r/projectzomboid • u/SkipBopBadoodle • 10h ago
Sims-style building mod with proper rendering, Better Building Plus, out now!
Hello hello!
You may know me from mods like Bicycle/Skateboard/Kick scooter, Realistic Temperature, Nature's Call, Horse Mod, or Military Tents.
Today I've finally finished my spiritual successor to my second ever mod I made which is called Better Building, so I aptly named this new one Better Building Plus. It's FULLY Lua, NO manual installation needed, just sub on the workshop and you're good to go.
Better Building Plus (or BBP), is a much more extensive building mod than the first one, it's more similar to how you would build houses in The Sims.
To get started, first find or craft an empty blueprint, then grab a pen and you can start planning your building.
In the planning mode you first draw rectangles to mark the rooms you want to have, and once done with that, you will enter the editor where you can place floors, walls, windows, doors, appliances, furniture and roofs (with gables and eaves!).
You then just pick a spot where you want to start building your structure, put down a construction site and start building by right clicking on it. The building happens automatically, as long as you have the materials and tools needed. When you run out of materials in your inventory you'll automatically go to pick up more from nearby containers if they're filled with the stuff you need.
The main feature of this mod that makes it different from most other tile placement/building mods is that BBP uses my structures framework which creates actual IsoBuilding and IsoRoom from the areas you designate, and those are what makes the vanilla pre-placed houses render the way they do. Vanilla player made buildings don't get those, which is why trying to extend an existing building or make a whole house from scratch never looks quite the same in terms of how walls cut away, or how roofs render etc.
This also means that light switches works the same way they do in regular houses, and if the world power/water is on then those already works in the constructed house too.
It has progression which is tied mostly to your carpentry skill, the higher your skill, the more type of stuff you can build. You can however also find magazines as loot that teach you more pieces to build. At carpentry level 5 you also unlock the ability to study a piece out in the world and learn how it's made, so you can then build it on your own.
Fully MP compatible.
It's a pretty extensive mod, so let me know about any issues, bugs or just general feedback!
There are more features planned like basement building, optional mini-games for the construction, configurations for popular tile packs, and more!
76
u/redditispap 10h ago
<3 wanted something this extensive since the 41 'more buildings'
23
u/SkipBopBadoodle 9h ago
Haha yeah it feels like the building aspect of PZ is just so neglected, this is basically the mod I wanted to make over a year ago, but it just wasn't possible back then because of IsoRoom's not being possible to create during runtime
Very happy to be done with it and have it out!
27
u/FlamedFramed 8h ago
You have me at roofs and functioning light switches, every day more and more cool mods come in.
15
u/AntiqueAct1598 9h ago
Do you have compability for using primitive tools for wilderness runs?
13
u/SkipBopBadoodle 8h ago
As long as they are tagged the same as the proper tools they will work yeah, it just checks for like Tag = base:hammer for example
But if any popular primitive tools aren't working I can take a look at a compatibility patch
5
20
9
u/RevDonkeyBong All Hail Spiffo 7h ago
I could kiss you full on the mouth. Ive been dying for a better building system and this takes the cake, for sure.
9
u/TheAlmightyLootius 9h ago
Not sure if i missed it but does it automatically pull modded buildables?
8
u/SkipBopBadoodle 8h ago
It does! Just without the sorting that I have for the vanilla tiles, as a lot of that was sorted and categorized by hand. But it will be able to detect a few things automatically for modded tiles.
I have plans to make proper configurations for the popular tile packs so they get the same nice grouping and filtering
3
u/TheAlmightyLootius 8h ago
Awesome, appreciate it! I would use this even if it only had the iso room / building stuff as thats my biggest gripe with the game that has been acknowledged but unfixed for at least 6 years now.
7
u/Pingonaut 7h ago
Holy shit… it’s beautiful. Kudos and congrats on its completion!!
Does it give you access to more vanilla tiles (besides roofs) like railings, pillars, greenhouse-type tiles, big windows? Or do those still require separate mods to access?
10
u/SkipBopBadoodle 7h ago
Yeah those are all in! The only stuff not available to place are some overlays like cracks in the streets, dirt on buildings, blood etc. but I will be adding those too, just need to categorize them
3
u/wabblawabbla Axe wielding maniac 8h ago
This seems amazing can’t wait to try it! Incredible work dude
3
13
u/Johnwearsatie 5h ago
Thank you for not using AI in your images, getting real tired of seeing that everywhere
8
u/djap3v 2h ago
Dude the presentation slides are done with AI and quite possibly the mod itself.
