KnoxMap

Draw any place on Earth. Play it in Project Zomboid.

Made by euclid80tr · Discord

Important

KnoxMap is an unofficial fan project. It is not made, endorsed or supported by The Indie Stone. It contains no game files: it builds maps from your own copy of Project Zomboid. See Disclaimers.

KnoxMap turns a real place into a playable Project Zomboid map, from one window:

choose an area → terrain → furnished buildings → compile → install into the game

It reads the real streets, buildings, water, parks, railways and land use from OpenStreetMap, fits every building onto its real footprint with rooms, stairs, furniture and lights, spawns zombies where people actually lived, and installs the result as a mod.

_{Choosing an area: Central Park's real boundary, straight from a search. Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors.}

What you get

• The real street plan. Roads at their real widths, with pavements, kerbs and centre lines. The map is turned so the town's main street grid runs along the game's tiles, so streets are straight lines, not staircases.
• Water, bridges and railways. Seas and harbours, rivers with square railed bridges, canals, piers and railway lines. A road or railway over another is a real overpass: ramps up to a railed deck, the road below running on underneath.
• Monuments as themselves: arches, columns, statues on paved squares and fountains, instead of little houses.
• Buildings you can walk into, every one on its real footprint. Houses with bedrooms upstairs; blocks of flats with a corridor and separate flats; shops, schools, churches, clinics, offices and factories laid out as what they are. Every room has a light switch, every staircase is clear, and roofs follow the footprint.
• Real heights, up to 30 storeys, taken from OpenStreetMap where they are mapped and from the neighbours where they are not.
• Working lifts in buildings of five storeys or more, when the Elevators mod is enabled (optional).
• Buildings that are what they really are. The pizza place, the bank, the pharmacy or the hotel OpenStreetMap has in a building becomes the game's own rooms for it, fitted out like vanilla's: a dining room and a pizza kitchen, aisles of shelving and a till, guest rooms upstairs.
• Erika's Tiles, if you have it. With Erika's Tiles subscribed (and Setup run again), shops get glass shop fronts in painted frames with glass doors and a sign over them, drinks machines, posters and bookcases inside; homes hang its far larger range of paintings, posters and mirrors and pot its plants; main streets get speed limit signs. Maps made that way list it as a requirement.
• Start where you like. With the optional Spawn Selector mod, the map's named buildings and places appear as starting points.
• Buildings that look their part: wall materials by neighbourhood; windows that suit the building - sash windows on houses, tall panes on flats, glass panels on towers and shop fronts, stained glass on churches - spaced the way that kind of building is, with blinds or curtains to match.
• The real map in your pocket. The in-game map (M) shows the real streets, buildings, water and woods, with real street names and landmarks labelled.
• Zombies where the people were. The spawn map comes from an estimate of who lived and worked in each building, and every part of it is adjustable.
• Any shape you like: a rectangle, a polygon, a circle, a freehand outline, or a place's real boundary.

_{Midtown Manhattan around Bryant Park: the terrain (left), turned 26.7° to the street grid, and the paper map players carry in game (right). Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.}

_{Streets as KnoxMap lays them, drawn with the game's own tiles by tools/render_ground.py (not an in-game screenshot). Tile artwork © The Indie Stone.}

Quick start

You need: Windows 10 or 11 · Project Zomboid Build 42 installed through Steam · an internet connection. Python is optional: if your PC doesn't have it, setup downloads a private copy into the KnoxMap folder.

1. Download KnoxMap: the newest KnoxMap-v….zip from Releases, then unzip it anywhere. (Or git clone it for the latest changes.)

2. Double-click KnoxMap.bat. The first time, it runs setup for you, which:

   • uses your Python 3.10+ if you have one, or downloads the official python.org build (checked against its fingerprint) into the folder if not,
   • creates a private Python environment inside the KnoxMap folder,
   • downloads the free PZ Mapping Tools,
   • downloads the map compiler from this repository's releases and checks its fingerprint,
   • finds your Project Zomboid install and copies the tile artwork the map tools need from your own copy of the game,
   • adds the rules for kerbs, road markings and Build 42 trees to the map tools.

   It takes a few minutes, once. After that KnoxMap.bat opens straight away.

3. Make a map in the window that opens:

   1. Choose an area (see below). Start small, a few streets, while you get a feel for it.
   2. Pick a kind of place (Town, Suburb, City, Rural) and press Generate map.
   3. Under Finish the map: Build → Compile → Install.

4. In Project Zomboid: enable your map in Mods (and Elevators too, if you want working lifts), then start a new game and choose it. Existing saves never pick up new maps.

If anything is missing, a Setup incomplete panel in the app says exactly what and how to fix it. You can run Setup.bat again at any time; it only does what is still needed.

