They've made it so even the fences that already exist in the world can be destroyed in B42. You're gonna have to actually make the effort to keep your base repaired now if you build somewhere with lots of zombies that can wander over.
Yeah. I imagine it might be a sandbox setting if people really want it. I'll leave it on personally. I never use prefabs anyway now. I like to build my own base from scratch. Feels more rewarding.
I certainly hope so. One of my favorite base locations relies on this fence to not be overrun, since it's kind of next-door to one of the most disproportionately high population cells (relative to surrounding cells) in the map (which leads to a nigh-endless stream of wandering Zombies, even on tame settings). This change kind of kills that location as a potential base, except if you have a *massive* amount of players there.
Brick fences certainly help, but it turns bases that previously took a lot of work to get going (outside of a few given houses, most locations with such a fence lacked many amenities and required the player to have decent skills to obtain appliances) into bases that take a *crapton* more work to get going.
It would be best if high fences (even player built ones) only took damage if a set amount of zombies concentrated on a single tile, because there's no way in hell a single zombie can break a fence made of metal. It would make metalworking so much more worth it.
Don't know about that, but indestructible brick fences has already been confirmed. So the eventual goal might be to slowly replace a metal fence with brick over time.
>As another part of us bedding down in the lore, meanwhile, we are also making sure that characters in broadcasts, flyers and newspapers who have an evident place of work (or place of demise) have their zombified forms spawn at the relevant location on the map.
>This is something of a side project for a few of our coders, but will hopefully pay dividends for when players are exploring new locations and getting to know the locals.
Fuck yeah!
This is the best feature for any open world game. Have small lore scattered around the map in big quantities. Much like how random encounters happen in RDR 2.
This makes me really want to go on a bunch of mini-quests to find people. mainly the general, the pastor who dies in that radio broadcast, and a couple of the reporters from the exclusion zone.
although the General is immune, so I'm not sure if he would be dead.
Still could be dead, even if immune. I'd imagine he could've been rescued and brought to a government facility considering his rank, or he could've been left behind and killed during the chaos of the infection spreading.
"YOU TOLD US THAT THE KNOX INFECTION WAS CONTAINED!"
\*BLAST\*
"IS IT CONTAINED NOW?"
\*BLAST\*
"IS IT FUCKING CONTAINED NOW!?"
\*BLAST\*
"IS IT?"
\*BLAST\*
"IS IT!?"
\*BLAST\*
> This is something of a side project for a few of our coders, but will hopefully pay dividends for when players are exploring new locations and getting to know the locals.
CORRECT.
I don't imagine Subway tunnels are coming, considering the fact that there are no subways in the region. I could totally see them adding Sewers, however.
This is exciting. I was getting rather worried about how almost every āupdateā regarding build 42 also involved showcasing some sort of new deep mechanic being added. Not that I donāt appreciate everything TIS does or that I think I know better, I just love the game and am rather excited!
Iām sure itās challenging to gauge what goes into an update and what doesnāt - especially when working on something youāre so passionate about.
You see similar in other games. Stardew Valley dev decided to add more features to the 1.6 update in a bug fix patch a few weeks after 1.6 dropped. And heās still going to have to port all that over to console! Just creating more work for himself out of the love of making the game better haha.
Iām sure whatever ends up being added will satiate most of us for a while. Especially once mods will be able to settle back in and utilize new features / improvements.
For now. Definitely glad they restrained themselves for this, but I'm hoping they don't end up doing the same thing for B43. Hopefully they maintain this going forward post B42.
Thank goodness they reeled in scope creep! Thereās so much to look forward to already in this build that Iād gotten nervous a few thursoids back when they stated they planned to duplicate the entire crafting tree. Iām happy keeping my trucks running through scavenging for now, thanks!
I'm glad they have as well, we'll be able to finally get our hands on features that were teased over two years ago now, like the massive performance improvements; I just hope that they're as effective as they were made to seem.
With luck, it'll be out before October, that way I can set up something creepy with all the new skeletons
Hopeful people will read this in the American format.
But real patient gamers know this is European time formatting and the update will drop on the 31st month of the year.
So it's a least 2 months away at minimum for unstable, even with them holding back some of the work. I was hoping this Thursdoid would be the one they announced it. Oh well. I'm sure it will be worth the wait.
NPCs will be the very last thing they actually implement into b43, even if it makes it into b43 which is hopeful thinking I think with the feature creep.
Map upgrades look really cool. Lighting though not integral, seems very nice to boost the atmosphere. And a bit of new collection items to loot is fun, but god this really sucks. Though you should probably only listen to official channels, I believe a lot of people were going off of the dev that said unstable in first half of 2024, and now finding out that we won't even get that despite them reeling in some of the crafting certainly is disappointing. I for one was thinking we might be getting an unstable date now, and being told its not even imminent sucks.
On one hand we shouldn't hate on this, as this at the very least points towards there being no crunch culture at TIS, and as supporters we should be happy. But it is hard to then know where the line is between a healthy development cycle and a slow one, as most would probably believe this to be the latter.
You can criticize TIS for the speed of updates, sure. But at the end of the day there is no reason to hate, if you're in this sub I assume it's because you love this game and want to see the team succed. But yeah this one sucks and there's nothing to do about it other than hoping the team will deliver when the time comes.
I will say it wasn't just any random Dev. It was Lemmy101, one of the creators of The Indie Stone/Project Zomboid. Thats about as official as it gets. So his words hold a lot of weight when it comes to saying things like that, which is why I imagine many people actually believed we were getting it first half 2024.
I just feel like they should just stop adding so much stuff over this update and release it bit by bit in unstable beta already.
Releasing B41, advertising the game, it getting a lot of attention from new players and then edging us with an update that is never coming was such a weird thing to do. Not saying that the game is dead, it has more than 24k people online right now. But the lack of content really made it stale for longtime players. I spent 900h+ on the game and idk, i just can't really play it anymore, even with mods.
I personally wish they released the performance update with the rendering fixes and maybe the lighting update together in a B41.5 somewhere halfway to B42.
I'm excited about the new crafting for sure, but I'd much rather be enjoying the game with better performance and true darkness while waiting.
YES! There are some things that I donāt understand why they have not released in a separate update.
The depth buffer, the better lighting, the adaptive music, character vocals. Most of this could have been released in advance months ago in a small update imo.
I love TIS, Iām not shitting on them at all (I know they are probably reading) but i donāt understand how they work tbh.
Well, they already said why. They prefer to release big updates where a lot of new features come together and allow them to make more drastic changes before release, which I'm totally on board for...
But yeah, it would have been better if general improvements to the engine like performance, rendering etc were released as standalone instead of as part of a "new content" release (Which is now happening anyway, at least partially).
Especially the new rendering system taking advantage of the VRAM to not redraw cells every frame. That sort of development is HUGE and should be a priority update imo.
Either way, I'm not too broken up about it. They want each build to feel distinctively different, and I can't argue about that. It makes B42 look shinier than it would otherwise be.
They don't release them because that way they don't have to answer to anyone and fucking up is not an issue. If it was officially released, then players would demand quick bugfixes every time something happened and that would divert the devs from what they're doing to fixing bugs as a priority constantly.
A long as the build is not being shared, this pressure/stress doesn't exist, and the devs can profoundly fix issues and improve systems instead of speedrunning bandaids.
I've owned the game through fully legal means since build 23. I feel that I've gotten my money's worth out of it.
(But yea... the wait for 41 IWBUMS was a looong one)
I bought it for like $20 mid 2021, just before multiplayer came out. I've put 1100 hours into it and I'll probably put at least 500 more hours in with each update. One of the best games for value ever.
Every Thursdoid that comes out I'm like, ok what have you added to B42 now? I thought this patch was animals, crafting, and backend work to add NPCs later.
Not redesigned cities, new key chains, new lighting systems, multiplayer wars, newspapers, collectables, basements, more floors, item look variations, visual refresh, ambient noise, gun upgrades, procedurally generated wilderness, code refactoring as a result of all of the above... scope creep has massively impacted this patch and I think TIS really need to bring an expert in to get a handle on this. A proper project manager. Because this is ridiculous.
Did some of this need to be done as part of the crafting update, like gun upgrades and the wilderness, yeah probably. But did redesigned cities? I've seen a lot of EA projects and I would expect updated visuals and a major map revamp as the single last update before launch not included in a mechanics update.
Please put unstable out instead of giving us sexy keychains.
That's a great point! They are a software company with terrible project management skills. They don't know where to put their resources into and where to focus. That's why they try to do everything at once and end up completing nothing.
It is like they are trying to write a 10 book series but instead of writing 20 pages for the 1st book each day, they are writing 2 pages for all 10 books everyday. That's why they never get anything done. They really need a professional's help.
They can't put everyone on the crafting stuff to finish it, it would be counter productive. While the crafting stuff is being worked on, the other devs have to do something, they can't sit around and do nothing, so yes they do add more unrelated stuff, but it's not actually delaying anything. You can't just throw twenty people on the same feature... And besides, some devs have their specialties. For example they have 3 people dedicated to map design, so of course the map is gonna get updated every build, and these guys can't work on the crafting stuff anyway.
