new items that will be craftable with the new blacksmith/forge systems.

We’ve expanded a lot over the past year, and we had called time on anyone else for fear of things running away with themselves.

Clearly Soul Filcher joined recently, and unmentioned in this blog we’ve got Fenris in the guts of our Discord integration, Patrick with his (very encouraging) experimentation with ragdolls, and there’s a hugely experienced guy called Matt who we haven’t announced before who’s putting in foundations for future engine improvements. After all this we mentally shut the door on likely changes and additions, until…

Zac, the coding maestro behind 41’s animation systems, made his return to work after a long period away this month – and is now working the kinks out of issues we’ve had since he was last with us with character rotation and movement.

Here’s a link to show his WIP improvement – though it might not be super-perceptible in vid-form. When this is all sorted the in-game character should feel more responsive, and also give us more flexibility when improving on the general animation suite.

He also brings alongside him a lovely guy from Tea Games called Ash, who’s helping integrate the video play middleware Bink into the game which will (among other things) help us mix some improvements into our title screen, and to provide combat video examples in our tutorial windows and such.


The other guy, meanwhile, who’s burst onto or internal development scene is someone we know as ‘The Prof’.

Thomas ‘ProfMobius’ Guimbretiere comes to us by way of Minecraft, and some players might already be familiar with his mods and work over in block-land. He started modding Minecraft something like 13/14 years ago and co-produced MCP, the predecessor of Forge, before later authoring important mods like Waila, Jabba and Opis.

He was then hired by Mojang themselves for work on Minecraft Java (ooh, Java) and went on to work on oceans, corals, new villager AI, village construction and a full rework of the game’s world generation. All of which is, clearly, hugely relevant to our interests.

Since his Mojang days, he’s been working on the backend of Razzleberries (https://razzleberri.es/) but now he’s in the iron grip of Spiffo. To begin, to we’ll be easing him in on something he’s familiar with that we’ll probably cover next time. There’s plenty of fun stuff planned beyond that too though.


For all you Americans, Amz has made you a Thanksgiving vid. It’s got some WIP raccoons in it and everything.

Though, thinking about it, maybe we should have gone with the turkeys. Anyway…

Many thanks also to everyone kindly voting for us in the Steam Awards. We really appreciate your support and associated reviews, but also if you are in two minds about whether or not to click for us – please consider the likes of No Man’s Sky or Deep Rock Galactic which are both amazing. It’ll still be a while till 42 is in public beta, and we’d be more comfortable with the nomination-love once it’s out, all-singing and all-dancing.

———————

This week’s misty mess from CAPSens Crim. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here[pzwiki.net]. The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki[pzwiki.net] should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List [projectzomboid.com]that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord[discord.gg] is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here[projectzomboid.com].

Evening all, here we all are again. Let’s take a stroll through the development Event zone.

Now the vast infrastructure overhaul of the crafting systems has been merged and opened up to the rest of the gang, we’ve had a crack team of coders working solidly on implementing the various new post-apocalyptic profession tech trees, workstations and recipes that will provide for a vast amount of options for crafting and building in B42.

As a summary for anyone who isn’t up to date on our overall goals, the crafting overhaul is intended to provide the following things to Zomboid:

Give Zomboid a more feature rich end-game.

At present, long time players of the game often find they run out of objectives once they get a well-stocked and secure safehouse. We want to provide many more objectives a settled survivor can undertake to improve their safehouse, or indeed a community of players.

More things to build. More opportunities to craft. More ways to be creative.

Provide a way for servers to be able to run indefinitely without the need to wipe or respawn loot.

At present the gameplay loop relies so much on looting the map for items that servers run into problems when most urban locations are looted. These either cause servers to rely on unrealistic loot respawning, or to frequently wipe the server.

We want servers to be able to run well into the ‘Alexandria years’ and for players to experience life much further within the post-apocalypse in an interesting way that feels and plays different to the early chaos.

Provide believable post-apocalypse professions that would emerge in a post-technical post-apocalyptic society.

If it’s been 30 years since the apocalypse, making a new character who is a burger flipper ceases to make much sense.

