These are some of the common issues that you may run across when attempting to obtain the game.
-
Game Size Unfortunately, PVZ only supports fullscreen mode and windowed mode, with no adjustment to the size of the game window. If you are on an HD monitor, this may mean you either have to play fullscreen, or the game window will be tiny. To fix this, try changing your screen resolution as follows: Windows: search "screen resolution" in the search bar, and select something small like 1360x768 Mac: System preferences -> Display -> Scaled
-
Operating Systems This only applies if you are using Mac OS 10.15 Catalina or newer. This particular OS dropped support for 32 bit applications, which includes PVZ, meaning you will not be able to play the game natively on your Mac (regardless of whether on Steam or not) if this is the OS you have. To get around this, you will need to install a Windows OS onto your Mac, so in effect you will be playing PVZ on an "emulated" Windows which is running on your Mac. Macs have a built in feature which allows you to do this called Bootcamp. On the Apple website you will find some install guides for Bootcamp at the expense of about 50GB space on your drive. Once you get this running, simply install PVZ on your Windows partition and you should be good to go. 2.1 Windows Issues One issue that you may run into when playing PVZ on Windows is that your mouse is very laggy and sluggish. I found that turning off the wifi solved this problem, as many antivirus applications that came preinstalled kept popping up and slowing the processor. For further troubleshooting, try opening the task manager and see what's clogging up the GPU.
-
Save Files If you are just getting the game and want to skip playing through adventure and grinding the coins to unlock everything, you can do so using the game file editor located at https://github.com/raviddog/plants-vs-zombies-user-file-editor The only thing you will have to do here is find the folder which contains all your user saved data. To do this, the response post made here contains everything. https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/443/where-does-plants-vs-zombies-store-its-savegames Note that the editor has trouble modifying save files for non GOTY editions of the game. 3.1 Duplicate Save Files If for whatever reason you download multiple versions of PVZ excluding the Steam version (meaning 2 or more versions from the PopCap site or third party sites), it is very likely that these versions of the game will use the same save folder for your user data. There is no known workaround to this, but nonetheless, it is an important detail to note in case you run into the next issue, which is... 3.2 Corrupted Save Files Another common issue with save files occurs when you attempt to open the game and get the error "Error reading user save data: file too short." This means that somehow, your save file was corrupted. To get around this you will need to locate the save file (see above) and delete the userdata file. This will mean you have to start over, but you can use the save file editor provided above to instantly return to where you left off. This is connected with point 3.1 in that IT WILL NOT WORK TO INSTALL A DIFFERENT VERSION OF THE GAME (as the new version will attempt to access the corrupted file), with the exception being if the file corrupted for the Steam version, you could get around the issue by installing a non-Steam version and vice versa.
-
Other Issues 4.1 Lag During Plant Selection Screen This issue occurs most often when playing the game on a Windows partition of a Mac: the game will get very laggy and sluggish when it is on the plant selection screen, but nothing else. One fix to this is to use the non-GOTY edition of the game. Some of the top runners have download links to this version, which you can simply install and run. IMPORTANT: read point 3.1 above and delete your old save file if necessary.
For Linux users having this issue, see this video guide on how to resolve it:
