Cars and guns. In Project Zomboid, these are simultaneously your best friends and your worst enemies. While it's true that you won't last long on foot, whenever you go driving, the noise of your engine attracts the undead, and – even though there's nobody else on the road – it's inevitable that you end up smashing into a parked car, a roadblock, or a tree. Likewise guns. Without a silencer, all it takes is one shot and the entirety of Knox Country's former population is on its way to gorge on your neck. With build 42 still in the developmental 'unstable' state, The Indie Stone has just put a fresh twist on PZ's driving and combat. The new Project Zomboid update is a bit of a game changer.
The final episode of The Long Dark is on the way. Rust's Jungle update has just arrived, and Project Zomboid remains at the top of my personal chart. Expansive, vivid, and unique (rather than a barren wasteland, where supplies are sparse and bandits are everywhere, it takes place in the first week of the apocalypse), as build 42 rolls onwards, Zomboid keeps getting better. The new update, unstable 42.8.0, transforms the in-game physics.
Ragdolls. 12 years since Project Zomboid was released via Steam Early Access, and we finally have ragdolls. Until now, if you smashed into an undead with your car, they'd simply fall flat on the ground, like you'd gone into the debug menu and switched them to 'off.' Now, Knox Country's erstwhile residents will go tumbling through the air, bouncing off the asphalt and rolling into one another as you pile through them.
It's the same with gun combat – shoot a zomboid, and rather than just toppling backwards via a scripted animation, it will stumble and stagger. The Indie Stone plans to introduce ragdoll physics for melee attacks, too, but this will arrive in a later update.
Elsewhere in the new version of build 42, hunting has been made tougher and more believable. Now, if you shoot a wild animal, rather than falling down dead immediately, it may run off, leaving behind a bloodtrail that you have to follow in order to find the corpse. The better your aiming skill, the more likely an animal is to be killed with a single bullet. Also, larger, faster animals like deer are better at running than, say, rabbits.
On the subject of animals, the husbandry system introduced in build 42 has been slightly reworked. If you want to domesticate a wild animal, instead of leading it to a specific zone, all you have to do now is pick it up. There are also two crucial changes to how perspective works. Firstly, if you're sitting down, you can now hold the left mouse button and crane your character's neck to clock any inbound zombies
Secondly, from now on, if even one visible map tile is overlapped by a vehicle, that vehicle will also be visible to you. Perhaps that sounds technical, but you might have noticed how sometimes parked cars that ought to be immediately in your character's vision range don't appear on screen – if you're driving, this might be one of the reasons it's so easy to crash into stationary cars. Hopefully, with this fix, part of a giant set of patch notes, that won't be so much of a problem.
As for the long-term future of Zomboid, we're still looking ahead to the return of NPCs, either as friendly survivors or hostile robbers, or both. Maybe those will arrive in build 43. Until then, if you haven't tried Zomboid yet, you can get it here.
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