ZomboRut 1.2.1.3

🎮 ZomboRut 1.2.1.2 and 1.2.1.3 patch notes combined
A fix release — no new content, all consequences. Project Zomboid build 42.20 landed and broke every scene in the mod; that's fixed, along with the worst of the "nothing I do to my character seems to matter" pile. Traits, exhaustion, the stench, the arousal meter and the give-up all now land when and how they say they do.

Early access ships 1.2.2.2 — the exact same fixes, same day, no new features.

⚠️ READ THIS FIRST — HOW TO INSTALL
🚫 DELETE THE OLD ZomboRut FOLDER FIRST.
✅ THEN drop the new one in.
DO NOT merge, overwrite or copy on top of the old folder.
BACK UP YOUR SAVE before you do it.
QUIT TO DESKTOP and relaunch the game afterwards — the game caches animation models between saves.
🎮 Requires Project Zomboid build 42.20 or newer. NOT compatible with older builds — scenes will not work.
🚨 Game build 42.20 compatibility
PZ 42.20 broke every defeat and drag scene. The game removed the function the mod uses to turn a scene's stand-in into a corpse, so scenes died halfway through: the zombie teleported away, snapped back and carried on biting, and a surrender could time out into a pose→curl→pose loop you couldn't get out of. The mod now uses 42.20's replacement path instead. This release requires build 42.20 or newer and is not compatible with anything older — on an older build the scenes will not work. (Reported by wick3d.spade.)

The frozen "statue" partner is gone. Since 42.20, roughly one chained scene in seven spawned its partner as a rigid, corpse-posed body that never joined the animation while your side played normally. The game's new mid-spawn model repair was making the partner miss a two-frame window it has to catch; it now gets a window four times as wide, the rebuild waits until after it's on screen, and even a partner that still misses it now has a matching animation to fall into. 16 out of 16 clean on the build that used to fail, and a long chained run with zero failures on the shipping build.

🎬 Scenes end when the animation ends
A scene used to end on a stopwatch. It counted down a fixed duration, so the outro got chopped mid-pose when the clock ran out early, or held frozen for seconds when the clip was shorter than the window — the consensual BJ sat on its final frame for about four seconds, every single time.

Every outro now tells the mod the moment it actually reaches its last frame, and the scene releases you right there. The old countdown survives only as a safety net, so a lost signal still ends the scene instead of stranding you in it.

Other scene fixes:

Chained scenes no longer half-form. When one scene ended and the next started quickly, the second could inherit leftovers from the first and come out malformed. The state is now wiped clean before every scene, again at teardown, and a chained scene waits for the previous one to finish letting go.
Surrender no longer ends after a single scene. With the stench of the dead active, the crowd around you was left permanently unable to see you — no second aggressor could ever step in, so the surrender collapsed with most of its scenes unspent.
Fast-forward keeps everything on the same clock. A couple of places still stamped an unscaled timestamp when the game was sped up, so their timing quietly did nothing at fast-forward.
🩸 Consequences actually land now
Payouts and scars only count when the act completed. Cancel a scene ten seconds in and you used to collect the whole thing — mood payouts, body count, the lot. Every payout now waits for the scene to genuinely finish.

The stench of the dead is earned, and lands once. A scene cancelled moments in still granted the full 30 minutes of scent, and during a chained give-up the cloak kicked in at the first scene's end — popping the moodle and the "covered in their stench" line while you were still on the floor mid-encounter. Scent now needs the act to actually finish, and a give-up counts its scenes quietly and applies the whole cloak in one go when the encounter is over.

Exhaustion is real again. The endurance drain fired once per encounter instead of per scene, so a sixteen-zombie chain ended with a near-full stamina bar. It now fires per completed scene, scales with your Fitness (the drain halves per five levels of Fitness and doubles per five below), and enforces the loss by measuring and taking back whatever the bar regenerated during the scene — so a three-minute scene costs the same as a twenty-second one. The exhausted limp finally has fuel behind it: a seven-scene chain now leaves you at effectively zero stamina.