As time ticks by from the initial infection, we will retire pre-apocalypse professions and introduce post-apocalypse professions that mirror pre-modern professions such as blacksmithing, tailoring, butchering and so on. We are also tying these skills into relevant modern day professions where applicable.

Provide more community cooperation in multiplayer (and NPCs in B43 and beyond) with different interacting professions that can contribute to a community – as well as provide much more extensive crafting and building, encouraging trade and other interesting player interactions.

We want to give players more interesting choices of professions and activities to contribute to a survivor community, and allow for players to cut more unique and interesting niches for themselves within a survivor group or community.

Part of this is reshaping how the skill and XP system work to both make individuals less capable of mastering everything, while making their initial potential a lot higher without grinding if they spec into a particular skill heavily.

Simultaneously, meanwhile, we still need to be providing sandbox options to allow solo players to master more skills and professions so as not to cut solo players from all the new content and things to do.

Provide a framework for players who want to focus more on community building and player interactions than zombie survival, so that they can optionally run servers with a more traditional wilderness map based survival game or extensive tech mods.

While zombie apocalypse will always be our core focus for the vanilla game, we want Zomboid to provide a breadth of survival mechanics and content that, especially with mods, make a solid foundation for many other varied survival experiences outside the looting and zombie gameplay.

This includes making provisions for the full range of possibilities in terms of tech and progression modpacks and overhauls that will add mountains of new ways for the community to play the game.

Our tech tree is built from the ground up with the assumption that it is taking place on a wilderness map without any civilization – to ensure that there are no holes.

In normal gameplay, close to the apocalypse, it’s expected that players would be able to skip huge portions of this tree by using scavenged technology and supplies from the crumbling modern world. However, with the correct knowledge and skills, players will be empowered to fill any gap if that loot and technology is not available to them.

Let the modders be all they can be.

Finally, we also believe that the crafting systems themselves are solid and foundational enough for the amazing modders in our community to run absolutely fucking wild with – and we honestly cannot wait to see what they come up with.

Recap over
Now we’ve recapped our general goals with the crafting overhaul, we’ll introduce you to some of the work on three of the profession trees that we’ve been in the guts of this month.


One of the new post-apocalypse professions that will be available for players, blacksmithing will allow for the comprehensive working of metal to provide players the ability to craft many items that are unattainable outside looting in the current build of the game.

The initial work has been based around providing the ability for someone living in the wild to be able to work with metal using a primitive furnace and forge made using rocks and clay, along with higher tiers being producible later on as players progress.

Of course there will also be modern equivalents of these workstations available within the world map for players to exploit too, but as stated earlier we are filling out the crafting tech tree always from the very bottom, with the assumption that players do not have access to any looted supplies whatsoever.

Please note that we are currently exploring a new design for building mechanics, in our attempt to get away from using right click menus for everything. We are hoping for a nicer building interface since we’ll have a huge number of extra building projects for the player and just cramming them all into right click menus will get more and more cumbersome as time goes on.

With these facilities simple iron implements can be produced, such as nails, as well as the tools required to build the next tier. Additionally it can be used for simple assembly and maintenance tasks.

This second tier is approximately “Medieval-ish”, the furnaces are built using stonemasonry, consisting of dressed stone blocks and cement; there is a proper blacksmith’s anvil; and also a quenching bucket.

With this more complex and durable tools can be crafted, as well as a higher level of maintenance.

And yup, want to be the most popular person on a server? Crank out sledgehammers for your friends!

Finally in this area, for steel production we need to make coke, produced from charcoal.

This dome kiln can be used to produce both coke, and also charcoal from wood.

Wood charcoal is important for this branch of crafting. The heat it produces is good for working metal, but it’s also carbon and had effects on ferrous metal being forged. It will be able to be produced through other means than just the dome kiln, but can be produced more efficiently in higher quantities when using one.


We featured some of the possibilities with pottery in a previous Thursdoid however a big benefit of working with clay (as well as stone) is for additional options for building.

PLEASE NOTE: there’s anims, tile artwork, SFX and lots of other polish missing at present.

As well as stone or clay full-size walls, the extended building options from these systems will allow for paths, roofs and decorative elements allowing for player built communities to really feel like a settlement and provide options for security to keep the zeds at bay.

