Big new Project Zomboid update makes maps much more varied and realistic

There's a specific suburb in Muldraugh that I always use for a base; it's the one between Cortman Medical and the trailer park, just south of the gas station and the church. It's not because the houses are all on two floors, or because I often seem to find a working car there. It's because the zombies themselves seem to stay away - it's very lightly populated, and in Project Zomboid, the more alone you are, the better. But as much as safety, in Zomboid, I also relish unpredictability. It's the not knowing that keeps The Indie Stone's undead epic alive. With that in mind, the new Project Zomboid update for unstable build 42 is ideal.

Between the new animal husbandry mechanics, the ragdoll physics, changes to the lighting system, and the addition of basements and bunkers, Project Zomboid build 42 has already made the best survival game on Steam significantly bigger and more varied. But if you're a veteran player, you might have noticed some repeating patterns, that is, similar groups of zombies in the same areas every time you begin a new map. The new update revises Zomboid's enemy spawn system to make the world and the packs of the undead feel more varied.

The Indie Stone calls it the 'Zed Spawn Heat Map' system. Essentially, beneath the hood, the Zomboid map is divided into different tiles, each of which is assigned an identifying label. The map tiles around a military base, for example, will be marked as 'military base' tiles. After the new update, different tile types will have different values in terms of how zombies are spawned.

There are two contributing factors: radius of influence and spawn multiplier. In the case of the military base, a location which, before and during the outbreak, you could expect to be heavily populated, there is a high multiplier (more zombies) and a large radius of influence (a greater number of tiles surrounding and adjacent to the base will be populated by zombies). But the system isn't predictable.

"This system is coupled with a seed-based cell noise that subtracts from the aforementioned zombie spawn heat map in order to break the predictability of, for example, always having lots of zombies next to a military base," The Indie Stone says. "There are two noise levels overlaid on top of each other which will provide variety on a residential scale and on a district scale, i.e. sometimes a normally busy building will have no zombies (or at least fewer zombies), and sometimes an entire street or block will be voided of zombies."

In short, while map tiles have parameters to govern zombie spawns, those are mitigated and - to an extent - randomized by your individual map seed, meaning that it's unlikely for the same area to reliably spawn the same quantity of dispersion of undead.

On top of the spawn and map changes, the new unstable build 42 update introduces ragdoll animations for explosions and new sound effects so that you can differentiate between a zombie banging on a wooden panel and thumping on your door. There is also a nasty little change which means, if you trigger a car alarm, you can no longer cancel it using the old quit-and-reload trick - even if you exit and re-enter your game, it will still be going.

If you want to improve the game even further, get the best Project Zomboid mods. Alternatively, try some of the other best zombie games.

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