How do all. Here’s a check-in from a few different Build 42 departments, that also occurs in the lead-up to the first in-person meet-up for the wider PZ team since 2018. We’re all aflutter about it (and trying to remember everyone’s real world names instead of online handles) and hope to have lots of good B42 chat in amongst the introduction of an international team to traditional Geordie culture.
 

Let’s pop into a few different areas, then – with the caveat that for a fuller B42 overview our last dev blog is probably a better destination.


Work continues on the fire rewrite branch with the intention being to bring it up to a state in which it can safely enter our internal test build.

It recently came to mind that a lot of the ‘fire dev’ chat in blogs took place in the distant past, before we had to reshuffle and our current MP team became what it is today – thereby forcing flames into the sidelines for an elongated spell.
 

As such the guys have made a vid for us today that spells out some of the foundations of what is being done here, in terms of how fire spread, size and duration is governed – and indeed the sort of stats that lie beneath the hood that we can balance with, and that the community can mod with.

That’s the first half of the video: done with our old fire effects (which are too transparent and also on fast forward) so please take this aspect as instructional/iterative rather than a fait accompli.
 
The second part of the video then moves on to show our experimentation with fire visuals, working alongside our VFX artist friend Brian, as we work out different ways to make in-game flame effects better match our particularly coloured iso-world.
 


As regular readers will know, alongside tidying up smaller multiplayer irritations as they go, our MP team are currently transferring player inventory actions over away from the client and onto the server. They have another three or four weeks set aside for the first stage of this: at which point we will the player’s inventory loaded from the database on the server, and the server always having an up-to-date player inventory – hopefully all working in sync with the progress bars, item move times and expected results you get currently.

At this point the second major part of the code work will be getting underway: having all the item manipulation occurring on the server side, and ensuring that the server no longer trusts clients (those sneaky clients!) so that stuff like item adding cheats are rendered defunct.

After this, clearly, there’ll be a heap of testing and such – but we thought the more technically-minded amongst us would appreciate a catch-up on where the guys are with it.
 

This past week Aiteron has been working with the testers who’ve been reporting back on bugs and gameplay in the latest version of our revamped fishing – and has been largely working on an improved/experimental control system for a more chilled out and less button-holdy-tappy experience.

He has also been working with our aforementioned VFX specialist friend Brian, who has been supplying us with various splashes, bubbles and signs of water movement that will indicate the presence of fish, and also be a suggestion of the size of what lurks beneath. On top of bug fixes, changed recipes and improved items for the system he’s also been firming up on exactly what sorts of fish we’ll be adding to the game, and whether they’d be found in rivers or lakes (and definitely not swimming pools).
 

There’s gonna be lot of bass: largemouth, smallmouth, white, spotted and striped. And let’s not even get started on the crappies…


After an awful lot of code-side tinkering, a super WIP version of our crafting improvement has surfaced into something that’s viewable in a vid. Please note this is the visible tip of the iceberg, and clearly what’s on show isn’t final: you do not saw logs in a furnace, and this isn’t how you make a hammer.
 



So what’s on show here?

Various objects can now be entirely created using the game’s scripting language that’s been made similar to the way items and vehicles etc. are defined.

This covers various currently planned objects that can function as a craft station: stuff like blacksmith furnace, tailoring bench, fletchery, brewing stands, kilns etc. And, unlike the way it is now, these can also be objects consisting of multiple tiles/sprites with various rotations etc.

At a craft station the player is able to use their normal recipes (which may provide a bonus for doing the recipe at a craftstation) but it’s here that they can use their blueprints – and which ones are available will be defined by the associated object script.

Blueprints (working title) are similar to recipes in that they can take inputs, and produce outputs. However they are distinct from your usual recipes in the following ways:
 

• They have different duration modes – in real world seconds, game minutes or can run passively in the background for long periods.
• They may not require the player to be present. For example, a melting process may run on the craftstation while you run off to do other things.
• As well as items, they can take the input (and produce) Fluids and different in-game ‘energies’ – Electric, Heat, Kinetic or Steam.
• When active a Blueprint in progress can store its inputs/outputs, and may have storage capacity for them. For example, a blueprint that needs water as an input may well have an internal storage buffer for water. We’ll probably show this in a development vid next time.