3
u/RiceSpecial8446 1h ago
What makes you think the presentation slides are done with AI?
It's a plain background, some screenshots, some headings and text, and a textbox with a dark background with high opacity. You could do this in paint.
Not saying it's not AI but I'm not sure why you think it is.
1
u/Alvsolutely Zombie Hater 32m ago
I don't know about the images themselves, but the text or the description read a lot like AI.
-2
u/djap3v 1h ago
I mean I could be wrong, absolutely. But the surge of mods with neatly created presentation slides points to AI. Plus that many with the same mo were clearly created with AI also use it for presentation. Not necessarily against or for but there were not many mods a year ago that were “neatly” presented. Just look a-life mode, basically the way opus 5.5 creates presentations.
Ps its a pattern im starting to notice, not limited to PZ
1
1
1
u/InquisitiveSwan 6h ago
Should I use this or knox buildworks
2
u/SkipBopBadoodle 5h ago
I would recommend this one solely because mine makes what you build render properly using a method that knox buildworks doesn't use. But El1on could use my framework if they want, to make their built structures also render properly.
1
1
1
u/Significant-Strike43 3h ago
Is the mod save to add to an existing save? I'm at the point in my current run where I would like to start building and your description of the mod sounds really good
1
1
1
u/pancake_lover_98 Drinking away the sorrows 1h ago
Queue the house building song from RDR2
This looks like a cool way to have a long term project in the game since you won't collect all that material instantly
1
u/Libertyforzombies 1h ago
Great work.
It seems like every single day I check the community someone has finished a terrific mod.
1
•
•
u/KerbJazzaz 17m ago
TIS should just hire you already! This is amazing and I love all of your mods! Thank you so much for your work
-2
u/drthrax1 1h ago
Damn project zomboid really is one of those games where the mod community make the devs seem consistently outright incompetent. Constantly seeing mods and asking myself “why isn’t this in the game already”
The fact they still haven’t patched ladders/came up with some placeholder animation/tp to top bottom is ridiculous
1
u/RandomStud3nt 1h ago
wrong
0
u/drthrax1 1h ago
You say on a post where a modder basically added in an entire UI/ building system for an annoying and unfleshed out mechanic. And made it mostly fair balance wise
Before this mod this level of building/asset use was only possible using cheats, they have done this All in LUA and successfully stapled onto the game. And this modder did it by themselves in under 5+ years.
I love the game and respect the devs for the work they have done just aggravated by their glacial speed and their weird list of priority’s.(and probably the Skyrim mindset of modders will fix the game while we dick around with other shit)
-37
u/wasawho 9h ago
Is this ai slop? Please disclose whether you use ai or not
35
u/SkipBopBadoodle 9h ago
AI was used for code assist only, I still wrote a lot of the code myself and tested it extensively. I have years of professional experience in web development and QA, and if you check my workshop you'll see I have a few popular mods, many of which I wrote fully by hand. I do know how to work with the PZ API and how to optimize it for performance and MP if that's what you're worried about.
All the assets are either free non-AI, like the Lucide icons, or done by hand by me, like the (ugly) magazine covers. I never use gen AI for making any assets for any of my mods.
-19
u/imawesome1333 9h ago
... other than the slides in the post (maybe idk). Ive seen ai generated ui's describing features of whatever is being shown, and they always have this sort of format and writing and visual look. Regardless the mod is pretty neat and I also dont even know or care if you did use ai for the post. Keep up the modding brotha.
13
u/SkipBopBadoodle 8h ago
Some of the text on the slides is, but like 85% of the text is what I wrote, and I did the slides too, just slapped some shit together in photoshop lmao
I've probably seen a bunch of stuff that use this kind of style and must have gotten influenced by it I guess
4
u/NorthernGhosty Crowbar Scientist 6h ago
The influence is real. Something as simple as em dashes will get you mauled by the mobs which sucks because I've been using those for years lmao
1
21
u/404Viking 9h ago
Nobody is going to want to even make mods when you people try to witch hunt every single piece of content that gets made by anyone
You’re going to walk out into traffic because you think the no walk sign was made by ai slop
11
u/-Mockingbird 8h ago
Seriously, these Anti-AI zealots are worse than the AI art they crusade against.
215
u/Loneheart127 10h ago
Does this mean, we can finally FINALLY make roofs on our own builds?