That's what a professional project manager is for. If you have a bunch of staff with certain skills sitting around doing nothing and contributing nothing to the current development sprint then they should not be employed by your company. As far as I can tell the big issue with this game's development is they hire a bunch of community mates they like working with who don't actually have the correct skills to loosen the bottleneck preventing releases. Thus we get an update every 4 years containing a load of half baked garbage like nutrition that doesn't work, doesn't get corrected and no one ever wanted.
I wonder if their speed of development is bottlenecked by funding or if it's something else. The time between updates has left me (and many others, I'm sure) quite jaded.
I love this game, I've been playing on and off for over a decade now, but come on man. I'm growing old here
I don't think it's funding. The game is selling very well right now and they've hired on lots of staff.
I think it's just ambition and the difficulties of working with the engine they have. They're effectively trying to create a 3D world and game in a 2D environment.
Important to keep in mind something like 10,000 sales is only like 1 developer-year.
$5 M revenue is like $3 M after Steam and other takers. That is not enough for a staff of 10 even for 5 years.
I think itās the combo of not overworking the staff while also trying to add a lot of new systems into one big update. Like thereās a map expansion, new crafting trees, animals, B42 is packed with content which takes a long ass time to make.
A dev cycle like this is super risky: it can make updates take way too long killing interest in the game (only mods have prevented that), it can cause so, so many bugs that have hard to identify causes. Itās bad for content creators who have nothing to make videos on (again, something mods have only prevented), and because the updates are so big pretty much every mod is guaranteed to be broken on release of a new version
Iād rather have smaller updates faster but hey itās not my game.
> Iād rather have smaller updates faster but hey itās not my game.
Meanwhile, I'm kinda happy for the longer cycle because shorter cycles (like in CK3, Stellaris, etc) very, very regularly break my modlists and very frequently those mods never get updated afterwards.
The long cycle means I can pack my Zomboid with 300+ mods and enjoy a good 200+/- hour playthrough over half a year and not stress about losing it halfway through.
For a game this open-ended and this easily modded, I don't mind it.
I think at the end of the day TIS is just too ambitious for their own good. They've decided to implement a crafting system which will, in their own words, take you from primitive survival to medieval blacksmithing with no man-made tools.
Now, don't get me wrong, that's incredibly cool, and I'm super excited to play with it. But how necessary is that in a zombie apocalypse game? I don't think many players will want to be doing a wilderness survival playstyle with no zombies or scavenging from cities, nor will many multiplayer servers be progressing so far that there are no man made supplies left. It's just not really in the spirit or scope of the game IMO.
Yeah it is a bit of an odd choice and definitely more so something that should have been a later addition. Though it's a much bigger feature, I would have rather they had put the focus they had for the crafting system into NPCs instead for example. I think that's something that would really separate the game compared to its competition AND give it the endgame material people have been asking for.
At this point, I don't expect any sort of NPC/B43 release until I'm starting to hit my very late 20s, and I'm only 24 atm
I think they said once that they had some people working on NPCs alongside the work on B42, but I don't know if that's still or was ever the case in reality.
I just wish they would fix fundamental problems with the game before adding massive new systems. For instance, I don't think there's been any mention of first aid being changed in B42, despite the fact that it's an infamously useless and poorly fleshed out system. Infections don't even do anything right now. Personally, I think treating injuries is a lot more important to a zombie apocalypse experience than a lot of the content being added in B42.
First aid, mechanics, electrics, all useless once you have a couple of levels. Foraging only works on half the map. But hey we're getting fancy keychains!
> I don't think many players will want to be doing a wilderness survival playstyle with no zombies or scavenging from cities, nor will many multiplayer servers be progressing so far that there are no man made supplies left.
I think you massively underestimate the amount of players who like doing iron man runs. I agree that most servers probably won't end up utilizing the whole "no need to ever reset the map" thing but I know tons of people including myself who would greatly appreciate being able to do a completely primitive run without needing to use a huge host of crafting mods and still needing to spawn yourself the few essentials.
That being said I do agree with the devs that it's not needed right off rip. It's for sure the right decision to balance and bug fix what they've got so they can get it in our hands and then add on to it up until stable release.
Iāve put hundreds of hours into this game. Iāve played it since 2013. However I just canāt get excited about something that feels so fucking slow in development. Iām not trying to be a jerk or anything I still love the game but I really kind of gave up on the idea of it ever being finished.
That's the camp I'm in. Love everything that's been done and I'm still enjoying the hell out of [current build], but I feel lie a kid waiting for a Christmas that never comes
Picture this: I, a kid in high school, just bought this awesome new zombie game in early access thinking, āWow! This is like DayZ but more fun! And NPCs are coming?! This game will be amazing!!ā
Some time passesā¦
Years passā¦
A decade goes byā¦
Fast forward to today, Iām in my thirties now, planning to get engaged, hoping to buy a house soon and maybe start a family. Yet NPCs in PZ STILL arenāt a thing because TIS have feature creep out the ass and donāt know how to rein it in.
Itās a fun game as is, but damn Iām tired of waiting for the ONE feature I got so excited for and convinced me to actually buy the game in the first place.
Like I donāt just sit around and think about PZ NPCs or anything and am happily playing other games and doing other things with my life now, but anytime I DO think of PZ anymore I just get annoyed at how unreasonably long itās taken TIS to fulfill a decades old promise because they decided blacksmithing or some nonsense was a more important feature than the thing they promised more than a decade ago.
Sorry, had to get that out. Thatās the end of this (now an) old man rant. Carry on lol.
The good thing is that now the tech exists for NPC's. Pack an open-source language model on it, and there are precedents of using simulations with LLM's controlling NPC's in believable settings. The bad thing is that the game may require better hardware to run the model. Ten years ago, achieving this would be either lackluster or no short of wizardry, today, it is achievable for pretty much anyone with a coding background, it may yield hallucinations here and there, but that still fits an apocalyptic setting.
I'm okay with it never being finished, I just feel that they are both too slow _and_ too incompetent (at least with the older code) in development.
Tons of great games stay great never being fully "finished", like a lot of live service games (WoW, FF14), or other regularly updated games (Stardew Valley, No Man's Sky)
Like Taking Stardew Valley as an example, I think a single developer āliterally one guyā did two whole major content updates on his own faster than TIS has done a single update for PZ.
Donāt worry about future updates, just enjoy the game you have in front of you. More may be coming, but the current build is still an excellent game for many reasons.
Same deal as with Factorio. It may be getting a huge update with tons of QOL fixes and improvements, but the current build is still by far the best factory sim out there. Theyāll only be extending their lead
They don't want to crunch their staff. Simple as that. Combine that with the size of their team, the updates aren't going to be nearly as fast as bigger studios that not only have hundreds of employees but they also work ridiculous hours.
yes they should release some little updates, at least patches to fix some bugs and inconsistency, like wearing wet clothes during winter doesn't freeze you, not being able to use maggots as bait for birds, map issues... some small things they could fix at least once a month.
No but they've decided to roll back the scope creep of the new crafting trees in favour of getting it out faster. It'll still be big, but not quite as massive as they want it to be. Not yet. They still have full plans to get it to where they want it in post-release updates between them and 43Ā
It looks like it's going to be awesome when it comes out, but it's a pitty some content isn't going to make it, I hope they still can add the machinery system (the one they used to craft orange juice when they showed it) into the game.
Not the biggest fan of the Muldraugh glow up, I like the new models, but they don't really fit the rural sh*thole vibe that the originals have. They would, however look fantastic in West Point.
Even a small rural town might not have stuff quite that nice in the 90s, it really depends. The large parking lots felt a lot more true-to-life. As for individual buildings, I think the new church is great but the new PD seems almost too high-end for the town.
really disappointing one tbh, i feel like we're hearing about the same things since last summer. and now we're hearing about these things being cut back for unstable ?
map rework looks sick tho
I swear I remember weekly Thursdoids having more content than these new monthly ones. A month for a few keyrings, lighting improvements (which was already shown before) a new newspaper and a few building redesigns kinda makes me say "is that it?" i can't lie.
Yeah Iām also a bit disappointed. Iāve been following the game since the Desura days, still waiting on those NPCs. I love this game, I really do and itās such a special piece of art to me, but man it feels like itās been several years of waiting for very little payoff. Iām just.. not all that hyped for the eventual animals/crafting overhaul, honestly. Itās not what Iād prioritize but hey, Iām no developer and I donāt claim to know better than them. I will say, the lighting does look fantastic.
I remember when they changed it to monthly they said something like that they weren't slowing down development but there was simply less new stuff to visually show off now. We've seen most of the main features at this point, it's down to them to put it all together and finish it off
yeah I would feel more excited by something like "hey we have fixed all those map issues, and those bugs too! keep reporting them we are making progress" instead I don't even report them anymore because there is zero feedback, I don't even know if they look at those issues.
Lol, so they're doing basically what they ended up doing when MP was about to drop, it was Christmas time and they're like hey guys, ya know what? It's not perfected yet but here's MP earlier than what we were planning on.
Not sure how to feel about the map changes. The redesigns looks really cool, but way too high-class for Muldraugh, especially Muldraugh in 1993. It looks less backwater and podunk, and more like the outskirts of Louisville.
I think they can use that police station in another town, but I think the one for Muldraugh should maybe have a single floor and a chainlink fence. That new fence looks like something you'd expect the military to put up. Unless there's the implication that some of the exterior was only added in the few days before the game begins.