Blueprints are processed much like recipes where the inputs by default are consumed to create the outputs. However the default behaviour can be complemented or overridden by custom lua code for certain blueprint events like OnStart, OnUpdate, OnFinish, OnCancel. This is similar to normal recipe events such as OnCreate.
 
Using this custom lua code interesting things can be done – like for example a blueprint for a Meat Drying Rack which has several input slots for meat. The blueprint can be set to run passively, so it wont require a player to manually start it up.
 
The OnUpdate event then triggers a lua function which checks if the Meat Drying Rack is situated in a exterior space, and if so we can then go into our usual PZ super-nerdery level of depth by calculating the amount to dry a meat item based on temperature and the cloud intensity / sunlight at that time. So when a meat item is dropped in one of the UI slots it starts passively drying the meat.
 
Another feature of blueprints is that their UI can be scripted. The video shows a few simple (bizarre) test examples of different UI layouts. However they can potentially be scripted to have any desired appearance – using any of the game’s existing UI elements, or indeed modded ones.
 
As mentioned heavily above: the video is very early WIP, especially where the UI is concerned, and there are still some parts not yet functional. In a future update we can show a more functional UI, and run through some more interesting case examples.


Finally, over to RJ in the animal zone.

“I’ve been diving more and more into a farm animal’s designation zones – which are paddocks you outline for your animals to occupy (as long as they don’t get loose) and where the game will allow you to do all your various primary animal-rearing tasks. For most of this week I’ve been refactoring and simplifying my animal behaviour and meta code, but there’s a few interesting things to mention.”
 
“Cows and sheep can now recognize a roof area and stay under it during heavy rain, I’ve been trying to get sheep to move in more of a flock most of the time, and baby animals will follow their mother more correctly. You can also now drop food directly on ground for them to eat, or in the feeding trough container – where it won’t spoil quite so quickly.”
 
Also, among many other things (haircare, first aid, dropping bags, new emergency broadcast system noises) the Sound Team have also started making animal noises.
 
Behold, the cows now have hoofsteps.
 


This week’s tarmac follow party from Darth. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The 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.

Experienced gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here.

Hey all, hope you’re all doing well and that thus far 2023 has been kind. Let’s get straight into it.


First of all we’d like to welcome officially three new people to the full Project Zomboid team.
 
Fenris_Wolf should need no introduction to the old hands of the Project Zomboid community. He took over and maintained the ORGM mod with great aplomb from the original creator ORMtnMan – and will be a name familiar to many.
 
Right now he’s reacclimatizing himself with the PZ codebase, charged with clearing out some of the niggly things that have been on our ‘to do’ list so he gets his fingers dirty in many and various different areas of the game. Clearly his expertise with guns and the firearms code will likely come into play at some point in his time with us, but for now it’s all about bedding down and getting comfy in Spiffo’s hovering mothership.

Also joining us officially, meanwhile, are Amz and Pat_Bren.
 
Amz is another familiar name from the community, and was a great help to us in the days of 41 MP testing. She’s now officially a full-time tester working with Sasha and Yana, and will also be making cool videos for our blogs and improving our (already extraordinarily professional) social media engagements.
 
Pat_Bren, meanwhile, has been writing up a storm for Build 42 on a part time basis – writing new radio and TV channels and content, new lore for what’s going on around the world and much more besides – and will now be working other cool future content in an official and ongoing capacity.


Right now, we’re probably due an ‘overview’ of Build 42, so everyone is on the same page about its contents rather than skipping about between them each blog.
 
42  boils down to four large chunks of deep-rooted work that we want to all come together: the crafting/animals update, the map expansion, the optimization/lighting/basements engine upgrade, and the weighty job the MP team have taken on to move all inventory interactions over from clients to server.
 
