Tails

How do, all. Let’s visit a few different PZ departments to see what’s cooking.
41 PATCHING
We are currently partway through the journey to the 41.69 patch. Planned patches to Build 41 are intended to be, generally, not feature-led and instead focus on balance, QOL, fixes and polish. The current contents of 41.69 includes:
New items and 3D models New foraging discoveries. Many improvements for controller and Steamdeck play Many improvements to the MP experience in areas such as: the sometimes weird vehicle physics, the PvP safety system, the PvP cooldown timer, safehouse bugs, sleeping and radio/VHS sync.
There’s a lot more incoming next week, but we intend to keep this patch relatively short and sharp if we can – though of course will also need to be sure of MP stability before any release (even to unstable) as there’s still quite a lot of large adjustments to the MP code going into the pot.
FISHING AND LOCKPICKING
Although it’s not clear where it will land in terms of a build release yet, this week Aiteron’s new fishing system had its first internal test. This was largely a bug-chasing exercise, especially in terms of MP, but the testers had fun.
 
There’s still a lot of work to be done, and we will need better and more appropriate anims to really sell how it works, but the current mission statement is to get it all working – so we can then add some polish.
 
We also need to bring the mechanics closer to realism, through exploring what is caught (and how) in Kentucky – and what different types of lines, hooks, lures, bait and catch options we should include to increase/decrease your chances of catching a particular sort of fish. Likewise, clearly stuff like your location, the weather, the time of day and your fishing skill will all come into play.
We won’t go into detail, as it’s still distant, but something else that’s in the design phase while Aiteron implements fishing is bringing elements of his lockpicking mod over into the main game – in a new and improved package to boot.
 
Locks will vary in type and challenge, and the tools required may differ. Through this, stashes with useful loot will be added to the map – hidden behind locked doors. This will also enable locked doors within houses, chests, locked gun cabinets etc.
MAP WORK
The map team’s ongoing mission to improve the Knox Event map continues. Amidst other tasks focussing on the Many Years Later challenge map, converting and building new farms to fit in with our animal plans, and plotting for future expansion… here’s a few extra fun things that will be appearing in an exclusion zone near you.
 
New tiles to improve the appearance of existing locations. Some older, and very distinguished, buildings for the richfolk of the area. MUSIC
On top of the gameplay improvements mentioned last time, the guys at Formosa UK (formerly Noiseworks) are working on a first draft of a rework of the action music.
 
Instead of switching between tracks mid-fight, the plan is to cross-fade between different intensity levels of the same track. The base intensity will be the regular track that you are used to, but then there will also be a high action version that has been beefed up a bit.
When the action subsides, or the number of zombies you’re fighting declines, the music will enter a low state and eventually fade out.
FARM ANIMALS
Work on the introduction of farmed animals continues for their planned introduction in Build 42.
 
All the following information and videos are SUPER WORK IN PROGRESS and will improve a bunch as we move forward. Please don’t worry/complain/laugh/faint/query/weep about ‘em. (Usual caveats apply basically!)

Some bullet points on the current integration!
All animals are defined in lua definition tables, which will allow for maximum modding possibilities: it’s via these definitions that you can essentially adjust animal behaviour. When in their pen farm animals will wander around, ‘emote’ by flapping wings or rootling for food on the ground, sit, rest, lie down etc. Relevant animals can graze grass, which then regrows after an appropriate amount of time –  which can be defined in a new sandbox option. Animals will eat from a trough, which is something you’ll either construct or loot from a farm.
    Animals all have different growth stages – for example calves become cows/bulls, and grow in size. Their growth will be guided by various parameters – like their hunger, thirst, general health and the size of their enclosure. Baby animals will stick by their mother’s side, and even take milk directly from the udder. The bigger the animal size, the more meat it will produce when it is butchered. There will be various breeds in-game – so you could have a “meat breed” (Angus) or a “milk” breed (Holstein) – and maybe even something in between like a Simmental. Growth rates will be realistic, so a cow will take two full years to be at its full size, but this will be modifiable via sandbox options. Cows will generate milk for a certain period after delivering a calf. The more you continue to milk the cow, the more milk you’ll get each day. Leaving a cow with a full udder, however, will cause issues and a decrease in lactation. Sheep grow wool that you can retrieve with a shear, and also have a milking system if you enjoy sheep milk.
    Hens can lay eggs. If a henhouse is present they’ll lay eggs in it, otherwise they’ll do it on the ground. They can be fertilized by a rooster, so if left for a time can hatch out chicks. You will need to shut the door to the henhouse every night, and open it back up every morning, or will you risk visits from Mister Fox – and see the resulting bloodstains to boot.
    ANIMAL BREEDING
What’s currently being added to the above systems are some ways to encourage the breeding of animals – to improve your herd, and that of your friends and neighbours, as the apocalypse draws on.
 
It sounds complicated, but it’s actually quite easy for us to generate animals with a ‘full’ (for our purposes) genome – again all defined in lua definition tables for easy modding.
 
Each animal type will have a set of abstracted genes that each contain two ‘alleles’ inherited from parents, from “milk quantity”, to “life expectancy”, “strength”, “appearance” genes and a lot more in-between.
 
We’ve gone for a somewhat realistic, yet still gamified, genetics system to make it feel somewhat accurate. We want to have some of the interesting consequences of genetics, and also to have them present clear enough results for players to engage with in cross breeding projects.
 
When breeding animals, characters with appropriate skills will be able to inspect the animal and get an idea of its various health-related attributes (aka genes) – while others such as egg laying, fertility or milk production will be observed in the animal during its lifespan. Higher skills will also, most likely, make this more apparent/obvious to experienced breeders.
 
The gameplay loop of animal breeding will involve trying to pick the correct pairings/groupings of your animals to pass along the best genes into their offspring.
 
Over successive generations you will be able to improve your stock with better milk production, egg production etc – or help you to focus on producing animals with more meat for slaughter.
 
Finding new animals to breed to diversify and improve your stock’s gene pool will be a prime reason for farmer players to interact with other groups, or go hunting around the farms on the map. Likewise, this will zero in on the concept of a ‘prize bull’ that you might grow an emotional bond with, and really, really not want to get ill – or perhaps even get stolen in MP.
 
The science will be that each animal will carry two sets of alleles in their genome, one contributed randomly from each parent. You have dominant and recessive alleles, and this will mean that you definitely have to be careful about in-breeding, as base generated animals may have recessive gene timebombs in the forms of genetic illnesses of varying types, waiting to ruin your prize bull and your entire stock if you’ve inbred your animals too much.
 
We’re sure there’ll be mods that will allow players to observe the genes more directly, but in the base game we’re expecting a tad more ‘art than science’ approach and using informed guesses and examination and observation to improve your stock.
 
There’s plenty more to this system, but we’ll leave it there for now. All animals will use this genetic system, and we’re sure at some point we’ll look into expanding it into the plant system too, however that’s not a priority right now and almost certainly in the worlds beyond Build 42.

 
This week’s cool arcade base from Damien. A changelist of all our pre-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

a and please try to do it in the future for the song Echoes from Before comes to play a little more 

it s my favorite  song 

along with the one for when you die and the one for combat, the sound of the second menu song

l made Echoes from Before play once on a custom map in a elevator feels like there were zombies everywehre and she played it l was very happy kkkk

so l think it only plays when you re in a room and it s full of zombies inside the building and no zombies knows you re there



2 things 1 thanks Zach for making this song 


and 2 l love Echoes from Before because it gives a feeling of sadness and depression 

like thinks that 5 7 8 days ago everything was * Normal * people walked cars  fights etc

and in the  other day

almost eternal silence, the people you saw yesterday  turned into zombies and some completely disfigured 

this song makes me sad 

F for everyone who dies from the Knox Infetion 








Well... to the whole word 




here the song
 

i love the minute 2:13 when the dun dun starts 

make me think in the past 

that everyone l killed was people one day

l think maybe it s the only one else. 

some zombies l feel sorry to killing them

Au Au

Translating 

Goobye ;}

After several barnstorming ‘future plans’ blogs this one is a bit more near-sighted we are afraid, but might cast some light on our intentions for the general upkeep of PZ while larger-scale features are worked on.
 
First though, the boring-er stuff!
 
HOUSEKEEPING
TEAM EXPANSION!
 
We are looking for a game development specialist, likely someone with AAA experience, who wants to go indie and doesn’t mind one of their superiors being a cartoon raccoon. We need an Animation Engine Programmer, who would be in charge of improving the code guts of Project Zomboid.
 
Good experience required with working on or developing character animation systems in a proprietary engine: root motion, blending, masking, inverse kinematics, ragdoll etc. Competitive rates, flexible working, worldwide dev team. Apply within.
 
GET OFF THE OLD BETAS PLZ!
 
At some point in the near-ish future, we will be tidying up some of the older Build 41 MP betas available on Steam. Namely, 41.60, 41.61 and 41.65.
 
Please return to the non-beta live version of the game as soon as you can to be 100% sure that you avoid any game or mod corruption when these disappear – whether on a server or in SP.
 
(The sound issue that meant that some remained on 41.65 has now been dug up, fixed and patched in 41.68 stable.)
UPCOMING 41 PATCHES
Today we hotfixed the stable build with an FMOD sound engine update that should finally solve the issues experienced by some players with certain output/peripherals set-ups.
 
Next up will be a small patch, 41.69, designed to counter what we feel are some of the more pressing issues that the game currently has – and where a fix can be quick, simple and hopefully non-disruptive. The issues at hand currently are:
 
Problems with safehouses, including unwanted teleports for safehouse members when the safehouse owner is offline. An issue with a non-responsive PvP icon impacting on general play. The fact that looted VHS tapes are single-use and can’t be used by other players.  
We apologise for these small patches, and know it’s annoying having to wait for a server owner or host to update, but we hope that this will be the last of these smaller niggly patches for a while.
 
The team will then implement quite a lot of QOL and balance work that we already have waiting backstage into the internal beta, and we can knuckle down on 41.70 (if all goes well) as a wider and ‘small feature-led’ patch with a longer lead-time for the community.
 
This will also contain many and varied improvements to the MP experience, alongside some work to make our game better compatible with the SteamDeck.
 
[Post-blog Addendum:
We've been working on the VHS one-time XP bug that's annoying on MP servers - but our fix will likely create disruption and required updates for mods that use radio/TV.
As such, while annoying, it seems wise to make 41.69 a bigger patch as opposed to the quick-fix-build mentioned in the blog.
41.69 is being prepared and will spend some time in an unstable beta for required mod fixes.
We have a lot of QOL and balance changes somewhat logjammed at the moment, so hopefully we can get it all in and tested - so it shouldn't be too long a wait before it gets into unstable. Thanks all!]
SOUND DEPARTMENT
The patch described above will also contain a lot of the recent work from our friends at Noiseworks – who are now known as Formosa Interactive UK btw, but our dev relationship with them won’t be changing.
On the menu for this sound update are the following:
 
Reworked Shotgun and M16 sounds, and additional firearm sounds for the Desert Eagle and the M9. New indoor reverb tails for small/medium/big rooms for all firearms to make them sound more realistic indoors. Additional foley sounds for zombies tripping over fences/obstacles/through windows New environmental sounds for the Electricity/Water shutdown, and how the world reacts when either happens. There’s different shutdown sounds for inside/outside, and electric appliances play shutdown sounds in sync with these when the player manages to catch the event while close-by. Plus attempting to drink or get water from taps when the water is off might play water sputtering sounds. A new background atmo bed for foggy weather More specific roomtones for different building types, along with some random oneshot sounds. For example, in the prison you can occasionally hear rats, or other metal squeaks. Meanwhile in the mall, while the electricity is still running, there’s a chance of mall music playing. A bunch of additional world emitters for streetlights, neon signs, hot dog stations, gas pumps, arcades etc – all of which also react to the Electricity shutting off. All the vehicle doors have also been re-worked and split into layers for more variation and to make them squeak less often.  
The guys are also in the process of reworking the music system to address tracks not playing out – and also have future plans to make combat music more engaging and dynamic.
 
