No matter how experienced or proficient you are, several frightening questions hang heavy over every playthrough of Project Zomboid. They’re available for the first few weeks, but what are you going to do when the water and power supplies finally run out? How are you going to craft weapons and other survival essentials if you can’t find the right materials? And why can’t you aim your gun up or down? As The Indie Stone continues to expand Project Zomboid build 42, and the greatest zombie game on PC accelerates away from rivals like DayZ, State of Decay, and Dying Light, a new Zomboid update provides solutions to those quandaries, and delivers myriad fixes.
Project Zomboid build 42 is still in its developmental, ‘unstable’ phase, but The Indie Stone has already released several sizable updates since December. Weapons and items have been rebalanced, there are now map seeds so you can replicate the position of basements between playthroughs, and the distribution of guns and crafting materials is more realistic – police stations, for example, are now much more likely to yield firearms. I’ve written before about why PZ is the best zombie game available today. The latest update makes it even better.
There’s an enormous amount in here, but chiefly, you can now learn crafting recipes via reverse engineering – if you find a completed version of an item, you can right click on it and select ‘research craft’ to begin to learn how to make it yourself. Researching an item’s craft recipe provides the same XP as performing that craft recipe yourself. But there’s another boost to skill grinding and crafting in general.
After the latest update, you should be able to find abandoned mobile library vans scattered around Knox Country. These will be filled with the research manuals that you need to increase your XP gains when learning new abilities, sparing you the life-threatening trips to actual libraries and bookshops, which are often surrounded by zombies.
In terms of combat, vertical aiming has been improved and there are now ‘aim up’ and ‘aim down’ options for guns. Pressing the Shift key and the ‘rack’ command can now be used to cycle through fire modes without having to go into the inventory, and base game weapons now have a safety catch function. On the surface, that might feel like a purely cosmetic feature, designed to give guns a bit more realism.
But when you have melee and ranged weapons hotkeyed to your belt, it’s possible that, when trying to take out your machete, you accidentally select a gun. You press ‘attack,’ the shot echoes around Louisville, and 15 minutes later the zombies are picking you out of their teeth. Putting the safety on should stop that from happening.
It had to go eventually, but sadly the useful bug whereby you could kill zombies from long range with melee attacks has been squashed. Sandbox mode has gotten a big change, however. Going forward, you can customize your game so that the water and power never get cut off – if you want to play without the hassle of building rain collectors or scrounging for a generator after 30 days, that’s finally possible. The full build 42.3.0 update contains dozens more fixes and balance changes, but all told, it’s another big step towards improving Project Zomboid.
You can get Zomboid on sale right now. Otherwise, you might want to try some of the other best survival games, or maybe the best horror games now on PC.
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