These are all at different stages – for example animals are further ahead than a lot of the elements of crafting in terms of being ready to actively test and play with. Right now with the crafting, the work taking place is on the back-end codeside of crafting stations and component UIs.

Meanwhile with the engine upgrade at this point we’re essentially fixing up various different rendering issues that were broken with our quite fundamental changes to the system up to a point at which it’s ready to be merged into the test build.

The map team meanwhile continue to pump out new towns, interesting locations and fun places to travel to and hold out in.



Around these big ticket items we also have other coders, writers, artists and 3D modellers working to improve aspects of the current game.

So there’s the in-depth fire overhaul, Aiteron’s revamped fishing, better farming, more imaginative and fun items to find and use, better events to come across, improved recipes, new animations and activities, improved music system and deeper soundscape – and general piles and piles of polish and improvement throughout.
 
So with all that firmly held in mind, let’s have a quick dart around some of the different departments of PZ to catch up on a few bits and bobs.

• Our smashing friend Steve N, who we’re borrowing from EverCurious Entertainment, has been digging into our animation system and working out some longstanding issues that we’ve been desperate to fix. We’re currently jumping into a test build to check nothing else has been broken by his changes, but the result will be a lot more silky smooth turns and 180s in your survival forays.

• The big debate currently in our work with livestock is how to make it clear to players that you’ll need to designate areas that you want them to occupy and produce within, alongside building them fences they won’t escape through. We’ve got various ideas for this and will be running our experiments past the testers.
  
  Increasingly we’re realising just how much more ‘life’ these non-human and non-zombie creatures bring to the game. To which end we are also experimenting with some non-interactive beasts that will run before you get near, and give the game a smidge more desolate color…
  
  
  

• As mentioned before, alongside refinements and improvements to the music system, right now via Formosa/Noiseworks we’re in the process of getting real life human actors (in Los Angeles! In America!) to record some basic bodily noises to give extra life (and pain) to our Knox Event survivors. Imagine how cool it will be in MP when one of your buddies reaches you, having escaped zombies and run in terror, and you can hear their panicked heavy breathing.
  
  That’s the sort of thing we want to capture, alongside noises of hurt and exertion as you tumble around the landscape. While we’re there we are also going to get a variety of other ‘spoken’ TV and radio noises that we can then obfuscate to improve the entertainment system slightly.

• Aiteron is back with us and has picked up on his work on fishing. This is its current iteration, which will shortly be mixed into the internal test build. This probably needs some more tweaking with the ‘strain’ animations – and the indications that a big fish is being caught – but is really getting there now. It’ll be mixed into the internal test build soon, which is also the point at which Formosa can start working on the new sound effects and such.
  
  
  

• About a bazillion new items – some useful (hose now required for gas siphoning, kids) and some more aimed at making the world feel fuller and more ‘real’ are also currently going into the internal test build. Here are a few examples.
  
  
  

This week’s wintry scene from BruceWayne (not the real one). A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The 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. Experienced gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. Thanks to everyone who voted for Spiffo in the Labo(u)r of Love awards. He seemed quite chuffed about it.

First off… ahem… “Vote for Project Zomboid in the Steam Awards!”

In a fairly mindblowing chain of events, mainly due to the awesomeness of the survivors of the Knox Event, Project Zomboid has been nominated for Labor of Love in the Steam Awards.



We are up against some fantastic other games (vote Deep Rock or No Man’s Sky if you’re less keen on us – those teams are incredible!) but just being on the list is a massive achievement for us and we’re so grateful for the community for getting our name up in lights like this.

So thanks everyone, it really does mean a lot!

We’ve got a lot of the team away on their Christmas break this week who weren’t around to prod for contributions, or have a house full of sick people who need attention (that’s me, Hi), however the following items were shoved into the blog writer’s sack nonetheless.
 

• In preparation for getting real actor-recorded body sounds, huffs and puffs for the game – Matteo has been recording his own voice to get a feel for what’s required. He’s kept them quite subtle to match the perspective, and the consideration that the player doesn’t want to be heard by zombies, so right now they’re not too over the top. We might change the approach with this, but it’s interesting to consider them and think what they’ll bring in terms of immersion to the game.
  