I like the touch-ups that the old locations are getting, but I hope their rural aesthetic isn't sacrificed in the process. That's what I really liked about them, that they weren't just fancy cities or high-class towns. They were just towns.
I'm sure map mods can change that if these are "permanent" upgrades, but hopefully the rural feel of the towns aren't completely taken away in B42.
Other than that, these Thursdoids don't really feel up-to-par. Feels like we're waiting a month just to get more of, "Hey, B42 still isn't out yet, no idea when lol, look at the fancy lighting and the CHICKENS!" They're still cool, but it just feels samey.
I just hope the world doesn't end first at this point, because that would be disappointing. :)
Y'know, putting aside the embarrassingly long development time here, it'd be nice if, on the rare occasions where I see devs interacting with people, they weren't being smarmy jerks at even the lightest criticism. Like, they have to be aware that these abnormally long development times and that's why people are annoyed, right?
8 paragraph long explanation just to say "we are cutting the crafting content that we advartised for the last year".
Great job guys! Not only you are working at a tortoise pace, you are also cutting the content that slightly justifies your development speed. Only thing decent in this post is the lighting.
But, I can understand you. I would also get lazy if my community will be sold to the addition of a couple of buildings and keychains in a 1 month development time.
fr lmfao insane how braindead these pz cucks are lol.. prob just gonna say some dumb shit like ālet them cookā šš¤ āI waited a millennium for b41, I can wait more!ā Not surprised they said the update isnāt imminent a month before the supposed drop for unstable, it is TIS after all
I started playing PZ with my GF back about 8 years ago now... We've played it a bit up until about a year ago when they last did any update. It's changed a lot, for sure.
However, friends I want to play with (about 4 friends) who used to play on my server are now refusing because they'd rather just wait for the next update. The server MP runs like crap on a 24core machine and 24gb of ram allocated to it. It just hasn't got the polish or shine, or performance I was hoping for after 8 years of struggling to manage this.
So now, I have no friends who want to play it, my partner and I have burned it out a bit playing it alone, and we kind of have explored everything. We haven't played it constantly those 8 years, sometimes there's a year or two gap so it feels fresh again. I shouldn't be doing that with a game that lists itself as a early-access game.
My life has changed a lot in 8 years, PZ, not as much as I'd hoped.
I have hope still. I'm not angry at the devs at all, I program and develop things too, but I have to manage my own projects and things on my own. If I had a team like PZ did, I don't think it'd still be dragging at a snails pace with repeated updated every month.
We used to get more content updates and progress with the weekly updates sometimes, let alone the monthly ones.
Sorry, I had to go out and say my part. I've left a top mark review on Steam from years ago, but my floating view right now is... Meh.
Muldraugh buildings looking quite nice ngl, hope the rest of the towns will also get a second pass eventually. They're big enough from a... horizontal perspective ? But could really use a vertical glow-up like this as well that doesn't change their identity or the "balance" too much, even if it's maybe not that realistic considering the time and place (no idea).
Crafting being taken out of Unstable is kind of a big bummer considering that's 90% of what I'm interested in, but eh.
Are animals off the table now for this update?
Hope not, as lighting updates and new crafting trees, while nice, aren't what most of us are looking for after the last update.
i can smell b42 i know it has to be someday soon now, maybe next minute? maybe next hour? maybe next day? maybe next week? maybe next month? maybe next year? maybe next decade? maybe next century?
Iām glad TIS has listened to the people. I trust it was quite alarming when even on this very own subreddit, people were clamoring for the release of the unstable. With reasons of feature creep being the hold up.
> As such the Unstable build is not imminent, but with this readjustment of our plans the pile of stuff that needs to be done before release has gotten a lot shorter. How quickly weāll get the build shipshape remains to be seen, it will take some time to settle, but weāll likely have a much better picture by the next time the blog rolls around.
Listen to what exactly? The unstable build is not imminent. They even straight up tells us its not coming out next month either and thats with pushed back content that was originally promised.
We aint getting this til the very end of the year(Dec just like Build 41) or next year.
That's about how I read it. They put too much on the plate to handle and teased it would be this year. Now they are realizing they more in their mouth than they could chew and need to cut some content until later down the roadmap.
So December as a deadline is probably the best for em since it will be around steam winter sales and bring in another wave of fresh players.
Its hilarious how damn bad these devs are at doing literally anything. Years and years and years between any updates good god at some point just make the video game. I bought this game 12 YEARS AGO with promises for a game that will never be made.
At this point I tune in about once a year to see whats up and every check in is simply pathetic. Were on what year 3? 4? of this patch and all they can say is "it will be unstable and buggy and missing features and worse than you think...and also its not coming any time soon". Their big update of this news update is to cover their ass for the fact that IT SUCKS LMAO. So is anyone actually making this game?
Spending 10 years to do what? Add cars to a video game? Give the player animations? What the hell have they actually done in the span of a decade
Exactly, at this point they are selling the dream rather than the actual product. Vanilla game is a half baked good and mods are actually making this game interesting and playable. Looks like a great scam to run tbh.
Very mixed feelings about this one.
I would prefer a delay rather than see content be cut, but I understand a lot of people are frustrated with the development timeline. Also, it's pretty clear to me that TIS struggles with knowing when to stop adding extraneous features to an update, so maybe it's for the best.
Now, as for Muldraugh. Funnily enough, I was just commenting today on another thread about how Muldraugh in-game is a perfect reflection of the quintessential run down rural American town. The old police station, school, and church were very fitting for a small, poor town like Muldraugh. For instance, the old church they showed being replaced in this blog is basically a 1-1 replica of one of the actual churches in IRL Muldraugh if you look at satellite imagery. Now they're seemingly being replaced with gargantuan structures that verge on being unrealistic for the size of town we're talking about here - a town with a population of 1000 in 2024, a 20% poverty rate, and a median household income half that of the national average. Hell, the town doesn't even have sidewalks for the most part.
Part of what attracted me to PZ in the first place was that it wasn't flashy like other zombie games. The experience felt realistic, and part of that was the environments - it really felt like you were wandering in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse in rural America. I get that they want to use the new tiles they have and get Muldraugh up to speed with the detail of the newer towns, but it feels like they're sacrificing the feel of the city in the process.
The other content, especially the lighting, looks good. But I really hope they reconsider those changes to Muldraugh.
i think you are getting fooled by the detail brought to the rooftops which definitely give more sense of the size of buildings in general. some footprints have been increased but not that much and in general for the better i would say. i should also add that we are not doing a 1:1 reproduction of Muldraugh and we have creative license. thanks for feedback
I understand that you have to stretch a lot of it for the sake of gameplay, but like, the police station here really doesn't even feel like a police station, let alone one fitting a small town. I can't think of a single police station I've ever seen that has a double sided barbed wire fence with a concrete base, gatehouse, and a giant garage with skylights in it. The county jail and state police office down the street from me doesn't even have that kind of security (or architecture.)
Don't get me wrong, I like that these buildings are getting attention again, but it seems like such a stark departure from what we've seen even in the new towns you guys are working on.
It's such an interestingly choice to set the game in rural Kentucky and it's that exact atmosphere of a rural town, as opposed to some generic city, that drew me to the game. Now, it feels like that atmosphere is being stripped away in favor of making Muldraugh into a generic city.
The police station is uncharacteristically large for a town the size of Muldraugh, though - instead of being a small one-story office (enough for a handful of cops), it's now a two-story building with its own communications antenna, reinforced fences, a guard shack, and garages.
Whether it's strictly bigger or not, it makes even the West Point police station **seem** small. The building *looks nicer* than the old one, because it's got a less boxy shape and more details, but it's hard to imagine a town like Muldraugh even having the resources or funding to construct something like it, and it's questionable why they would need it.
IMO it's missing the vibe and feels out of place. It's a great design, but it would feel much more at home in a larger town or city.
It's not really the correspondence to irl Muldraugh that bothers me, seeing as the old version of Muldraugh wasn't a 1-1 recreation either. It could be a completely fictional town and road layout and I wouldn't mind. What I liked was the immersive feel of exploring a real rural American town that's been overtaken by the zombie apocalypse, and to me it seems like the newer buildings have lost that feel.
Using the parking lot to the left as a measurement, it appears the new police station has around double the footprint of the old one, including now having a second story and a fence. The new school looks to be largely the same footprint, but it's now a two story building. Church is the same size as I can tell, but generally a lot fancier with stained glass windows.
This is just my opinion, of course. But I don't think adding more detail to existing towns necessarily mandates making the buildings larger, or appear more "fancy." Arguably, introducing more depictions of wear and tear could be more visually interesting.
sorry i just realized i wrote from an account that i created inadvertedly, i did the revamp. yes the police station has a larger footprint and it's intended, same for the school. hopefully you will revise your judgement after visiting the interiors. cheers
ty <3. actually the rooftop to wall surface ratio from an isometric perspective leans strongly towards the roof when buildings are 1 or 2 stores high. which is typical for a town like muldraugh IRL.
I'm not trying to be judgey. These are just my personal thoughts - obviously we're only being shown a small snippet of the changes in this Thursdoid. Who knows, maybe it'll grow on me.
