Hey everyone – today we’re retiring our Steam vehicles beta branch and moving it into our traditional ‘I Will Back Up My Save’ beta slot as Build 39.

If you’ve been holding off from trying out our trucks, vans and cars as you were waiting for them to feel stable and (almost/increasingly) non-buggy then we’d politely ask you to consider entering the fray today.

We need an extra burst of community testers for the final patches before launch. We need to know:

• What’s unclear about the way we’ve implemented Vehicles and the Mechanics skill
• How the game runs on your machine. [And if there are any issues we will 100% need to know what sort of computer it is, alongside your tech specs]
• How vehicles are changing the way you play – both in the early and late game. And, of course, whether or not you’re having fun.
• Any bugs and weirdness that stick out like a sore thumb.

Please post feedback in the Build 39 in the new thread on our forums.

You can find the IWBUMS beta branch in your Project Zomboid – right click on Project Zomboid in the Steam games list, left click on properties and navigate to the Betas tab.

(Please note that, due to the extent of engine and gameplay changes in Build 39, existing savegames will not be compatible – a Steam beta branch of the pre-vehicles Build 38.30 will be available at the time of launch should people wish to finish off their existing games before moving onto vehicles.)

Clearly the team’s main focus is currently on getting Build 39 polished and out of the door – yesterday releasing Vehicles Build 41 that addressed issues impacting on community translations, missing car spawn zones, lots of player-crafter gate related bugs, split-screen niggles and lots of other fixes.

In the background, meanwhile, Bitbaboon Mark continues his animations work for when the team crosses over to them, Stas is polishing his new MP chat system to drop into Build 40 and Turbo is working on ‘type of sky’ game colours (the shade of the screen when its sunny, normal, cloudy etc) and should have some time-lapse vids to show next week.

This week’s ignored rest stop from Wei. 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 blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Our Discord is open for chat and hijinks too