Virginity falls at the right moment — when the intro animation hands over to the act, not at some arbitrary progress mark and not at the end. The groin ache, the trauma roll and the blood all still read that it happened, correctly, across a whole chain of scenes.

Virginal blood shows up wherever it's earned. The deflowering blood was only ever applied on a defeat, so a woman who lost her virginity to a subdued captive took the doubled ache, the trauma and the trait loss — and walked away without a mark on her. The blood follows the act now, not who started it. It still never appears for an oral scene, breaking off part way leaves your virginity intact, and male characters no longer bleed at all. (Reported by 8BitRizz.)

Cigarette, Protein Diet, Hydration Junkie and Drained land per scene, cancelled or not, instead of being deferred to the end of the encounter. The thirst effect was underscaled by 100× — it moved 0.125% of the meter, which is to say it did nothing. It's now the eighth of a bar it was always meant to be.

The sexual-limit penalty fires once per window. The +50 unhappiness and the "this is too much" complaint fired on every over-limit scene — at the default one-partner limit, that's a complaint plus half your unhappiness bar per scene, every scene, forever. It now lands once, when the window first tips over, and can only be earned again in a fresh window.

And the lines match the moment. A defeat now screams — the deflowering and the limit draw from harsh pools mid-scene — while consensual scenes keep the calm reflection and voice it at the end, where a reflection belongs.

Your partner limit is worked out live. It used to be stamped once when the save loaded, and it lied two ways: a limitless character (promiscuous, Rapist, or a Prostitute, whose trait is granted after load) read the default limit of one and could announce "I'm at my limit" on the first scene of their life, and if the sandbox option couldn't be read the limit sat at zero partners — permanently over the line from the very first scene. It's now derived fresh on every read.

"I feel horny" behaves like the recovery line it is — never while asleep, never mid-give-up, and never fired by a load, which used to make your survivor announce it the instant a save opened. It alternates with a second line, and three original over-limit barks are back in rotation after being stranded since the limit rework — already translated in every language.

Vicious Defeats no longer drains you through a takedown drag. The sprinter drag counts as a defeat and a utility scene, and the trait only checked the first half — so it chewed 1.5 HP per second for the entire cross-map drag, before a single scene had started. A long drag on its own could walk a healthy survivor down to the trait's floor.

Masochist can be picked. It shipped at cost 0, and character creation has no column for a zero-cost trait, so it simply never appeared. It's a cheap positive now. Existing saves are untouched.

💧 Arousal
The meter behaves the same at any day length. Act rates are written per in-game hour, but an act is paced by its animation in real time — the two only agreed at the 60-minute day the numbers were tuned against. The game's default is 90 and the setting runs 15 to 1440, a 96× spread over which the same thirty-second scene either emptied the whole meter or moved it four points. Verified across all four settings: an identical act now moves the meter by the same amount every time. (The slow passive build still runs on game time — "four in-game days from empty to full" is a game-time promise.)

Closed the read-a-magazine-then-relieve-yourself loop. Repeating that cycle banked a full stress, unhappiness and boredom wipe plus roughly 24 fatigue every time, with no cooldown anywhere in it — "never sleep again, never be stressed" behind two right-clicks. Relief now scales with time since the last release: a back-to-back second act pays almost nothing and ramps back to full over about three in-game hours.

"Satisfied" no longer sits on top of "Sexual Limit Exceeded" — the same act judged two opposite ways, both moodles on screen at once. The limit wins.

No desperation stress in the gaps between chained defeat scenes. A defeat drives the meter up by design, and the gaps counted as "not in an act" — so you were charged stress and unhappiness for arousal the assault itself created, which then fed the very stress that drives the auto-give-up.

Satisfied wears its own art now instead of borrowing.

😰 Give-up & surrender
A dominate character says a real refusal line. Refusing to give up above 33% health used a translation key that exists in no language file — and the game returns the key itself when it can't resolve one, so the speech bubble literally read ContextMenu_Dominate_RefuseSurrender. Worse, the auto-give-up retries every frame, so that non-line was screamed sixty times a second for as long as a zombie stood next to you. Three real lines now, picked at random, with a five-second throttle.