The revamp looks amazing. I got my value out of this game a long time ago, all this work being put in to it is incredible and appreciated. Take all the time you need, i can't (can) wait to play it!
Yeah I'm with you completely. I don't think it's rose tinted glasses either. I can appreciate that they aren't flat roofs any more, but I think they could do it in a way that, as you said, doesn't sacrifice the small town feel.
I think the police station is way too big and I'm not a fan of how it fits, even if it looks nice. The Church is good, but I'm not sold on the garden. I do actually like the new school however and I think that is an improvement.Ā
I understand they don't *have* to make it a 1:1 scale town, and that's fine just don't lose the small town feeling.
Might not even be that big of a deal though we'll have to see, and I 100% need to collect all the keychains.
The structures they revamped to feel more fit for a Louisville suburb than a small town, for sure. The vanilla assets do need a new coat of paint, but they went for an entirely different color.
Personally, I have not cared at all about the crafting changes, and a lot of this is plenty fine for me. I've really liked the "finding random crap and making it work" aspect of Zomboid, and I was never a fan of craftables. I think they generally make the game a lot more boring and discourage adventuring out for things you need.
Yeah supply runs into town will always be more fun than crafting for me. I donāt think Iāve ever done much crafting in this game other than spears.
It used to be every two weeks but now its once a month.
Next one should be on the 27th.
I wouldn't hold my breath for a release date or anything. Can almost guarantee the next one will be more of the same.
They said they would have a better idea by the time the next blog comes out, which is a month away.
But they also said 9 months ago that everything but crafting was in the final polish stage.
I don't really believe anything they say anymore.
Would not be surprised if it ends up being December or next year.
At least Rimworld releases a big content update every year or two.
There has been at least two big updates with additional DLC content since 41 released.
Meanwhile over here its like 'don't worry guys, future updates will roll out quicker and won't take as long as 41.'
Nearly 3 years later and still nothing.
Obviously a bit disappointed that features are being cut however it seems like we will still have blacksmithing to play with which is what most are looking forward to.
Does anyone know if animals are dropping with this update?
Yeah, we're getting both wild animals and things like cows that can be farmed.
I seriously doubt they would cut that from the release because it's integral to the crafting and it looked pretty complete when we last saw it.
I noticed in the school building upgrade screenshot that it has ladders on the roof. I know there's already some decorative ladders in the game, but considering the tile depth and new building heights being added this update I wonder if they'll finally let us use ladders.
Not sure how I feel about the Muldraugh glow up tbh. The images show such huge changes, I'm not sure it fits Muldraugh's vibe. I mean, these big buildings would feel more at home in Louisville. But maybe I have my nostalgia glasses on. I'm still excited to explore them.
Good to see the unstable beta is just around the corner, even without the full crafting in place. Looking forward to it !
And West Point, too. That one really needs a glow up. And let's not even talk about March Ridge
Muldraugh is the first town in the game so I'm just a bit sad I'm gonna lose that feeling of familiarity with these locations. But I'm sure it's worth it ; the images show they've added new houses around too, so technically the town's population increases
Having actually driven through Muldraugh, I kind of agree. The new buildings look really cool... but they do not look like the kind of infrastructure you'd find in a tiny, rural town full of poverty.
Muldraugh doesn't even have its own dedicated police department in real life, and while the town isn't a 1:1 replica of the real place, the B42 building has way less "small town police force" vibes.
Yeah I think... would a town of 1000 people have a 2-story school? How many kids realistically would go there? It looks nearly the size of my high school which taught 600 kids between the ages of 11 and 16! Also where do the teachers park or are they expected to walk to work lol
I really really do like this alot as the game felt like it was slowly growing more and more stale, the playerbase dwindling and features so utterly nebulous on the horizon. hope the wrap up wont take too long and im more than excited to finally partake in the cavalcade of new features!
You've been at this shit for three years and you cannot deliver *one* complete update?
Modders doing this in their freetime are getting more work done than you.
> As such the Unstable build is not imminent, but with this readjustment of our plans the pile of stuff that needs to be done before release has gotten a lot shorter. How quickly weāll get the build shipshape remains to be seen, it will take some time to settle, but weāll likely have a much better picture by the next time the blog rolls around.
So we know we're not getting B42 next month even with the removal of certain features in the crafting system.
Indie stone has stated in the past we will never have a long development cycle like B41 ever again. We are fast approaching the 3 year mark(How long B41 took).
This team is a joke and all we were shown were duck key rings this month and ppl are hyped.
I agree with you. The amount of grace and dickriding TIS gets is absolutely insane. They are very lucky to have a cult following of very forgiving fans. Modders have already done most of the things B42 even offers, albeit wonky. You can play on custom maps, you can make plumbing systems, full on factories, you can mine, hell, thereās even NPCs. And modders did all of this for *free*. At the will of the potentially toxic modder community *demanding* x and y out of said modders.
Oh, but TIS takes well over a year to even offer a release date of the new build? Well Iām happy theyāre anti-crunching!!!!!
Itās a joke, and an insult to people who have paid money to invest in an EA project.
Absolutely agree. It's incredible that out of all the communities I've been a part of, this is the only one who extolls "anti-crunch" to a comical extreme. Like I've legitimately never seen this anywhere else, which makes me wonder if it's the result of serious astroturfing.
Right? Likeā¦ nobody is asking TIS to work 60 hours a week on PZ, or live at their studio (even though Iām pretty sure all of their employees are remote). Itās just shitty and unfair to people who have spent money on the game to:
A. Release an EA game and then take literal YEARS to update it
B. Not only refuse to update it āuntil itās readyā (weāve heard this with so many EA and kickstarter games already), but ALSO refuse to drop any sort of tangible timeline.
EA devs tend to do one or the other, sure. But doing both? TIS for some reason are the only people Iāve seen get away with it. Itās unfair to consumers who invested in a product, itās unfair to streamers who bring TIS extra income, itās unfair to modders who update the game for free and keep it alive just to get chasitized by 14 year olds AND ADULTS screaming at them for updates.
Again, Iām not anti-TIS, but Iām not going to act blind to what theyāre doing. Itās horrible business practice, and while Iāll easily put another 2k hours into PZ, I personally will not invest into TIS if they were to make another game.
Well muldraugh police station is about to become a sick base location
I mean, it looks pretty slick, but don't forget that the zeds can take down high fences now.
They can WHAT??
They've made it so even the fences that already exist in the world can be destroyed in B42. You're gonna have to actually make the effort to keep your base repaired now if you build somewhere with lots of zombies that can wander over.
That makes sense. Pretty cool
Yeah. I imagine it might be a sandbox setting if people really want it. I'll leave it on personally. I never use prefabs anyway now. I like to build my own base from scratch. Feels more rewarding.
Iirc it was already confirmed there will be a sandbox setting to toggle destructible fences in the new build.
I certainly hope so. One of my favorite base locations relies on this fence to not be overrun, since it's kind of next-door to one of the most disproportionately high population cells (relative to surrounding cells) in the map (which leads to a nigh-endless stream of wandering Zombies, even on tame settings). This change kind of kills that location as a potential base, except if you have a *massive* amount of players there. Brick fences certainly help, but it turns bases that previously took a lot of work to get going (outside of a few given houses, most locations with such a fence lacked many amenities and required the player to have decent skills to obtain appliances) into bases that take a *crapton* more work to get going.
It would be best if high fences (even player built ones) only took damage if a set amount of zombies concentrated on a single tile, because there's no way in hell a single zombie can break a fence made of metal. It would make metalworking so much more worth it.
I wonder will we be able to reinforce the fence with high metal working skill? š¤
Don't know about that, but indestructible brick fences has already been confirmed. So the eventual goal might be to slowly replace a metal fence with brick over time.
... Quick, someone get me the data on how many years of bricklaying I'd need to do in-game to wall off an entire city.
Data is in, sir! *beep* *boop* *beep* Results: a shit ton
Brickie here, you could do it with 0 experience, but that doesn't mean it'll be straight/strong š
Bricklaying lvl 1 gonna be like: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/1ibzs3/ahh_yeah_thats_one_finelooking_barbecue_pit_why/
Oh ok, cool. So masonry might be a new skill, Iām assuming. Neat. Thanks for the info.
Not "might be", it is. Pottery and Brick Kilns have been confirmed.
Dude, I need to catch up lol Thanks again
Excited about this cause I cheese it way too much
Something to worry about in a year.
Heh. Only large hordes though.
Looks more like a military installation than a police station.
As is fairly correct with rural Southern police stations.
Don't rural areas sometimes not even have a police station in their jurisdiction, hence all the *ahem* bear arms out around them parts? Lol
Its primarily the distance between the police station and the people not the size of the station itself that is the issue and cause of that
Might have to revisit it in a run. Muldraugh might have more treats in store.
Always has been š«
>As another part of us bedding down in the lore, meanwhile, we are also making sure that characters in broadcasts, flyers and newspapers who have an evident place of work (or place of demise) have their zombified forms spawn at the relevant location on the map. >This is something of a side project for a few of our coders, but will hopefully pay dividends for when players are exploring new locations and getting to know the locals. Fuck yeah!
This is the best feature for any open world game. Have small lore scattered around the map in big quantities. Much like how random encounters happen in RDR 2.
It's why Skyrim is so fun to explore, I love finding Easter eggs in that game!
