Build 42.20 Stable · PvE · four survivors

Slapstick Apocalypse

The power is still on. That is the friendly part.

First the taps run dry. A few days later the lights go out. When exactly is for you to find out — we do not publish the calendar. After that it does not get worse all at once, just a little more every day. Six facilities sit on the map: repair one and you get your zone back. Not Kentucky. We are not that ambitious.

One more thing before you join:

What is different here

Six things you notice on the first evening. The last two take longer.

Cleared stays cleared for a while

no respawn

What you put down does not come back, nothing spawns in to replace it. That does not leave an area empty for good: zombies drift in from next door, here far more rarely than in the original. Then there are the hordes described beside this. It does not apply to you: you come back, inside your faction's claim if you belong to one. The character is gone all the same. What they knew is in the journal, if you kept one.

It does not get worse, it gets more

months

The baseline climbs slowly over months, from a few to a great many. Not a wave that rolls over you, but a background that gets denser. Starting early makes it easier, later on what counts is where you stand.

On top of that come horde events: every so often the server sends one out. It knocks first, though. A direction, a noise, your character has something to say about it, and then you get time to make up your mind. It does not chase you either. It passes through. Stand where it is going and that is on you. Move, and you had the choice.

Nobody lies down briefly here

they get back up

Whoever dies gets back up shortly after — on the wrong side of it. Leave someone lying to fetch something quickly and you fetch nothing. Infection through saliva only, small mercies.

A bite is still not an immediate sentence: between catching it and the end there are days, not hours. Enough time to try something — and the reason anyone bothers with the vaccine.

The grid wants visitors

skilled work

Substations can be brought back, but only once the power is gone. You need some know-how, tools that do not survive the attempt, and a long afternoon — and you make noise that carries. Company tends to arrive. Rarely the kind you want.

On your own you own nothing

factions

A base is only safe as a faction claim, and the claim grows with every member. You respawn inside it too. On top of that: missions that track themselves, a shared bank, and a perk tree that upgrades the faction and its members. You pay at the PhunMart vending machines, and the currency comes from kills and time played.

There is a way out. Allegedly.

long game

Somewhere between opened-up corpses and textbooks there is a vaccine. You set up a lab, run autopsies, take blood samples and make your way through a research chain nobody finishes in an evening. The books are in hospitals and on military ground, of course — the places you would rather not linger.

We sped it up a little: autopsies go faster than intended, and textbooks, chemicals and syringes turn up more often. It is still a side project for people who already live somewhere safe. Whether anyone ever finishes it, nobody here knows. Not so far.

What it looks like

Twelve shots from this server. Nothing staged.

In-game substation panel: a list of components and the state of the zone it feeds.
A substation from the inside. Three parts missing, none of them nearby.
Four player characters standing close together by a blue estate car, each dressed differently.
Four people, four wardrobes. Clothing is armour here, not taste.
Top-down game view: a red car on a country road, grass and trees around it.
There is always one somewhere. Usually with a flat battery.
Vehicle Claims window: four vehicles of one owner, listed with type, position and time.
Who owns what is in the list. Before anyone asks.
Access window of a trailer: the owner, below it a second player with the levels Drive, Mechanic and Manage.
Lend the keys without giving them away. In three levels.
World map with labelled vehicles next to a base on Hamshank Road.
The map knows where the cars are parked. Where the zombies are, it does not.
A character reading in an armchair, next to the Personal Journal window with skills and a progress bar.
What someone learned is in the journal. Reading takes longer than forgetting did.
At night in front of a black van: two characters, each with a shepherd dog.
Two people, two dogs. The dogs listen better.
Country road in the rain: a character with a shepherd dog, three zombies closing in from the left.
Three coming down the road. The dog noticed first.
A car driving through a settlement at night, only the headlight cone is lit.
At night you see as far as the headlights reach. The rest sees you.
Top-down view of a water treatment plant: tanks, basins and a parking lot with fallen zombies between the cars.
The water treatment plant. The parking lot tells how the first visit went.
Rosewood Water Treatment Plant panel, status offline: three components, all marked Needs Assessment.
Offline. Three components waiting for someone to take a look.

And what Build 42 brings by itself

Not every good idea here is a mod. Build 42 is the largest update this game has ever had — the server turns the new systems up on purpose rather than papering over them.

Making things, not buying them

Nine entirely new skills: blacksmithing, pottery, glassmaking, masonry, flint knapping, carving, butchering, husbandry, tracking. Plus workshops, kilns and a fluid system. You can forge your own tools at an anvil once there are none left to find — and eventually there are none left to find.

Eight at 2.0× XP, tracking 1.8×

Animals and farming

Cows, pigs, chickens, sheep — with age, pregnancy, milk, wool, eggs and a mating season. A fox will help itself to your hens overnight if you leave the coop open, and animal noise draws zombies. Hunger and thirst tick down slowly here on purpose: a barn should be worth having, not something that keeps you home every morning.

14 animal settings · milk and hatching slower, wool normal

Basements

Buildings have lower floors in Build 42 — dark, mostly untouched, occasionally holding the best loot in the house. The spawn frequency here is turned up from „sometimes" to „often". With Excavation you dig them out further.

One step above the default

Twice as much Kentucky

Build 42 expanded the map considerably: Ekron, Irvington, Valley Station, Brandenburg, Fallas Lake, Echo Creek, March Ridge — all vanilla, all unlocked on this server. You start in one of six towns: Muldraugh, Riverside, Rosewood, West Point, Brandenburg or Irvington. No mod required, just petrol.

12 regions in the map line, 8 of them vanilla

Firearms feel different

Build 42 added jamming, weapon wear, weather affecting your aim, and headgear that affects your hearing. We have lowered jamming and noise and raised the weather effect. Shooting stays loud enough to be a bad idea — it is just no longer unfair.

Jam 0.2× · noise 0.8× · weather 1.3×

Knowledge, occupations, recipes

Build 42 reworked occupations and traits from the ground up. We hand you four extra free points at character creation — Build 42 asks for more specialisation, and this takes the edge off. Recipes you have not learned still show at the workbench: you know what would be possible, and you still have to find the book.

Four extra points · unlearnt recipes visible

What else is lying around

Two are worth picking up. The rest is still being sorted.

The server

online

Who plays here, how to get in, what is configured. Sandbox settings, loot cycle, zombie ramp — the full version instead of the summary.

Modding

planned

Build 42 rewrote a good deal of how mods work. What that costs, what still runs, and which Build 41 guide you are better off closing.

Mod database

933 entries

Load order, dependencies, map cells and the full workshop descriptions. Searchable. Recorded values stay in the original.

Still open

reserved

Room for whatever comes up. Screenshots, a chronicle, a map — nothing decided.

Team Slapstick

Four survivors, three alphabets, one power grid.

Everyone is welcome

PvE

We run this in German, write it down in English, and swear in whatever comes first. Nobody here needs perfect grammar to repair a substation. If you can read a map and stay quiet while someone else is working, you will fit in.

Καλώς ήρθατε · Dobro došli · Willkommen · Welcome

Full translations

planned

Serbian and Greek are on the list. Serbian will use the Latin alphabet — our fonts carry no Cyrillic or Greek glyphs, and a headline falling back to a system font looks exactly as bad as it sounds. Until that is fixed, foreign scripts appear in monospace, deliberately.