It’s been an extremely long time coming, but Project Zomboid‘s promising Build 42 update appears to finally be coming along. The developer The Indie Stone has now officially confirmed on Twitter: Build 42 is due to release sometime in 2024.
The importance of Project Zomboid‘s Build 42 cannot be overstated. The last major revision of the long-lasting indie zombie simulator, Build 41, came out in December 2021. From that point onwards, the majority of Zomboid‘s big and meaningful content and feature updates had been getting rolled up into Build 41. Examples include a substantial performance uplift, the addition of wildlife and animal/ husbandry, medieval-esque tools, fluid mechanics, map expansion, skyscrapers and bunkers, and loads more.
Project Zomboid’s Build 42 is coming in 2024
As per The Indie Stone’s latest announcement, “B42 will be out this year.” This appears to have been a relatively tentative post, it’s worth highlighting, as The Indie Stone dislikes giving out “long-range external ETAs” for major content updates and beyond. The studio prides itself on its dedication to non-crunch production, and putting out regular announcements and release window expectations might’ve stepped on the toes of this approach.
Indeed, Project Zomboid has been in active development for a very long time now, having first released as a tech demo in April of 2011. The Indie Stone subsequently released the game in Steam’s Early Access programme in 2013, and Zomboid has slowly been trucking along ever since.
As exciting and promising as Build 42 might be, one problem that’s now on the horizon are Project Zomboid‘s many mods. In fact, the Zomboid community has already started preparing for the inevitable “Modpocalypse” that will, sadly, affect virtually every contemporary Zomboid mod under the sun. Build 42 is a substantial rewrite of the game, after all, it’s highly unlikely that any of the game’s impressive mods will work with the new version without similarly substantial retrofits.
Keeping all of the above in mind, 2024 is definitely going to be a fascinating year for Project Zomboid players, even if its modding community ends up reeling from all the big changes that are coming up.
