Suomiboi

It’s been a really big week for us, as we merged the second-to-last element of Build 42 into the main codebase across the rest of the team – which is the long awaited tech upgrade which brings a whole host of improvements to the engine.
 
It’s currently being tested and the feedback has been super positive so far. This said, it’s also brought over lots of small bugs, visual glitches, and issues with new depth map clipping items incorrectly. Nothing over-dramatic, but enough stuff to keep testers and coders alike fully occupied.
This is where a lot of our brains have been at recently, so we thought we’d give you an update on the engine as it now stands while testers run around kicking its tires – alongside some videos they have made along the way.
 
Likewise, we also have some examples of some of its new capabilities that we will be able to explore in future – perhaps during the Unstable beta, perhaps beyond.
 
So, a run-down of what this tech upgrade brings into the game:
 
OPTIMIZATION
We’ve made huge optimizations to the rendering of the map that should have a huge impact for most lower-midrange and upwards systems. We are now easily able to get a solid framerate even on 4K, or on furthest zoom. The difference in performance is honestly surprising, and extremely satisfying.
 
For full disclosure, however, we’ve discovered that a few of the absolutely lowest end systems capable of running our game are still adversely affected. This is because the solution for such large FPS optimization comes at the expense of GPU memory usage for the caching textures used. Cards with extremely low dedicated GPU memory may run into problems.
 
We’re investigating and trying to optimize this further to make sure as many systems as possible can benefit, and worst case scenario these optimizations will be disabled on systems where they would do more harm than good.
 
However, it’s still entirely possible that we’ll be able to resolve this completely and provide a large boost to even the most potato systems. More likely, we’ll provide some kind of automatic detection to provide as large a portion of the optimizations as possible for a GPU’s available memory. This will be our next task post visual-bug clear out.
 
Generally we estimate that a huge majority of our playerbase will benefit greatly from the optimizations. Since most of the optimization frustrations we hear come from players who feel their machine should be able to run PZ at a solid framerate, we feel this work will ease the vast majority of performance sadness we see in the community.
 
VIEW CONE
Another improvement born out of necessity is an improved and smoother viewing cone. Due to the optimizations, it was no longer feasible to alter the lighting of tiles frequently enough to allow for the smooth light changes required for our tile based viewing cone.
 
As such we needed to implement a completely separate and newly-coded viewing cone that didn’t rely on tile lighting – which truth be told we were never a huge fan of anyway.
 
Now we have a much more accurate, smooth and fancy viewing cone – and now we have extra hands on it internally feedback is being collated so that we can provide plenty of requested options to allow you to tweak it this way and that. (Making it more or less visible probably being the primary one.)
 
 
 
LIGHT PROPAGATION
The new lighting system is now in full testing, and seems to be working pretty well so far.
 
This new propagation system allows for much prettier and more convincing lighting of the world, especially now we have basements which would have been extremely unsatisfying with our existing 41 lighting.
 
41’s system basically had an ‘ambient light’ level that permeated the entirety of the world depending on the time of the day. Then on top of that indoors would get a reduction in ambient light to make them slightly darker than outside.
 
The new system propagates light from light sources such as bulbs, or the sun, across tiles to simulate reflective light. It’s not something cutting-edge that you’d expect from the Unreal Engine, or something, but for our purposes it’s extremely effective. It allows for light from a window to creep across the room, allows for rooms with no natural lighting to be in complete darkness even during the day, allows more immersive coloured lighting, and all manner of other things not previously possible in PZ.
 
Most importantly of all, it fixes the room lighting issues that plague b41 when room layouts are changed with sledgehammers leaving strange lighting artifacts on the floor, since all lighting is calculated purely based on the geometry of the rooms now.
 
With this will now come gameplay balance – there’s debate on the team as to whether the player character should have a little more clarity in the darkness, some internal spots are a little more inky-blue than black, and new gameplay elements like not being able to read in the dark will need finetuning to the new visual.
 
Also seen in the following video, for extra immersion, doors are now fully animated – as discussed last time. This makes a huge difference to the feel of interacting with them during gameplay.
 
 
   
OVERGROUND UNDERGROUND
We’re still in the process of adding basement spots around the map – whether random or permanent. However, as discussed previously, the new upgraded engine allows support for levels from -32 to +32.
 
This allows for both much more convincingly tall skyscrapers for city locations, as well as for basements and potentially sprawling underground complexes. The mapping and modding is gonna be wild.
 
Part of this is also strapping in engine capabilities to help us in future – and as such please take the following as an EXAMPLE video of what we can now do in PZ.
 
Our coders and mappers have enough on their plates at the moment, and as such this is not a confirmed feature for when 42 goes Unstable.
It will, however, be feasible within the engine which is why we’ve chosen to show it.
 
Essentially, EP has been working on some extra physics engine functionality to allow for the physics to exist on floors other than the ground floor – as well as providing new physics shapes that in future will allow for this. This work was also a necessary foothold for other physics-based features we have brewing for future versions.
 
 
Please note also, just to quell any mapper fears again, these extensive engine and map data structure changes will not make existing map mods invalid. All maps will need to be reexported in the new versions of the tools when we release them, most likely around the time we put out the Unstable beta, but they won’t need to be redone from scratch.
MEANWHILE…
We’re waiting on a big commit to fill in some of the gaps in the crafting system process itself, so in the mean-time lets focus on some of the fun stuff that’ll be coming out the other end: weapons.
 
Clearly we already have the more ‘normal’ and traditional blacksmithed weapons for B42 already, and likewise the more ancient-styled stone axes and such. With these we’re avoiding anything specific to any period or culture, going for real life examples that were common across history and geography, and that could pass as something reasonably iron age, medieval, or post-apocalypse. We have consulted an expert in these matters regarding the designs and selection, and we’re also providing them with further weapon designs as we make them for feedback.
 
But, as we stretch out into our apocalypse we also wanted something a little more… apocalypse-y.
As such, currently what’s being wrapped up are post-apocalypse improvised weapons. These include classic examples like the “nail-spiked weapons”, but also weapons that have been constructed with welding and metalshop tools.
 
With these designs a conscious decision has been made to not think about weapons from other games or zombie media, and instead research was conducted regarding real life improvised /crafted weapons. This included stuff like police collections of seized weapons and trench warfare, with additional inspiration from weapons in Max Mad-style post-apocalypse media.
 
We also took on something of a procedural approach, where we looked at the weapons and items that existed (or could exist) in the game, and imagined them being combined like Lego bricks to create weapons. Granted in many cases we just re-invented the wheel, but that helped keep things grounded, realistic, and consistent with the rest of the game.
 
Although we tried to make these weapons realistic and believable, we have allowed for a couple of weapons to be slightly (reasonably) zany. We’re allowed to have a little fun, after all, and all those weapons will also have realistic drawbacks when wielded.
 
Simultaneous to this, we are also adding some broken versions of existing Zomboid weapons. Some of these broken weapons and their parts will be used in crafting other weapons, but these fragments also exist for gory consequences when weapons break when bashing a zombie with them.
I don’t quite know why we’re using this strange moustachioed gentleman to demonstrate these today, but lets have a proper look at him in any case. Curious chap.
 
BACK TO ANIMS-LAND
Finally, a big welcome to Nick from our colleagues at TEA Games who has joined us to help us implement something we call PenguinTech – after the time Zac got two million on-screen dancing penguins into a Wii game.
 
Originally slated for B41 this will, in essence, be a clever way of optimizing our zombie hordes – pooling what states they are in, and then sharing a smaller pool of zombie skeletons for the same anims. With this, fingers crossed, we’ll get better performance when there’s a horde on-screen and in turn we can be less dainty with their application in your survival.
 
A full round-up of everything confirmed for Build 42 can be found here. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

Sky High
So… hmm, where were we?
 
Okay so, recent weeks have seen two mega-merges into our trunk internal testing build.
 
The first was latest from our MP team, to top up the central development branch with their latest from their ongoing server work to flag up any unexpected issues and to get a few gameplay systems back online in MP.
 
The second was the guts of the long-awaited crafting revamp from Turbo, which means that the functionality for all our primary crafting stations is now in – and it’s a matter of banging heads together and integrating everything we’ve had stacked up for it.
 
To this end we’re pleased to announce that we’ve hired yet another stalwart individual from the modding community to aid us in this quest.
We were thinking about the different modders who could give our crafting team a little extra grunt, we have so many amazing ones after all, but the offerings of Soul Filcher stood out as being produce of exactly the sort of brain we needed.

We’re really happy to have Soul officially on the team, and while his initial introductory task has been some tidy-up work and minor improvements on our many and varied different traits he should be diving into the new crafting stations with the others in the weeks ahead. 
 
SKY HIGH
The engine upgrade is now in a phase of finding all the edge case issues where something doesn’t render correctly due to the new caching rendering method.
 
Alongside this, very excitingly, the map team are working on larger buildings and basements to be slotted into the game map.
EP tested out the first building to use the increased floor limits, a literal 32 floor skyscraper which looks super impressive to see in-game. This, as yet unnamed, skyscraper also allowed us to get a fun new animation into the mix as well…


PLEASE NOTE: Impact with pavement is WIP. There’ll be far more crunchy SFX, far less blending issues with the character standing back up, and also more blood obviously. Screaming too.
 
 
Elsewhere we are making the most of the improvements to how sprites are cached and handled. This now allows, for example, sprites to be combined with overlays into a single cached texture.
 
With this we can create nicer, and more accurate, highlighting and borders when they are selected and moused over. As seen here:
 
 
Increasingly with the engine upgrade it’s become ever more clear that with it we’ll be able to polish up more oddities and visual quirks of Zomboid in the long term.
 
If you’re interested, this is made evident by the testing tools that we’ve added to Zomboid’s debug menus that put the new tile depth system through its paces.
 
 
In this video you will see a large debug 3d cylinder that can be moved around to test how it interacts with the map environment.
This now interacts with walls and other objects as if they were bona fide 3D geometry within the iso scene, which was impossible up till now. Previously it would have inserted itself in its entirety between tiles laid on top of each other.
 
This will allow us to increasingly have a more believably 3D looking world despite using 2D tiles, getting rid of a lot of unsightly glitches and potentially opening up other gameplay avenues in the further future.
 
To be clear, this vid shows the sort of stuff that we’re now able to finally nix – although whether that will happen prior to 42 going unstable or later on is still an open question.
 
Oh and here’s another player/zed falling vid as we love it so much…
 
 
OH, RATS
We’ve shown rats in blogs before, but previously they didn’t have many rules or conditions attached.
 
Now, as we close out what has internally been dubbed as ‘rat week’ we can say that rats will procedurally spawn as the world is explored – and they will also appear in special randomized ‘rat stories’. They can randomly spawn with trash, trash containers, and corpses.
 
 
As the days of the apocalypse tick by we will slowly approach the “Maximum Rat Index” –  which is currently two months on default non-Sandbox settings – which is the point at which rats will have the highest chance of spawning and a higher chance of appearing in greater numbers.
 
In buildings with rat problems we will also be working with the sound team over at Formosa to make sure we have fun stuff like noises for rats in ceilings, rats in the walls, rats gnawing on flesh, rats scuttling over different floor surfaces etc.
 
We’ll keep a lid on the majority of our special randomized rat stories, but expect some gross supplies and destroyed loot. That said, are you familiar with the concept of a rat king crown? Google it if not!
Oh, and would you like something to wash down with that bleach?

 
MAP LATEST
Lots of fun stuff going into the map expansion, not least the 32 level skyscrapers we have going into Louisville.
 
Our plan is to have a few of these pepper the urban landscape, where appropriate, for 42 – and then to come back for more fully-fledged urban replanning later down the line.
 
If you take in all the new basements required for the new build, and the new swathes of land to the west of Muld that are being finalized, there’s a lot of ground to cover for the map team – even if so much of it already in the can. We want everything to be good quality, and don’t want any aspects rushed.
 