BEYOND 41
Okay, maybe a little from our future plans. RJ continues to work on our first implementation of PZ livestock. Look at this happy beast!
 
This week’s foggy, rainy Gotham-esque nightmare from †. A changelist of all our pre-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

Find on Steam Betas - unstable branch. Saves should be fine but you'd be advised to back them up to be sure.
 
41.67 changelist
 
MP
 
- Cheat control
 - Each anti-cheat can now be disabled via server option
 - Several anti-cheats can now be configured via server option
 - Anti-cheats are disabled by default for co-op hosted servers

- Max/Min/Default values hint is added to ServerOptionChange UI window for double and integer server options
- Old SafetySystem tooltip text is changed in accordance with new icon
- GhostMod and NoClip are removed when admin gets player access level
- Adjusted anti-cheat thresholds
- Player is not kicked on coop host server
 
- Adjust MP gain XP limit by sandbox XPMultiplier value
- Fixed typo in UI_ValidationFailed_Type9
- System property "rconlo" is added to make RCON server listen on loopback interface only
- New IsoObjectID class replaces ZombieIDMap.
 
- Limit the "mods" string reported by Steam servers to 128 characters. A new keyvalue "modCount" reports the actual number of mods used by the server.
 The server browser and favorites list will display "... and N more" after the list of mods, when there are more mods than are displayed.
 This is to fix some servers reporting ??? as their version number, which prevents people from joining.

- The server will exit if there are syntax errors in the servername_SandboxVars.lua file.
- The server's servername_SandboxVars.lua is saved after loading it to update it to the latest version with comments.
- Added missing buttons to disable toggle in admin panel UI
- Added closing admin panel UI if player has no access level or revoked privileges
- Added closing safezone tool UI if player has no access level or revoked privileges
- Clarified safehouse tooltip - show all reasons why a safehouse cannot be claimed
- Added server option "SafehouseAllowNonResidential" to allow claiming all buildings
- Added confirmation before releasing a safe house
- Fixed the owner sometimes showing in safehouse member list
- Added check when releasing safehouse if player is the current owner or an admin
- Fixed DisableSafehouseWhenPlayerConnected teleporting players outside when a player is removed while there are members online
- Fixed DisableSafehouseWhenPlayerConnected never replacing the safehouse after a player disconnects
- Added updating of the safehouse online member count periodically

- Fixed both options on yes/no confirmation when quitting a safehouse removed the player
- Fixed zombie that can be deleted by admin or zombie owner
- Fixed server hanging on quit command because of active RCON connection
- Fixed CD and VHS tapes possibly being different for each client.
- Fixed GlobalModData.save() not being called on the server.
- Fixed ZomboidRadio.Save() not being called when other things are saved on the server.  It was called every 10 game-world minutes, however.
- Fixed Lua error in ISPlayerStatsManageInvUI after calling the /additem command in multiplayer.
- Fixed issues with the Stitch packet.
- Fixed repeated exceptions in GameClient.sendAddedRemovedItems() when a container object is null for some reason.
- Fixed adding items to or removing items from containers not being synced in multiplayer if the player teleports before the changes are reported to the server.  This was one cause of the issue fixed above.

SOUND

- Updated Windows and Linux FMOD to 2.02.05.
- Added error checking and logging when initializing FMOD.  The sound system is disabled when errors occur.

FORAGING
 
 - Added Search Focus system for foraging
   -focus is set in the investigate area window
   -only one focus may be active at a time
   -increases chance to find certain categories of item when searching
   -player must be skilled enough to identify the item category to focus on it
   -focus effectiveness is determined by player skill and category
   -hidden item categories will not be rerolled (rare find protection)
   -square must be valid to roll the item type (cannot be used to find plants on roads)

- Fixed duplicate clothing effect displayed in ZoneDisplay tooltip
- Fixed missing per player render flag in ISBaseIcon
- Tidied spriteAffinities definitions
- General tidying and alignment of tables
- Removed stone/firewood identify category skill requirement
- Added translations for search focus functions
- Added controller support for search focus
- Fixed medicinal herbs requirement - check for recipe instead of trait "Herbalist"
- Fixed tooltips flickering in Zone Display
- Added tooltip to make long tips easier to read without scrolling
- Added zone display tip for using search focus

BALANCE

- Fixed Axeman not applying bonus for swing speed
- Added correct adjustment of exercise fatigue.
- Updated community translations.
 
FIXES
 
- Fixed car dashboard delay when taking damage
- Fixed doors missing their glass, and the triangle-shaped floors_exterior_natural_01 dirt tile.
- Fixed disassembling player-built floors resulting in two floor tiles after reloading, an auto-generated wood floor plus a dirt tile.

MAKE SURE TO BACK-UP before continuing a save.
This is an unstable (i will back up my save) release and you can expect bugs.
 
Server operators will find .zip files with their server backups, should they need to revert. 5 cycling incremental backups each server run, and a special backup per version change. It can also be configured to backup periodically while the server is running, but you may expect a few seconds of lag if you do this.
 
Accessible via unstable steam branch, server and client.
 
 
41.66 CHANGELIST
 
MP CHANGES
 
Increased experimental maximum player limit to 100. Default remains at 32. Servers with more than 32 players will likely result in poor map streaming and desync, so proceed with caution.
  Optional Login Queue system for MP servers added. 
    - Players connecting to a full server will be placed in a login queue, connecting automatically once a slot freed up. The queue will advance after the client has finished loading the game.
   - LoginQueueConnectTimeout=60 server option determines for how long the server should wait for a connection of the client before they are timed out.
  Added options for automatic server backups. Several cheating security fixes to prevent unwanted admin access as well as unwanted actions performed by clients.
  Several improvements and fixes for VOIP. Added Automatic Gain Control options. Allow VOIP and text to travel to radios tuned into the same frequency. Non-equipped stationary radios now two-way for text comms.
  Added admin panel tool for creating custom safehouses/safezones Added new PvP icons. Moved to the left hand side with the other UI icons. It will be moved up further before hitting the stable branch. Servers now set a Steam server rule named "PVP" with a value of "1" or "0" depending on the value of the "PVP" server option. This can be used by server browsers to distinguish between pure PVE and PVP enabled servers. Added a "SledgehammerOnlyInSafehouse" server option:
    - if AllowDestructionBySledgehammer is enabled, you can set SledgehammerOnlyInSafehouse to true to allow destroying stuff with sledge only in player's safehouse.
  Added buildUtil.setHaveConstruction
    - This is a function to set the haveConstruction flag on a zone to prevent loot respawn if ConstructionPreventsLootRespawn is enabled in the server sandbox settings.
   - set haveConstruction on zone for building, movable, barricading events and when claiming a safehouse, so a home won't spawn loot after being claimed, even if a player hasn't built anything in them yet.
  Updated /rainstart /rainstop and /thunder commands Added /lightning /startstorm and /stopweather commands Added providing optional reason in KickUserCommand Added providing optional coordinates in AddVehicleCommand Updated text for server commands Updated ShowOptionsCommand to allow use by non admins Disabled doubled-up commands AddAllToWhiteListCommand and AddUserToWhiteListCommand Removed unnecessary server options.
  Updated overhead username display
    - with only ShowFirstAndLastName enabled, show player nam
    - with only DisplayUserName enabled, show username
    - with both options enabled, show player name with username in brackets
  Server .ini file now has the tooltips for the various options and settings attached as comments Added limit for server public names to 64 characters and public descriptions to 256 characters Disabled NightLengthModifier since it is currently non-functional. Will be reintroduced soon. Added check and teleport for safehouse trespassing.
    - Fixes issue with players becoming trapped when a safehouse owner goes offline with DisableSafehouseWhenPlayerConnected enabled
    - Fixes issue with players intruding in safezone areas via movement exploits
  Safehouse fixes:
admins and moderators can quit safehouse (if not owner)
admins and moderators can invite themselves to a safehouse
do not show the 'Quit Safehouse' button to admins who are not in this safehouse
  Fixed non-relevant Lucky/Unlucky traits being usable in MP. Fixed some duplication exploits. Fixed being unable to access/change player inventory as admin. Fixed Ping Limiter not working.  Fixed showing the "ADMIN POWER:" debug text in multiplayer. Fixed some cases where crashes at low speeds cause fatal injuries. Fixes for some instances where black boxing could still occur when players were passengers in vehicles. Fixed an exploit that allowed bypassing container item limits. Fixed non-members being able to perform moveables actions inside safehouses. Fixed admins in ghost/invisible mode still making sounds. Fixed "Medical check" on another char in a car causing chars to be stuck in a car Fixed crawlers sometimes teleporting when trying to path to a player. They will now turn to the target. Fixed, via removal, defunct server option "LogLocalChat". Fixed kicks in relation to Safehouse creations. Fixed being able to exit a vehicle when inside a safehouse without having appropriate permissions. Fixed a bug that rendered passengers unable to leave a car. Fixed death by bleeding while driving causing a kick from the server Fixed not being able to die near other players until hp drops down, and not being able to move if char died while other players try to rescue. Fixed looting animation stopping when another player attempts to grab the bag/container. 

NEW
 
Added back the "Toggle Music" key binding, bound to nothing by default. It appears under the new "Audio" category near the bottom of the key-binding UI. Players can now dismantle several player-built structures (floors, etc) Corner pillars will now be built automatically when placing walls/fences etc. Updated Kingsmouth and Studio maps. Room definitions, bed and foundation fixes, added video cameras, military equipment, and more. Added tooltip information on what mod an item is from. Can be turned off in main options. Added "Inventory Container Button Size" Display option to change the size of the buttons on the right-hand side of the inventory and loot windows. Updated Survival Guide. Merged into a single window and also made to work with a controller Added trait reset button to character creation screen. Implemented the blue combination washer/dryer appliance. Use the context menu to switch between washer and dryer mode. Context Menu is now usable in the loot panel backpack list. Added more CDs and VHS tapes, including Dog Goblin sequels. Updated ISCraftingUI and CraftTooltip to display multiple choice item counts, as well as heat requirements for recipe ingredients Added AllowFrozenItem parameter to recipes and evolved recipes Added Perogies, Peppermint, Potato Pancakes. Added OnCreate item script property.

BALANCE
 
Setting Cruise Control now starts at current speed when switched on Attempting to sprint when the character is too exhausted to sprint will now make the character run as fast as they can instead of walking and having to press the "Run" key separately. Fixed M16 still having its initial experimental values. No longer a death laser. MinDamage reduced to 0.8, MaxDamage reduced to 1.4. Greased back hair now requires hair gel. Frog legs and whole fish are now dangerous uncooked. Military lockers and crates now movable. They'll also contain loot. Unified spawn items and starter kit functions in SpawnItems.lua. Fixed drinking directly from river/puddles not making characters sick.  Drinking tainted water now more merciful if character is already sick. Added ability to use sheet ropes to create log stacks Fixed players not becoming bored inside player-built rooms. Agoraphobic and Claustrophobic traits fixed to work inside player-built rooms. Added relevant tile properties (pick-up, rotate, water source etc) to: new farm dirt tile, washer-driers, dead farm plants, hay bales, red mobile tool cabinet, troughs, play castles, bird baths, sinks and more.
  Spear charge fixes (MP and SP): charge only zombies in front of the player reset sprinting time when spear charge occurs  

NOISEWORKS
 
Added a volume automation for the hard of hearing trait in addition to the muffling we already had, additional -6db (needs some testing if this is okay) Added EmptyPan sound for "Empty Frying Pan" and 2 other recipes.  The sound is a placeholder for now.  Added values MeleeHitSurface for per-weapon door-hitting sounds. Added DoorSound=WoodShackDoor for new door sounds for wood-plank doors. Added StoveTimer sound. Added sounds played while constructing gravel-bag and sand-bag fences. Added sounds for turning media devices on/off and muting/unmuting. Added Dismantle sound for radios and televisions.  Added generator repair, connect and refuel sounds.  Added sounds for drinking and filling containers from water dispensers. Added new climb sound for high finces. Added bullet impact sounds. Added the violin melee hit/whoosh sounds
  Minor volume tweak to zombie voices when they're very close, they were a bit too loud Added occlusion to vehicle engines, horn, sirens (needs some testing) Slight adjustment to the bass of the footstomp Play PourLiquidOnGround when emptying paint buckets and similar items. Fixed playing DrinkingFromTap or GetWaterFromTap when drinking from a river sometimes. Play the FallLight sound when tripping over a hedge/tree.  