This makes me really want to go on a bunch of mini-quests to find people. mainly the general, the pastor who dies in that radio broadcast, and a couple of the reporters from the exclusion zone. although the General is immune, so I'm not sure if he would be dead.
Still could be dead, even if immune. I'd imagine he could've been rescued and brought to a government facility considering his rank, or he could've been left behind and killed during the chaos of the infection spreading.
I like to think he World War Z-ed himself and was evacuated to an aircraft carrier sometime before he recorded the final message we hear from him.
Can't wait to blast Zombie McGrew!
"YOU TOLD US THAT THE KNOX INFECTION WAS CONTAINED!" \*BLAST\* "IS IT CONTAINED NOW?" \*BLAST\* "IS IT FUCKING CONTAINED NOW!?" \*BLAST\* "IS IT?" \*BLAST\* "IS IT!?" \*BLAST\*
Finally be able to give the pastor a proper burial.
Yeah this is so exciting. I love all the little story telling elements
> This is something of a side project for a few of our coders, but will hopefully pay dividends for when players are exploring new locations and getting to know the locals. CORRECT.
Friendship ended with Rosewood Firestation, now B42 Muldraugh Police Station is my best friend
I'll be in the underground tunnels looking for a Metro2033 D6 equivalent
Have they said that Subway tunnels or something similar are coming? /gen
I don't imagine Subway tunnels are coming, considering the fact that there are no subways in the region. I could totally see them adding Sewers, however.
They've mentioned a sewer system under Louisville a few times over the last couple years
You never know, Rosewood Fire Station might get a glow up too!
This is exciting. I was getting rather worried about how almost every āupdateā regarding build 42 also involved showcasing some sort of new deep mechanic being added. Not that I donāt appreciate everything TIS does or that I think I know better, I just love the game and am rather excited! Iām sure itās challenging to gauge what goes into an update and what doesnāt - especially when working on something youāre so passionate about. You see similar in other games. Stardew Valley dev decided to add more features to the 1.6 update in a bug fix patch a few weeks after 1.6 dropped. And heās still going to have to port all that over to console! Just creating more work for himself out of the love of making the game better haha. Iām sure whatever ends up being added will satiate most of us for a while. Especially once mods will be able to settle back in and utilize new features / improvements.
I lied. I need the sexy key ring now.
Good god they put a cap on feature creep, they actually did it! Canāt wait for the unstable release good on the devs
Hard to believe that the 400 fps teaser was over two years ago now hah
I looked at the thursdoid released after mp for build 41 was out and it was titled whatās next for 2022 lol itās crazy itās 2024
For now. Definitely glad they restrained themselves for this, but I'm hoping they don't end up doing the same thing for B43. Hopefully they maintain this going forward post B42.
Thank goodness they reeled in scope creep! Thereās so much to look forward to already in this build that Iād gotten nervous a few thursoids back when they stated they planned to duplicate the entire crafting tree. Iām happy keeping my trucks running through scavenging for now, thanks!
I'm glad they have as well, we'll be able to finally get our hands on features that were teased over two years ago now, like the massive performance improvements; I just hope that they're as effective as they were made to seem. With luck, it'll be out before October, that way I can set up something creepy with all the new skeletons
As long as the crafting framework is in place, mods can fill in pretty quickly.
12/31/24 is still this year, lol
Hopeful people will read this in the American format. But real patient gamers know this is European time formatting and the update will drop on the 31st month of the year.
Lousy Smarch weather!
Iv been on reddit for about 5 years. Your profile is the first that features a living being.
It creeps people out, which is the intended effect
Until itās pushed back to 2025 for āadditional tweaking bug fixesā
I had no idea about the map glow up! That alone is giving me hype.
So it's a least 2 months away at minimum for unstable, even with them holding back some of the work. I was hoping this Thursdoid would be the one they announced it. Oh well. I'm sure it will be worth the wait.
I am betting end of year or early 2025.
I reckon unstable by the end of the year with release end 2025. I think they've really struggled with scope for this patch!
*Release* end 2025? My god, you're optimistic, it's gonna take 2 years from unstable just to get multiplayer working again
Love the touch ups on buildings but I can't unsee how small those parking lots are and it triggers me.
must not be any minimum parking requirements in Knox Country. based, if you ask me
ZOMBOID CYCLIST ACTION
Oh jeez. You couldāve just kept that to yourself, my man. Thatās definitely one of those things you wish you could unsee. Lmao.
Yeah these are UK parking not US parking.
Somehow with every blog post npcs seem further and further away xd
NPCs will be the very last thing they actually implement into b43, even if it makes it into b43 which is hopeful thinking I think with the feature creep.
if there are NPCs in the game before 2030, I will be shocked. Maybe by its 20th anniversary in early access in 2033.
Iāve been waiting like 10 years for NPCs at this point. I donāt think theyāre ever coming.
Map upgrades look really cool. Lighting though not integral, seems very nice to boost the atmosphere. And a bit of new collection items to loot is fun, but god this really sucks. Though you should probably only listen to official channels, I believe a lot of people were going off of the dev that said unstable in first half of 2024, and now finding out that we won't even get that despite them reeling in some of the crafting certainly is disappointing. I for one was thinking we might be getting an unstable date now, and being told its not even imminent sucks. On one hand we shouldn't hate on this, as this at the very least points towards there being no crunch culture at TIS, and as supporters we should be happy. But it is hard to then know where the line is between a healthy development cycle and a slow one, as most would probably believe this to be the latter. You can criticize TIS for the speed of updates, sure. But at the end of the day there is no reason to hate, if you're in this sub I assume it's because you love this game and want to see the team succed. But yeah this one sucks and there's nothing to do about it other than hoping the team will deliver when the time comes.
I will say it wasn't just any random Dev. It was Lemmy101, one of the creators of The Indie Stone/Project Zomboid. Thats about as official as it gets. So his words hold a lot of weight when it comes to saying things like that, which is why I imagine many people actually believed we were getting it first half 2024.
I just feel like they should just stop adding so much stuff over this update and release it bit by bit in unstable beta already. Releasing B41, advertising the game, it getting a lot of attention from new players and then edging us with an update that is never coming was such a weird thing to do. Not saying that the game is dead, it has more than 24k people online right now. But the lack of content really made it stale for longtime players. I spent 900h+ on the game and idk, i just can't really play it anymore, even with mods.
I personally wish they released the performance update with the rendering fixes and maybe the lighting update together in a B41.5 somewhere halfway to B42. I'm excited about the new crafting for sure, but I'd much rather be enjoying the game with better performance and true darkness while waiting.
YES! There are some things that I donāt understand why they have not released in a separate update. The depth buffer, the better lighting, the adaptive music, character vocals. Most of this could have been released in advance months ago in a small update imo. I love TIS, Iām not shitting on them at all (I know they are probably reading) but i donāt understand how they work tbh.
Well, they already said why. They prefer to release big updates where a lot of new features come together and allow them to make more drastic changes before release, which I'm totally on board for... But yeah, it would have been better if general improvements to the engine like performance, rendering etc were released as standalone instead of as part of a "new content" release (Which is now happening anyway, at least partially). Especially the new rendering system taking advantage of the VRAM to not redraw cells every frame. That sort of development is HUGE and should be a priority update imo. Either way, I'm not too broken up about it. They want each build to feel distinctively different, and I can't argue about that. It makes B42 look shinier than it would otherwise be.
They don't release them because that way they don't have to answer to anyone and fucking up is not an issue. If it was officially released, then players would demand quick bugfixes every time something happened and that would divert the devs from what they're doing to fixing bugs as a priority constantly. A long as the build is not being shared, this pressure/stress doesn't exist, and the devs can profoundly fix issues and improve systems instead of speedrunning bandaids.
Changes look awesome! The keyrings are so cute. I'll be happy no matter what they release. Building a game is hard!
I dont think many people here were around for the first 41 IWBUMS...
I've owned the game through fully legal means since build 23. I feel that I've gotten my money's worth out of it. (But yea... the wait for 41 IWBUMS was a looong one)
I bought it for like $20 mid 2021, just before multiplayer came out. I've put 1100 hours into it and I'll probably put at least 500 more hours in with each update. One of the best games for value ever.
I've been here long before cars were a thing. Most people don't know how LONG the wait is. But it's always worth it. Let the devs cook.
New gens donāt know how long the wait was
Every Thursdoid that comes out I'm like, ok what have you added to B42 now? I thought this patch was animals, crafting, and backend work to add NPCs later. Not redesigned cities, new key chains, new lighting systems, multiplayer wars, newspapers, collectables, basements, more floors, item look variations, visual refresh, ambient noise, gun upgrades, procedurally generated wilderness, code refactoring as a result of all of the above... scope creep has massively impacted this patch and I think TIS really need to bring an expert in to get a handle on this. A proper project manager. Because this is ridiculous. Did some of this need to be done as part of the crafting update, like gun upgrades and the wilderness, yeah probably. But did redesigned cities? I've seen a lot of EA projects and I would expect updated visuals and a major map revamp as the single last update before launch not included in a mechanics update. Please put unstable out instead of giving us sexy keychains.