Choosing an area

Tool	How
Search	Type a place and press Enter. Pick a result for a box around it, or its OUTLINE button for the place's real boundary: a park, a district, a whole town.
Rectangle	Drag a box on the map.
Polygon	Click point by point round any outline; click the first point to finish.
Circle	Drag out a radius from a centre.
Freehand ✎	Drag round what you want. The line is smoothed into a clean outline.

A shape is built only inside itself. The map still covers the shape's whole bounding box (the game needs whole cells), but outside the shape the land turns back to countryside, with the main roads and rivers running on so the town is not an island.

You can also open KnoxMap straight to a place: add ?q=Bryant Park, New York to the address, and &outline=1 to take its real boundary.

Tuning a map

Open Fine tuning under Style:

Setting	What it does
Zombies per person	How many zombies each person who lived or worked there becomes.
Living space	Floor area per person. Lower means more crowded buildings and more zombies.
Horde cap	The most zombies one 10×10-tile spot can hold. Vanilla towns peak at 10.
Flats above / Flats chance	How readily large untagged buildings become blocks of flats.
Tallest building	The storey limit, up to 30. Real heights from OpenStreetMap are used where mapped. Tall cities take much longer to compile.
Straighten streets	1 turns the map so its main street grid runs along the tiles; 0 keeps north straight up, with diagonal streets as staircases.
Woodland, Parking, Room size	What they say.
Seed	The same area and seed always give the same town.

After Build, a Zombie census shows the estimated residents, workers and zombies. Change the zombie settings and press Recount to redraw them in a second without rebuilding, then compile again so the game sees the change.

_{A generated block of flats, floor by floor: a corridor, flats outlined in orange, stairs, doors and windows.}

Good to know

• Size and time. A few square kilometres is a comfortable town. Compiling is the slow part: a 600 × 600 m city block takes a minute or two, and several minutes with 30-storey towers.
• North may not be up. With Straighten streets on, the map is turned to its street grid, often by 20-45°. The in-game map is turned the same way.
• Maps are cached. Regenerating the same area reuses its OpenStreetMap download, so trying different settings is quick.
• A map is only as good as OpenStreetMap's data for that place. Well-mapped city centres come out best; rural areas often lack buildings entirely.
• Where maps go. Installed maps are copied into %USERPROFILE%\Zomboid\mods. Project files stay in KnoxMap's output\ folder.
• KnoxMap updates itself. When a new version is released, it downloads in the background and the top of the window says Restart to update; closing and opening KnoxMap installs it too. Your maps, logs and settings are kept. To turn it off, add "auto_update": false to knoxmap_config.json.

Compatibility

• Project Zomboid Build 42 only. Build 41 cannot load these maps, and setup warns you if your game looks like Build 41.
• Windows only. The map compiler is a Windows program.
• Mods: the generated map is an ordinary map mod. Lifts need the optional Elevators mod; without it they are just closed doors. With the optional Spawn Selector mod you can pick any landmark of the map as your start. Other map mods that occupy the same area of the world may conflict.
• Multiplayer and dedicated servers: not tested.

Known limitations

KnoxMap is new, and most of it has been checked by tools rather than by playing. Help is very welcome here, especially screenshots from the game.

• Not yet confirmed in game: that kerb tiles face the right way, that lifts carry players with the Elevators mod, how labels in non-Latin scripts appear on the in-game map, and how 30-storey towers play.
• Winding old towns have no single street grid, so their streets still step across the tiles where they turn.
• Very large buildings (over 200 tiles across by default) are skipped.
• Overpasses are lifted one or two storeys on Build 42's ramp tiles, which carry players and cars; not yet driven in game. Big interchanges come out busy, and tunnels are left out.
• Turned buildings keep their real angle with stepped walls unless they are within Square up buildings degrees of the grid (15 by default; 45 stands every building upright).
• Interiors are generic: rooms suit what a building is, but they are not the real layout of any real building.
• Big maps take time. Downloading, and above all compiling, a large or tall city can take many minutes; the map compiler uses one process at a time.

Troubleshooting

Problem	Fix
Setup fails	The whole run is written to logs/setup.log. Run Setup.bat again; if it fails the same way, post that file.
Setup cannot find Project Zomboid	It asks for the folder: paste the ProjectZomboid folder from your Steam library.
Setup says the game looks like Build 41	In Steam: right-click Project Zomboid → Properties → Betas → pick the Build 42 branch, then run Setup.bat again.
OSM query failed	The free OpenStreetMap servers are busy. Wait a minute and try again, or choose a smaller area.
The map is not in the game	Enable it under Mods, then start a new game.
The window is blank	Install the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime (built into Windows 11).
KnoxMap closes straight away	It shows a message and writes the error to logs/knoxmap.log. Running Setup.bat again fixes most causes.

Reporting a problem

Everything KnoxMap does is written to the logs folder: knoxmap.log for the app (with a short description of your PC at the top of each run), setup.log for Setup, and worlded/ for the map compiler's own output.

When something fails, the message in the app carries an id such as E-7F3A2C, the same id that sits beside the full error in the log.

