PZwiki:News

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March 2024(7 April 2024)

Hello and here's to one of the most active months in the wiki recently! There's a lot to recap, so let's start with the monthly summary of March.

There were several big milestones that were on the home stretch for the past months that finally came to conclusion.

First of all, we closed not one, not two but three of the big open projects on the wiki. First, with a header work finally done previous work and heavy groundwork in prior months, a vast majority of the pages were categorized, so the long-standing Project Navigation and Categories could finally be closed! Vaileasys, as a leader of this project, would like to give huge thanks to Calvy for getting it over the line for the final push, but all the brainstorming and planning that happened on wiki and Discord that predated it also helped tremendously, glad to have it done now! The remaining bits of polishing the navboxes, navbars will now be done as part of the general wiki tasks, as well as some bits in Project Locations and Maps and Project Seat Yourself Furniture.

Next, we finally made the final push to close the Project Build 41 Update that was with us for a while. There are still some pages that are not yet updated to the latest possible version in Category:Version, but these are done out of the scope of the project and following its closure finally paved the way to open Project Build 42 Preparation where some unobtainable items were moved. Thank you for all contributions though the years, including then newly registered Frightcrafter helping to add final touches with Tie, Bow Tie mentioned in the last monthly summary and Teromax34 adding missing earrings!

And at last, the Project Spiffo's Construction Crew was finally done! Other than the still slightly neglected Project Seat Yourself Furniture it was one of the old thematic projects created a while ago, so it is nice to see it finished as well. As while the leader, Calvy mentions, there's not much to really say. The project is finished and the only minor contributors being Faalagorn and Vaileasys, the minor contributions helped as well!

So, with the closed projects out of the way, let's summarize the progress of the remaining open ones then!

Project Build 42 Preparation

Project Build 42 Preparation is the new kid in town. It's User:Vaileasys being the leader now, similar to how it started with the Project Build 41 Update, but the project is open to changing hands if the need arises. So far, it inherited some of the leftovers from the Project Build 41 Update and got added existing future pages such as build 42 or planned features or upcoming versions listed, but also some other Future items and some items we know are coming based on the Thursdoids teases.

Also, thanks to WegoBOOM Bois, the Brandenburg page is up now! While the location is not clearly confirmed, we will probably move and do the same with what we believe is Ekron and Irvington based on the research done on Discord by some users here and coordinate it with the Project Locations and Maps properly.

Finally, thanks to the all-time-awesome Calvy helping pretty much everywhere else, helping here too and adding a list of items based on what we had teased in Thursdoids!

We expect the project to gain the track closer to the build 42 IWBUMS release, but till then it will serve us a dumping ground from what we gathered from the bits in monthly Thursdoids and various other teases by The Indie Stone on their social medias!

Project Locations and Maps

Project Locations and Maps is healthy as always. Our cooperation with Blindcoder, creator and maintainer of the Project Zomboid Map Project to update the POIs here, is a bit on a backburner yet, but expect some cooperation with the map in the future as well! Anyway, here's the summary from the project leader, ThinkDock:

Hi all, ThinkDock here. This month was an absolute monster for wiki progression, L&M included. Here's a brief summary:

User:Calvy once again worked his Louisville magic, with all the pages ready for a final cleanup and standardization before they can be considered complete. Thanks so much! You're a legend for that.

Huge shoutout to Slightsmile and Ksliem for tackling Fallas Lake and March Ridge! There were some cleanups and standardization that needed to be done due to me standardizing the formatting, but all in all, their contributions made the pages way easier to work with than if they were left as they were before. Thanks!

We also had some minor contributions from the following users:

I personally focused on finishing up March Ridge and Fallas Lake this month, and have kicked into overdrive to finish the remaining towns before build 42 arrives. Now that we're starting to reach the end of updating the major locations, I have plans to add various general articles consistent with the format of gas station and Laundromat, but for all other business types.

Future plans will mainly consist of quality-of-life improvements to files of location screenshots, infobox details of locations, new categories for stores and other locations, as well as the aforementioned general articles and a significant rework of the Businesses page once all that's complete.

Hopefully build 42 will have dropped by then so we can hit the ground running with the new towns in Knox Country, but if not, and the new towns drop while phase three is in motion, phase three will be put on hold until the new locations in Knox Country are finished.

