Zens Zombie Door Bangers

What Is This?

This mod adds the ability for zombies/infected to bash open doors.

It's inspired by Liven's PvZ Mod (shout-out to his excellent mods!), but mine uses a slightly different method for detecting door locations based on their open/close sound position.

Unlike the amazing PvZ mod which changes many core vanilla zombie features, this mod does not touch anything else to do with zombies.

It just makes aggro'd zombies hit any doors they are standing near until they open. I initially developed it for my Namalsk server where I did not want to run PvZ but still wanted zeds to knock open doors.

There is a JSON config with the mod that allows you to tweak how many hits it takes to open a door, whether or not locked doors can be opened, and you can also adjust how many door hits are required to open a door based on the zombie type (eg. you could make soldiers able to bash open locked doors, but no other zeds can).

Only doors that have been closed or locked with a Lockpick by players are detectable by zombies with this mod. In my experience this is usually fine, as most players are only hunted by zombies into a building when they've shut a door behind them anyway.

Each door has a unique hit counter associated with it, so if you get swarmed by zeds they can bash open the door pretty quickly. They will only open vanilla building doors so don't worry base campers, you're still safe!

Known Issues:

Also, sometimes the zeds will wander off before the door opens, but I think this is a good thing as it adds an element of randomness to them. Sometimes they will bust open your house, sometimes they will lose interest and wander off. To decrease the chances of this happening just set the door hit count to a lower number than the default.

Finally, some vanilla buildings in DayZ have incorrect door open/close sound position placement which means zeds will not interact with those doors properly. With my limited knowledge of 3d modelling in DayZ, I think this is because when the building models were created the sound positions were placed incorrectly.

I've only noticed it on a single door in a couple of buildings so it's no big deal. This building has one such door: DayZ Factory. I think the Arma barracks has one door like this too.

There may be other bugs, but after running this on my servers for several months I haven't noticed any. I've done my best to make it as performance-friendly as possible, so there shouldn't be any significant effect on server FPS. I haven't noticed any FPS issues on my servers.

Installation Instructions:

Note: this also mod requires my Zen Core Mod to function: https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=3702420204

Install this mod like any other mod - copy it into your server folder and add it to your mods list. It must be run on both server and client. Make sure to copy the .bikey into your server keys if you're not using a server management tool like OmegaManager which does that automatically.

When you run the mod for the first time a default JSON config will be created in your server profile: %server_root%/profiles/Zenarchist/ZenZombieDoors.json

This is where you can tweak the zombie door banger config values such as how many hits a door takes to open. If you add any zombie configs to the JSON then note that the mod uses a Contains() check on the zombie type, so "ZmbM_Soldier" config will apply to any zombie that contains that type name and will affect several different zeds.

Repack & Source Code:

Unfortunately due to lack of time I can't maintain all of my mods all of the time. I do my best, but these mods are offered as-is. If there's a problem, you have the source code and my permission to fix it yourself and upload a fixed version to the workshop without any credit necessary. It's all free.

You can repack this mod if you like, and do anything else you want with it for that matter. The source code is on my GitHub at www.zenarchist.io

Side Note: This door hit animation is a vanilla feature that isn't used in the main game, so hopefully someday the devs will add this feature at least for certain high threat zeds like soldiers etc as it makes zombies a much bigger threat and lockpicks more valuable outside of PVP if you disable bashing open locked doors in the JSON config. Shout-out to the epic open-source Syberia Project mod, that's where I discovered these door hitting animations.

Learn Modding

Want to learn how to make your own mods? Check out my guides on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Zenarchist

Buy Me A Coffee / Contact Me:

All my mods are free and open source, but it takes an enormous amount of time to put some of these mods together. If I've helped you out, please consider helping me buy my next coffee! I don't expect it, but I very much appreciate it.

To contact me you can send me a message there too - I get an insane amount of messages so it's the best way for me to filter out the noise and focus on people who are willing to support my work with a coffee first:

https://buymeacoffee.com/zenarchist

Enjoy!