Modding Project Zomboid is an education in how real-world game engines evolve over time.
Very quickly, you realize that “the API” is only half the story.
The other half lives in places such as:
- update loops
- lifecycle hooks
- shared mutable state
- undocumented invariants
Many modders hit limitations and assume they are arbitrary.
In practice, they are often architectural signals:
- this system was never designed to be re-entered
- this data is assumed immutable after initialization
- this logic only works because something else already ran
Once you stop treating the engine as a black box and start treating it as a system, your mods change fundamentally:
- less brute-force logic
- fewer timing hacks
- fewer hidden dependencies
Modding stops being about “making features work” and starts being about aligning with the engine’s internal model.
That shift is the same one required when working on large, long-lived production codebases.
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