Knox County Tapes: A New Soundtrack for Project Zomboid

Knox County Tapes is a Build 42 mod with two jobs: it gives Project Zomboid a new soundtrack, and it lets you replace any sound in the game with your own.

Music that follows the danger

The vanilla score is gone from the title screen onward. In its place is a 14-track album that reads the room with the same two meters the game's own score reads: threat, which is what's coming at you, and intensity, which is what you're doing.

• Exploring: slow Atmosphere tracks, with stretches of silence in between.
• A pack coming for you: Rotting Server Room. About four zombies closing in does it, fewer if you're panicking or hurt. Jumping in a car or climbing through a window brings it in for a bit too.
• Swarmed: Rotting Dubstep.
• Dead: This Is How You Died.

It crossfades up fast the moment things get worse. It only eases back down after 20 seconds of quiet, so a zombie wandering out of view doesn't flip the music back and forth. The pause menu turns it down, and it fades out while you sleep.

KCT FM, 91.1

Every radio and car stereo gets a new station, ham radios included. Tune to 91.1 and the whole album plays. A radio on a shelf plays from where it sits, and one in your hands or your car plays right there with you. The soundtrack steps aside while the station is on.

Ham radios rarely come with the station in their presets, so opening any radio adds 91.1 if it's missing.

Swap any sound

The mod ships with a small companion called Knox County Tapes: My Mix. Copy it into your Zomboid/mods folder, drop in .ogg, .mp3, .wav or .flac files, and enable it.

• Music: put files in title, explore, tension, combat, death or radio and they replace the album for that mood. Several files shuffle.
• Any game sound: put a file in sounds named after the sound, for example ZombieBite.ogg. Add ZombieBite_2.ogg for a random variation.

The mod writes the full list of names to Zomboid/Lua/KnoxCountyTapes/sound-names.txt. That's 3,064 sounds, grouped by category, from footsteps to door slams to your car's ignition.

Restart after adding files. The game only loads audio from mods it indexed at startup.

Settings

Mod Options has a switch to get the vanilla music back, volume sliders for the soundtrack and for KCT FM, and a slider for the quiet time between exploring tracks. The soundtrack follows the game's Music volume, and KCT FM and your swapped sounds follow the game's other volume sliders.

Build 42 only. Every player hears their own setup, so it works in multiplayer as long as the server allows the mods.

What changed in 1.0.2

• The music follows the game's own threat and intensity meters, crossfades between moods, dips on the pause menu and fades out while you sleep.
• The soundtrack no longer pans to one side, and it follows your Music volume.
• KCT FM holds a steady volume, stays with you in a car, and shows up on ham radios.

Get it

Knox County Tapes on the Steam Workshop

Running a server? Add 3808540273 to WorkshopItems= and KnoxCountyTapes to Mods=.