This will of course be a balancing concern for us, but we feel with sufficient effort and skill a survivor should be able to (very ultimately) erect walls that zombies do not simply attempt to walk through and bash their heads on until they fall over.


The last profession we’ll cover today is the Brewer, who has numerous valuable things to bring to the table. While at present alcoholic drinks may not have too much direct impact on gameplay, we will be providing more benefits and downsides to the partaking in alcohol.

After all, we imagine it would be a likely bit of escapism for many a zombie apocalypse survivor, and there’d be more value still added later down the line once the NPCs and the accompanying psychological overhaul we have planned at the same time.

In the first instance of this, however, the Brewer profession also allows for the creation of a rather vital way of preserving food.

Last ‘doid we showed you building developments high upwards into the sky, this time we’re going deeper underground as there’s too much panic in this town.

For those unaware, Build 42 will come with two sorts of below ground floor. First off we’ll have the Permanent ones that will always be attached to locations on the map. These will generally be familiar locations, places of interest, businesses and secret military complexes.

Today however, we’ll be looking at our Randomized ones. We currently have 119 of these designed: some empty and desolate, some full of loot beyond your wildest dreams, and some that make you seriously question the mental state of the previous occupant. Here’s a fuzzed-up image to whet your whistle.

These will be basements, bunkers, panic rooms and Waynes World sets that you will be delighted to discover spawning on your regular looting sorties – and they will appear within whatever houses could potentially fit them in and still look natural. The frequency of their appearances will also be governed by a Sandbox option.

We’ll also have a long list of designated spots within buildings on the map where a random basement will fit, these spots will be assigned and a random compatible basement will be placed in the world on world creation.

Here’s a quick video to show some of our favourites off but first a few familiar words of caution!

This is WIP, stair placement within buildings will improve, and likewise the steps will look more natural in the way that they appear within the house. We may also look at hatches etc as time goes on.

Lovely Aiteron’s mission of tidying up, reorganising and adding new utility to our front-end UI continues. Notably he’s currently improving the Mod Manager which, as an ex-modder himself, he is ideally suited to do.

Here’s a quick video showing his changes.

So what’s seen here? Well, amongst other things, the following:

• Mod and map order. You will now be able to change the load order of enabled mods and maps, which also comes with an auto-sort for available mods.
• Share your presets. You will now be able to share your preset of mods (with specific mods, and the load order) and your friends and/or players on your server will be able to take it and use it themselves. If some mods are missing, then the game will flag it and show links to the ones that are uninstalled.
• We have added special version tags that will be required for mod compatibility for B42. This is due to the massive changes to the game likely invalidating a large number of mods, and the potential for serious bugs if people attempt to run with those designed for B41. Hopefully in this way things will be clearer through the B42 Unstable process, and sailing can be as smooth as we can all muster it.
• The game’s use of ModIDs has been altered to be appended by the workshop ID of each mod. This adjustment is aimed at resolving server issues that result in file mismatch errors when users attempt to connect, due to various mod versions sharing the same ModID. This happens on the Steam Workshop a fair bit due to re-uploads and modpacks. Now, with the workshop number attached to the ModID, only the “correct” version of a mod will be loaded by clients connecting to servers. We’re hoping that this will then lessen frustrations with said cursed file mismatch errors whenever you’re in an area of mod self-conflict.
• We are also working on a new modding API and new modding guide for 42. It’s currently unclear whether it’d be released alongside a 42 Unstable. It’s certainly in the works though.

An area of the game we need to improve is the feeling that ‘something happened here’. We have burned down houses, survivor homes and our costume zeds – but we don’t have much that says people who were panicked were once here.

As such now we will be including a random chance for homes, stores and businesses to have been looted – with items strewn over the floor, general detritus and litter, and sometimes graffiti on the walls too.

(There’s no graffiti that says ‘Hit them in the head!’ just yet, but we are a video game so give us time on that one I’m sure it will happen eventually.)

At the same time as the big ticket new systems, our coders and art team like to dripfeed fun smaller stuff into the test build. Recent additions have been:

The Military Manpack Radio. Works when worn on the back, in addition to other radio usages.