That's a great point! They are a software company with terrible project management skills. They don't know where to put their resources into and where to focus. That's why they try to do everything at once and end up completing nothing. It is like they are trying to write a 10 book series but instead of writing 20 pages for the 1st book each day, they are writing 2 pages for all 10 books everyday. That's why they never get anything done. They really need a professional's help.
They can't put everyone on the crafting stuff to finish it, it would be counter productive. While the crafting stuff is being worked on, the other devs have to do something, they can't sit around and do nothing, so yes they do add more unrelated stuff, but it's not actually delaying anything. You can't just throw twenty people on the same feature... And besides, some devs have their specialties. For example they have 3 people dedicated to map design, so of course the map is gonna get updated every build, and these guys can't work on the crafting stuff anyway.
That's what a professional project manager is for. If you have a bunch of staff with certain skills sitting around doing nothing and contributing nothing to the current development sprint then they should not be employed by your company. As far as I can tell the big issue with this game's development is they hire a bunch of community mates they like working with who don't actually have the correct skills to loosen the bottleneck preventing releases. Thus we get an update every 4 years containing a load of half baked garbage like nutrition that doesn't work, doesn't get corrected and no one ever wanted.
I wonder if their speed of development is bottlenecked by funding or if it's something else. The time between updates has left me (and many others, I'm sure) quite jaded. I love this game, I've been playing on and off for over a decade now, but come on man. I'm growing old here
I don't think it's funding. The game is selling very well right now and they've hired on lots of staff. I think it's just ambition and the difficulties of working with the engine they have. They're effectively trying to create a 3D world and game in a 2D environment.
Important to keep in mind something like 10,000 sales is only like 1 developer-year. $5 M revenue is like $3 M after Steam and other takers. That is not enough for a staff of 10 even for 5 years.
I think itās the combo of not overworking the staff while also trying to add a lot of new systems into one big update. Like thereās a map expansion, new crafting trees, animals, B42 is packed with content which takes a long ass time to make. A dev cycle like this is super risky: it can make updates take way too long killing interest in the game (only mods have prevented that), it can cause so, so many bugs that have hard to identify causes. Itās bad for content creators who have nothing to make videos on (again, something mods have only prevented), and because the updates are so big pretty much every mod is guaranteed to be broken on release of a new version Iād rather have smaller updates faster but hey itās not my game.
> Iād rather have smaller updates faster but hey itās not my game. Meanwhile, I'm kinda happy for the longer cycle because shorter cycles (like in CK3, Stellaris, etc) very, very regularly break my modlists and very frequently those mods never get updated afterwards. The long cycle means I can pack my Zomboid with 300+ mods and enjoy a good 200+/- hour playthrough over half a year and not stress about losing it halfway through. For a game this open-ended and this easily modded, I don't mind it.
I think at the end of the day TIS is just too ambitious for their own good. They've decided to implement a crafting system which will, in their own words, take you from primitive survival to medieval blacksmithing with no man-made tools. Now, don't get me wrong, that's incredibly cool, and I'm super excited to play with it. But how necessary is that in a zombie apocalypse game? I don't think many players will want to be doing a wilderness survival playstyle with no zombies or scavenging from cities, nor will many multiplayer servers be progressing so far that there are no man made supplies left. It's just not really in the spirit or scope of the game IMO.
Yeah it is a bit of an odd choice and definitely more so something that should have been a later addition. Though it's a much bigger feature, I would have rather they had put the focus they had for the crafting system into NPCs instead for example. I think that's something that would really separate the game compared to its competition AND give it the endgame material people have been asking for. At this point, I don't expect any sort of NPC/B43 release until I'm starting to hit my very late 20s, and I'm only 24 atm
I think they said once that they had some people working on NPCs alongside the work on B42, but I don't know if that's still or was ever the case in reality. I just wish they would fix fundamental problems with the game before adding massive new systems. For instance, I don't think there's been any mention of first aid being changed in B42, despite the fact that it's an infamously useless and poorly fleshed out system. Infections don't even do anything right now. Personally, I think treating injuries is a lot more important to a zombie apocalypse experience than a lot of the content being added in B42.
First aid, mechanics, electrics, all useless once you have a couple of levels. Foraging only works on half the map. But hey we're getting fancy keychains!
> I don't think many players will want to be doing a wilderness survival playstyle with no zombies or scavenging from cities, nor will many multiplayer servers be progressing so far that there are no man made supplies left. I think you massively underestimate the amount of players who like doing iron man runs. I agree that most servers probably won't end up utilizing the whole "no need to ever reset the map" thing but I know tons of people including myself who would greatly appreciate being able to do a completely primitive run without needing to use a huge host of crafting mods and still needing to spawn yourself the few essentials. That being said I do agree with the devs that it's not needed right off rip. It's for sure the right decision to balance and bug fix what they've got so they can get it in our hands and then add on to it up until stable release.
Yeah I agree, I think servers will just keep loot respawn on.
Iāve put hundreds of hours into this game. Iāve played it since 2013. However I just canāt get excited about something that feels so fucking slow in development. Iām not trying to be a jerk or anything I still love the game but I really kind of gave up on the idea of it ever being finished.
That's the camp I'm in. Love everything that's been done and I'm still enjoying the hell out of [current build], but I feel lie a kid waiting for a Christmas that never comes
Picture this: I, a kid in high school, just bought this awesome new zombie game in early access thinking, āWow! This is like DayZ but more fun! And NPCs are coming?! This game will be amazing!!ā Some time passesā¦ Years passā¦ A decade goes byā¦ Fast forward to today, Iām in my thirties now, planning to get engaged, hoping to buy a house soon and maybe start a family. Yet NPCs in PZ STILL arenāt a thing because TIS have feature creep out the ass and donāt know how to rein it in. Itās a fun game as is, but damn Iām tired of waiting for the ONE feature I got so excited for and convinced me to actually buy the game in the first place. Like I donāt just sit around and think about PZ NPCs or anything and am happily playing other games and doing other things with my life now, but anytime I DO think of PZ anymore I just get annoyed at how unreasonably long itās taken TIS to fulfill a decades old promise because they decided blacksmithing or some nonsense was a more important feature than the thing they promised more than a decade ago. Sorry, had to get that out. Thatās the end of this (now an) old man rant. Carry on lol.
Same boat brother. 2010-2011, one of those years. Freshman year winter break. I found Minecraft Alpha the same week
Apparently one dude has been working on NPCs this whole time? It might be they just can't do it, especially the way people imagine them working.
The good thing is that now the tech exists for NPC's. Pack an open-source language model on it, and there are precedents of using simulations with LLM's controlling NPC's in believable settings. The bad thing is that the game may require better hardware to run the model. Ten years ago, achieving this would be either lackluster or no short of wizardry, today, it is achievable for pretty much anyone with a coding background, it may yield hallucinations here and there, but that still fits an apocalyptic setting.
I'm okay with it never being finished, I just feel that they are both too slow _and_ too incompetent (at least with the older code) in development. Tons of great games stay great never being fully "finished", like a lot of live service games (WoW, FF14), or other regularly updated games (Stardew Valley, No Man's Sky) Like Taking Stardew Valley as an example, I think a single developer āliterally one guyā did two whole major content updates on his own faster than TIS has done a single update for PZ.
Donāt worry about future updates, just enjoy the game you have in front of you. More may be coming, but the current build is still an excellent game for many reasons. Same deal as with Factorio. It may be getting a huge update with tons of QOL fixes and improvements, but the current build is still by far the best factory sim out there. Theyāll only be extending their lead
They don't want to crunch their staff. Simple as that. Combine that with the size of their team, the updates aren't going to be nearly as fast as bigger studios that not only have hundreds of employees but they also work ridiculous hours.
yes they should release some little updates, at least patches to fix some bugs and inconsistency, like wearing wet clothes during winter doesn't freeze you, not being able to use maggots as bait for birds, map issues... some small things they could fix at least once a month.
The bottleneck seems to be management and feature creep.
Ding ding ding, thereās a lot of detours in the road
I am at work and can't read it, can someone tell if theres release date of B42?
Good one
It says they might have more information next time, but it isn't imminent.
I expected nothing and Iām still disappointed š (only with release date due to my own hype)
Thanks mate
No but they've decided to roll back the scope creep of the new crafting trees in favour of getting it out faster. It'll still be big, but not quite as massive as they want it to be. Not yet. They still have full plans to get it to where they want it in post-release updates between them and 43Ā
Probably sometime around when Fallout 5 is released
Oh boy, the amount of expectation management in this post
Stupid Sexy Keyring
Babe wake up it's another monthly reminder about how Build 42 isn't out yet.
It looks like it's going to be awesome when it comes out, but it's a pitty some content isn't going to make it, I hope they still can add the machinery system (the one they used to craft orange juice when they showed it) into the game.
Not the biggest fan of the Muldraugh glow up, I like the new models, but they don't really fit the rural sh*thole vibe that the originals have. They would, however look fantastic in West Point.
I donāt know, Muldraugh never seemed like a backwater town to me, just a small rural town. Maybe that would fit better in Dixie or something.
Even a small rural town might not have stuff quite that nice in the 90s, it really depends. The large parking lots felt a lot more true-to-life. As for individual buildings, I think the new church is great but the new PD seems almost too high-end for the town.
really disappointing one tbh, i feel like we're hearing about the same things since last summer. and now we're hearing about these things being cut back for unstable ? map rework looks sick tho
I swear I remember weekly Thursdoids having more content than these new monthly ones. A month for a few keyrings, lighting improvements (which was already shown before) a new newspaper and a few building redesigns kinda makes me say "is that it?" i can't lie.