With that in mind, let’s have another more detailed look at Xeonyx’s ‘scraper showcased in the first video. What a beaut!
Elsewhere, what better place to explore in an update where lighting and lightsources are going to be far more than an issue – than Ayrton’s spooky abandoned orphanage in a forest?
 
All the cool kids will want to hang out there, we’re sure.
 
Finally, for a map expansion we need signs for homes and businesses. So expect all sorts of new fun stuff, alongside adverts and map-reveal flyers for them on the radio and in peoples’ homes.
 
 
IT’S A GAS, GAS, GAS
Alongside other new clothing, bags, holsters, and functional gear in 42, we’re also adding fully featured military webbing and SCBA gear.
The webbing provides two hotbar slots that can be used to attach walkie talkies, special new angle headed clip-on flashlights, and appropriate knives. The SCBA gear, meanwhile, provides one. Military webbing also serves as a wearable container that is superior to wearing fanny packs.
Some of this coolness can be seen in the following video – alongside the shemagh scarves that will allow British fans of a certain age cosplay as Simon Reeve.
 
 
As seen in the next video, SCBA gear is also functional in that, when it has an attached tank with oxygen remaining and is turned on, it will protect the wearer from inhaled atmospheric hazards. This also applies to the Hazmat suits.
 
 
We have also made Gasmasks functional, although they require filters that are drained by exposure to airborne contaminants, and have added Halfmask Respirators that use different filters that are consumed at a faster rate.
 
Some other, appropriate, masks will now also provide mild protection from corpse sickness. However, your character will remove and replace their mask when eating, drinking, smoking, taking pills, and such.
 
Engineer characters, and characters that learn the recipes, can also craft improvised gasmask filters, as well as recharge gasmask and respirator filters. All of these new items spawn in appropriate locations, vehicles, and on appropriate zombies.
4K REVOLUTION
One of the primary complaints we get about PZ, and a rightful one, is our lack of support for higher resolution monitors.
 
There have always been workarounds, but they haven’t been effective enough -and on a 4K screen the resolution makes our UI look to be a size that only a furrow-browed ant could use.
 
Well come 42 unstable (hopefully – it’s a big task) our local hero Fox will have climbed Resize Mountain – and up-rezzed our entire UI to make it far more amenable to those lucky folks with super-snazzy monitors. So good news for many, we hope.
 
HOLSTERS
In 42 not only are we adding visible holsters, in multiple colours, but also special shoulder and ankle holsters.
 
Shoulder holsters will conceal the holster and handgun when garments like jackets are worn over them, and also can store two pistol magazines as a container. Ankle holsters can only hold the m36 Revolver currently, and the holster and firearm will be concealed by long pants, skirts or dresses.
 
You’ll be able to find them on both existing, and new, zombie costume types – and we strongly suggest seeking out a plainclothes police detective zombie. (Might be tricky though).
 
 
OTHER STUFF
Following the successful integration of the effort and body noises from real actor people in a real recording studio into the game we’ve decided to get a load more done (three new men, three new ladies) so we get a range of different-sounding people – which in turn will make for more interesting character creation, and for more variety when players stand and fight around each other in MP.  
For the longest time, since forever in fact, alcoholic intake hasn’t had enough impact on the player – outside of some fun stuff when drink-driving. We haven’t gone as far as implementing a whole new animation set, but as a fun little side project you might find a few extra complications next time you’re utterly shit-faced.  
FINALLY
A MASSIVE thanks to everyone who bought a Steadfast Spiffo from Makeship!
 
We sold 2000 more plushies than the first run of Spiffos due to your amazing charitable instincts – and we raised over 73,000 US dollars for Cancer Council Queensland in memory of our friend Vicki Ann Woods!
 
Thank you so much for helping us with this, and we hope you enjoy your Steadfast Spiffo when he arrives on your doorstep later this year.
We’ll see you back here next month (details on the temporarily monthly Thursdoids here) for more cool stuff. Thanks again all x
A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here

Hey all, hope this finds you well.
Lots of work on the technical side of the four main pillars of 42 these past two weeks – all of which relatively dry, so let’s run through that briefly before checking out some of the other items rolling in.
 
Right now the foundational code to our in-depth crafting systems revamp are being brought into a position where the MP team can better get their hooks into it, while in our optimization/lighting/height channel we’ve been continuing to polish out cutaway issues, errors thrown and the way our isoregions system handles its newfound 32 potential storeys.
For our MP upgrade, meanwhile, work continues on getting the machinations of player inventories (building, recipes etc) over onto the server – while also improving the implementation of our (pretty much fully cooked at this point) new fishing minigames and systems. Domestic animals, meanwhile, are in bug fix mode – with additional attention being given to their pathfinding and around animal escapes.
 
While all this is ongoing other team members are beavering away raising the quality of the game in smaller-scale ways, so let’s look at a few of those fun nuggets now.
 
CURRENT AFFAIRZ
One way to give our towns and city more personality is to provide more written literature for you to loot and peruse – whether it’s a fully readable lore item, or simply an interestingly named (if non-readable) book found in a house you loot that might deepen your understanding of the life of the zombie you just bludgeoned downstairs.
 
 
Build 42 will feature a range of newspapers, each with a final three or four issues to pick up and read in a separate ‘written content UI’. They will contain news articles about the initial build-up to the Knox Event articles, everyday life articles, and even a few breadcrumbs as to what’s really been going in.
 
This will also include smaller scale publications: like ‘town news’ pamphlets for the smaller settlements that don’t quite warrant a full-scale newspaper. 
 
Beyond this we’ve also had a lovely man called Stuart taking all our teeny-tiny map logos and up-rezzing them into more suitable forms for both in-game and irl usage. Their first use within the game are ‘local business’ fliers that are also readable via the same ‘printed media’ UI.
 

 
Clearly there’s not much zed content that can be made from these, but their gameplay role is to mark up interesting locations (and sources of potentially helpful loot) on the in-game map – a function that we feel will be especially handy for new players.
 
We feel that finding a flier that’s a membership advertisement for, say, the West Maple Country Club and revealing it on the player’s map will give an interesting reason for new players to leave town and explore – and likewise a job advert for McCoy logging and a corresponding map reveal might flag a decent place to potentially find an axe.
 
There’s SO MUCH stuff on the PZ map, and we wanted a way to direct people to some of the locations we’re most proud of. Especially those lost in the vastness of Louisville.
 
PERSONAL READING
We also really want you to feel interested in the deceased people whose homes you are raiding, and perhaps even saddened by their demise. From this we’ve also added a LOT more texture to the names of some of the books, comics and magazines they’ve been reading – and indeed the photographs they’ve been tenderly keeping in an upstairs drawer.
 
The hope is that when the spawn tags on these 1500 different interestingly titled books/mags (non-readable) combine with the way we guide our RNG looted spawns work then neat little stories will form in your head about the sorts of folks that lived here up until recently – and perhaps who you just left dead on the kitchen floor.
 
Perhaps they were reading a book called “Long Term Illness Management” by Laura Paloma, which shines a light on the medication in the bathroom.
 
Perhaps their love of military history ties in with the guns, or maybe it’s satisfying to know the zombie in the garden used to read trashy thrillers.
 
Likewise finding photographs that aren’t simply called “photograph” in a cupboard won’t do much to you, but instead seeing “Photograph of a Smiling Family” or “Photograph of a Wedding Car Arriving at a Church” will hopefully do you some emotional damage. We’ve got about five hundred of these, and they’re already bringing some amazing (doomed) colour to the average loot run.
 
We’ve also got six new TV channels, a new radio station, and 75 new VHSs ready to mix into the game (all written by Pat_Bren, who’s also the architect of all the above alongside coder Blair Algol) so really feel that B42 will broaden the narrative possibilities of the game significantly – while also neatly tying into the gameplay in many instances.
Some other changes that are tied into the above:
 
The books, magazines and comic books that now have individual titles, will also be persistent. Instead of disappearing after being read, there will be a cooldown period that dictates how much time must pass before the character’s moodles can benefit from re-reading said item. In conjunction with this revision of literature items, we’ve gone over the mechanics of the Illiterate traits. Illiterate characters are unable to read literature items, but in some cases, such as Comic Books, Catalogues, Photos, and “certain magazines”, they will be able to enjoy looking at the item instead of reading it. In build 42 Illiterate characters will also be unable to read or write player generated notes using sheets of paper or notebooks, write notes on maps (although they can still put symbols on them), read the text on the annotated map items, or understand the nutritional information on packaged food. We’ve done a common sense implementation of needing light to read. If there is insufficient light in a character’s square, and they don’t have an active light source, they will be unable to read (or “look at” for illiterate characters) printed matter, unable to read nutritional information on packaged food, and unable to open maps.  
MEN WITH VEN
Part of the above has been in ensuring that the right newspapers and pamphlets spawn in their appropriate towns, and as such we’ve mixed in a new municipal region system that tells the game’s systems exactly what area of the map each location in the game is located within.
 
We’re also using this for some new vehicles owned by local businesses, that only ever spawn in their hometown and associated region.
 
It’s generally not a known gameplay function, but for many builds now we’ve had ‘profession’ vehicles on the map that are owned by carpenters, metalworkers and electricians – all of whom *do* leave tools in their vehicle overnight.
 
We’ve never flagged this up, however, which has been a missed opportunity – as for players searching for particular items these are very much mobile treasure boxes. Therefore Martin has created a variety of new vehicles for different businesses to better communicate what sort of special loot might be found inside.
 
We have vehicles for different utilities, nationwide businesses and local businesses – many will only spawn in one town, and some are unique in that only one instance of that vehicle will spawn in the world.
 
We know that PZ players love collecting vehicles, especially in multiplayer servers, so this should spice up the hunt for the vehicle collectors. This regional system, and unique vehicle system, is set up to be easily used by mods also.
 
GASP. WHEEZE. PANT.
Regular readers will know that we recently had our very own recording sessions in a studio with microphones, actors and everything.
 
We had various missions to accomplish with this – a primary one being to obtain recordings of a male survivor and a female survivor huffing, puffing, getting hurt, climbing over things, sneezing, coughing and even shouting “hey!”.
The first fruits of these can be heard below and (while subtle when added to the mix and heard in isolation from the way the game sounds currently) we believe that they’ll add a lot to your overall experience once they land in 42.

(PLEASE NOTE: This is a work in progress. Volume and balance levels are initial ones and will change, likewise some recordings sound better than others and we haven’t cherry-picked the ones that work best yet. We think that the exertion noises during heavy combat could certainly do with a boost.)
 
 
 
 
 
A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games industry gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Project Zomboid strongly discourages the unlawful dissemination of classified military intelligence
 

How do all. Here’s a check-in from a few different Build 42 departments, that also occurs in the lead-up to the first in-person meet-up for the wider PZ team since 2018. We’re all aflutter about it (and trying to remember everyone’s real world names instead of online handles) and hope to have lots of good B42 chat in amongst the introduction of an international team to traditional Geordie culture.
 
Let’s pop into a few different areas, then – with the caveat that for a fuller B42 overview our last dev blog is probably a better destination.
FIRE
Work continues on the fire rewrite branch with the intention being to bring it up to a state in which it can safely enter our internal test build.

It recently came to mind that a lot of the ‘fire dev’ chat in blogs took place in the distant past, before we had to reshuffle and our current MP team became what it is today – thereby forcing flames into the sidelines for an elongated spell.
 
As such the guys have made a vid for us today that spells out some of the foundations of what is being done here, in terms of how fire spread, size and duration is governed – and indeed the sort of stats that lie beneath the hood that we can balance with, and that the community can mod with.
That’s the first half of the video: done with our old fire effects (which are too transparent and also on fast forward) so please take this aspect as instructional/iterative rather than a fait accompli.
 
The second part of the video then moves on to show our experimentation with fire visuals, working alongside our VFX artist friend Brian, as we work out different ways to make in-game flame effects better match our particularly coloured iso-world.
 