I haven't had much time to moderate POIs on the Map Project, but hopefully this month I'll have some time to get around to it.

Feel free to use the project talk page or discord to brainstorm with other editors. See you all next month!

Project Modding

Project Modding is still without a leader and nobody really focuses on it right now, though it did see some minor contributions from the two users:

Hopefully, we'll see more in the future, where the main gameplay and item pages in the wiki are stabilized and set in stone.

Project Seat Yourself Furniture

PZwiki:Project Seat Yourself Furniture is sadly on backburner still, unless someone wants to take it over, but at least it was brought to #1 spot in the PZwiki:Tasks following the closure of Project Build 41 Update, so hopefully it'll be the next main project we tackle after finalizing other stuff!

It did see some contributions from Slightsmile, though!

Project Translations

And finally, Project Translations, while it didn't see any maintenance updates from Vibrance, and we didn't do any testing of the Translate extension, it did see a lot of content updates even if we are still ironing out the main English wiki.

Simplified Chinese

Traditional Chinese

Czech

  • NyaCZ continuing translation of some items/firearm pages.

Italian

  • Thunas translated some pages throughout the month.

Polish

  • Szyszka translated some of the new templates.

Russian

  • KwaKwaW translating a lot of pages, nice! Especially seeing as some Russian pages are long outdated now.

Spanish

Turkish

Turkish, aside usual and huge contributions by Ksilem, updating translation of the existing pages this time, saw some new contributors too!

Also, thanks to the hard work of Vaileasys and Calvy, all the new infoboxes are translatable, and the work is being done on converting the rest, as well as retiring Category:Deprecated templates which hopefully brings translating easier.

Other important works

Finally, let's start the other important works with the summary note from Vaileasys, saying he was hoping to get more done this week, but generally doing a ton of work otherwise, thank you a lot!

  1. Changed to a dark theme as default (will be looking into this more in the future).
  2. All new are now updated for English - we just need to look at adding tooltips explaining some of the values.
  3. Started build 42 prep - this is somewhere to compile all the changes coming in build 42, and make any necessary changes to make updating to build 42 quicker and easier (such as templates). This will likely be split into more specified projects once build 42 is released. Faalagorn and Calvy have done a great job at starting to compile features, and Slightsmile has started adding some of the features that are in the game, but not yet functional.

Other than minor stuff, that seems to be it from me.

However, there was a lot more about that, starting with the tasks page rework by, yet again, Calvy having a clearer, more categorized layout with a dedicated template, hopefully giving more insight on what are we focusing outside of the project as well as splitting tasks for administrators, server manager, and bots, roughly sorted by what are we focusing but not as strict as before, also giving rough progress, so make sure to check it!

Also, again by Calvy, following a discussion on Discord, we saw a (third or so now) iteration of recipes revamp, this time focusing on readability. It is a well-timed one, as the crafting will see an overhaul in build 42, and we had to get rid of the old slow one, so the new {{Recipe}} and {{Recipe list}} templates will be backbones for the new crafting system, being more visible, using pixelart class for icons, fewer nodes so should load quicker and handle more recipes, and hopefully easier to use and translate, too! We're slowly phasing out the old template with it in place.

We also did a lot of mundane task by CalvyBot, making thousands of edits that would otherwise have to be done manually, ranging from minor typo fixes to introducing new features, it helps us greatly and improves the professional look of the wiki!

Roudrick joined earlier in the previous month, but contributed plenty of bits, mostly about the lore like the NPCs and VHS tapes, something that needed (and still needs!) some extra love.

Teromax34 on the other hand, aside from some Spanish translation, contributed some missing models, too! And in the end, Calvy adding even more as well :). It's great seeing items models slowly being completed, seeing they were added late into build 41!

Finally, as of late this month User:Angostura is back with quality edits, helping to bring pages up-to-date, thanks, good to see you back!

Oh right, and I forgot, User:Vaileasys made all the tables corners round now, yay for that!

Minor edits

And as always, take a look at the Active users list for details!