  
  
  
  
  

• We’re currently working on bringing our optimization and basements branch (both mapper-placed underground areas that always appear, and the randomly occurring ones placed as surprise features and treasure/zombie boxes) into a testable state. This is an ongoing process, but a lot of progress has been made this week so it’s rather exciting nevertheless.
• The integration of fire is still trucking along with most of our attention currently being on making flames fit the scene, we have a VFX artist joining us for a little while early in the new year – and in the meantime are experimenting code-side too. We’ll share some vids when we’re closer to the finished article.
• Blair is working on a variety of things – and is currently super proud of ‘LootLog’ which he wants advertised so modders are aware of it. This is a dev and modder tool that, once activated, logs every item that spawns around the player rather than wait for the player (or modder/dev) to discover it. Info logged includes a list of items; the room definition in question; the container type in question; and the X, Y and Z coordinates of the container in question.
  
  This is intended as a tool for us and the modding community to evaluate the amounts of loot that spawn, and where it spawns. The blog writer is aware that it isn’t super sexy blog content – but Blair underlines that it is a ‘niche pleaser’ so if you are in that niche: consider yourself pleased.
• Also in the Algol pipeline this week: improved ‘profession’ houses with cars outside that match the profession, new weapons, new zed stories, new ‘filler’ book items with names dreamt up by dreamy Pat_Bren and the implementation of all sorts of new foods and 3D items.
• RJ’s animals have entered initial testing, which made for an extremely fun first day of crazy bug reports and ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and cuteness. It’s amazing what ‘life’ non-human and non-zombie animated creatures suddenly bring to PZ when you encounter them in-game.
  
  Fun bugs we dealt with included:

Alongside the chickens that keep opening doors, five eggs dropped on a wooden floor created a house full of roosters.



Pigs breeding so fast that a piglet horde started to form before one of our tester’s eyes.



While not a bug, this one was deliberate, here’s also a picture of some cows in a strip club.

Merry Christmas.



This week’s festive grave visit from 지혁! A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The 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. Experienced gameplay coder and want to join Team Awesome? Jobs page here. We’re also on sale at the moment if any of your mates fancies it x

THANK YOU to everyone who has already ordered their future survival companion.

Head over to the Makeship campaign page to order your own :spiffo: Spiffo:

https://shop.makeship.com/3FHlgG8

Happy December Thursdoid, and a big hello to all the new survivors who’ve jumped on board in recent weeks. This week we’ll be doing a quick check-in with the various different departments who are at work on Build 42 and providing a little freeze-frame of exactly what’s being worked on.

First though, we would be remiss if we didn’t inform all fans of raccoons, soft toys and ‘both of these things’ that: the Makeship campaign for the Spiffo plush has been EXTENDED for a full extra week due to everyone getting all excited about it.

If you are interested in sliding under a closing door then reaching back for your fluffy Spiffo, like Indiana Jones, then final orders can be made here:

https://shop.makeship.com/3FHlgG8


Okay, so let’s go round the Zomboid houses. Starting with… the sound team?

Formosa (formerly Noiseworks) have a lot of different things on the brew – work on new music and music systems, all the new actions and items for B42 (switchblade, firecracker etc) and clearly all the animal stuff which they’ll be starting on in due course.

Something else they are starting work on, however, are ‘acted’ character noises – pants and puffs recorded by real life actors to add a little more depth and feeling to the game, not to mention a greater feeling of ‘real’ when you are standing next to a character who has exerted themselves or is being injured in MP.

This will likely be an option you can turn off if you find it intrusive, but the Sound team believe they will provide an extra layer of immersion for Knox Event survivors. The sorts of things they’ll be recording will be: effort noises for window and fence climbs, sleeping noises, pain noises when bitten or scratched, vomiting, sneezing coughing etc.


As those who read this blog might recall, we’ve been screaming out for a big brain to come in and lend their clever thoughts to some of the movement bugs and issues in our anims system for a while. Previous attempts to find a Chosen One didn’t work out, and as such since the 41 release we’ve had a significant blocker in terms of improving our animation system and our animation tools.

