PZwiki:News

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May 2023

Community News^{(28 May 2023)}

Hello again! To brighten up PZwiki a little, after a brief discussion on the Discord, I decided to update this section each month with a monthly recap of what happened in PZwiki if time permits, hopefully every last weekend of the month. So, starting with May, what happened? Quite a few actually, though most changes were under the hood.

Annonymous side statistics

Thanks to the lovely website manager Kirrus, some anonymous site visitors stats are available to be viewed using self-hosted Matomo Analytics, A Google Analytics alternative that is totally annonymous, but allows us to see most visited pages, devices being used and the like – this should allow driving more direction in the areas that needs the most attention, like most visited pages or tailor it better to the devices being used.

Favicon

Thanks to Mash, we now have a unique, nice-looking favicon! It should appear in most browsers, as well as in bookmarks or shortcuts, and being available in several sizes should be picked right for each device. Feel free to let us know if there's some issue on other devices, especially Apple ones, as there are sizes and icons that are unique to some devices, so if something comes up pixelated, we might consider adding something for it!

Wiki manager

Following the news from February, I ranked up higher to a wiki maintainer, this, among some other minor things, allows me to do some more under the hood changes, including changing some of the interface, which brings me to another point.

New sidebar

I cleaned up and revamped the sidebar a little, including adding a tooltip to each of the entries. This was followed by some renames briefly talked about on Discord too. Feel free to leave any comment on Discord or on my talk page if you see any typos or want something changed.

Cleaned up TODOs

Along the improved sidebar comes also improved TODOlist, I refreshed PZwiki:Tasks as well as PZwiki:Community portal, basically moving what I had on my talk page and removing things that no longer apply. You can now watch the direction wiki goes better. While at it, I also cleaned up some of the Help:Contents and Help:Style guide (where, after a brief discussion with TIS team thanks to Kirrus asking them directly whether US or UK writing style is preferred, a US preference comes first so sorry Spiffo!), though more changes, including writing up Help:Tables is still on the table (no pun intended!).

Minor changes to the Main Page

There were some minor changes to the news to the Project Zomboid Wiki, following the changes for sidebar and TODOs, mostly to the news sections. These are not yet carried to non-English Main Pages, though there might be some more changes coming, so stay tuned!

RecipeLookup removal

RecipeLookup template served its purpose since its introduction back in 2011 by then-wiki administrator DUMBELLS and saw a whooping over 600 edits, but since then became too large and outdated and was, after several experiments and tries, replaced with Template:Crafting by our another administrator User:Vaileasys who did lots of the groundwork for what we have now back in 2019. It was largely replaced for the English pages since, and then I slowly began finishing off what Vaileasys started and finally, after months or replacing it here and there, I went up and replaced it elsewhere, finishing it just today. This finally allowed me to remove the template and its surrounding ones. This allows to focus on future, especially as Build 42 will totally overhaul crafting and remove some old item icons and template errors, as well as ease up maintaining what we have now. Nothing is without loss though, as unfortunately the new template wasn't translated to most languages yet and some pages such as non-English Crafting page suffered the most, so if you have time, you can help translate and add missing stuff to those pages based on the newest content!

Also, hopefully it won't be needed, but just in case, old versions of templates can be restored by any administrator, I also have a local copy of the Russian and Japanese crafting pages, as these were the largest, so feel free to contact me if you want to recreate the pages but want to look how they looked like before.

Item models

Thanks to Carina, most items have models now! There'll be still some cleaning, but Carina did mention few times that if you want any model uploaded, you should ask her about it, so I guess don't hesitate to ask her about it on Discord!

Other contributions

We also saw some returning and new editors doing some minor cleanups as well as some updates for French and Russian pages. While this month was quite slow, a lot has happened since February anyway and slow updates are to be expected until the game gets a new update, which gives us time to focus on improving existing things!

What's next

For me first, I'll finish up cleaning and close PZwiki:Project Recipe Template and Distribution which will be a first project closed, clean up and remove duplicate images now that they're not needed, move some templates that use Crafting/core template directly, then move up on removing old navboxes and infoboxes and then follow a little more about categories, especially the non-English one to give a good base to work at. Then update some admin pages and hopefully go on full-on for updating everything to build 41 and closing PZwiki:Project Build 41 Update project! Till the next month!