New fluid containers that use the revamped crafting systems that deal with liquids – so for example the canteens use the new tech where they’re a single script item definition with procedural textures and icons, similar to how clothing items work.

Backpack sprayers that are fluid containers, that should prove useful for farming. (And also get us thinking about flamethrowers, once we have the time to get back into the fire rework.)

• The Sound team hit an impressive milestone the other week, with them hitting the total of 50 music tracks that have been re-written so that they work within 42’s new and awesome dynamic music system. Our thanks, as ever, to the fabulous team at Formosa and everything they do for the game.
• Taking over a building, but still a clean-freak even though the world’s gone to shit and appearances no longer matter? Well worry no more, as 42 will allow you to wash away and scrub the grime and graffiti to make your safehouse look and feel spotless. Until the blood starts to drip again, clearly.

In keeping with all the other game studios and publishers providing ‘faintly spooky content’ at this time of year, please take this offering of deer skellingtons and a baby deer skellington.

We trust that you are now suitably unsettled, and please note that it took about a minute to get our pre-existing animal skellingtons into motion. We haven’t spent all month on the skellingtons.

We’ll see you back here next month (details on the temporarily monthly Thursdoids here[x.com]) for more cool stuff.

Thanks again all x

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

So… hmm, where were we?

Okay so, recent weeks have seen two mega-merges into our trunk internal testing build.

The first was latest from our MP team, to top up the central development branch with their latest from their ongoing server work to flag up any unexpected issues and to get a few gameplay systems back online in MP.

The second was the guts of the long-awaited crafting revamp from Turbo, which means that the functionality for all our primary crafting stations is now in – and it’s a matter of banging heads together and integrating everything we’ve had stacked up for it.

To this end we’re pleased to announce that we’ve hired yet another stalwart individual from the modding community to aid us in this quest.

We were thinking about the different modders who could give our crafting team a little extra grunt, we have so many amazing ones after all, but the offerings of Soul Filcher stood out as being produce of exactly the sort of brain we needed.

We’re really happy to have Soul officially on the team, and while his initial introductory task has been some tidy-up work and minor improvements on our many and varied different traits he should be diving into the new crafting stations with the others in the weeks ahead. 


The engine upgrade is now in a phase of finding all the edge case issues where something doesn’t render correctly due to the new caching rendering method.

Alongside this, very excitingly, the map team are working on larger buildings and basements to be slotted into the game map.

EP tested out the first building to use the increased floor limits, a literal 32 floor skyscraper which looks super impressive to see in-game. This, as yet unnamed, skyscraper also allowed us to get a fun new animation into the mix as well…

PLEASE NOTE: Impact with pavement is WIP. There’ll be far more crunchy SFX, far less blending issues with the character standing back up, and also more blood obviously. Screaming too.

Elsewhere we are making the most of the improvements to how sprites are cached and handled. This now allows, for example, sprites to be combined with overlays into a single cached texture.

With this we can create nicer, and more accurate, highlighting and borders when they are selected and moused over. As seen here:

Increasingly with the engine upgrade it’s become ever more clear that with it we’ll be able to polish up more oddities and visual quirks of Zomboid in the long term.

If you’re interested, this is made evident by the testing tools that we’ve added to Zomboid’s debug menus that put the new tile depth system through its paces.

In this video you will see a large debug 3d cylinder that can be moved around to test how it interacts with the map environment.

This now interacts with walls and other objects as if they were bona fide 3D geometry within the iso scene, which was impossible up till now. Previously it would have inserted itself in its entirety between tiles laid on top of each other.

This will allow us to increasingly have a more believably 3D looking world despite using 2D tiles, getting rid of a lot of unsightly glitches and potentially opening up other gameplay avenues in the further future.

To be clear, this vid shows the sort of stuff that we’re now able to finally nix – although whether that will happen prior to 42 going unstable or later on is still an open question.

Oh and here’s another player/zed falling vid as we love it so much…

We’ve shown rats in blogs before, but previously they didn’t have many rules or conditions attached.

Now, as we close out what has internally been dubbed as ‘rat week’ we can say that rats will procedurally spawn as the world is explored – and they will also appear in special randomized ‘rat stories’. They can randomly spawn with trash, trash containers, and corpses.

