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Posted: Jan 28, 2023 in Project Zomboid
By Nathan Young
Project Zomboid is loved by thousands of dedicated players, despite its old release date and problems. Some of these users have advanced computers with 4K resolutions to help them slay undead atrocities. Sadly, this isn’t the case for Zomboid due to the game’s design. That’s right, a popular title like this doesn’t entirely support high-end devices. This is caused by the user interface (UI) being too small on large resolutions, which isn’t ideal for survival. Experienced players know this situation far too well, as it’s been around for many years. Luckily, there are a few tricks to make the UI better on higher resolutions. Let’s get this started!
The user interface for Project Zomboid is what allows players to see their character’s information, available items around them, and more features. This is crucial for anyone to survive in the hostile environment, but when issues arise it can ruin the gameplay. Without the UI system, everyone will have a much harder time staying alive against zombies. Whether you’re trying to manage your character’s health or attempting to loot a building, the UI helps with that. It’s a fairly basic system that’s used in almost every single game, emphasizing its importance.
On a low resolution, everything seems to be better than something higher. This is due to the UI scaling to your screen’s size, but doesn’t entirely work all that well. Many players complained about this issue, as lots of them have advanced monitors now. Even if someone doesn’t have that high resolution, a basic 1980×1080 size still looks odd in-game. If you switch to 1280×800, then everything becomes clearer in Project Zomboid. However, this decreases the visuals and shouldn’t be the only solution.
Instead of switching the resolution, you can increase the font scales and other similar aspects. This will help a lot and is easily done in the settings menu, but doesn’t change everything. For instance, the inventory slots at the bottom of your screen in-game aren’t impacted by these edits. Other fixes may include manually changing your graphics card options to scale properly, disabling DPI scaling, and more technical workarounds. These are mentioned in the official thread on Steam for this game’s Support category. Try reviewing that resource to see what can work for you, but don’t set your expectations too high. The post starts by stating, “Project Zomboid isn’t built with high resolutions in mind.”
There you have it, Project Zomboid’s UI scaling isn’t designed for high resolutions. This will hopefully change in the future as the game develops, but it’s been years without any update for the problem. Some players have taken to customizing their UI with mods, which can occasionally be better than the default variant. However, most players will simply change their resolution and tweak some settings to resolve the scaling issue. It’s an unfortunate situation for Project Zomboid and its users, but there are workarounds at the very least. We hope this gives you more insight into UI scaling for the game. Have a good one, gamers!