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Ever since I was a child and thought it would be neat to traverse my hometown using sewers – no questions at this time, thank you – I've been strangely captivated by all things underground. I love building subterranean hobbit-holes in Minecraft, and my favorite part of Stephen King's IT is when the Losers Club build their den beneath the forest. All of this is to say: I have been very, very excited for Project Zomboid's Build 42 to add basements to Knox County.
Now that a beta for Build 42 is finally available to play, I've been using Project Zomboid to sate my mole-ish tendencies. But I have just enough self-awareness left to appreciate that for most people, the best bit of this update will likely be the addition of wild animals and animal husbandry. The beta's full breadth is staggering – it also introduces blacksmithing, new towns, and a fantastic shooting rework among many other things – so while there's certainly something for everyone, my something is living like a goblin beneath the sun's domain.
That is, until I met Gary Charles.
Hunkering down
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To get the full Build 42 experience, I opted to spawn in the newly-added town of Echo Creek. A rural middle-of-nowhere sprawl, Echo Creek is Project Zomboid's most remote start to date. My first day there was grueling: combat has been overhauled to be much more physically demanding, with muscle strain and exhaustion kicking in after killing just a few zombies with the classic push-and-stomp method. In search of somewhere to rest, I bounced between a few isolated homes before finding one safe enough to put my feet up.
You can actually sit on furniture now – praise The Indie Stone – and after a quick sofa-slump, I'm once again in fighting shape. But wait – what's this? A cupboard- no, a staircase? Going down? Oh sweet Spiffo, my first basement. Lighting has been reworked, so it's pitch-black down there until I fumble for the lightswitch to reveal the most daddish room I've ever seen, complete with a poker table, well-stocked bar, and darts board. It's everything I ever wanted – nay, more.
Unfortunately, I don't get to enjoy it for long. I spend a measly three days stocking my new home with food before calamity strikes. While on a loot run I'm cornered by zombies in a kitchen and underestimate just how tiring fighting is now. Too exhausted to properly swing the baseball bat I've found, I try to speedwalk away from the zombies and inadvertently step in a pile of broken glass, lodging shards in both feet and slowing my survivor to a crawl. Too slow to escape, I'm bitten in the neck, bleed out, and fall dead in a bush. As is the Zomboid way.
I spawn my next character in Echo Creek and by pure chance, almost immediately spot keys to a nearby truck that I'd overlooked earlier. I've barely been able to explore the area on foot because of how spaced-out it is, so I hop in for a joyride. Besides the occasional barn, there's absolutely nothing to see until, a little further out of town, I spy a chainlink fence teeming with zombies. But it's what I spot behind the fence that causes me to slam the brakes: chickens. So, so many chickens. Before I've even clocked the gorgeous farmhouse sprawling behind the chicken pens, I've already decided to settle down here.
That's easier said than done. The farm is teeming with overall-wearing zombies, and with combat being more tiring, I can't simply hop out and get to work stomping. Instead, I use my truck's horn to start drawing them out to the road, drive a little ways up, and then floor it back into the horde. Rinse and repeat until the road is so clogged with bodies that even with the truck's windows rolled up, a status moodle tells me the resulting smell is unbearable. It takes me a few more days to clear up stragglers and barricade the farmhouse's many smashed windows, but it's all worth it when I unearth a massive basement beneath my new home. Sometimes, good things happen to strange people.
Clucking around
Somewhat settled, I turn my attention to the tens of chickens in my yard. Zombies have torn one pen's fence down, which means a bunch of my feathered friends have already run to freedom. It also hits me that I have literally no idea how to care for chickens. Will they eat three-day old highway mush? How about burgers? Upon poking around, I piece together that I'll need to fill each pen's troughs with food and chicken feed if I want to keep the eggs rolling in.
Unfortunately, I can only find a few sacks of feed kicking about, which means hopping back in my truck – which now struggles to start, presumably choked with the farm's ex-management. My plan is to drive around in search of nearby farms to loot, but as I take off down the road, a single chicken struts in front of my car. I screech to a halt and just avoid smearing it with my bumper, but the chicken is remarkably chill about the near miss and patiently waits for me to jump out and collect it. Already forming an attachment with this runaway diva, I pause Zomboid to ask my friends to help name him. Through two competing cries of "Gary" and "Charles", Gary Charles – already the light of my post-apocalyptic life – is born.
The game won't let me put Gary Charles in the passenger seat of my truck (boo), so I detour to drop him off in an intact pen before setting back out. But things are different now. While this playthrough started with an urge to find every basement possible, I realize my new calling is to protect Gary Charles and his egg-laying coworkers at all costs. But as I drive along rural country roads, I spot more and more farmyard animals that the apocalypse has forgotten. Sheep graze in abandoned fields, while pigs stand in front of troughs that will never be filled again. It occurs to me that they all need help, not just Gary, and if I can find some rope and a livestock trailer to transport them, my farm is big enough to house them all. My purpose is clear: I need to transform my base into Knox County's largest animal shelter.
I didn't think anything could trump my unshakeable goblin urge to burrow, but Gary Charles and Knox County's soon-to-be rescued farmyard animals have stolen my heart. Though I wasn't expecting Build 42's beta to be so fulfilling right out of the gate, additions like animal husbandry have already added much-needed purpose to Project Zomboid's later stages. Perhaps one day, I'll find the perfect basement and hunker down – but for now, there's too much to live for on the surface.
