After several barnstorming ‘future plans’ blogs this one is a bit more near-sighted we are afraid, but might cast some light on our intentions for the general upkeep of PZ while larger-scale features are worked on.

First though, the boring-er stuff!

HOUSEKEEPING

TEAM EXPANSION!

We are looking for a game development specialist, likely someone with AAA experience, who wants to go indie and doesn’t mind one of their superiors being a cartoon raccoon. We need an Animation Engine Programmer, who would be in charge of improving the code guts of Project Zomboid.

Good experience required with working on or developing character animation systems in a proprietary engine: root motion, blending, masking, inverse kinematics, ragdoll etc. Competitive rates, flexible working, worldwide dev team. Apply within.

GET OFF THE OLD BETAS PLZ!

At some point in the near-ish future, we will be tidying up some of the older Build 41 MP betas available on Steam. Namely, 41.60, 41.61 and 41.65.

Please return to the non-beta live version of the game as soon as you can to be 100% sure that you avoid any game or mod corruption when these disappear – whether on a server or in SP.

(The sound issue that meant that some remained on 41.65 has now been dug up, fixed and patched in 41.68 stable.)

UPCOMING 41 PATCHES

Today we hotfixed the stable build with an FMOD sound engine update that should finally solve the issues experienced by some players with certain output/peripherals set-ups. It should not cause any issues with server version mismatches.

Next up will be a small patch, 41.69, designed to counter what we feel are some of the more pressing issues that the game currently has – and where a fix can be quick, simple and hopefully non-disruptive. The issues at hand currently are:

• Problems with safehouses, including unwanted teleports for safehouse members when the safehouse owner is offline.
• An issue with a non-responsive PvP icon impacting on general play.
• The fact that looted VHS tapes are single-use and can’t be used by other players.

We apologise for these small patches, and know it’s annoying having to wait for a server owner or host to update, but we hope that this will be the last of these smaller niggly patches for a while.

The team will then implement quite a lot of QOL and balance work that we already have waiting backstage into the internal beta, and we can knuckle down on 41.70 (if all goes well) as a wider and ‘small feature-led’ patch with a longer lead-time for the community.

This will also contain many and varied improvements to the MP experience, alongside some work to make our game better compatible with the SteamDeck.

SOUND DEPARTMENT

The patch described above will also contain a lot of the recent work from our friends at Noiseworks – who are now known as Formosa Interactive UK btw, but our dev relationship with them won’t be changing.

On the menu for this sound update are the following:

• Reworked Shotgun and M16 sounds, and additional firearm sounds for the Desert Eagle and the M9.
• New indoor reverb tails for small/medium/big rooms for all firearms to make them sound more realistic indoors.
• Additional foley sounds for zombies tripping over fences/obstacles/through windows
• New environmental sounds for the Electricity/Water shutdown, and how the world reacts when either happens. There’s different shutdown sounds for inside/outside, and electric appliances play shutdown sounds in sync with these when the player manages to catch the event while close-by. Plus attempting to drink or get water from taps when the water is off might play water sputtering sounds.
• A new background atmo bed for foggy weather
• More specific roomtones for different building types, along with some random oneshot sounds. For example, in the prison you can occasionally hear rats, or other metal squeaks. Meanwhile in the mall, while the electricity is still running, there’s a chance of mall music playing.
• A bunch of additional world emitters for streetlights, neon signs, hot dog stations, gas pumps, arcades etc – all of which also react to the Electricity shutting off.
• All the vehicle doors have also been re-worked and split into layers for more variation and to make them squeak less often.

The guys are also in the process of reworking the music system to address tracks not playing out – and also have future plans to make combat music more engaging and dynamic.

BEYOND 41

Okay, maybe a little from our future plans. RJ continues to work on our first implementation of PZ livestock. Look at this happy beast!

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