MP TEAM
As regular readers will know, alongside tidying up smaller multiplayer irritations as they go, our MP team are currently transferring player inventory actions over away from the client and onto the server. They have another three or four weeks set aside for the first stage of this: at which point we will the player’s inventory loaded from the database on the server, and the server always having an up-to-date player inventory – hopefully all working in sync with the progress bars, item move times and expected results you get currently.
At this point the second major part of the code work will be getting underway: having all the item manipulation occurring on the server side, and ensuring that the server no longer trusts clients (those sneaky clients!) so that stuff like item adding cheats are rendered defunct.

After this, clearly, there’ll be a heap of testing and such – but we thought the more technically-minded amongst us would appreciate a catch-up on where the guys are with it.
 
FISHING
This past week Aiteron has been working with the testers who’ve been reporting back on bugs and gameplay in the latest version of our revamped fishing – and has been largely working on an improved/experimental control system for a more chilled out and less button-holdy-tappy experience.

He has also been working with our aforementioned VFX specialist friend Brian, who has been supplying us with various splashes, bubbles and signs of water movement that will indicate the presence of fish, and also be a suggestion of the size of what lurks beneath. On top of bug fixes, changed recipes and improved items for the system he’s also been firming up on exactly what sorts of fish we’ll be adding to the game, and whether they’d be found in rivers or lakes (and definitely not swimming pools).
 
There’s gonna be lot of bass: largemouth, smallmouth, white, spotted and striped. And let’s not even get started on the crappies…
CRAFTING
After an awful lot of code-side tinkering, a super WIP version of our crafting improvement has surfaced into something that’s viewable in a vid. Please note this is the visible tip of the iceberg, and clearly what’s on show isn’t final: you do not saw logs in a furnace, and this isn’t how you make a hammer.
 
So what’s on show here?

Various objects can now be entirely created using the game’s scripting language that’s been made similar to the way items and vehicles etc. are defined.

This covers various currently planned objects that can function as a craft station: stuff like blacksmith furnace, tailoring bench, fletchery, brewing stands, kilns etc. And, unlike the way it is now, these can also be objects consisting of multiple tiles/sprites with various rotations etc.
At a craft station the player is able to use their normal recipes (which may provide a bonus for doing the recipe at a craftstation) but it’s here that they can use their blueprints – and which ones are available will be defined by the associated object script.
Blueprints (working title) are similar to recipes in that they can take inputs, and produce outputs. However they are distinct from your usual recipes in the following ways:
 
They have different duration modes – in real world seconds, game minutes or can run passively in the background for long periods. They may not require the player to be present. For example, a melting process may run on the craftstation while you run off to do other things. As well as items, they can take the input (and produce) Fluids and different in-game ‘energies’ – Electric, Heat, Kinetic or Steam. When active a Blueprint in progress can store its inputs/outputs, and may have storage capacity for them. For example, a blueprint that needs water as an input may well have an internal storage buffer for water. We’ll probably show this in a development vid next time.
Blueprints are processed much like recipes where the inputs by default are consumed to create the outputs. However the default behaviour can be complemented or overridden by custom lua code for certain blueprint events like OnStart, OnUpdate, OnFinish, OnCancel. This is similar to normal recipe events such as OnCreate.
 
Using this custom lua code interesting things can be done – like for example a blueprint for a Meat Drying Rack which has several input slots for meat. The blueprint can be set to run passively, so it wont require a player to manually start it up.
 
The OnUpdate event then triggers a lua function which checks if the Meat Drying Rack is situated in a exterior space, and if so we can then go into our usual PZ super-nerdery level of depth by calculating the amount to dry a meat item based on temperature and the cloud intensity / sunlight at that time. So when a meat item is dropped in one of the UI slots it starts passively drying the meat.
 
Another feature of blueprints is that their UI can be scripted. The video shows a few simple (bizarre) test examples of different UI layouts. However they can potentially be scripted to have any desired appearance – using any of the game’s existing UI elements, or indeed modded ones.
 
As mentioned heavily above: the video is very early WIP, especially where the UI is concerned, and there are still some parts not yet functional. In a future update we can show a more functional UI, and run through some more interesting case examples.
LES ANIMAUX
Finally, over to RJ in the animal zone.

“I’ve been diving more and more into a farm animal’s designation zones – which are paddocks you outline for your animals to occupy (as long as they don’t get loose) and where the game will allow you to do all your various primary animal-rearing tasks. For most of this week I’ve been refactoring and simplifying my animal behaviour and meta code, but there’s a few interesting things to mention.”
 
“Cows and sheep can now recognize a roof area and stay under it during heavy rain, I’ve been trying to get sheep to move in more of a flock most of the time, and baby animals will follow their mother more correctly. You can also now drop food directly on ground for them to eat, or in the feeding trough container – where it won’t spoil quite so quickly.”
 
Also, among many other things (haircare, first aid, dropping bags, new emergency broadcast system noises) the Sound Team have also started making animal noises.
 
Behold, the cows now have hoofsteps.
 
This week’s tarmac follow party from Darth. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too.

Experienced gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

Hey all, hope you’re all doing well and that thus far 2023 has been kind. Let’s get straight into it.
NEW FACES
First of all we’d like to welcome officially three new people to the full Project Zomboid team.
 
Fenris_Wolf should need no introduction to the old hands of the Project Zomboid community. He took over and maintained the ORGM mod with great aplomb from the original creator ORMtnMan – and will be a name familiar to many.
 
Right now he’s reacclimatizing himself with the PZ codebase, charged with clearing out some of the niggly things that have been on our ‘to do’ list so he gets his fingers dirty in many and various different areas of the game. Clearly his expertise with guns and the firearms code will likely come into play at some point in his time with us, but for now it’s all about bedding down and getting comfy in Spiffo’s hovering mothership.
Also joining us officially, meanwhile, are Amz and Pat_Bren.
 
Amz is another familiar name from the community, and was a great help to us in the days of 41 MP testing. She’s now officially a full-time tester working with Sasha and Yana, and will also be making cool videos for our blogs and improving our (already extraordinarily professional) social media engagements.
 
Pat_Bren, meanwhile, has been writing up a storm for Build 42 on a part time basis – writing new radio and TV channels and content, new lore for what’s going on around the world and much more besides – and will now be working other cool future content in an official and ongoing capacity.
42 STUFF
Right now, we’re probably due an ‘overview’ of Build 42, so everyone is on the same page about its contents rather than skipping about between them each blog.
 
42  boils down to four large chunks of deep-rooted work that we want to all come together: the crafting/animals update, the map expansion, the optimization/lighting/basements engine upgrade, and the weighty job the MP team have taken on to move all inventory interactions over from clients to server.
 
These are all at different stages – for example animals are further ahead than a lot of the elements of crafting in terms of being ready to actively test and play with. Right now with the crafting, the work taking place is on the back-end codeside of crafting stations and component UIs.
Meanwhile with the engine upgrade at this point we’re essentially fixing up various different rendering issues that were broken with our quite fundamental changes to the system up to a point at which it’s ready to be merged into the test build.
 
The map team meanwhile continue to pump out new towns, interesting locations and fun places to travel to and hold out in.
Around these big ticket items we also have other coders, writers, artists and 3D modellers working to improve aspects of the current game.
So there’s the in-depth fire overhaul, Aiteron’s revamped fishing, better farming, more imaginative and fun items to find and use, better events to come across, improved recipes, new animations and activities, improved music system and deeper soundscape – and general piles and piles of polish and improvement throughout.
 
So with all that firmly held in mind, let’s have a quick dart around some of the different departments of PZ to catch up on a few bits and bobs.
Our smashing friend Steve N, who we’re borrowing from EverCurious Entertainment, has been digging into our animation system and working out some longstanding issues that we’ve been desperate to fix. We’re currently jumping into a test build to check nothing else has been broken by his changes, but the result will be a lot more silky smooth turns and 180s in your survival forays. The big debate currently in our work with livestock is how to make it clear to players that you’ll need to designate areas that you want them to occupy and produce within, alongside building them fences they won’t escape through. We’ve got various ideas for this and will be running our experiments past the testers.

Increasingly we’re realising just how much more ‘life’ these non-human and non-zombie creatures bring to the game. To which end we are also experimenting with some non-interactive beasts that will run before you get near, and give the game a smidge more desolate colour…
  As mentioned before, alongside refinements and improvements to the music system, right now via Formosa/Noiseworks we’re in the process of getting real life human actors (in Los Angeles! In America!) to record some basic bodily noises to give extra life (and pain) to our Knox Event survivors. Imagine how cool it will be in MP when one of your buddies reaches you, having escaped zombies and run in terror, and you can hear their panicked heavy breathing.

That’s the sort of thing we want to capture, alongside noises of hurt and exertion as you tumble around the landscape. While we’re there we are also going to get a variety of other ‘spoken’ TV and radio noises that we can then obfuscate to improve the entertainment system slightly.
  Aiteron is back with us and has picked up on his work on fishing. This is its current iteration, which will shortly be mixed into the internal test build. This probably needs some more tweaking with the ‘strain’ animations – and the indications that a big fish is being caught – but is really getting there now. It’ll be mixed into the internal test build soon, which is also the point at which Formosa can start working on the new sound effects and such.
  About a bazillion new items – some useful (hose now required for gas siphoning, kids) and some more aimed at making the world feel fuller and more ‘real’ are also currently going into the internal test build. Here are a few examples.
This week’s wintry scene from BruceWayne (not the real one). A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Thanks to everyone who voted for Spiffo in the Labo(u)r of Love awards. He seemed quite chuffed about it.

Really hope you guys win! It would be deserved! I've enjoyed Zomboid for years and you are the most tenacious bunch of devs I know. Thanks for the years of fun and congrats for the nomination!

Really hope you guys win! It would be deserved! I've enjoyed Zomboid for years and you are the most tenacious bunch of devs I know. Thanks for the years of fun and congrats for the nomination!

First off… ahem… “Vote for Project Zomboid in the Steam Awards!”

In a fairly mindblowing chain of events, mainly due to the awesomeness of the survivors of the Knox Event, Project Zomboid has been nominated for Labor of Love in the Steam Awards.
 
We are up against some fantastic other games (vote Deep Rock or No Man’s Sky if you’re less keen on us – those teams are incredible!) but just being on the list is a massive achievement for us and we’re so grateful for the community for getting our name up in lights like this.
 
So thanks everyone, it really does mean a lot!
BLOG BEGINS
We’ve got a lot of the team away on their Christmas break this week who weren’t around to prod for contributions, or have a house full of sick people who need attention (that’s me, Hi), however the following items were shoved into the blog writer’s sack nonetheless.
 
In preparation for getting real actor-recorded body sounds, huffs and puffs for the game – Matteo has been recording his own voice to get a feel for what’s required. He’s kept them quite subtle to match the perspective, and the consideration that the player doesn’t want to be heard by zombies, so right now they’re not too over the top. We might change the approach with this, but it’s interesting to consider them and think what they’ll bring in terms of immersion to the game.
 
  We’re currently working on bringing our optimization and basements branch (both mapper-placed underground areas that always appear, and the randomly occurring ones placed as surprise features and treasure/zombie boxes) into a testable state. This is an ongoing process, but a lot of progress has been made this week so it’s rather exciting nevertheless.
  The integration of fire is still trucking along with most of our attention currently being on making flames fit the scene, we have a VFX artist joining us for a little while early in the new year – and in the meantime are experimenting code-side too. We’ll share some vids when we’re closer to the finished article.
  Blair is working on a variety of things – and is currently super proud of ‘LootLog’ which he wants advertised so modders are aware of it. This is a dev and modder tool that, once activated, logs every item that spawns around the player rather than wait for the player (or modder/dev) to discover it. Info logged includes a list of items; the room definition in question; the container type in question; and the X, Y and Z coordinates of the container in question.