IN-GAME MAP
 
Added a button to the in-game map to remove all annotations and forget map knowledge. Hide the mini-map when the inventory and loot windows are visible when using a controller (so the mini-map doesn't overlap). Display controller button prompts in the in-game map. Play the MapOpen and MapClose sounds when viewing the in-game map.
  Fixed the in-game map view not being centered on the player the first time it's displayed, when the mini-map is also used. Fixed moving map symbols with the mouse. The mini-map will be moved up a few pixels before hitting the Stable branch in order to not cover up the MP info.  

KNOX EVENT MAP
 
Export of current dev map - including some new locations and improvement of general landscape Pylons and radio masts added to map Various map fixes  

FORAGING / SEARCH SYSTEM
 
Added foraging tips system to investigate area window. Added some fixes to make the system work with controllers. Overlay radius now used instead of item radius for placing investigate arrow markers. Restructured trait/profession multipliers - now uses definitions. Added profession and trait category specialisations.
    - Big bonuses to spot categories for professions.
    - Small/medium bonuses to spot categories for traits. Added functions for modders to add trait/profession definitions. Added ammunition category to urban loot. Added medical category to urban loot. Added clothing items to urban loot. Added some more misc items/fruits/veggies. Added pinecones (only available from September to December). Added pinecones can be used as campfire fuel. Show spotting arrows immediately when the player notices something. Force-find now reveals an item nearby for the player instead of just moving it closer. New identifying items system - items can be identified if close enough or from afar with high skill. Zone display now reveals exact categories when reaching high enough level (identifyCategoryLevel). Set a minimum dark overlay value so the search radius is always visible even in bright daylight. Categories can be more or less common (or not available) during rain or snow. Items can be more or less common (or not available) at night or during the day. Items and categories can be more or less common (or not available) after it has rained. Items are moved to player inventory if a backpack goes over capacit - Yotherwise dropped onto the floor. Refactored, bugfixed and documented many functions. Fixed resetting itemTotal when fillZone is called. Fixed inverted light level values when indoors. Added foraging weather effect reduction for equipped umbrellas. Increased darkness/weather effect reduction cap. Resolved an issue with calculating foraging darkness/weather effect reduction. Fixed issue causing item markers to disappear when looking away. Added a chance to generate extra items on affinity sprites - more firewood in forests - more stones on roads. Tweaked and tidied bonus item generation and syncing. Added a flag to bonus icons for future management. Set affinity check to occur after all icons are loaded. Activate nearby zones inside radius. Allow multiple categories per affinity sprite. Show item ghost before spotting if in visible radius. Added bonus vision definitions for all professions. Place item marker arrows when inside item spotting radius if item is visible. Cloud darkness and fog level visibility increased on zone display. Added some variation to the zone display fog. Added zone display vision effectiveness tooltip. Updated search info tip. Skip checking icons outside loaded cell. Changed default itemDef value canBeOnTreeSquare to true. Added more search radius/trait/profession bonus info to Investigate Area tooltip. Added showing the poison skull on forage pins for mushrooms/berries if player has herbalist skill. More categories visible on Investigate Area window tooltip with high skill. Tidied up and documented ISSearchManager/ISBaseIcon. Tweaked forageSystem penalty calculations. Fixed icon arrows remaining on screen when sprinting. Added short sighted foraging debuff can be removed by wearing glasses/reading glasses. Added testFuncs to skill definitions. Fix rerolling zone icons while sprinting. Fix spotting icons while fast forwarding. Vision radius calculations refactored and tidied. Icon performance improvements. Fixed icons recreating with incorrect conditions. Reduced and capped stuttering caused by cell checks. Fixed overlay toggling in vehicles. Improved search radius transitions when toggling mode. Improved forage zone activation, icon moving, bonus icon generation. Fixed wild crop seed spawns. Fixed using the wrong broccoli type for foraging. Fixed issues in force find tracker. Skip sprite affinity checks on squares with trees or attached data. Fixed missing spaces in search window tooltips. Fixed missing item texture on pins for floor items. Fixed moved objects spawning bonus items. Removed performance impact for ISSearchManager, ISZoneDisplay, ISSearchWindow when UI not visible. Removed seasonal variances from medicinal plants Added WildPlants category for seasonal wild foods Updated ISSearchManager table resets to use table.wipe Updated radius and modifiers in ISZoneDisplay vision tooltip Tidied up some debug stuff in ISZoneDisplay Added foraging profession and trait specialisations for WildPlants  
Balance:
Increased maximum possible spotting range further for specialised characters. Reduced base XP rewards for foraging. Tweaked icon density in zones. Insects, mushrooms, herbs are now much more common at night. Medicinal herbs are much easier to see. Increased medicinal herb yields. Herbs and mushrooms are more common in the rain and after it has rained. Added disabling search mode if a zombie is very close (about 1 square away). Reduced headwear vision penalties, added penalties for more types (not hats, never hats). Increased chance of items to be on affinity sprites (stones on stones, etc). Allow affinity icons to be moved again if they were not noticed before. Malus for item size adjusted to a curve to be less punishing. Rebalanced many item sizes with overrides for spotting (fruit trees, crops, etc). Reduced berries poison level by a lot - not likely to be fatal. Reduced mushroom toxicity range - still very risky to eat unidentified. Added additional food sickness penalty for consuming poison berries and mushrooms. Added a new increased minimum vision radius for well-lit squares. Increased variance of medicinal herb yields. Weather penalty calculation tweaked for snow cover. Weather penalty maximum increased. Overlay radius tweaked to use forageSystem min/max size values. Stones more likely to be found in cracks in the road + rates increased on roads. Removed skill requirements for some item categories. Tweaked sprite affinity and bonus icon chances. Tweaked sprite affinity/bonus icon chances. Foraged drainable items roll for a remaining amount. Increased zone icon density. Additional variation for zone density. Added more sprite affinities to trash, junk icons, and insects. Reduced chance of finding rotten wild foods. Increased chance of fresh wild foods with high skill. Profession and trait vision modifiers also affect the overlay maximum vision radius. Increased vision cap for extremely skilled and specialised characters. Decreased vision cap for non specialised characters. Ensure vision radius bonus always applies when aiming or sneaking. Rebalanced profession and trait darkness effect modifiers. Check darkness cap before placing item marker arrows. Removed override item size for some small items. Added more sprite affinities to categories. Dead animals much more likely to be stale or rotten. Aiming takes priority over crouching bonus in forageSystem. Bonus vision effects apply to maximum radius. Chance to find logs reduced. Rebalanced vision radius/view distance for spotting. Increased maximum hunger bonus for food items. Tweaked vision penalties for clothing. Increased base spotting speed and bonus spotting speed when aiming/sneaking. Reduced snow cover and cloud penalty. Umbrella rain penalty reduction increased and only applies to rain. Minor zone item count balance tweak. Added more sprite affinities for stones. Adjusted profession vision bonuses. Category chances tweaked to accommodate WildPlants. Debug: Added a new IsoMarker type for debugging icon vision radius. Added icon vision radius + category info debug options. Added debug option: "Show Icons Locations".
   Splitscreen fixes:
Fixed split screen icon syncing. Fixed picking up forage icons with controller in split screen. Moved forage icon pickup option to the top of right click context menu. Increased range of back button wheel pickup option. Back button wheel forage options now use item textures. Added discard item option to back button wheel. Tidied up changes for split screen icon syncing. Fixed syncing of arrows/markers when an item is moved or removed. Fixed removal of icons noticed by co-op player. Added zone display split screen support. Sync forage item poison values in splitscreen co-op. Fixed a bug when co-op player simultaneously picks up items in ISForageAction  

MODDING
 
Added ISCarMechanicsOverlay.PartList[].vehicles tables to any parts that don't have them. VehiclePart.setInventoryItem() no longer calls setModelVisible(true|false) for all models, because this interferes with some mods that choose different models based on which item is installed for a part. Instead, a new method VehiclePart.setAllModelsVisible(true|false) was added that is called from these Lua functions:
                Vehicles.Init.XXX
                Vehicles.InstallComplete.XXX
                Vehicles.UninstallComplete.XXX
    Mods that define "init", "install.complete" and/or "uninstall.complete" Lua functions can now choose to hide or show whichever models they want.
    Additionally, VehiclePart.repair() now calls the part's "init" Lua function (if it is defined) when creating a missing item.
    This allows the "init" function to hide or show models.
  The game will look for mod texture-pack files named Pack2x.floor.pack (correct) and then Pack.floor2x.pack (incorrect) if the first file doesn't exist. Added IsoGameCharacter.XP.setPerkBoost(Perk perk, int level). This is for mods that want to change an existing player's XP multiplier for a skill. Added IsHidden parameter for recipes and evolved recipes
    - If true, this hides the recipe on the crafting menu
    - Hidden recipes are still able to be crafted via the right click menu
    - Evolved recipes are hidden unless a result item exists
         - This allows adding additional ingredients via the crafting menu  

CONTROLLER
Pressing and holding the left analogue stick displays a radial menu that allows toggling crouching, sitting on the ground, and auto-walking. A quick press of the left joystick button toggles crouch, the same as before. Pressing the controller A button when a text entry has the focus displays the on-screen keyboard.
    - Left shoulder button changes focus between the text entry and keyboard.
    - D-pad navigates in the text entry. Foraging / Search mode improved to work with controllers.  

