Project Zomboid (Video Game)

Tip 1 - Don't be a hero.

These are the end-times.

There was no hope of survival.

This is how you died.

Project Zomboid is an isometric real-time zombie survival Western RPG being developed for PC by The Indie Stone, a British and Canadian team which began as four developers. It takes inspiration from games like Survival Crisis Z and X-COM. The team was at first known for having extremely bad luck as it rushed to meet the schedule to release a demo in 2011. On 8th November, 2013, the game secured an Early Access launch on Steam, and it remains actively worked on in Early Access to this day. In December 2021 it received a major update reimplementing online multiplayer, which gave it a significant resurgence in popularity.

The game was initially set in a fictionalised version of Muldraugh, Kentucky; a small town by the side of a highway which includes a number of businesses, a large logging camp, some light industry, and various classes of housing. It has since expanded to a detailed simulation of the whole county circa summer 1993, large enough to require vehicles to realistically travel from one end to another. There's also a day-night cycle, a cycle of seasons, and even a simulation of nature slowly taking over the abandoned areas. Farming, trapping, fishing, carpentry, cooking, character customization, skills and perks are all present; moreover, your character can also be afflicted with depression, boredom, hunger, thirst and illness as they try to survive. And of course, the game also simulates swarms of zombies that potentially number in the hundreds, and possess detailed visual and hearing systems to make sneaking past them a tough, but fair challenge.

Compare and contrast with Dead State, a different take on a zombie Western RPG from an indie developer, with less simulation but more focus on the story and Turn-Based Combat.

This game contains examples of:

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2xFore:
- Planks are a basic crafting ingredient, and the staple of the carpentry systems of the game. You can choose to grasp a plank by one end and direct the other at a zombie temple, if you must. You can even shove some random nails into it if such misuse is not unforeseen.
- Build 42's weapon upgrades mean that now random planks of wood can be your best friend. Nails? How about a sawblade to give the zombies a special hello?
555: Phone numbers featuring this trope can be found in the upcoming reading materials.
The '90s:
- By default, the game begins in the summer of 1993.
- The "Six Months Later" scenario takes place in early 1994.
A-Team Firing: Under the original firearms aiming system, starting without a single rank in Aiming skills meant your character only had the default hit chance of the weapon, which tended to be at best 50%, and that was further slashed by distance from the target. Result? You could blast an entire drum from a revolver into a zed 10 tiles away from you, miss all six shots and get your face eaten off. Oh, and the only way to improve this skill is through practice, which involves spending irreplaceable ammo and making a lot of ruckus, while it only provides experience upon a successful hit. The new aiming system has gone some way towards easing this, however.
Abandoned Hospital:
- Every hospital and clinic you will come across has been recently abandoned, due to the Zombie Apocalypse. Pretty much all of them are some of the prime spawning sites for zombies, being absolutely packed with them.
- Build 42 added a massive hospital complex based on Waverly Hills Sanatorium, which, given its state, was abandoned decades before the events of the game, giving the standard "creepy old hospital ruin" vibe.
Absurdly Ineffective Barricade: Played With and might be even a simple case of your low skills.
- Furniture can be put between you and possible avenues of incoming zombies. Depending on how and what is placed and at what density, you might stop a few stragglers, or they'll just clamber over the "barricade", possibly breaking it in the process.
- Low Carpentry combined with shoddy maintenance means your walls and barricades probably won't last long against the hordes.
- Hammering a single board in a window will draw more zombies with the noise than it can stop. Either board up properly or suffer the consequences.
- Whilst it's possible to use cars as a makeshift barricade, most zombies will just crawl under them unless there's some other kind of blockage on the far side.
- Wooden and log walls are this against fellow players because, unlike zombies, they can deconstruct them with a hammer and a saw, both of which are easy to find and lightweight enough to carry that some players might keep them in their backpack at all times. This is much unlike stone and brick walls, as they require a sledgehammer to knock down, which is a very rare and heavy tool.
Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
- The growth time of crops is much shorter than it is real life (e.g. cabbage is capable of fully growing in 10 in-game days while it takes around 2 to 3 months in real life, despite being one of the fastest growing vegetables). Justified, as having the crops grow for months would make farming significantly less useful as the average Survivor will be dead long before the crops finish growing.
  - However, build 42 introduced a painfully realistic farming system, where crops take more or less their real time to grow. This means various old strategies, like setting up your base and garden on the rooftop of large buildings like malls or schools are no longer viable, because such rooftop gardens will provide a pittance of food needed, and it will take half a year before it even grows. This also forces players to create genuine farms to stay fed, and also fencing them in some way to prevent zombies from trashing the crops.
- It is somehow possible to know the exact weight of the Survivor without using a weight scale. Justified, since managing weight would be frustrating if there was no weight scale laying around especially given how being both underweight and overweight give negative debuffs.
- All television sets in the game (with the exception of Old Television) have built in VHS players. This was likely done to reduce clutter as most households in the 90s with a TV would likely have a VHS player as well.
- Regardless of what you're wearing, you always have a back slot that fits any large weapon.
- Boards used for boarding windows are not an actual object, but are automatically generated for the purpose of that action. This solves the massive hassle that would be carry around an absurd amount of lumber and nails to build something that can be torn down within seconds.
- Cars, no matter their type and size, have a loading capacity equal with what your survivor can carry, and twice of that with a trailer hooked in the back and twice of that when using vans. While arbitrary, this exists to counter-balance the actual issue of a single small coupe being able to haul around about a tonne of stuff in real life, which would completely trivalise the game if implemented. There are mods that do change this one way or another.
Acid Reflux Nightmare: Going to sleep with a excessively full stomach has a chance of causing the player to wake up early with both the panic and anxious moodles.
Action Girl:
- A female Survivor can potentially become this if she survives long enough, becoming able to take out hordes of zombies on her own, and it is pretty much mandatory for long-term survival.
- It is possible for a female Survivor to be a United States Army veteran.
Action Survivor: All player characters start out unskilled and unequipped, with no more advantages than some basic professional training. The only exception to this is the Veteran, who has experienced enough combat that nothing fazes them anymore.
Aerosol Flamethrower: The Engineer profession comes with several recipes for turning household cruft into tactical saviors, and hairspray is one. Rather than the traditional flamethrower, however, the Engineer makes an incendiary bomb out of spray, sparklers, and aluminum foil.
Afraid of Blood: One of the negative traits (Fear of Blood) makes the survivor become increasingly stressed when covered in blood. They will also panic when using first aid on themselves and will not use it on others.
Agony of the Feet: Feet are one of the locations you can get hit in, with injuries reducing your speed until healed. Most often, you'll get hit in the feet by crawling zombies or while stepping on glass barefooted.
A.K.A.-47: Firearm names in general, and pistols in particular, are clearly stand-ins for real-life models. Some are close enough to their real name you might not even notice it's this trope in action. The only guns in the game that don't have slightly different, legally-distinct names are the M16, M1911, M9, and M1A.
Aliens in Cardiff: The Zombie Apocalypse starts in a rural area that includes several tiny and extremely obscure real-life towns/communities, such as Muldraugh and Branderburg, with their populations ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand.
Allohistorical Allusion:
- One recipe magazine is an FBI incident report on the San Fernando bank robbery. As it teaches you a recipe that allows you to turn bulletproof vests into limb armor, it's likely meant to reference to the North Hollywood shootout, where the bank robbers wore limb armor made out of refashioned bulletproof vests.
- The ST 4 tape describes a 1992 incident in Varginha, Brazil, where a meteor streak appeared in the sky, with the residents noticing a terrible smell (similar to the events preceding the Knox Infection) and suffering from nausea, fever, and anxiety (similar to the early phase of Knox Infection), which caused the military to check up on the whole thing, only to allegedly not notice anything. The story bit is clearly inspired by the 1996 Varginha incident where a man was confused for an alien, causing other residents to claim to have seen more aliens and an UFO, then assume that the military (which was engaged in routine movement) has been deployed to capture the aliens.
All-or-Nothing Reloads: Averted. Maybe not in the case of magical reloading of semi-automatic pistols in older versions' "Easy" mode, but otherwise any activity involving ammunition can be interrupted by sprinting, then continued later with little or no redundancy.
The Aloner: Since NPCs aren't yet implemented as of Build 42, playing in singleplayer means that you're the only survivor in the entire world.
Alphabet News Network: One of the news agencies is News Now Network, more commonly known as Triple-N.
Alternate History: The Knox Event occurs in July 1993 and results in the collapse of human civilization and then the near extinction of humanity by the ninteenth game day (July 28th).
Ambiguously Bi: Female survivors get the same bonuses for reading the adult HottieZ magazine as male survivors do, who can in turn read the HunkZ version.
And Then What?: Once you survive the initial phase of the game, successfully make it through the helicopter event, barricaded both the area of your choice and the house you want to live in, stockpile supplies, find cattle, and bring it to your base to raise and butcher, set up a garden to grow vegetables and traps for catching wild animals, rain-catchers and security measures, haul all the tools and objects you will need... there isn't much left to do other than just keep living, doing the same sets of repetitive actions to stay fed, hydrated, and sane. And all of this can be achieved in less than a month in-game. While there are routine complaints about it from the player-base, this is an intended feature by the devs - the struggle with ennui that comes from making it alive through the troubled start.
And Then John Was a Zombie: In most cases, this is how you died. You can even sit there and watch yourself stumble around looking for more brains, if you want.
Anti-Armor: Bladed weapons will destroy clothes worn by zombies, making them more vulnerable to future attacks.
Anti-Frustration Features:
- Since the bulk of player actions are contextual, based on the items in the player's inventory and surroundings, the game automates a good deal of inventory juggling on the player's behalf:
  - The game takes into account the contents of the player's personal inventory, worn containers, and containers they can open from where they are standing (including on the ground, on tables, etc.) If the player performs an action that requires an item that they don't currently have equipped, the game will automate the process of removing the needed item from the nearest available container, equipping it, performing the action, and (in most cases) returning the item to its original container, saving several steps of manually moving items around for a single action.
  - Crafting and construction recipes count all items within reach when determining whether you can craft something. Having a pile of wooden planks on the ground will allow you to create a carpentry object within a small radius without having to put them in your inventory, saving you from crushing yourself while trying to make a bed or staircase.
  - You have the ability to pick up certain large items in the world (Large appliances, Furniture, etc) as long as you have the appropriate tools. For very large items that would be unfeasible to carry, like beds, the process will break the item into several "parts" that can be carried individually. Like with crafting, the game will allow you to use the other pieces as long as they are within reach to place the item down again, allowing you to move them over in several trips.
  - The game will automatically perform certain small manual actions on your behalf, such as inserting a car key into the ignition when you try to start the engine, or automatically chambering the first round of a newly inserted magazine. This saves you from forgetting an important step in a crucial situation, though less crucial actions are still left to the player (removing the key or emptying the chamber, for instance). But the most obvious feature is the fact that your characters will hydrate themselves on their own, no action needed, as long as there is any kind of drink in the inventory.
  - The player can mark items in their inventory as favorites, preventing them from being used up in crafting recipes or as fuel.
  - Uninstalling car parts bypasses the usual 50-unit encumbrance limit for the player's inventory, which massively cuts down on the amount of inventory juggling that would otherwise need to be done when working on cars. A few mods use this feature for their own objects that would be normally flat-out impossible to lug around.
- While you have to individually inspect crops to get full information on them (based on your agriculture skill), you can hover your cursor over them to get a quick idea of what their current level of water is, and when they were last watered.
- Build 42 introduced the "Chance to Damage" system for firearm hit chance, meaning that if you "miss", your shot will still deal a nominal amount of damage, along with stunning zombies and having a chance to knock them down.
- There is no trait or occupation that give you the Long Blade skill, and Long Blades are very difficult to find and make, thus making it incredibly hard to improve the skill. To compensate, it's the only melee combat skill that has skill books associated with it.
- Build 42 made it so that running a generator indoors, thus suffering carbon monoxide poisoning, warns you of a noxious smell, even though the real chemical is odorless.
- If you get your Electrical skill to Level 3, you'll automatically learn generator operation without a magazine, avoiding a situation in earlier builds where you could be a master electrician, but still fail to understand how to use a generator.
- If you can't find mechanics-related magazines, getting the Mechanics skill to Levels 8-10 will progressively unlock the ability to alter standard, heavy-duty, and sports cars.
Anti-Grinding: The effectiveness of skill grinding has varied somewhat over the game's history, as the developers have tried to make up their minds how difficult it should be for one character to be good at everything. Currently, most skill-building actions provide only small amounts of XP, so those skills are very slow to train unless you've got an XP multiplier going, either from your starting occupation or traits, or by reading a how-to book.
- In Build 42, some XP grinds have been either outright removed or capped at a low skill level, such as Welding or Carpentry. While intended to dissuade disassembling every piece of furniture you come across or spending days breaking crates in a warehouse, being pressed into actually building walls and furniture at the less-effective and less-pretty early levels didn't come without pushback. Thankfully, this setting can be changed in sandbox mode.
- It's even worse for Welding, an already annoying to level skill. The only previously-extant grind, disassembling metal furniture like stoves and fridges, is gone altogether. Now you must either disassemble wrecked cars, which is heavily dependant on either map-generation RNG or being able to easily access a junkyard / blockade, or saw apart small pieces of metal for blacksmithing purposes.
Anti-Hoarding: Carrying too much stuff can significantly slow down a Survivor's movement speed, makes them tired quite quickly and makes it harder to climb fences, which can be fatal in a situation where it's necessary to quickly escape from hordes of zombies.
Apocalypse How: Class 2, bordering on Class 3. The Knox Infection has turned most of the people in Knox County and the rest of the world into zombies and any semblance of order has completely collapsed. Supplementary materials reveal that by Day 19 pretty much everyone on Earth is either dead or a zombie. However, some people are stated to be immune to the airborne strain of the Knox Infection. Non-Human animals and plants are also completely unaffected by the virus.
Apocalyptic Gag Order: The US Government is aware of the Knox Infection and the situation in Knox County but downplays its severity to the public while claiming that "The Knox Event is contained". The American public only realizes the truth once the Knox Infection starts spreading across the United States but by then it is too late to stop it.
Arbitrary Gun Power:
- Among handguns, the SN38 revolver, chambered in .38 Special is more powerful than the M9 pistol, chambered in 9x19mm, likely to compensate for the revolver's low capacity and reloading time. This also happens with other revolvers and the semiautomatic pistols using the same caliber. Some handguns also used to do more damage than the MSR700 rifle, chambered in 5.56x45mm.
- When it comes to rifles, the extremely rare M16 (with similiarly rare 5.56 ammo) originally did massive amounts of damage due to some testing settings not being changed before the update was released.
Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: Since zombies are attracted to the sound of gunfire, and ammo is rare at default settings, you'll spend most of your time fighting with melee weapons. Build 42 even introduces the ability to forge medieval weapons, which are the strongest in their class.
Armor-Piercing Attack:
- Zombie bites will usually have a lower chance of being stopped by armor than scratches.
- Guns target bullet defense instead of scratch defense, rendering most types of armor useless against them.
Artificial Stupidity: While this is a Zombie Apocalypse game, the AI isn't just representing a mindless horde, but also genuinely struggles with proper pathfinding. There's a handful of exploit-like survival tips (mostly regarding specific shapes of barricades, their distance to each other and placement) rendering AI not incapable, but unwilling to attack your base or its barricades, as it will be unable to plot a path there. Those might be a veiled homage to Dawn of the Dead (1978), but the far more likely option is simply broken AI.
Artistic License – Biology:
- While no one should eat burnt food consistently as health professionals speculate that it can contribute to a higher risk of cancer, eating some burnt food once will not result in an instant and certain death like it does in the game.
- In real life stale ingredients do not become fresh if you put them in a bowl, and tainted water does not become clean when you put it into a pot and make soup or stew, but that's exactly the way it works in the game.
- Hunger and stored calories are entirely separate. Thus, you can starve to death in a few days while being morbidly obese.
Artistic License – Chemistry: Build 42 altered carbon monoxide poisoning (from running a generator indoors) so that it gives you a moodle indicating a noxious smell. In real life, carbon monoxide is odorless.
Artistic License – Medicine:
- In-game, a bleeding wound will never clot on its own, even if days pass.
- The only penalty from a wound infection is slightly increased pain. Fatal infections (such as gangrene) are not a possibility.
A-Team Firing: If your Aiming skill is non-existent, your base chance of hitting is 50% at a range of 5 tiles, which means that you can easily miss against a slow-moving zombie at a range where any person able to hold the gun should be able to reliably score hits. Your odds will get even worse at longer ranges, and panic (which will be extremely high in the first days of survival) makes range-related penalties much harsher. Notably, your character model is clearly aiming the gun and there are no hip-shots involved that could justify the terrible hit chance.
Awesome, but Impractical:
- Two-handed weapons that can't be wielded one-handed do a lot of damage, but they have an incredibly slow attack and tend to be very heavy, which results in a lot of Endurance loss and (in Build 42) muscle strain. The sledgehammer is the ultimate example due to combining extremely high damage with the highest weight out of all the weapons, though its main use is to break down walls and doors, and it's the only practical way to access some locations and hidden loot.
- Metal reinforcements and barricades. Sure, they're more durable than walls built out of planks, but materials are rarer and non-renewable (whereas nature ensures a steady supply of wood via tree growth), and it takes an obscure, relatively hard to raise skill to build them. Meanwhile Carpentry can be raised to level 8 just by watching TV and reading books during the first few days and it helps out with a variety of applications other than barricades. Most importantly, while metal-based barricades are more durable, they're not unbreakable. And last but not least, if you park cars in front of your barricades, they can be the crappiest ad-hoc barricade and they will be still inaccessible to zombies, offering perfect protection at a fraction of materials and skills needed.
  - Build 42's default settings capped the skill gain from VHS tapes at a relatively low level, however. While this keeps you from near-instantly becoming a professional carpenter, it's still not much incentive to get welding, as that skill also has a complicated XP grind without any sort of television or VHS bonus.
- Generators. They provide you with electricity that you don't really need for anything. The only application they have is keeping your car's battery charged and keeping freezers running. While charging car batteries is good in an emergency, keeping freezers running is pointless as long as you aren't hoarding food you can't eat or preserve (which after the first few months means you are likely overhunting or overfishing). Almost every other use is either a gimmick or an unnecessary luxury, while still requiring considerable effort to keep the generator going. That said, they do have a niche: powering up gas station pumps, allowing you to greatly multiply your fuel reserves.
- The Chevalier Cossette is the fastest vehicle you can drive and has the highest engine power in the game. However, since you can outrun the zombies just by walking, that speed is mostly useless and can even be detrimental; the vehicle controls, coupled with the limited field of vision can end up making you crash, potentially fatally. In addition, it only has two seats, has the lowest trunk and cargo space of any vehicle in the game, and is one of the loudest cars, so it's not even good for quick smash-and-grab runs. Finally, it's the rarest car in the game, so finding one is a matter of pure luck.
Axe Before Entering: One of the main ways to deal with locked doors in the absence of any alternate ways past them is to destroy them with a weapon. Each weapon has its own stat for door damage, and axe-category weapons are naturally the best at this - short of a (vanishingly-rare) sledgehammer.
Back from the Brink: On a meta level. The game was the butt of jokes about unfinished projects and had a steadily shrinking player base and fandom over the years. Then build 41 came out, first as beta and then as a mainline. The result? The number of active players tripled, with both old users returning and new ones joining the fray, making the game more played than it ever was before. It is still unfinished, though, but at least can be enjoyed even in such a state thanks to the massive overhaul.
Back Stab:
- Hitting an enemy from behind will do 50% more damage to them. Also, if you're hitting a zombie who is unaware of you or any other players, you get a significant bonus to your Critical Hit chance.
- Depending on the difficulty setting, zombies will have an increased chance to bite (instead of scratching and lacerating) when attacking a survivor from behind.
- If you have a short bladed weapon and sneak up on a zombie, your survivor will raise their left hand to perform a backstab.
Badass Driver:
- The Speed Demon trait allows you to squeeze more speed out of any car, along with being to switch gears faster. The only issue is that it makes your car louder.
- The Sunday Driver trait inverts this — you're so bad at driving that you can't go above 30 miles per hour (even if you're driving a sports car with performance parts), and you'll also accelerate slower.
Badasses Wear Bandanas: The Veteran, who saw enough combat to be immune to panic, can start off wearing a bandana.
Bad with the Bone: Animal bones and jawbones can be wielded as clubs, while long sharp bones can be used as knives. They're fragile, but skilled crafters can turn them into more durable weapons.
Bank Robbery: You may stumble upon a crew of zombified bank robbers in your travels, all dressed in suits and carrying duffel bags and guns. At least one of them will have a lot of money in their bag.