As the days of the apocalypse tick by we will slowly approach the “Maximum Rat Index” –  which is currently two months on default Sandbox settings – which is the point at which rats will have the highest chance of spawning and a higher chance of appearing in greater numbers.

In buildings with rat problems we will also be working with the sound team over at Formosa to make sure we have fun stuff like noises for rats in ceilings, rats in the walls, rats gnawing on flesh, rats scuttling over different floor surfaces etc.

We’ll keep a lid on the majority of our special randomized rat stories, but expect some gross supplies and destroyed loot. That said, are you familiar with the concept of a rat king crown? Google it if not!

Oh, and would you like something to wash down with that bleach?

Lots of fun stuff going into the map expansion, not least the 32 level skyscrapers we have going into Louisville.

Our plan is to have a few of these pepper the urban landscape, where appropriate, for 42 – and then to come back for more fully-fledged urban replanning later down the line.

If you take in all the new basements required for the new build, and the new swathes of land to the west of Muld that are being finalized, there’s a lot of ground to cover for the map team – even if so much of it already in the can. We want everything to be good quality, and don’t want any aspects rushed.

With that in mind, let’s have another more detailed look at Xeonyx’s ‘scraper showcased in the first video. What a beaut!

Elsewhere, what better place to explore in an update where lighting and lightsources are going to be far more than an issue – than Ayrton’s spooky abandoned orphanage in a forest?

All the cool kids will want to hang out there, we’re sure.

Finally, for a map expansion we need signs for homes and businesses. So expect all sorts of new fun stuff, alongside adverts and map-reveal flyers for them on the radio and in peoples’ homes.

Alongside other new clothing, bags, holsters, and functional gear in 42, we’re also adding fully featured military webbing and SCBA gear.

The webbing provides two hotbar slots that can be used to attach walkie talkies, special new angle headed clip-on flashlights, and appropriate knives. The SCBA gear, meanwhile, provides one. Military webbing also serves as a wearable container that is superior to wearing fanny packs.

Some of this coolness can be seen in the following video – alongside the shemagh scarves that will allow British fans of a certain age cosplay as Simon Reeve.

As seen in the next video, SCBA gear is also functional in that, when it has an attached tank with oxygen remaining and is turned on, it will protect the wearer from inhaled atmospheric hazards. This also applies to the Hazmat suits.

We have also made Gasmasks functional, although they require filters that are drained by exposure to airborne contaminants, and have added Halfmask Respirators that use different filters that are consumed at a faster rate.

Some other, appropriate, masks will now also provide mild protection from corpse sickness. However, your character will remove and replace their mask when eating, drinking, smoking, taking pills, and such.

Engineer characters, and characters that learn the recipes, can also craft improvised gasmask filters, as well as recharge gasmask and respirator filters. All of these new items spawn in appropriate locations, vehicles, and on appropriate zombies.


One of the primary complaints we get about PZ, and a rightful one, is our lack of support for higher resolution monitors.

There have always been workarounds, but they haven’t been effective enough -and on a 4K screen the resolution makes our UI look to be a size that only a furrow-browed ant could use.

Well come 42 unstable (hopefully – it’s a big task) our local hero Fox will have climbed Resize Mountain – and up-rezzed our entire UI to make it far more amenable to those lucky folks with super-snazzy monitors. So good news for many, we hope.

In 42 not only are we adding visible holsters, in multiple colours, but also special shoulder and ankle holsters.

Shoulder holsters will conceal the holster and handgun when garments like jackets are worn over them, and also can store two pistol magazines as a container. Ankle holsters can only hold the m36 Revolver currently, and the holster and firearm will be concealed by long pants, skirts or dresses.

You’ll be able to find them on both existing, and new, zombie costume types – and we strongly suggest seeking out a plainclothes police detective zombie. (Might be tricky though).

• Following the successful integration of the effort and body noises from real actor people in a real recording studio into the game we’ve decided to get a load more done (three new men, three new ladies) so we get a range of different-sounding people – which in turn will make for more interesting character creation, and for more variety when players stand and fight around each other in MP.
  
