Welcome to the Monday Zomboid newsburst!

A fresh internal testing build was put out last Tuesday, with RJ’s fishing system entering test procedures on Friday. EasyPickins has been thundering out fix after fix and things are really shaping up well. We really need to find a way to get a nice text list of SVN changelists to really show the gravity of this stuff as the changelist for the next build should be flipping immense.

Mash has been continuing on her work on the next major map expansion, so while you may not hear much from her side of things, when it comes around it’s going to be a huge deal. Though she is perhaps starting to sympathise with all those times she was all ‘Andy, have you got those cells yet?’ now she’s in charge of 100% of the process of map creation. Andy has been using his map-free time well, busy with some new combat animations with which we hope to drastically increase the feel of combat in the game, making it more intuitive and visceral.

Finally Chris is back in the world of NPCs, where he shall probably remain for some time until we’re ready to start showing stuff, and is preparing a whole bunch of stuff to hand over to RingoD and Will, along with EasyPickin’s awesome NPC flowchart scripting tool.

In terms of features currently being fed into internal testing, though, let’s turn to Romain and his exciting fish-based adventures. (Please note – all Romain’s Frenchisms have all been Englishised by an untrained translator. Though some early screenshots may have escaped this process!)

First things first, what’s happening with the new cooking system that you’ve been implementing?

The first feedback from the testers was pretty good – the system’s way more fun and a lot easier to use than the old one. With a little creativity you can make a lot of cool stuff. It’s not perfect, and there’s still a few bugs I need to eradicate – but they’re fairly small ones. Next up I’ll be adding in extra recipes like pasta, sauces in pans, pizza… with the new system it’s all pretty easy to implement, and something that modders can add recipes to easily.So I saw you wondering about doing hunting/trapping next, how come fishing got the nod?

Did I mention I’m now on twitter? [Ed> He is you know! https://twitter.com/rj_pz] Well, after a little talk on Twitter, I decided that fishing would be way easier and faster to code than trapping. That said, a lot of work on trapping is already in the can – it just needs a fair amount of extra work that’s mainly due to the multiplayer. In terms of hunting, well Andy has worked on some new animations but we’ll clearly need to implement animals with their own behaviours first. Chris has developed some lua driven animal behaviour code that is a part of the NPC scripting system which we will be able to use for such a thing.

So yeah, fishing! What a lovely morning activity during a zombie apocalypse! Grab a beer, prepare your bait, smash a zombie’s head in and ready your fishing rod…

So many questions: How does it work? What do you need? How long will it take? Is it the same as your old mod?

Well that’s why it doesn’t took me long to code it! I took the old mod code (which was never released by the way!) and then I adapted it, because it was originally built for good ol’ 0.2.0q. Then I added MANY new things.

So basically, first you have to find a fishing rod (or craft it), grab some bait (worms, little fish, plastic lures) find a lake/river (so, near West Point basically) and start fishing.

How long will it take to catch a fish?

Well, it depend on your luck, it’s quite hard to determine and that’s one of the main things we’re testing for at the moment. It needs to take a while, but not too long to be boring – but not too short a time for it to be an over-powered food source.

I like to think about the Zelda’s fishing system, in Ocarina of Time. I remember that being really cool, and in itself it reminded me of my childhood fishing : a cool moment ! No zombies back then though…

Oh gosh, I wish we had zombies back then…

So yeah, currently in testing until it’s fun – and once it’s releasd we can work on fish nets, different sorts of fish etc.

How easy will it be to fish, won’t it be an infinite food source? How scarce are items you’ll need?

It’s ‘easy’ in that it doesn’t require any player skill, it’s RPG stylish so you don’t need to press a key when you hear a sound to catch something. It’s a timed action, and you wait. It’s also made tricky because your line can break (depending on your skill, luck and the size of the fish), and on top of that you’ll have to craft fishing line for your fishing rod.

Items you can use to craft your own rod won’t be that rare – some wood, twine (or fishing twine : more resistant), bait (paperclip, nail…) and lure.

As for the ‘infinite food source’ issue, I plan to add some kind of “fish population” in the area, so the more you fish, the less chance you’ll have to find a fish. You’ll have to wait for the fishing population to come back. It’ll be probably changeable with the sandbox option though !

So is Fishing a skill like Carpentry etc?

Yes, this fishing skill will affect the chance of catching something with a plastic lure, the chance of the fishing line breaking, the quality of the crafted fishing rod etc. As for developing the skill, well you’ll get points by… wait for it…. Fishing! But even a fish that gets away will give you some XP towards it.

What sort of fish will we all be catching?

All the varieties of fish you can find in Kentucky, with different sizes/weights to add a “fishing contest” feel to it. Who will catch the biggest pike? Will you cook it, or keep it as a trophy? When it comes to cooking, you can cook the fish straight away to fight your hunger (hunger reduction will change according to the size/weight of the fish) or maybe cut it into fillets so you can use it in multiple recipes. The list of fish going into the first iteration includes the following: Catfish, bass, trout, pike, walleye and crappie fish. And yes, a crappie fish is a real fish! Google it!