Tips For New Project Zomboid Players

Highlights

• In Project Zomboid, taking things slow and focusing on one task at a time is key to surviving, and here in this list, we detail a few more tips to make that easier.
• Dying in the game is a learning process and an opportunity to improve your strategy for future runs.
• Playing with friends can make the challenge of surviving the zombie apocalypse in Project Zomboid more manageable and enjoyable.

Project Zomboid is one of those games where, if you don’t have a guide, you’re likely to die and die again. And then, even when you do get a guide, you’re still probably likely to die and, well, die again.

But, thankfully, that’s not actually a bad thing, if you learn how to use it to adapt better to the dangers of the greater Kentucky area. Here you have some handy tips that will likely help you find your bearings in the ruthless world of Project Zomboid.

Updated January 30, 2024 by Goncalo Santos: Despite how long Project Zomboid has been around, it’s still a phenomenal game to try out. However, if this is your first time playing, you might be daunted by how difficult it is to play. If you’re looking for a few more handy tips to keep you alive during the zombie apocalypse, we’ve updated this list to be a bit more comprehensive.

13 Go Slow

Project Zomboid is one of those games where you usually will have to go slow. Unless you’re an amazing player with hundreds of hours of experience, you will likely never set up the perfect base in a week or so.

Trust us from personal experience, we know the desire to create the ideal base the first time around no matter the cost.

This is a game where you can spend an entire in-game day just looting one or two houses and then going back to your base. Things will take time, and it’s much better that way than trying to risk your life and force everything to be perfect at once. So if you can, make sure to take things one at a time.

12 Death Is A Learning Process

Although you’ll want to survive as much as possible, your first few runs will inevitably be quite short. You’ll need to take some risks to learn the map and, crucially, you’ll need to learn from your mistakes. Your personal experience will be much more valuable than any guide you could find.

Thankfully, in more than a few ways, Project Zomboid works as a roguelike. Death might be the end for your character, but it’s just another opportunity for you to do better next time. You might’ve lost the skills and the sweet loot (which you can recover), but you’ll still have PZ’s most precious resource: knowledge.

11 Play With Friends

Fictional universes have been showing you the biggest life-hack of them all for getting better at Project Zomboid. The Last Of Us would be a miserable experience if Joel didn’t have Ellie. Train to Busan would be ten times scarier if the protagonist was alone on the ride.

Get some friends (or even just one) and start your survival journey together. Even if they’re as inexperienced as you, having an extra pair of hands and some company will make braving this Kentucky wasteland a much more manageable challenge.

10 Keep Calm And Slay Zombies

The first rule is to keep calm. Project Zomboid can be a scary game, especially with just the lack of music leading you to feel just how empty the world is. Zombies can be overwhelming and those jumpscares definitely don’t help.

What you need to do is ground yourself. If you panic and run around either trying to confront zombies like no tomorrow or running aimlessly away from them, you’re going to end up dead early on. So when you spawn in, take a moment to just ground yourself, look around slowly and get immersed.

9 Don’t Use Guns

Congratulations, you’ve found a gun. They are utterly useless. Trust us, unless you have a mod like the Arsenal[26] Gunfighter Mod, which actually adds some useful weapons and boosts firearms a lot, then you’re likely never going to use a gun.

They are loud, you are likely not skilled in them, and you’ll run out of bullets eventually. They’re also heavy, so there’s no use taking one ‘for emergencies.’ It’s best to skip them, especially early in the game. Just stick to the melee weapons.

8 Find A Safe Place

It sounds obvious, but you will really value having a safe place when you find your character tired, hungry, and thirsty. The best place is to use your spawn house as your temporary base, but this will only work for a couple of nights.

Look up the Project Zomboid Map online to see what safe places you may be able to get to in your starting town. The best places are on the outskirts as default settings will have zombies urban centered.

7 Stay Up To Date With The News

Electricity and water will shut off at any random time. It could be tomorrow, it could be next week. Value them and watch TV. If you watch the Life and Living channel 6am, 12am and 6pm, you will be able to learn skills such as Carpentry, Cooking, Foraging and Fishing — unless you already have them due to an occupation.

Listen to the radio for warnings regarding weather events or when electricity and water are about to run out. Read books and magazines that give you experience points or teach you specific skills. Getting smarter is often better than getting stronger in Project Zomboid.

6 Plan Ahead

After your first few runs, you’ll start to understand what is important and when. You’ll know that water and electricity will run out in your first month of survival. This means that you’ll need alternative sources for both of those resources.

As soon as you get even a temporary base down, start prepping rain collectors and get as many generators as you can carry. Learn what you should be bringing with you, and what is just clutter. But, remember, even if it isn’t useful for you at the moment, you might dearly need it soon.

5 Walk, Don’t Run

For the love of all that is good, walk, don’t run. Your first instinct will be to run away from the zombies, but this will only tire you out. Trust us — your walking speed will be faster than any zombie.

So, even if they’re following you, just walk and you will be able to gain some distance. This will also help you keep calm when it comes to zombies, making sure you don’t freak out and can control yourself around them.

4 Push To Kill

You should go into your options and change a setting under Display, and turn the Aim Outline setting so that it can work on any weapon. This will help you when right-clicking and aiming at zombies for melee combat, but also when the zombie is highlighted, you can press the space bar and push them.

This is very important for gaining distance, but also you can often push zombies over, which will make it easier to kill them, even when unarmed.

3 Know Your Limits

So you’ve survived longer than a day, and you suddenly think you’re the next Rick Grimes who will survive no matter the odds. Well, let’s just hold your horses there. Whether it’s a scavenging mission gone well or you’re just on a zombie-killing spree, you should really pay attention and know your limits.

You may think that, even though your character is tired, you can ignore it and just go on a little longer. You should play it safe as long as you can and get back to base.

2 The Value Of Sheets

If you find a sheet, loot it if you can. Sheets and ripped sheets (usually able to be made from clothing you can rip) are very valuable and easy to get. Sheets can be hung on windows, which will come in very handy, especially as your base might not be automatically fitted with them.

Ripped sheets can also be great for patching up holes in your clothing with a tailoring kit, so you don’t leave yourself open to bites and scratches. They can also be used as makeshift bandages.

1 Curtains Down, Lights Off

The moment you get into a house to stay in, you should turn the lights off and pull any curtains down. If there are no curtains, use sheets and add them to the window and cover them. This is just so any zombies that are outside or wandering nearby don’t see you.

As long as you’re not overtly loud, you should be fine, and it will make things a lot safer for you in the long term.