Life after the zombie apocalypse can be tough, especially on your lonesome; wouldn't it be nice to have a friend? A friend to scavenge with, to come to know, to grow increasingly suspicious off, to murder before they do you in first. The Indie Stone had long-planned to add multiplayer to Project Zomboid, but today revealed it's far, far closer than expected, coming to the survival sim soonish with PvE and PvP modes.

"It all really depends on how well future tests go and what new issues crop up, but it's certainly not months away - or 'next year' as per previous community estimates," the developer said in a blog post. It had intended to finish adding human NPCs before working on multiplayer, but they turned out to take longer than planned while multiplayer, unexpectedly, took far less.

Zomboid will let players host their own dedicated multiplayer servers complete with mods. Ultimately it wants four-player split-screen support too. Multiplayer will have both co-op and PvP modes, but defaults to co-op "to ram the point home." The developer does warn that it may be a mite hackable at first, so players should probably play on whitelisted servers, though Minecraft has taught us that's often the best way to play an online game with building anyway.

Project Zomboid is still in alpha, available through Steam Early Access for $14.99.