Barbell Beating: In addition to barbells being used for their intended purpose of weightlifting, they can also double as a blunt weapon. While it does have high damage and durability, the painfully slow attack speed, tiny range, and high exertion cost for each swing makes it inferior as a weapon to most household items.
Batter Up!:
- The baseball bat is one of the best non-blacksmithed Blunt weapons. Add nails for extra damage but reduced durability. Or why not try jamming a rake head through it, or railspikes, or a huge sawblade?
- The short bat isn't as strong as the full-sized bat, but it's easier to carve in terms of both skill and materials. It can also be upgraded for extra damage and durability.
Battle Discretion Shot: Some meta events are sounds of people firing off guns, sometimes in rapid bursts. Whatever happened, you'll never get to see the results, but the sound will attract zombies towards its location.
Bedsheet Ladder: Oh yes. They were present from the earliest builds and using them is one of the basic survival strategies - taking the upper floor of a building and hanging them from every possible window just in case of having to bolt. The zombies can't climb anyway (but they can pull the rope down and the Survivor along with it). Ropes made out of rags are also one of the most universal construction materials.
Beef Gate: The zombie populations in West Point and Louisville are much higher than the average, meaning that it is better for weak/inexperienced survivors to avoid going there until they develop their combat skills.
Behind the Black: Panic from zombies and phobias depends on what the player can see, not what their character should be seeing. If you're fighting a horde of zombies, zooming in can thus keep panic under control.
Berserk Board Barricade: The standard way of barricading doors and windows is to nail planks across them, up to 4 per side. While it can be done by unskilled survivors, Carpentry improves the health of your barricades.
Better to Die than Be Killed: If a Survivor is surrounded by zombies and has a bottle of bleach on hand it is possible to invoke this trope by making the survivor commit suicide by drinking bleach rather than risk being devoured by the zombies.
Beware the Living: On PVP-enabled servers, your fellow survivors can easily be much more dangerous than zombies, as they're tough, recover quickly from knockdown, can attack you at range, and can easily inflict broken bones, deep wounds, and/or gunshot wounds, all of them being extremely difficult to treat.
Big Eater: Survivors with the "Hearty Appetite" trait play this straight as they will get hungry more quickly. Inverted with the "Light Eater" trait which reduces the Survivor's hunger.
Big "NO!": The demo character gets one if the raider shoots his wife.
Bizarre Beverage Use:
- Bourbon bottles can be used to make Molotov Cocktails. It can also be used to disinfect wounds.
- Milk can be used to make Mildew Spray which helps treat farm plants.
Blatant Burglar: The Burglar has the option of starting off with a beanie and also a balaclava or a bandana.
Blatant Lies: For a brief period of time, the LBMW radio frequency gets used by the military for the purpose of a broadcast, with it claiming that they asked all media embedded within the Louisville camp for permission. However, not only is LBMW the only media that makes this broadcast, but the previous broadcast had soldiers breaching Jackie's trailer due to the fact that she refused to comply with the order to not report on zombies. It's obvious that the soldiers simply stole her equipment and appropriated it for their own purposes.
Blessed with Suck: Starting with the Obese character trait nets you a whopping 10 trait points, and in exchange makes your character slower, less fit and quicker to tire. However it crucially also sets your starting weight to 105 pounds, which means you'll take much longer to starve to death, giving you a wider window to ignore gathering food. Compared to the sister trait Emaciated which starts the game with a ticking clock, obese is a favorite of hardcore players and challenge runners.
- This is no longer the case, as food and water are fairly easy to secure even without dipping into skills like the revamped Foraging or resorting to hunting plentiful and delicious animals that now roam the Kentucky countryside.
  - Furthermore, Build 42 has outright disabled the weight-related traits in favor of fast and slow metabolisms, affecting how your character gains weight over time instead.
Blood-Splattered Warrior: Fighting zombies will cover you and your clothes with a lot of blood. There's no effect normally, but if you have the Fear of Blood trait, you'll gain stress from being covered in blood.
Book Dumb: Given enough time (and a LOT of grinding) it is possible even for an illiterate survivor to master most of the skills.
Boom, Headshot!: While attacking a downed zombie, you do more damage if you're standing over their head.
Booze-Based Buff: Alcohol can substitute for painkillers, anti-depressants, sleeping pills, and beta-blockers. However, drinking too much will make the player drunk, and mess up coordination.
Boring, but Practical:
- The "end game". Technically there is no such thing, but if you choose to play for maximum survivability it's feasible to set up a sustainable, well-fortified life for yourself where risky scavenging is a thing of the past. You can stay inside, only needing to clear stray zombies from your walls every few weeks. This monotony of farming, fishing, trapping, and water purifying can go on indefinitely.
- Stomping on downed zombies. While it can take up to a dozen hits to kill a single zombie, it will let you save weapon durability and ammo. Some solid military boots make this even more practical as they tend to require fewer stomps to get the zombie to stop moving.
- If your point budget allows it, getting just about any hobby trait carries your long-term survival a long way. If you start the game with at least a single point in any given skill, it retains a big bonus to experience gain, which in turn makes reaching high levels far easier and feasible. This is particularly important with First Aid and especially Aiming, since there are limited opportunities to train them in the first place, and Aiming didn't even have a book to help with experience gain prior to Build 42. Of course hobby traits won't replace an actual professional competence, but they still give a massive edge.
- Some of the occupations offer a bonus that doesn't do anything flashy, but is undeniably super-helpful:
  - In previous builds, the Park Ranger profession. While it didn't help with combat or barricading, given how much it rains in Knox County, the weather resistance actually came in pretty handy. Now Park Ranger just gives you a moderate bonus to Foraging and Trapping and a small boost to Carpentry, plus increased movement speed in forests, which is still great, especially in the mid/late game.
  - The lumberjack profession. While it lacks the above entry's bonus to Carpentry and Foraging, it makes up for it with an extra point to Axe and Strength, in addition to costing no trait point, and has a unique bonus to the swing speed of axes to boot. With these bonuses, you can create a max-strength melee fighter who can chop down hordes of zombies at the start of the game.
  - The Fire Officer profession gives you a boost to your fitness, strength, sprint, and axe skills, making your character an all-around effective scavenger and melee fighter from the get-go. Fire Officers also have a chance of spawning in fire stations, giving immediate access to many of the game's most effective weapons and gear.
  - The Veteran profession gives you a decent boost to strength and firearms accuracy, but the big draw is a unique perk called "Desensitized", which essentially makes you immune to the entire panic system from the outset. Normally, panic is a huge part of the game, especially if you face off against loads of zombies (though this does get better over time). You can take beta blockers to make panic go down, but they're in limited supply and the effects are temporary as well. Panic ruins your accuracy with all weapons but particularly with guns. With the Veteran profession, it becomes functionally possible to face off against a horde of dozens of zombies while using a pistol, and calmly pick them off one at a time.
  - The Burglar profession gives you enormous bonuses to Nimble and Lightfooted. Combine it with the Gymnast trait and take your shoes off, and you are effectively completely silent on the move, able to sneak right up behind a zombie and crit backstab it with a short blade without it hearing you. Being guaranteed access to a car on day one (thanks to Burglar giving the hotwire skill) opens up the world to you right away, an invaluable skill depending on your playstyle.
  - Being Unemployed does absolutely nothing for your character apart from giving them 8 extra trait points, giving you an unparalleled degree of flexibility. One of the best options is to build someone who spent their time off work playing baseball or being a cardio bunny, leaving every other skill behind in favour of building Strength and Stamina. The result? A meathead who has to learn everything from scratch, but can outrun a horde of runners and bash dozens of skulls open without tiring out.
- Sledgehammers - not as a weapon, but in base construction. A lot of attention goes to building defensive walls out of wood, or even metal, but all constructed walls can be worn down by zombies over time, and a large enough horde can reduce them to matchwood in minutes. How can you easily build a zombie-proof base? Simply find a two-story building, drop a sheet rope out a window, then use the sledgehammer to destroy the stairs (make sure you do it in that order). Zombies can't climb, so you can rest easy on the second floor. The one catch is that zombies can knock down sheet ropes, so if you leave your base you might not be able to get back in: make sure to hide an emergency sheet rope inside secured by a barricaded door. If you want a permanent, self-sustaining base, find a two story building with access to a wide, flat roof (like a warehouse or hotel second floor), so you can set up rain collector barrels and plant crops.
- Iron Sights. There are a few different scopes you can install on your rifles, that greatly extend the maximum range of the gun (beyond what you can normally even see) and completely whack your aim up close... or use the humble Iron Sights, that simply extend your maximum range slightly without any trade-offs.
  - In Build 42, the new aiming system changed Iron Sights to Tritium Aiming Sights, which are now pistol-exclusive but are still a welcome benefit to range and now aiming time. Scopes appear to not ruin your range up close (your character presumably simply point-aiming) with rifles, but instead make the aim reticle take longer to narrow down.
- Flashlights. Sure, they need batteries, but they are lightweight and offer some of the best light sources in the game, along with it being concentrated light, rather than a simple radius (still present) around your character.
- Spears. They are the most basic, most primitive and easiest to make and source weapons. In their simplest form, they are nothing more than a sharpened stick. Yet they keep zombies at a really long distance due to their reach, deal adequate damage and can be literally made on a run, from an unlimited supply of tree branches. Break one or break a dozen? Doesn't matter. There are better and more reliable weapons, but none can compare to the sheer ubiquity and practicality of spears.
- Log walls, also known as stockades. They start at 400 HP and gain +50 per your Carpentry level, maxing out at 900. They require no skills to make them, barely any materials to build other than fallen trees and some rope (for which sheets and random rags will do). Neither wooden walls^note nor metal fences^note provide anything even remotely close to that level of protection and are very skill-sensitive to make them even worth building in the first place.
- Among firearms, a humble M9 Pistol is by far the best all-around weapon, despite being Master of None. It's the average of all its stats that makes it so great: 15-round mag (and having a mag in the first place), commonplace ammo, common weapon to find, and it's the 2nd most silent gun in the game. Loading and unloading its magazines, due to how common they and their ammo are, is also one of the easiest ways of training your Reloading skill. There are better, more flashy guns out there, but nothing comes close to the boring reliability of this weapon.
- In terms of cooking, soups and stews are this due to the fact that they accept pretty much any possible ingredient in the game, do not require the Survivor to read a magazine to be able to make them, and, in the case of soups, also provide a bonus to thirst.
- When it comes to armor, there are a few pieces that are available even to starting characters, yet have a decent chance of saving their life:
  - Denim and leather clothes give around 10-40% protection against scratches, and half that against bites, don't weigh as much as purpose-made armor, and cause no discomfort. Most notably, though, they can be easily looted from homes and zombies, making it trivial for the player to replace damaged armor.
  - Boots are unique in that they give you 100% protection against bites and scratches, massively reducing the damage you take from crawlers and lunging zombies. Hiking and military boots also have a huge bonus to stomping damage, allowing you to finish off downed zombies with ease. At the same time, they also don't weigh more than any other footwear, making them the best choice for any survivor.
  - Knee and elbow pads don't weigh much and cause little discomfort, all while providing a decent amount of protection to whatever limb they're put on. They can also withstand a fair bit of damage
  - Magazine armor makes the character near-immune to scratches and bites, especially when layered with other clothes, all while being craftable out of magazines and duct tape even at low Tailoring. Sure, it breaks in a single hit and comes apart when fully wet (whether from rain or sweat), but if you're playing with fatal infection toggled on, it's better to have your armor break than to be forced to pray to the Random Number God that you don't get infected.
- The Carving skill doesn't give you upgraded and/or high-powered weapons, armor, or the ability to build furniture and walls, but it allows you to create essential components and tools (such as handles for tools and weapons), and advancing to a high level allows you to create bats, which are solidly average weapons. Better yet, the only tool you need is a knife or a sharp stone (both being ubiquitous and easy to carry), and the only component needed for almost every recipe is a single plank at most (planks being easily acquired by sawing logs or deconstructing furniture).
Born Lucky: A currently-disabled trait as of B42. Picking it slightly increased the likelihood of valuable items spawning in containers and on zombies, and boosted repair success rolls.
Born Unlucky: Also a currently-disabled-in-B42 disadvantage, which made you find worse gear and have worse chances of repairing things.
Boulder Bludgeon: Build 42 introduces the ability to use small rocks as weapons. They unfortunately don't benefit from any skills, but are still miles better than your bare hands.
Breakable Weapons: All of your weapons have limited durability, becoming unusable once fully broken. Before that happens, you can repair it with various materials (tape, glue, and so on) for diminishing returns. Build 42 also introduces head and handle condition for some weapons, bladed weapons getting dull with use and needing to be sharpened, and the ability for broken weapons to remain partially usable, such as a broken baseball bat functioning as a one-handed club.
Break Out the Museum Piece: The Antique Oven is a 19th century-esque wood-burning oven and was one of the rarest ovens in the game before the map expansion added so many rural houses to steal them from. It also has several advantages over regular electric ovens such as not requiring access to power, never starting a fire and being able to keep a base warm.
Broomstick Quarterstaff: A broom counts as a long blunt weapon, with predictably awful damage and durability. It's best used for its intended purpose of cleaning, or turning into a spear instead.
Bulletproof Vest: It's possible to wear one, and it's very useful, providing a lot of protection to the torso (including full protection from bullets). Unfortunately, that's the extent of its coverage, and you can't repair it. With enough tailoring, you can take them apart to turn into arm and leg armor as well, making yourself a full set!
Burn the Undead: Zombies can be killed by conventional combat, but the bodies will continue to poison you until they decay (which takes at least a week to happen) or you get rid of them. Burial takes far too long if there are many corpses lying around, so a common alternative is dragging the bodies into a big pile and setting a fire in order to cremate them.
Cabin Fever: Exaggerated. You can get an unhappy moodlet if you stay inside any building for more than two days. It turns depressive after another three. Keep in mind that the mechanic doesn't account for what structure you are inside - while it makes sense in some underground shelter with scant lighting (which weren't even present until Build 42), you can also get it while sitting during a rainy day in a spacious, comfortable and secured mansion, because.
Call to Agriculture: Settling down on a farm and growing crops is not only a totally viable playstyle but is also highly encouraged as it is essential for long-term survival.
Car Fu: Cars are very effective against zombies, though they will eventually break.
Catch-22 Dilemma: One of the best ways to get gasoline is via fuel pumps at gas stations. To start the fuel pump once the power is out, you need a generator. To fuel up the generator, you need gasoline. The normal solution is to siphon some gas from a car in order to jumpstart the pump.
Catch Your Death of Cold: Characters can contract the cold if they're soaking wet for long enough (whether from rain or sweating), or by staying out in very cold weather for long enough. Even if a cold clears quickly, it's a pain in the backside to handle, because all that coughing and sneezing will gather a whole bunch of zombies on you. One challenge even has you start with a nasty cold, on top of a bad wound, your house on fire, and all in the dead of winter.
Character Customization: With twenty occupations, more than fifty traits (positive and negative), and twenty skills to train and use in-game, you've got a lot of room to make characters that play very differently from one another. Maybe you can't even run to the end of the block without needing to catch your breath, but you can read how-to books in half the time and don't need to eat much. Specialization is encouraged by most skills being very slow to train unless you get an XP multiplier on them from somewhere.
Charged Attack: Melee weapons gain an increase in Critical Hit chance if you wait for 2 seconds in the combat stance without making an attack.
Chef of Iron: It is possible for the Survivor to be a former cook which provides a bonus to the cooking skill.
Chubby Chef: An overweight/obese Survivor with the Chef or Burger Flipper occupation is this.
Cigarette of Anxiety:
- Smoking is a cheap and easy way to get rid of stress. Smokers can also relieve unhappiness with it, though being a smoker itself can cause stress and unhappiness if the addiction is not indulged.
- Cigars have the unique quality of being able to reduce unhappiness even for non-smokers.
Civilization Destroyer: The Knox Infection once it spreads beyond Knox County. In a matter of less than three weeks it wipes out billions of people, leaving alive only a few small groups of immune (to the airborne strain of the virus) survivors across the world.
Comfort Food: Certain foods such as sweets, junk food and meals cooked from various fresh ingredients help to relieve unhappiness and boredom much better than fulfilling actual hunger.
Commonplace Rare:
- You'd be surprised how rare toolboxes and their contents are, despite going house to house searching for them.
- Charcoal grills are pretty rare in some areas, especially given the setting itself (a predominately rural and suburbian county somewhere in Kentucky).
- There is only a small handful of wells across said rural area and even fewer water pumps. Of course, all of this is done for the sake of game balance, as they provide effectively infinite amounts of clean water (though some wells might be tainted).
- 1993 statistics suggest that 40-50% of American households had a gun, and Kentucky, especially its rural parts (where most of the game takes place), would have even more gun owners. In-game, guns are surprisingly rare at default settings, as it's more like 5-10% of households having a gun, and civilian zombies have an incredibly low chance of carrying a gun.
- The only way to get a hands-free light source is to procure an angle-headed flashlight (a rare item), then find an ALICE belt and suspenders (an extremely rare item) and put the flashlight on one of the webbing slots. It's not possible to craft your own flashlight holder, nor a headlamp.
- Sledgehammers are absurdly rare due to their ability to break down walls, to the point that there's a meme about how everybody threw their sledgehammers into the Ohio River before the game started. If you don't want to drive across the entire map in searches of one, you'll likely only obtain a sledgehammer by forging it from a steel ingot.
- Certain items, such as rake heads, railroad spikes, and circular sawblades, can be used to upgrade melee weapons. However, you're not allowed to forge them, no matter how good of a blacksmith you are.
- Cleaning liquid and bleach, which are used to clean walls and floors, are surprisingly rare in houses. It's not even justified by balance reasons, as there's no gameplay reason to clean up your safehouse.
Compromising Call: Radio communication will make noise that alerts zombies, so it's possible for one player to accidentally get another killed by transmitting a message as they're sneaking by a horde of zombies. Fortunately, it's possible to use earbuds or headphones to avoid attracting attention.
Conditioned to Accept Horror: Survivors who are former war veterans are completely immune to becoming panicked. In addition, with every passing month all Survivors grow increasingly desensitized to zombies (the panic reduction peaks at around 5 in-game months) meaning that it will take many more zombies to make them panic.
Constantly Lactating Cow: After they were added in build 42, cows (and sheep) are giving milk all year long, no matter what. In fact, they can (temporarily) stop lactating only if they aren't milked for five or more days.
- However, this was later updated to require the animal to be pregnant.
Continuing Is Painful:
- If your character dies, you can begin another on the same map - without any skills or inventory, at a random point on the map.
- You might end up getting attacked by your dead characters, if said world is not deleted.
Conveniently Empty Roads:
- There are some car wrecks here and there but for the most part the roads in Knox County are mostly empty. Justified, as most of the people in Knox County are dead or have turned into zombies.
- There is an actual world generation setting for this purpose exactly - no wreckage or unusable cars will ever spawn on any roads, offering a free ride for as long as the road itself holds prior to being overgrown by vegetation (which can be disabled, too).
Cooking Mechanics:
- The game features a wide variety of food and drinks. In addition, the game features the ability to use various ingredients to cook a large variety of meals such as soups, stews, stir-fries, cakes, pies, sandwiches, burgers, tacos, sushi, fruit/vegetable salads, pancakes, muffins, onion rings, fried shrimp, pickled vegetables, omelettes, pasta, rice and more.
- Update 41.72 has added the ability to make onigiri, baguettes, biscuits, cookies, toast (including avocado toast), grilled cheese, pizza and sweet pies. It is now also possible to mix various drinks to make cocktails.
- Some mods take this even further by adding additional recipes such as baked potatoes, fries, corndogs, sundaes, waffles, sauerkraut, kimchi, lemonade, kvas, wine, moonshine, pickles, dried meats, fish and fruit. In fact, one of the most popular mods, Gourmet Revolution, is dedicated entirely to expanding food variety, both in terms of ingredients and what sort of recipes you can get, adding massive variety to both and also offering new means to preserve food.
Cool, but Inefficient: A variety of starting traits aren't worth the absurdly steep cost of getting them, even if their bonuses are on paper very useful:
- Brave, at 4 points, makes your character 30% less likely to panic. Or you can simply survive for two months and gain similar results free of charge. Once a year has passed this trait does nothing, as the player character gradually gets desensitized to the game's horrors, which eventually disables panic mechanics entirely.
- Iron Gut, at 3 points, offers the player a 50% chance of resisting food poisoning. A chance. Have you tried not eating stale or rotten food instead?
- Resilient, at 4 points, decreases your chances of catching cold. Or you could just wear warm, dry clothes and have a sufficient fuel supply to keep you warm over the winter, eliminating the risk of being ill in the first place. It has an additional effect of decreasing zombification progress by 75%, but There Is No Cure, meaning you die about a day later when catching The Virus. You're just kicking the can down the road at that point.