—Faalagorn☎/✓ 23:34, 28 May 2023 (BST)

February 2023

Community News^{(26 February 2023)}

This section was always a tad neglected, but after a few years of radio silence, it's time for some refresh!

New administrator

Kinda weird to introduce myself, but thanks to User:Kirrus, I got admin rights right at the beginning of Feburary. This allowed me to do some Spring cleaning to the Wiki.

Wiki mainteneance

Again, thanks to the User:Kirrus, we had some new Wiki upgrades, including caching tweaks, new SyntaxHighlight plugin and some mainteneance upgrades.

Nearest neighbour image scaling

Separate 120 px / 128 px item icons are no longer needed! Thanks to the addition of a class=pixelart to MediaWiki:Common.css by User:Kirrus, it can now be applied to icons which are now scaled using nearest neighbour and are no longer blurry, see User:Faalagorn/120 px test to see how it works. It took a while to update all templates and pages to not use the 120 / 128 px variants of icons, but it should work in all modern browsers and some older ones as well, without having to upload a separate version of the icon (unless you are stuck with IE6, though can you even browse anything at that point?). Currently it is applied only to images using class=pixelart and for galleries it can't be applied automatically, but maybe in future it could be applied globally for everything (since we mainly use pixel art anyway).

Cleaning of old burden

Aside of removing the 120 / 128 px icons, I also removed some old templates. There's still more to do (you can track progress on my User:Faalagorn page, especially for translations, so if you can, please upgrade the old pages to use the newest templates, especially the Template:Crafting, Category:Infobox deprecated. It also helps to add DISPLAYTITLE to translations as per Help:Style guide.

New languages

Ukrainian thanks to User:NeGat1FF, Hungarian thanks to User:Gerizmo and Chinese Simplified (Mainland China) thanks to User:Dlm tamashii are all officially added to the wiki now! Feel free to translate to those or existing languages, or add your own!

PZwiki projects updates

Everyone welcome User:Pohly as the new manager of PZwiki:Project Locations and Maps! Also, some original projects by User:Vaileasys were updated in PZwiki:Community portal. The PZwiki:Project Build 41 Update is close to being finished too, hopefully to be settled before Build 42 hits!

Other works

User:Aiteron did a lot of work with Modding recently, we also had a lot of contributors from the regional existing communities, including Russian by User:ВЛАДИЧКА, Thai by User:‎Godofpleum007 and a lot of work by others, including plumbing revamp by User:IN REM and loose edits by many unnamed contributors in Special:RecentChanges! Thanks a lot for any edit made!

Future work

For me, I'll keep on cleaning the old burden and eventually focus on upgrading everything to Build 41, hopefully before Build 42 hits IWBUMS. Some of the work I do can be tracked on my user page. Until next time!

—Faalagorn☎/✓ 22:49, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

May 2019

Community News^{(16 May 2019)}

It’s been several months since the last update, however a lot of both minor and major updates have been made.

Changes to the wiki

There have been some fairly large changes made to the wiki lately, mostly stylistic, however were much needed. Previously all articles would use the default “wikitable” design, however we’ve made our own design could “pztable”, so please use this one instead of the old “wikitable” one.

New Main Page

Firstly, the Project Zomboid Wiki has seen a complete redesign. Much of the design was influenced by the previous design (by MalonyJenkins) and various voices on discord, so thank you everyone that provided some input.

New pages

With the new main page, several new pages had to be made to improve the sections. New location pages for each major location (Muldraugh, West Point, etc.), new item lists (Medical, Literature, etc.), various lore pages (Knox Event, Businesses, etc.), a furniture page, which functions similarly to the current Items page, and plenty more.

Administration stuff

The navbox template has finally been out of a sandbox and into an actual template page, which is Template:Navbox/Core, since we still don’t want to break all the non-english pages (more on this later). The languages template, also known as the language bar, has had a style redesign, with the functionality being unchanged. This has been done to more closely match the category bar at the foot of the page.

