Project Zomboid mods
built from scratch

Be able to turn trailers that end up wedged badly into corners.

A full remake from scratch, with fully custom lore and extraction.

Make crafting stations movable that currently aren't.

Remove the ruined-building effect from a specific area. Not 100% sure if it's possible yet.

A bigger hospital near Brandenburg/Irvington/Riverside. Can't say for now, need more details and a new model to learn.

A bigger, more realistic fire model for fireplaces.

Hand models with individual fingers.

A placeable object that waters itself for a few days.

Be able to administer food/medicine to another player, aimed at doctors.

A from-scratch remake of the detailed engine mod, discontinued and locked by its original author.

A full military profession, exclusive traits and clothing. Just noted, nothing confirmed yet.

Remove a car seat HUD that shows up while driving in multiplayer.

An update to a mechanic that already exists but is unconfirmed on the current build.

Make rabbits, passive in vanilla, turn hostile.

Hordes that gather zombies that already exist instead of spawning new ones, with multiplayer support.

A from-scratch, better version of Zamazon Trading — an Amazon-of-the-apocalypse system, the biggest one on the board.

See and grab nearby items without opening container after container.

Solar panels, batteries and alternative power for bases.

Noted on the list, haven't checked yet if it's doable.

A rope hook to reach high places.

Jump out of a moving car, with damage scaling with speed.

An update to a mod that makes infections survivable, broken since March 2025.

A big overhaul of CDC airdrops and medication, stalled since December 2024.

Real money in bank safes and security deposit boxes.

Build ceiling/roof tiles on the floor above without building a staircase first.

Not a promised fix — an attempt to ease the chunk-streaming freeze while driving/fast traveling. Needs research into engine-level patching first; may get cancelled if it turns out not to be feasible.

A small truck carrying a propane tank, for refueling the blowtorch on the go. No mod does this — closest ones are item-level propane refills, not a vehicle. Needs a new vehicle model.

A proper combat stance/animation set for the katana. Every mod that did this is broken on current stable — needs custom animation work, not just a data mod.

Show calorie info on drinks, gated behind the Nutritionist trait, like food already does. Confirmed real vanilla gap by decompiling the game — drinks track calories internally but the tooltip only reveals it in debug mode, never to normal players. The code that needs changing lives in compiled Java with no clean Lua hook found so far — not a promise, just an attempt.

Mutual actions between two nearby players — hugging, cuddling, petting, playing cards, dancing — that lower Unhappiness and Stress for both at once. Checked the Workshop: pose mods like TTRP Poses cover the visuals but do nothing to moodles, and Lifestyle: Hobbies is individual-only and currently breaking saves/multiplayer on 42.20.2. Would need custom multiplayer actions and animations built from scratch, syncing both players' moodles.

A flashy one-handed spin-cock animation for the lever-action rifles, like Arnold's move in Terminator 2. Nothing like it exists — the closest mod only swaps in a faster two-handed rack, and vanilla has since added its own racking animation anyway. The good news: a proven code hook for custom lever-action rack/reload animations already exists (used by that same mod, 12,500+ subscribers), so the injection point is de-risked — the real cost is animating the one-handed spin flourish itself.

A controllable flying/scouting drone. Checked the Workshop: nothing real exists — the only mod named "drone" has no description, 1 subscriber, and 0 comments. Vanilla has no flying, freely-controllable entity or camera to build on (the closest thing is fixed security cameras viewed through a TV/monitor), so this would be a new discipline for this board — battery/range, a camera that moves independently of the player, and multiplayer sync if it's ever meant to run on a dedicated server.

Old-school house phones with real numbers — call a friend and they actually have to be home to answer, no cell phones. A mod that does exactly this already exists (Infoteo's LandLine, published for 42.20.2 specifically), but the requester doesn't want to subscribe to someone else's mod and its license forbids forking or reusing any of its code, so this would be built independently from scratch. Same calibre as Zamazon or force-feeding another player — a phone interaction menu, a number registry tied to safehouses, a call state machine (dialing/ringing/busy/timeout), and server-side proximity checks for multiplayer. No confirmed vanilla hook yet for the phone objects themselves.

Functioning traffic signals — red/yellow/green cycling, tied to the global power grid so they go dark when the power does — at every intersection on the map, not just one. A mod that does this for a single Riverside intersection already exists (Texas Ranger's Riverside Traffic Signals), but its own author lists map-wide tile detection as an unimplemented "planned feature," and it currently has a confirmed, unfixed dedicated-server bug (null IsoGridSquare during object-sync packets). Scaling to every intersection means automatic tile detection tied to chunk loading instead of hardcoded coordinates, real performance work across hundreds of lights instead of one, and solving that sync bug first so it doesn't multiply. Biggest scope item on this board's difficult list right now.