The exhaustion meter can catch you a second time. Once you disarmed a pending give-up, the warning ladder stayed pinned at its top rung — and between the two hysteresis floors (roughly 50% to 85% of the meter at default sensitivity) you were disarmed and unable to re-arm. The give-up simply stopped existing until you'd almost fully recovered. Disarming now steps the ladder back one rung, so the next climb re-arms you without re-voicing the warning.

A sprinter takedown seeds the right number of scenes. It sized its scene credits off a raw "zombies aggroed within 8 tiles" headcount, which counts zombies that an opposite-gender-only setting or an empty pool could never let fire. The count is now roll-tested against what can actually happen.

💾 Saves & new characters
A new character no longer inherits the dead one's state. Making a fresh survivor in an existing world handed them the previous character's partner list, a live "Sexual Limit Exceeded" window, their arousal meter, their trauma countdown and their kill quota — the game hands a new character a snapshot of the old one's mod data rather than an empty slate. Those records are now wiped at character creation, with a second net at load time for a character made while the mod was switched off.

Trauma lasts the duration it rolled. The target was re-rolled every hour and compared against the running clock, so Traumatized never really had a duration — it ended the first hour a roll happened to land short. On the default setting that's a 1-in-7 coin flip every hour from hour six, and the 24h / 72h / 120h settings all behaved like the shortest roll they could produce. It's rolled once now and held, and a fresh defeat restarts it.

🪢 Subdue & captives
NEW: tie a zombie with two belts. Rope is scarce early and easy to run out of, so a downed zombie can now be bound with two belts as well as with one rope. Duct tape is still required either way — belts replace the rope, not the whole kit.

A "belt" is anything worn in the belt slot rather than a fixed list of items, so the leather belt, the rope belt and any modded belt all work, while holster and webbing slots don't. A belt you're wearing counts, and comes off before it's used. Untying refunds exactly what you spent — the two belt types you actually used, or the rope — and remembers it across a save and reload.

And the menu says what you're actually undoing. "Untie" is the wrong word for two belts, and the warning underneath only promised "the binding" back, which tells you nothing. A belt-tied captive now reads Unbuckle and promises both belts and the tape; a rope-tied one reads Untie and promises the rope. (Reported by 8BitRizz.)

Rope in a backpack was duplicated. Subduing with rope stored in a bag found the rope but never removed it — a free subdue that cloned the rope every time. (Reported by AzureAdmiral.)

A captive subdued while crawling kept crawling. Push one over from behind, subdue it, and the game kept playing its crawl — the bound-on-the-ground pose never applied, so it crawled around instead of lying tied up. (Reported by AzureAdmiral.)

Dragging a captive offered the wrong menu entry. A captive drag runs on the same underlying system as a corpse drag, so it reused the generic "End Scene" label. When what you're dragging is a bound captive, the action is Drop Victim — which is what it was called in ZomboWin, so that's what it says now. A plain corpse drag keeps the old label. (Reported by AzureAdmiral.)

⚙️ Sandbox
The last option's description no longer runs off the screen. The sandbox page can't scroll the bottom-most option's tooltip, so whatever sat last flickered and ran off the bottom no matter how short its text was. An inert placeholder now parks in that spot and absorbs it — it isn't a setting, ignore it.

🌍 Localization
Recipes had no names. The lube recipes showed up in the crafting menu as their raw internal ids — "Lube_Zucchini", "Lube_Corn" — in every language, English included. B42's recipe format has no name field at all, and with nothing supplying one the game just echoes the id back. Fixed in all seven languages.

Lubed produce is named properly too, in every language, instead of falling back to English.

Forty strings that were English-only are now translated into Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Russian, Spanish, French and German — the untie menu, the arousal and defeat speech lines including this release's new harsh ones, the dominate refusals, all four arousal moodle tiers and their descriptions, and the arousal, opposite-gender and partner-limit sandbox options with their tooltips.