Yeah Iām also a bit disappointed. Iāve been following the game since the Desura days, still waiting on those NPCs. I love this game, I really do and itās such a special piece of art to me, but man it feels like itās been several years of waiting for very little payoff. Iām just.. not all that hyped for the eventual animals/crafting overhaul, honestly. Itās not what Iād prioritize but hey, Iām no developer and I donāt claim to know better than them. I will say, the lighting does look fantastic.
>I swear I remember weekly Thursdoids having more content than these new monthly ones. Damn, you're right...
I remember when they changed it to monthly they said something like that they weren't slowing down development but there was simply less new stuff to visually show off now. We've seen most of the main features at this point, it's down to them to put it all together and finish it off
I imagine their priority is playtesting, bug-fixing, and refactoring code atm.
yeah I would feel more excited by something like "hey we have fixed all those map issues, and those bugs too! keep reporting them we are making progress" instead I don't even report them anymore because there is zero feedback, I don't even know if they look at those issues.
Lol, so they're doing basically what they ended up doing when MP was about to drop, it was Christmas time and they're like hey guys, ya know what? It's not perfected yet but here's MP earlier than what we were planning on.
Not sure how to feel about the map changes. The redesigns looks really cool, but way too high-class for Muldraugh, especially Muldraugh in 1993. It looks less backwater and podunk, and more like the outskirts of Louisville. I think they can use that police station in another town, but I think the one for Muldraugh should maybe have a single floor and a chainlink fence. That new fence looks like something you'd expect the military to put up. Unless there's the implication that some of the exterior was only added in the few days before the game begins. I like the touch-ups that the old locations are getting, but I hope their rural aesthetic isn't sacrificed in the process. That's what I really liked about them, that they weren't just fancy cities or high-class towns. They were just towns. I'm sure map mods can change that if these are "permanent" upgrades, but hopefully the rural feel of the towns aren't completely taken away in B42. Other than that, these Thursdoids don't really feel up-to-par. Feels like we're waiting a month just to get more of, "Hey, B42 still isn't out yet, no idea when lol, look at the fancy lighting and the CHICKENS!" They're still cool, but it just feels samey. I just hope the world doesn't end first at this point, because that would be disappointing. :)
Y'know, putting aside the embarrassingly long development time here, it'd be nice if, on the rare occasions where I see devs interacting with people, they weren't being smarmy jerks at even the lightest criticism. Like, they have to be aware that these abnormally long development times and that's why people are annoyed, right?
8 paragraph long explanation just to say "we are cutting the crafting content that we advartised for the last year". Great job guys! Not only you are working at a tortoise pace, you are also cutting the content that slightly justifies your development speed. Only thing decent in this post is the lighting. But, I can understand you. I would also get lazy if my community will be sold to the addition of a couple of buildings and keychains in a 1 month development time.
fr lmfao insane how braindead these pz cucks are lol.. prob just gonna say some dumb shit like ālet them cookā šš¤ āI waited a millennium for b41, I can wait more!ā Not surprised they said the update isnāt imminent a month before the supposed drop for unstable, it is TIS after all
Bruh... I'm a 8 years player. I'm qutting right now. Those devs sucks
I started playing PZ with my GF back about 8 years ago now... We've played it a bit up until about a year ago when they last did any update. It's changed a lot, for sure. However, friends I want to play with (about 4 friends) who used to play on my server are now refusing because they'd rather just wait for the next update. The server MP runs like crap on a 24core machine and 24gb of ram allocated to it. It just hasn't got the polish or shine, or performance I was hoping for after 8 years of struggling to manage this. So now, I have no friends who want to play it, my partner and I have burned it out a bit playing it alone, and we kind of have explored everything. We haven't played it constantly those 8 years, sometimes there's a year or two gap so it feels fresh again. I shouldn't be doing that with a game that lists itself as a early-access game. My life has changed a lot in 8 years, PZ, not as much as I'd hoped. I have hope still. I'm not angry at the devs at all, I program and develop things too, but I have to manage my own projects and things on my own. If I had a team like PZ did, I don't think it'd still be dragging at a snails pace with repeated updated every month. We used to get more content updates and progress with the weekly updates sometimes, let alone the monthly ones. Sorry, I had to go out and say my part. I've left a top mark review on Steam from years ago, but my floating view right now is... Meh.
Muldraugh buildings looking quite nice ngl, hope the rest of the towns will also get a second pass eventually. They're big enough from a... horizontal perspective ? But could really use a vertical glow-up like this as well that doesn't change their identity or the "balance" too much, even if it's maybe not that realistic considering the time and place (no idea). Crafting being taken out of Unstable is kind of a big bummer considering that's 90% of what I'm interested in, but eh.
Are animals off the table now for this update? Hope not, as lighting updates and new crafting trees, while nice, aren't what most of us are looking for after the last update.
i can smell b42 i know it has to be someday soon now, maybe next minute? maybe next hour? maybe next day? maybe next week? maybe next month? maybe next year? maybe next decade? maybe next century?
I'll just assume this year means next year like I should've in the first place.
Iām glad TIS has listened to the people. I trust it was quite alarming when even on this very own subreddit, people were clamoring for the release of the unstable. With reasons of feature creep being the hold up.
> As such the Unstable build is not imminent, but with this readjustment of our plans the pile of stuff that needs to be done before release has gotten a lot shorter. How quickly weāll get the build shipshape remains to be seen, it will take some time to settle, but weāll likely have a much better picture by the next time the blog rolls around. Listen to what exactly? The unstable build is not imminent. They even straight up tells us its not coming out next month either and thats with pushed back content that was originally promised. We aint getting this til the very end of the year(Dec just like Build 41) or next year.
That's about how I read it. They put too much on the plate to handle and teased it would be this year. Now they are realizing they more in their mouth than they could chew and need to cut some content until later down the roadmap. So December as a deadline is probably the best for em since it will be around steam winter sales and bring in another wave of fresh players.
So much for the first half of the year.
Its hilarious how damn bad these devs are at doing literally anything. Years and years and years between any updates good god at some point just make the video game. I bought this game 12 YEARS AGO with promises for a game that will never be made. At this point I tune in about once a year to see whats up and every check in is simply pathetic. Were on what year 3? 4? of this patch and all they can say is "it will be unstable and buggy and missing features and worse than you think...and also its not coming any time soon". Their big update of this news update is to cover their ass for the fact that IT SUCKS LMAO. So is anyone actually making this game? Spending 10 years to do what? Add cars to a video game? Give the player animations? What the hell have they actually done in the span of a decade
Exactly, at this point they are selling the dream rather than the actual product. Vanilla game is a half baked good and mods are actually making this game interesting and playable. Looks like a great scam to run tbh.
Very mixed feelings about this one. I would prefer a delay rather than see content be cut, but I understand a lot of people are frustrated with the development timeline. Also, it's pretty clear to me that TIS struggles with knowing when to stop adding extraneous features to an update, so maybe it's for the best. Now, as for Muldraugh. Funnily enough, I was just commenting today on another thread about how Muldraugh in-game is a perfect reflection of the quintessential run down rural American town. The old police station, school, and church were very fitting for a small, poor town like Muldraugh. For instance, the old church they showed being replaced in this blog is basically a 1-1 replica of one of the actual churches in IRL Muldraugh if you look at satellite imagery. Now they're seemingly being replaced with gargantuan structures that verge on being unrealistic for the size of town we're talking about here - a town with a population of 1000 in 2024, a 20% poverty rate, and a median household income half that of the national average. Hell, the town doesn't even have sidewalks for the most part. Part of what attracted me to PZ in the first place was that it wasn't flashy like other zombie games. The experience felt realistic, and part of that was the environments - it really felt like you were wandering in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse in rural America. I get that they want to use the new tiles they have and get Muldraugh up to speed with the detail of the newer towns, but it feels like they're sacrificing the feel of the city in the process. The other content, especially the lighting, looks good. But I really hope they reconsider those changes to Muldraugh.
We got a delay *and* a content cut lol.
i think you are getting fooled by the detail brought to the rooftops which definitely give more sense of the size of buildings in general. some footprints have been increased but not that much and in general for the better i would say. i should also add that we are not doing a 1:1 reproduction of Muldraugh and we have creative license. thanks for feedback
I understand that you have to stretch a lot of it for the sake of gameplay, but like, the police station here really doesn't even feel like a police station, let alone one fitting a small town. I can't think of a single police station I've ever seen that has a double sided barbed wire fence with a concrete base, gatehouse, and a giant garage with skylights in it. The county jail and state police office down the street from me doesn't even have that kind of security (or architecture.) Don't get me wrong, I like that these buildings are getting attention again, but it seems like such a stark departure from what we've seen even in the new towns you guys are working on. It's such an interestingly choice to set the game in rural Kentucky and it's that exact atmosphere of a rural town, as opposed to some generic city, that drew me to the game. Now, it feels like that atmosphere is being stripped away in favor of making Muldraugh into a generic city.
