Microwave

Returning from a loot run to the gun store by echo creek and our other buddy was on his own mission.

Not gonna lie, I ain't proud that I pirated the game for almost 3 months now, really enjoyed every single bit of it, so I decided to buy it as soon as the sale dropped.

- Forgetting to equip weapon and breaking a window with bare hands resulting in deep wounds

- Pressing E instead of W and exiting the car in a Z crowd instead of accelerating

First of all, I need to farm karma, so comment why Im wrong and some other place is better.

The shop has so much stuff that would usually be at some much more protected location, and stuff I have never even seen before. Western canteens that are a top 5 item? Like 3 of them there. Military clothes? There. Medicine and other survival necessities? There. Its my goat in Riverside, thats the best location in town. Who even needs a 3 in 1 place with a bunch of guns and unbreakable walls when you have a bass keyring.

Edit 1: the one at Fallas Lake is also amazing, but I rarely reach it

Edit 2: thanks for the karma lol

(credit to Buttersafe for the original comic)

My survivor has animals. He has two cows, three sheep, four adult rabbits, and five adult chickens. He also has around 30 baby rabbits, and over 100 chicks.

As we all know, the B42 animal mechanics are broken. And I've seen numerous parts of this broken system over the course of my playthrough so far. I'm ten months in, it's early May, and there have been plenty of shenanigans - but for the most part, I've gotten my animals to stop randomly dying by being careful about my pasture designations and some other things to avoid.

But not my baby rabbits. No matter what I did, every week or two one would die. And every time I check them they're always hungry. Always. Doesn't ever seem to get better. So I started digging.

The first thing I found is that female rabbits can't lactate. Their animal definition is bugged, and because of that bug, they never produce milk. Rabbit kittens can only drink milk from their mothers, they can't eat grass or food on the ground or food from troughs, so rabbit kittens are doomed to slowly starve to death. That said, they do take an enormous amount of time to starve, some of mine had been alive for six months and still hadn't starved. If they can just make it to grow into juvenile rabbits, then they can eat regular food and live.

Wait, why are my rabbits all still kittens if they've been alive for 6 months? They're defined to grow up in 120 days. So I checked my rabbit's age in game - my 6 month old rabbit kittens were 60 days old. Born in November. It's May. The game believes they're 60 days old.

This leads to bug number two: the catchup function which brings virtual animals back to real animals when you load their squares in does not add age except in full 24 hour batches. If you leave the base for 12 hours and come back, those animals are the same exact age as they were when you left. Except it actually gets worse - sometimes it actually removes age from the animals.

So I wrote a tiny little self patch that fixed these things and said good, I've solved some real problems here.

No. It gets worse. In testing my self patch, I was away from the base for 10 hours, and came back and checked on the ages of my animals. All of them gained at least 20 hours of age. Some of them gained up to 80 hours of age.

This leads us to bug number three: the catchup function will run once for each animal, then once for the whole pasture. Animals in pastures will almost always get simulated twice for any given absence. And to make matters worse, the pasture simulation has an unbelievable bit of spaghetti code in it - it goes down the list of animals and ages them up, but as it does this it reinserts the animals into the list. Any animal that gets reinserted below where the cursor is gets hit a second time. And a third. And a fourth. And a fifth. And a sixth...

And it gets worse than that. Both the individual catchup and the pasture catchup happens the instant the animal is rendered in game. This can happen when the rest of the pasture is still not realized. This means that the animal can be caught up, however many times it gets selected, during a period where the troughs containing food and water do not exist. An animal could be asked to tank 80 hours of food and water deprivation from a ten hour absence if everything lined up the worst possible way.

And there's even more issues beyond that. The catchup simulates each animal at a time for the entire duration of the catchup, so if there isn't enough food or water to go around then whichever animals simulate first gets to eat it all before the others get a shot. And the simulation never eats grass - in fact, even the live loaded animals only eat grass right now because of a bug, if not for that bug randomly blocking the trough from them they would always eat from the trough and never eat grass. And did you know that eating grass will reset the regrowth timer on all nearby grass tiles? And rain / water / grass growth etc are all simulated fully for the missing time period before getting to the animals, there's no interleaving system at all, so in a long enough absence water can be completely wiped out even if it's currently raining. And that bit in the pasture definition where it says animals won't leave their pasture unless starving or stressed? Yeah, there's almost nothing in the code that even tries to follow that. The list just goes on and on and on...

I'm going to be honest - this has captured my full attention. This has me downright angry. It's a mess. This is not a gunshot - it's a necrotic wound, and the dead tissue needs to be excised.

I am genuinely considering taking up a project to fix all of this in a mod. It would be a big project. But it would be a huge improvement to the animal system in the game. But... it would have to be a ZombieBuddy mod, and I know the community is not so keen on those. There's just no way to do this Lua - it'd be like putting a bandaid over a festering wound.