Page updates/changes

For many years (since 2013), Project Zomboid has changed the name of the game location from ‘Knox County’ to ‘Knox Country’, however this has never been updated on the wiki. So that has finally been updated. Knox Country is now the current updated map of Project Zomboid, whilst Knox County is the old 0.2.0 map of Project Zomboid. The food page has also been updated, now having a list of all food items.

The state of Project Zomboid

Build 41 is still in an internal testing stage, however with many changes being added each week. We are hoping for an IWBUMS release before too long, however the timeframe is still unclear.

Going forward

We are currently working on a new Items page design, which will be separated into different categories, to improve the load time and for the future of translation. This new items page is getting close to completion, so it will hopefully be added before long.

Translation foundations

We have also begun work on a way of improving translation on the wiki. This is still very early in development; however, progress seems to be going well. More info on this should be coming with the next news update, with the items page being the main target to begin the new translation template.

Recipe/Crafting lookup

This template is ‘’still’’ borked, however we hope to work on this and the translation template simultaneously, once the Items page is complete.

Missing/Stub pages

There are still many missing/stub pages that we’d really like to get sorted. So, any contributions towards these pages would be much appreciated. These include:

• Heat source
• Radio
• Water Bottle (Mayonnaise)
• Water Bottle (Remoulade)
• Cake Preparation
• Recipe ingredients
• Bass
• Catfish
• Crappie
• Perch
• Pike
• Sunfish
• Trout
• Compost Bag
• Insecticide Spray
• Mildew Spray
• Mortar and Pestle
• Poultice
• Candle (merge Candle)
• Generator

New infoboxes

Some new infoboxes need to be made, since many articles are still using the very basic outdated ones. These include:

• Template:Infobox furniture
• Template:Infobox clothing
• Template:Infobox weapon mod

New pages

New pages that we’d like to see added, to improve the knowledgebase are:

• Survivor – somewhere to describe the survivalist houses (boarded, food hoarding), vehicles and upcoming zombies.
• Kentucky State Prison – the location of the jail to the west of Rosewood
• Crossroads Mall – the location of the mall to the East of Valley Station
• House In The Woods – the last stand challenge
• General John McGrew – the man in charge of the going-ons of the Knox Event.

---

That is all for now, hopefully in the next update we have some more information about build 41, so we can start making changes to compliment its release to stable.

- Vaileasys (talk) Wiki Administrator 15:20, 16 May 2019 (BST)

November 2018

Community News^{(28 November 2018)}

After a short hiatus, we're back with another update.

Changes to the wiki

Return of the regulars

As we all know, build 40 has finally been released to the stable branch, meaning that there's been a small influx of players returning to the game and experiencing the beautiful new weather effects. We've seen a few of our regular players and editors returning and editing the wiki, specifically Faalagorn and The-phil that have made a few necessary edits, so thank you to you both, along with everyone else that has contributed.

For several months Halkaze has been doing some fantastic work in translating to Japanese along with many other super helpful edits, and has truly become a pillar of this wiki.

Weather update

With the release of build 40, we didn't have too many changes or additions, so we've pretty much kept on top of this update. The weather article has been updated to explain the new weather system, however it's still missing some key components, such the effects on the player and some sort of guide to surviving the elements. So, if anyone has anything to add, please do make an edit.

Administration stuff

The navbox has seen a complete redesign, however it is currently using User:Vaileasys/sandbox, since making changes to Template:Navbox will break far too many pages, specifically those not in English. This is only temporary, so we'll eventually sort that out. Furthermore, more navboxes are needed for things like vehicles and environment. So, the navbox changes are still in the early stages.

Once we're done with the navboxes, I'd like to move onto making more infoboxes, specifically for furniture, so we can finally get to making those pages. Since the ability to pick-up and place furniture, I feel like this has become a major part of the game and really should be on the wiki.

Moving forward

With the fabled animations being the next major update, there will be some massive changes to the core of the game. These changes can range from basic survival to clothing and weapons. So as soon as we see a test build, some preparation will need to be made for the stable release to the public.

Other than the animations, we'll be improving the vehicle articles, food, cooking, and anything else that may be covered in the community projects.

---

That's all for now. We'll be back with another update in a few months time, hopefully with some much bigger news, for both the wiki and Project Zomboid.

