I've seen suppressors suggested many times, but most posts don't address balance or lore accuracy in any meaningful way. As a gun enthusiast and military veteran, I want to make a proper case for why this could work really well if implemented thoughtfully.   Suppressors have been legally available to civilians since 1902, and while the 1934 NFA added regulation and a tax, they never became illegal — just less common. By the early 1990s in rural Kentucky, it was entirely reasonable for hunters, wealthy homeowners, and military personnel to own them. Knox County has a strong hunting culture, and suppressed .22s and hunting rifles were a real thing in that era. It would actually be more unrealistic for there to be zero suppressors in the entire county.   A major misconception is that suppressors make firearms silent. They don't. They reduce the report to a safer hearing level and make it harder to pinpoint the source of a shot — that's it. You are not invisible. You are not silent. This is actually the key to balanced implementation.   I know there are no .22 handguns or rifles in the game, and I would also propose .22 be added alongside suppressors for varmint hunting and limited engagements.   Civilian locations: (gun stores, hunting cabins, wealthy homes): .22, .308, and .30-06 suppressors as rare finds Military base only: 5.56 suppressors for semi-auto rifles, possibly 9mm for handguns — extremely rare   How I would propose it be balanced: Zombies in close proximity would still detect and aggro normally regardless of suppressor use. Zombies at medium range that would normally aggro immediately upon a gunshot would still aggro, but without knowing your exact location — forcing them to wander rather than beeline toward you. This keeps suppressors from being overpowered while making firearms genuinely more viable in mid-game situations where a single shot currently attracts an entire city block.    Right now, firearms are largely an early or late game panic tool because noise management is nearly impossible. Suppressors would open up a stealthy ranged playstyle that the game currently lacks entirely. Bows and crossbows would arguably be far more overpowered if added — a suppressed bolt-action .22 with realistic noise mechanics is far easier to balance. This isn't asking for a game-changing weapon — it's asking for a realistic tool with realistic limitations that happens to make an underused category of weapons worth carrying.   My friend and I, who both have a large amount of real world experience with suppressors have many more realism and balancing ideas that we would love to share. (Such as suppressors adding increased weapon wear decreasing your firearm durability quicker than unsuppressed, or naturally subsonic calibers such as .22 and .45 being quieter suppressed; both of these things are true to real life and would assist in balancing)   Please tell me what you guys think! I look forward to hopefully discussing this idea with the devs and the community. This is an idea a friend of mine and I have discussed for quite some time and felt ready to share!

Yeah, damage regions and calculations for cars is wonky. Some of that same jank is present in floor targeting. I would greatly appreciate them tweaking it or reworking it somehow. I wonder if "grapple tech" is part of a planned rework

It still does not fix the issue. The game still crashes.   You can see saved file, when you relaunch and go to the Load option, but this is what it looks like (see attachment).

Version: [42.19] Mode: Singleplayer & Multiplayer Server settings: N/A Mods: [None] Save: [New Save] Reproduction steps:     1. Start the game in whatever mode.     2. Attack a zombie using the short blade jaw stab one-shot attack     3. If timed correctly the zombie will cancel the jaw stab and bite you   This behavior did not occur in b41 or in previous iterations of b42 so I believe it is a bug. It is a quite egregious bug since it can result in the death of a character for simply using a short blade weapon. Short blades are bad enough as it is, please fix this glitch. MedalTVProjectZomboid20260610172721293_EDIT.mp4

1. Kill The Brain I'm not sure that the in-game lore ever explicitly states that hitting the brain is necessary.  I believe this is probably just implied lore carried over from source material like Night of the Living Dead, in which they do explicitly state and demonstrate this.  I would say it's 1 of 2 things. Headshots are not actually necessary in PZ lore.  The method of killing undead is therefor similar to killing a living target. Headshots are necessary but we as players are simply seeing generalized animations that are not reflective of actual hit locations. However, I believe the game mechanics do have a Hit Location variable.. someone more knowledgeable can correct me on this, but I believe "headshots" do have higher damage, under the hood, so to speak.  Does this mean that the final blow is always to the head?  Probably not, but I don't know.   The only lore reference to this that I can think of is this bit from KnoxTalk Radio:     2. Feeling Pain I mostly referenced my take on this in your previous post "Why can't we throw punches?" in which I suggested that perhaps the zombie stun-lock we see in the game is not necessarily the zombies reacting to pain but is simply, as you stated here, the result of physics rather than their nervous system.  I think the middle-of-the-road idea would simply be that their nervous systems have a minimal amount of function.  So maybe they are having a minor pain response but not enough for prolonged reaction?   This is ultimately one of those things that boils down to the game needing to function in a particular way to be playable.  If the zombies had no stun-lock at all, it would make combat and movement difficult to reconcile.  There needs to be some base level predictability.  The fact that there is no concrete explanation for how all this works biologically is just part of the vagueness that we as players must accept and for better or worse, does contribute to the setting.  Sometimes having too much explanation could be bad for story atmosphere.  It's a tough call.     3. Bleeding, Organ Function, etc Making me feel a bit narcissistic, like some of this was instigated by my "explaining zombie longevity.." post?     I won't dive back in to that whole topic, but I do think there is valid reason for the developers to remain intentionally vague about this, while also stating clearly that certain things aren't going to be added to the game.  For example, extraterrestrial explanations would lead down a path to crazy monsters, special types of zombies, mutations, etc.. On the other hand a strict pathogenic explanation has players demanding antidotes, vaccines, etc.  Supernatural explanations (Hell is Full, Necromancy, etc) lead toward a setting in which we're fighting skeletons and ghosts.   Despite all this, while there is room for the lore to be tightened up a bit, the uncertainty and vagueness of how the zombies actually exist, persist, etc does serve some purpose.   As implied by my other suggestions, I believe the compromise here would be for them to give partial explanations where appropriate but always leave something unexplained so that there can never be a complete, definitive answer to what happened.  As with aforementioned source material, a great part of the audience intrigue is simply from endless debate and conjecture over the lore.  Explaining too much risks killing some of that charm so the writers must tread carefully.