Affiliates

We're still unchanged when it comes to our affiliate, Fallout Wiki and I successfully moved my old page there updating the contact info in the Project Zomboid Wiki - Independent Fallout Wiki to having me and Vail listed, but if you want to have a break from editing here and have some Fallout or different game wiki editing itch, do go help them too!

Future works

I try to mostly lay out my work in PZwiki:Tasks, but I guess the next thing I'll try to get myself to update the Boilerplates, finally getting my head around how pages should be laid out. There's still some template cleanups and work to be done, but with most done at least the basic boilerplates should be made so making the build 42 pages (and updating the existing ones) should be easier and more standardized.

There will be still some dark mode works, maybe with a new skin by Vaileasys, so stay tuned!

We'll see what the next month brings as far as projects and tasks go, but we're progressing really fast now, so let's see what I'll have to write next month! 16:07, 7 April 2024 (BST)


February 2024(3 March 2024)

Welcome again to the monthly summary! February is technically the shortest month in the year (less with the leap day this year), though with me writing the summary on each Sunday, I guess it's more dependent on the weeks' layout than the days alone. Anyway, this we got a lot to cover this month, so let's get into it!

This month started with some PZwiki awards cleanups, originally introduced by Connall as userboxes back in 2014 and slightly brought back in 2018, they were introduced as barnstars by Ikip late last year, but were to expansive for us, so instead of removing, I trimmed them down. There will be some more cleanups done later down the line, especially since they aren't used really widely, but since a few users seemed to at least get fond of them, I kept them, giving credit where it's due.

Next, thanks to nasKo we got new roles on Discord for wiki admins and wiki editors – the latter will be used to announce important messages and monthly summaries, so that's nice to have. We had some organizational/coordination updates too, more on that below.

Then, next main thing down the line was introduction of automated distribution template thanks to Calvy, carrying on the loose idea from Carina marked in PZwiki tasks page for a while. The script used also brought back a need of coordinated place on GitHub for those scripts – we might get a proper repository somewhere down the line, but right now they are being collected as a part of this list. They are slowly being updated on item pages.

Which bring us to another huge job Calvy was performing this month, utilizing CalvyBot to perform thousands of mundane tasks with clever regex scripts with Pywikibot, that brought us tons of minor fixes but also helping tremendously with both Project Navigation and Categories and removal of language bar lately (which is now replaced by a sidebar), as well as deploying new infoboxes…

…Which again, brings us yet another point, being the new infoboxes! By now, pretty much all the infoboxes are moved to the newer look and functionality, with the old ones being deprecated and removed soon™.

And another not-project-related work by Calvy is elaborating on Vaileasys idea of adding item tags – these will probably be especially useful on build 42 with the new crafting systems, but are starting to be useful right now!

And finally, before getting to the project summaries, we also had some organizational changes:

The Tasks got some cleanups too, some things moved to projects properly.

Project Build 41 Update

Following the leadership changes in Project Build 41 Update, I updated the job board and listed everythin that remains to be done. It's mostly a few missing items (some of which can be moved to build 42 project if they don't make it, as they only be spawned in debug mode and by admin in multiplayer, as well as bringing skills, items, recipes and tiles up to date, some of the tasks being shared with the Project Spiffo's Construction Crew and Project Seat Yourself Furniture, so some focus could shift there eventually.

Some items, mainly clothing, were split to separate pages too, following the new infobox, codebox and distribution deployments, to not host too much on one page. There will be a few more that will be split, some missing pages updated and afterwards the main focus will be updating the pages to 41.78.16 from Category:Version.

We also don't announce the project through the site notice now, as it's closer than ever to being finished!

Aside from that, we had some valuable contributions, too, thank you!

  • Stock creating Bowling Shoes page.
  • DevoTan adding some items and updating what's needed to be updated ammo pages.
  • Calvy helping with some pages in between too and adding missing models slowly.

Project Locations and Maps

The Project Locations and Maps is probably the most active one, sadly resulting in one contributor being blocked from editing because of some mishaps, but other than that it's getting healthy management of ThinkDock, including article rewrites and image categorization and contributions from other users.

Here's the summary from ThinkDock:

Hi all, ThinkDock here. While there were a few more heated debates and some speed bumps along the way, including an unfortunate loss of a contributor, January was a great month for locations and maps! Here's a quick summary:

Unfortunately, I am sad to announce that our long-time contributor Ikip was banned. His contributions were greatly appreciated, and will live on in the reworks and templates that we continue to use.

