An essential pillar of the Zomboid Modding Community

What do you do when you're not doing this?

When I'm not working on mods I am usually doing what I went to school for which is Art. Although lately most of my art has been Spiffo-related memes, or the cover art for my mods.

Did you have any of these skills before Zomboid, or did you learn through developing mods/frameworks?

I spent some time working on projects in BYOND. If anyone has played SS13 there's some old code and artwork probably still in use in the TG-Station branch.

What made you go from "I play this game" to "I'm going to make something for this game"?

I've been modding Project Zomboid since June 2021. My first mod was a "fix" to the traits and profession screen, which did not populate the profile-name when you went to save. I got tired of recalling which profile I was editing so I dug around the Lua files. After that I was hooked and started working on classics such as Vanilla Weapons Expanded, Helicopter Events Expanded, Conditional Speech, SwapIt.

Do you remember the moment you realized people were actually using your work?

I greatly enjoy browsing Twitch and YouTube and seeing my mods being in use of mentioned. Part of the reason I make mods is because I want to create something and share it with others.

Walk me through your setup. What tools/software/process do you use?

I started using the IntelliJ IDE when I first started, and I've been using the same 2022 community version. Since then however the juggernauts in the community have developed supplemental tools like Umbrella and easy to use decompilers. For visual stuff I use Photoshop.

Where does an idea start for you? A new potential game mechanic, a bug, a screenshot in your head? Just wanting to do something cool?

My focus has always been on vanilla+ or Quality-of-Life content with a strong dose of silly and hopefully fun experiences.

How many hours goes into your work? Per mod, per week, per month, however you want to describe it.

Really depends on the week, if I'm not working on a new mod or an update generally I just wait to hear a bug report. When the base game updates it keeps me busy for basically all of my free time for a month or so.

Was there ever a time you spent weeks working on something just to throw it out?

Not weeks, but at least a few days, yes. I thought it would be a great idea to make "germs" a mechanic. Anything that touched the floor got germs, and you had to wash your hands if you touched something flagged with germs. Otherwise you got sick if you ate with your hands (smaller chance if you used utensils). After finishing the basic systems I went to play test it and it was a fairly miserable experience. My character got sick basically every few days if I wasn't religiously washing my hands.

What does burnout look like for you, and what are the things that contribute to burnout the most?

I would say for most modders (and players) we have ebbs and flows of interest in the game. I think I'm a bit of an outlier in sticking out so long, and I think having the unofficial Modding Community discord has kept a few people interested for longer. The biggest factors to burnout are frankly unnecessarily nasty comments and lately people abusing AI/LLMs to "reimagine" your mod (in reality it's just a knock-off reupload).

What should real support actually look like?

Not everyone is in a position to offer monetary support, but honestly just a nice comment now and again would go along way. Also, I think when you run into a bug, knowing how to find your console.txt and describing the issue step by step would go along way.

What needs to change in the way players, server owners, or the community in general treat mod authors?

Honestly, I think most interactions are normal. It is the loudest and weirdest people that give a bad reputation for their respective camps. So I think more people in general should reach out and interact.

Anything else you want people to know

Lately I've been putting more energy into collaborating with other modders. That includes the Gun Works framework, Horse Mod, and the PZ Community Modding Projects. I also help maintain and manage the (unofficial) Zomboid Modding Community Discord (https://project-zomboid-community-modding.github.io/), which has the mentioned PZ Community Modding Projects set of repos (think community patches) and a mod-adoption system for ‘donated’ mods can find new maintainers. (Currently looking for maintainers for the legendary Inventory Tetris.)