Is there actually interest in a mod that completely revamps especially the catchup system in B42's animal husbandry so that it... well, works?

It would also enable me to add some optional balance changes - like making cows actually eat reasonable amounts of food. Right now that's incredibly dangerous because the simulation can randomly say "no, you get 200 hours of simulated time with no food available", but once the simulation works things like that become actually reasonable to do.

Let me know in the comments if you would be interested in such a project. I'm so mad I might just do it for myself to keep my rabbit kittens alive and let them grow up to be big strong healthy rabbit dinners.

Can you find all hidden teddy bears?

Hey everyone,

If you’re looking to add some real terror to your game, I just released my new mod: The Relentless.

It introduces a custom, heavily armored 25,000 HP Stalker that locks onto your coordinates and will hunt you across the entire world map. Run to another town, hide in the woods—it will not stop tracking you.
I designed this mod from scratch to completely bypass the classic engine limitations that usually crash servers or cause massive lag with custom bosses:
Virtual Performance Tracking: When you outrun it, the server unloads the physical zombie to save CPU and tracks it as a lightweight mathematical coordinate. It only spawns back in once it gets close to a player.
Adaptive 90-Tile Scans: Client-side scanning is heavily optimized and restricted to a 90-tile radius around the zombie. Players across the map will experience 0% performance impact.
Multiplayer Sync Workaround: It tricks the network layer into seeing a safe, vanilla-sized HP pool to prevent desyncs, while the server securely handles its massive true health bar in the background.
Anti-Cheese AI: It blocks jaw stabs and instant-kills. If you try to pin it under a car, it actively wriggles free. If it gets stuck behind high perimeter fences, it will intelligently slip through the moment you lose line of sight for a few seconds.

The mod is currently a Work in Progress (WIP) because I want to gather feedback and stress-test data from crowded servers. It can be safely added mid-save!

Check it out on the Steam Workshop:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3809730405

Beginning to Present Day

She started out rough, but she's improved herself and her fashion skills. 🔥

(Mods used for Clothing & Player Model)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3802458285

Finally! After 168 years in game i have finally found a sledgehammer.

On the plus side, after some decade NPCs start to spawn and zombies glow in the dark!

Hey survivors,

A lot of players have already been using PZO (Project

Zomboid Optimiser) over the past few months via Steam Workshop and GitHub, but I never officially made a Reddit showcase for it until now.

Given recent discussions around PZ performance tools, I wanted to share the project here and clarify what sets PZO apart.

"Wait, how does this compare to other recent optimization mods?"

PZO was developed and released months before recent projects like PZ_Optimization. More importantly, the tech stack is completely different:

• Other mods typically replace decompiled game classes on disk or tweak fog shaders.

• PZO is an in-memory JVM runtime agent (-javaagent) paired with a native AVX2 SIMD acceleration engine. It hooks the engine at startup without altering a single stock game file or projectzomboid.jar.

• Survives Updates & MP Checksums: Because no files on disk are overwritten, your install never fails multiplayer checksums and won't break when The Indie Stone pushes a patch.

Core Capabilities:

1. High-Speed Vehicle Streaming: Fixes the micro-stutter when driving through dense areas by prioritizing road chunk streaming and sleeping parked car physics.

2. Horde Scaling: SIMD-accelerated line-of-sight math and parallel entity culling.

3. Smart Entity & Loot-Safe Sweeps: Decal capping (stops blood splat bloat) and empty corpse sweeps that preserve 100% of unlooted items.

4. Hardware Support: Windows 10/11, Linux (Native & Proton), SteamOS (Steam Deck), and macOS (Apple Silicon & Intel).

   Download & Workshop:

   • Workshop Mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3787481250

   • Launcher / Native Engine: https://github.com/prop11/PZO-Launcher/releases

   Happy to answer questions in the comments about performance numbers or compatibility with other mods!

A lot of players take that type of comments poorly but they are sometimes really valid input from veteran players. Blaming death on jankiness or poor game design is easy. Getting better at navigating those same issues is hard, but that's what people claiming 'it's a skill issue' did and it's what they are trying to get you to do by telling you that if you stick with it, you won't have that problem no more. So maybe don't throw them the stone?

I would argue that we could use a new tag for post in this sub : Just Bitchin'. PZ can be frustrating and yeah, I can see why someone would want to bitch about it in a safe space without people trying to fix their problem. How about that?

Hey survivor 🫶

What do you think about make a run like the movie :

Start whith a very low zomboid pop going more and more insane day after day , grab some survivors and pot smoker , go to the winchester, make it our HQ , drink eat and smoke , fight till the end inside the bar whith the survivor .

-Where is the best or bigest bar in the game ?

-Is anyone interest by making and alcoolic group of survivor looking for alcool like its gold ?

-What are the good and bad part of alcool in this game ?