This is intended as a tool for us and the modding community to evaluate the amounts of loot that spawn, and where it spawns. The blog writer is aware that it isn’t super sexy blog content – but Blair underlines that it is a ‘niche pleaser’ so if you are in that niche: consider yourself pleased.
  Also in the Algol pipeline this week: improved ‘profession’ houses with cars outside that match the profession, new weapons, new zed stories, new ‘filler’ book items with names dreamt up by dreamy Pat_Bren and the implementation of all sorts of new foods and 3D items.
  RJ’s animals have entered initial testing, which made for an extremely fun first day of crazy bug reports and ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and cuteness. It’s amazing what ‘life’ non-human and non-zombie animated creatures suddenly bring to PZ when you encounter them in-game.

Fun bugs we dealt with included: Alongside the chickens that keep opening doors, five eggs dropped on a wooden floor created a house full of roosters.

Pigs breeding so fast that a piglet horde started to form before one of our tester’s eyes.

While not a bug, this one was deliberate, here’s also a picture of some cows in a strip club.

Merry Christmas.
 
This week’s festive grave visit from 지혁! A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. We’re also on sale at the moment if any of your mates fancies it x

Hello survivors! Three things of note this week.
FINAL BUILD 41 PATCH RELEASED
This afternoon we put out 41.78 to the stable branch, and you can read its changelist here.
Nothing seems to have exploded just yet, but there will very likely be a hot fix for anything that does crop up. We’ve had a few complaints of visual issues with some clothing that we’d thought we’d fixed for instance, that can probably get a quick look-over again before we move on.
This patch is largely quality of life changes, some MP tweaks and fixes for longstanding annoyances – so hopefully you’ll see a few things in the changelist that make you feel both cherished and warm.

Other than that hot fix, unless we return if circumstances demand it, the final devs who were tinkering in Build 41 will from this point on all be fully aboard the Build 42 train.
 
BARNYARD FRIENDS
First, let us reiterate – Build 42 is still a long way off. However RJ’s development playpen for the domestic animals that the build will feature is still ticking along quite nicely. This week he has prepared two videos for your delight but first TWO caveats.
 
First, our animator Martin wants it known that one of the things we’ll be working on will be the way animals turn / turn when they move.
Secondly, clearly what you’re seeing here is debug dev-stuff – especially how it looks and operates when leading an animal around on a rope. We haven’t quite landed on the best way to herd animals around yet, and will likely have to land at a halfway house between realistic, feasible and fun. Likewise, thirdly I guess, UIs clearly aren’t final yet either.
 
So here’s proof that you can pet the cute little animals in Build 42 of Project Zomboid.
 
 
And here’s how to coax them into a trailer so you can cart them off to slaughter them somewhere distant so their loud desperate squeals won’t attract zombies.
 
MAGICAL WOODLAND FRIEND
Yes, it’s happened. Spiffo merchandise is finally a thing. Behold! More information to come later on down the line. But for now…



To register your interest in crowdfunding a Spiffo plushie visit the Makeship Store! The full campaign begins in less than a week!

To find out how you could win one of two free plushies visit this twitter post!
This week’s table arsenal from Polaris. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. No-one is allowed to make a jar-based gag in the presence of our Spiffo plushie, please, as we had to google it and oh dear god no please no.

Good day, ragged survivors! If you’re a connoisseur of the wonderful world of community maps, you’ve probably already come across Throttlekitty’s Tiles mod, which many of the maps use. The mod adds dozens of new tiles to let mappers’ imaginations run free – and for players to use to decorate their bases.
 
Throttlekitty’s tiles tend towards the believably mundane: fire extinguisher holders for walls, oil and gas tanks, dumpsters, coffee and sewing machines, fuseboxes, bench grinders and vices, along with some Fallout-style walls made from junked cars.
Not only has Throttlekitty made all these tiles, but they also are very active on our official Discord, helping new and experienced mappers and modders to make the creation of their dreams, and you may have seen them thanked by some of our previous mod blog interviewees.
 
We wanted to find our more about Throttlekitty, so we scrambled our way through a building filled with new and interesting objects, and managed to find a bloodstained notebook featuring an interview with the famous tiler themselves! Take it away, TK…
Throttlekitty
Who are you in real life? Tell us a little about yourself.
“My name is Joel, and I work at a small indie studio making games, primarily doing rigging and some character art. I’m a long-time gamer and occasional modder as well. I’m at my happiest when I can put on some noisy music and just make things. I have a recent obsession with using AI to create images, very exciting times in that regard!”
 
How did you first discover Project Zomboid? Why do you like it?
“I remember passing on the game a couple times, but I’m very glad I did eventually give it a go, though I really don’t remember when, it was many years ago now! I love everything zombie-related, and Project Zomboid hits a lot of the marks: just the right mixture of grit, desolation, panic and hope. I think what I appreciate most is how detailed the games systems can be, without feeling overbearingly tedious, or like you’re playing off a predetermined checklist of things to do.”
 
Tell us about your tileset. How many individual tiles are there? Can you talk us through your process of making a single tile? What references, if any, do you use when making your tiles?
“I think I’m at a little over 100 assets released right now, not counting variations and overlays. I didn’t think it was so many already, and there’s still never enough! I built up a good workflow using Autodesk Maya and Adobe Photoshop to make my tiles; I try to do as much as I can in 3D to keep things simple for myself. To match the game style, I keep the models and textures from being overly detailed, and I use a toon shader to pick my colors in a way that I would when doing traditional pixel art. I constantly do renders while I work, to make sure that what I’m working on is on-target for the game.”

 
“On the 2D side in Photoshop, I’ll add hand painted details, dabbing in additional grunge or highlights, along with some basic compositing and color corrections before setting the final tilesheet layout for use in the game. As for reference, I’m usually making something based on the real world, so I’ll pull up images of what I want to make, and use those as a guideline. I find avoiding 1:1 copies a lot more fun anyway, and working in the confines of smallish pixel art makes the whole process a good challenge overall.”
 
How did you get into making tiles for PZ? Have you made artwork for other games before? Do you have any training in art/drawing etc.?
“I’ve been an artist my whole life, so doing graphics mods is something I always gravitate to. No particular training, a person’s growth in art is a very fluid ongoing process, I think!  I’ve done similar mods for other games in the past, I did a fair bit of it in Oblivion way back. Sometimes I’ll get the itch and make little personal projects for myself too.”
 
You’re known for your helpfulness towards other mappers. Can you tell us about some of the mappers/modders you’ve aided, and the projects you’ve helped with?
“It’s hard to keep count! I tend to be a very technical person, I like to dig deep into how things work.  I know that not everyone wants to spend their time that way, so I’m always glad to pass along interesting tidbits that I’ve found along the way on Discord or wherever. Plus it’s always great when someone else is trying to push the limits a little further, brainstorming is fun! Other people are doing the same too, communities are great for that. I generally stay away from jumping into others’ projects, I’ve a pretty full plate most of the time.”
 
Your tiles have that unique “PZ” look. Is that hard to achieve?
“Thanks, and it did take some work to get my tiles matching Mash’s style, seeing as how they come from 3D, and not pure 2D. I mentioned using a toon shader before. With my scene lights set up a particular way and with simple modeling techniques, I found that I was able to match the shades and palette quite nicely. A big benefit is that I get all the facing directions for free, and it can be easier to make more complex assets that would be difficult in traditional 2D.”
 
Your tiles are very varied, from new walls and containers to piping and industrial equipment. Is there a specific type of tile you enjoy making the most?
“I think I like working on pieces that say ‘I’m going to look awesome in your base, please loot me’ the best, and I should make more of those! I’ve made most of the industrial kits to help fill out those types of spaces.”
 
Is there anyone in the PZ community (or beyond) you would like to give a shout-out to? Which mods or maps (or tilesets!) by other users do you enjoy or find interesting?
“Oh jeez, practically everyone is making all great maps lately, it’s hard to keep up! Special shout-out to Daddy Dirkiedirk, Dylan, and Commander, always inspirational!”
 
What’s next in your tiling plans? What’s the dream?
“My Big Plan is making an absurdly large map for Zomboid! I jump back and forth between that and making new tiles. I wanted ways to make the locations look more interesting, and eventually more unique. One problem about big open world games is that there’s never ever enough art assets, so any way I can push that further helps.”
 
Thanks to Throttlekitty for answering our questions! You can find their tileset here.

Haylo survivors.
41.73 STABLE
We have the next patch to the stable branch primed and ready to go, however an issue that our fantastic Unstable beta testers have flagged is keeping it held in its pen for a little longer.
 
Players reported that some houses they’d cleared were spawning zeds upon booting up the new build, which alerted us to a snag in our map export process not dealing with map boundaries changing with map expansions. All previous map expansions came along with forced save incompatibility so this crept through unnoticed until now.
 
While it’s an aggravation rather than a save-breaker, we didn’t want to send a build with a known issue out to the masses – and have spent the last few days setting up a fix. This will need some testing, after which we’ll be looking to pump out the latest version next week.
If you’re interested in the changelist, or want to jump in to try it out, then you can find the unstable release notes for 41.72 and 41.73 behind the hotlinks.
 
42 CONTENT
One of the focus points of Build 42 is on extended survival in the months and years beyond the initial Knox Event outbreak.
For this, we are revamping our crafting system – and Turbo’s role has been in laying new foundations for a set-up that allows for: crafted items that have more RPG-like variable attributes based on the crafter’s skill, stats of input items that are reflected in the attributes of a final output item, and the ability of the game itself to recognise all these different attributes when an item is being passed between all of its various different locations and systems.
 
The next stage of this work, meanwhile, has been in taking this same sort of mentality to the liquids in the game – and also making them ever more interesting in our new crafting set-up.
 
WET STUFF
Let’s start with a video, and then move into some explanation.
 
 
 
So what exactly does this mean for the water, paint, gas, alcohol, washing detergent and bleach of the Knox Event?
Essentially all fluids will be defined and stored in a global registry, which is where we as devs can add new vanilla liquids – but also will make the system very moddable.
 
Each definition will store basic info such as ID, name, colour etc – then has different categories it can belong to like Beverage, Alcoholic, Fuel, Flammable and such. Beyond that we also tie in properties per litre of this particular fluid: for example Carbs, Proteins, Alcohol percentage or Energy if it’s a flammable fuel.
 
Liquids that are hazardous or poisonous can also have modifiers that configure the maximum poison effect, and how the effect behaves when mixed.
 
So yes, we’re going to have the most realistic bleach-drinking ever seen in gaming.
 
CONTAINERS
Containers are the coding class that actually store the fluids, and are the way in which the game code interacts with the above definitions.
Inventory items, objects found in the world and vehicles will all have a fluid container – which will allow them to store and use the liquids/fuels/whatever that they contain. Each container also has information stored with it that shows what particular fluids have been mixed in, and their content percentages relative to each other.
 
The system calculates and caches the summary of all the containing fluids properties based on their percentages. So, if you add 80% Soda and 20% pure alcohol the mixture fluid in the container will have 80% of the soda’s carbs, proteins etc and 20% alcohol. Then, when transferred again, the right ratios will still be maintained.
 
USAGE
Finally, we hear you cry, cocktail mixing will be a part of the apocalypse!
 
Yes, but also consider the applications this will bring to post-apocalyptic crafting – as well as to more basic stuff like mixing paints to create different colours, providing different fuels and different ways to tamper with said fuels.
 
Certain versions of our planned workstations, say one for brewing, could have one or more ‘fluidcontainers’ attached – while also allowing other ingredients as item inputs. Likewise we can have recipes that require more precise mixing and concentrations should we desire it.
The system does retain some control over your George’s Marvellous Medicine creations. We can put limits around what can, and cannot, be mixed – however we’re not 100% on how many limitations we will put on things right now. This will probably come through testing later down the line.
 
Unrestricted mixing would mean, for example, that any Fluid can be mixed with Fuel, which would mean that the energy value property per litre would go down when mixed, and that anything using the fuel such as a car or generator would have its operation and potential damage governed by the sort of fuel that had been put in.
 