1. Click Save report on the error, or report a problem at the top of the window. It saves KnoxMap-report-….zip into logs and shows it in Explorer. The zip holds the logs and the settings of your last few maps; your Windows user name is taken out of every path.
2. Post the zip, the error id and a screenshot in #bug-reports on the Discord, or open an issue.

For tinkerers

Everything the app does also works from the command line inside .venv:

.venv\Scripts\python -m knoxbuild output\mytown --preset city --set max_levels=12
.venv\Scripts\python tools\compile_map.py output\mytown
.venv\Scripts\python tools\render_ground.py output\mytown street.png 300 300 40 40
.venv\Scripts\python tools\audit_layouts.py 400

• KNOXBUILD.md: how buildings, rooms, lifts, fences, streets and the population model work, and the measurements behind them.
• worlded/README.md: the map compiler patch and how to build it yourself.
• tools/render_ground.py draws a map's ground from the real tiles the way the compiler lays them; tools/audit_layouts.py stress-tests floor plans for sealed rooms, blocked stairs, bad roofs and lifts; tools/validate_tbx.py checks buildings against the editor's own rules.

Disclaimers

Not affiliated. KnoxMap is an unofficial, non-commercial fan project. It is not made, endorsed, supported or reviewed by The Indie Stone. Project Zomboid and The Indie Stone are trademarks of The Indie Stone Ltd., used here only to say what KnoxMap works with. Please do not contact The Indie Stone about problems with KnoxMap or the maps it makes.

No game files. This repository and its releases contain no Project Zomboid game files. Setup reads tile artwork from your own installed, legitimately owned copy of the game and keeps it on your PC, for use with the map tools. Do not redistribute those extracted files. Pictures in this README that are drawn from the game's tiles (marked as such) contain artwork © The Indie Stone, shown to illustrate what the tool produces.

Thanks to The Indie Stone for creating Project Zomboid (https://projectzomboid.com/), which made this possible. This is an unofficial fan production for non-commercial purposes made under the Indie Stone Terms.

Real places, invented contents. Maps are built from OpenStreetMap, which may be incomplete, outdated or wrong, and KnoxMap simplifies it further. Everything inside the buildings (rooms, furniture, loot, residents, zombies) is invented by the generator and says nothing about the real building or anyone who lives or works there. The population figures are rough estimates for gameplay, not real statistics. Do not use KnoxMap maps for navigation, planning, emergencies or any real-world decision. Please be thoughtful about where you set a zombie game and what you share: homes, schools, hospitals and places of worship are real places to the people who use them.

Map data licence. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Every map KnoxMap installs carries the credit in game and an ATTRIBUTION.txt saying which data it was made from and how.

Publishing a map you made. You may share maps made with KnoxMap for free. If you do, on the Steam Workshop or anywhere else: keep ATTRIBUTION.txt in the mod, credit "Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors" on its page, do not sell it, and do not present it as official. Under The Indie Stone's Modding Policy, publishing a mod grants The Indie Stone a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to use it in connection with Project Zomboid.

Online services. KnoxMap uses OpenStreetMap's free, volunteer-run services under their usage policies: the tile server for the background map, Nominatim for place search, and the Overpass API for map data. KnoxMap identifies itself, caches tiles, searches and downloads, searches only when you press Enter, and paces its requests. Please do not modify it to get around those limits; for heavy use, run your own servers.

Privacy. KnoxMap has no accounts, telemetry or analytics. The servers it contacts, and what they see, are listed in docs/LEGAL.md.

Third-party mods. The Elevators and Spawn Selector mods are separate works by their own authors. Neither is included in, affiliated with or maintained by KnoxMap, and their behaviour and compatibility are up to those mods. KnoxMap only lays out buildings the way Elevators recognises lifts, and adds the map's places to Spawn Selector's lists when that mod is running; no code or files from either mod are copied.

No warranty. KnoxMap is provided as is, without warranty of any kind. Maps are generated automatically and have not been checked in game place by place. They can contain mistakes, and a map mod added to or removed from a save can break that save. Back up saves you care about. The authors are not liable for any damage or loss from using KnoxMap or its maps.

Credits and licences

• KnoxMap is made by euclid80tr.
• Knoxify by arytek: the original OpenStreetMap-to-Project-Zomboid terrain generator KnoxMap is built on.
• PZ Mapping Tools by Alree / Unjammer, built on Tim Baker's TileZed and WorldEd (GPL).
• Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).
• Elevators and Spawn Selector mods for Project Zomboid, by their authors, on the Steam Workshop.
• Thuztor's Mapping Guide v0.2 for the terrain colour conventions.

The code here is under different terms depending on where it came from: work added in this fork is MIT, the compiler patch in worlded/ and its prebuilt binary are GPL, and files from the original Knoxify have no published licence. See LICENSES.md for the details, and docs/LEGAL.md for every licence and policy KnoxMap follows and how.