Mod «The Director» for Project Zomboid

The Director is a cognitive AI overseer for Project Zomboid, compatible with Build 42.18 in both multiplayer and singleplayer. Acting as a server-side director, it monitors player actions to build a Bayesian model of your playstyle, generating unique scenarios for each survivor. Inspired by the Left 4 Dead AI Director but with advanced capabilities, it adapts dynamically to your behavior.

Core Features:

• Perceive: Tags events with semantic context such as loud, aggressive, vulnerable, at_night, or in_storm_phase.
• Remember: Consolidates short-term episodic memory into long-term narrative beats like firefight, hubris, near-death recovery, or betrayal.
• Model You: Uses Bayesian Beta distributions to track beliefs (paranoid, confident, methodical, aggressive, hoarder, explorer, expert), tightening as evidence accumulates.
• Predict You: A Theory-of-Mind layer models your expectations to subvert them effectively.
• Deliberate: Generates 5-10 candidate plans, simulates responses via Monte Carlo rollout, and scores them on competing objectives.
• Learn: Utilizes a UCB1 multi-armed bandit Q-table to record effective strategies across 420 state buckets, persisting across save/load cycles.
• Reflect: Self-critiques and adjusts strategy every 30 in-game minutes.
• Narrate: Delivers procedural taunts referencing your actual history.

Action Vocabulary:

• spawn_horde: Spawns walkers, sprinters, crawlers, or mixed hordes at a chosen offset from the player.
• lure_existing: Lures existing zombies via world sound.
• siege_phase: Initiates sustained multi-cycle pressure.
• taunt: Sends procedural chat messages referencing your profile.
• wait: Enforces relax windows to manage pacing.
• cull_distant: Removes off-screen zombies to optimize performance and make room for fresh threats.

Personas: Select the Director's voice in sandbox options:

• Patient: Long lulls with rare, significant strikes.
• Sadistic: Targets weakest moments (low HP, sleeping, low ammo).
• Tactical: Applies methodical, consistent pressure.
• Narrator: Features heavy taunting and theatrical pacing.

Cross-mod Awareness: The Director auto-detects active mods and adapts. Hand-written adapters are included for Warlord, Calm Before The Storm, Here They Come!, Bandits NPC, Helicopter Event Framework, and Hordes Alpha. Unknown mods receive conservative defaults via name-keyword detection. Other mod authors can create adapters without forking by placing a ZT_Adapter_YourName.lua file in the Adapters folder.

Persistence: All beliefs, Q-values, narrative beats, and persona drifts are saved. The Director continues its campaign seamlessly upon reloading a save.

Tactician Notes: Right-click in the world and select «Zombie Tactician» then «Open Tactician Notes» to view a live, color-coded panel displaying the Director's real-time thinking process, including perception, beliefs, projected outcomes, decision rationale, and self-reflection. Admin tools in this menu include Dump Brain State, Force Cycle Now, and Reset Learned Data.

Compatibility:

• Build 42.17 unstable.
• Singleplayer and dedicated MP (per-player belief tracking).
• Pure Lua implementation with no external services, API keys, or network calls.
• Save-safe: Persistence migrates between schema versions automatically.

This mod replicates LLM-style cognition (multi-step reasoning, persistent beliefs, theory-of-mind, reflection) using explicit modules in Lua, without requiring network access. As an early release, beliefs may drift unexpectedly. Use the Tactician Notes panel to monitor the AI's reasoning and report any issues.

Technical Information:

• Workshop ID: 3720305815
• Mod ID: ZombieTactician