The ability to recognise tampered fuel, poison etc. would (as usual) be gated behind the game’s professions – so a mechanic might smell something suspicious with watered down gas, or a chef might spot something odd with a mild concentration of something nasty in a bottle of juice.
 
When it comes to poisonous liquids, each has a maximum effect (mild, medium, severe, deadly etc) and control parameters such as a minimum volume and mix ratio. So, if a poison has max effect ‘deadly’ and the minimum amount required for death is 200ml – and you have 100ml mixed into a bottle – then the final effect when drinking will most likely be a medium poisoning.
 
The new system will also add new depth to such things as filling up a vehicle with gas, or siphoning gas from a car’s tank – but we’ll also retain the game’s current quick context options like “fill bottle from tap” to keep things speedy.
 
HUTCHES
Domestic and wild animals, albeit with fairly basic AI brains, will also be a part of Build 42 – and we have already shown our cows, sheep and deer. A fairly realistic take on poultry-keeping will also be part of this.
 
Please note the following UI is super WIP! We may well end up with icons instead of the 3D chickens.
Based on our own experiences with keeping chickens – if you have a henhouse you will have to close its door every night after your brood have gone in to roost. Otherwise there’s a very real chance of Fantastic Mister Fox paying a visit and stealing a few, and potentially leave others dead in their pen.
 
You’d be advised not to forget to let your hens back out in the morning either – for fear of them losing their condition, and adding to the mess in the henhouse that will need cleaning out.
 
Hens will also enter the nesting boxes within the henhouse to lay their eggs, and from which you’ll have to collect the eggs on a regular basis – if you haven’t collected recently then hens will choose to lay outside in their pen instead, where there’s an added risk of them being eaten by wild animals or going bad.
 
OTHER STUFF
While we’re going in DEEP (as is generally our way) on stuff like the above – Build 42 will also feature all manner of other improvements to the game engine, MP systems and general zombie survival and early game stuff too. So don’t fret too much if aspects of the above don’t exactly match your own play-style.
 
It should also be said that it’s still some ways off – partly because of dev illness (and recovery!) that we’ve discussed before, and partly because a proportion of the team are still maintaining and improving Build 41.
 
From now on you’ll likely notice the changelist of 41 patches shrink a little, as team members are taken off 41 and plugged into work on features within the 42 matrix.
 
JOB AD AGAIN
We are back on the hunt for an Animations Engineer / Technical Wizard  – most likely someone from the AAA game development space who has pines for joining a close-knit team of indie devs. If this is you, or someone you know, then our job page lives here!
 
This week’s forlorn firemen from OtakuYazawa. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too. Experienced games dev and want to work with us? Details here.

Hello! The last couple of weeks has had an unusually high number of absentees, by coincidental combinations of gaming conference attendees, long planned family visits, and even an unforeseen emergency hospital stay (that turned out fine, don’t worry) meaning we’ve been running on a somewhat diminished team of late, but that should be sorted out by next week and we’ll be running at full steam again! – so unfortunately, there aren’t any sexy vids or pics to show off. However still we have some super interesting stuff to talk about! However, it’ll likely take the form of ‘lotsa text’ so prepare yourself for that!
 
41.69
First, 41.69 (nice) build is still in progress, we’re testing a bunch of changes at the moment and are eager to get it out there, but are still weighing up the cost of disrupting the MP servers with the benefit of the goodies within, and making the call on when we’ll push to unstable and start the release process. We’ll let you know when we know more.
Here’s the changelist of 41.69 thus far!
 
https://pastebin.com/ZhRhKVZi

NPC Narratives
We figured a good way to give people something real tasty to sink their teeth into regardless of the lack of fancy vids or pics, would be to show off the text results of our Narrative NPC system that we discussed a few weeks back planned for Build 43.
 
As we detailed in our first NPC ‘meta’ system explanation, we have a powerful narrative event system that can be used to add context driven ‘storylets’ together into a somewhat convincing narrative for NPCs when they are away from the streamed-in world. These would define the goals of the NPCs, as well as evolve their situation so that when the player runs into them they have a convincing backstory, or events can transpire to affect those groups when they are not around for the player to witness. They will also drive events with npcs while the player IS present, leading to interesting generated story events for the player to interact with.
 
These events set flags on characters, move their virtual presence along road networks and between houses of which all the rooms on the entire map are accessible even when the tiles themselves have not been streamed in. We can add extra data and tags that change the NPCs states and allow them to experience simplified narrative events that will branch and trigger randomly, and each of these events can have numerous outcomes of which we can attach a line of dialogue recounting the event later, so the characters will be able to sit around a campfire and let the rest know their story, or group members can recount the events of an eventful trip the player wasn’t part of, or what transpired at the safehouse while the player was away.
 
Context sensitive text scripting is used to modify these lines of dialogue to fit the situation. For example, a tag for a character’s name in the dialogue can be substituted with ‘my mother-in-law, X’ or ‘my nephew, Y’ tracking the relationship between the two characters, or even between the character being spoken about and a third character (‘X’s brother, Y’). Other things such as a town location can be substituted where necessary, and there can be variant lines which are picked based on the characters, their flags, or other environmental conditions. Or just raw RNG, to mix things up a bit.
 
Pat_Bren has been busy coming up with a whole metric ton of varied events and mini narratives, and Lemmy has been integrating these into the event system. There’s a lot more to add yet, but its starting to yield some cool results.
 
Here’s a few narrative outputs. Full disclosure: some massaging of the results has taken place here, it’s somewhat curated as the system is still capable of some very odd results and the pool is not yet large enough to avoid ‘arrow to the knee’ situations, if we just threw in the first 10 results it’d probably not be so impressive at this stage, so we’ve picked ones with the least overlap — though you’ll likely notice a few repeated statements (in most cases this also demonstrates the variants or alternate paths we have there to mix it up) – our goal is, ultimately, with progressive builds, to widen the library of narrative events and lines to the point where each story feels completely unique (easier to do without voiced dialogue, but we apologise profusely to our translators). 
 
Please be aware these are still work in progress, and we still need to do some work to make these flow as naturally as possible as if recounted later to another character — rather than as a straight log of events that can seem a bit terse and unnatural, so none of the text is remotely final and we still need to figure out a good balance of information that would feel natural to share to a third party potentially weeks later…
(It’s very important to note that, at present, these narratives are limited mainly to the meta, and while we talk about how they will impact characters the player witnesses, there is still a lot of work to do in that department. This is all very super work-in-progress, and while a metric ton of work has been done across the NPC codebase, it's still a big job to piece it all together to work as one.)
Breakdown of a narrative
Let’s pick one of them and break down how it works:
As is probably clear, this is all too self-consistent to be completely random. This isn’t just a bunch of random disconnected events triggering one after another, but rather a mini-narrative that is comprised of several related events, each of which has various ways they can pan out and also conditions that can lead to them triggering in the first place, leading to a whole host of other outcomes that will affect the group in different ways.
 
To show this, you’ll see another branching version of this same narrative in the list of outputs above, starting with ‘Just before the shit hit the fan, Joe got sick’. Though it sharing the specific phrase ‘shit hit the fan’ text was a coincidence, it could have equally started with ‘Just before things got really bad’ or ‘Before all of this’.
 
Narratives have natural end points that can end that narrative, or instead they potentially lead naturally into another if relevant. In other cases they can set flags on characters or groups that will lead to other events, or even other narratives, having a chance of triggering on them in future. This is the way the narratives can ultimately serve as larger building blocks to make longer character stories that flow into each other convincingly.
 
So back to this demo narrative above:
 
“Just before the shit hit the fan, my sister Annie got sick.”
 
As detailed before, we generate the starting NPC groups from various families, with some other elements to mix things up. In the first event of this narrative, we pick an appropriate member of the household to ‘get sick’. This will set the first constant within this narrative that will be referenced and used throughout.
 
Then the second event in the narrative is thus…
 
“We tried to take her to the hospital… but the highway was blocked with traffic.”
 
This event will trigger the characters of the group (however it was generated) including the unfortunate Annie, to set a goal to travel to the Louisville hospital. Wherever they are in the world, a path will be generated along roads to that location. Even though the characters, nor a vehicle, are streamed into the world, and they exist virtually in the ‘meta’, we can randomly assign them an appropriate car and start them moving at approximately car speed along the roads enroute to Louisville.
 
If the player were to cross paths with this virtual ‘radar blip’ of these characters, it would spawn in the car with them inside, moving in the correct direction at the appropriate speed, and the more direct vehicle controlling AI would take over with the same destination in mind.
This event can play out in various ways, hitting the military blockade, crashing the car, getting stuck amongst a group of zombies.
 
Getting stuck in traffic has various outcomes, including for example a car-jacking attempt, or the person being carried turning in the car. Some of these may lead to more generic events or narratives, or may continue the main mini-narrative to a further conclusion.
Assuming all this carries on within the virtual meta world, they will make their way until they hit one of the traffic jam zones on the highway, which in this case causes it to trigger the next event in the narrative.
 
“By that time we realised it was too late, the car was blocked in, there was no way out. We had to abandon the car and make our way on foot.”
 
Alternatively, it could be they managed to drive back home, or get through the jam and onto the next problem. But, in this case the narrative branches to this outcome. We flag they have lost their car, and are now on foot. 
 
We set their goal to still be heading toward Louisville hospital, however now they are flagged as on foot and the group’s ‘radar blip’ move at a much slower rate along the road. If a player intersected with their journey, we’d spawn the characters all on foot, and the AI would take over from there with the same pathing goal.
 
Now they are on foot, this opens the door for other events linked to this narrative to fire that wouldn’t be possible within a vehicle. One such event that can randomly trigger is a worsening of the health condition of whomever was chosen to be the sick one, which is what happens next.
 
“Annie was real bad, her fever was getting worse. Bryan, her husband, had to carry her.”
 
True, at this time we don’t have any way to ‘make this real’ should the player happen upon this group, since we don’t have support for characters carrying others at the moment. We hope to add this, and should we do this, then when we spawn the characters in the flesh we would set them up as appropriate to the event – but regardless, at the moment these narratives in particular take place way too early for players to actually intersect with, so we can take a few liberties in these particular narratives anyway.
 
Notice Bryan is referred to as ‘her husband’, which is automatically generated using Annie as the context character, and the code examining the closest relationship between these two characters. We could instead have an alternate line of dialogue using the speaking character (Annie’s sibling) as the context and it would instead read ‘my brother-in-law, Bryan’, finding the shortest link between the speaking character and Bryan was through Annie. We plan for this to be expanded in future to automatically modify based on all manner of things, such as character opinion, and/or character’s traits (My idiot brother-in-law, Bryan, for example) though this may not be present in the first iterations of the system.
 
So now, we have flagged that the ‘illperson’ is being carried, and is being carried by Bryan. This opens up the potential for new events to be triggered, and indeed that is what happens. Poor Bryan.
 
Again, some choices, what they do with the zombie Annie and Bryan, there could be a third victim in attempting to put them down. These branches are, relatively, painless to write, and can be expanded on far into the future. It means we can have many small narrative threads, ones that last days, or ones that last months, that thread in appropriate events to steer the story in believable directions, with written or designed outcomes that make sense and feel like a real story, in a manageable and expandable way.
 
The ‘quests’ that we have with our story generation will likely fit in line with this above narrative system. Is a character split from their loved ones, on their way to another town to find them? Maybe you can help? We’re hoping for a more organic structure of interaction and transaction with NPCs that emerges from this narrative system and leads to some really cool and believable stories being told with our NPCs.
 
Header Image pilfered from a previous blog out of laziness, sorry! Centralized Block of Text has nothing more to say today, bye bye!

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.

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!

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!

Howdy survivors! Another crazy week for us, we’re still in a bit of a daze!
 
Just a few more days until the entire team are back together after the various international holiday periods have all come to an end, and we’re looking exceedingly forward to fixing up a few of the big issues that have come out in the wash since the MP launch. You can read more about them in last week’s blog here.
 
So the big question, now 41 is out there, and after the remaining MP issues have been fixed up, is what comes next?
 