There has been significant rejoicing, then, that our friends at Ever Curious Entertainment have lent us their own big brain Steve North – who has been deep in AnimZed of late, and should be providing a range of changes and improvements that will help out our animator Martin no end.

In terms of a player-facing end result, this means that in B42 hopefully there’ll be better blends between anims to tighten everything up and make things look smoother. It could also, potentially, improve the responsiveness of controls and give gameplay a slightly tighter feeling. We’ll see how it goes when the fixes go in.


Work on integration of the previously in-dev fire system continues, this week with the introduction of new mechanics like burnable oily surfaces and development of fire spread in save games and MP code.

We are also experimenting with visuals in that a more pixelated fire looks better in-game, and also will be having a VFX artist joining us for a time in January to further improve its appearance in our isometric illustrate-y looking world. It’s already looking a smidge better though.




Lots of fun new locations appearing from Xeonyx and Ayrton in the map channel, including this little doozy…



Over to RJ, resident of a country doomed to failure in a World Cup football match this coming Saturday.

“Right now I’m prepping my stuff so it can be put in front of our testers. I’m trying to improve the ‘meta’ part of the system that governs them when you’re not in their direct presence – primarily how the feeding trough and water troughs are managed while you’re away. That’s my main focus at the moment – but also need to add some polish to the genetics when animals breed, and I’ll be moving onto animal sickness soon also.”

Now onto Turbo, a resident of a country who will most likely be getting spanked by Argentina at the moment this blog goes live at some point this evening.

“I’m getting stuff ready so that other team members can jump into the more stable parts of my craft branch and help expand it, and plug stuff in. First, though, I’m going back over my crafting stations, and doing some refactoring – in essence adding a lot more automation to the way the system works in the code.“

“It should be worth the extra thought that’s going into it though, at the bare minimum you should be able to create a new station purely through scripting alone. If a certain station requires it then custom logic or a custom UI panel or element can easily be added – it should be as great for modders as much as ourselves.“

 
If you are/were aware of Blair as a prolific PZ modder, it will come as no surprise that on the team he is a WHIRLWIND of cool ideas and always has multiple gameplay tweaks and features on the go – and has struck up an amazing combo team with our ‘Loot Placement Artiste’ Baph.

Here’s some fun stuff that’s recently gone in for testing from the world of KEYS:

• Zombies will now only have a key, or a key ring with a key in it, for suitable buildings that they spawn in or near to. Prison Guards can have Prison keys, inmates cannot. Employees of a business can have a key for it, customers cannot.
• More keys will spawn in buildings, not just for the building, but also possibly for nearby vehicles. Sometimes those nearby vehicles may also have a key for that building in the glovebox.
• When a vehicle spawns a key (in its glovebox, on a zombie, or on the ground) it has a chance of being accompanied by a key for a nearby building as well.
• It’s ensured that only cop zombies get the cop car keys – although Survivor zombies could have anything.
• Building keys may well come pre-named according to the sort of building or business they unlock.
• We are doing more fun stuff with Key Rings in general, watch out rabbits!

 

So in essence: it will be possible for your survivor to find a locked building, find a key for it in the glovebox of a vehicle parked nearby, and then find a key for that vehicle inside that building. The keys may also be on a Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Keyring.

A Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Keyring may, or may not, have a minimal boost to your Luck. We will never truly let on.

Also: new options to let you mix in your runners with your shambles


Clearly this isn’t everything – we’ve also got optimizations, basements and other fun stuff lined up for 42 but there’s not a huge amount of news on these beyond ‘it’s all coming along’. Hopefully we’ll have a few more updates on these in our next pre-Xmasdoid.

Fanks all love yus x

This week’s good use of 41 fire from BoinXaysa. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The 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.

Now, the Block of Italicized Text demands: go and buy Dwarf Fortress on Steam! The original, best and most brilliant simulation there is – and ever shall be.
Its development, and developers, bay12games, are LEGENDARY and built the road that Project Zomboid travels on each and every day. Now DF is finally on Steam, and we implore you all to join in the fun!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/

Released to Stable on December 12th:

- Fixed ServerConnectPopup missing the new "Use Steam Relay" option, which led to the +connect argument not working.