Every spoken line was checked against its language's dialogue font, so no speech bubble falls back to the wrong typeface.

📌 Notes
Anything odd → #bug-report, with repro steps and clips.

 Every scene has contact sound now
Scenes used to play out to nothing but the voices. Now the contact itself is audible:

Claps on hip impact — hard or soft, per stroke.
Oral scenes sound with the motion.
Wet sounds for the face-sit and the solo scenes.
Punches land when the swing does.

The sounds sit on the animation itself, so the timing holds at any framerate and at fast-forward. 71 new sounds ship with the release, and no sound plays twice in a row.

Riding positions keep it soft on purpose, and drags stay silent.

Also fixed while in there: the cloth-rip sounds. Three rip sounds have shipped since clothes could be torn — but a quirk in how they were registered meant only one of them ever actually played. Every rip was the same sound, forever. All three rotate now.

 The menu wears the mod's name
With the mod enabled, the main menu shows the ZomboRut title art in place of the Project Zomboid logo — same spot, same background, same fade-in, any resolution. Disable the mod and the vanilla logo is back.
 Captives
Dropping a captive puts it down, not away. Dropping a subdued zombie — or ending a scene with one — used to fling the body about a tile and a half from where the animation had been holding it, usually back the way you came, facing a random direction. Worse, a drop along a wall could land it inside the next room, where the game fades it out and you're left with an unclickable ghost captive. The captive now lies down exactly where the drag held it, feet toward you.

A dragged captive keeps its own clothes. Dragging a tied zombie put it in a random outfit for the length of the drag — a different one each time you picked it up — with its real clothes snapping back the moment you set it down. It now wears its own skin and clothing the whole way.

A corpse can no longer steal a captive's right-click. Right-clicking a captive that happened to lie near a corpse also surfaced the corpse's scene menu — and picking from it played the scene with the corpse while your captive lay there untouched. The captive owns its menu now. Deliberately clicking the corpse itself still offers the corpse's scenes.
Captives stop cloning themselves. Walking far enough away that the area unloads and then coming back could bring your captive back in the wrong colours — and leave loose copies of it standing around untied, several of them after a few trips.

The game can't keep a tied zombie alive through an unload, so the mod rebuilds it from a saved snapshot when you return. That rebuild was being quietly overwritten, and once the captive stopped matching its own snapshot the mod could no longer recognise the ones it had already made — so it left them wandering and built another. Now it's one captive, every time, wearing exactly what it was tied in.

⭐ Early access only — 1.2.2.2
This section applies to the early access build. Everything above is in both.

Toys can take a first time, and it bleeds. A toy deflowering now leaves the same mark a scene does, instead of taking the ache, the trauma and the trait while leaving your character unmarked.

What does and doesn't count is unchanged, and worth spelling out: a penetrative toy takes it — produce, and a held tool short enough for that scene. The long-object scene does not, because it's authored as a non-penetrative act, so a bat or a spear can't deflower. Plain masturbation never could, and still can't. Break off part way and you keep it, exactly like the paired scenes. (Reported by 8BitRizz.)

More of the localization sweep. Early access carries 59 translated strings where the stable tier gets 40, and names nine custom items and seven recipes where it gets four of each. The extra coverage is the toy and lube content: the Bottle of Lube and its recipe, the lubed cucumber and carrot, the two held cloth props, the toy and lube context menus, and the sharp-toy sandbox options with their tooltips — all in the same seven languages.

⚠️ ONE MORE TIME — HOW TO INSTALL
🚫 DELETE THE OLD ZomboRut FOLDER FIRST.
✅ THEN drop the new one in.
DO NOT merge, overwrite or copy on top of the old folder.
BACK UP YOUR SAVE before you do it.
QUIT TO DESKTOP and relaunch the game afterwards — the game caches animation models between saves.
🎮 Requires Project Zomboid build 42.20 or newer. NOT compatible with older builds — scenes will not work.
Copying the new files over the old ones is the #1 cause of "the mod is broken" reports. Delete the folder.