Calvy Finished up the rest of the first pass of Louisville, so now all that needs to be done is formatting and other cleanups. However, he has mostly been busy with clothing and other items. That doesn't mean he hasn't knocked it completely out of the park with brainstorming, though! Thanks for all your help!

Ksilem Also helped out by reworking the Laundromat page, as well as adding on to various pages, including some Doe Valley and Fallas Lake works. This will make it a lot easier to complete these towns faster. They also did lots of brainstorming in the Discord. Thanks!

Vaileasys and Faalagorn helped with some brainstorming as well, mainly with figuring out what categories will be relevant for the project and which ones we have and don't have. Thanks, it's great to have admin support!

I personally did a lot of stuff behind the scenes this month, namely getting almost all the images of locations categorized. In the future, when we upload images, I want to kindly ask everyone to edit their page and categorize them according to what town the location is in, even if the category isn't made yet. If anyone knows how to work bots, please hit me up, as I had to do it all manually.

I also got moderator privileges on the Map Project (Thanks blindcoder!) so I will be adding more and more POIs on there as my time frees up. I also added the site maintenance task on the job board, so if you want to help out with behind the scenes stuff as well, feel free to, as now I have a documented list available.

As for future plans, after I have all the newer images categorized, I'm going to finish up Fallas Lake and then focus on improving consistency for the Map Project to keep it in line with the wiki. After that's mostly accomplished, it'll be off to the rest of the smaller towns and then the massive juggernaut of Louisville! I don't see myself getting through all that in only one month, so changes after that will be discussed in the next summary. That's just me, though! Feel free to use the Discord or project talk page to discuss with other contributors!

See y'all next month!

Other than that, there were two more old-time contributors helping us as well, as well as one newcomer fixing location coordinates, those help too!

I also helped with some image miscategorization lately, which should help the Project Navigation and Categories too!

Project Modding

Like I mentioned before, the Project Modding project didn't get much attention sadly. It's currently looking for new ownership, so if you think you are up for the task of managing it, let us know either here on the wiki or on the Discord.

It did see a contribution to the active list of Tiledefs in use by mods page by Glytch3r this month, thanks!

Project Navigation and Categories

The Project Navigation and Categories saw probably the most attention this month, the layout was finally pretty much finalized, with the only remaining ones being clothing (and unrelated Template:Body location changes), and materials intricacies when it comes to the item and some cleanups to other categories which will be narrowed down the line, possibly by other projects. Here's the summary from the project leader, Vaileasys:

We've had a lot of progress with the project this month, largely thanks to Calvy and the use of his bot swapping the header and updating categories. This month we've completed:

Other than some minor adjustments, the last major category left is Category:Clothing, which has been put on hold temporarily until we finalise the layout.

There was some categorization decisions related to Project Locations and Maps.

Project Seat Yourself Furniture

As expected not much moved in the Project Seat Yourself Furniture yet, but it got some minor job progress mainly thanks to the rapid progress in the Project Spiffo's Construction Crew and some in the Project Build 41 Update. Hopefully after both of them will be reaching mature stage, this project will get back to spotlight again!

Project Spiffo's Construction Crew

A lot has happened for the Project Spiffo's Construction Crew, it's yet far from being finished, especially as it all correlates with different projects and side projects, but it's catching speed real quick. Let me get the summary from the current project leader, Calvy:

G'day editors. It's been a good month over in SCC land. After finishing Project Electricals and Transmission I took up the role of leader from HakunaWhiskey, who I'd like to thank for their work on the project before me.

By contributor count, we're the smallest project (besides the on hold modding project), and it was clear that construction had been neglected for quite some time. Due to this, a large portion of this month has been dedicated to getting a good framework to build off of, including a full overhaul of the job board. So far the completed work this month includes;

I'd like to thank both Vaileasys and Faalagorn for their help across the project, and coordination with their respective projects to standardise articles. As well as;

For the coming month we'll be focusing on articles themselves, we still have missing articles from B41s release, and a large list of articles to update and improve.

Overall a really good start to the project, and looking forward there's a lot of work left to go, but I have no doubts that we can get it done.