• For the longest time, since forever in fact, alcoholic intake hasn’t had enough impact on the player – outside of some fun stuff when drink-driving. We haven’t gone as far as implementing a whole new animation set, but as a fun little side project you might find a few extra complications next time you’re utterly shit-faced.

A MASSIVE thanks to everyone who bought a Steadfast Spiffo from Makeship!

We sold 2000 more plushies than the first run of Spiffos due to your amazing charitable instincts – and we raised over 73,000 US dollars for Cancer Council Queensland[cancerqld.org.au] in memory of our friend Vicki Ann Woods!

Thank you so much for helping us with this, and we hope you enjoy your Steadfast Spiffo when he arrives on your doorstep later this year.

We’ll see you back here next month (details on the temporarily monthly Thursdoids here[x.com]) for more cool stuff. Thanks again all x

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

Hey everyone. Jumping straight in with an update on the new and improved crafting system this time around if that’s okay with y’all.

As we’ve talked about in previous Thursdoids, a large part of the crafting overhaul revolves around creating a unified, powerful and expansive system for machines, crafting stations and appliances. This covers all the different things you find around the world, and those crafted by yourself and your friends.

A primary piece of this puzzle has been in the creation of dev systems and methodology that allow for the hugely swifter implementation of far more varied/interesting crafting and devices – which in turn is a big thing for modders, and for the nu-medieval post apocalyptic society gameplay we will now cater for.

This has also been built, however, with a framework that will allow for a wide variety of other gameplay aspects – some of which will be a part of the initial 42 release, while others will be drip-fed into future 42 builds, and more still in the mainline builds beyond that. (The underlying systems will be available for modders from the word go, however.)

One of the advantages that the crafting revamp brings with it is the opportunity to provide engineering and electronics gameplay with a ton more depth. This system revolves around the concept of components.

An example of this would be a ‘power input’ component, which provides electrical power to a machine from an external wire. Another would be a crafting component, which would undertake a crafting recipe that can make use of any liquid or item within a machine’s resource component, that can store items, liquid or power. Importantly, every component also has an associated UI that’s been designed for player interaction.

This will mean as our library (and the community’s library) of components grows, we can quickly put them together to create all sorts of in-game machines and appliances. It’s also relatively easy to slap a UI skin on to each component (perhaps something already existing from the game, perhaps something new) to make them appear in the most appropriate way.

Components will also be moddable, so modders will be able to add new components that could then be used as parts of a machine’s in-game functionality and UI.

The end goal is to open this up to the player in-game, having these components as items obtainable through disassembly.

A burglar alarm for example will be comprised of a speaker component, as well as a battery input component and a motion sensor component. A player could feasibly go around collecting the components, removing the motion sensors and installing them around their base, wiring each of them up to lights to act as an early warning system.

Meanwhile the speaker component of the burglar alarm could be similarly wired up to a switch to allow people in the base to create a distraction sound to lure zombies away or into a trap.

These are just two potential gameplay moments plucked from the air, but good examples of a believable utility of scavenging components from real world items.

Putting aside all the new professions and skills coming to B42, this will finally provide engineering and electronic skills with a lot of cool utility – and make anyone with these skills a valuable asset to any survivor group.

This system will also be the bedrock for the crafting tree, providing functionality for the various profession workbenches, crafting stations and more primitive machines. For example, for the more medieval constructions, one form of power input available is rotational energy, allowing for mills and other contraptions to power machines and stations.

Ultimately our hope would be any machine or appliance on the map would simply be a combination of these components. Someone skilled enough would be able to remove them and put them together in any way they made sense: each component will have simple item, power, liquid or logic inputs and outputs.

Taking it a step further, it would also give us the option of making functional machines within the various industrial areas of the map – providing functional machines that could feasibly be utilized (perhaps even looted and taken back to base) and potentially making factory locations extremely high value targets for looting.

This will also, ultimately, add far more interesting gameplay to base construction and generator usage. We would have pipes and wires to facilitate the wiring and plumbing of machines and home systems together – rather than fudging water collector positions to make operable sinks, or just placing a generator next to a building and instantly powering it.

How far could this be pushed?

