In this guide, you will find all the details of Project Zomboid.
By default, the game only adds an outline to zombies when you aim with a gun, but change this. You will need to go into your game settings and switch aim outline to any weapon; it will make it easier to see which zombie you can hit and close enough to kill you.
Riverside has a low population with plenty of potential safe houses. Rosewood has a nice strip of commercial buildings right outside its gated community, where you hole up. Muldrow has a lot of exciting places to loot but comes at the cost of large hordes all over the place. West Point is arguably the most challenging place to spawn because the population is high there, and also, this is the closest spot to Louisville.
There are a few exploits and decent ways to cover your weaknesses, and not all negative traits are game-ending. To survive the game, you have to use Prone to illness, smoker, weak stomach, slow reader, and claustrophobic, but remember that they will change some aspects of your gameplay. If you struggle with combat balancing, carrying weight, and escaping zombies, you have to pick up stout or strong and fit or athletic traits.
Strong and Stout affect your carry capacity and strength, giving a 140 percent increase to melee damage while fit and athletic affect your fitness level and endurance, allowing you to run faster longer than usual. Some excellent positive traits to use in the game are a handy, wakeful fast learner, and organized. Traits are just mixing and matching till you find a combo that you like.
When you get your character and pick your spawn location, you have to spawn in, press C and start crouching. It will help you sneak by zombies, you are not invisible, but it will give you the advantage of going to the kitchen and looking for any starter weapons. You will find the kitchen knife, meat cleaver, and a rare chance of finding a frying pan, but it is much better if you find a spoon with utensils.
While you are in the kitchen, you have to grab the food; only grab enough food for a day or two. Every house has food in the early days; you will not run out anytime soon. You do not need to spend your first minute preparing for 60 seconds of distance running. So you need to grab perishables and one canned food. Half of your essential items list is in the kitchen, as shown in the image below.
You will need to look for a can opener and water container of any bottle cup, and you will automatically drink from this if there is water in it. Go on to one of the rooms and look for clean clothes to rip into bandages. You need a steady supply, and also, you need to be prone to illness because you have to change those bandages out first; otherwise, you will get infected.
Now you need to go to the bathroom because you will find most medical supplies. You will find supplies like painkillers, beta-blockers, and antibiotics when you get there. If wounds get infected from your prone to illness, you will need those antibiotics to combat that infection.
Medical supplies have a low weight, so you have to grab all the medical supplies you find and keep them in your bag or your back pocket, and if you don’t have enough space, then you can also store them in any sack or anything you can use to carry more items.
If you have more space to carry things, you need to look for beginner and intermediate books. You will not find Needles, first aid kits, scissors, thread, screwdriver, saw seed packets, and d in your first spawn house. So at some point, you will leave your spawn house and be assaulted from within your spawn house.
The number-first rule to understand the limitations is you never want to bite off more than you can chew. If you have an essential weapon, you probably don’t want to take on more than two zombies with a better weapon and some good strength. You can take on five or six.
Your environment increases your odds significantly. For example, if there’s a window between you and the zombies, this is free loot as long as you don’t get tired or break your space bar. If you can put some doors and walls between you and your immediate threat, that’ll be enough to stagger them. Line of sight and sound are crucial for luring and escaping zombies. They can hear you, and they will remember the last place you were.
Learning the ins and outs of this will let you start playing with the zombie’s pathfinding. You find yourself dying to zombies hiding behind doors. You have three options if you count
chickening out first. If your reflexes are quick and your game doesn’t lag, you can flick the door open and close it again by double pressing E, which will give you enough vision to know how many zombies are behind the door, and you will be fast enough that they cannot pass through the door.
The second option is opening the door from the side, which is very simple. The third option is to push the door, walk up to it, get ready to attack, and press the spacebar. Just bully it, you’ll go against the door, and if there are any zombies behind it, they will lock onto that sound and start banging the door down.
The only weapon you don’t need to use is a gun. Guns are paperweights for a long while, and one shot will guarantee you one kill, but guns aren’t worth using until you’ve gotten good at the relevant skills.
Finding a good car is a big step to finding a vehicle and choosing a base. You gain a portable safe house and a rolling storage unit, and also you will find more cars in the game. So you need to keep a record of where the vehicles you found are or go ahead and hoard them once you find a good parking spot and some gas.
You will also find the keys around the car on zombies near the vehicle or in the vehicles themselves. Still, if you skip keys altogether, you can gain two skills and mechanics and one skill in electrical to start hotwiring vehicles or choose the burglar profession. Running over zombies and crashing your car will damage it, so you must avoid hitting the car, as shown in the image below.
You also need to have a backup car that you will use for zombie killings in the game. When picking the safe house, you need to make sure that it is valuable for the long term and make your base safe to avoid zombies entering your base.
After building the safe house, you need to start planting the vegetables because the food in your area will not last forever, and if you begin harvesting earlier in the game, you don’t have to worry about the food. It would help if you staggered your crop’s growth times by a few days to offset one harvest rotting, which will leave you nothing to eat.
In the same vein as farming, you need to pick one from trapping and fishing. You can also do trapping and fishing, but you only need to take one at the beginning of the game. If you want to live for a long time in your base, you need to have as many water dispensers as you can find in the game because these have less weight and carry a high amount of water. You can also pick metal drums because these will hold more water than the rain collectors or water dispensers, as shown in the image below.
