Project Zomboid’s intercity wilderness is becoming a survival sandbox all of its own

Project Zomboid‘s upcoming Build 42 release is promising nothing short of a complete retrofit of the entire game, more or less, and the developer The Indie Stone is adding more goodness to the mix with every new monthly blog post. This time, we learned more about wilderness generation, for example.

Specifically, while it’s clear as day by now that Build 42 will run, look, and play better than Project Zomboid ever did before, there’s way more where that came from. “One aspect of [Build] 42 is that we no longer have a rigid black border, and instead have generated wilderness at the map’s edges,” explains The Indie Stone. What this means in a practical sense is that we will no longer come across huge swathes of nothingness between manually created content. Instead, the developer has now zoned-out all the unused bits so that the game generates natural-looking, resource-heavy areas of wilderness to survive in.

The picture featured below gives us an example of how a particular region of the Zomboid map handles biome generation, with each biome having its own wildlife (yes, wild animals are a part of B42), foraging opportunities, and maybe even campsites every so often.

Build 42’s procedurally generated wilderness is exciting for survivalists

In Build 42, Project Zomboid will pull its generated wilderness data from a grand total of six unique biomes:

• deep forest
• organic forest
• birch forest
• pine forest
• farm-maintained forest
• pollution-resistant forest

To ensure sensible, realistic-looking transitions, The Indie Stone has also created three more mixed biomes that incorporate elements of the six baseline biomes as players move from one region to the other. “[The biomes’] generation is guided by geographical features such as rivers, roads, neighbouring farms and large bodies of water. The end result is a lot of much-needed variety for all of your off-road adventures,” explains The Indie Stone.

All of this is bound to faciliate the kind of survivalist gameplay that was never fully realized in Project Zomboid up until Build 42. In the future, players will be able to escape the zed-ridden cityscapes to make their destiny in the open wilderness instead. And, what’s most important, the game’s procedural generation systems should be able to keep things interesting even when there’s not a horde of monsters chomping after you. So, grow plants and be vegetarian! Why not?

Not to be outdone in the graphics department this month, either, The Indie Stone also added a new layer of goodness to Zomboid‘s Build 42 with the addition of colored lighting. It sounds very simple on paper, yes, but the addition of hued light sources (such as sodium-based orange streetlights, which were in use in the 90s) adds a huge bonus to the game’s visual interest. Combine this with massively improved buildings and animations, and everything points to B42 being a real graphical winner.

So, good news all around. Though, of course, we don’t yet have a release window for B42, so it’s not a great time if you’re particularly impatient. I did discuss this problem not too long ago, though, so consider checking that out.