The most dangerous failures in modding are not crashes.
They are the updates where:
- everything loads
- nothing errors
- behavior is subtly wrong
In Project Zomboid mods, this almost always means one thing:
an internal contract changed.
These contracts are rarely documented and often implicit:
- when certain systems are expected to run
- which values are assumed to be initialized
- which collections are assumed to be complete
Mods that rely on:
- implicit execution order
- timing side effects
- shared global state
are not just using the engine — they are coupled to its invariants.
The goal is not to avoid this coupling entirely.
That is often unrealistic.
The real goal is to make those assumptions explicit in your own code,
so breakage becomes observable, debuggable, and contained.
How do you design mods that survive engine updates without constant reactive fixes?
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