 
Two Team Release Schedule
Going forward, now the behemoth that is Build 41 is increasingly looking to be in our rear-view mirror, we are going to structure the internal game’s development into two distinct teams (With General Arcade continuing in the meantime on improving MP, optimizing the server, increasing the player count and other MP related tech)
 
First, a little bit of a teaser!
 
 
(This is a fairly old internal video, created as a working proof-of-concept of various aspects of our NPC tech. It’s also not necessarily canonically accurate anymore. It was built to echo our earliest tech demo, but this might not be the start point we take with narrative in future, even if the characters would still be familiar.)
 
It’ll have been no surprise to anyone who read the interview in which Lemmy dropped some major Thursdoid spoilers that one of those teams is going to be focusing exclusively on NPC development from this point on. We’ll also be able to talk about it (not necessarily every Thursdoid, but certainly no longer in a vacuum), rather than work away in secret due to our ‘only discuss what’s coming next’ rule we instigated after a few instances of talking far too early about stuff.
 
Long ago we stated (informally on a forum post) our planned features for future builds, starting with hunting for build 42, and then numerous NPC builds for build 43 and onward.
 
However, many changed circumstances and much ponderings later, we’ve decided that this is not the best approach to take. First of all, its very clear that human NPCs have long been the most requested feature that is still outstanding, and the source of most of the frustration and bad feeling from those who consider the game to still be incomplete.
 
Not only this, but in slightly more selfish reasons, a big reason for not being comfortable with hunting and pets being first, is they are still NPCs and would necessarily leverage all the technology we’ve being working on for years at this point.
 
We have such amazing and peskily talented modders out there, we know fine well that as soon as we released this tech within their grasps, we would end up seeing extremely powerful NPC mods appearing, using our NPC tech heavily, before we had the pleasure of seeing this hard work paid off with our own NPCs.
 
It may be the initial build still contains hunting and wild animals, they ARE NPCs after all. It may be they drop into a subsequent build or later on in the unstable beta cycle, its not clear yet for reasons we’ll discuss in a bit. But the next BIG thing will be NPCs and we’ll have a dedicated team working toward this goal going forward.
 
However, NPCs will still, technically, be build 43. This is because we’ll be running a second dev team exclusively on a quicker, less risky yet still super cool content patch before the NPC work is complete, and then ongoing alternately between the other NPC patches to keep the content train going.
 
Behold this fancy graphic we cooked up! Now that we’ve blown up a bit we need some fancy graphical charts in our Thursdoids!
 
Hopefully the chart shows that, in very real terms, NPCs will be coming out as quickly as they can, uninterrupted, and the other builds are there to help bridge the gap. No build will ever take as long as Build 41 did, it was a practical rewrite of large portions of the game, but nontheless NPCs will take time to emerge, and we don’t want to leave the community without new content in those waits.
 
 
Build 42
There is still a lot of polish and fix work to do on 41, primarily for the MP team but also with a side-salad of bug-fixing issues in both online and solo.
 
Beyond this, however, is a much ‘smaller’ but still extremely cool update that’ll drop before NPCs, that will release during the push toward an NPC release.
 
I say ‘smaller’ only because no major functionality or new fundamental systems, and it will be more a balancing and content patch while NPC team’s work is underway. However it will still be pretty beefy in terms of what it brings to the game.
 
It will serve several important purposes:
 
1) To balance a lot of the existing mechanics, particularly in relation to traits, professions, skills and other areas of the game that have been neglected or suffered some degradation during the years of development since they were introduced. Balancing traits and professions, medical system, and other stuff where it comes down to essentially tweaking numbers to make more builds viable or close up ‘free points’ exploits in character creation. Loot balancing and anything else that’s an easy balance but will help improve the game also fits in here.
 
2) To begin the expansion of the ‘tech tree’ of the game significantly to provide a more rich end-game experience. While until NPCs exist, some of this may be slightly less impactful on single player (though we’re sure will still add a lot of potential), it will significantly improve the MP experience by servers being less pressured to wipe or have loot respawning, providing players and communities ability to create more items that at present can only be obtained through looting.
 
While we may not hit this spot in our first build, our ultimate goal is to provide significantly extra crafting potential to allow players to effectively create a post-apocalypse nu medieval community, to provide plausable alternatives to any of the lootable items in the game that would logically be plausable with the correct skills and resources so players don’t feel pressured to restart the early game repeatedly to get long term fun out of the game. Want to be the person who makes clothes and sells them to a neighbouring settlement? Build brick walls and create something that resembles an actual house? Maybe even build a windmill? Who knows.
 
These are all examples of things we could do here, and may not all appear in Build 42, but hopefully our intended direction is clear. Ultimately to build up to the point that Alexandria / Hilltop / Kingdom style communities can form years after the apocalypse, giving more incentive to keep playing and building on existing worlds instead of intentionally replaying the early game because there is no real late game.
All this would be a time sink and require a group effort and wouldn’t be compulsory for those who prefer to just die repeatedly in the early apocalypse days, but the hope is to allow for a much greater level of community building, and facilitate trade and potentially years of stories and rich history from within a single world, be it NPC populated or an MP server, spanning numerous player lives (so it can still be the story of how you died).
 
These professions and expanded tech trees would be heavily gated and require specialization, often in case of the more complex crafting paths requiring pre-apocalypse skills that while it’s possible, are extremely difficult to attain to high levels after the apocalypse without a character specced toward them. We long ago ‘nerfed’ a metalworking system that was added to the game due to the implausibility of some random survivor crafting spoons and katanas in the apocalypse, however we’ll be expanding this again to include better items available through sufficient mastery and enough plausibility with the character build.
 
We’ll increase the amount of recipes that’ll be unlockable within the world through books, magazines or VHSs, and try and accurately model more advanced and multi-tier crafting professions to allow survivor communities to thrive and provide much more diverse activities for players who like to stay in the safehouses.
 
Finally, and vitally, we’ll be introducing the concept of ‘crafting surfaces’ to further restrict where some crafting recipes can be used. Some more complex recipes will require specific tables or equipment, some will just require a table or surface of any kind, while others can be carried out in your hands with no surface at all.
 
This will add an extra level to the crafting, as making a place suitable for crafting the more complex multi-stage recipes, and potentially upgrading your crafting station and equipment, would become a more fulfilling experience than standing in the field and being able to make a stir fry.
 
We have many and varied other things we want to inject into the game also – we’re currently working on seated / reclining characters for example, and also want to expand on in-game events and tie them to the map. We also need to do some work to improve guns, and PvP, at some point. It’s not clear when smaller features will start appearing, however, so will report on them in blogs as the year progresses.
 
 
Build 43
Worked on concurrently to the balancing and crafting update, as well as discussed and shown within our blogs going forward, will be the first version of NPCs. We’re still deciding what should, could and would be present in the first NPC build. It could include autonomous NPCs that the player can group with, it could primarily include the reintroduction of the story mode, it could have NPC animals, or that could come later.
We really need to look at what we have, and what’s feasible to deliver in a reasonable amount of time, as well as what we could release as a first build and not have people who’ve waited years for them to appear be disappointed. There’s a lot of plates to spin, decisions to make that require more brain power than we’ve had to spare during B41’s development, so we’re going to take some more time to discuss what would make the most satisfying and manageable first build, and take a stock check of what we have.
 
We’ve got a LOT of NPC code, lots of cool systems, from Rimworld style priority and jobs system, personality systems, procedural story event systems, combat systems, autonomous survival behaviours, advanced group behaviour systems, vehicle driving systems, and a whole bunch more. While nothing could be described as 100% complete, the vast majority of the hard work has been done, is functional and is extremely cool.
 
But B41 has taken a huge amount of our time and resources, and also taken some elements of the PZ workings in a different direction to things our NPCs were using, and so they need some time to be reintroduced to the most current build and made MP compatible. And when we do that, we’ll be moving stuff over in stages to release, rather than try and get everything functional and release ready at once.
A good analogy is we’ve got two rooms, one full to the ceiling of extremely cool and complex circuit boards and wires that we’ve spent years making, one room is empty.
 
Trying to tidy and assemble everything in the first room will be a nightmare. So we’ll start moving bits into a new room, setting them up, plugging them in together, and making something cool out of them to release. After release we’ll continue bringing in more pieces and attaching them, and so on for perhaps 2 or 3 builds until the first room is empty and our vision of NPCs is complete. It doesn’t mean that’s all we have, far from it, just sorting that entire packed room out would take too long and we want to finally start pushing NPC content out as soon as possible.
 
We also have some big plans for a gun mechanics rework at some point, to provide a more solid gunplay experience that will make guns not only more interesting to use, require more a player skill element, but also make PVP encounters a lot more interesting for those who enjoy that kind of thing, as our PVP component is still one of the more lacking elements of our multiplayer experience. But for now we are not committing to where this will thread into the release schedule.
 
The process of moving stuff over will take some time, and so we may be quiet for a couple of Thursdoids until we start getting stuff moving in the current build. As soon as we are though, we’ll be talking about the ongoing NPC development, alongside the concurrent crafting and balance patch, until they drop. Exciting times!
 
It shouldn’t go unsaid, however, that if a big new feature is not ready then it’s not in our DNA to push it out of the door uncooked. We’re confident that this will be a great year for PZ, and feel we can keep the content pipe flowing, but also won’t be abandoning our accustomed position as the tortoise in the ‘tortoise vs. hare’ race which appears to now be paying dividends for both game and community.
 
 
Much love,
 
TIS x

Hey guys! I'm just quickly popping in here to say that unfortunately I've had to pause the making of the map, because my pc broke down last week and I have no money so I can't afford a file transfer, fixing the computer not to even mention buying a new one. So until I get it fixed (if there's anything to be fixed, it's an 8 year old pc) I'm going to have to lay low with the mapping and Radcliff.
 
Hopefully I get some extra work in addition to school so I can save up enough for the fix.
 
If anyone's interested in trying to find out the cause here's a little description of what happened:
 
I'd like to give one spoof though and that is, before my pc broke I had finished 5 new cells which I'll add to the beta once I get back going (I'm probably going to do 3 more so the map will grow from 4x3 to 4x5). I still have the beta version for test if anyone's interested in having a go. I have a few testers and so far I've only had well under 10 reports on bugs so all should be very stable and playable. Just PM me if you'd like to test it out.
 
Anyway, have a lovely weekend!! <3

Aaaalrighty then!!! I'm back from a long summer break and I've been slowly getting back to my daily routine of Radcliff building. That's why I decided to bring a little more sunshine into your week and make an exceptional Wednesdoid post!
 
For those wondering if I've abandoned the project that's a firm no and do not inted to. Tbh, I had a slight mental breakdown with the pace I was going at before and simply got a bit bored making this map. But now that I've gained some distance and strength, I'm feeling ready to carry on building!
 
Without further ado. Here are some pics for you fellas!
 
Neighborhood #1:
 
Neighborhood #2:
 
The Vine Grove Golf Course and Resort:
 
Progress update:
 
All buildings and help is warmly welcomed. My team has been fairly quiet the whole of summer so don't feel intimidated to chip in with anything.
 
Also if there is anyone who'd be interested in just furnishing buildings, I'd love that. It'd help out a ton since it's become somewhat of a routine for me and my creative spark on that side is slowly diminishing. I still have a constant and strict routine, but I seem to be starting to repeat myself quite a lot.
 
Lastly, as always have a lovely week! <3 I hope you like the it and please comment, PM and ask anything that's on your mind about the project.

Lovely Mondoid to you all from (for now) sunny Finland! I skipped the last Mondoid on purpose because I knew that I was going to be less active on the project for the last two weeks. Sorry if someone was waiting for that! (someone? anyone? ok then . . . ) I did however get lots done (mostly two weeks ago) and therefore I am here again with a truckload of buildings.
 
I've decided to go with just a slightly different start this week and show you guys how I like to draw my maps for PZ. I'll use the Radcliff map as an example. Now there might be some repetition to the OP, but I'll be getting more to the specifics here. If you're not interested, just skip the map part for some update goodies.
 
