A standalone add-on for Project Zomboid (Build 42) that adds an extended set of sandbox options for Bandits Week One's pre-apocalypse timeline — the part Week One keeps coarse or hardcoded.
Requires Bandits Week One (and its dependency, Bandits). Every option is read on the new-save sandbox screen. At default settings the mod does nothing — it only changes Week One's behaviour once you turn something on. Safe to add or remove.
In Week One, the whole timeline is driven by one number — BWOScheduler.WorldAge (hours played) — recomputed every in-game minute. Two things about it are awkward to control from the base mod:
- Start timing is coarse.
BanditsWeekOne.StartTimeis a six-value enum (one week / two weeks / one month / three months / one year / ten years before). There's nothing in between, and its only effect is to subtract a fixed offset fromWorldAge. - The collapse ramp is hardcoded. The symptom thresholds (
34 / 60 / 100 / 132) and dozens of otherWorldAgecutoffs are constants.StartTimeslides where the ramp begins but can't stretch it — so once symptoms start, the descent from "first cough" to "everyone scrambling" is always the same ~4-day window. A longerStartTimejust buys more quiet, then the same quick collapse.
This mod opens both up, and adds a couple of related knobs.
A sandbox page, BWO Extended Scenario:
| Option | Range (default) | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Enable Extended Scenario | on/off (on) | Master switch. Off ⇒ everything below is ignored and Week One runs untouched. |
| Override start time with exact days | on/off (off) | When on, Days before collapse replaces Week One's six StartTime presets. |
| Days before collapse | 0–730 (7) | Days of calm before the first symptoms. 7 = one week before, 30 = a month, etc. Only used when the override above is on. |
| Collapse pace | 0.1–10 (1.0) | Stretches or compresses the descent after the first symptoms. 1.0 is vanilla (~4-day ramp); 2.0 doubles it; 5.0 spreads it over weeks; below 1.0 speeds it up. The quiet period before symptoms is unaffected. |
| Emergency services duration | choice (scale with collapse) | How long police, S.W.A.T., security, medics, hazmat teams and firefighters keep responding. Choose scale with the collapse (longest), original game response time (auto 1 ÷ collapse pace), or a shorter preset. |
| Maximum sickness severity | None / 1–4 (None) | Caps how far the population's visible sickness progresses, without touching the rest of the timeline. For a milder outbreak that never reaches full collapse. |
A single client file, BWOExtendedScenario.lua.
Everything Week One does keys off BWOScheduler.WorldAge, and MasterControl computes that value as (elapsed game hours) − (a fixed offset it looks up in BWOScheduler.waShiftMap). Instead of reimplementing any of Week One's logic, the mod takes over that one input: each minute, before Week One's own MasterControl runs, it sets the waShiftMap offset to whatever makes WorldAge land on the value we want (a custom start day, a stretched ramp), then lets Week One's unmodified code run. The two things that aren't a pure function of WorldAge — the emergency-service flags and the symptom-level ceiling — are adjusted immediately after MasterControl returns.
Because it restores Week One's real offset and skips every adjustment when nothing is customised, it's a true no-op at default settings, and removing it reverts cleanly. It hooks MasterControl once at OnGameStart (swapping itself in on the EveryOneMinute event), so it overrides no functions destructively.
One subtlety it handles: Week One looks scripted set-pieces up at Schedule[WorldAge][minute] with an integer WorldAge. Stretching makes one WorldAge hour span several real hours, which would re-fire those cells; the mod keeps WorldAge integer and fires each cell only once. (Compressing the timeline below 1.0 can instead skip some scripted events — an inherent trade-off of speeding time up.)
- Project Zomboid Build 42, single-player (matches Bandits Week One).
- Needs Bandits Week One loaded; the
requireinmod.infoenforces load order so Week One initialises first. - Touches only Week One's own timeline inputs — no vanilla files, no other Bandits systems.
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