- Stout (6 points), on its own, is pretty good, giving +2 Strength... except Strong (10 points) exists, making it tempting (+4 Strength and 40% bash increase) to just go all in for an even stronger character and the additional effect of the better trait. This becomes even more important in Build 42, which introduced muscle strain and fatigue effects, meaning Strong is very pricey but significantly more potent than the already expensive Stout.
- On similar logic, First Aider (4 points), because there is Former Scout (6 points), which on top of (a rather questionable) bonus to First Aid skill, offers also +1 Foraging and, more importantly, additional results when using said foraging skill.
- Amateur Mechanic, when taken as a separate trait vs. being a Mechanic by occupation. It costs 5 points and allows the player to perform repairs without needing to read the manual first. On the whole, it's probably worth saving the points and hunting around for the manuals. Downplayed when combined with the Illiterate trait, but even then it's not a particularly efficient character build.
  - Later updates lowered the trait's cost to 3 points, making it easier to slot into a build.
- There used to be a Hardened Drinker trait, which offered a slower increase of the drunkenness stat when drinking alcohol. It cost 3 points, and had no other application than roleplaying.
- Outside of the perk system, raising livestock other than poultry is pretty much pointless. Animals have real-time pregnancy and growth system. Meaning that sheep of yours is going to mature and be worth butchering in about a year, providing meat that's going to last two weeks (ironically this makes killing a newborn lamb far more effective, even if it gives less meat per animal). Not even rabbits mate fast enough to make this worthwhile. Chickens and turkeys at least provide eggs on a regular basis outside of butchering the animal, which does affect long-term survival far more than trying to run a ranch.
  - However, larger animals do produce milk, which on top of being used in a variety of recipes can now be churned into butter. Butter is an extremely calorie-dense food, so a character whose weight is getting low can add it to a meal for a calorie boost... or just eat the whole stick as-is.
  - Sheep provide wool that can be spun to thread, a vital resource for Tailoring. The latter is especially useful at high levels, as it allows perfect restoration of most clothes. The alternative - growing and processing Flax - is much more time & resource intensive.
Cool, Clear Water: Zig-Zagged. You can drink water directly from lakes and rivers but doing so can make the Survivor sick and may even result in death. Therefore, it's essential to boil water to make it safe to drink. On the other hand, if water is labelled as clear, it will stay as such indefinitely and won't evaporate, either. Build 42 further made clean water a rarity, as even wells no longer provide it once the waterworks get turned off.
Cosy Catastrophe: Zig-zagged, much like any zombie apocalypse. Surviving the first few days is easy enough if you just avoid zombies and go for easier food sources. It gets worse after a few months, when you've exhausted pre-existing food supplies, then the electricity and water cut off. But if you manage to survive several months, to the point you've got yourself a self-sustaining base and you're growing your own crops, you're pretty well set to keep going indefinitely.
Cowardly Lion: It is possible for the Survivor to have the "Cowardly" trait which increases the panic gain from seeing zombies. The trope is played straight in that this doesn't prevent the survivor from fighting large groups of zombies if such need arises. However, it must be noted that panic will significantly decrease the damage and accuracy of the Survivor's attacks.
Crapsack World: And not just for your character. The game is unwinnable by design: "These are the end-times. There was no hope of survival. This is how you died." At least you can't say you weren't warned.
- After the "Erosion" mod was incorporated into the game, the sack gets even crappier as time passes, with weeds growing, walls cracking, and pavement flaking gradually.
Crazy Survivalist: The raiders in the tech demo. You can be this as well.
Creepy Basement: One of the basements contains a cage with a bucket inside, the implication being that the home's owner planned to kidnap somebody.
Crippling Overspecialization: Certain occupations are really, really good in one, specific thing... and not much, or nothing else. This is especially prominent with stuff like Electrician, Farmer, Mechanic, Tailor and Welder, as they start with relatively high (4-5 point on a 0-10 scale, which also offers massive bonus to experience gain) skill of their trade... and virtually nothing else.
Critical Encumbrance Failure: Averted. While reaching your maximum weight capacity with only a few grams of nails can lower your stamina effectively, the actual weight limit where you literally start breaking your back is roughly double that weight.
Critical Existence Failure: Averted, as sufficient health loss will reduce your carrying capacity, and injury to the limbs will impair any action with them. The pain will further penalize your speed and combat ability, and it's also possible to suffer a fracture that gives you a big penalty until it heals.
Critical Hit:
- Most weapons have a chance of scoring a critical hit, which knocks down the target and either applies a weapon-dependent multiplier to the damage inflicted (most weapons), or kills the target instantly (spears and short blades). The strike will also be extra fast.
- If you suffer a bleeding wound to the neck, whether from a zombie or another player, the health loss will be so fast that you'll likely die within a minute of real time if you don't bandage it.
- Data-mining revealed booting downed zombies is almost entirely up to luck, thanks to a strong case of Hitbox Dissonance. It might take a stomp or two, or it might take a dozen, with absolutely nothing affecting the hit chance itself, therefore making heavy boots ultimately pointless (they only affect damage output, not hit chance).
Critical Status Buff: The Adrenaline Junkie trait makes you move faster when your panic is high
Crowbar Combatant: Until the pick-up and place modes for furnishings were added, crowbars actually had no use besides combat. Now they can also be used for stockpiling floor tiles, as well as prying open barricaded doors and windows and they still make pretty good head-bashers, especially since they're the most durable weapon in the game.
Crutch Character:
- Spears are pretty powerful at the start of the game, as they have high damage and reach for something you can make out of wood with no skill, and their ability to deliver a One-Hit Kill allows them to be useful to characters who are suffering from severe damage penalties due to being easily tired (due to poor Fitness, which will eventually improve over the course of the game) or panicked (which will eventually subside as days go on). As you improve your skills and become capable of crafting other weapons, however, their downsides become apparent — no way to get an XP boost with a skill book (like Long Blade) or traits and professions (like Short/Long Blunt, Short Blade, and Axe), poor durability, lower damage than axes and upgraded Long Blunt weapons, severe damage penalties when wielded one-handed, a Critical Hit animation that leaves you unable to move and vulnerable to a bite, and poor crafting progression between early game and late game, as you start with carved spears and sticks with blades attached to them, which demand no skills to craft, then jump to garden forks, which demand Blacksmithing 8 to craft and Blacksmithing 10 to auto-learn.
- The crowbar has an absurdly long durability, with an untrained character needing over a thousand hits to break it, making at a great choice when you have few crafting options and haven't yet accumulated a surplus of weapons. Eventually, however, you'll improve your crafting skills and gain access to maces and upgraded baseball bats, which have higher damage, Critical Hit rate and critical damage, along the ability to be crafted without blacksmithing.
- The Veteran when compared to the Police Officer, as the Veteran's main advantage is being able to ignore all panic, which decreases the damage you do and makes it much harder to hit with guns. However, the Police Officer starts with more character creation points, noticeably higher Aiming (giving them a slightly better XP boost than the Veteran) and +1 to the Nimble skill (one of the most valuable skills due to allowing you to move faster in combat stance, but also the slowest to raise, so the 4x XP boost is extremely useful). As your panic reduction improves as time goes on, eventually making you near-immune to panic and thus rendering the Veteran's trait practically pointless, being a Police Officer is much better for long-term survival. There's also the fact that reaching Aiming 6 makes it so that panic doesn't impact your hit chance with guns, even if you still suffer the damage penalty, and the Police Officer can reach that point surprisingly soon if they can acquire the right skill book .
  - Build 42 boosts the Veteran trait by letting them altogether ignore the discomfort of wearing armor, a long term benefit exclusive to the occupation.
Cursed with Awesome: Certain clearly negative traits either aren't really that negative, can be worked around, or actually provide a buff or a synergy with other traits, while always giving back handful of points to invest into useful stuff:
- Short Sighted is effectively 2 free points, as long as you remember to wear glasses and carry spare ones. And even then, it is entirely possible to simply shrug off the effects of this trait, while enjoying the points it gives. On top of that, 2 points is the cost of the highly useful, but otherwise hard to afford Cat's Eyes trait, so at the end of the day, you might see a bit shorter, but far better at night.
  - There are niche penalties to Short Sighted at time of writing, like blurred vision if your glasses get knocked off by an attacking zombie. This also prevents your character from wearing full-face helmets or gas masks without affecting their eyesight, but it's still a pretty competitive drawback.
- Slow Reader in single player had only one consideration prior: do you want to fully milk Life and Living TV show or not. With build 42 nerfing the TV-learning, there is absolutely no downside to reading skill books slower, because you have all the time in what's left of your character's life.
- Weak Stomach (3 points) and High Thirst (1) are a duo of traits that can be combated by not eating raw or rotten food and having a basic water supply set up. You know, surviving 101.
- Cowardly. Your panic increase - from all sources - is doubled. But over time, your character becomes progressively more desensitised, making panic moot. On top of that, it does synergise with Adrenaline Junkie, which massively increases your speed when in panic, so you can simply run away from the thing that causes the panic attack. But what it does best is being a sonar-like ability: you don't need to see zombies to suddenly get a panic moodlet from their presence.
- Slow Healer decrease your healing rate quite substantially. However, 19 out of 20 death causes is being Eaten Alive, so it's hardly an issue during that rare occasion when you get out of a tight spot and need to get back into shape.
- Smoker, to the point the game reaches Smoking Is Cool. Cigarettes are one of the few things that will never run out, since they randomly spawn on zombies. Puffing a cig allows your character to de-stress almost instantly and removes the unhappiness moodlet. And on top of that, you get 4 points for picking this. It could only theoretically work as a bad trait if there was a finite amount of cigarettes in the game and no way of making more (which mods cover anyway). Because smoking allows to de-stress, it allows to pick other traits that increase stress gain - like Fear of Blood (5 point). Sure, you are going to be covered in gore and guts.... but you can be smoking in the process, which makes it moot. This combination nets 9 points, more than the default starting value, for no real downside of any kind and a nifty anti-stress mechanic.
  - Build 42 nerfed Smoker down to just two points, making it much less powerful a choice, and smoking can also give your character a hacking cough, which makes lighting up near zombies a bit more of a health hazard than regular smoking already is.
- Prone to Illness is 3 points and predominately governs the rate of zombification, which will kill your character a few hours earlier. Its other element is about catching cold... except Outdoorsman/Outdoorsy (at -2 points) not only negates the effect, but also gives you few other bonuses. You now have 2 points still to spare.
- Prior to being disabled, both Overweight (6 points) and Obese (10 points) could be shrugged off by simply starving yourself and doing basic activities. Obese can go down to Overweight in less than a week if one is pursuing that goal, and it's very easy to just stay away from danger for the duration. Unlike other Fitness-related debuffs, those two did not have persisting negative effects, meaning the starting massive hindrance of being severely overweight could eventually be completely shrugged off. In certain self-imposed challenges and scenarios, it was extra beneficial, because there was nothing but your own body fat tissue as a source of calories for the first month or so.
- Pre-build 42, Conspicuous was 4 free points, because being within zombies line of sight meant they spotted your character, period. So the fact that the mechanic not used in the game triggered twice as much made is a non-issue. However, after build 42 reworked stealth and detection, this trait became a genuine hindrance.
- Before its removal, Hypochondriac was a zero-downside trait. Sure, your character was constantly stressed due to being convinced they've got infected and showed the related moodlet... but it didn't matter. As long as you didn't have bites or lacerations, it was guaranteed fake, and even then, if you were infected for real, you simply died, making it a completely harmless.
- The Slow Metabolism trait, introduced in Build 42, reduces the calorie threshold to gain weight, and also gives you -1 fitness due to starting out with High Weight. So long as you can deal with the Fitness penalty and bring your weight down to normal, however, it's a boon when it comes to long-term survival, as it makes it so much easier to recover from starvation.
Cyanide Pill: Bleach. Drinking bleach is guaranteed to kill the Survivor and is pretty much the only way to commit suicide without the use of mods.
Cycle of Hurting: Getting attacked by a zombie will stun you for a few seconds, even if you take no damage or successfully push it away. If you're beset by 2-3 zombies, as such, it's possible to get stunlocked until you die.
Darkness Equals Death: At night or in dark areas your cone of vision is narrowed, making it much more likely for you to be jumped by a zombie. Note that this penalty stacks with the "Tired" moodle which can drop your vision down to something like 20 degrees.
Damage Over Time: There are many sources of such damage:
- Bleeding is caused by having an untreated scratch, laceration, bite, or deep wound. A single wound usually only kills in a few in-game hours, but a Slashed Throat demands immediate medical attention.
- Hunger and thirst will start doing damage once they reach their worst level.
- Extreme heat and extreme cold will damage you to a small amount of Hit Points, but they won't directly kill you.
- Sickness is caused by corpse sickness, eating rotten or poisoned food, drinking tainted water, and smoking cigarettes as a non-smoker.
- Carbon monoxide poisoning is caused by running a generator indoors (something that the item's description warns you against). It's not lethal, but it will decrease your Hit Points to 5%, making it likely that any wound you suffer will be fatal.
Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Build 42 is easily the biggest single-package overhaul the game has seen in a years, reworking a variety of mechanics, changing long-stay meta strategies and adding a new, additional subsystem. On top of that, not all of them are adjustable in the game settings, meaning they are permanent changes to the gameplay. Possibly the biggest change is the alternation of zombie detection and distribution, along with human stealth mechanics, which is a major change to basic, day-to-day survival and can take out even the most veteran players by surprise, while also make them fumble their moves due to being used to the old mechanics.
The Dead Have Eyes: Despite being walking corpses zombies can still see you, so staying out of their line-of-sight is important. Downplayed, as zombies can't see as far as the average survivor. Their sight also deteriorates over time.
The Dead Have Names: Zombies will occasionally drop items tagged with their name, such as diaries or ID cards.
Deadly Lunge: Zombies that climb a waist-high obstacle (by falling over it) will often respond to nearby players by immediately lunging at them, stunning them for a few seconds. This is intended to add an element of risk for players who exploit fences and windows for free kills on downed zombies, and can be turned off in sandbox settings.
Deadly Scratch: Scratches and lacerations from zombies have a 7% and 25% chance to transmit the Knox Virus infection (unless transmission is set to "saliva only"), and There Is No Cure once a survivor becomes a Zombie Infectee.
Death by Falling Over: Tripping while climbing fences, running through zombies, or going through trees will often cause you to suffer a scratch. Failing to bandage the wound, especially if it's on the neck, can easily result in death by clumsiness.
Death by Irony: Dean Porch is a former soldier who hosts the Exposure Survival program, which teaches you various survival-related skills, and he's also the writer for a few books about Fishing, Foraging, and Trapping. The Zombie Apocalypse seems like the perfect situation to use his survival and military skills in, and you can even find his camp in the woods of Knox Country, yet he has succumbed to the infection, likely due to not being immune to the airborne strain.
Debug Room: Across the Ohio River, the eastern side of it has the RJ's Void, which is just a stone floor that counts as a road for foraging purposes, and the Tile Graveyard, which contains every tile used elsewhere in the game, including separated parts of multi-tile objects. While you're not meant to find them in normal gameplay, it's still possible to do so by building an extremely long bridge across the river.
Defog of War: The darkness of night can make exploration extremely hazardous, especially indoors after the power goes out. There are various solutions for raising light levels, both stationary and portable, ranging from cigarette lighters to jury-rigged lampposts. Another example of defog would be taking beta blocker pills to counteract the loss of peripheral vision that comes with panic.
Diegetic Interface:
- The world map is meant to be an actual item that your character carries, as it requires writing implements to make markings on and an eraser to remove markings, illiteracy prevents you from reading or writing text, and, by default, you can't access it in the dark.
- You can only see the current time if you wear a wrist watch. If you also want to see the current date and temperature, you need a digital watch (the only one displaying such information).
Difficult, but Awesome:
- There are a variety of traits that change the way the game is played or decrease the usefulness of certain mechanics and meta strategies, making it much harder to survive. However, learning how to play around of those or even openly embracing the extra challenge offers additional character points and can flavour the gameplay significantly beyond the "vanilla" experience. There is also a clear difference between things like, say, Cowardly or Pacifist, and the Self-Imposed Challenge of playing as an Illiterate or Obese survivor.
- Making proper use of sound triggers, like firecrackers or alarm clocks. It looks easy, but due to the way how detection and swarming mechanics operate, it takes some getting used to it (doubly so since Build 42 changed related mechanics, adding muscle memory to the difficulty) to make the most of it. But done right, it's exceedingly satisfying to get an entire horde off your tail or clean a whole neighbourhood from danger, concentrating zombies in a single area (which, depending on how you play, might be either a great or fatal thing).
Disability Superpower: Downplayed. Being deaf means your character can't hear anything, including stuff like alarms, the helicopter or similar, but picking this trait during char-gen offers 12 character points. Nothing comes even close to this value. That's enough to pick a wide variety of expensive traits and rank up various stats, offering a significant buff, both short- and long-term. Done right, deaf characters are absolute juggernauts, but it also requires extensive knowledge of game rules.
Disaster Scavengers: You, unless you go far out of your way to only subsist off of nature. While the key to sustainable living lies in weaning yourself off of modern convenience, you'll still want modern tools, instruction manuals and non-perishable resources if you want to give yourself the best chance at survival.
Disposable Woman: Kate Smith, the demo character's wife, can survive the scenario (and, in fact, be perfectly fine aside from the leg injury), depending on the player's actions... but plays no further role in the story either way.
Deadline News: With the addition of radio and TV reports this became inevitable. Kentucky News Radio broadcasts this twice, once when the quarantine is overrun by thousands of undead, a second time when the station is attacked directly.
Deadly Gas: The air becomes one partway through, as the Knox Infestation develops an airborne strain alongside the original saliva-spread variant. At this point, the only ones who can survive are The Immune like your player characters, but even then there are no immunities against the original variant.
Deconstruction: Of the typical Zombie Apocalypse Power Fantasy that is so common in other zombie media. Project Zomboid asks “if you took away all the romanticism and wish-fulfillment fantasy of fighting zombies, what would the actual reality of the zombie apocalypse be?”
- You’re not playing as anybody notable or special, you’re just another random person in the world who will die in the apocalypse.
- Project Zomboid does everything in its power to remind you that this isn’t a story of your survival, but your death. “This is How You Died” is the tagline you see every time you start playing the game, the game lets it be known that survival is temporary, and your character will die no matter what. There is no “grand victory”.
- While other zombie games are mostly combat focused and see you mowing down hordes of the undead like a badass, Zomboid focuses on survival first. Combat is brutal, you’re fragile and vulnerable, and one mistake can lead to your guaranteed death. You’re discouraged from being a zombie massacring action hero all the time.
- A bulk of the game is the mundane stuff. Reading, watching TV, tailoring, building, cooking, fishing, or farming, all of this is suddenly cozy in such a harsh environment. And becomes the core of the gameplay loop even over fighting zombies. Survival is about maintaining and routine, not heroics.
Developer's Foresight:
- In the demo scenario, leaving the oven on while you run off to listen to the radio will result in your house burning down.
- Merely nailing boards over a window does not block all visibility through it, you need to cover up the gaps with either a curtain or a sheet.
- Water can be drawn from anything with a tap (kitchen sink, bathtub, etc.) and can be stored in any empty container, be it a plastic bottle or a cooking pot.
- Running water can be supplied even after the waterworks are shut off by building a rain catcher directly over a sink^note.
- You can die from consuming sleeping pills with alcohol.
- Illiterate characters, obviously, can't read magazines. However, because the whole point of HottieZ is erotica, they can still look at the pictures to gain the same benefits as reading it.
Devoured by the Horde: Zig-zagged. Because zombies tend to gather into groups and are attracted by noises, there's a good chance that you will die via a horde cornering you, especially if you're trapped in a building and can't escape. However, by default an infected player reanimates with a few in-game minutes, in practice the zombies will only spend a few moments chewing on your corpse before you stand up and join the horde.
Do Not Run with a Gun: Shoving or aiming a weapon (melee or ranged) forces you into a slow walk (though the Nimble skill will speed you up), and you can't attack without aiming. Making a melee attack against a downed opponent, meanwhile, does not allow you to move at all.
Does Not Like Spam: Eating a cooked frozen meal has an unhappiness value -18 meaning that it is almost as depressing for the Survivor as eating a raw cockroach (which has an unhappiness value of -20).
Downer Beginning: You start off the demo scenario with your things stolen, no food, a wife with a broken leg, and zombies everywhere.