• Fixed being able to still add a split-screen player when AllowCoop is disabled.
  
• Fixed seeing through walls sometimes after loading into a game.
  
• Fixed an error in ISZoneDisplay:getZoneTooltipText.
  
• Fixed players briefly appearing at 0,0 on the in-game map after joining a server.
  
• Fixed displaying players with name ??? on the in-game map. This happened when the client had not received the first full update with the player's name and other info.

[Released to the Stable branch on November 30th]

- Added AllowCoop server option to allow or disallow splitscreen clients.
- Added MaxTextureSize (default 256) and MaxVehicleTextureSize (default 512) options to the Display options menu. Each of these can be 256, 512, 1024 or 2048.

- Fixed the propane required for the metal wall upgrade system so that you are capable of making a Mk II metal wall without having to upgrade first.
- Fixed sleeping pills not being taken in account with the panic sleep exploit fix.
- Fixed some vehicle textures (such as for wheels) being limited to 256x256 instead of 512x512.
- Fixed reading ServerList.txt and ServerListSteam.txt with the default system encoding instead of UTF-8.
- Fixed being unable to slice or smash a rotten watermelon.
- Fixed an error in the farming menu that limited squares watered after the first to 50 water units maximum instead of 100.
- Fixed /additem command exception when run from the server console.
- Fixed redundant console output from ISInventoryPaneContextMenu.lua.
- Fixed distant remote players not being displayed on the in-game map.

Let’s get something out of the way first then. Ugh. We feel so unclean doing what we’re about to do. SORRY. SORRY EVERYONE.
All the other games were posting Steam Awards links like that, so we did too. Don’t vote for us if you’d rather not, but if you do – well click on the above massive intrusive image and that would be swell.

So, back to business, we released some final-ish fixes for the current stable build yesterday – the changelist for which can be found here.

There may well be another smaller patch, early next week, with some other minor changes – namely a few small anti-cheat measures, a fix for some modded textures and a bit of metal walls weirdness that still needs addressing.

This week we’re going over to Blair, and his current mission on overhauling our Farming system. Now, priority number one is to get things more tactile and animation-led with farming: when you use a watering can we want it through a direct mouse-click and not a maze of sub-menus.



Away from this, however, we are also making the overall system more complex, varied and interesting. Elements of this already coded into the 42 mainframe include:

• Plants have growing seasons, and for most crops there are one or two optimal planting months. You’ll be able to read the best month to plant your crops on the back of seed packets, and if you plant at the wrong time of year you’ll get a reduced yield, and perhaps the risk of producing sickly plants.
  
• Appropriate plants, such as Potatoes, can be planted using the vegetable itself.
  
• You’ll be able to dry seed Corn and Peas to preserve them for planting next year.
  
• Plants can accumulate slugs and snails for the player to deal with – either using looted pest control, or perhaps using a folksy remedy. Nearby slug repellent plants such as Rosemary will help too.
  
• Rosemary is one of several herbs added as well. They tend to grow more quickly, and when harvested are knocked back a few growth stages – and then can be harvested again later. The herbs you pick can also be used to propagate new herb patches while they’re still fresh, and can be dried as well.

• We are expanding the need to water your crops to houseplants. Potted indoor vegetation that players find in the world will now be living – similar, but not identical, to crops. They need to be watered, can fall victim to diseases, and will become visibly unwell before they die and become a dried husk. This also means that they will be another cool signifier of the days that have elapsed since the beginning of the Knox Event – since in time all the plants in homes, shops, the mall etc will wither and die.

Elsewhere, we’ve been seeing what animals look like without their clothes/skin on. We’re thinking that these look realistic but a little too fatty and should have a little more muscle on show – but it’s interesting nonetheless.