FIXES
Fixed a Lua error when trying to spawn a new character in game when the AllClothesUnlocked sandbox option or Character.CreateAllOutfits debug option is enabled. Fixed the "Aim Outline" option default being "None" instead of "Ranged Weapons". Fixed the volume controls not working in multiplayer. Fixed Home VHS tapes switching from blank to not-blank after reloading sometimes. Fixed some unique Home VHS tapes never being spawned. Now CDs and VHS tapes are randomized in ItemPickerJava. Fixed translation files from required mods having priority over the mod that required it. If mod B requires mod A, then mod B's translation files will be loaded first so they override the same translation in mod A, if present. Fixed sitting zombies facing random angles in multiplayer. Fixed an IllegalArgumentException in IsoChunk.SafeRead() when reading an empty map_X_Y.bin file. Fixed the mini-map displaying the game's map data in cells that have been overridden by mods. Fixed some curved-road zones. Fixed traffic jams on curved roads by implementing "traffjam / ParkingStall" and "rtrafficjam / ParkingStall" for polyline zones Fixed exercises not starting when a two-handed weapon attached to the back is equipped in both hands. Fixed a thread-synchronization bug with ZomboidFileSystem.getString() accessing RelativeMap. This led to walls not being cutaway due to failing to load the CircleStencil Shader. Fixed Character.Debug.PlaySoundWhenInvisible default being true when it should be false. Fixed a few cases where sounds from invisible players could be heard in multiplayer. Fixed bug in world dictionary when an item similarly named to a base item but with different module would be removed. This was due to scriptmanager.getModule defaulting to 'base' when the module was not found. Fixed scriptmanager.getModule testing for equals("Base") or startsWith("Base.") instead of startsWith("Base"). This would otherwise result in the same error happening still if one would name their module for example "BaseBuilding". Fixed item loading when trying to create an item with the same name in a different module. When a mod adds "MyMod.Apple" this a new item that exists alongside "Base.Apple", when MyMod is removed the "MyMod.Apple" bytes in the saves should be skipped. However due to ItemFactory.CreateItem calling the same scriptmanager functions that default to "Base" when no module found, it would try and instance "Base.Apple". Fixed bug in WorldDictionary ItemInfo where print debug would not print all lines. Fixed GameLoadingState doing GameClient stuff in single player. Fixed any exception that occurs when the "failed to create vehicles database" message is displayed not being printed. Fixed spawned fish in shops and stories unable to be filleted. Fixed getting extra materials when multiple players scrap an object. Fixed being unable to construct objects or floors through an open window. Fixed being unable to disassemble closed doors facing S and E. Fixed "take pills" anim playing only once when the action is queued. Fixed 'take pills' action being possible while running (it has no animation). Fixed the resize behavior of the "Select Spawn Location" ui. Fixed disallowed scrolling of map description in the "Select Spawn Location" ui using a controller. Fixed some forest and vegetation zones near curved streets. Fixed "ReceiveRemoveCorpse: incorrect square" messages on the client due to corpse rotting. These messages weren't errors. Fixed incorrect looping in RandomizedZoneStoryBase.cleanAreaForStory(). Fixed multithreading issues on the server with the vehicles database.  Fixed radial menu for light sources only available for secondary item slot Fixed double-clicking a watch runs an action but doesn't equip it. Fixed adhesive bandages weighing too much. Fixed mechanics books not being in SkillBook category. Fixed missing Fishing.OnCreateFish function on server. Fixed default name of a profession preset not being the name of the profession (has a number if there is already a preset with that name) Fixed bowl of beans recipe not scaling to source can's hunger reduction. Fixed two-tile table stories possibly spawning on two different tables, possibly with a wall in between. Fixed trailers being detached on the client but attached on the server. Fixed explosive traps not damaging zombies in singleplayer. Fixed server soft-reset throwing errors. Fixed "bare hands" checks which used translated item names. Fixed lightbulbs breaking even if unpowered. Fixed inability to plumb sinks in existing buildings if the water is still on. Fixed zombies densities not affecting loot spawn in MP. This caused Sledgehammers and other items to be a lot rarer in MP than in SP. Fixed not being able to climb over tall fences when a vehicle is nearby. Fixed being able to get XP from VHS tapes again after relog. Fixed TVs showing test screen (only happens 14 days after apocalypse and onward). Fixed one TV screen not showing in the screen 'animation'. Fixed the first channel not being properly loaded when radio loads its savefile. Fixed, via disabling, zomboid radio debugger in mp client that was throwing errors due to stuff not being present on client Fixed bug that caused the temperature panel to display all values as zero. (the call to PZMath.clamp in the panels would randomly pick the int or float overload between diff game boots). Also added Thermoregulator node debugger panel. Fixed WAV sounds flickering between speakers when near the player's location. Fixed some problems with clothing losing condition due to holes. Fixed the client savefile not being deleted when the server savefile is soft-reset or recreated. Fixed playing DrinkingFromTap or GetWaterFromTap when drinking from a river sometimes. Fixed trap synchronization issues in multiplayer (including multiple explosion sounds). Fixed noise-trap sound continuing after the trap is picked up. Fixed farm-plant names not being translated in multiplayer. Fixed missing translation for "Spent Rounds" in firearm tooltips. Fixed Disassemble tooltips for movables showing the incorrect object name (and no icon) Fixed unlimited maximum title and text entry for journals, notebooks, paper Fixed impossible disassembly of tall fences south and west of player Fixed missing radioInteraction codes for perks Fixed bug in RadialProgressBar with texture offsets Fixed bug in ISSafetyUI where second part of the radial cooldown would display incorrectly. Fixed alarms being enabled in buildings the player spawns in (in MP). Fixed NullPointerException in DeadPlayerPacket.set(). Fixed ability to have more than three saved splitscreen players in multiplayer. Fixed issues managing saved splitscreen players in multiplayer. Fixed SafeHouseRemovalTime greater than 596 removing safehouses. Fixed player facing direction never getting set on the server. Fixed Survival Guide error showing the guide when isShowFirstTimeSneakTutorial() is true. Fixed the "Learned Recipe" text above the player's head when watching a VHS not being translated. Fixed EvolvedRecipe.java using DecimalFormat (which uses the default locale) and instead use NumberFormat.getInstance(Locale.US) to try and fix rare crafting exceptions. Fixed getting Fitness XP without exercising when starting exercises while aiming. Fixed being able to dismantle carpentry window frames and door frames before removing the window or door. Fixed Z location check in RecipeManager isNearItem Fixed playing sound from the waist of zombies that are on the ground and instead play from their head. Fixed incorrect plant names (and "Mystery Plant") being displayed in the farming-info window. Fixed not being able to dismantle Metal Floor. Fixed, via removal, leftover Multi-core option that had no effect anymore. Fixed double-jump animation climbing over fences when holding a two-handed weapon. This mostly occured on Linux distributions. Fixed Pacifist trait not reducing XP gains with LongBlade weapons. Fixed Soup bowls, Stew bowls and Pie Slices inheriting original hunger values. Fixed not being able to scroll the outfit panel with the mouse wheel in the character-creation ui (with all outfits enabled). Fixed setStopOnWalk/setStopOnRun recipe function typos. Fixed uncooked Omelette being safe to consume. Fixed an ISZoneDisplay error when debug teleporting in single player. Fixed placing 3D items skipping a movement step if the player begins at the destination. Fixed being unable to pack/unpack frozen egg cartons. Fixed evolved recipes with matching item names not displaying correctly in ISCraftingUI. Fixed possible to add uncooked ingredients when cooking is required via ISCraftingUI. Fixed being unable to use "vegetable sacks" after they are emptied. Fixed temperature and frozen status of items used in recipes not being maintained. Fixed being unable to add burnt ingredients to recipes requiring cooked items. Fixed Paperbag icon. Fixed sports car front trailer attachment. Fixed lack of check for ReplaceOnCooked when drainables are cooked. Fixed duplicate entries in newBags, clothing_bags, newitems scripts. Fixed sackProduce items not being in items_food script. Fixed new tongs item not being called kitchen tongs (due to metalworking tongs existing). Fixed characters queueing the "Exit Car" action and therefore being able to exit a car when they should not be able to. Fixed characters being able to open/close vehicle doors while vehicle is in motion. Fixes to tutorial to improve SteamDeck experience Fixed collision for rain tanks, roof fences, large green lockers, Acorn plaza signs . Fixed not being able to jump turnstiles in both directions. Fixed being unable to rest on Red Theatre Chair. Fixed transparent stockings making the player's legs transparent. Fixed Lua error in MapSpawnSelect when the filename entry is hidden. Fixed pyramid.zip files not being allowed in Steam Workshop uploads. Fixed 3D models being clipped in savefile thumbnails when the minimap is displayed. Fixed duplicate ZombiesZoneDefinition.StreetPoor. Fixed the music volume setting being implied improperly. Fixed the sound of zombies eating continuing to play while exiting to the main menu.
 
 

One question, can you add white mushrooms/common mushrooms/champignons whatever you wanna call them in stores and fridges? We've got lots of new foods, and exotic ones like meat dumplings, sushi etc. but there are no champignons, It'd be nice to have acces to non poisonous mushrooms without foraging for them in the early game.

Also about power pylons please give them a buzzing noise, I don't think it would matter how loud they are, power pylons are in rural/forest areas so they would only attract closer-ish zombies and make mini hordes under it, would be a cool sight in the fields/open grounds, also it's a sign that society as we know it is still somewhat alive, till it isn't a month later when power goes off and world gets owergrown. The game Into the dead 2 has some levels where you've got objectives to run under power pylons which gives you these end of the world creepy vibes as the world is still somewhat alive with reanimated corpses shambling throughout the forest trying to get you and through the game lore telling you that this whole "end times"  thing isn't only happening in the US but globaly.

First off, our apologies for the delay to the 41.66 patch. There’s a fair amount of new checks and balances being added under the PZ hood, and a few of them have been throwing up errors and unwarranted user kicks.
 
There’s been a lot of testing, and back-and-forth between coders and QA folk, but it feels like the patch is increasingly settled now.
We are planning a wider internal user test tonight, the results of which will direct us either to a release, or further into next week if anything unexpected crops up.
 
Here’s a link to the latest changelist for those interested.

BUILD 42 CRAFTING UPDATE
The crafting update team have been working hard on designing the huge tech tree of crafting that will go into B42. As such, we thought we’d share a few more details on the direction it’s heading in.
 
If you want to hear about some of the more technical aspects of where we will be taking Build 42 then please check out the blog from two weeks ago.
 
Before we dip in, however, please also be reminded that B42 is our next ‘major’ build – and that doesn’t mean that there won’t be more incremental B41 patches coming in from our MP coders in particular. Likewise, in these patches we will clearly be balancing and polishing the existing game.
 
CRAFTING GOAL
Our goal with crafting in B42 is to be able to fill out the tech tree to such an extent that a group of players could, in theory, spawn on a map with nothing but wilderness and (with a lot of perseverance and time) build up to a late medieval community without looting a single building.
This will involve multiple tiers of crafting stations for numerous crafting disciplines, and an interwoven web of recipes required to progress to higher tech stations and items that require the use of multiple crafting professions.
 
If you’ve played any of the primitive tech, hardcore Minecraft modpacks that revolve around slowly climbing a tech tree of interdependent recipes then you’ll know what to expect – although obviously with our trademark PZ realism angle.
 
Everything detailed here is WIP, and could change, but the long and short of it is that each profession will have workstations that are required to make item/subparts. These stations can then be upgraded to gain access to more and/or better items.
 
The professions we are planning are also dependent on each other. For example, to make a piece of leather armour:
 
The hide needs to be obtained by a butcher or hunter The leatherworker refines the hide, and crafts the armour piece The blacksmith provides armour scales to be sown into the armour (and possible a needle) The tailor provides cloth inner linings for the armour piece, and thread for the leatherworker to sow with. Finally the workstations required to do these crafts are built by a carpenter/tinkerer.
On top of this lies the fact that this is a game set in the modern age. So, on top of that tech tree, we will sprinkle all the modern items that can be used to enhance on that late medieval tech, provide shortcuts or improvements, and provide for a mixture of modern and more primitive tech together.
 
Realistically, in practice, a lot of the early ‘teching up’ may be skipped if players have access to workstations or materials they have looted, but the option to go fully from scratch will be there for those who want to. Crafted materials will be there to keep things spinning once old equipment has started to rust and break, or to those who’ve come to a long-lived server where that sort of loot is no longer spawning or available.
 
On top of this, we will start to add diminishing returns on a lot of the technology found in the world. Generators will only repair so many times, their maximum condition slowly creeping down, and once we have alternatives available (unlikely in b42), we can look at how gasoline might start to go bad after many years.
 
The mechanics will slowly play a game of attrition with the loot on the map over time, but instead of this being a problem, the new crafting options will allow long-term server players to embrace the fall and start looking to more primitive solutions to their ongoing survival.
Our intention here is to allow you to play through the full fall of society, as seen in various long-running comics and TV shows. Clearly the different settings It’ll be tricky to pull off, but we are very excited about putting it into action.
 