August 2018

Community News^{(31 August 2018)}

Since the last update, we’ve had a lot of people, old and new, joining the wiki and contributing.

Community updates

As was mentioned in the previous update, we now have a discord channel dedicated to the wiki (yay). This has already been a great place to get some feedback on changes we’d like to make, while also motivating others to help by contributing. So, if you haven’t already, check out the discord channel.

Furthermore, we have gotten a lot of attention from the guys (and girls) higher up, seeing both a Twitter and a Thursdoid mention. This, along with the Discord channel has caused a massive increase in our active users, from a measly 6 to a whopping 10 (wow, too many to count)! So thank you everyone that has contributed to the wiki over the past 30 days, no matter how diminutive your edit may seem, it is all appreciated.

We are always looking for more people to help contribute to the wiki – while we’ve made a lot of progress, we’ve still got a long way to go before we can consider the wiki 'up-to-date'.

Changes to the wiki

There have been quite a few large and important changes made over the month, some tedious (which are still ongoing) and others are a lot more exciting.

Administration stuff

Notice boxes

First off, a small but important change, the notice boxes have been completely rewritten, since they were using multiple templates, including one which was directly copied from Wikipedia and far too in-depth and complicated for a small wiki like ours. Along with this change, some new templates have also been added, including one for merging and moving. Each of these templates will be added to a category so we can come back to them and either merge, move or remove the notice. All of these old and new templates can be found on a single template/page.

Vehicle infobox

An infobox for both vehicles and buildings has been created, both of which may see some changes as the wiki and game progress. Along with them, the design of the new templates that were mentioned in the previous blog update have been redesigned. The biggest changes include: moodle icons (which link to the relevant moodle), merged primary and secondary use into a single ‘function’ and food templates can now have up to 3 alternate images (this will eventually be added to more infoboxes), along with other more minor changes to the overall look of the infobox.

Main page changes

Some new screenshots have (finally) been added to the main page, along with a caption for each. So no longer will you come to the main page of the wiki and see the same dude jumping over a fence on a basketball court (yes, I’ve been on the main page way too many times). The main page is open to new screenshot suggestions, especially with the new update well on its way. Which, while I’m here, a Steam thread has been created, asking for any screenshots of the beautiful weather effects, which will be needed for an update on the weather article, but more on that later.

So, silly old (not so old) Vaileasys (thy author) made a boo-boo when trying to bypass the spam filter (no, I was not doing naughty stuff) in one of the core parts of the wiki, the bypassing methods resulted in some fairly minute, yet noticeable changes to the wiki, specifically the main page. Luckily for us wikioids (yes, we are wikioids now), Kirrus the Wizard of Esoteric Networking Magicks came riding over to our discord channel fixed it… (sorry for dragging that one out), so thank you Kirrus for my incompetence.

Head/navbar/background

Something else, pretty much everyone that uses the wiki regularly would’ve noticed, is the navbar/background template has been updated to a much nicer and slick design that is hopefully easier to read than the previous one, not that there was anything wrong with the old one Mr. Andrew323 (creator of the template).

Page updates/changes

Vehicles

One of the most noticeable changes that have been made is the new vehicle pages that have finally been made. They’re all using the new vehicle infobox, along with an image of each vehicle variant and their vehicle IDs, which can be used to spawn them into the game using server commands. However, unfortunately the articles are still stubs and need more content before we can remove that beautiful new ‘Stub’ notice.

Mechanics, electricals and metalworking items

Along with the vehicles, we’ve also added an article for each mechanic item, both tools and parts. Some of these have more content than others, however the basics are on their which should satisfy that stirring question many players have had.

Adding the mechanics articles has also lead to the addition of the long-awaited metalworking articles, which have been missing since… probably 2 years, when they were first added to the game. Along with metalworking though, we’ve also added ‘’most’’ of the electrical items, radios, walkie-talkies and TVs are still missing though as they’re a much larger task.

Food! Food has been one of the most up to date categories in the entire wiki for the longest time (since the disappearance of poor MJ). So we’ve been working our butts off, asking for suggestions and collaborating on the discord channel, until we found a design we liked, along with a future update to the navigation path. While this is a much less interesting update than vehicles or electricals, this has been a massive task, and is still far from being completed.