Thanks, Calvy.

It would be nice to thanks ThreeLime doing some meaningful contributions to the somewhat-neglected-yet-popular carpentry page!

Project Translations

The Project Translations didn't see a huge changes with Vibrance waiting Kirrus to let us test the Translate extension before evaluating it being deployed, to hopefully make keeping translations up to date easier, but it might take some time. It also made Ksilem focus more on helping with English pages, including the ones from Project Locations and Maps which is important task for a healthy basis for other translators!

Anyway, that doesn't mean there wasn't any strides being done – the {{Languages}} template is finally being retired in favor of the sidebar, done by Calvy's bot and I'll finally get myself to update the remaining 7 main pages to the new format, to retire the old templates. We're also slowly moving away from the translation database from {{Translate}} and {{T}} in favor for {{ll}} and retiring {{Sp}} in favor of {{lcs}} template.

As far as specific translations though, we saw some activity as usual, thank you everyone!

Traditional Chinese

  • A41133tw contributing some translations as usual this month, nice!

Simplified Chinese

Czech

  • NyaCZ joining and adding some Czech translations – some templates usage had to be corrected, but it's understandable, as they are confused sometimes.

French

German

Brazilian Portugese

Russian

Spanish

As well as Teromax34 coming back from a break, so hopefully we'll see more, Spanish being one of the most healthy languages supported on the wiki!

Turkish

Other important works

I summarized all the most important works above, this time, but let the Vaileasys summarize his work below:

Outside of the category project, most of my time this month has been spent on adding/improving infoboxes and misc work on various other templates.

The bigger changes are:

Infoboxes:

Other templates:

  • Navbox skills: added translatability.
  • Transcript: template to consistently format transcripts.
  • Mood: used to calculate the in-game moodle effect from values in game files.
  • Experience: added calculations for values in media files.
  • Tag link: template to simplify adding links to item tags.

As a side project I've been developing a parser for the scripts files, along with complimentary scripts. The purpose of this is for the item list and simplify updating values elsewhere, such as tables on on the weapons page.

Minor fixes

With that done, let's get directly into all the little but important fixes:

As always, you can also see the active users list page for the last 30 days.

I think I forgot to mention all the prior contributions of the long-standing user LethalCitizen, being focused on Easter eggs, but Lethal also helped improve the page for The Indie Stone, and creating the Formosa Interactive, General Arcade, The Eccentric Ape, and Tanglewood Games! Thanks a lot for all the contributions!

Also Calvy again helped us fixing some of the Spiffo and Discord page, thanks!

Affiliates

Nothing much changed here, but the Independent Fallout Wiki is being healthy as always, and so are we. Here's a short note from Kate Aces, an admin of the Fallout Wiki:

HELL YEAH this month we are celebrating our two year anniversary and hit 65,000 articles!

Congratulations on reaching 65k! That's a huge number of pages to maintain!

Future works

Next month should mark further style changes to the look of the wiki – I'll finish moving main pages to the new format, we'll finish deploying the new header, removing language toolbar in favor of sidebar and finally re-introduce the background image, so stay tuned! Some server-side things will have to wait, as Kirrus will be away for a week or two, so barred some emergency not much help here, but there's a lot that we have on mind, so we'll all have our hands occupied.

I'll try hard on finalizing the Build 41 updates and clearing tasks, to provide a blank canvas for future build 42 update too, so hopefully we can speed it up. I'll try collaborating more with the various other projects, including the PZMap and the overall community and developers, so a bright future is ahead of us!

Thank you for making it to the end reading it all, see you around on Wiki and Discord, and in the next month summary! —Faalagorn☎/✓ 18:07, 3 March 2024 (UTC)


January 2024(4 February 2024)

Welcome everyone to the summary of the first whole month of 2024! Now that we're deep in 2024, I archived all the 2023 monthly summaries to the 2023 archive, and changed the header names so they refer more to what the news were about. Hopefully for 2024 we will have a full 12 of the monthly summaries, with all the project summaries started in late 2023!

Despite some minor setbacks, this month was again much productive, let's start with the projects summary.

Project Electricals and Transmission

First off, let's congratulate to Calvy for manning up and bringing the final push for Project Electricals and Transmission and everyone else for contributing! The next in line will probably be Project Spiffo's Construction Crew, good to have another project closed, pushing focus to other ones and opening room for potential new ones in the future!

Project Build 41 Update

Project Build 41 Update again saw much love, thanks from the combined effort of Angostura, some minor additions by Stabbyson, Absolute Lambda updating missing items, Calvy's massive work, and Vaileasys hard work elsewhere, as well as everyone else contributing anything minor – you all probably saw the new infoboxes, codeboxes, models, as well as version updates – it's hard to close it totally just yet, especially as it intertwine so closely with other projects, and side activities, but it is close enough to be taken out of the everlasting site notice, combined with inability to translate it reliably and taking some space, especially with the new skin improvements (more about it below). I may also be the one trying to push it forward in the coming weeks, probably taking it off Vaileasys's shoulders (who's busy with Project Navigation and Categories and some template works, currently focused on adjusting new infoboxes and skins, which you probably noticed already), after our brief discussion for those following us on the official Discord server.

Project Locations and Maps

It's hard not to mention Project Locations and Maps without a great dose of admiration how much dedication is being put into updating it, here's the summary from the project leader, ThinkDock1721!

Hi all, ThinkDock here. While there were a few heated debates and some speed bumps along the way, January was a monster of a month for locations and maps! Here's a quick summary:

First off, I want to give an enormous thanks to Calvy for willingly tackling Louisville. It's quite the juggernaut, but they've managed to not only make a table with all the businesses, but also began the arduous process of elaborating on all the businesses so they're no longer stubs! There will be some cleanups required as always, but it's a monumental effort for just one person to take on. Thank you so so much!

Our long-time contributor Ikip categorized almost all of the location pages, and also helped out with some minor edits here and there. Thanks!

We also had some minor edits and small contributions from the following users:

Thanks everyone!

I personally completed my project of finishing all the spawn towns, managing to get all of both Muldraugh and West Point done this month. (Late nights galore!) I also restructured the project page a bit.

As for the plan for the future, with Ikip categorizing all the locations themselves and Calvy tackling most of Louisville, I'll be free to do some collaboration with the folks at PZWiki:Project Navigation and Categories to categorize all the images and business logos that were missed by the bots.

After that, It'll be on to the minor towns of March Ridge and Valley Station, and then off to Louisville for some cleanups!

However, once that's done, I'll be steering the project more towards challenge maps, site maintenance, and minor tasks until build 42 arrives with the new towns we all desperately want. It will be updated on the job board once I have all the ideas and tasks worked out.

That's just me though, feel free to use the project's talk page or the Discord to discuss ideas! See you all next week!

(please help it's 2:48AM right now and I have work at 7AM, I haven't even slept and I'm on for a 10 hour shift please help)

Hopefully ThinkDock will be able to get some rest though, especially we're on the right track starting a collaboration with Blindcoder to bring updates to POIs on the epic official map up to date with the ones done in the wiki – we'll start with making the Project Zomboid Map Project page updated and more visible, so more people can contribute to both the wiki and map project, which will be more than important after build 42 which is tentatively scheduled for the hopefully first half of this year in IWBUMS, which seems quite soon™.

Also, while minor, thanks to Missold for contributing description for Dentistry, Perfk for contributing one missing location for Wrecking yard, Chomasyean8 contributing some bits Louisville border camp, and Insp175 for adding note for the Kentucky State Prison page – those bits help too, thank you!

Project Modding

Project Modding sadly continues to be a tad neglected and most likely won't see a big push/update and stay open way past build 42 (which will surely bring a lot of modding updates!), though it's understandable most of the editors want to focus on adding content and modders do their job, but there were some minor additions nevertheless:

As always, thank you even for the tiniest contributions!

Project Navigation and Categories

Project Navigation and Categories finally saw the amount of work needed this time, thanks to the hard work of Vaileasys – while not yet finished, we expect it being finished soon. There's a brief summary of the works from Vaileasys.

Categories

The category project has finally received some major progress. We have the category tree mostly completed and have implemented almost every category, with just some items left. The big ones left are "Equipment/Tools", "Materials" and "Clothing". As part of this project, we're also adding the new Template:Header/sandbox2

Archive

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