We’ve had a ‘Many Years Later’ map sitting in Xeonyx’s ‘cool challenge map for a rainy day’ library that we’ll be using for testing once the crafting update leaves the design phase and starts being integrated too. It will likely be available as a playable Challenge map when the time comes.
 

OMG BACKTRACK
Okay, so a diversion from what we said originally.
 
While designing the new crafting update it became frustratingly clear that while trying to create a comprehensive crafting tree with all the options a low tech community would have open to them… there’s one thing that kept coming up.
Animals are used a fkin lot.
 
By pushing animals into (or beyond) the B43 NPC update, we were basically removing all animal produce from any crafting design. To omit them and still go ahead with the work would be setting it off on creaky foundations. Leather alone is used so much, it’d be a huge mistake not to have it feature in the overhaul’s DNA.
 
So we’ve flip flopped on this: that’s just how it goes sometimes.
 
We still cannot release our NPC code with the B42 update (for the reasons discussed in our 2022 and Beyond blogpost) however its clear that we’ll need to get animal husbandry and elements of hunting in there in some form for our crafting update to have its full potential realized.
 
So we’ve hit upon a compromise, we’ll have hunting and animal husbandry in B42. However, we’ll be doing some makeshift AI and behaviours that’ll likely not have the same capabilities that will be possible with the NPC behaviour code.
 
Our plan is to release with a more basic behaviour set (which, lets be honest, won’t hurt the realism of a cow’s portrayal much) and to replace said behaviours with the full NPC build in B43.
 
Here are some in-game bovine entities, coded by RJ and modelled by Martin, from one of our early design tests.
 

 
Hunting mechanics may also be cut down severely from what we ultimately envisioned, we’re viewing this primarily as a ‘minimum viable product’ to be able to introduce a supply of the crafting materials required for our tech tree and not to be considered our final promised system.
 
This will result in some work that’s wasted between the two builds, however its the only way we can see forward without designing a tech tree that’s much more limited and doesn’t reflect our game’s realistic angle players have grown to love.
 
Needless to say though, animals will likely be pretty dumb even by animal standards. They just need to be in there moving about in some fashion and respond somewhat appropriately, though we’ll do as much as we can without spending too much time on work that’ll ultimately have to be redone.
 

POST-APOC PROFESSIONS
So you’re a burger flipper, yeah? There aren’t too many open Spiffo restaurants around any more.
We’ll be redesigning the professions systems to have ‘expiry dates’ and ‘introduction dates’ to accommodate for servers that may progress years beyond a single lifetime since the apocalypse occurred.
 
If someone is born 10 years after society fell, they aren’t going to be categorized by pre-apocalypse professions, it ceases to make sense any more.
 
We’ll be introducing many new professions that are specific to more low tech societies that will unlock as the apocalypse progresses and those professions become more likely to be a character’s background. We’ll also be locking off pre-apocalypse professions based on the likely age of someone holding that profession at the point of the apocalypse.
 
Sandbox solo players will be able to crank up the years since the apocalypse to take advantage of these themselves from game start, if they should desire.
 
There will be crossover (a butcher, carpenter or a farmer fit into both) but old world concepts will cease to make sense going into the future, where a leatherworker or blacksmith profession will come back into fashion. Likewise, instead of being a fireman or veteran: you’re a scavenger or some form of ‘safe zone militia’.
 
Current planned professions related to the crafting overhaul include butchers, leatherworkers, herbalists, brewers, stoneworkers, potters, carpenters, tinkerers, blacksmiths, tailors, farmers, fishers and hunters.
AFFINITIES
To encourage team work and to avoid players getting through stuff too quickly (though, this will clearly be alterable in SP sandbox settings so as not to exclude solo players from playing with the new crafting) we will be introducing affinities. This may be in addition to, or replace, the current skill XP bonuses offered by professions and traits.
 
A profession or trait may grant affinity with various other skills tangentially related to the profession chosen. There may be an option to choose one more additional affinities within character creation.
 
Affinities represent all the general knowledge and skills related to a profession, or just a general cognitive aptitude, that make that character generally better at learning tangentially related skills and crafts.
 
It will only apply to crafting related skills (anyone can get better at using an axe, sneaking or fitness level), however learning something that’s not the character’s affinity (‘what they are naturally, or due to lots of experience, better at learning) will suffer a severe XP gain debuff.
 
It will just be ‘not the sort of thing they are good at’, and while they can get better over time and reach some functional level of usefulness it’ll be a long, long haul they are unlikely to master before they are eaten by a zombie. As such they’d be best off focusing on what they are, themselves, good at.
 
This will mean that, while a player may be able to perform several jobs within a community, no one person will be able to skill up to be 10 at everything. There will be skills they already start at a decent level on, and others they will be able to skill up relatively quickly.
 
There’ll be others that are just not in their wheelhouse, and are best left to someone else. This will encourage diversification within a community, and discourage the ‘meta’ pushing players toward a small subset of professions.
 
It also reduces the likelihood (on default settings, at least) that a small community will be able to produce everything required to thrive. This will encourage trade between communities, and if you’re able to offer something others can’t, it may keep you safe from any more hostile presences on the map.
WHEN?
All of the above, apart from early work on our basic animals, remains in the design phase. Build 42 is not imminent, and we expect there to be many patches to B41 between then and now.
 
We are going into detail a) to redress our earlier accidental misdirection on animals, and b) to hear the thoughts of the community on where we’re going.
 
There’s also many (many) other things going on elsewhere in the game – not least some new hires!
FRESH BLOOD
TIS would like to formerly welcome General Arcade’s Denis Trofiman to the PZ coding team, who will be looking at the integration of various cool middleware packages into the Knox Event codebase. Likewise our beloved Yana (aka Spiffo on the forums) is now a full-time QA alongside Sasha.
 
We have also made another recruitment grab from the community, and are absolutely delighted to have Aiteron on-board as a full-time coder on the game.
 
Aiteron, who you might know for his excellent work as co-dev on the Autotsar Yacht Club mod, and his own creations of lockpicking, better towing and helicopter mod, will generally be helping overhaul some of our existing (and some quite threadbare) features. The first of which being…fishing.
 
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS A WIP VIDEO. BETTER CHARACTER ANIMATIONS, WHICH WILL BE A VITAL PART OF IT, ARE NOT CURRENTLY INTEGRATED. 
 

Current controls:
 
Choose a place to fish by aiming (Mouse right button) and preparing to cast the hook and float. Attack button (Mouse left button) has you cast out. Holding RMB puts you in control of the fishing rod and pulls/releases the line. Aim control also impacts on left/right position of the rod. (Version that doesn’t require a RMB hold also en-route for accessibility) Within all this you simultaneously lead the float towards the player to catch the fish.  
This is all WIP and will need playtesting and polish (we really want a visible, correctly-sized, fish to be shown when caught too) but we wanted to show you the exciting fruits of Aiteron’s efforts.
 
This is only the first of the many different PZ systems we want to set him loose on!
OTHER ITEMS OF NOTE
 
Mappers and modders, please be aware that the latest tilesets containing all the content used in the construction of Louisville have now been released for community use. The latest versions of TileZed and WorldEd will be released simultaneous to the 41.66 patch. Whoever it is doing the Simpsons/PZ memes on the PZ Reddit. You are an absolute legend. Never stop. Please  
This week’s stick-up from DdBrey. A changelist of all our pre-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Vanilla guns have always been treated as a bit of a joke in the PZ community, I would argue realistically that guns would be best weapon in the 'zombie apocalypse' although that does heavily depend on towards the type of zombie disease and the fact that you can only make a game so realistic to the point where it's not fun. There are also many things that we do with guns today that I would like to point out on this, however they are vastly different or didn't even exist in 1993.
 
Before I make this suggestion I'd like to say that these are purely things that I can point out from a realistic/lore point of view I have no idea on how balancing these ingame from a developer point of view will run so please do feel free build on any suggestions I say.
 
Big changes:
 
Hearing protection:
 
Today whenever you handle a gun you will usually have the correct PPE (Eye protection and Ear protection) For now I will focus on the hearing protection. 
 
Around 30 years ago, ear protection was widely used on ranges as shooting any gun in a practical cartridge isn't good on your ears, the main threat isn't being deaf. It's tinnitus. Tinnitus is very common around old veterans as most of them wouldn't wear it during combat in order to communicate with eachother, it is very easy to lose hearing from a firing a gun without the correct protection. I would also like to point out that hearing loss from guns is both short term and long term, firing a couple .308 on a regular basis can ruin your hearing the same way emptying an entire magazine of .44 magnum in a few seconds can. Tinnitus is also not the same as being deaf.
 
Hearing protection ingame:
 
-Ear plugs: These are quick and easy way of covering your ears, you can find them in boxes of 100 and are normally disposable (howeveryou can find reusable ones that have to be cleaned). Wearing these would make the player lose the 'Keen hearing' trait which would cause them have to watch their back and listen for zombies instead of relying on seeing them behind their character. These would also fall out easily if you tried running over a fence and tripped over. Wearing them over a long time (Hours) would cause discomfort or ear infections.
 
-Normal ear protection: These aren't so much different from ear plugs except that they don't fall off you when you trip over a fence or melle fighting. Wearing them over a long time (Days) would cause discomfort or ear infections.
 
-Electronic ear protection: Electronic ear protection basically work like noise cancelling headphones except they have a microphone that plays low dB sounds but blocks out high dB sounds. Today's electronic ear protection is very good quality, I'd argue that it even amplifies sound so that you can hear even more than your normal ears and have amazing long battery life (Up to 600 hours). However the year is 1993 and it isn't as advanced as today. Wearing these would let you keep the keen hearing trait. They require batteries and would have a battery life for a day before the batteries need replacing. You would also have to repair these with the electronic skill if they are damaged in fighting. They don't fall off when you trip over a fence or melle fighting. Wearing them over a long time (Days) would cause discomfort or ear infections.
 
-It would also be helpful (but not necessary) to point this out to new players as a tip that Spiffo would give you when entering the game's tutorial.
 
Hearing loss:
 
-If the character has the 'Deaf' Trait then none of this applies to them except minor pain.
 
-When firing a cartridges like 9x19mm, 45 ACP, .38 SPL and .223, there would be a slight ringing sound combined with the loss of keen hearing however you would still be able to slightly hear things around you. If you continued to fire these repeatedly all sound would be muffled, slight rining and loss of keen hearing and minor pain.
 
-Firing cartridges like .44 Magnum, .308 and 12G would instantly make the sound of muffled (you wouldn't even hear the first shot) and would cause ringing and loss of keen hearing and -minor pain.
 
-Over time if the character keeps doing this (maybe over a couple weeks) they will gain the trait 'Tinnitus' in the character info and lose keen hearing. There should be multiple hints in the health menu showing 'Ringing ears, ear pain'. When right clicking them it should prompt for you to put on ear protection.
 
All of these can be altered in the sandbox/server options.
 
 
Shot placement:
 
Selecting where you want to shoot:
 
Instead of the entire target being highlighted when aiming a gun, specific parts of the body can be highlighted with the press of a button.
 
The head:
 
-A skilled shooter on a flat range can easily make a hole in the face of a target, the problem is that it's the face of the target and not the brain. Moving targets are a lot harder to get on the head bit still possible. All of this depends on the aiming skill of the character. Also has a chance to graze the the head.
 
Centre mass:
 
-Also known as the torso this would be the easist target to hit and is where most people learned to shoot over the centries, shooting there when the highlight isn't fully green can result in the player being shot in the arm. Against players it's very important as they can be a bigger threat than zombies. I don't know myself if zombies can be killed without destroying the head ingame (I've tried hitting a zombies legs on the group for a few seconds and it shrugged it off like it was nothing) however I will focus on this in my next suggestion. All of this depends on the aiming skill of the character. Also has a chance to graze the the torso.
 