The map:
 
Ok, straight to the progress:
 
Comparison:
 
As always, all buildings and help are accepted with warm hearts and many, many thanks!!!
 
Happyhappy Mondoid everyone! <3

EDIT: Until I find the time to update this a bit, after checking this go see Thuztor's Mapping Guide! It explains this process in a bit more organized way
 
Hi guys! Here's a little tutorial on how to draw "handmade" maps for the PZ mapping tools.
 
So, let's start!
 
1. Software
 
You need somekind of a photo editing software. Paint will do, but I would recommend something with a bit more options. You could go with Photoshop or similar, but I like to use Gimp as it's free and has many similarities with Photoshop, but it's a bit more simple. Also as we're only editing a few colors we won't be needing anything too fancy.
 
2. Maps
 
There are two maps we will be drawing. The "main map", which has roads, streets and lighter grass areas. Then we have the more intricate vegetation map. We will start by drawing the "main map". The image has to be sized by the amount of cells you want to have on your map. one cell is 300x300pixels which means that if you want to have a 3x3 cell map the image has to be 900x900 pixels. (I'm not sure which way the pixels have to be if you'd want a 3x5 map for example, but it is either 900x1500 or 1500x900 I'll update when I get the info...)
 
3. Drawing the "main map"
 
When drawing a map 1 pixel = 1 tile
 
Ok as said, we'll start by drawing the "main map". We have 6 colors to use in doing the map as follows:
 
4. Drawing the vegetation map
 
We'll start drawing the _veg map over your existing main map. This is where it comes handy to have a little more than paint in your disposal as you'll be able to create layers and add those on top of the main map. There's another six colors that will define the vegetation. (If you're using paint or a program that overwrites the .png file, save this after a different name for now.)
 
 
5. Adding the maps to WorldEd
 
Now that you have the two files, whateveryouwant.png and whateveryouwant_veg.png, make sure they are in the same folder. Then open WorldEd and from the top left click File, New... Then input the cell amount that responds with your map. Remember 1 cell = 300x300pixels.
 
 
6. Start editing!
 
 
Here are the .png Files I used in making this tutorial:
http://i767.photobucket.com/albums/xx319/elmosyrjalainen/MyfirstPNG_zpsb42a622f.png
http://i767.photobucket.com/albums/xx319/elmosyrjalainen/MyfirstPNG_veg_zps7f4b8629.png
Feel free to use them in your learning! If you use them as a part of your mods or something else please add proper credit.
 
Sorry if I forgot something or left something out. This went on a bit longer than I expected and I'm a bit tired. (It's about 4am here now and I have to wake up in 3 hours)

It felt like the day would never come, but we’re really happy and proud to announce that Build 41 has been released to stable!
 
If you’ve been out of the loop on the beta, a good place to start would be our new trailer to celebrate the release and show those new to Zomboid what’s in store for them:
 
 
This build marks a huge step for us, the graphics, gameplay, audio and netcode being significantly remastered and radically improved, Build 41 feels more a sequel than a patch update. As well as a huge map update, new mechanics and systems, its by far our biggest update yet.
 
Under normal circumstances, we may have done a little more polish and fixing before releasing to stable, but the truth is next to no one are playing Build 40 now, apart from those that didn’t know of the beta branch. It’s presence if anything has been damaging to Project Zomboid’s first impressions and we were only waiting for multiplayer to drop in a somewhat stable fashion to allow us to move on, as we feel strongly that Build 41 even with the remaining bugs and issues that need weeding out, casts a far superior first impression for new players.
 
Build 40 will forever live on in a branch, access the beta branch “legacy40 – Classic Zomboid” at any point to continue playing, or if your specs aren’t capable of running build 41 comfortably.
 
So what’s new in this build?
 
Massive animation and character overhaul, more immersive animations and smoother gameplay and combat, highly customizable character that shows clothing and equipment in the world. Visibly ripped and damaged clothing. Visible Backpacks and Bags. In-game map system to allow the player to chart their exploration and find their way around the huge map. New animations and new movement systems. Sneaking, sprinting, jogging, racking, reloading, climbing, fence-jumping, collapsing and much much more. New multiplayer built from the ground up for smooth, immersive and low latency player and zombie movement. New combat, new weapons, new difficulty balance. New tutorial teaching you the very basics of the new movement and combat. New character creation – many, many different new clothing options both on spawn and discoverable in the world as loot or on zombies. New city to explore, the gargantuan Louisville, as well as many improvements across the entire map, including new buildings, decoration, and curved roads for easier driving. New zombie behaviour: feasting on recent corpses, lolling against walls, falling over fences etc. Blood and dirt system that progressively bloodies bodies and clothing of survivors and zombies New injury system – movement and combat visibly hampered when injured. Lacerations now possible, an injury state that lies between bites and scratches. Improved gunplay: green/red target outline while aiming, increased gun loot spawn. Randomized environmental storytelling elements. Death Scenes, zombies discovered in the situations in which people died. Prayer meetings, sports-viewing parties, survivor zeds wearing backpacks etc, vehicle crashes and blockades. Situational zombie type/clothing and inventories – cop zeds in police station, firemen zeds in burnt buildings, Chef zeds in restaurant kitchens, bride and groom zeds at a wedding ceremony in church etc. Clothing protection: different clothing provides different levels of protection from zombie attacks. New Sims-style cutaway vision system. Vehicle handling improvements, resizing and appearance tweaks. Updated, remastered and expanded Kentucky-themed soundtrack. Complete soundscape overhaul – All new sounds, building a more immersive and compelling sonic landscape. Items now have placeable 3D models in the world, for all your decorative needs. New Gameplay Styles
Apocalypse: Stealth focus. Short lifespan. Combat best avoided and picked selectively.
Survivor: Powerful combat. Longer Lifespan. A challenging playstyle based on PZ’s previous Survival mode of Build 40.
Builder: Construction, Exploration, and Farming focus. A more relaxed experience. New Challenges
Kingsmouth – A separate challenge map, Kingsmouth puts you on a paradise island vacation resort.
Studio – Try to survive as the Knox Infection hits the dream factory. Some of these zombies are not like the others. Entirely new foraging system. New inventory slots – belts and holsters now give quick equip slots. Weapons can be attached to the character’s back. New thermal / body temperature system. New Tailoring system for clothing repairs. New Fitness / Exercise system. New emote system – Hold Q to bring up the Radial Menu for Emotes. New water visuals – including visible flow direction. New puddle system during heavy rain. New fog visuals. New levelling system. New VHS, and CDs system. Broken glass and related injuries. 3D Store Mannequins – can be dressed however you like Working washing machines and driers Server-side saving: MP save system now in a server-side database. Offline SP-side, also means no more lost cars via irl power outages. New radial menu for reloading firearms. New game cursor New loot balance and loot balance system: houses and stores now have loot in the containers you would expect from real life – and not in a jumble. Isometric aiming cursor that shows where you’re aiming in iso space to aid in combat. A gigantic list of fixes and QoL improvements.  
 
Thank you
A huge thanks everyone for the wonderful experience we’ve had since releasing multiplayer, seeing such a wave of positivity has been wild and made this long journey for this build more than worth it! Seeing the player numbers dwarf our previous record has been crazy:
 

 
We’re over the moon over the success the multiplayer has seen and we vow to continue and expand on that.
 
We’re so proud of everyone on our team, we know we wouldn’t be here today if we didn’t have such dedicated devs working on all these features, often under intense external pressure, and the support team for helping us keep the sometimes chaotic wheels spinning. Every one of them is wonderful and deserving of all our thanks.
 
Finally, a huge specific thank you to General Arcade, in particular Yuri and Andrei who have put such amazing work into bringing a quality to Zomboid’s multiplayer we simply would never have (and indeed, hadn’t) achieved without them. They’ve put huge amounts of work into this, and we’re thankful to them for helping Zomboid multiplayer come to the vision we had for it.
 
That’s all for this update. See you all after the new year where we’ll talk about what comes next!

Straight in with the MP update this week.
 
As stated in the last Thursdoid, we feel we’re on the home stretch now and are still confident in our December (or at worst January, after Russian New Year and Christmas, if we get uncomfortably close to the holidays) estimate.
 
Though truth be told, the day we were pushing to have a release candidate ready for was Dec 1st – and clearly that didn’t happen. The additional issue with black boxing (which wasn’t discovered and within the schedule to a Dec 1st release) took up a good chunk of the MP team’s time to diagnose and repair, so the presence of looming holidays marching toward us is ever-present.
 
It’ll basically come down to how quickly the last serious issues get squashed as to whether we’ll make it before Xmas. We still very much want it, and will tirelessly push toward getting it out during early December, until the proximity to the holidays no longer feels safe to release in terms of pumping out the required hot-fixes while team members are away.
 
Many of you have probably seen that we gave MrAtomicDuck permission to make a video based on his experiences in our latest MP test session, we said that we wanted to hear his honest opinions and were extremely happy to see what a positive experience he had.
 
 
As highlighted in his video, and in our previous Thursdoid, the main release-blocker at this point is vehicles, whose rubber-banding and physics bugs are severe enough that we’d not be comfortable releasing until they are fixed. Put simply: they are frequently an instant death trap and this clearly isn’t something that could be present in a release candidate build. As such, the MP team are hard at work improving these as we speak.
 
Several other issues discussed last week are fixed, VOIP is now crystal clear (however we’re still investigating to make sure VOIP doesn’t have any adverse effect on network performance), black boxing and excessive rubberbanding and lag experienced by a select few of our testers seems to have similarly been dealt with.
 
So outside the vehicle issues described, our next priority pre-release is dealing with issues with zombies not responding to guns, helicopters, alarms etc.
 
Eagle eyed viewers of Duck’s video may have noticed that the gunfire wasn’t attracting the hordes one would expect. At some point in the restructuring how zombies work to eliminate lag bites etc and provide smooth movement to clients, their ability to reliably hear all sounds in the world has been broken.
 
This will be a top priority along with vehicle fixes, and the doctor zombie convention that seemed to have been taking place at the hospital.
 
ZOMBIE SYNC
We thought we’d respond to the main reoccurring piece of negative feedback we read after Duck’s video, which was otherwise overwhelmingly positive.
 
The main piece of negative feedback we read, that cropped up several times, related to instances where a certain broom-wielding maniac was fighting zombies and visually it looked a bit odd. The choice of using a one-handed broom while simultaneously wielding amped-up admin powers, and maybe a slightly higher ping, probably exacerbated this!
 
However, it highlighted that the combat between other remote players and zombies can sometimes have sync issues. In crowded scenes like these, especially, characters seem too far from zombies when they kill them, and zombies sometimes fall in the wrong direction.
We certainly intend to improve this going forward – possibly prior to release, but much more likely afterward. However, there is only so far we will be able to push it.
 
Our biggest priority with making solid multiplayer was to prioritize interactions between the local player and zombies that are targeting them, so that lagging zombies leading to an unfair bite are an impossibility.
 
This to our mind, in a game where a single zombie bite can end a character you’ve pumped many hours into in an instant, was our biggest priority at the expense of all else.
 
As such, the way zombie positions are calculated (which will always differ between clients due to unavoidable latency of different geographic locations) is handled in a way to ensure that when a zombie is chasing the local player, then that local player will treat the zombie as if it were a single player zombie. This, then, has the side effect of essentially doubling the latency and delay on syncing that zombie’s position with the other players who are NOT being chased by that zombie.
 
As such, zombies chasing someone else will always be a little bit out. We have a lot of code in to predict zed movement, and we do mask this inconsistency as much as possible, but it will always be a present issue.
 
There are, however, various other ways we can look into improving these visuals in future: finding ways to speed up message transmission and server tick rate to help sync them further, and better predicting their movements between clients.
 
