
- Making fishing clearer and easier to follow for new players – making the messaging clearer to the player when fish are present for example via the disturbances on the water, and making it more obvious when a fish has been caught.[/*]
- Fixing issues with body-dragging, for example bugs with phasing through walls on pick-up and drop.[/*]
- Improving animal pathfinding to make them act more realistically around walls and map structures, and continued general work on the unseen paths that animals will follow.[/*]
- Optimization work on the player’s view cone to help the game in busy areas. [/*]
- Map testing and fixing throughout new towns added to the game, and all the existing areas that have been given a glow up – which are primarily in Muldraugh. [/*]
- Adding more opportunities for players who generally don’t go to farms and forests to come across animals in-game.[/*]
- Adding 42’s new depth textures to scenery and items that testers discover, and that we previously missed out.[/*]
Languages
From the very beginning of PZ amazing community translators have brought so many people from around the world to our game, and allowed non-English speakers to better enjoy the Knox Event. Recently, however, due to the extent and expanse of the full translation sheets over twenty different languages it became clear that it was simply going to be too complicated to keep going in this fashion, especially with the motherlode of B42 content still soon to drop alongside everything that we on the team know still lies ahead. There’s at least 100,000 words in Build 42, possible more depending on how many new CDs and VHSs we get in, so it’s about a novel’s worth all added up. Build 42 will see a big shift for us in terms of localization, then, as we are moving to a complete professional translation of the entire game in a full 21 different languages. Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Spanish and many others. We have essentially covered all of our most popular playing languages, and all of our most requested inclusions. This will cover everything in-game: including both new content, and edits to the old. Existing translations have been checked through to ensure consistency and accuracy, and to fill in some of the gaps a few of the translations had due to the sheer vastness of the PZ broadcast system. Importantly, access to all existing community translations – and prominence of existing community translator game credits – will clearly remain in the game. We are so grateful to our amazing community translators, and we have worked out some cool ways that we can thank such a hugely complex web of people from all over the world – whether they have worked as individuals, or within smaller circles of co-translators who’ve been dedicated to various different parts of the game during different timeframes over the many years of PZ’s existence. If you are reading this and you are in this bracket (ie. if you are a credited community translator, or have been in the past) then please go into the translations channel on our PZ Discord for further information about your ‘Thank You’ package, or email nasko[a]theindiestone.com.Zombie Heat Map
When the game map for a new build approaches final, one of the main jobs we always have to do is update the zombie heat map. This is what governs zombies that spawn outdoors: around buildings, on roads, around farms and fields. The current Build 41 one for Muldraugh looks like this:

From the Art Studio
All the newspapers are now finalled, and as such Pat, Unconid and Werlias are moving onto the in-game business flyers – which serve the gameplay function of revealing interesting areas on the player map. This will in turn encourage exploration, and serve the function of showing new (and existing) players interesting locations that they can journey to and could perhaps prove useful in their continued survival. (Some typos in the following – we will be finalling the first batch of these over the next month).

Nu_Twiggys
Next up, here’s another quick glow-up video of a survivor-favourite location from the map team – alongside some neat day and night visuals. Also shown in this video is an example of one of some of the super rare vehicles that will be found spawning in particular towns – there are multiple examples of cool surprises like this that you’ll come across in your travels in B42 that we’ve been dropping into the game as development has gone on. [previewyoutube=4-DZqLKw3dM;full][/previewyoutube]