Legs:
 
-Getting shot in the limbs is no joke, a lot of blood flows through them and will start to spurt out heavily (although it shouldn't happen all the time). Shooting the legs should be harder than hitting head. However if shot in the leg there should have a small chance of you walking like you have a broken/fractured leg. (I would like to mention using a tourniquet would be the solution to this but that would be too realistic and unfun). If you have the trait 'Adrenaline' this doesn't apply. As for zombies, shooting them twice successfully in the legs could turn them into crawlers. Also has a chance to graze the the legs.
 
All of these can be altered in the sandbox/server options.
 
Reaction to gunshot:
 
In this suggestion I'd like to suggest how zombies react to gunshots. IIRC the lore is based around the Romero/WWZ zombies I wouldn't really consider them to be 'infected' zombies as they posses many attributes that defy biology however it is a subjective opinion. Seeing as the game is 'Project Zomboid' I'd like to build upon the 'infected' type of zombie that the player could select in the difficulty or create their own in the sandbox.
 
These zombies are based upon a realistic biological disease like the 28 Days/Weeks later rage virus or the runners the Last of us cordyceps (pls give TLoU crossover). The main aim of this is to make them the terrifying things they are in movies/games; They run like humans, attack like humans but also react to pain like humans. This includes not having to destroy the brain for them to die.
 
Staggering, knockdown, delayed knockdown and bleed out: 
 
Stagger:
 
-Zombies that are shot in the chest by a handgun in the gun's effective range can be slowed down (maybe having an animation showing that it is in pain, staggering or maybe even cowering back a bit) before going back to attacking.
 
-Players wearing armour on the chest will not be effected by handgun rounds but has the chance get 'Internal bleeding' leaving the player in moderate pain for a while until it heals.
 
Knockdown:
 
-When a zombie is shot in the chest by a shotgun or rifle they will either instantly fall until the ground and get back up to attack, or it they will continue to run at the player before tripping over and getting up to continue their attack (this is to mimmick the delayed knockdown of being shot if anyone here has hunted any large game even hitting the right spot, it will run away before dying shortly later). If the zombie is running and is shot in the leg (Very hard to do) it will always instantly trip over and fall.
 
-Players wearing armour on the chest will not be effected by handgun rounds but has the chance get 'Internal bleeding'
 
Bleed out:
 
-When a zombie is shot anywhere  in the limbs they will leave a trail of blood where after hours or days they would eventually fall to the ground and die if they aren't killed by the player. This could be a good way to track the horde as it will leave a blood trail which leads to a horde or a single dead body.
 
-If the zombie is shot enough times (or has a small chance to be shot once). They will trip over and flail their limbs around as they have a catastrohpic bleed, if the player walks over them for a while the zombie on the ground will attack them and stagger them like crawlers can, however if they are not put down then they will eventually bleed and die a few moments later.
 
All of these can be altered in the sandbox/server options.
 
Crawling and prone:
 
Prone shooting accuracy increase:
 
-When going into prone, rifles will increase accuracy and follow up shots are easier to take. If aiming is high enough then this will apply to handguns as well. If the player's fitness is low and they try running into prone posistion they have a chance to trip over. Going into prone makes you're highlight harder to hit however makes you more vulnerable to getting shot in the head if you do get hit.
 
This can be altered in the sandbox/server options.
 
Crawling:
 
-Crawling allows for players to move while using folliage to hide themselves depending on sneaking skill (easier to hide in long grass when erosion hits). Fitness determines how fast you can get up and down, spamming crawling and getting up will cause exhaustion, crawling with a lot of weight causes back pain. You can crawl under cars and dumpsters as well to escape from the horder as well as shoot any zombies that try to crawl under to get you.
 
 
Small changes:
 
Slings and Lanyards:
 
-When a sling is connected to your longgun you will not drop it when fighting or tripping over a fence
 
-When a lanyard is connected if you trip over a fence or drop it in a fight it will stay connected and drag along the floor where you can pick it back up.
 
Gun melle:
 
Bayonets:
 
-When longguns have a bayonet attatched a button press can turn it into a a spear where you can do a bayonet charge or use it as a conventional spear.
 
Gun bashing/pistol whipping:
 
-A press of a button can turn the gun into a club. Instead of shooting the character will hit the zombie on the head with the gun and will can use it to destroy the head if they are standing on top of the zombie.
 
 
Speed reload:
 
-Double tapping 'R' will cause the player to reload much faster but will drop the magazine which retains all the rounds on the ground which can be collected later.
 
Gun cleaning:
 
-Cleaning guns after shooting (not to be confused with cleaning off blood) is important. Although keeping guns clean is largely exagerated especially in military terms. It is good to clean guns with regards to long term wear. Having a dirty gun after shooting doesn't really affect reliability unless the ammo is bad. Cleaning things like Gun patches, oil, ram rods and any type of cloth can be used to clean them.
 
Nitpicks:
These nitpicks are things that I wouldn't prioritise in terms of gameplay but to make them known if the devs wanted to add these small details to the game.
 
-Guns having a manual safety that has to be turned off next to their firemode, this might look like a no brainer. But a person who has never picked up a gun before might not even know a safety exists (Especially as today most pistols don't have manual safeties).
 
-If character is wearing electronic ear protection and is standing over corpses that have flies over them, the flies' wings will override the sound of the game.
 
-When firing guns you can pick up the casings and reload them with the right tools and materials found in gunstores (this is not a skill you can learn easily back in 1993 in the apocalypse) it has to be an occupation or trait. Smokeless powder (Gunpowder) is also very different when reloading and can be catastrohpic if done incorrectly.
 
-Right now all guns are literally fully automatic. Semi automatic guns (Single fire) shouldn't have a reduced fire rate but have one click of the mouse means one pull of the trigger. If the player feels like spam clicking their M14 it will shoot fast but will not expect to hit anything.
 
-Flash suppressors (not sound suppressors) are used in most rifles today however old hunting rifles in 1993 they were not standard. The M16 and M14 have flash suppressors which do not totally remove the flash at night, but stop the shooter from being blinded. A .308 like the MSR788's muzzle flash would blind the player if shot at night.
 
-Guns like all of the pistols, M14 and M16 will have their bolt/slide locked back when they are empty or if the player pulls it back on an empty magazine. It is more easily shown on pistols. Press X releases the slide/bolt forward. Once forward the player call pull the trigger once which cannot be heard again unless it is the M9.

-Semi Automatic guns that have their slide/bolt locked to the rear will not be able to pull the trigger.
 
-If the trigger is pulled on any gun that goes 'click' once it cannot be pulled again unless it is racked manually. This doesn't apply to the revolvers or M9.
 
-Stripper clips for the M16 can be used to quickly load magazines.
 
-Speed loaders can quickly be used to reload revolvers.
 
-.223 can be used in an M16 but 5.56 cannot be used in an MSR700 without it causing dangerous wear to the gun and possibly to the shooter.
 
-Mounting any optical sight has to be zeroed and taking it on and off again has to be rezeroed, this would be harder to impliment and only really affects shooting at 100m. Most people have a different zero to other people, handing someone a rifle used for precision that is zeroed to you might have a different zero for them making them miss their shots.
 
-Laser sights are terrible for leading targets in the open as you wouldn't see where the laser is if you didn't aim fully at the target.
 
-Holding the longgun the current way causes a lot of arm fatigue if held like that for a long time. When pointed downwards with it resting on the body it spreads the weight across the body the sling

Conclusion:
 
I would like to fully address this thread as inspiration to developers to change how guns as well as how zombies could work in future builds, I don't expect every the exact thing I suggested to be implemented but there is always room for innovation.
 
You might not agree with everything I have suggested on this thread but I am free to hear all criticism and any other ideas that could also be suggested.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

So we've had the ability to place items for quite some time and that's just great, but let's talk about the potential of being able to turn on the flashilghts while they're placed on something. So flashlight, an item that is not of much use unless you loot during the night or until after the power shuts off since you don't want to bring a generator to every house just to be able to safely navigate inside, but even after the power shuts off, though useful it limits you to only 1-handed weapons, and it only provides light in the direction that you're looking at, but imagine how great would it be if you could go inside a house, place a flashilght in a corner, turn it on and shower the whole room with light, and now you can hold weapons with both hands like axes, crowabars etc. and even see behind you with your "hearing" which makes looting safer, 2x safer with keen hearing. Just in case I'll mention how freaking useful this could be for the illiterate characters.


In this picture it's been 4 months since the power went out, and since I don't want to bring my generator wherever I go, I have my trusty flashlight with me.



Now imagine if you didn't have to hold this flashlight, and instead place it on the counter behind you , then turn it on and get the same effect, but now you've got 1+ hand to use and you can see behind yourself.



With the flashlight radius as it is you could light up most of the houses and apartments throughout the map.

Hey all, here’s a general update from TIS Towers on various things. We do hope this finds y’all well.
 
First off a quick heads-up on the forthcoming 41.66 patch. It’s now content locked, and is now receiving required fixes reported by our internal testers. We will look to put it out into a new unstable beta branch as soon as we can.
 
The full current changelist can be found here for those interested.
 
Next up, a few details on our Build 42 work.
 
As previously mentioned the core MP team will be sticking with Build 41 patches to improve life out on the servers for the immediate future, but work on the next big build has nevertheless now begun/continued in earnest.
 
Already announced for Build 42 was a major expansion of late game crafting and a major focus on game balance – details on which can be found here.
 
There are a few other irons in the fire for this build too though. As ever, no ETAs on any of this.
 
We are very much still in the early versions of this build, and indeed much of the late game crafting update is currently in the ‘pen and paper’ planning stage. More on this in future blogs.
 
ENGINE TECH IMPROVEMENTS
We have recently taken some time to get rid of a bunch of our longest standing issues with the game’s engine.
 
Whilst this is definitely not a b41-style level of disruption, we’re digging deep inside our renderer and looking for ways to get rid of the quite severe problems that have been baked into our engine for a long time in terms of both capabilities and performance.
 
Performance
Of course, the biggest issue our engine struggles with daily is the extreme CPU and GPU heavy requirements of having a map composed of so many unique tiles, shaders and other stuff without the ability to use a z-buffer to let us render in an optimized way like most 3D games.
 
Ironically the fact that its ‘a simpler looking 2D game’ is what works against using a lot of the power of the GPU to render the map fast. This results in large FPS drops, particularly when zooming out due to the mind meltingly inefficient draw method that the ISO perspective forces on us.
 
We’ve had a few rather bold ideas on how to solve this, using the caching of chunks that have already been rendered, which we hope will vastly increase the FPS in B42.
 
It’s early days, but looks promising. This tech requires heavier use of the GPU memory, however, so it may be that this optimization will only be able to benefit cards with a few gigs of free VRAM. We’ll have to see which generations of GPUs will be best able to leverage it when its dev time is a little further down the line.
 
Speaking of not being able to use a z-buffer to render things in an optimized way: in actual fact, we’ve also been working towards being able to use a z-buffer to render things in an optimized way.
 
This essentially frees us from having to slot the draws of zombies, vehicles or players in between the appropriate tile draws in ‘back to front’ order.
 
We’ll be able to simply draw all the characters and vehicles on-screen at the end, their pixels then discarded if they are deeper into the scene than an existing building object’s pixel.
 
This should massively optimize the rendering speed of zombies, and allow us to sort them by materials. It will free us to use cached chunks indefinitely, until the lighting or cutaways demand a change, rather than rendering all the tiles individually.
 
We have had some surprising FPS results in 4k on max zoom, however we also expect this will likely fall a lot in practice – once the work is complete and everything is drawing. Please excuse any visual glitches at the moment!
 
