Project Zomboid: Build 42.21 Stable Released

The Indie Stone released the 42.21 update for Project Zomboid to the Stable branch today, following a test phase on the Unstable beta that began last Wednesday. Because players reported no major issues during testing, the team pushed the patch to the main branch. Full patch notes are available on the Indie Stone forums.

Going forward, this workflow will serve as the standard release procedure for Project Zomboid. Updates will first launch in the Unstable branch for community testing before moving to Stable.

Main Stuff

• Zombie Duplication and Disappearance: The developers fixed the primary causes of zombie duplication in multiplayer and resolved an issue where zombies vanished when players left and re-entered a game world chunk in both singleplayer and multiplayer. These bugs heavily affected high-population servers, though the team plans to address remaining edge cases in a future update.

• XXL Trees: Project Zomboid patch 42.21 updates the cutaway behavior of XXL trees. Trees now cut away more effectively for players inside vehicles, no longer hide overhanging houses or furniture, and feature adjusted transparency to improve overall visibility.

• Lua Methods Re-enabled: The “loadstring” and “loadstream” Lua methods, which were previously disabled in update 42.20.4 to resolve security vulnerabilities, are active again following further investigation by The Indie Stone.

Big Thanks

The Indie Stone thanked Scribl (Boris) and Rasmus Moorats (nnsee) for identifying the security vulnerabilities addressed in patch 42.20.4.

Got feedback? Found a bug?

Players can share feedback on update 42.21 through the Indie Stone forums. Anyone encountering a bug should read the bug reporting guide before submitting a report on the bug reports forum. The developers note that reports submitted elsewhere, such as Discord, may be missed.

The Block of Italicised Text would like to direct your attention to the PZ Wiki should you feel like editing or amending something. You can also find The Indie Stone on Bluesky, on their Discord, Reddit, and Forums. Project Zomboid updates can also be received via email.

Discussions regarding this update are pinned to the Project Zomboid Discussions Forums.

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