That is what the blogs are for, for giving us insight on the direction they want to go and what we can expect for future updates. I suggest you go back and read all those that came out because they can answer a lot of your questions that you have asked here. Here is one recent interview that might help too. I felt that it answered a LOT of questions.       https://projectzomboid.com/blog/news/2022/01/2022-and-beyond/   Go on the official PZ discord and hop in the discussion threads that they open when patches, blogs, etc come out. Theyre not going to comment on every single post that someone makes because there is a LOT of those that would take up all their time. Not even the community manager can do that on all the platforms they have available. 

how do you disable them? without getting rid of them altogether?

Related:    

https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Iron_Ingot_Mold https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Garden_Fork_Head The first will give you the loot distribution and the second information needed for crafting.

I have just updated through GOG on macOS (26.5.1) and I’m getting the same error. No mods installed, removed all config files from ~/Zomboid - no luck. 2026-06-03_23-50_DebugLog.txt