Project Zomboid Build 42.21 hits Stable and stops zombies vanishing from chunks

The Indie Stone pushed Project Zomboid Build 42.21 to the Stable branch on 28 September, five days after it went out on Unstable. The studio wrote that players testing the beta reported no major issues, so it pressed the button.

It is the first incremental update since Build 42 reached Stable, and it sets the pattern for future releases. Each version goes to Unstable first, players test it, the team makes changes if needed, and only then does it ship to everyone.

The disappearing dead

The headline fix is for games with large zombie populations. Until now, zombies could vanish when a player left a chunk of the map and came back, in both single player and multiplayer. Multiplayer games also had a habit of duplicating zombies. The Indie Stone says it has fixed the worst cases of both, while a few remaining instances are on its radar for the next update.

The XXL trees added in Build 42 also get out of your way more often. They cut away better when you are driving, no longer hide houses and furniture underneath them, and are more transparent overall. The developers call it a work in progress.

The Unstable patch notes, which the Stable post links to as the full changelist, include plenty of smaller changes:

• Welders now start with Welding recipes instead of Blacksmithing
• 86 more fluid containers can purify water in the right oven
• Washing machines clean dirty rags, strips and bandages
• Fridges and freezers warm up gradually on the day the power goes out
• Explosives now work in basements

What it means for servers

Modders and server admins get something back. The 42.20.4 hotfix disabled the Lua methods “loadstring” and “loadstream” to deal with security vulnerabilities. After further investigation, both are enabled again. “Sorry for the disruption, modders/server admins!” the team wrote.

According to the Unstable notes, players could previously get onto dedicated servers without authenticating properly through Steam, which meant SteamID bans did not stick. That hole is closed. There is also an expanded anti-cheat, fixes for safehouse exploits and less juddering when driving on a ping of around 150 or more. The server browser now shows the last wipe rather than the last restart.

Joining a server on a different game version now shows a notification. Your server and your players should run the same build. The Indie Stone says saves from 42.20.4 should not be affected. Its advice for Unstable testers was to back up the save first anyway, and that is a sensible habit before updating a server too.