Given as it’s Easter Monday we’re afraid that all the Zomboid team have been doing family stuff and have been absent from their usual workstations, so it’s a somewhat limited Mondoid this week. We have a few items of note for your informative pleasure, however.

Firstly, after a lot of debate both within the team and on the Steam discussion page between players we’ve decided to take the metalworking system discussed last week in what’s best described as ‘a more Zomboid direction’. RJ will be starting work on the new approach tomorrow, so we won’t go into detail until it’s nailed down, but the gist is that it’ll concentrate far more on ‘working’ scavenged metal so that the forge doesn’t become a magic ingot box.

Next up, we’ve had some more positive results from our optimization tests on older laptops – which have given us further confidence that the upcoming animation revamp won’t impact too much on players with lower end hardware.

Speaking of which, also for the animation update, Binky has been reorganizing the texture mapping on the characters. This sounds in itself boring, but in reality it leads to a lot of options with characters that were previously off limits, for example blood and gore overlays on both characters and clothing, as well as providing us with a few more optimization options for the 3D models.

Before we part, then, here’s a look at Binky’s new man. Doesn’t he look shiny?

Thanks all! We hope those celebrating had a good Easter. Normal service will be resumed next week.

This week’s featured image by, somewhat aptly given the holiday that’s currently ending, Jesus0288 over on Steam. The Centralised Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something, and the PZ Mailing List that can send blogs like this and patch notes direct to your mailbox. We also live on Twitter right here! Okay thanks bye!