nasKo

The mod was updated since then, so worth checking out if it was fixed in the meantime.

Thanks, people. The issue was found and fixed for the upcoming patch.

Thanks a ton! My initial tests seem to point towards the mod Tsar's Common Library to be the culprit. Character goes to sleep fine for the first time, but whenever you try to sleep for a second time, nothing happens. I put your pack in two halves, had it happen with one half but not the other. So I halved that borked half again, and repeated these steps until it only happened with Tsar's Common Library. Then I tried the whole pack again with only TCL disabled and it worked fine.

Could you send us a list of the mods by chance, or create a pack on the workshop that we can check?

Thanks for the report! Not a bug for once https://theindiestone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/38267-4151-bug-cant-remove-curtains/

I'm confused. There was no update on July 1st, so this would have had to be a thing for six months. Can you confirm you did not have these issues before, that this behaviour is the same without mods, and that it also happens on the latest version (there was an update today)?

You remove them like you would remove furniture now. Not a bug.

And then, suddenly, fourteen days had rolled around once more… 41.51 IWBUMS BETA RELEASE 41.51 is pretty much cooked at this point, and the past few days we have been primarily addressing any potential incompatibilities on different / more elderly operating systems. We intend to release this early next week. The latest changelist for 41.51 can be found here. Some items of note: As previously mentioned, 41.51 contains significant optimizations to our save game system. As such any saved games played in 41.50 will NOT be operational or loadable. A separate Steam beta containing the previous 41.50 build will be provided so that you can continue and finish your current game. Similarly, in a changelist as big as this some mods WILL become incompatible – especially those dealing with loot distribution. We have kept the PZ Discord modding channels informed of the primary forthcoming change, but there will inevitably be a period of waiting before some of your favourite mods (and certainly mod packs) are fully operational again. Again, if you enjoy playing modded PZ then the 41.50 beta will still be there for you to use in the meantime. If you’re a modder who would like further information on what’s changing then please click through to this thread on our forum, where mapper extraordinaire TheCommander has also made a very handy forum post and easily understood infographic. Please be patient with all the community’s modder crew while they find the time to update their/our beloved mods! MP STRIKE FORCE As discussed previously we are now updating on all things MP every month – for the reasoning behind that decision please click on through. And so, here’s a run-down of what Yuri and Andrei have been up to over the past few weeks, followed up by a nice little vid that Yuri made for us. First of all, we added FPS data to our statistics. Servers will now collect FPS data from each client and collect it their statistical data. Seeing as the introduction of local ownership may lead to performance degradation on clients, knowing client FPS will help us to improve performance and as such we can use this tool in load testing. We then spent some time investigating zombie desync. We noticed that our zeds were pausing after they changed ownership between clients. As such we’ve made a fresh implementation of how zombie behaviour syncs. Right now the zombies will continue moving to the target and restore their state on a new client after changing ownership. What’s currently in the build is an initial implementation – we’re going to test how it works before developing it further. We implemented ‘get up’ sync for zombies. This bug could lead to zombies that were laying down on one client, but standing upright on another. We synced zombie falling. Zombies in local ownership now calculate the position and rotation of their fall point, and the client sends this information in the hitCharacter packet. Now all clients will show the same falling anim, and desync where zeds dropped in different places for different places is avoided. This issue also led to players seeming to finish off invisible zombies while you were playing. We had a long think about how we can improve a fight between a zombie and more than one player. A primary issue was how a zombie should react to hits from other players, as often ownership change can lead to desync. We had the idea that zombies should react to hits from their target player, but hits from other players would only lead to splashes of blood and a decrease of their health without a change in ownership. We’ve made an initial implementation of this, but it doesn’t seem to be a full solution yet – as such we will debug it, and potentially think of ways to improve or replace the system. We’ve spent some time updating our tools, specifically the fake clients we use to simulate a full and active server. Now clients can process zombie AI, we needed to simulate the same in our fake clients. This will help no end in our future testing and edge-case scenario simulation. NOISEWORKS Tomorrow (barring minor fixes) is the last day we have booked in for work with Noiseworks on their PZ Sound Revolution – although we are also making plans for a ‘Round 2’ to further improve the PZ soundscape, put some more work into the implementation of the procedural music system and respond to the feedback of the PZ community once it’s been released out into the wild. As such the Noiseworks build shouldn’t be *too* far behind the release of 41.51 into the public IWBUMS beta. The primary final polish that’s been put into Noiseworks over the past week or so has been on vehicles, music selection and general mix balance and bug fixing. Vehicles, especially, needed a little more love as gear changes / RPM and how the new sounds interacted with the existing PZ framework needed a fair bit of love. The vehicles are now 10x better than the angry lawnmowers currently in Build 41, though we intend to come back to them in Noiseworks Round 2 when we have more time to make some code-side improvements to help them out. Here’s a quick video of what they’re sounding like at the moment. (Please note there will be improvements to zombie collision thuds, car door and trunk noises before we release!) Something else we intend to release with the Noiseworks build are the 3D items that Rockstar Mark and RJ have been working with, but that’s not 100% at the moment as they’re working out the best ways to scale/rotate items in their export process. This is the way that a box of jars currently appears in-game, which isn’t… ideal? VCRS We want to shake up the current ‘spend the first week watching TV’ meta, while also introducing some new and typically 90s loot, and as such Turbo has been working on the PZ entertainment systems. This will be a simplified media playability version of the Devices branch that Turbo has had as a side project for a long time now, and will include retail CDs and VHS tapes – with common, rare and exceptional spawn changes depending on the recording. Clearly, some of these will also be the shows shown on the television with XP and skill bonuses. There will also be unique home VHS tapes, which will either be shows recorded by the people of the area or camcorder recordings, that have a 1 in 5 chance to attempt to spawn instead of a blank tapes. Clearly all this will be textual, just as the current TV and radio channels are, but we hope it’ll be a nice way of adding some more flavour to the world. There will be lots of new movies, TV shows and general new writing content. The ability to record material will not be in the build however, and will have to wait until Turbo’s fully fledged Devices side project (which includes computers and security systems) comes to fruition. Here’s a quick video of its current implementation, along with the ways that recordings can impact on your player’s skills and moodles if we so choose. PLEASE NOTE this won’t be how it ends up in the game proper. Being terrified by a horror movie to such an extent that it would leave you vulnerable to the zeds probably wouldn’t be much fun – so please consider WIP! LOUISVILLE Work on our version of Louisville continues, which as discussed in previous blogs is now visible in the mid-distance. This week we won’t be showing any new chunks of the map, as our map team continue to be quite protective of their giant sprawling baby, but maybe we can have a quick look at some of the new brands and locations that the more urban environment will bring. This week’s featured image from Rexiem. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Buen día, zomberinis! This week we take a look at the work of Snake, one of our most popular modders. “Most popular?” I hear you say, scanning the Steam Workshop. “Why, I can’t find a whiff of this so-called ‘Snake’ fellow anywhere!” But hold on a moment – Snake’s mods are only to be found on his own website, pzmodding.blogspot.com. The mods are easy to download and install, and the couple of extra steps to get them to work hasn’t hurt Snake’s high standing in our Spanish-speaking community. From an abandoned ship to a hunting and food mod, Snake has many mods and several maps, but has thankfully made an all-in-one pack to bring many of them together for easier installation. We’ve prepared a short list of some of the contents of the pack and asked the creator a few questions below! Le Gourmet Revolution Snake’s piéce de resistance mod, and much more than the name suggests. It is in fact a sort of modpack of its own, bringing together new crops to farm, foods to find and cook, with new and advanced fishing, hunting, and foraging systems. Read new seed packets of crops like rice, pumpkins, and wheat to learn how to plant them, then use your new crops in a variety of recipes. It also adds the ability to make food like waffles and cupcakes that appear in our game but are not creatable. The hunting system lets you use a bear trap or a slingshot to hunt animals like sheep, boar, chickens, or bears for their meat or fur, and the new fishing system (a hobby of Snake’s as we’ll see below) adds many new types of fish and bait, along with a metal detector to find pieces of metal to use in crafting. This is a mod for true survivalists. Abandoned Ship At the bend in the river northeast of West Point, you’ll now be able to find a huge cargo ship, devoid of all life apart from the undead. Even to reach this is a huge challenge. Unless you have a boat mod, you’ll have to use your carpentry skills to build a bridge from dry land out to the ship. Reach the ship and fight off the horde inside and who knows what treasures you might find below decks? Fuel Tanks, Table Saw Two smaller mods that add useful craftable items. Fuel tanks let you store your fuel in an easy-to-use container that’s much more handy and tidy than, say, fifty gas cans dropped on the ground (we’ve all been there). The table saw uses electricity to cut logs into planks faster but be careful – it’s very loud! Military Complex The first map Snake made, the military complex is a very post-apocalyptic base filled with great new custom graphics (body bags, US Army crates and boxes, new graffiti) and lots of cool loot including Alice backpacks and new weapon parts from the other mods in the pack. The complex includes barracks, an overrun hospital, and an airfield. The hospital especially is a sight to behold, filled with blood and barricades that make it difficult but rewarding to explore. Weapon Accessories (WPA), Ammo Maker Reloaded These separate but related mods add the ability to add cool accessories like a tactical light, lightweight grips, a suppressor, and even a silencer to your guns, along with recipes for creating ammunition from shell casings, gunpowder, and lead, and a few new guns to fight off/attract those deadly hordes with! And that’s not even everything! With the modpack you’ll find more advanced car mechanics like tyre maintenance, a factory in Muldraugh, metal baseball bats, a gunstore in Riverside, reinforcements for log walls, and containers of acid to clean new rusty metal items with. An interview with Snake (Snaaaaake?) Hello! Who are you in real life? “My name is Christian, I’m 37 years old and live in Argentina. I’m a graphic designer and also repair computers. I’m a self-taught person so I always enjoy learning new things!” How did you first discover PZ? Why do you like it? “I found PZ through a Battlefield clan I’m part of. I like it a lot because of how open-ended it is, the isometric graphics style, and the focus on realism, along with its notorious difficult level!” How did you get into PZ modding? Did you have experience modding other games previously? “It all started when I downloaded a very buggy mod and wanted to make a better one myself. As I’m a self-taught person (I’ve never studied programming) I began to read scripts and base game code along with another mod’s code in order to understand how it all works. Then it was just a matter of applying my new knowledge along with what I know about graphic design and audio editing to start developing mods.” “I had never made mods before, but as I began to understand how Lua code worked I also started a simple but very laborious mod for Starbound, the continuation of a Spanish translations mod, which I have 90% finished.” What do you consider your best mods/maps? Are they also your most popular ones? “I could never choose a favourite as I work hard on balancing and improving all of them but the most popular one in the community is Le Gourmet Revolution!” Why have you made your mods available only on your website instead of the Steam Workshop? Are you afraid this limits your audience? “I’ve had my website for several years and am very fond of it. The Spanish speaking community is used to coming to my blog because I always post when I update some mod either on Facebook or Discord.” “I don’t really care about the limits of my audience, but I plan to publish my mods in the Workshop when Build 41 is out of beta and stable. Then I hope, with some help, to translate the mods into more languages.” The Spanish-speaking PZ community is one of our most vibrant and prolific communities. How have you found that community? Are there any members of the community you want to mention? “I first found the Spanish PZ community on Facebook and that led me to explore the game a little deeper. There I met Atox creator of Eerie Country.” “Then after a few months I met Karen who is now my girlfriend! We’ve been dating for more than 3 years. She used to ask me about how to configure the PZ server with the mods I made and that’s how we got to know each other.” “Dydimos helped me to open the blog, and when I joined the official Project Zomboid community I met ditoseadio, who helped test the mods I was making. Then we decided to open a Spanish speaking Discord for PZ.” What are your general principles for PZ mods? Do you think things should be made harder, easier, more realistic etc.? Have any real life interests informed your mods/maps? “Quality over quantity! I prefer to improve what I’ve already done (be it balance, bug fixes or details) before adding new content. I think things should be balanced; when you add something good you also have to add something bad to balance the scales in survival. For mod development I usually do a lot of research before adding something.” “Regarding inspiration, I consider myself a very creative person. I like computers as well as spending time outdoors camping whenever the weather permits, so many ideas have come from my days in the outdoors.” “I also want to mention that many members of our community contribute ideas to improve or add new things to the mods and others help in development, for example Truji, who is in charge of adding the 3D models of food and weapons.” Your modpack adds a lot of new survival elements to the game: more crops to farm, foods to make, guns to scavenge, hunting, and even cheesemaking. Can you tell us a little about how these change the experience of the game? “With the mod pack, I want to allow the player to create all food items that are finite in the base game (such as salmon fillets, cheese, pork chops, peanut butter etc), to expand the player’s options for survival in a very long game.” “Playing with the mod pack prioritizes the skills of scavenging, cooking, fishing, traps and aiming, along with metalworking and electronics for some things eg. the table saw.” Your modpack also adds several new areas to the map, such as an abandoned ship, a gun store, a military base, and a factory. Which of these areas would you use as a base in a zombie apocalypse and why? “Actually none of those sites can be considered as good places to make a base if you are not experienced as they have very high zombie spawn! The zones I added are made to get finite items from the game and to force players to have to leave their base in order to build their dream home.” “I usually build my bases from scratch in remote areas or beside lakes and after some time go and explore my new areas to find materials to improve my base.” Your maps/mods have a very strong visual style. Do you have to change anything about your style for the graphics of PZ? “I try to make the content as similar as possible to the base game’s art. As I’m a graphic designer it’s quite easy for me to create sprites. I’ve always loved isometric art so I’m very fond of the graphic style of the base game!” I understand you love fishing. Can you tell us about this interesting hobby and, most importantly, can we see some big fish you’ve caught? “I could spend hours and hours writing about fishing! I am a sport fisherman and it’s a great passion as well as a family tradition all the way back to my great grandparents. I’ve been fishing since I was 5 years old, and I’ve learned an incredible from my own experiences, as well as my father.” “As I said before, I am very passionate about learning and know a lot about the behaviour of the different fish species in our rivers, as well as how the weather influences their feeding times, tides, changes in the river bed and many other things.” “Here’s my favourite fish, a dorado or golden dorado. It’s a very strong fish – a perfect predator!” “And here I am searching for a good spot to fish dorados in my city (they hunt close to the rocks).” Other than your own, which mods/maps do you enjoy or find interesting? “The first maps I played with were Downtown, and New Denver (now Slocan Lake, BC). Then Eerie Country (which has an excellent level of detail) and Lobii City, to both of which I have contributed some custom tiles and loot spawn code.” “Before Build 41 I used to play with mods like ORGM, lockpicking, and Project Farmoid. Now I play with Dynamic Traits, and Worse Looting and Even Worse Looting.” What’s next in your modding plans? What’s the dream? “I’m currently expanding the Riverside Gunstore area, adding some stores and places of interest such as a restaurant, coffee shop and even an arcade.” “My plan is to unify all the mods in my pack into one mod, so it fits perfectly into the spirit of the base game and gives the player more hours of entertainment in a long term game without affecting the balance.” “My dream has always been to create content and make video games. As a kid I used to imagine making my own fishing game. And now Project Zomboid has allowed me to realise this dream through modding!” Thanks to Snake for taking time to answer our questions! You can find all of Snake’s mods on his website pzmodding.blogspot.com.

Not yet but its weight along with its weight reduction will also be changed. It still fits those things.

THE BAD NEWS This week we have been playing the MP build extensively, to try and get a clearer and more solid idea how much work would be required to get it into a state we’d be comfortable releasing, and have increasingly become aware that it’s not good enough. We have been too optimistic, and for that we are extremely sorry. Advances have been made, and the quality of where it is going is clear from our many tester testimonials and gameplay sessions, but since the (vital) transitions to zombies on the client it is not even close to the quality that the game or our players deserve, even for a beta. Furthermore, the deeper we’ve looked into it, the more systemic issues deep down have reared their heads. It needs more time in the oven. We simply cannot release it half-baked. You don’t have to look far in gaming to see what can happen when you do. We recognise that (especially in the past two weeks) we have been making cautiously optimistic noises – but put simply the more we played, the more we became aware of deep-rooted issues that it would be near-impossible to fix in a ‘live service’ situation. Project Zomboid has every chance of being extremely popular when we release MP – it’s something that we’ve read from people everywhere, and increasingly something we’ve quietly believed ourselves. As we’ve said multiple times in the past, the multiplayer release of 41 is by far the most important build in Zomboid’s history, and if we don’t stick that landing it would be bad. As it stands the MP build we’re playing internally isn’t robust enough to cope with potentially huge floodgates being opened upon it. Support requests, tech queries and bug reports would simply drown us – and the player and community experience would be poor in the absolute extreme. We had a big meeting with General Arcade, and went through everything that could (and should) still be done to make PZ a MP game that could both stand the test of time, and a huge launch day. Something that would keep multiplayer servers populated and not result in disappointment for our community that have been so patient for so long. This will likely be a much longer wait than we’ve been hoping, and particularly in light of the last two weeks of misguided hopefulness over improvements that while exciting, in the cold hard light of day still are far short of what we would dare release. We have long shied away from giving any form of ETA, but in the interest of ensuring we are not stringing anyone along with vague notions of a timescale Thursdoid after Thursdoid, we have agreed with our MP team that anything up to six months should be the ballpark we’re now aiming for when it comes to getting a Build 41 MP release into player hands to a level of quality we’ll be confident it won’t blow up in everyone’s faces. We know this will be of disappointment for many — and we’ll likely receive some flak for this decision — which is understandable, especially given the noises we’ve been making in the Thursdoids recently. But we ask those that are upset by this news please to bear in mind other recent releases that people were begging for, and getting increasingly hyper-frustrated at the frequent delays — only to finally have it in their hands, as they facepalmed and asked themselves why the hell this wasn’t held back further?? That’s what we’re doing — because we’re lucky enough to be in a position we’re able to do that, both financially, as well as without marketing spends or boardroom pressure forcing our hand, and we are committed to the fact that while we feel the pressure from the community’s frustrations at the wait as well as our own desire for it to be ‘done’, we will not allow that to blind us to putting something out that will end badly for both us and our community that want to see the game grow. We may get a bloody nose for delaying it further and for this long, but we’ll take that gladly to ensure that doesn’t instead happen on release–as that’s a bloody nose we might not recover from. This has been an immensely difficult week for us — people sometimes forget that we want this build out there too. It’s not just a game to us but our daily lives, and the march toward a multiplayer release — the moment we’ve desired to see for so long vanishing away months into the distance, and the prospect of continuing that climb for another six months is heartbreaking to us. Nonetheless, it’s 100% the right call — we will not waver, and when all is said and done and multiplayer has been out for months and everyone is playing it, we promise everyone — ourselves and our community — will be glad we made this call, instead of releasing in a soon forgotten whimper. We may take our time, but we get the job done in the end. Hopefully the almost unanimously positive reception to the long awaited animation update proved that to be the case. I honestly believe we wouldn’t be where we are today if we weren’t just as strict back then on what we put out, when everyone was chomping at the bit to play it, bugs and all, and couldn’t fathom why we were being so careful and protective for such a long time. Now people have had it for a long while, no one would want to go back in time and have us retroactively release the anim build 6 months earlier than we felt comfortable doing so, and risk it crashing like a lead balloon and damaging the game’s reputation and future. Our caution led to the most success Zomboid has ever enjoyed. We know the same will be true about multiplayer when people are finally playing it. We’ve discussed with GA about getting two more internal QA engineers the MP team will have direct access to day to day while working, to allow them to more quickly diagnose and test stuff with more players outside our TIS internal tests. They are also on the lookout for additional resources for the coding team to speed things up. Though it’s worth pointing out that this will require some significant time to learn the codebase and get up to speed for any new developer, which is why it was never a practical solution before our decision to commit to this longer delay with which to capitalize on another coder. We hope with the changes we make, along with many organizational changes to improve our internal workflow with GA, we can deliver something sooner, and will of course continue looking for new avenues to speed things up — but for all intents and purposes we’re committing to this period of delay to make sure it is definitely achievable and no one should be under any illusions of expecting it sooner. THE GOOD NEWS It’s not all bad news however. This longer and more defined schedule of getting MP up to scratch makes it clear that we can’t just continue this release drought in the meantime. Therefore we are going to start releasing IWBUMs builds with new content in the interim, rather than holding back until the MP build is complete as was our original plan. We will be removing MP elements from the current trunk code that would interfere with the single player game, and releasing a six month backlog of changes, fixes, optimization and upgrades waiting to go into the game. LWJGL 3 and java 15 upgrades in particular that will improve performance and compatibility, not least a new fancy garbage collector we’ve never had the opportunity to use before that should all but eliminate any periodic pauses that have plagued our game in the past. After this, we will be starting to release additional content builds to tide the community over in the wait. We have to be somewhat careful on the style of content we add, so as to not make the MP work more complicated and hold it back further, but stuff you should be able to look forward to in the coming months include: Noiseworks sound overhaul. Noiseworks are due to provide the first complete version of their ‘round 1’ additions to the game, replacing all sounds in the game, for testing and feedback from TIS. Those keeping up with the Thursdoids will have a good idea of what this will bring. After some testing, and adjusting sounds to tester and community feedback, we’ll be getting this out to you as soon as we can. Noiseworks will then be continuing with adding additional sounds, and a procedural music system, which will bring even more atmosphere to the game. Map updates. We’re pushing toward a release of Louisville, which nears completion outside some zoning work and bug-fixing. It’s unclear how much time remains to polish this up to releasable standard, but it seems very likely it will drop before multiplayer. Non-90 degree roads with curves, improvements to the existing map, and even perhaps beyond our original scope of the map now our mapping team has grown. Several other really cool gameplay features. We’ll talk about them in the coming Thursdoids when we can feel confident they will drop in the interim period. THURSDOIDS Speaking of Thursdoids, a primary piece of feedback we’ve had from the MP team has been the detrimental effect that the weekly cycle of blog updates on MP progress has had on the development process. A weekly development sprint, where results are desired to show off or talk about makes it much harder to work on longer term improvements. To be honest this is not the first time this has been brought up or felt by the TIS team, the weekly blogs have always stacked a lot of pressure on our shoulders, only ever being 7 days away. But we are both immensely proud of our weekly blogs, and have found them to be a huge part of keeping our community content and informed. Truth be told, we have also been somewhat nervous that reducing their frequency suddenly may be perceived by our community as some kind of winding down, rather than something that would improve development in any way, and so have long been resistant to change. However, in the interest of aiding the MP team in having the time to do longer and less interrupted work on features without the pressure to provide small incremental improvements that clearly haven’t been enough to make the leaps to release that are needed–we are going to make the following changes to how we release Thursdoids over the coming six month period. We will be doing bi-weekly Thursdoids (that’s every two weeks). These will likely be more content-packed, and have more time spent writing them. They will hopefully provide much more bang for your buck and less likely to have us repeating ourselves. We’re only going to focus on multiplayer development every other Thursdoid, allowing the team to have a solid month to make longer term, deeper and more substantial improvements without worrying about us coming knocking for stuff to show or test. The alternate Thursdoid will focus on the single-player interim updates, features and fixes coming in the shorter term. That all said if we do have cool MP stuff to talk about, we’ll be sure to let you know regardless of what week it falls on. We’ll see how these Thursdoids go down over the coming months, and will decide based on that what to do once multiplayer releases whether to go back to weekly Thursdoids or to carry on with bi-weekly. Thanks for reading, and apologies again for the major misstep in our recent enthusiasm. While we did state it was ‘cautious optimism’, we regret letting short term improvements and perhaps a bit of wishful thinking colour our blog updates. Sometimes you just get lost in the weeds and an uptick one week is deceptive to how much work really remains. We hope the firmer date will give solace to those who check week after week to frustration, who are largely only interested in multiplayer, that they can safely put our game aside for a while, and when to start looking again. And to everyone else, we hope getting fresh content again will help the time pass that little bit quicker. Much love The Indie Stone

Greetings zomrades! We are always amazed at how many great maps our community is making, and Eerie Country is one of the very best. Some maps go for huge size and others for high levels of detail, but Eerie Country sits in the perfect sweet spot between both. With an appropriately eerie feeling pervading each and every area, Eerie Country has a much more apocalyptic feel than our base map, but also a wonderful variety of places not found in our Knox County like oil derricks, an airport, military watchtowers, bus stations, greenhouses, and detailed farms. Some areas make use of custom textures but many use our base game graphics to create places with entirely different vibes than our map – no mean feat! Every single area has clearly been thought out. Farmhouses have yards with henhouses, barns, and grain silos. Factories are filled with machinery, and you can’t blame the apocalypse for how dilapidated some of those gas stations look. Towns with narrow streets become more claustrophobic when they’re filled with debris, wreckage, and barricaded buildings. Military checkpoints and medical areas filled with body bags (SO MANY BODY BAGS) tell a story but like every story in the world of PZ they have the same ending – those pesky zombies always seem to win! With multiple towns and dozens of cells to explore, it’s a surprise to learn the map is mainly the work of only two people, Atoxwarrior and Otomie Warrior. We spoke to both of the authors to understand how such a great map came together. Atoxwarrior Atoxwarrior, pictured with his sister Who are you in real life? “I’m in my last semester at university for a music teacher degree, and I’m very passionate about music. I’m a guitar player but lately I’ve been learning to sing for my band, Toxic Lovers. Other than that, I’m an ordinary young man who likes video games, post apocalyptic movies, going out to visit nature with friends and spending time at home with my family.” Can you describe your Eerie Country map for us? “Eerie Country is a map that seeks to show how society tried (and failed) to fight the zombie pandemic, but also to encourage exploration. I’ve always found it important for a map to have a great diversity of places for the player to venture, not only for the loot but for the environment itself, to encourage the player to leave the comfort of their base. My goal when making the map is to offer a fun experience that awakens players’ curiosity.” How did you first discover PZ? Why do you like it? “I discovered this beautiful work of art when looking for isometric games. The pixel art style along with the open world zombie survival aspect meant it was love at first sight. I remember the excitement I felt when creating my first character and exploring a world in chaos. I didn’t do very well because I ended up running away from the zombies and getting lost in the forest and dying of thirst, but it was very exciting!” How did you get into PZ mapping? Did you have experience making maps or mods for other games previously? “I had no experience creating mods or maps but was inspired to start when I read on the Indie Stone forums that I could make my own world. It was exciting but my biggest challenge was trying to understand what the Thuztor mapping guide said as I don’t speak English. I had to use Google Translate to understand how the TileZed tools worked, and everything was an arduous process of trial and error. Luckily I am very patient and managed to make my first map which is now “Irvington”, one of the cities in Eerie Country. I’m planning to make my own tutorials in Spanish as I want more players to have the opportunity to create their own maps.” You collaborated on Eerie Country with Otomie Warrior. How did you come across them? Which parts of the mod are yours and which are theirs? Did you have help from anyone else? “I met Otomie in the Indie Stone forums. We share a taste for creating maps and can speak the same language, which is very helpful. He’s a great partner who has supported me all these years. He’s contributed a lot to the map including the missile silo, the mountains, the labyrinthine church in the swamp area, along with many other buildings in Eerie and more that have not yet been released. I also want to thank Snake who helped with Lua coding, and Cyrrent Eiledoll who helped me create the natural tiles for the swamp which give that area such a unique atmosphere.” How much time have you put into making your map mod? What were the biggest challenges in making it? “I started the project in 2016 but didn’t have much time to work on it due to college and other work. Thankfully my Patreon has allowed me to commit more time to making the map!” “Without a doubt the biggest challenge is thinking of interesting places to add to the map. Comments and suggestions from players are very helpful for this. My work has also helped me appreciate the developers of the official map because now I know how much work they have to do, and recreating a real life city is not as easy as many people seem to think!” What were your inspirations for this map from real life, movies, other videogames etc.? “Eerie started as a project to offer multiplayer players an experience they could enjoy by being able to fight or hide in different corners of the map, but as the project progresses I see it more as a work full of references to movies and video games. For example “Centralia”, the city I recently built, is inspired by Silent Hill and The Last of Us. Every time I add something to the map I look to add references, but I also like to investigate real life situations because sometimes reality is more disturbing than the imagination.” If you had to pick one place in your map to use as a base, which area would you choose and why? “At first I liked living in the junkyard that was south of the map in the middle of Highway 3, but now I like living in the other junkyard in Centralia. Maybe later as I make more progress, I’ll change my mind again!” Which maps or mods by other users do you enjoy or find interesting? “I highly recommend Snake’s mods since they have such a wide variety and are of special value for the Spanish-speaking community. I hope they’ll be translated into English and on the Steam workshop some day because they are pure gold!” “I would also like to recommend Relihschneider’s mod SWAT & RIOT PACK, which has lots of great equipment, and Toxic Fog by Planelalgol. (I wish PZ had a greater variety of gas masks, seeing as I collect them in real life!)” “Another one I find very interesting is Peppercat’s Dynamic Traits which lets you gain or lose traits based on your playstyle. Finally I have a long list of maps I love to explore and that inspired me the most: Downtown, Radcliff, Drayton (Rebuild, Phoenix, and Cherbourg.” What’s next in your mapping plans? What’s the dream? “Right now I’m continuing the development of the capital city of Eerie, trying to recapture the atmosphere of Resident Evil 3. Of course, only the community can judge if I get it right! My dream is to be able to finish the Eerie map and make a multiplayer server filled with entertaining stories for the Zomboid community. I also hope my map becomes an inspiration for other mappers!” Many members of the Project Zomboid community will be aware that your family recently encountered some extreme difficulties. If you feel able to, could you let us know what happened – and, importantly, are there any further ways that people who use your maps and appreciate your work can contribute to help this situation in any way? “My family is very grateful for all the support from the Zomboid community. There are details of the accident we prefer not to tell, because of the implications it had locally, and since the loss of a member of our household so tragically and almost losing my sister has left scars that will be difficult to heal over time. I hope you understand, and that someday justice for so much corruption comes to Venezuela.” “My sister has been able to recover satisfactorily and continues to fight like the strong woman she is (as her younger brother, I admire her a lot). I know it is not easy for her, but as a family we are all together in this. She is working on her own business at home, creating personalised notebooks. You can find her work at AbiBookCa on Instagram.” “Currently the only way I have to help my family is my work and what I receive from the people who support my Patreon (which can be found here). I owe my patrons a special mention because without their financial support, this young Zomboid fan would not have come so far. In the future I would love to be able to pass on the support I’ve received to other creators who do not have the necessary resources to survive.” “The Zomboid community is one of the best communities and I feel proud to be a part of it. It has taught me that despite adversities we can always help others. Thanks to all the Indie Stone team for giving me the opportunity to tell my story, I appreciate it very much.” Otomie Warrior Who are you in real life? “In the old Indie Stone forums, I was 956 Texas, and I was born and raised in McAllen, a city in the southernmost region of Texas close to the Mexican border. I work as a construction safety officer and have a family to take care of, so I work on PZ buildings in my spare time.” How did you first discover PZ? Why do you like it? “I first discovered PZ in 2016 on Steam and liked the retro Super Nintendo vibes the graphics gave. Seeing it was a survival horror zombie game made it even better!” How did you get into PZ mapping? “I got into creating buildings after realising the game could do with more variety. I also wanted to design my own buildings with traps in them so the player would have to be cautious while exploring them.” Can you describe your contributions to the Eerie Country map and what it was like working with Atoxwarrior? “Working with Atoxwarrior has been a great experience! I’ve learned a lot from him and we’ve become good friends. Even though he lives in Venezuela, we keep in touch through social networks. I hope one day I can reunite with my good buddy in Colombia and enjoy a good chat and some coffee!” “I have contributed over 300 buildings to the map and they come in all shapes and forms, from urban cities to forest camps and even missile silos!” Which of the areas/buildings you worked on is your favourite? In which of your buildings would you most like to set up a base? “I most enjoyed working on the buildings of the Old Town section. It’s inspired by Resident Evil’s Raccoon City with narrow alleyways, traps, and many rooms to explore. I would most like to set up a base in an old forest camp I made that has a good wood wall space for ten people. I wouldn’t want to set up a base in the old city – it’s crawling with zombies.” Which maps or mods by other users do you enjoy or find interesting? “Superb Survivors is lots of fun, but I wish it worked in multiplayer!” What’s next in your mapping plans? What’s the dream? “I plan to keep helping Atoxwarrior. My dream is to finish the Eerie Country map and make it an all-time favourite thanks to its unique buildings and the vast map you can explore!” Thanks to Atoxwarrior and Otomie Warrior for taking time to answer our questions! You can subscribe to the Eerie Country map here.

Hey all, here we all are again. Here’s your latest zombie news. Beginning with the latest from the MP Strike Force who are working on the implementation of multiplayer for the ongoing Build 41 public beta. After a more highly populated test last night, last week’s quiet optimism for the client zombies work remains – but there’s certainly many/varied subsidiary issues that have been dislodged during their implementation and need sorting out. In terms of gameplay blockers there are some car issues that need addressing (meaning last night’s test had to be vehicle-less), player deaths are prolonged to the extent that you wonder if God mode is active, the client zed system seems to get confused when admins/players choose to teleport close to their buddies and very occasional doppleganger naked zed corpses occasionally form during zombie killings. Survivors also reported being liberally doused in level-ups out of nowhere also, which Spiffo will have to clamp down on. In terms of the group combat itself – it can still look messy with fellow survivors engaging with zeds in the mid-distance and the zombies getting Force Push-ed, and occasional zeds (again in the mid-distance) teleporting position. Likewise corpse placement doesn’t align all that well and needs a once-over. HOWEVER players reported that (obvious bugs aside) they were never really put in a position where they got an unfair bite. There were no zombies ‘giving birth’ to other zombies (tester phraseology, not author’s own) and teleporting instakill zombies were a non-thing. This was the primary aim of the recent client zeds work, so is good to hear – especially when there are still screws to tighten in this area to make everything flow some more in terms of visuals and feel. Similarly, we had a tester in central Canada playing alongside Yuri and Andrei in Eastern Russia – on a server in France – and they were able to play together relatively comfortably. Which is more good news. Fingers crossed this week we can do a big push on the bugs outlined above and knock it all into better shape. Thanks for your continued patience on this, we recognize that it’s far less fun watching a marathon vs. a sprint. Finally in other MP news RJ has now made it so that Walkie Talkies now work with VOIP – if someone is talking in VOIP with an equipped radio or a radio on their hotbar, and you have a radio on or near you on the same frequency then you will be able to hear them. If you’re standing at a distance from the walkie-talkie then the voice you hear will be quieter, and vice-versa. This has been something we’ve been wanting to implement for a long time, and it’s great to finally get it in and placate PZ Reddit’s persistent Bernie Sanders. It also allows us to remind you of that most vital of PZ development discoveries: that the French word for ‘walkie talkie’ is ‘talkie walkie’. SFX AND MUSIC OVERHAUL These past few weeks the PZ sound overhaul crew have been tackling the music system, as well as plugging in many and various new SFX created by their colleagues. So, over to The Noiseworks’ Michael Klier to find out a little more. “The music system has been revamped from the ground up. Instead of a random playlist the music choice now reacts to the game.” “There are different parameters that have an effect on the music. A different selection of tracks will play when you’re roaming a town zone vs exploring the wilds. Music is no longer a constant either. When a track plays out we now give players a chance to indulge in the new ambiance of the soundscape for moment. It’s only after a random amount of time that a new track will start playing.“ “When you wake up after going to sleep a different selection of tracks will start playing, and which ones play will depending on various situations – such as if you’re waking up to zombies, have had a nightmare or are simply going to a more pleasant start to the day.” “Action music will be triggered when you decide to engage zombies head on, and if things get a bit hairy, the music will change gears as well. We are, however, also making sure that you won’t be able to tell whether you’ve escaped to safety (or are entering dangerous territory) by the music alone.” “In future iterations of the PZ soundscape (so not in the initial drop) we have plans for layered approaches to using the stems of the soundtrack that Zach has provided – but for now we are concentrating on how the individual tracks play as a whole. That said, tracks will no longer simply fade out – if you leave a town zone for example they will conclude musically. Likewise the ‘starting’ signature track when you load in or spawn in a new house will always be “Finally Calm, until things start becoming… not calm.” Please note that the following mix is WIP, but it’s a good example of where we’re at. As before PLEASE NOTE that the vast majority of work for this is being done by the Noiseworks team, and as such it’s not holding back any MP work. BENDS IN THE ROAD Behold the work of Kukrapok! While Mash, Binky, Xeonyx and RingoD continue their labours in our version of Louisville this has started to happen to the internal main map… A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too! Our thanks to all bratty stepsisters out there for refusing to relinquish their gaming PC!

What I meant by practical was not in game-terms but how feasible it is in real life. It's largely only a hollywood kind of thing from what I've seen.

Nah. Where were you seeing this? As for the merit of it, while it would probably look hollywood-cool, I doubt it's a practical use of firearms. I don't know much about guns, though.

Hello everyone! A bit of a featureless Thursdoid this week, Noiseworks have been knee deep in the music system overhaul the past week, and we’ve nothing to show in a video, so we’re afraid this will be a multiplayer-centric blog this week. However we have some encouraging news from the latest Wednesday test. The phrase of the day is ‘careful, measured optimism’. Please note that there’s still a laundry list of ‘stuff to do’ before we’d be comfortable putting it out there, however it feels like the last big thing, the client zombies that we’ve been talking about over the past while, is starting to feel like its getting very close. The testers reported ‘10000% much better, speaking of combat.’ and ‘Aye combats definitely 100% better & fun’ which is extremely welcome news. However there are still issues to resolve, with a horde at one point completely disappearing, and a couple of very odd glitches with zombies sliding across the floor quickly when aggroed by a second player that will need to be resolved as these are the types of bugs that could ‘get someone killed’, the prime sort we want to avoid. We’re planning a much bigger test on Friday, now the issues with the zombie syncing have mostly been resolved it makes sense to open it up to bigger player counts, so we’ll let you know how that went next week! After we finally get the last few issues with zombie syncing finished off, there are numerous other things we need to make sure are working solidly, car physics being a prime one, as there’s been many a death or being permanently stuck inside cars caused by iffy network transmission of physics forces. Again, a prime example of what we need to avoid. There seems to be some other issues relating to night-time having a weird effect on zombie visibility, meaning zombies can get extremely close without becoming visible. For a while it appeared this was related to the client zombie stuff, however it became clear this week this is likely a bug affecting single player too and is purely down to the game logic for spotting zombies, and so we’re pretty confident it won’t take too long to fix. Ah, during the writing of this blog I notice a code commit where it has been fixed. So there. There will likely be a whole host of other, more minor, problems — all we can promise is when it comes to less severe problems, we will draw a line in the sand as close as we can, and not be needlessly perfectionist about getting them all fixed up (we want this out there more than you do!). However, as we’ve discussed before we still want the first version to represent some level of quality, being one of the biggest opportunities for Zomboid to really break into the mainstream there is a lot at stake on providing a positive and fun multiplayer experience, and not squandering the opportunity we have by releasing something broken. So we have to be careful to get rid of any bugs that are likely to cause extreme frustration or annoyance to players or appear extremely broken, as like it or not IWBUMs very quickly gets treat like the official release regardless of its ‘opt-in beta’ status. In addition, we need to make a pass over the VOIP system, which can be a bit echoey and weird at times, and make sure its solid as we feel that player’s abilities to talk clearly and immersively to each other will be of prime importance to Zomboid’s success once multiplayer releases, especially given the recent rise in popularity of roleplaying in games. Once we feel we’re extremely close, we’ll be having some form of short-term public single server test to really see how far we can go with player counts that are difficult to reliably attain behind closed doors. We also have some plans as we did prior to build 41’s initial launch into IWBUMS, to get some more publicly visible testing via streamers in the week or two before release, which we hope people will enjoy watching (as we will, amongst gritting our teeth and sweating), but again we need to make sure the multiplayer comes off well for such public exposure as that. It should however provide us with a bit more last minute feedback on fixes and tweaks still needed and measure how the build will go down, as it proved incredibly useful prior to 41’s initial IWBUMs release. So while today’s news is extremely encouraging, and the trek ahead seems a lot shorter today, please be aware there are still several stepping stones ahead that need to be navigated. Though the one that we’re feeling very close to jumping off of is, as far as we can see, one of the most unstable, awkward and yet important stepping stones to date and we’re extremely glad to be close to getting off of it! Slow and steady wins the race though, you know our style by now, and that it’ll be worth it in the end even if its a royal pain getting there. Before we go, as always, here is a couple of fun highlights reels from the Wednesday testing! Also check out this fun little news piece about a certain familiar ground-zero Kentucky town! https://www.reddit.com/r/projectzomboid/comments/nqfy1i/how_to_pronounce_muldraugh_and_other_irl/ This week’s Fort Minitown by Tedbeeeeeeeeeeeer on Reddit. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

We don't give out release dates. We'll release it when it's ready and right now it's simply not.

Happy Thursday all. Things are ticking on okay over here, hope things are well with you. MP STRIKE FORCE For those out of the loop, the last few weeks of dev-time on the Build 41 internal test build has been centred around moving control over nearby zed placement from the server over to the client. As you’ve seen in previous dev blogs the previous system was allowing 32 players to run around and have fun smoothly, but instances of zombie teleportation were still present – along with their game-ending and game-breaking bites. As such the transplant was made, and for the past two weeks the team have been stitching the new organ in. Last week’s test started out bright, but soon turned into a bit of a mess-on when players congregated in the same area. This week, after a week of pruning, a small scale Wednesday Night Test felt much better. Over the last week Andrei has been fixing up some problems involving players seeing different inventories on zombies, as well as some odd naked zombie behaviour when they are being run over by cars, and some fixes to combat desyncs involving more than one player. Yuri meanwhile has been working solely on the zombie desync issues, improving the code that teleports desynced zombies into their correct positions to try and do this when the zombie is not visible to a player. Last night enough bug fog had been cleared to reveal other smaller-scale issues, but we feel like we’re steadily closing the net around them, and the testers seemed a lot more positive in the playability. Early indications are that the client driven zombies have the potential to work well and the system seems to be for the most part operational, however all the situations where this can go wrong need to be isolated and fixed up before any true benefits can shine. As before, we’ll be scaling up player numbers as each thrice/twice-weekly test goes by – each time flushing more and more gremlins out of the system. At the moment the transferal of zombies between clients when multiple players are present is sometimes rather bumpy (resulting in pathfinding complications, ‘Force Push’ zed deaths and disappear/reappearances) but its getting better as every day of work goes into the new system. The server is now no longer taxed at all, which is hugely cool, and means that when we nail this and release 32 player servers, they should require a lot less in terms of cpu and memory to run, and our upper limit on player counts after that are undoubtedly going to benefit from it. Here’s a quick vid of the testing from last night. OTHER STUFF Nothing huge of note to show you visually (or audibly) this week, everything is very ongoing, but perhaps just a quick rundown of ”who else is on what” for a few PZ workers when it comes to builds in/around the vicinity of the mptest build will be handy – so you know what else is in the works in terms of nearer-future zed survival. The Noiseworks continue there complete overhaul of the PZ soundscape. Our amaze-o composer Zach Beever has supplied them with our whole soundtrack, including files for each separate instrument, and right now they are nose-deep in elegant new ways to mix it all together and match to the action. They will also be delivering the first batch of new vehicle sounds tomorrow, which we can’t wait to hear as (let’s face it) our current ones are prettty shit. Turbo’s chatbox improvement project continues – giving you more customisation options, improving legibility and improving (fixing) its implementation with in-game devices like radios. Fox and Aitor, our graduate coders, are working on better in-game item categorization and fishing QOL improvements respectively. We’re big fans of the Crashed Car Mod here at TIS towers (as indeed should you be, do check it out) and it’s made us realise that we have our burnt out wrecks on the road, and we have our low quality/dented cars, but we have nothing in-between. Having write-off car wrecks extremely common over the entire map doesn’t fit our current or planned lore, but having a few fender-benders and t-boned cars certainly will. As such Martin is taking a break from a new range of ‘taking cover’ animations that he’s been working on for a future build, and has started doing a range of front, right side, left side and rear ‘smashed up’ variants of each PZ vehicle. These will then be later used as more atmospheric ‘vehicle stories’ in which you might come across (for example) a front-damaged sports car that’s piled into a side-damaged police car in a barricade – alongside all the relevant zombies. Finally, wrap your ears around this tribute to the PZ theme from Exxhy. Amazing work mate, really cool stuff. This week’s emergency service call out from IU.A.TI Cave Troll. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

What are you talking about. We blog every Thursday. This is just a monthly Mod Spotlight.

The Zomboid mod scene is currently in full bloom, and so is our Mod Spotlight thanks to our writer friend @Pat_Bren_Writer! This month, Patrick has chosen to take a look at the numerous and diverse mods of Planetalgol. The Many Mods of Planetalgol Spend any time looking in the PZ Steam workshop and you’ll almost immediately come across the work of Planetalgol, who has an incredible 119 (!) mods listed at the time of writing. Activate several of his mods at random and you’ll find yourself firing your flare gun at sprinting zombies, flinging smoke grenades you have attached to your military webbing, and sheltering from toxic fog in a secret, zombie infested base. But where to start? How do you prioritise with such a horde of mods bearing down on you? Thankfully, Mod Spotlight is here to help! We’ve been in touch with the author himself to highlight some of his best mods to get you settled into the strange and wonderful world that is Planetalgol. Terror Zeds The first line of this mod’s description reads “WARNING: DO NOT USE THIS MOD!!!” which just about sums it up. If you thought PZ’s basic zombies were hard to kill, wait until you’re trying to out-sprint sprinting ones suddenly bursting from a horde of their slower brethren, being chewed on by walking skeletons, dodging fire zombies and ones whose sounds attract nearby fellow undead. DO NOT USE THIS MOD! Lab Complex Alpha Regular survivors may have noticed a strange facility at the end of a series of winding mud roads to the southwest. We’ll let you come to your own conclusions as to the purpose of this base, but Planetalgol’s mod adds an entirely new layer to the base – literally! Find the elevator and you can head down to the underground level where a twisting maze of medical rooms, construction sites, and who knows what else horror awaits. A true end game challenge for PZ veterans. ZREs A lot deeper than it first appears, ZREs adds military rations and their components to PZ. Unpack rations to find base foods to make new meals, or pack rations together into boxes for efficient storage. This is a mod for the long term survivor. Advanced G.E.A.R. Definitely for the action-oriented survivor, this compilation mod adds a variety of new weapons to PZ, along with new clothing and gear to hold them in. A flare gun, incendiary grenades, a knuckleduster and landmines are some of the new tools you can play with. Just don’t forget to use the new gun cleaning kits before a big firefight. Worse Searching, and Even Worse Looting These two separate but related mods increase the tension of searching containers throughout the world. Worse Searching, inspired by Escape from Tarkov, hides the contents of a container until they are searched through a timed action. Even Worse Looting goes a step further by adding locked containers and their keys to the world. Toxic Fog A you-get-what-it-says-on-the-tin mod, this makes PZ’s beautiful pure white fog turn green and deadly. Make sure you have your gas mask to hand if you venture out, and for an even greater challenge, rain can be made toxic too. —————– After somehow surviving all of that, we headed to Planetalgol’s safehouse to ask him a few more questions about his many mods. Who are you in real life? “I’m an older punk rock/metal dude. My earliest memories are from when I lived on a First Nations reservation in the Canadian bush country where you had to get flown in and out by floatplanes. I’ve been a cook in fine dining, a construction foreman, and a bartender/bouncer at an illegal underground bar, among other things.” How did you first discover PZ? Why do you like it? “I think it was a friend of mine, a film professor and big Romero fan, who first told me about PZ, back when the zombies looked like weird green aliens. A couple of years ago I had spare time to fill, looked it up again and got hooked by multiplayer.” “I played on Ambiguous Amphibian’s server, which has no PVP safety or player names displayed. I found the combination of trying to avoid getting killed by other players, and the trash and corpse strewn post apocalyptic environment to be magical.” “My preference has always been for really punishing hardcore games, all the way back to Nethack through to Dark Souls, and PZ just totally slotted into that for me.” You are a very prolific modder – 119 are listed on the workshop. Do you have many more in the works? Why do you think you have this rapid-fire approach? “Currently there are actually 128 mods of mine on the workshop. However that includes a couple of private test mods, and does not count several mods I haven’t uploaded that “work” but I don’t feel are ready to upload. So the number is closer to 200 overall.” “My rapid-fire approach probably has a lot to do with my pandemic lockdown situation more than anything else. As well, the majority of the mods are really simple affairs that don’t require much time or effort to wrap up.” What do you consider your best mods? Are they also your most popular ones? “Best is hard to pin down. Best for increasing the base game difficulty without radically changing the gameplay would be Worse Searching and Even Worse looting. Best for being weird, wild and hardcore ruthless would be Terror Zeds. Best for providing hardcore, endgame level challenge content would be Lab Complex Alpha.” “Worse Searching and Even Worse Looting are surprisingly popular, but my most popular mods tend to be my most shallow ones that just add new tactical toys to play with!” How did you get into PZ modding? Did you have experience modding other games previously? “Initially I got into modding to make custom content for my MP server and just kept on going. The majority of my stuff is designed with using it on my, super ruthlessly ridiculously player-adversarial hardcore hellhole server in mind.” “Previously I extensively DMed weirdo oldschool Dungeons & Dragons, and dabbled in some writing for it and some other indie RPG stuff, and that has a big influence on my approach.” What are your general principles for PZ mods? Do you think things should be made harder, easier, more realistic etc? “A fair amount of my stuff has the goal of making the game harder, and a lot of my mods that could make the game easier, such as tactical gear stuff, are made with the intent of using them with other mods that make the game harder. For example, some of my grenade mods would make PZ easier when used with vanilla zombies, but if you look at those mods in the context of using them with Terror Zeds they don’t seem so overpowered.” “Almost all of my mods are made with the goal of using them for my super ridiculous hellhole server. Worse Searching, Even Worse Looting, and Worse Vehicle Condition were made with the idea of complicating and slowing down the initial player looting rush and the smart rascals clean out towns in a matter of hours.” “A lot of other creators’ mods make the game easier and, although that’s not my bag, I think it’s great that those options are being generated for people who want that out of the game.” Other than your own, which mods do you enjoy? “It’s hard to get into this without leaving anyone out by accident! I have a lot of respect for the usual big names, Fenris Wolf/ORGM, Filibuster, Paw Low, SoulFilcher and Snake.” “Eerie Country is my favourite map mod. It wonderfully captures horror movie vibes and I find it such a pleasure to play in. The Scrap Weapons/Guns and Armor mods are something I find really charming and fun. A guy called Madman Andre has been quietly releasing a lot of great food/”realism” mods.” “Oh, and Nocturnal Zombies! That mod is an absolute treat and the gold standard for enhancing zombies in a multiplayer environment.” What’s next in your modding plans? What’s the dream? “Oh lordy, I have so much stuff on my backburners right now. I’m working on Apocalypse Machines that adds more post-apocalypse style vehicles and wrecks to the game, as well as a suite of mods that add shipping containers, animal corpses, hidden caches etc. and multiplayer stuff for faction and base raiding play. I’m also making a Mars base map/total conversion, as well as more endgame/raid dungeon style map content in the vein of Lab Complex Alpha.” “But my dream is to properly mod in monsters when animals are released and make a game like PZ crossed with Escape From Tarkov, but it’s an insane irrational monster apocalypse like Stephen King’s The Mist. Alligators, mutant dinosaurs, zombie alligators, zombie mutant dinosaurs, off-brand Terminators, Lovecraft knockoffs. I can’t wait!” Thanks to Planetalgol for taking time to answer these questions in such great depth. Next month Pat will be digging into one of the most exciting user maps currently available – so stay tuned!“