Remove every abandoned train carriage blocking Knox County's railway so the whole line can actually be used — vanilla-only, no dependency on the (hugely popular, 26k+ subs) Railroader mod that makes a locomotive drivable on that same track. Checked the game's code: carriages aren't a special engine object type (no IsoObjectType entry) and aren't part of the Moveables system (only Train_Signal is registered there) — so they're plain map-authored objects, not something with an existing hook to reuse. Real Railroad Deconstruct's own changelog confirms they ARE destroyable via the standard vanilla sledgehammer+Destroy system already, just one at a time. The one thing that can't be nailed down without opening the game and checking a real carriage's sprite name: exactly what to search for when scanning the map. Flagged as long/uncertain until that's confirmed in-game.

Bring computers to life with a barebones 90s internet, working for the first several days or until the power grid goes out. Randomly generated website names unique to each playthrough, discovered via addresses scattered on notes and fridges around the map, browsable recaps of shows/news, downloadable content limited by era-accurate storage, and floppy disks that must be swapped by hand between PCs to move files — with the mandatory dial-up connection sound. Checked the Workshop: a mature, actively maintained mod already covers similar ground in huge depth (Computer Mod, Build 42 tagged, updated 10 Aug 2026, 1,320 ratings) — read its actual shipped code: website names are a fixed table, not randomized per playthrough, and floppy disks/dial-up only exist as flavor text with no real mechanic behind them. Its license requires asking the author before any patch or addon, so this is being built independently from scratch instead, same precedent as Zamazon Trading. Confirmed buildable: vanilla has zero interaction hooked to the decorative Computer furniture object, but reading Computer Mod's own code confirmed the standard Events.OnFillWorldObjectContextMenu event — the same generic technique any mod uses to add right-click options to a world object — is all that's needed, so wiring up interactivity is a solved problem, not a risk. Needs, from scratch: object interactivity, a custom browser-style UI, a procedural site/name generator with per-save persistence, a new floppy disk item with partial-download tracking, in-world clue notes added to loot tables, and a tie-in to the power grid/generator state. Same calibre as Zamazon Trading or bigger — no day estimate yet, needs breaking into pieces before promising anything.

A fully working, from-scratch rebuild of the classic Common Sense QoL pack, confirmed asked for by name: prying doors/windows/vehicles open with a crowbar, picking up loose junk from the ground, reloading every selected magazine at once, clipping a flashlight to the toolbelt, an ammo counter HUD, opening canned food with scissors or a screwdriver, swapping out dirty bandages, equipping items straight off the ground, washing only equipped or only unequipped items separately, crafting sheets from scrap materials, disinfecting dirty bandages with alcohol, and easier fuel transfer at campfires/BBQs/fireplaces. Checked the Workshop: the dominant fork, Sentido Común [B42.20+] (217,600 subscribers), claims full B42.20 stable support in its own FAQ, but today's comments say otherwise — the crowbar no longer forces vehicles or doors despite the sandbox option being on, plus a live exploit letting grass be farmed infinitely off a single bush that can no longer be removed — and the author's own pinned discussion admits ongoing multiplayer problems. Built independently from scratch rather than patching any existing fork, same precedent as Zamazon Trading and the Functional Computers idea. Each individual mechanic maps to a real, previously-proven vanilla hook, but this is 12+ distinct features bundled into one mod, already at 217k+ subscribers in its most popular existing form — same calibre as Zamazon Trading or bigger, needs breaking into pieces before promising a timeline.

Everyone goes to bed at once and picks a duration — a week, a month, a whole season — and the next time anyone wakes up, that much time has genuinely passed. Confirmed in the game's own code and by two mods already published this build (True Sleep - Better Multiplayer Sleep, Multiplayer Sleeping): vanilla's real fast-forward-the-night mechanic already exists and works in MP (server options SleepAllowed, SleepNeeded, FastForwardMultiplier — a full night in ~15 seconds by default), but it is strictly a group mechanic — it only fires once every connected player is asleep at the same time, because there is one shared world clock, not one per player. Neither existing mod breaks that wall; the closest attempt (True Sleep's "solo nap") deliberately leaves world time untouched when only one player rests, specifically to avoid time-warping everyone else mid-session. So a literal solo hibernation ("I sleep, everyone else keeps playing, then I wake up weeks later") isn't possible without two world clocks existing at once — the engine has one. What is real and buildable: extending the existing all-asleep group skip from "one night" to "however long the team agrees on," turning it into a genuine whole-server hibernation — but it needs every player online at that moment to go to bed together and accept it, same requirement vanilla's own night-skip already has, just scaled up. Unverified: how cleanly crops, zombie migration, weather and vehicle/generator state catch up over a multi-day or multi-week jump instead of a single night — nobody's pushed the existing mechanism that far yet.