 
Due to all this, in B42 it currently feels safe to assume that zooming out will have significantly lower performance penalty – and that higher resolutions will become more feasible for at least mid-range GPUs, and possibly lower end GPUs too.
 
Variable Chunk Heights
In the game, since our very earliest builds, we’ve been limited to 8 storey buildings. This was primarily because the height was global, and increasing this would incur a penalty to performance across the entire map even if that extra space was not used.
 
The other issue was simply performance when drawing those extra floors. If we’re struggling to render the amount of tiles we already have, adding extra tall buildings would be a big mistake.
 
Thirdly, there’s something to be said about less being more in terms of gameplay. However, this hard limit of 8 has long been a thorn in our mappers’ sides, as well as for our mod community.
 
Seeing as it looks like we’ll be able to solve the performance issues discussed above, we’ve now added a variable chunk height system which will allow each chunk of the map to define its own max height.

This means that in Build 42 it’s looking like a particular area could have floors up to 32 in height, should the mapper desire it.
 
Four way stairs
Currently, due to certain tech limitations, we only have stairs that rise in north or west directions.
 
This is annoying, and we’d like to get rid of this limitation for numerous reasons. We’ve done some mock-ups of how stairs would look in the other two directions, and think we’ve found a way to make it work.
 
They look a little odd, however functionally being able to have stairs in any of the four directions would give mappers and ourselves much more freedom in building design.
 
Map Coordinates
Another limitation that has been very longstanding is the fact that negative map coords (expanding out the map in the negative X and Y directions) is not possible in PZ – due primarily to some TIS naivety early on in development.
 
For the maths-minded out there: casting a player’s x, y, z location to an int to work out what tile they are standing on will return the wrong value if any of those coordinates are a negative value.
 
There were thousands of places where this occurred in the codebase, and they all needed changing from a static cast to a math.floor, so that they will work in negative dimensions.
 
Making negative map coordinates possible means that we, or modders, will feasibly be able to build northwards and westwards, and opens up a huge extra area of potential map area to expand to.
 
It likewise also puts other cool stuff (back) on the game dev table that we’ll discuss at a later date.
Light Propagation
We have also been updating our lighting system.
 
In the current B41 we have an ambient light level that’s inherent to every tile within the map – though slightly reduced indoors. Light sources are only capable of lighting the room that they are in.
 
Locking yourself in a cupboard with the door shut currently results in the same light level as you’d get in the living room with open curtains.
For B42 we are rejigging how lighting is calculated, to make a much more interesting and realistic light propagation system.
 
Now being in a room with no windows, even in broad daylight, will leave you in the darkness. The evening sunset glow will encroach through the window and bathe your room in a red tint, creeping back toward the window and dimming as the sun goes down.
 
Interiors of buildings will lighten and darken with the daylight based on how much exposure to the bounced light they will feasibly receive. Opening a door to a lit room will bathe the outside corridor in light, and so on.
 
This is all still development in progress, and it maybe requires tweaking of light intensities, colours and fall-off ranges.
Please also excuse any glitches you see, this is all still very much in the oven!
 
 
OTHER BIZNESS
The map team continue their awesomeness, with lots of map polish currently going into the current Knox Event map – including electricity pylons and cool new locations like this. The Noiseworks gang continue with their improvements of the PZ soundscape, with their current mission being to provide background sounds that provide different ambiance for times when the electricity and water are on, for when they are off, and an audible change to signal the exact moment when the turn-off happens in-game. Currently awaiting integration are also 14 new music CDs, 14 movie VHS tapes, 20 new TV show tapes and 44 home recorded tapes too. You will be delighted to hear that these include several new sequels in the much-lauded Dog Goblin horror franchise. Our thanks to Brat Pen for these. The curator of the online PZ map project, Blindcoder, wants to let you know that he’s on the case with updates – and apologises for delays caused by Covid and irl fun/games. His blog here. Our thanks to him for all his amazing work also.  
 
This week’s flamingo fun from Cute Cappuccino. A changelist of all our pre-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

Hello all, and a big welcome to all the new players – who probably almost outnumber the old players reading this at this point. It’s been… quite the month.
 
To the newly initiated: we do a dev blog every two weeks, and we call them ‘Thursdoids’. These are often interspersed with mod blogs on particular community heroes on the off weeks.
 
We generally only talk about the more imminent features in the development blog these days, but clearly occasionally set out wider plans – as we did in last time’s Thursdoid blockbuster.
 
This blog, however, is not a blockbuster we’re afraid – as it is predominantly us working on the upcoming 41.66 patch which contains many and varied vital and more pleasant improvements to our current MP release. (With a few other bits of fun and balance in-between.)
There’s no solid ETA on this patch, but we’re now limiting further additions and are within the testing process.
 
Once we’re happy with it, we will put it out on an unstable beta branch for the community to try out, before moving it into the mainline after the necessary fixes have been mixed in.
 
Current contents include:
 
An optional login queue system to make survivor waits outside full servers more organised, as well as to avoid server lag due to multiple players joining. Cheat security fixes and improvements. Improvements and fixes for VOIP – which currently is fairly faulty in the main version. Fixed several duplication exploits. Improvements for server owners. Specifically a new server option to specify actions which will be logged by the server. This can be used by admins to keep track of player activity such as theft, enabling pvp or destruction of property. It supports any action by name including actions added via mods. Translation support and custom extra information can be logged on a per-action basis. Player levels and other critical anti-cheat logs may also be added, which can allow admins to identify cheaters and other shenanigans via their logs. (We also intend to do a general tidy-up of server options, and to remove some of the more redundant ones before patch release.) Updated and fixed Kingsmouth and Studio maps. Tooltip information now provided on modded items, underlining which mod the item comes from. A fix for trailers and attached vehicles suddenly wanting to explore space. New Noiseworks sounds. Including violin melee hits, new melee hit noises on doors, new dismantle sounds, generator noises and more. In-game map polish. A lot of foraging balance, and loot location tips. Working in-game radios (voice and text) Split-screen fixes and polish. Fixed VHS tapes exploit after relog, bizarre temperature bug, flickering mod sounds between speakers, enabled alarms in spawn buildings and much more.
Elsewhere we’ve had lots of meetings and chats this week about where we’re going forward over the next months (and, in some instances, years) between ourselves and our partners, and it’s been an exciting time.
 
Some of the team are moving onto the next major build(s) at this point, while others are remaining on the upkeep and polish of the current version. We should have a more gameplay-y and feature-y update for you next time round, as well as news on our ongoing MP improvements and optimizations.
 
Thanks all! See you next time.
 
This week’s chill vibes from Adres4t. A changelist of all our pre-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!

If we have a window that is only partially barricaded (1 or 2 planks - where we can still see out the window) we could stab zombies banging on the barricades with a spear or maybe a knife. 
 
Right now if a zombie is trying to break through the barricades we need to go outside and kill them from the outside. When we try to stab a zombie from the inside we end up hitting the barricades and damaging them further. It would make sense that we couldn't swing a baseball bat or similar blunt weapon at them, but we should be able to stab through the window with a spear. Similar to how we can stab zombies with a spear through metal fences. 
 
Are we able to shoot through partially barricaded windows? I have not tried this because generally I avoid guns whenever possible in PZ. I'd rather not have to guns if a pointy object can do the same task.

Twine should be craftable. Yes, would take skill (foraging? and/or a crafting recipe?) and time, but still.
 
This would require stripping long fibers from a suitable source, such as trees and other plants. Branches and logs would be a source, perhaps giving a random amount of fibers and destroying the resource in the process. Second, the fibers need to be soaked in water for several days ("retting"), and then dried (ie. kept in warm enough conditions). Lastly, they're twisted and tied together to make twine.
 
All in all, quite a bit of time and effort involved, but this would make a basic resource renewable in MP and make a wilderness base more viable.

A short Thursdoid this week, and we’ll return to our normal larger update blogs from next week in our first 2022 blog! Where we’ll discuss where we’re going after build 41 has been finished off!
 
First of all, wow.
 
We’ve put a huge amount of work and time into this game, and while we always considered ourselves lucky to be able to sell more copies than a lot of indies who struggle to get their game noticed in the extremely competitive indie game dev scene, we never quite imagined we’d manage to break out in the way we have this past month.
 
It’s thanks to the tireless devs in our team who have worked on this game for years and made the game what it is through passion and blood and sweat, the support team who’ve had to try and get all our new players into the game when they have issues–despite this massive surge happening throughout the holidays, the community that have supported us the whole time through this journey and understood what we were trying to do, the incredible modding community who have expanded the game in so many ways and made diving into Zomboid many orders of magnitude more interesting, and it’s thanks to the content creators that have grown up alongside us, who’ve dedicated hundreds of hours of their content to Zomboid to introduce and entertain new players looking to dive in, and we’re overjoyed to see them get extra exposure as the game’s been thrust into many people’s line of sight.
 
There are so many links in the chain that led us to where we are, and we wish you all a happy new year and thank everyone for coming on this ride with us!
 
 
Build 41.66 plans
 
A few updates on our plans for the next patch for Build 41, which will be appearing in the new year!
 
VOIP has experienced numerous issues which we are keen to solve in our next patch, firstly the voip is adding a significant amount of additional traffic to servers which decrease performance not insignificantly, especially when larger groups are together. In addition, we’re experiencing some rather annoying peaking and clipping when some users start talking which is rather annoying to listen to. We hope to have a solution to this in the next build. We’ve implemented a queuing system to the server joining process. This accomplishes several things: Allows more than 32 players to queue to join a server, and will maintain a queue number that will decrease until they load into the game. This will allow those looking for entry into popular servers a way to start the joining process and allow them to browse the net, watch the Youtubes or play other games while they wait for connection. Forces players to load in one at a time, so as not to cause the server severe lag from numerous players joining at once and requesting large clumps of map chunks to be sent their way. Allows for whitelisted players to be flagged as priority irrespective of their admin status, which will let them jump the queue to get in if they have say VIP status for helping fund a server, or are content creators on their own community servers. Other big issues we’re seeing reported are item duplication bugs, something we’ll be looking to resolve before release. Also we’re keen to look into ways to make dealing with updating workshop mods a lot easier, both in terms of mods updating and causing connection issues for clients as the server hasn’t updated yet (which admittedly is a very very difficult issue to see how we can improve), improving the system for detecting changes and getting rid of any lingering ‘workshop mismatch’ errors that are not related to a server not being updated. Also, an incident recently involving a mod update breaking saves makes us realise we may need to do more to safeguard saves from mods removing item definitions.  
There are likely countless other fixes that we have in the pipe, so if you don’t see your own particular issue listed here, it doesn’t mean we’re not aware of it or have a priority to fix it, more that this blog writer forgot about them! We’ll discuss more in the new year in the run up to the patch, which will likely be put into a public unstable branch first to ensure there are no issues that could cause problems for servers who do not wish to test the fixes.
 
A reminder to those operating public servers, that we cannot guarantee you won’t be hit by very destructive hackers or griefers, and its vitally important that if you’re willing to take the risk with public servers, then you practice frequent server back ups. In fact we’d recommend even white listed or private servers to consider server backups with some regularity, as its always possible a mod update or a game update could cause you problems.
 
As always, we suggest and recommend only whitelisted servers and running a public server is done at your own risk. If you want to be secure from hackers, it’s also not currently a good idea to display your server IP publicly or advertise its presence on the server list.
 
While we’ll constantly look to increase the security of the multiplayer, it was not the primary priority compared to providing a solid co-op experience during the long development, we’ll try and shore up any vulnerabilities in the packet security in the next build, but It will take some considerable time before we can implement solid anti-cheat measures given the open nature of our game’s architecture.
 
Sorry if this blog is a little short and perhaps we’ve forgotten some huge thing we were going to mention. Forgive us if our patch has to wait until the new year, and we’re a little more absent than we should be due to the holidays. The international team will be back up to full speed next week, with the Russian devs who’ve been hard at work over Xmas fixing up and adding stuff, who will be taking their holidays in early January.
 
