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Live Wire (batman_LiveWire) is a Project Zomboid Build 42.21 mod, translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. It turns the Electrical skill into a trade: solar panels, wind turbines and water wheels produce silent power, and an inverter placed in your house powers every appliance around it, with no fuel and no fumes. Batteries stored in a power bank keep the surplus for the night. The server is authoritative, so the mod is multiplayer-ready and designed for dedicated servers.
Everything in the mod is original: no code or asset comes from another mod.
How it works: sources, inverter, house and power bank.
flowchart LR
S1[Solar panels 100 W] --> I
S2[Wind turbine 400 W] --> I
S3[Water wheel 120 W] --> I
I[Inverter 1,500 W max] <--> B[(Power banks with batteries)]
I --> H[Every appliance within 20 tiles and 3 floors]
| Role | Devices | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Sources produce | Solar panel 100 W, wind turbine 400 W, water wheel 120 W (nominal) | Any number per inverter, each within cable range (12 tiles horizontally, 3 floors apart at most by default) |
| Batteries store (optional) | Car batteries or deep-cycle batteries inside a power bank | 4 batteries counted per power bank, charge efficiency 0.90. Several power banks per inverter |
| The inverter converts and distributes | Inverter | 1,500 W max (house demand), 20 W idle consumption, efficiency 0.85 to 1.0 (from the installer's level). One per network, can be placed indoors, no toxicity (it is not a game generator) |
| The house | Every powered appliance | Every appliance within 20 tiles and 3 floors up or down of the inverter is powered. No per-appliance wiring |
The 20 tiles and 3 floors come from the vanilla options GeneratorTileRange and GeneratorVerticalPowerRange. The game itself decides what is powered (a square is powered as if it were near a generator), so fridges, lights, stoves, TVs and radios work exactly as in vanilla.
One source + one inverter. Without batteries the house runs on the current production only: for example, three panels on a sunny day run a fridge-freezer at noon, but not at night. Add a power bank with batteries to carry the load through the night.
Fridges and freezers keep food cold while you are away (area unloaded), as long as there is power. Checked in game: a fresh steak in a powered fridge, player 300 tiles away, 10 game hours: the steak aged 0.083 day (cold) instead of 0.417 day (warm).
Engine limit: the power state found when the area reloads counts for the whole absence.
A water pump wired to the inverter keeps the house taps supplied from water barrels standing next to it (vanilla rain collectors or Useful Barrels): sinks, showers, baths and toilets work again after the water shut-off. Details in Water Pump.
- Get a source and an inverter. Ready-made solar panels and inverters turn up in garages, hardware stores and electrician storage (Loot tables). You can also craft them in the Electrical category: solar panel at Electrical 3 (10 solar cells, salvaged from calculators with a screwdriver), inverter at Electrical 5 (Recipes).
- Place them with the vanilla furniture cursor. Placing and picking up need a screwdriver and the device's Electrical level. Solar panels, wind turbines and water wheels must stand outdoors; the inverter can go indoors.
- Connect the source: right-click it, Live Wire, then Connect to an inverter (or, from the inverter, Connect equipment). It costs 1 electric wire per 4 tiles, rounded up (Wiring).
- Check the result: the inverter starts switched on. Its right-click menu shows the powered area (a cyan circle on the ground) and opens its screen (Inverter screen and software).
- Add storage for the night (optional): a power bank holding car batteries or deep-cycle batteries, connected the same way (Equipment).
Capture à faire : the "Connect to an inverter" menu on a solar panel, with the wire count.
Subscribe to the mod on the Steam Workshop (Workshop item 3821807453), or copy Contents/mods/batman_LiveWire into your Zomboid/mods folder, then enable batman_LiveWire (Project Zomboid Build 42.21). The Computer Mod (3725497089) and Laptop Mod (3798992436) are optional. The source code is at https://github.com/cyberbobjr/LiveWire.
All devices with their key figures.
Outdoors: solar panels and a wind turbine with their green "connected" lights, and the backup generator.
Indoors: the inverter (lit screen), power bank, computer, wall alarm and breaker.
Equipment - Wiring - Production and Calculations - Multiplayer - FAQ