Downer Ending: Since the game is endless and character aging is not implemented, there's no chance of rescue or a game win screen; you are supposed to die of unnatural causes eventually, and only then will the game truly end, fulfilling the "This is how you died" premise. Even if you manage to "win" the game by establishing a safe and sustainable base and survive for several months or even years into a Cosy Catastrophe, it's only a stalemate. The overwhelming majority of people are dead and any semblance of civilized society is gone for a very long time if not forever.
Dramatic Slip: You can trip while running by bumping into too many zombies at once, or by getting unlucky while vaulting fences or going through trees. It can easily get you swarmed by zombies, and if you suffer an injury while falling, you might bleed out or become incapable of running.
Draw Aggro: You can shout in order to attract the attention of zombies. It's often used while clearing an area, luring zombies outside of buildings (as fighting indoors is riskier), taking zombies away from a location, or saving allies who are beset upon by a horde. You can also equip a whistle or megaphone to make a lot more noise, or crouch in order to whisper instead of shouting. And of course there are ways to draw aggro without being there, by things like cooking timers, alarm clocks or firecrackers, which can be used either as a distraction to sneak past a heavily infested area or a way to get out of a siege situation. Electricians can further weaponise it with automated, remote systems and even home-made bombs.
The Dreaded: The infamous helicopter. It's single-handedly the biggest killer of people who survived the first two weeks of the game and the greatest risk for your base even if you survive the event itself.
Dressed in Layers: It is possible to wear multiple layers of clothing, which comes with its advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, wearing several layers of clothing offers better protection from being bitten and scratched by zombies as well as helping you stay warm during winter. On the other, this increases the chance of the survivor sweating and even overheating.
Driven to Suicide:
- Implied in several house events. It is possible to stumble upon a couple of non-zombified corpses with a loaded pistol laying on the floor nearby, or a non-zombified corpse surrounded by empty bottles of alcohol.
- The Survivor can play the trope straight by drinking bleach, drinking alcohol with sleeping pills, jumping off a high building, walking into a fire, crashing their car at full speed or simply letting the zombies devour them.
Drowning My Sorrows: One of the ways to get rid of unhappiness is to drink some alcohol, although you may need several bottles to deal with serious depression.
Drunk Driver: Even with traffic laws no longer being a thing, drunk driving is still a good way to die in a car accident, as severe drunkenness will cause your driving controls to be delayed.
Dumpster Dive: Trash containers primarily contain useless or low-value items, such as scrap metal, partially eaten rotten food (mainly useful for composting), insects, and heavily damaged weapons, but you may occasionally find useful gems, such as skill books or fishing supplies.
Dying as Yourself: As long as you die without being bitten or get killed by an explosion, you won't reanimate.
Dying Moment of Awesome: The game is littered with these. Knowing that you're infected and running out onto the street to die in a blaze of glory are fun parts of the game.
Early Game Hell: Played With. On one hand, supplies are at their peak, services are still on (even the TV) and you can survive for the first week or so just eating looted sandwiches people made for themselves. At the same time, your survivor has no experience surviving in an apocalypse, and aside from some hobby knowledge and occupational training has little in the way of practical skills. While supplies are plentiful, you must first get them for yourself and secure some position before there are hordes everywhere. Can also occur by various pre-set conditions, which will make early game significantly harder, with or without the option it will get easier later on.
Eaten Alive: What happens to a Survivor if they get dragged down by the zombies.
Elaborate Underground Base: Build 42 added underground elements. Those range from simple basements to staggering, multi-level complexes. The biggest one is located under the pre-existing Rosewood secret military base. The surface of the complex is completely dwarfed by the underground element, located twelve levels below (hope you character can endure stairs, especially when getting out of it). The complex is the size of a small town, containing a military depot and an extensive research facility with labs and a med bay, and an abundant amount of supplies and ammunition. It is also completely overcrowded by its former staff, appearing in the hundreds even with the low spawning sliders, making it a massive undertaking to clear it out in single player - and if one somehow manages that, then there is the issue of removing all the rotting bodies.
Elemental Crafting: In blacksmithing, iron is used for most crafting purposes, while steel is mandatory for high-tier weapons and armor. It's also possible to use steel to substitute for iron, but that's a real waste.
Emergency Broadcast: There are hourly automated emergency broadcasts you can tune into via radios if you find the frequency (be it by luck or finding a radio already tuned to it). Mostly they serve to give you the forecast for today and tomorrow's weather, along with a warning for rougher weather like heavy thunderstorms within the next week or so. But it can also tip you off to the Helicopter arriving that day, and forecasts power and water going out. Finding the emergency broadcast frequency early can save your life. It also serves to occasionally broadcast cryptic messages about suspicious activity or communication failures in the 'exclusion zone', but these seem to have no impact on the game right now aside from flavor.
Empty Room Psych:
- Occasionally, you will find a garage, shipping container, or something that has no windows or doors you can open the easy or hard way. If you come along with a sledgehammer, however, you'll be able to crack that baby open and find the sweet shelves and crates inside. Just don't expect them to hold loot any better than the other random loot you've found everywhere else. Except for the West Point gun shop.
- The southern and far-eastern sides of the map have nothing but a forest, with roads stopping in the middle of nowhere when you enter them. They're presumably meant to be completed later on, and mods occasionally use them as a way to add in new locations to Knox Country.
- The other side of the Ohio River is primarily an empty plain, since you're not meant to be there, though there's a small forest and a dirt shore in the center, and the eastern side is a Debug Room.
Endless Game: The game doesn't end until you die. In some early releases the game was not technically endless because you could not keep yourself fed and hydrated without scavenging, and theoretically you could strip the entire map (although the size of the map made this an unlikely feat). However, now that food can come from farming, fishing, foraging, hunting and trapping, and water can come from rain-catching and boiling groundwater, setting up a lifestyle that is well-protected and fully self-sustainable is entirely feasible.
End of an Age: No matter how much the player tries to preserve it, modern civilization is gone for good. Nearly all of the modern items you find in the game do not replenish, meaning that they will inevitably disappear once you play long enough. Those that survive the apocalypse will invariably be forced back to a simpler lifestyle and the gear that the player can create with blacksmithing effectively reverts them back to the Middle Ages with swords and metal armor, not mentioning the various bone and stone tools that can be crafted.
Equipment-Based Progression: Zomboid does not play this as straight as "you need this item to advance to the next act of the plot", because there is no plot. Nevertheless, certain tools act as "gatekeepers" for segments of gameplay. You need a screwdriver for electronics and gun modding; a fishing rod to fish; a trowel to plow for farming; and an axe, saw, and hammer to take full advantage of Carpentry. The straightest use of the trope would be the sledgehammer, as there are some structures that simply cannot be looted unless you can destroy one of the walls.
Even the Rats Won't Touch It: While stale food can be used as bait for traps, it is impossible to use rotten food for that purpose.
Every Pizza Is Pepperoni: The pizza's 3D model is always depicted as having pepperonis on it even if no pepperonis were used to make the pizza.
Everything Fades:
- Bodies will remain on the map until they gradually decay, leaving skeletons behind before vanishing altogether after weeks.
- Loose items left on the ground for more than a couple of in-game days will be deleted if no players are around.
Exact Words: Hearty Appetite's description says "Needs to eat more regularly". It doesn't say you are actually hungry. This trait can quickly lead to being overweight, because your character is hungry without really needing to eat, and without knowing how the game mechanics work, it is very easily to pig out on your supply despite consuming 4/3 of the calories you actually need.
Failure Is the Only Option: Like Dwarf Fortress and many other survival games, you already lost the game by the time you played it. Since the game is endless, there is no hope of any rescue and you will die eventually, despite your best efforts.
Fallout Shelter Fail:
- The Brandenburg shelter, meant as a refuge in the event of natural disaster or an enemy invasion (even though the Cold War has ended), is ironically considered to be one of the worst shelters in the game. This is due to only having a single exit (making it easy for zombies to block your means of escape), the benches having poor sleep quality, the storage room only having food, which will only last for a few days, and the shelter overall not having much space to build in.
- You may occasionally encounter safehouses made by other survivors. Despite being completely barricaded and with all doors and windows intact, however, all the inhabitants are zombified, likely due to somebody falling victim to the airborne infection.
Fast-Forward Mechanic: Like The Sims, the in-game speed can be sped up to 2 or 3-times speed, allowing players to perform long-term actions like reading a book or exercising without having to sit through the entire process. There's even an in-game option to resume normal time once a timed action is completed, preventing you from accidentally overshooting the process. Time also automatically passes more quickly while you're sleeping.
Fatal Fireworks: Americans in northern states might have been excited by the prospect of exploiting Kentucky's more lax pyrotechnics laws, but alas there are only sparklers and firecrackers available. (Non-American readers, see the other wiki for details of terminology and regulation.) And if you happen to be of the Engineer profession, those sparklers can become the fuses of incendiary bombs, with hairspray as the fuel.
Fat Idiot: A Survivor with the "obese", "slow learner" and "illiterate" traits is this.
Fishing Minigame: Build 42 adds a rudimentary fishing minigame about tackling your catch and even selecting the right spot to toss the line. Compared with the previous "use fishing rod next to a body of water and simply wait" system, it's still a leap in terms of complexity. Unfortunately, this change removed spear fishing from the game.
Finishing Stomp: Stomping on a downed zombie is a viable method to killing them especially if you target the head, although it may take a few stomps to put one down.
Fire Keeps It Dead: There's a chance for corpses of killed zombies to be "fake dead", meaning that zombies that have been killed by the Survivor can rise up from the dead once again as they progress through decay stages. Burning their bodies to ash is one way for them to never come back, since it destroys the body.
Fitness Nut: A possible starting combination, with perks focusing on increasing strength and cardio (and bordering on Dumb Muscle due to the heavy specialisation required). Despite its apparent weaknesses, it is an extremely efficient build for easy survival, outrunning the horde or even facing it head-on with a baseball bat, starting with very high values in very hard and slow to raise stats and making long-term survival easier.
Fishing for Sole: Socks and shoes are two of the trash items the player can catch while fishing. If you're a bit luckier, you can also catch glass bottles, dirty rags, tin cans, and broken fishing nets, which at least have some degree of use to an established player, such as fishing nets being one of the few renewable sources of wire.
Fishing Minigame: A fairly standard one where you have to cast the line onto a fishing spot (indicated by waves on water) and wait until the fish catches your bait. Once it does, you have to reel in your line while making sure that the tension doesn't reach the yellow or red zone, waiting for a few seconds if it gets too high or even unreeling it if it fails to go down (usually due to the fish struggling).
Flipping the Bird: The "Insult" gesture will have you perform a bras d'honneur, which pretty much has the same meaning as flipping the bird.
Fog of War: Zomboid uses a sophisticated line-of-sight lighting system to prevent the bird's-eye view of the action from being an unrealistic advantage. The sense of hearing is subtly accounted for, but nonetheless the profusion of opaque obstructions inside buildings—to say nothing of a dense forest—adds to the suspense considerably. Especially at night, which is almost totally pitch-black in newer versions of the game.
The Food Poisoning Incident: Eating rotten/burnt food, raw meat/fish and unknown berries or mushrooms will make a Survivor sick and can potentially result in death.
Foregone Conclusion: There's a reason the game's tagline is "This is how you died" - there is literally no win condition. You may be able to establish a fortified base with entirely self-sufficient food, water and defenses, but inevitably you will die. However, most experienced runs end thanks to means other than the obvious prospect of the horde managing to kill you.
Fork Fencing: Flatware is always available to drive into zombie eye sockets, if you dare to get that close. Just don't expect to get more than one shot with any given fork, unless you retool it into a Sinister Shiv.
From Bad to Worse: As if fighting off zombies isn't bad enough, there are events in the game that sees the situation deteriorate further and your chances of survival dwindling along with it:
- The first, occurring approximately a week after the game begins, sees a helicopter fly by close over the area. Helicopters are noisy, zombies are attracted by sound, and they will follow the helicopter en masse. If you're lucky, you'll have made a fortified base for yourself, but you can still expect to fight for your life. If you're unfortunate enough to get caught outside when the helicopter flies by, it will follow you, bringing a zombie horde with it. In this case, unless you have an escape vehicle nearby, you're better off making your peace...
- The second, occurring within a month by default, sees Knox County's power grid and waterworks fail. No more electricity means no more TV, no more working kitchen appliances, and no more easy light sources unless you find a generator and know how to operate it. No more waterworks means no more easily accessible potable water. If you haven't learned at least a few survival skills before this point, you will face an uphill battle just trying not to starve or die of thirst.
- As the months pass, you'll go from the warm, sunny summer to the cold and bleak autumn and winter, making supplies even scarcer and needing clothes as well as warmth to stay alive.
Frying Pan of Doom: You'll probably want to use it for rodent meat stir-fry most of the time, but in a pinch a frying pan can crush zombie skulls as well as any other tool you can wield.
Full-Frontal Assault: Downplayed. It is possible to fight zombies while wearing nothing but underwear. Some mods allow you to play this trope straight.
Functional Addict: It is possible for the Survivor to be addicted to smoking with the "Smoker" trait. However, the only negative consequence of this is that the Survivor gets anxious after not smoking for awhile (increasingly throwing off their aim with firearms and damage with melee weapons) and it is relatively easy to maintain a steady supply of cigarettes as cigarette packs occasionally spawn on zombie corpses and can be frequently found in gas stations or bars. Because of this many Project Zomboid players consider the "Smoker" negative trait to be one of the most forgiving.
Furniture Blockade: A decent way to block off zombies is to place furniture in their way, as they'll have to break it in order to keep going. It's less effective against your fellow survivors, as they can simply move it out of the way, but it'll still delay them for a few seconds.
Game Mod: The game is pretty moddable, and a lot of documentation is available if you know where to look, so there's bucketloads of them! Want to make it so the infection is actually survivable if you take care of yourself? There's a mod for that. More guns and armour? There's mods for that. Hardcore survival modes, like permanent winter with below-freezing temperature 24/7? There's mods for that, too. Everything from basic Quality-of-Life to significant gameplay switchups are on the table. Some of them have even been implemented as official features, such as the Erosion mod; the dev was hired onto the team and their first project was to make it a full part of the game!
Gameplay and Story Segregation:
- Zombified versions of characters that appear on TV and radio can be seen even before their canonical deaths.
- You can occasionally get newspaper issues from the future. Similarly, issues made after July 6 (the start of the Zombie Apocalypse) can appear inside the exclusion zone, and not just Louisville, even though it would've taken a Contrived Coincidence for them to get there.
- Dean Porch claims on Exposure Survival to always carry a paperclip for the purpose of using it as an improvised fishing hook. If you find him zombified, however, he won't actually have a paperclip in his inventory once you kill him.
Gardening-Variety Weapon: Most types of gardening equipment can be used as weapons, such as trowels (which are surprisingly lethal on crits, which they score frequently), garden forks, or rakes.
Gas Siphoning: It is possible to siphon gas from cars if the Survivor has rubber hose and a gas can or any sort of object capable of containing liquid in their inventory.
Gasoline Lasts Forever: Played straight. No matter how many months or even years pass since the start of the apocalypse the gas in cars and gas stations will remain perfectly usable. The developers have stated that in future updates, gas will eventually go bad.
Gateless Ghetto: Justified in that the town was under quarantine. As the game went on, the infection spread, the quarantine lines either expanded outward or were overrun, and more areas of the map became open for player exploration. The "standard" Knox Country map in current builds has no real perimeter restrictions, though getting into Louisville proper does require breaching the local quarantine/checkpoints, which span the whole length between the river and the edge of the map.
Ghost Town: In the original map the town was fairly heavily populated with NPCs at the start of the outbreak, but the vast majority of them would die in the first few days and the rest would hole up and hide, leaving the streets deathly quiet. In current builds Knox Country is devoid of non-zombie NPCs, leading to Louisville being a Ghost City (save for the shambling masses), though NPCs are planned for reintroduction in the future.
Godzilla Threshold:
- Grabbing a shotgun usually only happens when you are completely desperate, since the sound of the single shot will attract everything in the radius of 100 tiles to your location. But if a horde is already after you, you've got nothing to lose. After all, shotguns can hit multiple zombies with a single shot, making them exceedingly ammo-efficient.
- The news mentions the US Army being willing to use increasingly violent measures to contain the Knox Infection such as gunning down people trying to escape Knox County. When it becomes apparent that the Knox Infection is impossible to contain the military decides to blow up all the bridges across the Ohio river, effectively trapping any survivors left.
Golf Clubbing: Golf clubs are okay, but they can't beat a baseball bat for pure zombie-smashing efficacy.
Gone Horribly Right: The US government manages to successfully isolate Knox County and prevent any information about the situation there from reaching the outside world… which leaves the rest of the world woefully unprepared once the Knox Infection starts spreading across the globe, causing complete societal collapse.
Grievous Bottley Harm: Players can break glass bottles to use as weapons in a pinch.
Guide Dang It!: Further made worse thanks to Tutorial Failure. Either you dedicate some extra time to read online guides and/or the wiki, or you might never figure out certain mechanics, most of which are the basis of your day-to-day survival.
- A particularly nasty case has to do with character creation and skill levels: the skills that your survivor start with not only determine their abilities at the outset but also determine the rate at which they gain experience in that skill, permanently. A character with a single level in a skill will learn that skill four times faster than an untrained character.
- The now-removed negative weight traits (i.e. obese and underweight) seem like temporary hassles at first, considering that you can go on diet/binge eat to get back into a healthy weight. However, the fitness/strength malus from those traits are actually tracked separately, meaning that an obese character who manages to get down to a healthy weight to is still 2 strength weaker than a normal healthy character and will have a considerably harder time getting into shape even when training regularly.
- The hunger moodle does not actually reflect your hunger level. Rather, it merely reflects how hungry your character feels at the moment. They may feel hungry after downing 10 ice creams, but their body is actually bursting with calories and will gain weights for a time afterward. Conversely, your character may feel full after eating a bowl of berries, but the low-calorie content of these fruits can't really sate their hunger and they will slowly lose weight and starve. This further ties with various character traits that affect starting weight and food requirements. For example, obese characters will feel hungry sooner, making it extra tricky to do something with them being overweight, while in reality, they can spend a whole day on a single sandwich.
- Over the years, the game never, ever, actually explained its foraging and crafting systems, both of which received two major overhauls during development. It actually reached the point of a Grandfather Clause - because crafting was never explained and was a knowledge acquired by third-party guides, the new system introduced with Build 42 (one that completely reworked the pre-existing sub-systems and mechanics) is not explained anywhere in the game or official documentation. This is especially egregious with the bushcrafting part of it, as you might never figure out how to even gather resources, not to mention putting them into use.
- There are many things that aren't explained about damage to zombies in-game and aren't intuitive:
  - The fact that both the critical chance and the damage multiplier depend on your weapon.
  - Critical hits with knives can only be performed as a jaw stab, and these, in turn, can only be performed if there are no other zombies nearby.
  - Hitting a grounded zombie gives you a multiplier equal to 5x or your weapon's critical damage multiplier, whichever is better. It stacks with critical hits, too
  - Melee damage can vary dramatically based on distance to target, with attacks at minimum range being very weak while attacks are maximum range can do up to twice the usual damage.
  - You get a big damage bonus if you hit the same zombie 4+ times in short succession, with the bonus further increasing for each subsequent hit.
Gun Accessories: A few accessories are available, slightly improving guns in various ways, such as sights to increase the maximum range or increase aiming speed, a flashlight attachment, or a recoil pad to reduce the time between shots, for a few examples.
Guns Do Not Work That Way: .223 and 5.56 are considered entirely separate calibers in the game, and are not interchangeable at all, thus keeping the M16 in the Too Awesome to Use territory.
- This distinction was quietly removed in Build 42, with rifles either using 5.56 or 7.62 caliber.
Hand Cannon: The B-F pistol and the Magnum are chambered in .44 Magnum, and have the same damage as 5.56mm rifles. With good aim, a headshot with one can easily take down a zombie with one bullet.
Handicapped Badass: It's a rule of character creation that all handicapped characters are this, for a certain definition of badass at least. Picking negative traits that qualify as disabilities generally give you a ton of positive trait points to compensate, with deaf giving you the most points of any negative trait in the game, but good luck figuring out that there's a horde banging at your front door or that you set off an alarm.
Hand Signals: The game has an assortment of gestures for players who either can't use the voice chat and can't afford the distraction of typing, or simply don't want to raise unnecessary attention by making noise (as using the in-game chat will cause zombies to hear you). They range from everyday ones like shaking your head or giving a thumbs up, to various military hand signals like "Cease Fire" or "Freeze".
Hard Mode Perks: Picking negative perks awards additional trait points that can be used to choose the more powerful positive traits.
Hassle-Free Hotwire: Zigzagged. It's possible to hotwire vehicles without any tools, but this requires either starting as a Burglar or having a modest level of skill in both Mechanics and Electronics. On the other hand, hotwiring has a chance to fail - which means you definitely don't want to be trying to hotwire a vehicle in a life-or-death emergency. Given that a lot of cars can also start without any gas in their tanks, jumping in a random car and trying to hotwire it when you need to make a getaway is an easy way to end up dead when just sprinting away would have saved you.
Healing Herb: Numerous medicinal plants can be found by foraging or, if you have the seeds, grown in a garden:
- Black sage acts as a painkiller.
- Comfrey makes fractures heal faster when applied as a poultice.
- Common mallow treats common colds.
- Ginseng restores a small portion of endurance.
- Lemongrass reduces sickness, though 2-4 hours have to pass before a second use will have any effect.
- Plantain, applied as poultice, makes bleeding wounds heal faster.
- Wild garlic poultices can remove wound infections.
Heal It with Booze: When the First Aid system was added, disinfecting flesh wounds became somewhat important, as wound infections increase how much pain your character feels from an injury, which further reduces their effectiveness.^note If you can't find household disinfectant or sealed alcohol swabs, whiskey will do. Drinking it can also provide some small pain relief. It's also useful for lifting your sadness or making a Molotov Cocktail.
Heal Thyself: Although there is no instant health, you can still treat injuries by bandaging them and getting plenty of food and rest while waiting for them to heal naturally, occasionally popping a painkiller as needed. With later updates came more detailed medicine and a dedicated First Aid skill to develop. The injury-prone survivor has disinfectants and bandages of varying sophistication to deal with flesh wounds, and may be unfortunate enough to have to splint themselves for several weeks for a broken leg. That's in single-player mode. In multi-player, one can also serve as The Medic.
Heavily Armored Mook: Firefighter zombies can endure a lot of damage due to their clothes being extremely tough.
Heavy Equipment Class: Being a Veteran allows you to ignore discomfort from armor, thus allowing you to wear a full set of heavy armor without rapidly becoming unhappy.
Hell-Bent for Leather:
- Leather jackets and trousers are some of the best protective clothes in the game, excellent against the rain and, more importantly, zombie teeth. However, just like in real life, they are terribly uncomfortable during a hot, sunny summer, up to the point your character will run the risk of heat stroke, and they don't insulate that well from cold during winter, either.
- In a non-standard variant, leather padding is the best upgrade available for your clothes. With enough layers and a sufficiently high Tailoring skill, it can make you near-immune to zombies, all while providing a small amount of protection against gunfire.
Hell Is That Noise: The sound of zombies banging on obstacles will cause your character to suffer from slowly increasing anxiety.
Herd-Hitting Attack: With multi-hit enabled, shoves and most weapons will gain the ability to hit 2-3 zombies at once (depending on the exact weapon used), making combat against groups much easier.
Heroic RRoD: Overexertion can be your undoing if done recklessly. Wise survivors avoid running unless absolutely necessary.
He Who Must Not Be Seen: NPC survivors loot buildings, alert zombies with their screams and gunfire, and leave behind annotated maps, intact vehicles, and barricaded buildings with lots of loot, but you never get to meet them in person. All of this is due to NPCs currently being unimplemented.
Hidden in Plain Sight: The Inconspicious trait does this to your character. As long as you stay quiet and don't run, zombies will completely miss your presence at medium to long distances. Depending on game build, walking at the speed of Zombie Gait could render your character pretty much invisible, which could save your skin in a pinch, or at least allow you to catch your breath.
Hide Your Children: Although the developers are still actively debating amongst themselves and the community as to whether or not children will appear in the game, the 'no' side of the argument is currently winning. Teenagers are present, however, in the form of zombies wearing small backpacks (often filled with toys) and stereotypical student clothes, which frequently spawn in schools.
Hitbox Dissonance: Damage done to downed zombies depends on where you stand, not on where your weapon is actually hitting. With short blades, in particular, this means that doing the most damage requires you to stand in such a way that your survivor stabs either the ground or the zombie's legs. And even with proper positioning, it's still up to a random chance if it's head or torso (or even arms) being attacked - even when you keep hitting the same spot and the zombie in question remains immobile.
Hollywood Density: A plunger has 0.5 encumbrance. After breaking, it turns into a broken stick with 1 encumbrance. The implication, then, is that the head of a plunger has negative weight.
Hollywood Healing: It is possible for the Survivor to make a full recovery from any injury or sickness that doesn't result in instant death or zombification. This even includes perfectly setting your fractured bones and never developing any lasting impairment. However, healing from diseases and injuries still a fair amount of time, which can make it a challenge to simply survive long enough to recover.
Home Porn Movie: One of the randomly generated basements contains a double bed with a camera right in front of it, implying that the basement was used by the home's previous owners to make those.
Hooks and Crooks: A large hook can be wielded as a decent Short Blunt weapon, but it breaks surprisingly fast.
Hope Spot: Getting bit by a zombie will spread the disease onto you, but some players have reported that it can be cured. Not so; the cured disease was most likely a normal sickness. The Knox Infestation is completely uncurable and getting infected guarantees your end is near.
Hot Drink Cure: As of build 41.72 it is now possible to brew herbal teas with various healing properties.
House Fire: With the way zombies burn and fire spreads, it's not hard to start one (or more) of these yourself with an ill-advised Molotov Cocktail or a carelessly-placed campfire. Firefighting does in fact exist in the game, but once a typical house is more than seared, you and your little bucket of water may as well kiss it goodbye.
- Putting a propane tank inside the oven is a very good way to cause one, for whatever crazy reason you'd want to (maybe as a final hurrah for a trapped and bitten character with no way out?).
- In later releases, some procedural variety was applied to the map, so you will occasionally find a house that's been pre-burnt to the ground.
House Squatting: It is possible to set up a base in any of the houses on the map.
Hyperactive Metabolism: Downplayed. Eating will increase healing rate and make you recover faster from poisoning, but will not give you instant health. It does provide bonus carry weight and a slight combat buff, but it only lasts as long as you're well fed.

I - O

Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Build 41 has three rough difficulty levels; Builder (Easy), Survivor (Normal, the intended experience), and Apocalypse (Hard). There's also Custom Sandbox, so you can set the game up however you want - hardly any zombies, massive framerate-ruining numbers of zombies, no respawning for zombies, rapidly respawning zombies, lots of guns and no food, lots of food and no guns, fast zombies, slow zombies, random speeds for each zombie; you can experience the game however you like. Especially with mods.
- Build 42 changes it up with Apocalypse (now Normal, the intended experience), Outbreak (Easy, loosely the same as Survivor mode with reduced cooldowns and faster stat regeneration) Extinction (Very Hard, making zombies and random events more difficult and adding sprinters into a default setting for the first time), and Rising (Very Easy, a slowed-down experience meant to accommodate more casual players) in addition to Custom Sandbox.
I Know Mortal Kombat: A few VHS tapes are for entertainment purposes, but will provide a small amount of experience:
- Grady v King is a recording of a boxing match. By watching Grady's footwork, you'll gain experience towards the Lightfooted skill, which helps you walk quietly.
- Mathematical Quadratics and Algebraic Configurations is a mathematics lecture that has been taped over with a porn movie featuring a plumber and a woman. The sight of the plumber's "Big Pipe" will improve your Long Blunt skill
- OSCC '92 is a recording of a car race. The scene of a car's tires being changed will have you learn a bit about Mechanics.
- Stock Cars is another recording of a car race. The sight of a car burning will help you with Mechanics.
- The third episode of Z-Squad (a reference to The A-Team) features a scene where the heroes armor a van with a little bit of Welding and Mechanics.
- Mother's Boy, which is the game's version of Psycho, has the "Psycho" Shower Murder Parody, which shows you how to fight with a Short Blade.
- Dead Wrong, which is a parody of Dirty Harry, has the parody of the "Do you feel lucky, punk?" scene teach you a bit about Reloading and Aiming guns.
The Immune:
- Downplayed. One radio channel states that the zombie virus is mainly spread through the air and only a small amount of people (including the player character) are immune to the airborne strain. However, no one is immune to infections via bites or scratches.
- If you set Transmission to 'Off' or 'Everyone's Infected' in the Sandbox the player can essentially be this, being able to survive scratches and bites without risk of zombification as long as they're alive. Alternatively, you can make infection non-fatal, in which case you'll simply suffer from non-fatal sickness when infected, then recover.
Impeded Communication: All of the TV and radio stations ( except the Automated Emergency Broadcast) will go dark on Day 9 as the Knox Infection breaks quarantine and spreads worldwide resulting in a complete global societal collapse.
Improbable Weapon User: Until you're able to secure yourself a reliable supply of proper weapons, you'll spend most of the game fighting with whatever is at hand — wrenches, musical instruments, brass nameplates, and more. If it has some kind of a grip and seems heavy or sharp, you can almost certainly use it as a weapon.
Impromptu Fortress: The bread and butter of any survival lasting longer than the first two-three weeks is building quite elaborate fortifications, and using as many pre-existing (and preferably indestructible) fixtures in the process as feasible. This might range from boarding up the windows to setting up a multi-layered stockade. And of course, every single two-story (or higher) building can become an impenetrable fortress as long as your character is carrying a sledgehammer to demolish the stairs.
Improvised Armour: A sewing needle will allow you to add patches of cloth, denim, or leather to your clothing, improving their protection against attacks. Increasing your Tailoring skill can even allow you to make yourself mostly invulnerable to scratches, so long as the armor holds. Such "patchwork armor" also has the advantage of being far more airy than say, a regular leather jacket, allowing you to wear it during hot summer days without risking overheating, while providing comparable protection.
- Build 42 ups the ante further by permitting the players, with the right skill and materials, to create a variety of armor sets, ranging from magazines roughly taped together and wooden armor, all the way to metal armor pieces, either forged or welded together. Not to mention the selection of sporting equipment that can also be used for the same purpose.
Improvised Screwdriver: Using a whetstone, you can sharpen various bits of metal into screwdrivers. They perform admirably in their role, whether you use them as tools or weapons.
Improvised Weapon: This can be considered a core mechanic of the game, since very few of the combat-ready items were meant to be weapons, firearms excepted. Baseball bats, a hammer, and boards of wood can be used as weapons. Get some nails, and you can make yourself a spiked bat (more damage, but it'll break faster). Get an empty bottle, a rag/torn sheet/sock, and some gasoline, and you have yourself a Molotov Cocktail.
Indestructible Edible: Some foodstuffs don't expire at all, making them a good choice for an emergency stash. These include canned foods (but only while the can is closed) and most types of junk food (such as chips, sweets, and chocolate).
Ineffectual Loner: The core premise of the gameplay, or at least in the single-player mode. The reason why it's so hard to survive and especially face off against hordes of zombies is because there is only one person to do so - you. You only have a single pair of hands, you can only do a single task at once, and there is no backup, support or cavalry to help... Even trivial tasks like exploration or scavenging for supplies are limited by the fact that it's only a single PC facing against an area the size of an actual county. It doesn't even make that much of a difference in how competent your character is, since, again, there is only so much a single person can do. The game in turn becomes ridiculously easy when played in multiplayer, even with just two people.
Infinity -1 Sword: Axes do a good amount of damage, have a decent reach, do a lot of damage on crits, and come in both one-handed and two-handed weapon. However, they're an uncommon find, have a lot of encumbrance (which also makes them hard to swing), and are less powerful than the much rarer long blades. For added bonus, it is possible to make stone axes that are accessible - depending on a specific character build - no later than the 4th day of the game in the vanilla. They are almost as good as the industrial-grade steel tools when it comes to utility and lethality, while having the added bonus of being made out of random, infinite resources, so wear and tear is a non-issue - you can always make more, as long as there is a single tree and some grassy patch of land nearby.
Infinity +1 Sword:
- Long blades have a good reach, powerful critical hits, and a lot of damage, with the katana being able to kill zombies in 1-2 hits. However, they're incredibly rare to find, and even with Build 42 allowing one to forge swords, you have to go through a long process of building a forge and grinding skills in order to become a swordsmith. Katanas themselves remain both unforgeable and unparalleled in terms of damage, having nearly triple the damage of any other single attack in the game, firearms included. They also have no damage range, meaning they always inflict maximum punishment on the walking dead.
- The M16 rifle has a 30-round magazine, high range, the ability to go full-auto in an emergency, compatibility with laser sights and red dot sights, and a decent damage output. Being a military rifle, however, it's very rare, and it can be hard to keep the bullet-hungry machine's magazines fed with ammo.
- The M1A rifle is an upgrade to the bolt-action MSR788, as it uses the same caliber and also boasts high range and damage, but replaces the 3+1 internal magazine with a 20-round detachable magazine, gains compatibility with red dot sights and laser shots, and also fires semi-automatically. As such, it's rarer to find due to its power, although not as much as the M16.
Interface Screw: Being drunk will blur your screen. It'll also hide the hypothermia moodle unless you're really cold, as drunkenness makes you feel warm.
Inverse Law of Utility and Lethality: Some of the best occupations are those of "harmless" (or truly harmless) civilians, while backgrounds like Cop, War Vet and similar are at best average and only truly benefit in specific types of combat. Probably best seen in the Burglar-Cop pair, where Burglar has access to a handful of unique abilities, can sneak around in a really efficient way, and gains a bonus to a bunch of hard-to-raise but handy skills, while Cop... can fire guns a bit better than everyone else.
In-Universe Game Clock: The default timescale is 24:1- you play one game day in an hour. In single-player you can fast forward through tedious activities at a few different speeds, and this happens automatically when you sleep. In Sandbox or multi-player, you can customize the timescale from as fast as 96:1 to as slow as real time. The game clock tracks not only time of day, which is important since night can get very dark, but also the date. The weather changes according to the calendar, to the point of forcing wardrobe changes to avoid heat stroke and frostbite.
Instakill Mook: Every zombie becomes one if the Infection Mortality setting is set to "Instant". As soon as an attack successfully transmits the Knox Infection, you drop dead instantly.
Instant Illness: If the Infection Mortality setting is set to "Instant", getting infected by a zombie will immediately kill you and raise you as a zombie.
Instrument of Murder: Musical instruments can be wielded as blunt weapons, but they break extremely fast. Electric guitars (bass or regular), however, actually last for quite a while. Banjos and guitars also leave behind a neck when they break, which can be used as a mediocre club for a while.
Insurmountable Waist-High Fence:
- When it comes to literal waist-high fences, this is generally averted, as anything that is waist-high can be vaulted over by players or zombies—it just takes a little extra time. In previous builds, locked gates couldn't be opened from either side, leading to the oddity of having to clamber over the fence right beside it every time.
- Indie Stone has previously had to fix or add zombie behaviors that resulted in players making areas inaccessible with overly-simplistic means. As mentioned with Absurdly Ineffective Barricade, cars can be used as a method of barricading areas, but this previously resulted in areas becoming inaccessible to zombies as they previously didn't have the ability to crawl under them. This had even happened with televisions and microwaves, as a programming oversight resulted in them being unable to break or walk over them.
- Bodies of water have Invisible Walls around them, so not only is it impossible to swim, you can't even try to walk in water close to the shore.
In-Vehicle Invulnerability: Averted, the player can be killed in the vehicle either by a player or a zombie. If their window is broken, (or they left the (door) window open,) the driver is vulnerable to melee attacks, and a player with a firearm can shoot and kill a player hiding inside of a vehicle. And that's saying nothing about how lethal crashing your car can be.
Inventory Management Puzzle: A very real element of surviving. You desperately need everything.
- You can also only add/remove items from containers like plastic bags or backpacks if they're equipped or on the ground, and you have three 'equip' slots total including the 'wear on your back' option for certain gear. Certain equipment can add more, though, like holsters or high-tier backpacks, and some non-keys fit on your keyring, like pocket knives and bottle openers.
Invisible President: The US president (who would be Bill Clinton at the time) goes unnamed and unseen.
Isometric Projection: And not only that, but there is also a fixed angle that can't be turned, so beware of corners and sharp turns, as nasty things might await right behind them.
Item Crafting: Used to make several items in the game, as well as upgrading existing ones. The quality and even "tech level" of crafted items vary wildly, from stone-and-sticks survival tools to home-made, remotely detonated explosives.
It Can Think: The sandbox settings allow you to make it so that zombies are capable of opening unlocked doors instead of smashing them. You can even set things up so that only some zombies have this ability.
Jack of All Stats: Blunt weapons. They don't have the reach of spears, the damage of long blades and axes, or the jaw stab attack of short blades, but they hit a perfect middle-ground among all weapon types and don't need regular maintenance to stay sharp and combat ready, either.
Joke Item:
- Cap guns do zero damage and have a non-existent range (just below the minimum range), ensuring that you can't even use them to stun zombies or train your Aiming. The only use they have is training your reloading skill (something you can also do with a real gun) and making a noise (which isn't much louder than yelling).
- You can stab zombies with weak weapons like pens, pencils, geometry compasses, scissors, forks, spoons, and so on. The damage is so low that you'll need over a dozen hits to kill an average zombie (assuming a baseline survivor), and it only takes a few hits before your weapon breaks.
Just Before the End: The apocalypse doesn't truly start until one week into the game, with the infection still confined only to Knox County and the outside world still safe. Essential services like water, electricity, and T.V stations still work and will continue to work for at least another month. Eventually, however, the virus will break containment and spread to the rest of the world, causing all semblance of modern society to disappear altogether. That being said, right from the start there are already hordes of zombies roaming around, given that you are at the ground zero of the outbreak.
Justified Tutorial: Educational VHS tapes, which improve your character's skills, explain things in ways that are applicable in-game. For instance, the tapes on tailoring are dedicated to sewing patches onto clothing, noting how cotton is the worst, leather is the best, and denim is in-between, and the Exposure Survival episode on fishing has Dean say that paperclips can be used as an improvised fishing hook.
Karma Houdini: General John McGrew does not contract the Knox Infection and is still alive by the time the TV and radio broadcasts end despite helping the United States government suppress the truth about the Knox Event, leaving the rest of the world woefully unprepared for dealing with it once it starts spreading across the world. However, this is a downplayed example: while he survives the second wave of the Knox Infection, he now has to survive in the zombie-infested apocalyptic hellscape that he was partially responsible for creating.
Katana Superiority: The katana is the most powerful melee weapon, allowing any survivor to consistently kill zombies in one hit. The downside is that the katana is extremely rare, as to be expected of the game's 90s Kentucky setting, and is also surprisingly fragile for a sword. It cannot be repaired, so relish that max damage while you can!
The Key Is Behind the Lock: Car keys may occasionally be found in the car itself.
Kick Them While They Are Down: A viable and vital tactic that players can and should resort to in order to survive. A zombie that has been successfully knocked over can be stomped on or hit in the head for huge damage, and if a player stands on one, they can even prevent that zombie from getting back up.
Kill It with Fire: How? Why, with Molotovs of course! Or, if you're too lazy for that, just build a campfire and persuade one trend-setting zombie that the shortest route to your juicy brain goes right through it. Zombies swarm together, of couse, and they ignite one another stunningly well. However, beware that fighting with fire is often Awesome, but Impractical. While zombies are good fuel, fire does not kill them quickly, nor does it affect their mobility.
Laser Sight: A particularly useful weapon modification to be installed on pistols and rifles, increasing their accuracy by 5 points (on 1-100 scale). Which is equal to an extra rank in Aiming - no small feat, especially when learning how to shoot. As of Build 42 and the new aiming system, it instead serves to make the aim reticule tighten faster, a very useful function for anything it can be attached to.
Late to the Tragedy: The presence of survivor homes and vehicles, annotated maps, and bandit/survivor zombies make it clear that the players aren't the only people currently alive in the region. Because NPCs aren't yet implemented, however, you only arrive after the survivors have died or been forced to abandon their home.
Lawman Baton: Wherever cops are, you'll likely find a nightstick. Its stats are only slightly above average for a Short Blunt weapon, but it's also very durable.
Left Stuck After Attack:
- Performing a jaw stab with a short bladed weapon will occasionally leave it stuck in the zombie, forcing you to manually retrieve it.
- Breaking a bladed weapon on a zombie may leave the blade stuck in their body.
The Lethal Connotation of Guns and Others: While guns don't do more damage than melee weapons (an axe or long blade is a lot more powerful in the hands of an experienced user), they have special benefits in PvP — wounds inflicted by guns often come in the form of lodged bullets (which can't be pulled out with bare hands, and demand stitching afterwards), and they bypass most types of armor.
Lethal Joke Item: A trowel may initially seem useless as a weapon, but it has a high crit chance, a 10x critical damage multiplier (whereas high-tier Short Blades only have a 3x or 4x multiplier), and the ability to hit two zombies at once with multi-hit (whereas high-tier Short Blades only hit a single zombie per attack). It doesn't make trowels superior to fighting and hunting knives, but it does mean that they're a lot more competitive than it may initially seem.