These past two weeks we’ve also made a lot of progress with getting the previously shelved fire system back on track, including the ability for the game to have liquid-looking Molotov fire FX on the ground. The actual visuals are going to be fine-tuned and improved soon, so we’d rather not share images of it, but rest assured it’s going to be pretty cool.

Finally, another quick bump for the Spiffo plush that Makeship are creating for us – which is something that the community has been asking for since forever:
https://shop.makeship.com/3FHlgG8

If you want one you’ve got two weeks to put your order in.



In case you want to give it for Christmas then Mash has also created a certificate of gifting intent that will hopefully come in useful.



This week’s road-side (well, centre) picnic from Athena. A changelist of all our pre-release and post-release patches since the 41 beta began can be found here. The 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.

• Propane Torch usage rebalanced for Fixing and Repair scripts to accommodate the change in capacity; all reduced to 2.
  
  
• Added "AllowRottenItem:true" parameter to the recipes to Empty Frying Pans; Griddle Pans; and Roasting Pans. This will allow players to reclaim said pans when they let Stir Fries and Omelettes get rotten.
  
• Recipes such as the Mildew Spray Cure, and Emptying Sacks of produce now have the field "AllowRottenItem:true" which allows rotten items to be used in that recipe.
  
• Fixed the Make Mildew Cure recipe not allowing both regular and Canned Milk; as players were unable to make this cure after all of the normal Milk has gone rotten.
  
• Fixed being unable to use Rotten Milk to make the Mildew Spray Cure.
  
  
• Commented out the "Make Pot of Soup" recipes; they're obsolete given the evolved recipe system which handles this matter better.
  
• Fixed being unable to use Canned Soup to make evolved recipe soup.
  
• Changed the display name of "Canned Soup" to "Canned Vegetable Soup".
  
  • Note: To make Pots of Soup with Opened Cans of Soup you must now add them to a Pot of Water, as an evolved recipe soup. This fixes the Super Soup exploit and will allow players to also add additional ingredients to the Soup. The other way of making Pots of Soup was an obsolete and in many ways incompatible method from before the evolved recipe system.
• Updated the Clean Tray recipe so it works with trays of Biscuit Dough, and also so that it works with rotten and cooked ingredients, so players can always recover a tray from rotten trays of food.

• Several tweaks to clothing masks.
  
  
• Added missing SetMelee Delay on Pistol Whip animation.
  
• Fixed Hoodie and Vest masks to work properly with base mesh.
  
• Fixed JokeKnife, JokeArrow, BunnyEars, FurryEars, Antlers and GodStar Headbopper to work with all hairstyles.
  
  
• Fixed moodle and heart wiggle-speed, now reduced by half.
  
• Fixed an issue with forageSystem.lua not accounting for the new loot rarity settings.
  
• Fixed the veteran having some duplicate clothing selection options.
  
• Fixed in-game map road that was made curved in cell 35,31.
  
• Fixed print() statement from JoyPadSetup.lua that resulted in unnecessary messages in the console log.
  
• Fixed source files not being loaded in the Lua debugger on Linux.
  
• Fixed mod Lua files not being loaded in the Lua debugger.
  
  
• Fixed being able to purify Watering Cans in an Oven.
  
• Fixed being able to turn Cooked Eggs back into Uncooked Eggs.
  
• Fixed Pizzas having the hasMetal tag.
  
• Fixed error in SliceCooked test.
  
• Fixed PopEmpty2 and PopEmpty3 having DisplayCategory = WaterContainer instead of DisplayCategory = Junk.
  
• Fixed PopEmpty having DisplayCategory = Material instead of DisplayCategory = Junk.
  
• Fixed BeerCanEmpty having DisplayCategory = WaterContainer instead of Junk.
  
• Fixed Buckets not having been updated to use metal filling sounds instead of plastic filling sounds.
  
• Fixed distant players not appearing on the in-game map when the server option allows it.
  
• Fixed Male_Undies not having the "OBSOLETE = TRUE" parameter. Also removed them from the foraging pool.
  
• Fixed not using a language's desired encoding when reading credits.txt.
  
• Fixed non-admins seeing invisible remote players on the in-game map.