The state of Project Zomboid

Recently, build 40 has been moved over to the IWBUMS beta branch, which is accessed by a lot more players. What this means for the wiki is that we still have a lot of time before we see the new animations being released, which will likely change a lot of what’s currently on the wiki (specifically clothing and weapons). However, with build 40 we may also see some changes to the current farming system which has been mentioned in a Thursdoid, although not confirmed as of yet. We will however, be seeing the new beautiful reflections on vehicles, which will mean all the current vehicle images will need to be replaced (dang it).

Going forward

The RecipeLookup template hasn’t seen any love lately, so hopefully some progress will be made on that over the next month. Currently, the food articles are the main focus, then we’ll probably move onto cooking and food. We may also see some changes to Knox County, radio, the addition of television and Knox Event (some beautiful lore), which some work has already been done for in the background.

A quick note on the author's future status on the wiki: while I (Vaileasys) am and will continue to do my best for Project Zomboid and the PZwiki, I will be starting up a new job in my personal life, which means along with Uni, the updates I make to the wiki will likely dwindle down somewhat. Although, I will continue to play the game, read the dev blogs and make edits (especially if it’s something major) to the wiki. I will always still be available to contact.

- Vaileasys (talk) Wiki Administrator

July 2018

Community News^{(30 July 2018)}

This is just a quick update regarding the changes to discord.

Dedicated Discord Channel

As the heading suggests, we have a discord channel dedicated to the PZwiki set up. This is somewhere we can go, whether you're a contributor or reader, to discuss changes, make suggestions, or ask questions. If you don't use discord, that's fine, you can still leave messages on discussion pages and the external wiki threads. The purpose of the discord channel is to have an instant messaging discussion, allowing us to collaborate more effectively and hopefully respond quicker.

You can join the channel conversation here.

- Vaileasys (talk) Wiki Administrator

Community News^{(20 July 2018)}

After a long break, we're finally back with more news on the current state of the wiki.

Wiki Administration

You may have noticed a lack of administrators on the wiki for a while, which there is a very good reason for. Since the last update, Connall has been employed by The Indie Stone as a dev, which has taken up a large portion of his time. However, him and Kirrus will still be popping by and are always contactable, see their user pages for details.

So, who am I? If you've been keeping up with the logs over the last few months you may have noticed me, Vaileasys, making a lot of changes to the wiki, which I'll get into in a moment. I am a new administrator here on the wiki and will be frequently active, you may also see me on the forums and Steam. Come say hello to me on my talk page and ask me anything you may be unsure about.

Changes to the wiki

There have been a lot of changes made to the wiki so far, mostly regarding consistency. The style guide has been updated, so check that out, as well, a number of help articles have been prepared to help you learn the basics and get started editing quickly. I've also made some changes to the boilerplates, hopefully making pages less confusing to read and edit.

Community stuff

The community portal has seen a massive overhaul, making it easier to navigate to what you're looking for. All the contents of the old portal can still be found as subpages, including things to do and priority issues.

PZwiki:Community portal are now finally up and running, these are projects run by you, the community, to focus on a particular section of the wiki based on your areas of expertise within Project Zomboid. Anyone is free to contribute to any of these projects or become the leader of any that are missing one, or create a new project. To get the community even more involved, we've decided to pick back up on the long since abandoned userboxes and awards. Userboxes are simply a small piece of code you can put on your user page as a communicative notice, which will help editors to collaborate more effectively.

The state of Project Zomboid

Sadly, Project Zomboid is several updates ahead of the wiki, therefore we ask anyone, no matter your experience, to check out the priority issues or projects on the community portal. As I'm sure everyone would have noticed, Project Zomboid was updated to build 39 at the start of June, this update added vehicles along with plenty of other minor changes and additions. As a response, we've organised the Vehicles and Mechanics project in hopes to get this update covered quickly. Additionally, we've already been able to get our hands on the new weather mechanics that will be coming with build 40. You can find how to opt into that here. Be sure to report any bugs you encounter.

Going forward

I will continue to make more changes behind the scenes, the somewhat broken Template:Crafting in particular. I've also got some more plans to further improve the boilerplates/page layout. If you'd like to see what I, personally, am working on, you can check out my user page. In regards to these news articles, we may decide to make this a monthly thing, reporting on changes that have been made on the wiki along with the state of the game.