Well, in testing the system’s flexibility, Turbo grabbed some existing sprites from around the map to make sure the system was working okay for both our needs, and those of the modding community.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS VIDEO IS FROM A DEVELOPMENT TESTBED.

There’s no guarantee any of this will make it into B42, and likewise they are all built from random tiles that Turbs has nicked from our industrial sprite collection. This is all a part of testing the speed and simplicity of creating new machines – and from that underline how powerful the new system is.

Everything seen in this vid was put together with minimal specific code – and largely relied on existing components put together within the machines in the PZ script files along with new items and recipes.

We’ve got enough on our plate, so we likely won’t have a full suite of replaced ‘existing machines and appliances’ by the time 42 unstable rolls around but we believe that these new foundations for PZ’s crafting system will provide great opportunities both for our existing gameplay, and the gameplay we have planned for the years ahead.

This has certainly been the part of 42 that’s taken the longest to come together (not helped by dev illness and hospitalization in early development stages) but it’s also the stuff that we absolutely needed to nail to provide the huge boost in player and community creativity that we know it can provide. We’re at that point now, we feel, and look forward to showing off more applications in the near future.


A big Spiffo welcome to Patrick, an actual real American on the main dev team. Patrick is a software engineer who has been away working in academia on educational games for a fair while – but has his roots in more conventional gaming and has had his claws in various Tomb Raiders, Tony Hawk games, Ratchets, and Clanks over the years.

His primary mission is the implementation of ragdolls into the game – although initial work and experimentation is still very much exploratory.

We haven’t had an actual real American who remembers 1993 on the dev team for a while, so it also means he gets to answer a lot of questions about parking lots, drivethroughs and various other Americana. He is coping with this admirably.


A quick check-in with our (still WIP) animal tracking system. This could probably look a little better in terms of visual variation when it comes to animal tracks and direction, but is shaping up to be pretty fun.


In B42 not only will holsters be visible, but a new shoulder holster item has been added. Additionally we now have military webbing, which can be worn instead of a shoulder holster, and also occupies the spaces that fanny packs would occupy.

This webbing provides two additional hotbar slots, which we currently have set up for walkie talkies and knives, and also provide superior container option to fanny packs. Not only can these items be found as appropriate container loot, but also can be seen on both existing, and new, zombie outfit types.

Just over a week left if you want to buy yourself a Steadfast Spiffo[www.makeship.com], and say ‘fuck cancer’ simultaneously.

Tweet for further info.

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

The Indie Stone are pleased to announce another crowd-sourced Spiffo plushie through our friends over at Makeship – this time raising money for a cause that’s dear to all our hearts.

First off, let’s meet the raccoon himself.


They came for him… they still come… but he will NEVER yield.

He is: Steadfast Spiffo.

Spiffo is BACK, with maxed out levels of adorability. With his roomy camping backpack filled with useful survival supplies, sturdy axe, and many utility belts, he’s prepared for anything… and for a limited time, can be added to inventories as YOUR companion in the apocalypse!

Face down the odds. Fight the fight. Survive against the horde – all accompanied by a plushably grizzled hug-raccoon!

Interested in putting down money for Steadfast Spiffo? Then visit the crowdfunding page over on Makeship![www.makeship.com]

We’ve timed it so (hopefully) orders will be ready to make for amazing Christmas presents.



All money raised by the Indie Stone from Steadfast Spiffo will go to the Queensland Cancer Council[cancerqld.org.au], an Australian cancer charity that brought help and solace to a good friend of ours during very difficult times.

Vicki Ann Woods was the partner of Zac Congo, one of the principal architects of the animation system that made Build 41 (and PZ) the success it is today. Even during a long illness, her love and moral support became a part of what the game has now become.

Sometimes (not always, but sometimes) we get people asking how they can further support Project Zomboid. They say that they paid some money long ago, but have so many hours of gameplay that they want to add a little more. We always tell them not to be daft, and just tell some friends or leave a nice review.

Well, for the next 21 days we have a different answer: please buy this Spiffo!

Buying this Spiffo helps support people like Vicki, and like Zac, during their times of greatest need – and to aid research that will help all of us and our families worldwide.

Thank you x

(And here’s that link again if you need it)[www.makeship.com]