I never knew I could respect someone and still hope they seek therapy in such equally strong amounts

Why not your own basement?

There are so many mods for Zomboid, some of them are staples that never leave my modlist. I have a mod that replaces almost all the headgear on zombies with a headcrab from Half-Life (you can loot and wear the headcrabs too), as well as a couple “occupations” based around a Black Mesa security guard, or an HECU marine.

There’s the whole host of True Music add-ons, which all add actually listenable music to the game, in the form of cassettes, records, or CDs. There is also a collection of mods called True Action, that give you more emotes and animations for your character, such as dancing or actually sitting on a chair or bed instead of just the floor. Tons of vehicle mods too; plenty of real-life vehicles from all kinds of eras (the game takes place in the 90s, so I usually like to keep the 90s aesthetic) but there are plenty of “lore-friendly” ones that have made-up names for the cars. Mods that add interiors to RVs so you can have a mobile base, mods that make you able to add a basement to your house/base, new maps (one I have called Project Russia, and it’s basically the surrounding area outside Moscow, also a huge map)…

I love PZ, really do. I do however also recognize that its playloop is a challenge for many many people to enjoy. The game suffers from essentially needing to know how to play in order to learn how to play. I have yet to find a single one of my friends that enjoyed the game until I sat down with them, watched them play via stream and coached them.

So when you do buy it, pay real close attention to the return window if you aren’t really enjoying it. If you aren’t essentially hooked in an hour, you probably never really particularly enjoy the game.

You find them in the world and can pop them into TVs. There’s no video but it’ll play the content as subtitles next to the glowing television

To expand on the other reply, TV and VHS are already systems in the game, so it’s just a case of finding all these volumes as loot

Just to be clear, “watching” is a bit of a misnomer. In Project Zomboid TVs play programs to dispense lore/world-build, show what’s happening outside the Exclusion Zone, teach recipes and skills to players, improve their mood (mental health is an important part of gameplay), potentially draw in nearby zombies with the light and noise, and give survivors something to do while resting during downtime.

However, it’s all just text - the TV will light up, and if it’s tuned to a live channel or playing a VHS, a new line of text will pop up above it every few seconds. As the apocalypse advances more and more channels will go dark or switch to automated reruns (the attention to detail in this game is just *chef’s kiss*), eventually leaving looted VHS tapes as the only way to watch most programs.

That said, if the modders used a program to extract subtitles and kept the timings, you could theoretically play the episode at the same time and watch it in sync alongside your character. Here’s hoping someone makes a mod that lets you launch VLC to a second monitor from within the game with the proper timing offsets!