Lethal Letter Opener: You can use letter openers in combat, but there's no lethality to speak of, and they break extremely fast.
Let No Crisis Go to Waste: When Judge Matt Hass realizes that the Knox Infection is airborne, he doesn't miss the opportunity to mock liberals for advocating gun control.
Level Grinding: Over the years, the game gained a reputation for the ebb and flow of this trope. Skills either were growing fast or barely at all. Each new expansion of the crafting system usually meant that not just grind, but forced one was getting back to the menu, only to be gradually lessened due to negative feedback... to show up again during the next expansion of the crafting. There also seem to be clash of designs over the years, with the dev team either trying to make a harsh, unforgiving game (but lessening the grind due to how easy and fast it is to die) or to think in terms of long-term survival going indefinitely (and thus doubling down on grind and slow progression of skills), with the approach changing every few years.
Level Scaling: Inverted. By default, zombies will continue to get weaker and slower with every passing month as they decompose which makes avoiding/fighting them much easier in the long run. They make up for that by becoming more numerous over time (at least with the default settings).
Lightning Reveal: The main menu seems to show a man caring for his sick wife. When the lightning flashes, however,it is shown that the man is actually a zombie feasting on the woman.
Limited Loadout: While you can fit a huge amount of items into your inventory, your quick-access slots are limited, with some items giving you access to extra slots:
- The back slot is always available, and fits most weapons that don't fit into the belt slot, along with swords.
- The belt slot fits smaller melee weapons, as well as swords. Improvised belts give you a single slot, while proper belts give you two slots.
- The holster slot fits all handguns. A normal holster gives you one slot, while a double holster gives you two. The shoulder holster also gives an extra slot on top of the one from the belt holster.
- The ankle holster gives you a single slot for the .38 revolver.
- The ALICE belt and suspenders have two slots that fit the angle-headed flashlight (allowing you to use it hands-free), canteens, knives, and radios.
- A single bedroll slot is provided by larger backpacks.
Liquid Courage: Being drunk will reduce your level of panic, meaning that a bottle of bourbon can act as an improvised substitute to beta blockers.
Lives in a Van: It is possible to sleep in cars. However, doing so in an open area leaves the Survivor at risk of being attacked by zombies.
Locked Out of the Loop: Besides the US government, nobody outside of the Knox Country exclusion zone is initially aware of the fact that there's a Zombie Apocalypse going on inside the zone. Even as citizens start riots in demand of answers, none are given, though some information leaks out anyway.
Lodged-Blade Recycling: Sort of. Sometimes you can find zombies with (improvised) weapons stuck in their backs, and once they're re-dead you can pull the weapon out for your own use. This is usually limited to things like knives, letter-openers, or scissors, but you might manage to find a zombie with a whole makeshift spear or even a machete stuck through it. You may also occasionally need to retrieve your own weapon from a zombie's face after performing a jaw stab.
Logical Weakness: Zombies have a few of those by default, like the fact they have Zombie Gait, can't operate doors, can't climb fences or ropes, or that they are decomposing over time, so their senses get worse and worse - all of which can and should be exploited for long-term survival, as they are slow and not too smart. Those can be further adjusted by the game's settings when starting a new game. On top of that, there are logical weaknesses imposed by the game engine, like zombies inability to aggro on something they can't see (merely following the sound) or the fact they will only ever try to crawl under a car if there is an in-game square of free space on the other side.^note
Loose Floorboard Hiding Spot: Some annotated maps will point you towards a Survivalist Stash hidden underneath a building's floorboards.
Loser Protagonist: The Survivor, if you take all of the negative traits meaning that the Survivor can potentially be a cowardly, weak, unfit and unemployed loser who is addicted to cigarettes. It goes without saying that playing such a character is a self-imposed challenge that makes the early game even harder than it already is.
Low-Speed Chase: A healthy player walks faster than a non-sprinter zombie, and will also never get hit if they walk away in a straight line. Combined with the fact that exhaustion will eventually prevent you from running, you may find yourself forced to outwalk a horde of zombies, with the chase potentially lasting for several in-game hours.
Low-Tech Spears: Spears are the easiest weapon to craft, as their basic versions amount to a long stick that you either carve with a knife or attach a blade to. At higher tiers of crafting, however, spears will likely fall off in favor of maces and edged weapons.
Luck Stat: The "Lucky" and "Unlucky" traits, which affect your loot and weapon repair rolls by quite a large margin.
Luck-Based Mission: Your starting location is purely up to chance. You might spawn in a forest camping site, or you might spawn two blocks away from your planned permanent base. And unless "Starting gear" is tacked in settings, the game will enforce With This Herring on you, leaving you at the mercy of random loot from the starting location. Whilst it can be somewhat job-dependent (a Fire Officer is likely to start in or near the Rosewood Firehouse if they choose Rosewood as their starting location etc.) it's still randomized, so you can't be 100% sure of what's going to happen.
MacGyvering: The setting being what it is, there is a little of this sprinkled throughout. The greatest concentration comes with the jury-rigged "traps" that the Engineer profession knows how to make: incendiary bombs from hairspray and sparklers, smokebombs from coldpacks and newspaper, etc.
- Build 42 massively expands this. Not only can you smith your own purpose-built tools and weapons, you can also get wacky with improvised upgrades for weapons. Wanna jam a brake disk into a wooden plank and use it as an axe?
Machete Mayhem: A machete is one of the game's more powerful weapons, with high damage and moderate range and swing time. However, its rather uncommon, appearing typically only in hardware stores or the boarded up homes of ex-survivors.
Made of Plasticine: Blunt weapons will inflict bleeding wounds to players just as frequently as bladed weapons, potentially leading to situations where you slit somebody's throat with a rock.
Magikarp Power:
- Negative starting traits that give penalties to trainable stats can be overcome with enough training, and the most severe ones (particularly Obese) can give you a ton of points for traits that give you abilities no training can get you, meaning it's theoretically possible for you to create an obese nerd character and eventually turn them into a Genius Bruiser. This is difficult, time consuming, and dangerous to accomplish, however.
- Starting as a blacksmith or with the Blacksmithing Knowledge trait, especially in singleplayer and on most PVP-enabled servers (where it's always Kill on Sight), typically requires you to make forays into Masonry, Carving, Carpentry, Butchering, and Pottery in order to craft your tools and workstations. After doing so, however, you have access to the ability to make metal items of all kind, especially armor and weapons. This means that you can dress your allies in an Armor of Invincibility and treat machetes as if they were common junk.
- The Cowardly trait makes you suffer more panic from zombies. As time passes, however, you'll eventually become near-immune to panic (as it'll only take 2 seconds to shed maxed-out panic after surviving 5 months), at which point the trait has become 2 free points.
Master of All: With infinite time and resources, you could become this, but it's not likely. If you didn't start with bonus ranks and an XP multiplier in a skill because of your occupation and traits, it will probably be very slow to train. Some, like First Aid, you just don't have the opportunity to regularly practice (hopefully), while others, like Electrical, require a huge supply of scavenged items to practice on. The Character Customization encourages specialization.
The Medic: After the later addition of a First Aid skill and a sophisticated medical system, one can choose from a couple of medicine-related jobs and advantages to get a leg up—or one can gain First Aid experience the old-fashioned way through simple bad luck. Still, in single-player it's purely a case of Heal Thyself, and First Aid is not an easy skill to build. In multi-player, however, The Medic can come into their own by examining and treating (with skill-dependent reliability) other unfortunate survivors.
Mighty Lumberjack: The lumberjack occupation gives you a decent boost to the Axe skill, along with a small one to Strength and Maintenance. It also gives you the Ax-Pert trait, which makes you swing axes faster.
Militaries Are Useless: Despite the desperate efforts of the US Army to contain the Knox Infection it manages to infect almost everyone in Knox County and the rest of the world.
- Zig-zagged. While the US Army has abandoned Knox County the communications that can be heard on the Automated Emergency Broadcast imply that the US Army continues to hold out against zombies.
- In addition, it should be noted that it's not the infected themselves who cause the apocalypse, but rather the airborne strain of the virus they carry. There is only so much the military can do against an incurable airborne disease that kills everyone who isn't immune to it.
Minmaxer's Delight: Some traits are considered to be much better than those of equal value, or, if they're negative, easy to work around:
- Thin-Skinned gives you 8 points in exchange for multiplying your chance to avoid injury by 0.7. However, your base chance is 15% and never gets higher than 22% (with a combat skill at 10), so the difference is only a few percents. It's better to simply not get hit in the first place.
- Slow Healer with fatal infection enabled, as any hit from a zombie has at least a 10% chance to inevitably kill you, and the chance isn't affected by how fast you heal. Once again, it's best to not get hit.
- Prone to Illness makes you zombify faster, suffer colds much faster, and have nastier colds once you actually catch them. However, zombification is incurable, so delaying it doesn't matter, and colds can be prevented by wearing adequate clothes and making sure to not idle for a prolonged amount of time.
- Weak Stomach makes food poisoning almost always lethal. However, you can avoid eating unidentified berries and mushrooms, and the game will otherwise warn you if a foodstuff is dangerous to eat.
Min-Maxing: It is a borderline self-imposed restraint to not engage with this trope. There is a very limited starting budget during character creation, which by design disables a large amount of useful traits, as they will be beyond the possibilities of the default point budget. Picking disadvantages and ones that can be either ignored, eventually worked out of, or aren't all that bad to begin with is a vital consideration, since positive traits can only be gained during char-gen.
Molotov Cocktail:
- One of the weapons in the game, which can be made out of gasoline or strong alcohol, and is very effective against hordes of zombies.
- Another variation is the fire bomb, which demands gasoline and can't use denim strips as the wick, but can be thrown farther and has a larger explosion. Skilled electricians can also turn it into a timer bomb, remote-activated explosive, or proximity mine.
Money to Burn: Money is useless in the post-apocalypse, so you can only use it as kindling for a fire.
Mooks, but No Bosses: In contrast to many other zombie games, there are no unusually strong or "special" infected you have to face off against, with every default zombie being as slow and dumb as the other. Despite this, they're far from being generic enemies you gun down en masse, with a few generally being a threat and a horde is usually outright suicide to try and take on directly.
Morale Mechanic: Facing off large numbers of zombies, or being surprised by some, can cause your character to panic—it lowers your combat ability and worsens tunnel vision. You can reduce your panic with beta blocker drugs and alcohol, and your tendency to panic will naturally decrease the longer you survive and the more zombies you kill. Also, the Veteran occupation is immune to panic.
- A straighter example is "Unhappiness" which makes all actions take slightly longer to perform.
Mundane Made Awesome: Getting your first axe can be a transcendent experience in Zomboid. Not only is it a sublime weapon, it's superb for battering down locked doors and almost required for felling trees for your lumber and carpentry.
Must Have Caffeine: Players can brew various caffeinated drinks with a mug full of water, either coffee or a tea bag, and any other ingredients that fit the beverage. They're rather valuable as they can decrease hunger, thirst, exhaustion and unhappiness.
Must Have Nicotine: One of the starting negative traits is being a smoker. You (slowly) constantly gain the Stress moodlet, which only goes down when you smoke. And unlike other bad starting habits you can pick for extra points, you can't quit smoking without mods, forcing to keep killing zombies and then riffling through their pockets in search of cigs, even long after you establish your base. However, with sufficient stock of cigarettes, it becomes a highly useful way of handling Stress mechanics. And while you might be unable to quit, but you won't get any smoking-related health issues either.
My Car Hates Me: Cars with low-quality engines will often require multiple tries to start, especially in cold weather. Merely annoying in a safe situation, potentially deadly if you're fleeing from zombies.
Mysterious Employer: The military remnants broadcasting over the Automated Emergency Broadcast System appear to not even know who their commander is, as one soldier wonders as to who, exactly, is giving out orders, and another claims to not trust somebody.
Necessary Drawback: One of the goals for Build 42 was to tie together zombie presence with loot. As a result, the better the local loot, and the more numerous it is, the more undead are going to "guard" it. This can lead to some rather awkward situations, like a random house containing thirty zombies in a single room, because there is a Survivalist Stash under the carpet, or a gun range being absolutely packed with the undead.
Negative Ability : Because of the Point Build System used while creating a character, there are many traits that do nothing but make it even harder to survive the zombie apocalypse. These traits range from minor things like moving inventory items slowly or needing to eat more often, to major disadvantages such as being deaf, illiterate, or very under/overweight.
Nerves of Steel:
- If you're a veteran, you'll never suffer panic from seeing zombies, no matter how many they are.
- With each day that passes, you'll recover from panic faster. At the maximum of 150 days, you'll be near-immune to panic, as it only takes you a couple of seconds to fully recover.
Never Gets Fat: Zig-zagged. Just like in real life weight gain is determined not just by how much you eat but also by what you eat and what you spend your time doing. Survivors who live off high calorie foodstuffs like junk food/sweets and regularly eat foods rich in fats and protein (e.g. peanut butter, etc.) will rapidly gain weight. However, Survivors on a low-calorie and/or vegan diet will have a hard time avoiding weight loss even if they eat until they are completely full. Weight loss is also affected by various activities. Running and fighting hordes of zombies burns through calories faster than sedentary activities like reading skill books and sleeping.
Never Learned to Read: The Illiterate trait prevents the player from reading any books and gaining their benefits. Despite the hefty 8 trait points this provides, it is widely regarded as one of the most difficult ways to play the game, as it prevents you from benefitting from the crafting recipes and XP bonuses provided by skill books, both of which are absolutely vital in the mid to late game.
Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: The helicopter pilot from a search-and-rescue or news media unit. In default settings, once during your run, at a random day after the first two weeks, a helicopter will be dispatched to the general area. It's a flying, very loud object that can be seen and heard from miles away, attracting zombies from across half the city during its flyover. This is already bad, but to make matters worse, if the helicopter pilot spots you - which is his job - he will follow you to see who you are and how you are doing, unintentionally sending a literal army of undead toward you. Preparing for the helicopter event is by far the most important thing in any long-term survival, and is the biggest reason why people die if they weren't killed right at the very start.
No Bikes in the Apocalypse: Unless you mod them into the game, they are simply not present. And for a long time, due to limitations of the game engine, modded bikes only worked as carry weight reduction. Notably, there are still cars by default - that generate lots of noise and require precious, irreplaceable fuel - in a game that can be traversed on foot. Of course, Knox Country has gotten a lot bigger since then, and hiking across the length of it on foot could take weeks compared to a few days by car.
No Can Opener: Canned food can only be opened with a can opener, no exceptions. Therefore, it's entirely possible to end up with a stockpile of canned food that can't be eaten. While this is an intentional design choice that the devs defended over the years, pretty much every single major mod gives options to use other tools to open cans.
- This was eventually remedied by the options of opening certain cans with a ring-pull and the rest with a can opener, knife, or at least a sharp object, with the clumsiness of the latter options making it slow and potentially causing an injury to your desperate survivor.
No FEMA Response: Deconstructed, with disastrous consequences. The US government's response to Knox Infection was to put Knox County under strict quarantine as well as cut the phone lines so that no information could reach the outside world. This means the rest of the world is completely unprepared because FEMA responded and did their job. And with the use of environmental storytelling in a few of the military-operated locations, it's made clear that FEMA responded all too well initially, putting everyone at ease that the situation is under control.
No Name Given: The host of the Cook Show goes unnamed, as they never introduce themselves.
Noodle Incident: You can find a job ad with the March Ridge school urgently needing a janitor. One of the stipulations is "Clean criminal record required this time", implying that the school suffered an incident with a janitor who had a criminal record.
Pants-Positive Safety: Small and medium melee weapons can be easily stored on one's belt without a sheath (which doesn't exist as an item).
No Periods, Period: Played straight. Female Survivors never have to deal with periods and their side effects (e.g. period cramps).
No Recycling: Averted in regards to wooden items, as they can be burnt for fuel or carved down into a smaller item, and most metallic items, which can be melted down in a furnace and turned into a piece of metal suitable for crafting (typically at a forge). You can even recycle broken weapons and armor in this way.
No Smoking: In a selective variant, the game allows you to grow hemp, and the presence of seeds in the drug lab suggests that it's meant to represent variants intended for recreational use, but you can only use it for the purpose of making twine, rope, and burlap out of it. This is despite the game allowing you to smoke tobacco.
Soft Glass:
- Very strongly averted — trying to break a window unarmed will make you punch/elbow it, which can inflict a bleeding wound, and climbing through a broken window without clearing the glass from it will also inflict injury. You'll also want to wear shoes while walking on glass, and gloves while picking up shards, as you'll hurt yourself otherwise.
- Played straight for zombies, who can break glass windows bare-handed and climb through them (by clumsily dragging themselves through) with no risk of injury.
No Stat Atrophy: Played straight, as far as the skills on your character sheet. But there is "stat atrophy" in the sense that the game considers things like hunger and thirst to be "stats". These will absolutely deteriorate if you do nothing about them, sometimes quite quickly. Plus whilst you can't actively lose stats like fitness or strength, if you lose too much weight you'll gain the underweight trait and that comes with penalties.
No Such Thing as Dehydration: Averted. Drinking water is essential to survival and being severely dehydrated makes you more vulnerable to overheating and imposes significant combat penalties.
No Zombie Cannibals: Played straight. The zombies immediately stop eating a dead Survivor once they reanimate as a zombie and never attack each other.
Not Completely Useless:
- Clothes worn by zombies are bloodied and often badly damaged after having to kill the owners, rendering them mostly useless to wear... but they are the basic supply of ripped sheets that can in turn be turned into a whole variety of useful things. Killing zombies with blunt weapons doesn't damage their clothing, but piercing and slashing attacks almost always ruin them.
- The lack of NPCs and the collapse of civilization in Knox County means that money is mostly useless except as tinder for starting a fire. Despite this, as of Build 42, you can mint your own gold and silver coins from reclaimed metal, if you so choose. It's even more useless than paper money.
Nobody Poops: Despite the many aspects of your physical and emotional state to manage, there's no waste elimination to worry about. Fairly popular mods add it in.
Noisy Guns: Each firearm has separate stats to track how loud it is and how far the gun report can be heard. The sound of gunfire attracts zombies towards the source - which is you. Done badly or with insufficient ammo, a shooting spree might turn into being Devoured by the Horde. Having said that, there are reasons to intentionally attract a horde, and killing everything that shows up is perfectly feasible.
No Peripheral Vision: The helicopter can only be detected by sound. If your character is deaf, they can't simply look up and notice its presence.
Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: The survivors are effectively normal people — or at best a Shell-Shocked Veteran — who are forced to fight for their lives. While normally this would be a death sentence to any average Joe, the default enemies they face against are shambling corpses that are as dumb as bricks and can't even open a door, which gives them one major advantage over the large hordes of zombies wanting to tear them apart.
Not the Intended Use:
- Cars were introduced as a mode of fast transportation and to haul large amounts of goods at once. However, players quickly figured out their best use is to follow Roger's plan: set up any given car in front of your barricade, so the zombies won't have momentum nor direct access to the wall section. For all purposes, any section blocked by a car is indestructible, making fortifying your base trivial. And this is regardless of whether you have the game set to let zombies crawl under cars, as they will have no reason to crawl under them in the first place in such a scenario, while also not attacking the barricade due to having no direct access to it.
- A wooden frame for walls isn't stopping the zombies in any meaningful way... but it still works like a fence, tripping them over, while not slowing the player in any real way during crossing and not risking the injuries you might get from fence-jumping. This allows you to use them as an additional defense measure, since it's far easier and safer to kill zombies that are on the ground than those still walking toward you - and you can also use firearms against anything before the frame "wall", having clear line of fire. A wooden frame is also far more durable than a fence, so there's less risk of it breaking down when a horde pours over it.
- Soda is only really in the game purely for the sake of immersion, but it is heavy on the calories and reduces the unhappiness of your survivor. It's the little treats that keep you going.
- Cowardly is a negative trait that doubles the panic meter gain. It also has the unintended effect of being a zombie detector, because before you even spot them on your screen (especially at night or in dark places), you will get the moodle, alerting you about zombie presence nearby. On top of that, because the game has It Gets Easier mechanics, the trait eventually loses any effects at all, since your character will eventually be hardened by the experiences of surviving through the Zombie Apocalypse. That makes it a free 2 points trait that offers a positive result, if in a completely roundabout way. You just have to live with the penalties for a long, long time.
- The various animals introduced in the Build 42 update can be used as a primitive alarm system as they are deathly afraid of zombies despite being immune to the Knox Infection and the zombies' lack of interest in them and will promptly run away in fear the moment they see one, signaling to the Survivor that there are undead in the area.
Not Quite Dead: Update 41.73 has added the toggleable option of some zombies being "fake dead" - meaning that zombies that have been killed by the Survivor can rise up from the dead once again as they progress through decay stages. Although optional and not on by default, this addition makes proper corpse disposal, such as burning corpses, much more important than it was before.
