ladyterukiSadly pressing the F12 key did not take the screenshot, for some reason, so you'll have to take my word for it.
I was playing and thought : "damn, I had never noticed how realistic the thunderstorms are in PZ !"
...when I got up to get something to drink, I realized the thunderstorm was IRL 😅
Huh. I open Steam this morning and what do I find ? The screenshot that yesterday wasn't appearing ! I have this new mod that displays more complete stats (including XP gained), every time I go to sleep I get a report, plus when I died it showed me a thorough recap.
So yeah, here's "proof" that I did survive for... 69 days.
Nice.
Aw, man... I missed the opportunity to take a screenshot of my 712hrs in PZ on Steam...
So um, yeah, bought the game legally 3 months ago and here we are. Add to that the ~100hrs with the arrr🏴☠️ version and that's quite a bit of gameplay since I started this thread in May.
As the prophecy foretold, my summer was spent in Kentucky : https://mastodon.social/@ladyteruki/114514004069795808
At some point I instinctively did a 180 to go kill more Zeds a couple of houses over, and it hit me : "wow, instead of avoiding them I now run towards Zombies" 🤩 Precious feeling.
All of the storytelling is environmental. Since you're the only survivor you'll ever meet (at least in singleplayer, but Build 42 doesn't have multiplayer yet anyway, and the planned NPC builds are not in the near future), there's noone to tell you anything. So you gather stories from what you see. What you find. What you understand.
It's fantastic.
Entire mechanics are built around this, like literally, they're called "stories" :
- Randomized stories https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Randomized_stories
- Vehicle stories https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Vehicle_stories
- Zone stories https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Zone_stories
- Building stories https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Building_stories
- Table stories https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Table_stories
- Survivor stories https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Survivor_stories
And that's just the intended ones.
Because PZ relies so much on RNG, these stories can combine in infinite ways completely accidentally. But also, there's a number of unintended stories that emerge from gameplay.
Last night I ran into an example, but first, some context.
PZ doesn't have children. All the zombies, and of course character creation for the survivors, are adult. Zero size variation, nothing. In fact, children are not even mentioned. The lore doesn't bring up what happened in daycares when the Knox infection hit, there is no mention of people terrified about how to protect their kids, nothing. Aside from a handful of places over the entire map, you won't event find cribs in houses, and very rarely in furniture stores.
A lot of it seems to come from issues regarding the game's rating, which I get. In a way, it works to the game's ambient despair anyway. This world has no future. There is no "next generation" to protect from the Knox virus, there is nothing to save at all. It's all lost.
Last night I was looking for books my collection is missing, and naturally I went to a nearby school, having already looted nearby bookstores. The West Point school is not as fancy as you could expect it to be considering the posh town that surrounds it, but it does have a school library (and a lunch cafeteria that I also needed to loot).
As I went, room by room, clearing the area of all zombies, I killed this guy in the toilets :
I've found zombies in schools that were carrying a bottle of dye or a set of masonry tools. It just happened that this one formed a story. I love this about the game.
As I cleaned the brain splattered on my leather jacket, I felt morally justified.
Project Zomboid : *game update goes live*
Me, as the sound of a thousand cries echoes through the Steam Workshop's broken mods : "Yeah, I should start a new one"
So far it's one of the most interestingly designed modded maps I've seen.
Sadly the map includes some weird obsession for anime, there's giant figurines in several places -
All of the interesting spots where I'd have liked to set up a base were either like that, or veeeery far away from any gas stations (I actually didn't find ANY gas station, maybe I missed it).
...but I had the most awful performance there. Maybe once I get my new computer (whenever the f*ck that is) I'll run it a bit better, but there's nothing more frustrating than losing characters, plural, to lag, because your screen froze near a high rise building but Zombies ate you in the meantime. There seemed to be a lot of fun places to base in, too, but that was just not viable as is.
West Point was never a town I liked much in vanilla, but the expansion gives it so much depth and appeal ! It's not as dense as Louisville (where really I think I've had the most fun in vanilla, plus it's where I've succeeded the best so far), but it has so much to see and do ! TWO GigaMarts (one vanilla, one modded), for instance, made me happy.
Anyway. I hadn't talked about PZ much lately, but I still play ! Exploring modded maps is taking most of my time at the moment.
Well, sh*t. THERE IS a gas station in Willowbrook. And I know for a fact I looted the buildings nearby... but for some reason I absolutely didn't notice there was a gas station there.
Anyway, none of the base spots I liked were close, so that still works. But damn, I literally parked next to it.
I for one am glad they released multiplayer for B42, not because I wanted multiplayer, but because people will finally shut the f*ck up about it.
...Hopefully.
https://projectzomboid.com/blog/news/2025/12/unstable-42-mp-released/
Unstable 42 MP Released - Project Zomboid
Unstable Build 42.13, which contains multiplayer support, has been released. Merry Christmas. Ho ho ho. IMPORTANT NOTES Multiplayer is WIP and has been released for stress testing. HOW TO FIND BUILD 42 Build 42 is currently on the Unstable beta for all Project Zomboid players on Steam. To find it: Right-Click game in Steam library […]
I was meaning to clean up my modlist anyway. I added something at some point during the past month that was just not being digested well by my RAM.
As always with major game updates, it'll give me an excuse to start over.
Oh, bless you and your loved ones on 712 generations !
This means that you can now, IN VANILLA, carry both a duffel bag on your back and a satchel at the same time.
So that's one mod I won't be needing anymore.
"Added quick tips, displayed when loading a game."
Oh, that's good. You know what would be even better, @theindiestone ? Player-submitted tips. Think about it.
Can you make it so that if I'm driving faster than the road is loading, the trailers stop hitting my vehicle, next ? Because hot damn, it is so annoying. And again, I live for the Sunday Driver trait, I am not going particularly fast.
The other day I lost a trailer like that. Road stopped loading, van did a full stop in front of a black square, trailer didn't do a full stop, went over the van, and just decided to live there now.
Eventually I had to unhook the trailer and leave it behind to make it home.
Ok so the new meta is : find an emergency vehicle in the first week so that you have the frequency before helicopter day. Got it.
Do they mean annotated maps ? What other kind of print media would be related to locations ?
ViolettivettäAt this point my game is so full of mods that I can't tell anymore XD
That's going to be A LOT of free food in rural areas. You find a field of these, you are MADE.
I use MoveTo a lot and it feels like this will considerably change how liberal I am with my hotkey.
I'm confused, wasn't that already the case ? Was a mod saving my butt this whole time and I didn't realize it ?
(can we use lighters and matches that are favorited, by the same logic ?)
...I'm trying to understand how that is different from this :