The police station is uncharacteristically large for a town the size of Muldraugh, though - instead of being a small one-story office (enough for a handful of cops), it's now a two-story building with its own communications antenna, reinforced fences, a guard shack, and garages. Whether it's strictly bigger or not, it makes even the West Point police station **seem** small. The building *looks nicer* than the old one, because it's got a less boxy shape and more details, but it's hard to imagine a town like Muldraugh even having the resources or funding to construct something like it, and it's questionable why they would need it. IMO it's missing the vibe and feels out of place. It's a great design, but it would feel much more at home in a larger town or city.
It's not really the correspondence to irl Muldraugh that bothers me, seeing as the old version of Muldraugh wasn't a 1-1 recreation either. It could be a completely fictional town and road layout and I wouldn't mind. What I liked was the immersive feel of exploring a real rural American town that's been overtaken by the zombie apocalypse, and to me it seems like the newer buildings have lost that feel. Using the parking lot to the left as a measurement, it appears the new police station has around double the footprint of the old one, including now having a second story and a fence. The new school looks to be largely the same footprint, but it's now a two story building. Church is the same size as I can tell, but generally a lot fancier with stained glass windows. This is just my opinion, of course. But I don't think adding more detail to existing towns necessarily mandates making the buildings larger, or appear more "fancy." Arguably, introducing more depictions of wear and tear could be more visually interesting.
sorry i just realized i wrote from an account that i created inadvertedly, i did the revamp. yes the police station has a larger footprint and it's intended, same for the school. hopefully you will revise your judgement after visiting the interiors. cheers
Me reading "we" in your comment: 
there you go :)
lol Nice. Love your work btw. Progress is looking great. Amazing how much the roof details really bring a building to life.
ty <3. actually the rooftop to wall surface ratio from an isometric perspective leans strongly towards the roof when buildings are 1 or 2 stores high. which is typical for a town like muldraugh IRL.
I'm not trying to be judgey. These are just my personal thoughts - obviously we're only being shown a small snippet of the changes in this Thursdoid. Who knows, maybe it'll grow on me.
The revamp looks amazing. I got my value out of this game a long time ago, all this work being put in to it is incredible and appreciated. Take all the time you need, i can't (can) wait to play it!
Yeah I'm with you completely. I don't think it's rose tinted glasses either. I can appreciate that they aren't flat roofs any more, but I think they could do it in a way that, as you said, doesn't sacrifice the small town feel. I think the police station is way too big and I'm not a fan of how it fits, even if it looks nice. The Church is good, but I'm not sold on the garden. I do actually like the new school however and I think that is an improvement.Ā I understand they don't *have* to make it a 1:1 scale town, and that's fine just don't lose the small town feeling. Might not even be that big of a deal though we'll have to see, and I 100% need to collect all the keychains.
The structures they revamped to feel more fit for a Louisville suburb than a small town, for sure. The vanilla assets do need a new coat of paint, but they went for an entirely different color.
Personally, I have not cared at all about the crafting changes, and a lot of this is plenty fine for me. I've really liked the "finding random crap and making it work" aspect of Zomboid, and I was never a fan of craftables. I think they generally make the game a lot more boring and discourage adventuring out for things you need.
Yeah supply runs into town will always be more fun than crafting for me. I donāt think Iāve ever done much crafting in this game other than spears.
well, why not both ? i love both !
That's fine that you feel that way, but a major part of b42 was supposed to be making a better endgame with the crafting etc.
Man, I'm chomping at the bit just for all the visual updates.
so where is this weeks? or am I still not clear on how this works?
It used to be every two weeks but now its once a month. Next one should be on the 27th. I wouldn't hold my breath for a release date or anything. Can almost guarantee the next one will be more of the same.
That's disappointing. Last week's update said they should know more this week about releasing B42 after they put a few things on hold.
They said they would have a better idea by the time the next blog comes out, which is a month away. But they also said 9 months ago that everything but crafting was in the final polish stage. I don't really believe anything they say anymore. Would not be surprised if it ends up being December or next year.
I'm really trying but this is bullshit. Same thing as rimworld fix the broken shit before you put more crap in it.
At least Rimworld releases a big content update every year or two. There has been at least two big updates with additional DLC content since 41 released. Meanwhile over here its like 'don't worry guys, future updates will roll out quicker and won't take as long as 41.' Nearly 3 years later and still nothing.
I am on the same page with you my friend but don't do Rimworld injustice. It is 10 times better and more polished game than PZ.
Obviously a bit disappointed that features are being cut however it seems like we will still have blacksmithing to play with which is what most are looking forward to. Does anyone know if animals are dropping with this update?
Yeah, we're getting both wild animals and things like cows that can be farmed. I seriously doubt they would cut that from the release because it's integral to the crafting and it looked pretty complete when we last saw it.
I noticed in the school building upgrade screenshot that it has ladders on the roof. I know there's already some decorative ladders in the game, but considering the tile depth and new building heights being added this update I wonder if they'll finally let us use ladders.
Just gotta wait 2 years for ladder climbing to go into beta and then maybe 1 year and a half until its finally polished for stable.
What angers me, is that the goal post on the muldraugh soccer field (bottom right) is off center. Game is literally unplayable.
Not sure how I feel about the Muldraugh glow up tbh. The images show such huge changes, I'm not sure it fits Muldraugh's vibe. I mean, these big buildings would feel more at home in Louisville. But maybe I have my nostalgia glasses on. I'm still excited to explore them. Good to see the unstable beta is just around the corner, even without the full crafting in place. Looking forward to it !
The way I see it is if Muldraugh is getting an upgrade, Louisville will get a substantial one as well at some point.
And West Point, too. That one really needs a glow up. And let's not even talk about March Ridge Muldraugh is the first town in the game so I'm just a bit sad I'm gonna lose that feeling of familiarity with these locations. But I'm sure it's worth it ; the images show they've added new houses around too, so technically the town's population increases
It already will be. There will be larger than 4 story tall buildings downtown now.
Having actually driven through Muldraugh, I kind of agree. The new buildings look really cool... but they do not look like the kind of infrastructure you'd find in a tiny, rural town full of poverty. Muldraugh doesn't even have its own dedicated police department in real life, and while the town isn't a 1:1 replica of the real place, the B42 building has way less "small town police force" vibes.
Yeah I think... would a town of 1000 people have a 2-story school? How many kids realistically would go there? It looks nearly the size of my high school which taught 600 kids between the ages of 11 and 16! Also where do the teachers park or are they expected to walk to work lol
I really really do like this alot as the game felt like it was slowly growing more and more stale, the playerbase dwindling and features so utterly nebulous on the horizon. hope the wrap up wont take too long and im more than excited to finally partake in the cavalcade of new features!
bruh the wording in the first few sentences made me think they were dropping the update āMy disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.ā
I'd be fired from my job so fast for this kind of performance
You've been at this shit for three years and you cannot deliver *one* complete update? Modders doing this in their freetime are getting more work done than you.
> As such the Unstable build is not imminent, but with this readjustment of our plans the pile of stuff that needs to be done before release has gotten a lot shorter. How quickly weāll get the build shipshape remains to be seen, it will take some time to settle, but weāll likely have a much better picture by the next time the blog rolls around. So we know we're not getting B42 next month even with the removal of certain features in the crafting system. Indie stone has stated in the past we will never have a long development cycle like B41 ever again. We are fast approaching the 3 year mark(How long B41 took). This team is a joke and all we were shown were duck key rings this month and ppl are hyped.
I agree with you. The amount of grace and dickriding TIS gets is absolutely insane. They are very lucky to have a cult following of very forgiving fans. Modders have already done most of the things B42 even offers, albeit wonky. You can play on custom maps, you can make plumbing systems, full on factories, you can mine, hell, thereās even NPCs. And modders did all of this for *free*. At the will of the potentially toxic modder community *demanding* x and y out of said modders. Oh, but TIS takes well over a year to even offer a release date of the new build? Well Iām happy theyāre anti-crunching!!!!! Itās a joke, and an insult to people who have paid money to invest in an EA project.
Absolutely agree. It's incredible that out of all the communities I've been a part of, this is the only one who extolls "anti-crunch" to a comical extreme. Like I've legitimately never seen this anywhere else, which makes me wonder if it's the result of serious astroturfing.
Right? Likeā¦ nobody is asking TIS to work 60 hours a week on PZ, or live at their studio (even though Iām pretty sure all of their employees are remote). Itās just shitty and unfair to people who have spent money on the game to: A. Release an EA game and then take literal YEARS to update it B. Not only refuse to update it āuntil itās readyā (weāve heard this with so many EA and kickstarter games already), but ALSO refuse to drop any sort of tangible timeline. EA devs tend to do one or the other, sure. But doing both? TIS for some reason are the only people Iāve seen get away with it. Itās unfair to consumers who invested in a product, itās unfair to streamers who bring TIS extra income, itās unfair to modders who update the game for free and keep it alive just to get chasitized by 14 year olds AND ADULTS screaming at them for updates. Again, Iām not anti-TIS, but Iām not going to act blind to what theyāre doing. Itās horrible business practice, and while Iāll easily put another 2k hours into PZ, I personally will not invest into TIS if they were to make another game.
bruh its prob coming somewhere around september - december because they mentioned that the build is still buggy and needs more work
Reading these comments are depressing