- Vaileasys (talk) Wiki Administrator

September 2014

Community News^{(5 September 2014)}

Another one of these the very next day, pretty surprising in all honesty. You probably won't be seeing these once a day but seeing as there's a fair bit going on it does seem to warrant an update from day to day. Interesting in it's own little way. Anyway, what's been going on today? Well first off pzwiki has a new Twitter account, for quite some time we had the link in the sidebar that said "Follow us on Twitter" I had never clicked on the link. Turns out, I should of. It had been linking to an old wiki administrator account, that was a cross between a personal account and wiki. It was all rather... odd. After a discussion with brilliant blindcoder (you would know him for his excellent Project Zomboid map.) and the magnificent man with the rocking body nasKo I decided to start an account for the wiki. The account can be found at: @ZomboidWiki so follow it!

The Twitter account will mainly be used to notify users of major changes to the wiki, along with general information.

If you visit the wiki semi-frequently, you can see that the main page has been rejuvenated a bit, to make it look a little bit more sleek. Hopefully everybody will enjoy the changes that have been made. Should you seem something out of place, make sure to pass on a note to me. I'll be sure to look into the issue. You can thank Bowlympicshero for the update to the front page and for his work, I introduced and awarded the Front Page Designer award, so congratulations to him.

Nightmare has put in considerable work into the Items page at the moment, adding class names, statistics and also doing translation work for the German version. It's all been pretty impressive so props to him.

I believe that's all for now. Until next time. --Connall Project Zomboid Wiki Manager 03:19, 6 September 2014 (BST)

Community News^{(4 September 2014)}

Hello again, time for another quick update as we integrate more and more items into the wiki. At the moment we've had a couple of users continue work on things such as the items page, which have been looking pretty impressive recently. In any case I figure I would do a quick rundown of what's happened.

A project page has been created, but at the moment it's just temp as I get more things written down and integrated for the use of projects. What are projects though?

Projects are supposed to be a centralized page in which leaders can create tasks and contributors can be on the same page. It allows people to know what should be focused on and what problems people are aware for. It allows for an easier standardization and a central discussion point on changes that can be made, whether info wise or design wise.

It will hopefully make people more encouraged to contribute to project and will give a central goal that people can work towards. I will be rolling it out in a couple of weeks time and bringing pages under certain projects. Nothing might happen (due to the number of consistent editors is certainly possible) but lets hope not.

Some of things we have pulled from MediaWiki are Ambox Templates, these offer new information boxes that people can access and use on pages to make things look a little bit more slick. Documentation has been included and you should find everything you need at Template:Ambox so be sure to check that out.

I will also be rolling out a new main page design that was spearheaded by Bowlympicshero tomorrow at some point. The final design (short of any objection) can be found: here

As per the last post, I have been looking into user badges and I have in fact pulled over the user boxes template from MediaWiki as well. As a test run I have created an administrator user badge that can be found on my page here and Kirrus page as well. While there is a third admin by the name of Pianoman, due to his inactivity I have not put a badge on his profile. While Kirrus is an admin, anything to do with the wiki should be coming to me. Kirrus is here to make sure that the server boxes are running as smooth as possible and less to do with general editing around the wiki.

That's all for now, thanks for reading.

--Connall Project Zomboid Wiki Manager 05:41, 5 September 2014 (BST)

Community News^{(2 September 2014)}

Hello there, I have decided to open up this community news section, where we will post anything management wise that happens with the wiki.

There will be a few things going on over the next coming weeks and months that you should hopefully look forward to. One thing we will be looking at is documenting Project Zomboids LUA Modding and hopefully getting at least something started on that front. I will also be exploring the idea of "Projects" and "User Badges" as a way to insentivise or at least help users show off a little on their profile for the wiki.

I have cleaned up the administrators list, removing those who were no longer an active member on the wiki.

As always please feel free to ask my anything, if you are interested in something being added on the wiki, feel free to visit my talk page.

Thanks,

--Connall Project Zomboid Wiki Manager 03:24, 3 September 2014 (BST)