Project Zomboid

Knox County is quarantined and everyone in it is dead or dying. You play one survivor, from above, in an enormous simulated map of houses you can enter, loot, barricade and burn down by accident.

The simulation depth is the point. You get hungry, thirsty, bored, depressed, sick and tired. Wounds get infected. Cars need fuel, batteries and repairs. Power and water shut off after a few weeks and never come back. Zombies are slow individually and lethal in a group, and noise travels a very long way.

• The title screen tells you the truth: "This is how you died." Death is permanent and expected.
• Character creation is a real build: occupation, positive traits, negative traits you take for points.
• Skills level through use and through reading skill books, and a dead character takes all of it with them.
• Sandbox settings control everything: zombie speed, population, loot rarity, day length. Nobody should feel bad about tuning them.

1. 1

   Build a sensible character

   Take an occupation with useful skills, and take negative traits that do not kill you (slow reader over slow healer). Avoid anything that reduces fitness or strength on your first run.

2. 2

   Loot your starting house completely

   Bags, weapons, food, sheets for curtains and bandages. Curtains stop zombies seeing you through windows, which is a real mechanic.

3. 3

   Find a bag, a melee weapon and a water container

   Inventory weight, one reliable weapon, and something to drink from. Everything else is negotiable.

4. 4

   Move quietly

   Sprinting, shouting, gunshots and car horns pull hordes from off-screen. Walking and sneaking are the default speeds.

5. 5

   Set up before the utilities die

   Water and power shut off in the first weeks. Fill every container, and plan for rain collectors and a fireplace.

6. 6

   Read your skill books before you grind

   Books multiply the experience you earn. Reading Carpentry first makes every plank you nail worth several times more.

• Moodles: hunger, thirst, fatigue, panic, boredom, unhappiness, pain, sickness. Each one has consequences, and several compound.
• Injuries: scratches, lacerations, bites, fractures, burns, deep wounds. Bites are almost always fatal, everything else is treatable if you have the supplies.
• Carpentry, farming, fishing, trapping, cooking, mechanics, electrical, tailoring, and a full combat skill spread.
• Cars are simulated down to the parts: engine condition, battery charge, fuel, tyres, and the noise they make.
• The world decays. Food spoils, houses rot, and the zombie population migrates over time.

• Location beats fortification: an isolated house with one approach beats a mansion in town.
• Barricade windows, remove or block stairs, and keep a second exit you can actually use.
• Rain collectors, a fireplace or a generator, and farming plots make a base sustainable after the utilities die.
• Generators are loud and need fuel and maintenance. They are a mid-game project, not a starting one.
• Store food in fridges while the power lasts, and learn to preserve after it does not.

There is no explanation, no cure quest and no narrative arc. What there is: emergency broadcasts on the radio and TV in the first days, which taper into automated loops and then into static.

• The first week of in-game broadcasts is the entire story, and it is worth listening to properly.
• Notes, corpses and the state of houses tell you what happened to the people who lived there.
• The quarantine, the military response and the collapse are all implied rather than dramatised.
• The mood is loneliness rather than horror. The zombies are less frightening than the empty supermarkets.

• Co-op and dedicated servers both exist, and a shared survivor group changes the game completely.
• Split roles: someone learns mechanics, someone farms, someone carpenters. Skill books are limited so specialising is efficient.
• A friend can drag you out of danger, or bring the horde to your door. Both happen constantly.
• PvP servers exist and are a different genre entirely.

• Fight one zombie at a time, in a doorway or a fence line. Never in the open.
• Push, then swing. Shoving creates the space that makes a swing safe.
• Watch your weight and your fatigue. An exhausted survivor misses, and a missed swing is how it ends.
• Curtains on every window, always.
• Never drive at night at speed. Zombies do not show up in headlights soon enough.
• Turn the settings down for your first run and up later. Learning on default difficulty is optional.

• The official site and the developer's Thursdoid blog posts for build progress.
• The community wiki for trait costs, skill book tiers and map coverage.
• The interactive Knox County map, which is the single most useful third-party tool for this game.
• Ask in our Discord. Everyone has a story about how their best character died and all of them are worth hearing.