Project Zomboid Build 42 will be another big update for the lo-fi zombie survival game, but one of the biggest changes is coming to the Knox County map. The developers say they’re working to expand three sides of the map – basically everything on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, and that this expansion will “most likely” arrive at some point in Build 42.
In the rough illustration provided in the latest Project Zomboid update post, the Knox map looks like it’s more than doubling in size. The Indie Stone says it’s not ready to go into “forensic” detail on what’ll be included in the new areas, but it does hint that the map team has been returning to fictionalised versions of real locations in Kentucky.
That means that some of the place names assigned by the Project Zomboid community to locations in the map are set for some changes that will better reflect the game’s internal narrative. One tiny hamlet on the Knox map has been non-canonically dubbed Ekron by the player community, which lines up with an actual town in Kentucky near Fort Knox and south of Brandenburg.
That location has been known as Fallas Lake to the Project Zomboid team, which says the reasons for that “will become explicit” when the map is updated. You can view the current maps with many of their points of interest indicated using the browser-based Project Zomboid map tool.
The team shared some screenshots of the updated areas of the map, which include a school auditorium full of (empty) folding chairs placed in front of a speaker’s podium and the interior of a simple church.
The Indie Stone is currently working on fixing some crashes introduced in the latest unstable builds for Linux, and says it has some additional work to do with tidying up Build 41 – so we don’t yet know when to expect Build 42, but when it arrives, we’ll have a lot more of zombie-infested Kentucky to explore.