However, it’s unlikely this will ever be perfect when dealing with potentially hundreds of zombies being witnessed by numerous clients at the same time. In other games with high enemy counts, it’s rare that a single enemy can instantly kill you, so other games generally have more leeway available to them than we do.
 
On the up side, as it stands, combat with zombies by the player themselves will suffer zero latency, and will be completely indistinguishable from single player combat.
 
The price paid for that is sometimes companions you can see fighting other zombies (especially those who have larger pings) may not appear to connect fully with zombies they are fighting or the zombie they hit may slide a bit as they die or change target.
 
We think that’s a good price to pay for what it brings to the individual player’s combat, and further when you’re more likely playing on a more local server (unlike our testers connecting from all around the world onto a server based out of Paris) we don’t think these issues will get in the way too often for the majority of players.
 
As ever, also, it’s an evolving process that we will continue to work on both in the run-up to release – and as each new patch and build is released beyond it.
 
To end with, a few more vids taken by the internal test team – one of which very much underlines why we need to get the vehicles physics fixed up.
 

 



This week’s featured safehouse from Alejodbort. 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!

Tropical Breakfast with the new 3D coconut items.
And some guests, who have made themselves comfortable on the floor.

Hello all!
 
Last Thursday we released Build 41.54 to the IWBUMS public beta, and right now we’re working on a quick 41.55 patch (most likely released next week) so we can balance it from public feedback and fix up a few bugs.
 
Here’s what the changelist currently looks like, the highlights of which run as follows:
 
Adjustments to the new soundscape from Noiseworks – primarily in instances where gameplay messaging was getting lost in the sound mix and the zoom. Also: changes to the mix balance for reverb return/sends, rain surfaces, adjustment to camera zoom effect on world sounds, and some mix tweaks for too loud sounds. More 3D items, and some resized ones. Some animation smoothening for a few instances in which folk were getting unfairly killed Some much needed balance for the player’s ability to run through a crowd of zombies without being stopped or falling. Something fun for the vehicle modders (in an area that we won’t be covering as soon as we’d like ourselves) that top modder iBrRus prodded us about – which should see some cool new stuff appearing on the Workshop.
NOISEWORKS NEXT
Phase 2 of the Noiseworks is underway, and will be mixed into IWBUMS builds and patches as we go. Some aspects of it will require TIS-side code resources (like vehicle-related sounds, which we recognise could be improved) so will be addressed a little later down the line while we work elsewhere. That said there’s plenty of other cool stuff that will be dropping in from Noiseworks from build to build.
Of primary note for those with a favourite weapon that don’t sound quite right yet: far more individual sounds are on their way.
Right now weapons are divided between six different loosely-affiliated groups each with a generic set of Hit / Swing / Break sounds:
 
Blunt Metal Weapons (Light, Medium, Heavy) Blunt Wood Weapons (Light, Medium, Heavy) Blunt Plastic Weapons (Light Medium, Heavy) Blade Weapons (Light, Medium, Heavy) – these are used for small Axes as well Stab Weapons (Light, Medium, Heavy) Heavy Axes
These share a generic set of additional hit surface sweeteners, but right now in the game a generic one is used as default hit for impacts on metal/wood/plastic/stone surfaces, and a set of sweeteners for hit impacts on body/head surface (a gore layer).
 
We’re planning to extend these with additional surface sweeteners covering all in game surfaces for different weights, and additional impacts for bodyparts that fit the specific weapon type that aren’t generic – as they are at the moment. The more individual stuff that is added, the more accurate the noises of the various strikes and blows of the different weapons will be.
 
On top of this the NW gang will be adding new additional weapon sounds for all the special weapons like music instruments etc. and extending the current set for greater variety.
 
Also on the menu, meanwhile, is making world sounds inside buildings sound different based on relative elevation level to the player, and also to incorporate object condition to affect certain sounds like door bangs for instance.
 
Something else that will have far less of a generic catch-all soundbase will be with water-related sounds – right now water coolers don’t sound like water coolers, it doesn’t sound quite right when you are filling a bottle from a body of water and the like.

41.56+
Beyond what is (probably) next week’s patch there are many and varied different functions and features bubbling away – alongside, clearly, the Multiplayer Strike Force at General Arcade who are reporting continued good progress with their work that we’ll look more deeply into in the next dev blog.
 
In terms of SP additions, we have the entire map of (our version of) Louisville now ready to go into internal testing.
 
This does not mean it’s ready for public consumption (there’ll still be a lot to do with zoning, working out spawn stuff, new loot definitions for new stores, zombie heat maps etc etc) but it does mean that we will have boots on the ground looking for bugs and hunting out issues.
 
On top of this all the polish done on the current map, like the curved roads and general improvements to wilderness and shorelines, which will all get its first major runout too.
 
This will be a HUGE milestone for all our map team – Mash, Binky, Ayrton, Xeonyx and RingoD – and we’d like to thank all of them for their hard work even if we will initially be rewarding them with a big pile of bugs to fix.
 
Please note that the map being in internal testing will not necessarily mean it’s part of 41.56 / 41.57 or any other imminent-ish numbered build. It’s too early to say and there’s still a lot of work required to get it into the game proper.
 
We will also likely be overhauling connected systems, like spawn points, alongside it – and there’s a lot of other features we can and will be getting in earlier.
 
Primary amongst these is the new Foraging/Search function, which we are still steadily improving behind the scenes. Recent additions include the ability to spot the newly super-small 3D items like keys and berries within the same system, and a cool saturation effect in the world shader to make it clearer when the activity has been engaged.


 
We have also been considering tying the system to other ‘hidden’ things that are easily missed in the game, such as the hidden floorboard stashes currently connected to the discovery of annotated maps.
 
PZ ON THE GO
We got a present from kindly old Uncle Gabe in Seattle the other day.
PZ looks and sounds great on it, but there’s a few minor control issues that could do with some polish. We should have them licked in time for the launch though.
 

 
Thanks all!

 
This week’s bog roll hoarder from TChrist over on Steam. 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!

And then, suddenly, fourteen days had rolled around once more…

41.51 IWBUMS BETA RELEASE
41.51 is pretty much cooked at this point, and the past few days we have been primarily addressing any potential incompatibilities on different / more elderly operating systems. We intend to release this early next week.
The latest changelist for 41.51 can be found here.

Some items of note:

As previously mentioned, 41.51 contains significant optimizations to our save game system. As such any saved games played in 41.50 will NOT be operational or loadable.
 
A separate Steam beta containing the previous 41.50 build will be provided so that you can continue and finish your current game.
Similarly, in a changelist as big as this some mods WILL become incompatible – especially those dealing with loot distribution.
 
We have kept the PZ Discord modding channels informed of the primary forthcoming change, but there will inevitably be a period of waiting before some of your favourite mods (and certainly mod packs) are fully operational again.
 
Again, if you enjoy playing modded PZ then the 41.50 beta will still be there for you to use in the meantime.
 
If you’re a modder who would like further information on what’s changing then please click through to this thread on our forum, where mapper extraordinaire TheCommander has also made a very handy forum post and easily understood infographic.
 
Please be patient with all the community’s modder crew while they find the time to update their/our beloved mods!

MP STRIKE FORCE
As discussed previously we are now updating on all things MP every month – for the reasoning behind that decision please click on through.
And so, here’s a run-down of what Yuri and Andrei have been up to over the past few weeks, followed up by a nice little vid that Yuri made for us.
First of all, we added FPS data to our statistics. Servers will now collect FPS data from each client and collect it their statistical data. Seeing as the introduction of local ownership may lead to performance degradation on clients, knowing client FPS will help us to improve performance and as such we can use this tool in load testing. We then spent some time investigating zombie desync. We noticed that our zeds were pausing after they changed ownership between clients. As such we’ve made a fresh implementation of how zombie behaviour syncs. Right now the zombies will continue moving to the target and restore their state on a new client after changing ownership. What’s currently in the build is an initial implementation – we’re going to test how it works before developing it further. We implemented ‘get up’ sync for zombies. This bug could lead to zombies that were laying down on one client, but standing upright on another. We synced zombie falling. Zombies in local ownership now calculate the position and rotation of their fall point, and the client sends this information in the hitCharacter packet. Now all clients will show the same falling anim, and desync where zeds dropped in different places for different places is avoided. This issue also led to players seeming to finish off invisible zombies while you were playing. We had a long think about how we can improve a fight between a zombie and more than one player. A primary issue was how a zombie should react to hits from other players, as often ownership change can lead to desync. We had the idea that zombies should react to hits from their target player, but hits from other players would only lead to splashes of blood and a decrease of their health without a change in ownership. We’ve made an initial implementation of this, but it doesn’t seem to be a full solution yet – as such we will debug it, and potentially think of ways to improve or replace the system. We’ve spent some time updating our tools, specifically the fake clients we use to simulate a full and active server. Now clients can process zombie AI, we needed to simulate the same in our fake clients. This will help no end in our future testing and edge-case scenario simulation.  
 
NOISEWORKS
Tomorrow (barring minor fixes) is the last day we have booked in for work with Noiseworks on their PZ Sound Revolution – although we are also making plans for a ‘Round 2’ to further improve the PZ soundscape, put some more work into the implementation of the procedural music system and respond to the feedback of the PZ community once it’s been released out into the wild.
 
As such the Noiseworks build shouldn’t be *too* far behind the release of 41.51 into the public IWBUMS beta.
 
The primary final polish that’s been put into Noiseworks over the past week or so has been on vehicles, music selection and general mix balance and bug fixing. Vehicles, especially, needed a little more love as gear changes / RPM and how the new sounds interacted with the existing PZ framework needed a fair bit of love.
 
The vehicles are now 10x better than the angry lawnmowers currently in Build 41, though we intend to come back to them in Noiseworks Round 2 when we have more time to make some code-side improvements to help them out.
 
Here’s a quick video of what they’re sounding like at the moment.
 
(Please note there will be improvements to zombie collision thuds, car door and trunk noises before we release!)
 
 
Something else we intend to release with the Noiseworks build are the 3D items that Rockstar Mark and RJ have been working with, but that’s not 100% at the moment as they’re working out the best ways to scale/rotate items in their export process. This is the way that a box of jars currently appears in-game, which isn’t… ideal?
 

  VCRS
We want to shake up the current ‘spend the first week watching TV’ meta, while also introducing some new and typically 90s loot, and as such Turbo has been working on the PZ entertainment systems.
 
This will be a simplified media playability version of the Devices branch that Turbo has had as a side project for a long time now, and will include retail CDs and VHS tapes – with common, rare and exceptional spawn changes depending on the recording. Clearly, some of these will also be the shows shown on the television with XP and skill bonuses. There will also be unique home VHS tapes, which will either be shows recorded by the people of the area or camcorder recordings, that have a 1 in 5 chance to attempt to spawn instead of a blank tapes.
Clearly all this will be textual, just as the current TV and radio channels are, but we hope it’ll be a nice way of adding some more flavour to the world. There will be lots of new movies, TV shows and general new writing content.
 
The ability to record material will not be in the build however, and will have to wait until Turbo’s fully fledged Devices side project (which includes computers and security systems) comes to fruition.
 
Here’s a quick video of its current implementation, along with the ways that recordings can impact on your player’s skills and moodles if we so choose.
 
PLEASE NOTE this won’t be how it ends up in the game proper. Being terrified by a horror movie to such an extent that it would leave you vulnerable to the zeds probably wouldn’t be much fun – so please consider WIP!
 

LOUISVILLE
Work on our version of Louisville continues, which as discussed in previous blogs is now visible in the mid-distance.
 
This week we won’t be showing any new chunks of the map, as our map team continue to be quite protective of their giant sprawling baby, but maybe we can have a quick look at some of the new brands and locations that the more urban environment will bring.
 

  This week’s featured image from Rexiem. A changelist of all IWBUMS patches since the 41 beta was released can be found here. A general list of stuff added to PZ, and vids of features being worked on, is kept here – so you don’t have to plough through endless dev blogs for info. The Centralized Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send you update notifications once builds get released. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too!