Not Using the "Z" Word: The news media and the government try to avoid using the term "Zombie" (the closest being the Knox Talk radio station calling them "the dead"), and so do many other people, but a few survivors can be seen using the term on KPATV and in a few annotated maps. Out-of-universe, however, the game calls zombies what they are.
One Bullet Clips: Depending on the game version and starting game rules.
- Up until Build 40, the fiddliness of reloading guns came in three flavors. "Easy" will deduct loose cartridges straight into your gun (one at a time with a shotgun). "Normal" will make you eject, fill (tediously!), and insert individually-tracked magazines into semi-automatic guns. "Hardcore" will make you do that and use a separate key to chamber a round first, even between shots for a pump-action shotgun. Working the action when a round is already chambered will even eject unspent cartridges onto the ground, forcing you to pick them back up.
- From Build 41 onwards, the options are removed in favor of always making reloads play mostly by Normal rules. Magazines must be individually acquired, filled, and swapped into and out of your gun (barring it using an internal magazine), though chambering the first round if you load a magazine into an empty gun is done automatically; while you still have the option to manually work the action of your gun, it's never required unless you're clearing a jam or totally unloading the gun, and in both cases the cartridge is ejected straight into your inventory.
One-Handed Zweihänder: Most two-handed weapons can be wielded one-handed if your other hand is occupied (usually with a bag or a light source). However, this reduces the damage they do.
One-Hit Kill: Certain short blades will make you perform jaw stabs whenever a Critical Hit is scored, instantly killing the target.
One Size Fits All: One of the relatively rare concessions to convenience over realism in the game, any survivor can equip any piece of equipment, saving you from having to hunt down a pair of shoes or bullet proof vest in your size.
"Open!" Says Me: The default reaction of zombies towards a door is to repeatedly bash it until it breaks, unless you use the sandbox settings to have them open doors.
Optional Stealth: You can sneak around the suburbs to avoid attracting any unwanted attention. It pretty much becomes mandatory if there's zombies everywhere and you're relying on melee weapons while low on supplies. From build 42 onward, even without trying to sneak around, various stealth mechanics are still passively in place, so not making sudden moves and/or noise and using terrain to break line of sight, one can roam zombie-infested areas without risking detection - while actual attempts on sneaking offer a chance to avoid being detected entirely or to reliably perform stealth takedowns without alerting other zombies in the area.
Optional Traffic Laws: Though it's in their best interest not to get too crazy, since crashing will still damage the car and injure them, the survivor can drive however they want and there is no one who will stop them. Justified, since it's the apocalypse and order in Knox County has completely collapsed.
Our Zombies Are Different: The "Zombie Lore" feature allows you to customise the zombies present in the game and their physical abilities and parameters. By default, the game uses the classic "Romero" zombies: fast shambling undead, dumb as doornails, average strength and toughness, no special infected, no zombified animals, and any human that gets bit is guaranteed to be infected. If you want a workout, you can set the zombies' speed to "Sprinters". If you're terrified of the idea of zombies that think, you can make them smart enough to "Navigate & Open Doors". You can max out the speed, strength, toughness, intelligence, memory, smell, hearing and sight of your zombies if you want to deal with what are effectively vampires (and want a serious challenge).
Overrated and Underleveled: Many occupations start out incapable of doing things that you'd expect them to be able to do, due to their skill levels falling below the requirement. For instance, the carpenter is incapable of building wooden windows, and the tailor won't be able to sew leather gloves.

P - Z

Paint the Town Red: Hitting an enemy will spill blood onto the surroundings, and while blood on the ground will eventually fade, bloody walls and floors will stay so permanently, though the blood will eventually rust. The aftermath of fighting a horde indoors may well require a few dozen bottles of bleach to clean up.
Paper-Thin Disguise: The icon for the Inconspicuous trait is a plain baseball cap - the type that's stereotypically used for "blending into a crowd".
Parasol of Pain: Umbrellas can be wielded as improvised spears, though all of their stats (except durability) are inferior to carved spears.
Parody: Several of the movies and shows available on VHS tapes are parodies of shows and movies popular in the early '90s.
- Home Invaders 2 is a parody of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.
- Pleistocene Park is a parody of Jurassic Park (1993) but with mammoths instead of dinosaurs.
- CyberKiller 2 is a parody of Terminator.
- Ace Pilot is a parody of Top Gun.
- Space Crew is a parody of Star Trek.
- The Thompsons is a parody of The Simpsons.
- The Omega Department is a parody of occult detective shows like Twin Peaks and The X-Files.
- The Moderators is a parody of Power Rangers.
- Mother's Boy is a parody of Psycho.
- Operation Fort Knox is a parody of James Bond. (If the title is any indication, it might specifically be a parody of Goldfinger.)
The Pen Is Mightier: Pens and pencils are counted among the "bladed" weapons. They are poor even as emergency weapons.
Period Piece: The cars, televisions, VHS tapes, and omnipresent digital watches, combined with the lack of cell phones, personal computers, or internet elements all point to the game being set in the early 1990s; if you watch the right channel on TV you can even hear a statement from an Army General giving the date as sometime in July 1993. The exact date is visible in the HUD if your character is wearing a digital watch.
Permadeath: All deaths in this game are final and once your character dies there is no way to save them or go back to a previous save.
Perpetual Beta: The game has been in development since 2011, with the ending nowhere in sight. In fact, the status of endless beta became part of the marketing since 2021, when the game was already in dev for a decade.
Pipe Pain: There are several types of pipes in the game: the lead pipe and the iron pipe both serve as blunt melee weapons, and the iron pipe is also used in various metalworking recipes. Using the plastic pipe as a weapon is, sadly, disallowed, so no hollow bwonk sounds as it bounces harmlessly off a zombie's head.
Pistol-Whipping: Used when shoving with handguns, and rarely when you shove with a longarm. Unfortunately, it does no damage and is slower than normal shoving.
Point Build System: The foundation of Character Customization. Each occupation comes with a positive or negative number of points to be spent on positive and negative traits; generally the more inherent positives an occupation has (such as better starting stats or special abilities), the more drawbacks need to be taken. Some of these may come with free skill ranks, but after that all skills can only be improved through practice.
Poison Mushroom:
- Phone books cause boredom when used, and are otherwise only useful as kindling.
- Drinking bleach will cause you to suffer from inevitably fatal poisoning. You could, however, poison meals with it, though this is useless in singleplayer and can be disabled by the host on a multiplayer server.
Pompous Political Pundit: Judge Matt Hass on Triple-N (one of the two news TV channels), who is a proud conservative and writer of books promoting his political views. Once it becomes confirmed that the Knox Infection is spreading across the entirety of the United States he uses the situation to gleefully mock liberals for advocating for gun control policies.
Power Equals Rarity: The katana is arguably the best melee weapon in the entire game, capable of taking out any zombie in one or two hits. However, katanas are exceedingly rare and break rather quickly.
Powerful Pick: The game takes the "axe" in "pickaxe" quite literally, as the pickaxe is able to cut down trees and use the same skills and animations as the other axes, and is even more powerful and durable than the fireaxe.
Press X to Die: Drinking bleach will not kill you immediately, but it will kill you.
Previous Player-Character Cameo: Zomboid manages this within a single release. There is certainly more than one way to die, but zombie infection is easily the most common. If you die while infected (even if something else killed you, like bleach or falling off a roof) you will quickly get back up and join your new zombie brethren. Game over, right? Well, yes, but you can still load that same save, and you will be able to spawn a fresh character into the same world, with all the changes you had already made intact. This includes not only any fortifications or stockpiling you had accomplished, but also the fact that "you" died and became a zombie. You can find and rekill your former self, which you'll want to do if you were carrying good loot. You may have to track yourself a ways from your death-spot to recover backpacks and the like, but anything you had been holding in your hands will be lying on the ground right where you undied.
- Remember Bob "Baldspot" Smith and his injured wife Kate, from the old 'Til Death Us Do Part tutorial years ago? You might find their old safehouse in Muldraugh. And the couple inside, zombified.
Procedural Generation: Most of the world is made by hand. If you go outside of the map's boundaries, however, you'll end up running into an endless procedurally-generated forest (and road, if that's where you leave the map).
Punch-Packing Pistol: Played with. Due to the way how the game handles loot, players are far more likely to find snub-nose revolvers and basic automatic pistols (especially early on) than any other kind of firearms. Said handguns are legitimately good choices that can serve well for years of survival, having sufficient stopping power against zombies - even if their damage isn't top-notch, they still do more than enough to kill them.
Purely Aesthetic Gender: Your Survivor can be male or female but the choice has no impact on gameplay. This extends to clothing, as all clothes can be worn regardless of gender. The only difference is that a male Survivor can grow a beard but a female Survivor can't.
Quick Melee: You can shove enemies regardless of what you're wielding. Against a downed target, this turns into stomping, which can do a lot of damage with the right footwear, positioning and the unrelated hitbox.
Rainbow Pimp Gear: Because you heat up from fighting and running, you can easily end up suffering from heatstroke, especially if you're wearing warm clothes and/or the weather is hot. As such, a perfectly legitimate strategy in summer is to get rid of all your clothing (except boots for stomping and avoiding cuts from walking on glass, and maybe gloves to pick up glass shard safely), allowing you to run around without overheating. Of course running through a thicket or even a single bush will hurt. The alternative is making a literal set of rags, where you mend a bunch of half-torn clothes taken off from zombies with leather patches - the end result is an airy costume that has stats on par of wearing full-on leather biker gear and looks like a clown patchwork.
Rare Candy: The skill show VHS tapes can be watched after the TV broadcasts end and provide a one-time XP bonus to certain skills. Home VHS tapes also can cover skills that normally don't have their dedicated TV show, making them even more valuable. With default settings, there is exactly one of each of these Home VHS tapes spawning on the map, so good luck sieving the entire, properly-scaled rural county in search for that single tape for your collection.
Razor Apples: It is possible to add bleach to certain meals like soups, with predictable results.
Real-Place Background: The current map, Knox Country, is based on 1990's Knox County, Kentucky, and follows roughly the same layout (allowing for some adaptation due to the grid-based mapping and such). However it has started to diverge to suit the fiction where necessary.
- Somewhat, at least. The map doesn't reflect the location or cities of real-life Knox County, Kentucky (itself made up of much smaller towns than in the fictional version). The map does, however, give realistic distances for existing (or based off existing) areas in a different region of Kentucky.
- This leads to a slightly odd feeling if you're familiar with the real-life area, as real towns like Muldraugh and Brandenburg flank fictional ones like Riverside and Rosewood.
Reclaimed by Nature: As days go by, urban areas will have grass growing on roads, mini-forests forming on lawns, and vines crawling up buildings.
Reduced to Ratburgers:
- When the power finally goes out, and all the existing perishable food rots, you will need to fish or trap if you want decent amounts of protein. Until you get good at it, trapping will only produce "small animal meat": mice, rats, or squirrels.
- Foraging and searching around in trash bins and dumpsters will often produce insects. They provide little nutrition and will quickly make you depressed, but they may well save your life.
Regenerating Health: Your Hit Points will slowly regenerate, with bonuses for high satiety and a penalty for hunger, thirst, having a cold and being cold.
Reluctant Warrior: The Reluctant Fighter trait, which can be taken even if you're a police officer or military veteran. It reduces the amount of experience you gain for combat skills, but it does not give you any mood penalties for killing, as there's no reasoning with the zombies.
The Remnant:
- Listening to the Automated Radio Frequency allows you to hear the military relaying various orders and mentions of other exclusion zones. These messages can be heard months after the start of the game implying that at least some part of the US Army managed to survive the initial apocalypse.
- The helicopter pilot, if the event is set out to repeat. He can show up years into the game. And he's always announced by the ARF system, meaning someone is manning the post, too.
- You. A few of the starting occupations make you a member of some public service, be it the police, fire guard or park rangers. And you start in your uniform, so Still Wearing the Old Colors comes in the package for as long as you keep it. A few different mods and pre-set scenario conditions expand on this concept.
Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: If you knock down a zombie but don't kill it, followup finisher strikes will aim for the head to ensure they stay down.
Rescue Equipment Attack: Fire axes are very solid weapons, with the benefit of extremely high durability, good damage and reach, and being eligible for the Lumberjack's bonus to axe swinging speed.
Ridiculously Fast Construction: Assuming that your character has materials available, it's possible to construct a decently-sized house in a day or two, assuming that you work 12-16 hours each day and never get distracted. Even if you're building a mansion, it'll likely only take a week to finish construction.
Robbing the Dead:
- Zombies are a good source of clothes (which can be turned into rags) and jewelry, and some may also carry more useful items (such as embedded weapons). However, your character will be disturbed by this if they're not a military veteran, suffering unhappiness as the result.
- Dead players, naturally, can be looted by those who are still alive.
Rolling Pin of Doom: The rolling pin isn't a great weapon, but can be used in a pinch. Better to use it for making bread and pies, if you know the recipes.
Room Full of Zombies: Any room can potentially be this. And in most cases, there is no way to tell, unless you open the door. One of the very first things new players have to learn is "door flashing": opening and instantly closing doors for a brief flash of the room, while whatever is inside stays there, or at least is slowed down for a few seconds by the door itself. Beware the zombies that stand on the tile behind the opened door, giving you the impression the room is safe, and then grab you the second you cross the threshold.
Run, Don't Walk: Inverted. The character used to be only able to walk, until the developers realized the game wouldn't be so dark running around like Benny Hill.
Safe Zone Hope Spot:
- You can encounter buildings with their windows and doors already boarded up. Despite giving the appearance of being safe, they are already overrun. However, if you deal with the zombies inside or lure them outside, there is a Survivalist Stash made by the people who originally secured the building, which at worst will contain a cardboard box full of seeds, and at best will be loaded with more weapons and ammo than you can carry.
- A hidden radio station broadcasts an air guard base as a safe haven for the first few days. Eventually, however, somebody else takes over and suspiciously claims that the original occupants of the base and all of the zombies are gone, and asks for listeners to come over without any weapons. The game's files list this guy's calls as "kanibals," so it's safe to assume they killed the original occupants and plan on making any survivors that come to them their next meal.
Sanity Slippage:
- Panic ruins your combat strength and leads to ever worsening tunnel vision. Prolonged stress can lead to depression, which both worsens combat stats and makes all actions more sluggish. The developers claim that Depression will be even worse in future updates, affecting things like your ability to work with Non Player Characters.
- In earlier versions, the player may see ghostly versions of zombies all around.
- 7 days after the game's start, Judge Matt Hass recites an odd poem about zombies, ending it with "Welcome to Hell, America". It seems at odds with his prior behavior, and given the fact that you can find him zombified at the TURBO studio, the implication is that he was going delirious from the infection while recording the broadcast.
Save Scumming: The game autosaves every time you sleep or close the game, so this is extremely difficult to do yet still possible (though prone to causing bugs) if you manually back up your savegame files, or forcibly close the game.
Sawed-Off Shotgun: You can make them. Shotgun + Saw = "Sawn Off Shotgun". Damage and range goes down, spread goes way up, and weight lightens. According to the item's icon, only the barrel is sawed, not the stock. It's also one of the very few instances where it's a single-barreled, pump-action shotgun that gets this treatment, though as of Build 41.49 you can also saw down the double-barrel shotgun that was added in 41.18.
Scavenger World: As would presumably follow a zombie apocalypse.
Schizo Tech: As items are depleted, survivors improve their crafting skills, and services are shut off, it's easy to end up with such an aesthetic, as modern stuff is mixed in with stone age technology (such as wooden spears, bone axes and armor, and stone knives) and medieval technology (like steel swords and armor that are produced with the help of a forge and smelter).
Schmuck Bait:
- The Mall. The likely place where the first (numerous) survivors of the Zombie Apocalypse would ever go, and the infection went along with them. Despite this, it has plenty of valuable resources needed to survive - but good luck getting there to loot those supplies. There's two of them in fact, and one of them is even bigger.
- The updated tutorial goes over some of the basics of interacting with the world, particularly in fighting off the undead, and eventually tells you to press Q to take the cure for zombification once you're too scared to continue. Pressing it instead simply makes your character call out to the zombies to get their attention, as the game tells you that there is no cure.
Scream Discretion Shot: A few meta events are people screaming in fear and/or pain, presumably due to being torn apart by zombies. (Un)fortunately, you'll never get to see the grizzly fates that were visited upon the survivors.
Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
- After the US Army fails to get the situation in Knox County under control it decides to abandon the region to its fate. This is a in-universe reason why we don't see any (living) soldiers.
- Knowing when to make use of this trope is an essential part of long-term survival. Sometimes, there are just too many zombies in an area for whatever you came looking for to be worth it, even if you know that it'll be there.
Seen It All: The Veteran background, in addition to skills with gun use, provides a unique trait: Desensitized. It makes your character completely unaffected by living in the horror of the Zombie Apocalypse, prevents panicking and doesn't cause any sort of distress from the bloodshed. As far as your character is concerned, conventional war was worse.
Self-Surgery:
- If you suffer from a lodged bullet/glass shard, you'll have to pull it out yourself.
- Deep wounds will need stitching, causing pain in the process.
Serial Escalation: Surviving a single day in this game is relatively easy. Surviving a week is challenging but doable. Surviving a month is hard. The longest verified time that a player had survived in the tech-demo? A year and three months - which, evidently, the devs never counted on people reaching, since the death notice misspelled "year" as "hear"◊. Worth noting that the eventual cause of demise on the longest runs were not the zombies, but rather the fact that there was no more food left on the map and farming and hunting hadn't been implemented yet.
Shell-Shocked Veteran: The Veteran has a double chance to suffer nightmares while sleeping, and they're the only thing that can cause them to panic.
Short-Range Shotgun: Downplayed, the shotguns have fair range - better than pistols in fact, but still don't quite reach to the edges of the screen. Interestingly, the double-barrel shotgun has a slightly narrower spread than the pump-action shotgun. It's played straighter if sawn off.
Shotguns Are Just Better: With enough ammo on your person and diligence in both using it and evading the inevitable hordes pouring from every direction, no firearm can compare to the shotgun's damage output; and unlike the Molotov Cocktail it doesn't carry the risk of burning down the user or half of the map. It's feasible to turn an entire town into a bloody graveyard by sunset. Even the loud noise it generates can be useful: a much more attainable goal for a less skilled or fortunate survivor is to pop a shot somewhere remote, then duck back into the desired location once every zombie comes crawling. Even with the new aiming system, a sawed-off shotgun boasts ammo efficiency no other gun can match, with the potential to damage and kill multiple zombies at a time.
Shout-Out:
- The Challenge scenario "A Really CD DA" is a reference to Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead's "Really Bad Day" challenge, where you are naked, drunk, sick with the flu, and your house is on fire. Both games have a similar premise of a highly-realistic survival simulator set in a zombie apocalypse.
- There is an ice cream shop in Louisville called Ice Ice Tasty.
- There is a law office in Rosewood called Marple & Christie Legal Services.
- There is a law office in Louisville called Goodman Legal Services.
- The description for the desensitized trait is: War... War never changes.
- The zombie population peak day setting is set to 28 days by default. This is most likely a reference to 28 Days Later.
- The hunting supply store in South-Eastern Louisville is named "A. A. Ron Hunting Supply.".
- A radio broadcast mentions how the in-universe fast food chain Spiffo's began preparing their meat by feeding cattle beef.
- A recent screenshot from "map.projectzomboid.com" shows a soon-to-be-released map extention contains a trailer park with a half-burnt trailer, a shed with a bunk bed inside, and a trailer decorated to double as a bar.
- You can occasionally find a zombie with a Wooden Stake shoved into its heart, indicating that whoever tried to kill it thought that they operated by vampire rules. Left 4 Dead 2 fans might wonder if Francis, who frequently got the two monsters mixed up, is out there in Knox County.
- The underground complex under Rosewood secret military base is a clear reference to the first Resident Evil, with a giant research facility housing hundreds of its former staff, now undead.
- One of the shows on KPATV is about video games, with some of them being Mars Disaster, Street Combat II, and Fatal Combat.
- You can find a book called "Slaves of Arnok: Dwarf Empire", written by T.Z. Adams.
- The inventory icon for a comic book is unmistakably a Superman comic.
Shovel Strike: You can fight with a shovel, but it's better used for landscaping. Most importantly, it can be used to dig graves for burying zombie corpses, sparing you from having to burn them (at the cost of, well, lugging the bodies around and using space making those graves).
The Simple Life Is Simple:
- Between farming being introduced in the first build from the RC series back in 2013 till the final update of build 41, played absolutely straight. It took minimal effort to learn how to farm, and the skill itself was mostly about additional information. Reading a few "For Dummies" mags was enough to know all the effective ways of keeping the plants safe from pests. The only even remotely difficult part was getting the seeds, since they only came in industrial-grade packets.