We'll need a little more info on that. How do you determine they're not at 100 condition?

We're aware of that and there will be a sandbox option for it.

MULTIPLAYER WORK We’ve had a full complement of coders back on the internal 41 MP build since Tuesday, following the Russian May public holidays. Last night’s traditional Wednesday Night Internal Test was a bit of a washout due to a completely unrelated bug relating to an XP change not being compatible with MP. This has now been fixed, and we’re doing a Thursday test to see how things have improved, and things seem to be going well so far! A few issues but definite improvements. We’ll be doing more fixes and a bigger test tomorrow, so hopefully we’ll be in a good place for improvements for next week. SOUNDS Work from the Noiseworks sound design crew continues to arrive for our assessment, with Michael from Noiseworks plugging them all into the mainframe. It’s become increasingly evident that some of the NW gang are becoming quite partial to our game (even playing it for fun!) and as such ever more interesting and well developed sound design keeps on appearing. This isn’t always the case when you get separate teams in to work on existing titles, and makes us really appreciate having such solid (can we say ‘sound’?) chaps working on PZ. Noiseworks stuff is being done separately from more general dev duties on PZ. Other departments aren’t being held back by this CURVES Kukrapok, creator of the Cherbourg map and a member of the boat mod team, has been part of the official PZ team for a few months now – so we thought it might be an idea to let folks know what his initial task is. (Not least because it’s a real ballache of a job, and he could probably do with a little community cheerleading!) You may have noticed that the roads that criss-cross the Knox Event zone aren’t exactly standard issue – 90 degree turns result in many car/tree incidents, broken bones and worse. As such, Kukrapok’s current task is to provide for both official and community mappers when it comes to better and smoother curves and corners. “After I was taken on by TIS, I was quickly tasked to create new tiles in order to add 45 and 22.5-degree angle roads.” explains Ayrton/Kukrapok. “This should prevent players from crashing into a tree too often when they encounter a sharp turn. Even though, I’m sure there’ll be still plenty of opportunities for each of us to wreck our newly fixed cars. (I see you Speed Demon thugs!)” These angles are not just restricted to the corners themselves. It should also allow us to have much more natural roads between towns, instead of a network of long 90 degree roads, we could have more interesting angles and smaller turns during road trips to make the world feel and look more natural to drive around. “The task is a long one, as it requires a certain number of tiles to be created in order to have proper transitions in between all new angles and this applies to street curbs, terrain blends, traffic lines, etc.” “However, the result will improve the whole map eventually, and many modded maps, while also providing a smoother driving experience and a more natural feel to the map. Below is an example of 45-degree transitions of street curbs.” Overall this task has involved the creation of 1133 new tiles (!) with most of them providing a mathematical brain ache to complete also, so many thanks to Kukrapok for his devotion to the cause! This week’s foggy scene from Stean on Steam. Trying saying that five times with your mouth full. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

We have these conversations multiple times a week. It boils down to the fact that MP needs to make a good first impression. Not squandering the opportunity to grow the game by releasing a buggy first build that's going to disappoint anyone who touches it is also a priority. People would get straight up omae wa mou shindeiru'd by zombies teleporting behind them and the word would quickly spread that MP is unplayable. This would be a thing with a single person on a server or 20, so it doesn't make a difference. Actively working on just getting the game to work with 4 people or something would actively hold back development and is just not how it works; it's not some sort of stacked cake where the bottom piece is 2 players working fine, then finishing the second piece that allows 4 players to play without issues, etc. So again, the game would not be enjoyable even with just a few people because the core of the game - zombies - are simply unplayable right now. The explanations of the past blogposts should put this in perspective. I understand being frustrated about the time it takes but ignoring the reasons and explanations already given - especially when they are already addressing the argument you're trying to make - isn't helping you nor us by having to read you venting. Nobody wants MP out more than us. I also find it quite audacious to criticise us for the fact that we're planning out the future of the game beyond MP by having an external team work on an area where the game has been severely lacking in for quite some time. We're trying to make the best game we can. The only thing that would be satisfied with a release of unplayable MP is the impatience of few, and that only temporary because the reality of the state of MP would quickly set in. How we know? Because that's what happened in testing, the initial hype died down really quick. There are more eyes on PZ now than ever before and wasting our opportunity to grow the game even further by releasing a bad but lasting first impression of MP would put us back, not forward.