A warship docked near Louisville, explorable below deck, repairable, and — the big ask — able to actually fire its guns once repaired, with sub-levels holding parts needed to unlock other content at a specific Louisville location. Checked the Workshop: the core "docked warship you can explore for loot" concept already exists and worked well — The Frigate (Gabester, 1,350 ratings), a frigate on the Ohio River between West Point and the road up to Louisville, with military loot and hazardous below-deck corridors. But it's Build 41 only (no B42 port, unanswered request) and its license is on lockdown — no extending or altering without permission, so this would be built independently from scratch. Louisville already has real port infrastructure in the mod ecosystem too (Louisville Shipping Port, just west of the airport), confirming the location makes sense.

Nobody combines the three pieces this asks for: the ship itself for B42 (mapping work — TileZed/BuildingEd, same new discipline as the pending 2-3 story hospital, not 3D modeling), a working gun that can actually fire after repairs (no functional ship weapon exists in any PZ mod found — new mechanic from scratch, no vanilla hook to lean on), and a cross-location progression system gating Louisville content behind parts found in the ship's sub-levels (no precedent found either). Same calibre as Zamazon Trading or bigger — mapping + a brand-new weapon mechanic + a two-location dependency system, not something to promise a date for yet.

A non-destructive Lua layer on top of vanilla's nutrition system, brought as a full written design: punish eating pure fat (butter, lard, margarine, cooking oil, mayo) standalone with escalating sickness — a second dose the same day triggers real food sickness, pain, unhappiness and a 12-hour stamina debuff, and directly wipes the calories just gained — while rewarding real food with bonus calories for protein sources, and a bigger bonus for eating protein + carbs the same day. Diet variety and nutritional-deficiency effects are planned as later phases.

Confirmed in the game's own code that every piece of the core design is real: Calories/Proteins/Carbohydrates/Lipids already exist as per-item data on ~400 vanilla foods, and the player's own Nutrition object exposes matching getters/setters straight to Lua (confirmed live in vanilla's own debug menu). The real food-sickness pipeline this needs is proven working in production already — a published B42.17+ mod (Immersive Diets Mod) routes lactose intolerance and peanut allergy through that exact same engine pipeline. The one worry in the original design — telling standalone eating apart from a recipe ingredient — turns out to need no extra detection at all: eating and cooking already run through two separate game systems, so butter used in a stew never triggers the "eaten" hook in the first place. Checked the Workshop: nobody combines punish-the-exploit with reward-the-real-food this way — the closest competitor, Real Calories and Nutrients Overhaul, takes the opposite, more invasive route (rewriting ~400 item values directly) and is currently on hold waiting for a stable build. No blocking risk found anywhere in the core design — Long only because of the sheer number of interacting systems and the calibration work needed, not because anything is unproven.

A general utility that changes where the byproduct of an interaction lands. Flagship example: ejecting a gun's magazine always dumps it into your main inventory — the ask is a way to mark a container as its actual destination instead. Confirmed directly in the game's own code: ISEjectMagazine.lua hardcodes self.character:getInventory():AddItem(newMag), no hook, no setting. Checked the Workshop first: the closest thing, Quartermaster - Auto-Sort & Store Loot (Deckard, B42, 73 ratings), solves a different problem — it's a manual "Distribute Loot" button that walks already-owned items to designated boxes after the fact, not a real-time redirect of what an action produces the instant it happens. Nothing found does that.

The same "result of an action shoved straight into getInventory(), no hook" pattern repeats in roughly 100 separate vanilla Lua files — unloading bullets, stripping a vehicle part, skinning an animal, washing clothes, and more — each its own function, so there's no single chokepoint to patch once for everything. The real build is: a right-click "set as destination" option on any container (saved per character), plus overriding a curated handful of those ~100 functions one at a time (same copy-the-function-and-change-one-line technique used elsewhere) so each checks for a marked destination with room before falling back to normal inventory. Starts with magazines/ammo as the proof of concept, expandable to more interactions in later updates — Long because of the new UI plus the per-function patching, not because any piece is unproven.