Thanks for everything!
 
TIS

build 41 has been an amazing build for me so far and cant wait to start seeing some animals to hunt in build 42.

build 41 has been an amazing build for me so far and cant wait to start seeing some animals to hunt in build 42.

we have pancakes and we have maple syrup, come on devs just let me pour that shit on top.

awesome cant wait for this update to come out.

I think it would be a good idea

some of buildings and rooms should have them, they could serve as alternate way in/out for rooms building and even alternate escape route,additionaly some hidden items can be found in them
character would be able to crawl through them but zombies too,attacking during crawling would be rather limited because of available space,although character would be still able to use pistols to attack zeds crawling behind and on front him/her
screwdriver and/or crowbar would be required to open covering of vent

I love the that new foraging system and cant wait to try this once it get added.

I would support more types of crops to grow just need some more items to grow like eggplant, Zucchini

NEW
 
- The containers in the "Move to" controller context sub-menu are disabled if the container can't hold the item to be moved.
- During "Walk To" or other timed-action movement, allow the player to continue to move while aiming, instead of stopping.
- Added a radial menu for light sources that is accessed by holding the F key for longer.
- Added "Pan Camera While Driving" display option. This will move the camera in front of the car to give better vision of things ahead. Please give us some feedback how this feels. Some had issues with this previously, so the option is off by default. 
- Added recipe.StopOnWalk and recipe.StopOnRun script properties to the codebase to control whether the crafting action is interrupted by walking and running. Currently this is only used to allow inserting/removing batteries in flashlights while walking.
 

ANIMS AND MODELS
 
- Made male underpants smaller and to look like briefs.
- Made female bra strapless.
- Made the same changes to male and female zombie textures.
- Adjusted Bikini and Swimsuit texture to fit new female underpants and bras.
 

NOISEWORKS
 
- New weapon hit sounds:
 
        Axe, Wood Axe, Stone Axe
        Pick Axe
        Badminton Racket, Tennis Racket
        Hockey Stick, Lacross Stick
        Broom, Fishing Rod, Pool Cue
        Garden Hoe, Rake, Leaf Rake
        Shovel
        Snow Shovel
        Spiked Baseball Bat, Spiked Plank, Spiked Pick Axe Handle
        Baseball Bat
        Canoe Paddle
        Golf Club
        Plank
 
These also have a new setup where a regular hit sounds different from a hit that causes the attacked zombie to fall and a more impactfull killing blow.
 
- Added farming-related sounds for plowing, seeding, watering, and harvesting
- Adjusted the drinking sounds to fit the anims better.
- Further tweaks to busy sound areas - and especially with engine noise in and around zombie hordes. Please test!
- Addressed issues of lost / strange sounds during busy periods - such as during rain etc.
- Tweaked puddle footstep loudness (it was too loud still)
- Removed seagull sounds from towns
 

FIXES
 
- Fixed applying mildew cure to plants being broken.
- Fixed the player phasing through obstacles after climbing over a tall fence.
- Fixed Lua error SMetalDrumGlobalObject:update() when it rains.
- Fixed shoving zombies from behind sometimes causing the zombie to move toward the player.
- Fixed hitting a zombie that is getting up from lying face down flipping the zombie onto its back.
- Fixed killing a zombie that is getting up from lying face down creating a corpse on its back.
- Fixed the player's hit-reaction animation sometimes playing long after the attack happened.
- Fixed zombies finishing their bumped animation too soon, allowing them to get another attack quickly.
- Fixed playing two getting-up animations if the movement key is pressed after the animation has started.
- Fixed vehicle engines not taking damage if the hood is uninstalled.
- Fixed pan condition not resetting each time at FightStep:KillZombie in tutorial
- Fixed new pan not spawning if the player somehow does manage to break the pan at FightStep:KillZombie
- Fixed hiding the Set Alarm dialog due to the player position changing slightly after turning.
- Fixed highlighting useable parts of vehicles when the player is inside a vehicle.
- Fixed exception trying to place an item on the same square as a Car Battery Charger (or any object with no sprite).
- Fixed the controller focus remaining on a context menu after selecting an option with the mouse.
- Fixed a Lua error after pressing the 'V' key while a game is loading.
- Fixed not automatically reloading changed animation files.
- Fixed IndexOutOfBoundsException in JAssImpImporter.GetKeyFrameScale() with a test animation.
- Fixed "Could not find bone index for node name: "Translation_Data_$AssimpFbx$_Translation"" warning with a test animation.
- Fixed ISRadialMenu:setSliceTexture() calling setSliceText().
- Fixed the welding sound not stopping when building metal objects.
- Fixed zombies opening locked carpentry doors.

Hey all, before we get to the meat of this week’s blog a quick word on the 41.56 patch.
 
We had intended to release 41.56 last week but have been wrestling with some sound bugs that make noises cut out in ‘busy’ areas with a lot of zeds, rain, puddles, cars etc. It feels like we’re getting somewhere with it now, so fingers crossed we’ll push it out early next week.
 
Also in this somewhat intermediate build:
Fixes for some edge-case animation issues that, for example, would see a fallen character get back up and shove when the player didn’t want them to. Also: shoving zeds sometimes moving them towards you, zeds flipping onto their front or back when hit to ground, and zeds getting in an unfair quick attack sometimes if they’ve been bumped. New weapon hit sounds for: Axe, Golf Club, Baseball Bat, Rackets and Planks. New character models with improved/adjusted underwear to allow for some of the new LV outfits Adjusted the drinking sounds to fit the anims better.
Here’s a quick vid showcasing some of the new sounds, if you are an axe aficionado or a liker of planks. Or indeed a fan of our NEW RUDE PANTS and a few Louisville scenes. Please bear in mind that some of the audio might still require a balance pass – they are fresh in.
 


In more general ‘our version of’ Louisville news: testing, fixing, zoning and new zed outfitting continues. This week we also added in the ‘zed heat map’ that governs spawns in the new area, so it’s getting closer and closer to a properly playable area at this point.
 
Something else we haven’t mentioned before that’ll be released simultaneous to LV, meanwhile, is…

MAPDOID
Just to underline before we begin: plenty of people enjoy playing PZ without the following new feature, and as such it will be OPTIONAL with a range of different settings for it (more than shown today) available in your Sandbox options.
 
With that said right now every month Blindcoder’s (spoilerific) online PZ map gets half a million visits, while Eris’ minimap has quarter of a million known users.
 
It’s been clear to us for a long time that a fair proportion of PZ players would benefit from some form of in-game mapping system that’s been built to a) retain the hardcore nature of the game, and b) be configurable enough to suit both PZ vets and PZ noobs.
 
As such, for quite a long time, we have been experimenting with various different tech-side approaches to this behind the scenes.
 
Our plans for the future of PZ  (in terms of game systems, objectives, being sent to different locations on the game map, creating more and more cool ‘events’ to seek out etc) – will also benefit hugely from a system that we as developers can drop markers on, and where players can make their own markings and records. (Read on for a few given examples of this)
 
Finally, clearly, we’re about to drop our biggest and most complex game location yet into PZ – and to get the best of it (and to share discoveries between our players) the release of our version of Louisville seemed the best time for a new mapping system to make its grand appearance.
 
And so, without further ado, here’s a video of our new (optional) mapping system – built to be completely mod-friendly, and easily adaptable to suit community mappers.
 
In essence: the map ‘draws itself’ as you explore. You check it as a ‘timed action’, meaning you physically see the player taking out the map – rather than it be on an instant on/off toggle.
 
You can zoom out to see the entirety of the huge uncovered game map, and you can zoom back in to check out the parts of the map that your exploration has exposed.
 
You can then mark up items of interest, your safehouse, an area you’d like to come back to later etc. etc. using a system not dissimilar to the way you can currently leave markings on our current looted maps.
 
AS EVER PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS SYSTEM – IT WILL BE CHANGED AND IMPROVED FURTHER BEFORE RELEASE

A video showing the map functioning after a small amount of exploration, and some initial mark-up:
 
 
Another vid showing the same map after some exploration along a nearby road, and subsequent player mark-up:
 
 
A final vid showing you going for a drive on the same map. (NOTE: the map stores the last zoom level you used on it – it doesn’t always open on it being fully pulled back)
 
 
So, beyond the basic exploration that’s evident in these videos – what else will this system provide in future? Well: a shitload of cool stuff essentially, but let’s start with something that’s easy to imagine from the way the game currently plays.
 
[PLEASE NOTE: FOLLOWING CONCEPTS ARE GIVEN AS AN EXAMPLE, THEY AREN’T IN THE BUILD YET AND MIGHT NOT BE PRESENT IN INITIAL VERSIONS]
 
Currently in the game we have ‘metasounds’ that we use to move zombies around – you will know these as gunshots, distant screams etc. Using the new map system we will be able to have these as actual physical events on the map rather than virtual ones: we can put a ‘?’ in the general area of where your character heard a woman screaming from, and where the zombies are swarming towards, and should you explore that vicinity later on you might find zombies feeding on a female survivor with cool loot and a decent weapon for example.
 
We can also expand this to a variety of rare large-scale, and as yet not in-game, events that we can play in the new PZ soundscape for your character to hear – and then drop in a ‘?’ exploration marker for an area that you might like to explore. Your traits could also potentially help or hinder the accuracy of the area approximated on the map. (Hear a helicopter crash in the distance? Maybe head to the circled area on the map that’s temporarily showing the basic area where you heard it come down?)
 
Again, the above is an example of where we want to take this – but right now behind the scenes we are also revamping the looted ‘Annotated Survivor maps’ to work better with the new system (and Louisville, and modded maps) and having the ability to mark up potential areas of interest from this will be massive for creating variety in gameplay as we go on.
 
On top of this we (and modders) could potentially create objectives and map markers from messages heard over the radio system – or notes discovered in buildings etc etc. The list of potential applications is huge, and will finally create new reasons to fully explore all corners of the vast map (and vast new map) that our mappers have been building for so, so long.
 
The system, meanwhile, also allows for areas, certain sorts of buildings, or certain roads to be made visible should you loot a particular map. We’re not sure how specific we’d go with this just yet (or what game modes would allow for it) but the system also enables you to – for example – pick up a Spiffo’s Restaurant leaflet with a small map on it and then for this small area centred on a Spiffo’s restaurant to appear on your overall map.
 
With this in mind we might be able to encourage exploration to some of the more far-flung areas of the Knox Event that a lot of players never venture out towards. (Hell, a lot of players don’t even realise that our locations are all on the same vast map!)
 
It’s a hugely versatile system, and will open up many, many doors for the modding and mapping community also. Essentially with the release of Louisville (and the mapping system) we will also release a new version of WorldEd for PZ mappers – within this there will be commands for users to automatically add forests, water and buildings for an in-game map. However, right now folks will have to draw in roads manually. (Alternatively, a CartoZed image can also be used for the least amount of work.)
 
After so long without a mapping system we recognise that many will have grown used to playing without one, which is why you won’t have to use it if you don’t want to.
 
This said, we will certainly be building in new systems that use it – there will likely be MP applications to come, while our plans for both an objective-built story mode and wider systems featuring future NPCs will use aspects of the tech.
 
If you want to continue to experience the current map-free exploration game style, however, then we are 100% making certain that the option to turn it off is there. Likewise we are making sure that what the map can provide is as configurable as possible across both sandbox options and the game modes they’re tied to.
 
Our more sceptical internal testers have generally found it very engaging once they’ve got their hands on it, and we suspect that it will be hugely beneficial to most players’ survival experiences come its release.
 
This week’s collector of objects from Noah. 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!

I would like to see this feature get added.