Project Zomboid

The changes you'd actually notice watching, rather than the full list.

• '78 AM General M35 Series

  The military trucks. The M35 and the rest of the fleet are why the convoy shots look nothing like vanilla.

• Guns of Marz

  Most of the guns you'll see. Recoil and handling that make a firefight a decision rather than a click.

• Project Cook

  Cooking is a whole system now, not a menu. A surprising amount of base time goes on the kitchen.

• PZ Map

  The map overlay in the corner, and the reason nobody gets lost any more.

• Combat Text

  Damage numbers on screen — you can watch a fight going badly in real time.

• Realistic Temperature

  Temperature actually matters here. Winter is a different game to summer.

• Neat Rocco's UI

  Most of what's on screen. The interface has been taken apart and rebuilt.

• Craftable Military Fences

  The fences around the base are craftable, which is most of why it looks like that.

The settings that decide how the game plays, and why they're set where they are.

Most of them shamble. Some of them don't.

Zombie speed: random · roughly 1 in 100 sprints

The odds are good until they aren't. You can hear the moment a fight changes — one of them moves differently and a routine clear becomes a run for the car.

It gets worse for the first three months

Population starts at 0.8× and peaks at 1.35× on day 90

The world opens quieter than a default game and climbs for ninety days. Week one is not what the run looks like. Early confidence is the thing that gets people killed on day forty.

Building is fast. Fighting never gets easy.

Carpentry, electrical, welding, mechanics ×4 · combat skills ×1.5 · fitness and strength ×1

Nobody wants to watch someone hammer planks for an hour, so the base moves quickly. Combat deliberately doesn't — two hundred days in, the character still swings like someone who worked in an office, and a group of five is still a real problem.

Plenty of guns. Not much to put in them.

Ranged weapons ×1.2 · ammunition ×0.5 · military crate spawns removed

Finding a rifle feels great right up until you count the rounds. Every shot is a decision with a cost, and the noise brings company from streets away.

One swing, one zombie

Multi-hit disabled

No crowd-clearing sweeps. Numbers actually mean something, and a doorway is worth more than a weapon.

A bite is fatal, and it takes its time

Blood and saliva transmission · two to three days to turn

There's no cure and no argument about it. What there is, is a couple of days to get the gear home, write the note and hand over the keys. That's usually a better story than dying on the spot.

The lights go out on day twelve

Power fails day 12 · water day 16

Both sooner than standard, and usually before the base is ready. Generators and rain collectors stop being a project for later at about day eight.

Generators drink, and engines carry

Generator fuel burn ×2 · engine noise ×1.2 · fuel stations start emptier

Power is a supply line, not a switch. Every fuel run is a loud vehicle going somewhere it hasn't been cleared, which is exactly where the interesting things happen.

Nobody sleeps

Sleep disabled

It's a shared server, so no one can fast-forward the dark for everybody else. Night has to be lived through, indoors, with the lights off.

Three real hours is one day in Knox County

Day length: 3 hours

Roughly one in-game day per stream. It means a night that goes badly costs an entire session, and it's why the panic when the sun starts going down is genuine.

Load order runs first to last; later mods override earlier ones. Five Workshop items ship more than one mod ID, which is why 64 items produce 72 mod IDs.

• 6 Libraries & frameworks
• 2 Weapons
• 7 Vehicles
• 3 Vehicle systems
• 12 Items, gear & world content
• 2 Crafting & cooking
• 15 Gameplay systems & quality of life
• 11 Interface
• 7 Late overrides & fixes

See all 65 mods in load order