It was officially announced on July 10th that B42.20 or the STABLE branch will be released on July 29th (exact time: TBD). This was of course met with crazy levels of excitement and there are numerous videos going into true detail about exactly what this means for the community and the exact changes that will occur. From massive map changes and a complete overhaul of the entire game’s look. To numerous bug fixes, and lore expansion. It’s obvious B42 stable is going to fundamentally change the game. But I am curious what going Stable actually will mean for the common play from beginners to veterans!
B42 Save Stability
We can start with one of the most important changes for long term game enjoyment and server stability. The very small likelihood of saves being bricked. In the past unstable updates constantly broke save files (including the new stable). Which is remarkably upsetting for casual and veteran players of course. Now, of course excuses could be made since it’s “unstable” but when it’s the main version of the game for the last 1.5 years (B41 was nearly dead) the save breaking was incredibly disruptive to the community overall. Stable implies this will NOT happen at all, but nothing is truly guaranteed as we all know with Indiestone. This includes MP servers as well which in the early days were doing around 2 or so wipes per month for bug fixes and/or updates. Things have been more stable the last 4-5 months but the zombie culling bug was incredibly game breaking. Stable being released and officially supported might mean that these game breaking bugs are hot fixed significantly faster as well. Allowing people to finally have super long term (some years+) servers again. These are huge staples of the community and will 100% up the player count again.
Let’s Play Series Returns
This is one I am especially excited about. I missed the crazy long Let’s Plays we would get from streamers or YouTuber back in B41. Of course we still can find many great challenges or long term playthroughs, but the constant save bricking has definitely discouraged people from committing hundreds of hours to single updates. And there have been significantly less of the very entertaining “100PZ players doing XYZ” HarvestZ style videos with B42 MP still having so many bugs and being unstable. I can imagine there will be a MASSIVE resurgence in the B42 Rat Race challenge as well which is going to be just a wonderful thing to see. I could never do the run myself, but god is it entertaining to watch! I am super excited to see what the big guys like Shivas or BritishBadger can do with a fresh 42.20 run that isn’t going to get broken or be bricked in the next few weeks.
Speedrunning Returns!
Now come on. It’s me. Of course this is something I am going to focus super heavily on! With B42 stable officially released, it means I can work with the other PZ mods to get the Speedrunning page set up and ready to go! I am hoping it’ll be released in the next few weeks. This should also give Indiestone some time to get out any hotfixes that will inevitably be pushed out within the first few weeks of launch. But what this means is you will now FINALLY be able to do Official speedruns on Project Zomboid B42. With the hype around the launch and the potential to completely outshine B41’s launch. This could truly be the real rise of PZ speedrunning, something I have always wanted to see happen and be a part of. While I can’t share all the details of how it’ll be implemented and the plans for new categories/rules I can tell you this. It is going to be amazing. There are so many rule changes coming to make speedrunning more convenient and accessible for everyone! Definitely check back in a few weeks to see my official speedrunning announcement!