- Build 42 completely overhauled the system, fittingly renaming the related skill from farming to agriculture. By adding a mostly realistic growth cycle, plants now take months to grow, any crop failure on the way can be devastating, and experience gain is very limited (not to mention stretched in time) - so preventing any issues is twice as tough, as your character is unlikely to notice or know remedies. On top of it all, because the growth is now so long, it takes not a small garden, but a half-acre farm to stay fed, and it has to be managed with hand tools, making it a back-breaking labour. Ironically, getting seeds now is much easier since foraging in the wild is by far the easiest way to get them. Starting the game with the Gardener perk became highly useful just for its exp multiplier.
- Because build 42 also introduced farm animals, there is another hurdle to general farming complications. Animals are covered by a different skill entirely, meaning being a competent crop farmer doesn't translate at all into being good at animal care and vice versa.
Sinister Scythe: A hand scythe is available as a fast swinging but average damage and low durability weapon. A reasonably effective weapon until something more durable for long term use can be found. Now that animals have been added to the game, the hand scythe and its full-sized cousin are much handier for cutting hay to feed your flock.
Sinister Shiv: Shivs can be made out of glass shards, toothbrushes, or small bits of metal (such as spoons and forks). Their damage sucks somewhat, but they're a good starting weapon for Short Blade users.
Skill Scores and Perks: There is a hard line between these. Perks are occupations and traits, which you choose a balance of at character creation. With a couple exceptions, these will never change through play. Skills, on the other hand, may start with a few free ranks from your perks, but otherwise they increase only through practice.
Slashed Throat: Bloodletting wounds to the neck will cause players to bleed out very quickly, requiring them to stop the bleeding fast.
Sliding Scale of Video Game World Size and Scale: In terms of scale (literal scale, not scope), it would be very hard to find a game that surpasses Zomboid on the realistic end of the meter and is set in the real world. The game map mimics real-world Kentucky's dimensions shockingly well, down to the level of municipal zones (e.g., residential vs. commercial) and often individual buildings or other landmarks. The scope is nothing to sneeze at either, being somewhere on the order of 13km x 10km, covering four towns, the city of Louisville, and the wide spaces between and around them, and there are no hard boundaries — if you leave the map, you'll simply find a randomly-generated forest, along with roads that go on forever. Most likely, even if you did find competition on either score, none would have even a fraction of Zomboid's count of enterable, fully-furnished buildings. Even if you weren't able to fight zombies and scavenge houses within it, the map alone is an exceedingly ambitious project. Travel within the map, on the other hand, is quite compressed when measured in real time. By the game clock, it's roughly plausible.
Small, Secluded World: The game takes place in Knox County which the survivor can never hope to escape. Justified, as the US Army sealed off the area before abandoning it.
Smoke Out: The Engineer profession comes with several recipes for turning household cruft into tactical saviors, and one option is a smokebomb: newspaper, rags, and a therapeutic coldpack. Even non-Engineers can learn this recipe if they get lucky, and Electrical skill can upgrade the bomb with timers, proximity triggers, and remote switches.
Smoking Is Cool: The smoker trait is often considered free points since it's easily negated and allows cigarettes to remove unhappiness. As such, most powerful builds pre-Build 42 nerf required your character to be a smoker.
Spam Attack: Repeatedly hitting a zombie will eventually cause the damage of your strikes to increase dramatically.
Speaking Simlish: Zig-zagged. When watching TV or listening to the radio the audio is a bunch of Sim-like gibberish but the text displayed alongside the audio is in perfectly legible English.
Spread Shot: The shotgun is basically a wedge of death, which gets wider if you saw it off. In Build 42, the shotguns were given a much tighter spread under the new aiming system - but the trope still applies to an extent even when not cut down to size.
Sprint Meter:
- Running and performing laborious tasks like swinging heavy weapons will eventually get you an "exhausted" moodlet. Notably, it governs all of your physical ability, not just being able to move or attack. You can keep pushing yourself to the point of being barely able to move, and recovery from total exertion may take hours or even longer if you're wounded, hungry or haven't slept.
- Build 42 introduces muscle strain as a separate concern, which represents the pain of using the same limb too much. You gain it whenever you perform certain timer-based actions or attack (even with guns, due to recoil), with the amount depending on your strength, weapon skill, and the weapon's weight.
Stat Grinding: There is a character sheet of over twenty skills, from Weapon Maintenance, to Sneaking, to Cooking, plus two physical stats, Strength and Fitness. All are rated from zero to ten, and there are only two ways to improve them. Either you start with a few ranks by choosing certain occupations and traits from the start, or you grind them up through use. The grinding can take a very long time without an XP boost of some sort, discouraging a player from trying to be good at everything at once. Occupations and traits that come with free skill ranks generally also come with a mild XP multiplier in those skills. There are also a how-to books that can be scavenged, each covering two ranks of one skill and providing a large XP boost over those ranks if you take the time to read the whole thing.
Stealth-Based Game: Build 42 massively improved stealth mechanics and the way detection by zombies works. Now things like weather, lighting, their relative position to the player, pace of movement and even the surface below the player's feet (affecting the sound of their footsteps) affect how easily you're detected. As a result, it is now possible to sneak around in a much more natural, logical way, rather than simply cheesing the AI. While the new system has its own quirks, one can now get into a room with a zombie, manoeuvre around it and then leave, without being detected - a feat previously impossible to pull.
Stealth Expert: The Burglar gains a decent bonus to all stealth-related skills, which also makes them much faster to learn in gameplay. If you also take the Graceful (reduced footstep noise) and Inconspicuous (reduced chance to be seen) traits, you can eventually become near-inaudible and very hard to see.
Sticks to the Back: Regardless of what you're wearing, you always have a single back slot that fits most weapons that don't fit into the belt or holster slots. While you can add a sling to a longarm, it will simply reduce the gun's encumbrance instead of adding an extra back slot.
Still Wearing the Old Colors: The Veteran can start off wearing a military-like outfit - beret or boonie hat, dog tags, military camo shirt, a t-shirt with "ARMY" written on it, and camo shorts.
Stock Animal Diet: When setting up traps, the best bait to catch rodents is cheese, while rabbits will be lured the most by carrots and earth worms make the best bait for small birds.
Stock Food Depictions:
- The pizza's 3D model is always depicted as having pepperonis on it even if no pepperonis were used to make the pizza.
- Burgers are always shown as having a patty in it even if it has no meat or fish in it.
Subsystem Damage: For the living, leg injuries will slow you down (sometimes to the point that you can only limp slowly), while arm injuries will penalize your speed and damage in combat. It's also possible to break your limbs, making these penalties much worse, and you can also suffer from broken ribs (reduced endurance) or a fractured skull (increased need for sleep).
Super-Persistent Predator: The horde. Individual zombies are easy to lose, but a horde may never stop once it sets its sight on you. The more you try to run from it, the more other zombies will be alerted to your location and join the hunt, creating a chain reaction of zombies following other zombies following you. If you are lucky, the path ahead will be clear of additional zombies and allow you to break the line of sight at some point. If you're not, the horde will keep growing and growing while you'll get more and more tired. Eventually, your stamina will be depleted, while they are absolutely no worse for wear.
Super-Speed Reading: Downplayed. The Fast Reader trait allows the Survivor to read books 30 percent faster.
Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: The game takes various liberties when it comes to time compression, healing durations, or learning new skills (like the fact one can become a competent carpenter from scratch by watching TV for a week or the speed at which vegetables grow). However, physical training happens in more or less real time: it takes weeks of intense exercises to improve stamina and strength, and in the meantime all it does is burn calories at an increased rate and make your character tired and/or cramped, which in turn affects all other activities and the pace of any potential, further exercises. It won't show real, meaningful effects until after 2-4 months, depending on how dedicated one will be with the training and what were the starting stats.
Suspiciously Apropos Music: The last song heard on the Music Video Channel, 9 days after the game's start, is the Halloween-themed Fright Night song, which ends with the lyrics "And remember, there's no-one coming to save you!". Considering that, by the time you hear the song, all hope of rescue is gone, it's scarily appropriate.
Sword Almighty: Long Blades, which are all swords, are the strongest weapons in the entire game, with the one-handed machete doing the same damage as the sledgehammer, yet being far less tiring to use, while the katana can kill even the toughest zombies in 1-2 swings. Swords can be crafted by a survivor skilled in Welding or proper Blacksmithing as of Build 42, and while the finest sword you can make is much less strong than a katana, it has a damage rating that knocks almost every other melee weapon out of the park.
Tactical Door Use: Unless you tweak the "Zombie Lore" settings in Sandbox mode, zombies cannot open doors the normal way; they will instead try to break down the door. So in an emergency, closing a door behind you with a horde hot on your heels will at least give you a few moments to breathe. You might be able to sneak out the window while they're busy, too, because the other tactical use of doors is that once a zombie gets started on trying to batter one down, it takes a fair bit to distract them - and it's also quite noisy, so it's bound to draw the attention of any others and keep them there too. However, for long-term fortification purposes, the best way to use doors is to not use them. Instead, dangle a rope from a second-story window, then board up all the ground-floor openings completely. Those former doors are not now useless; rather, they make a great focal point for incoming zombies so that you can sneak out and brain them from behind.
- While locked doors were always there, an update added the magic of keys. Occasionally, a zombie will have a house key on its body, generally of the building they're in or near. The game tracks which keys are for which doors, and it even remembers when you bash down the door and scavenge the doorknob to install on your own door later. While the ability to lock and unlock your own doors is useless in single-player (again, unless you decided to grant zombies door privileges), in multi-player on the other hand...
- And there is of course the so-called "door flash" technique, where doors to a room are opened and then immediately closed with quick tapping the related key. As a result, player gains a glimpse of what's on the other side of the doors and the overlay of the room, but (most likely) without alerting the potential zombies. And even if zombies will be alerted, there is still the door blocking their instant lunge at player character. Learning this is essential for scavenging in more densely populated areas with at least a semblance of safety.
Talking to Themself: As chatting in multiplayer staves off boredom regardless of the presence of other players, it's possible to avoid going crazy by monologuing to yourself - which by pure accident is similar to the real-life occurrence among people in prolonged solitary situations.
Tampering with Food and Drink: It is possible to slip toxic substances, such as bleach, into prepared meals. Be cautious accepting meals from other players you don't fully trust.
Tastes Better Than It Looks: No matter how nonsensical the combination of ingredients and spices may be, cooked meals will make the Survivor happier (provided that the ingredients are varied and fresh). A salad made out of raw potato, salt and bread? Why not.
Taught by Experience: Certain skills can be increased or gained only via related activities. Some of them are thus painfully hard to raise, even with experience modifier from reading books prior, like Medicine, which you will only be able to level up by being injured first, requiring a risky Self-Surgery. Some skills take it a step further, as they don't have any teaching aids, so all there is is your raw, on-hand experience - Firearm skills fall squarely into this field.
Taught by Television: Certain TV programs are a handy source of knowledge and experience in the early days, particularly for the ubiquitous Carpentry skill. Be quick with those, since electricity isn't to stay forever and TV will be out after 9 days regardless. After that, you'll need a generator and tapes.
- Build 42 aimed to discourage this to an extent, and under default settings there is a fairly low level cap of 3 for learning by television or VHS.
That Nostalgia Show: While setting the game in 1993 was originally for practical reasons, as it meant that there was no in-game internet (which both made it harder to learn skills and made the US government's quarantine and information blackout over Knox Country more plausible) and prevented the kind of invoked feature creep that constantly updating a modern setting would have, the developers did eventually start leaning into the early '90s setting once they settled on it, the in-game lore containing numerous references to the pop culture of the era in everything from movie, TV, and song parodies to the use of a Public Access Show and VHS tapes to learn various skills to two of the haircuts being explicitly named as "Grunge" and "Rachel" (or, as of Build 42, "Raquel") haircuts.
There Are No Tents: Averted. It is possible to make tents and set up camp anywhere on the map.
There Is No Cure: The Knox Infection. Zombie bites always result in death and zombification.
There Was a Door: Zombies can bust down windows and player-built walls when they don't see a convenient path, while players can deconstruct fences and wooden player-built walls, or destroy pre-built and stone/brick walls with a sledgehammer.
Throwing Off the Disability: Several negative traits can be lost depending on the circumstances, since the traits on character creation only determine what the associated stat starts at. Underweight and Very Underweight can be lost by fattening oneself up with high calorie food and avoiding physical activity, and Overweight and Obese can be lost by holding off on eating until the one weight point lost per day puts you into standard weight (and thanks to how the overweight traits require less eating, this is somewhat encouraged by the game.) Feeble and Weak will eventually be lost once Strength is trained into an average range, and same goes for Out of Shape and Unfit for Athletics. Starting with these traits will effectively allow free points to spend on positive traits once you can get into normal ranges.
Tier System: When it comes to car gas tanks, mufflers, brakes, and tires, they have 3 tiers of increasing performance - old/valu/small, regular, big/performance. Suspensions, meanwhile, only have the regular and performance tiers.
Time-Passage Beard: Male Survivors will grow a beard after a certain period of time which can only be removed with a razor or scissors.
Title Theme Drop: The main theme has a chance to play when you're fighting a large group of zombies.
Too Awesome to Use:
- Most firearms and assorted ranged weapons, but especially the shotguns. They're extremely noisy and will attract zombies from farther than the screen can show, and their ammo is rare and cumbersome.
  - Later updates changed this with penalties to melee combat and more places to loot guns and ammunition. Use guns smartly, and you'll kill more zombies in a day than you could in a week.
- Sprinting. A great way to avoid an amassed group of zombies, but don't do it for too long or you'll be overtaken by the same dead heads you're trying to outrun. Skilled players usually do this in bursts to redirect the hordes away from their camps.
- The axe can be too awesome at first. With enough scavenging, you can accumulate a surplus, or craft crude axes from forest resources, but until then its usefulness for felling trees might make you reluctant to swing it at zombies.
Too Dumb to Live: When your player character chooses to move up or down a rope, they won't be able to change direction. If you climb down a rope to see how many zombies are at its base, you can't go back up until you touch the ground, and if there's, say, an enormous horde of zeds waiting for you down there, well...
Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket: If you try to open a can with a sharp blade instead of a proper opener, there's a chance to stab one of your hands badly enough that you'll likely have to forget about fighting for the rest of the day. Which is still an improvement to earlier builds, where cans could be only opened with tin opener. Screwdriver? Hitting them over a surface? Knife? Nu-uh, impossible. This made tin openers one of the most badly needed equipment to just get by.
Training from Hell: You're likely to take this one yourself in the town you start in, as skills provided by jobs from the beginning in comparison are relatively low. If you can survive beyond the first few months, barring extraordinary luck, you will have completed that training.
Trauma Inn: Hit Points will regenerate faster while sleeping.
Tutorial Failure:
- The original, early version of the tutorial was quite lackluster and didn't even explain all the basics, while also passive-aggressively mocking the player for having trust in tutorials.
- More recent versions of the tutorial still fail to cover a variety of basics that were added since the last version of the tutorial. You will have to figure out things like cars, proper looting and storage either via trial-and-error or from online guides.
Two Shots from Behind the Bar: There is a specific script for items distribution on each map generation that pretty much guarantees there is going to be a shotgun in some container behind the bar counter in the few bars that are in the map. If you are lucky, it will be the pump-action variant, too. If you're not, it'll only be a short bat.
Unaffected by Spice: Zig-zagged. Not only does going overboard with spices have no negative effect when making dishes, it usually increases the happiness gain from a dish. However, drinking an entire bottle of hot sauce or eating raw black pepper will make the Survivor unhappy.
Uncertain Audience: In-Universe, this occurs to the Woodcraft show on the Life And Living TV channel, as the host assumes that he's mostly watched by women, and constantly looks for an excuse to take his shirt off. The problem? His show is about carpentry, which is primarily a male hobby. When he finds out what his audience actually is, he does not take the news well.
Unconventional Food Usage: Perishable foodstuffs can be converted into fertilizer by putting them inside a composter.
Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: The game is rife with this and it is arguably one of the main selling points. Some of the examples:
- Run right next to an innocuous looking tree or a thicket of them? The branches can scratch you up and cause bleeding.
- If you can't open a door, you break a window and climb in, obviously; but if you don't take the time to remove the glass from the frame, now you have a bleeding hand to fix (which might have glass shards that need tweezers to extricate)... or not, because you were wearing gloves.
- Accidental fall from a second story? Broken leg, naturally; but it's easy to make a splint from sticks and rags. However, you'll need to keep that on for weeks (already very generous), with your movement speed being not at all zombie-compatible the whole time.
- The game keeps track of how and if your food is preserved. A fridge is good for keeping your food relatively fresh for few days longer. A freezer will be obviously better, but did you use just a home freezer, or did you haul an industrial-grade unit that keeps things at an even cooler temperature? Even then, you can't keep it frozen for the rest of eternity, because not only you need generator for that, but after few years of being home-frozen that food is still going to get bad or at least lose its nutrient value.
- Found a locked car that you really need to get into, but not the keys? You can always break the window and get inside, except now you obviously lack the window itself. Want to drive? You can always try to hot-wire the thing with the right tools, but it will take time, isn't perfectly reliable and you are draining the battery each time your try. Zombies get to the car before you managed to start the engine? Just get outside on the other side of the vehicle and leave them banging on the car you are no longer in.
- And then there was the "Hardcore reloading" option for firearms in older versions of the game. One key would eject or insert a magazine, or start tube-feeding rounds into a shotgun, while another will work the action to chamber a round. If you work the action when a round is already chambered, you will actually eject unfired rounds onto the floor. In more recent updates, you do not need to manually chamber a gun unless it jams, which would have made shotguns very fiddly to fire indeed.
- You can build rain collector barrels to store rain water with a high enough carpentry skill... or you can just use regular cooking pots or saucepans instead. Or why not stop by historic Coalfield to steal the rain barrels that are already there? There are plenty of places on the map with important, static resources such as this if the player knows where to look.
- Having an active Generator indoors will cause the occupants' health to deplete over time, without otherwise giving much of an indicator that the generator is causing suffocation. Generators in real life produce carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, both of which are unbreathable and are hard to detect due to lack of odor.
- Using the in-game chat (text or voice) will attract zombies. This includes using a radio without headphones or earbuds, too, so if you don't have these, you should mute the radio while sneaking, or at least turn the volume down to the minimum.
Universal Ammunition: Played straight in earlier builds, where ammo was restricted to pistol rounds in 9mm, 12 gauge shotgun shells and .223 and .308 for rifles. Eventually, build 41 significantly increased ammo variety, but there are still on average 2 different guns that can fire the same round. Mods to add more weapons play this even straighter, since guns using the existing ammo types will almost universally use the existing magazines as well, e.g. a Makarov (which uses a 9x18mm bullet in reality) being programmed to accept 9x19, thus able to load the same magazine you scavenged from a Beretta.
Unluckily Lucky: Your character is immune to the airborne strain of the highly-contagious Knox Infection, but virtually everyone else in Kentucky, USA and the rest of the world wasn't. You're more or less a Sole Survivor up against hordes of zombies, eager to spread variants of the disease no one has any resistance to.
Unorthodox Sheathing: Swords can be carried on your back, not just on your belt. You can even do this with one-handed swords.
Unskilled, but Strong: One of the most potent starting builds is that of a dumb meathead or a cardio bunny. You don't pick any occupation and you unload all the points to increasing your Strength, Stamina and pick Baseball hobby. The result is an absolute juggernaut that can outrun a horde of running zombies and then bash few dozens of heads with a bat (or any blunt weapon) without ever tiring off. Of course, you have to learn everything else from a scratch, but it's one of the best combat builds in the game, quite literally powering through all the normal limitations of the combat system.
Unspecified Apocalypse: The exact cause of the Zombie Apocalypse is not known. Theories include US military releasing the disease (accidentally or deliberately), mutated Mad Cow Disease, Divine Punishment, terrorists, and/or the disease coming from a meteor (as a similar incident happened in Varginha, with people exhibiting syndromes similar to the early phase of the Knox Infection).
Unwinnable by Design:
- The Tutorial, deliberately so. You are expected to end it by dying and there is no way to survive, even if you are fairly experienced as a player. Even if you somehow manage to kill all the zombies spawned in the area (which by itself is a tough nut to crack, as there are dozens of them with very few options for weapons to fight back with), you can't leave it, so you will eventually starve to death once food runs out. Even if you could get through the fence, there's just more zombies.
- The game itself has no true win condition; all you can do is postpone losing by staying alive indefinitely, defying the "This is how you died" premise for as long as you can.
Useless Item: You can forge a draw plate for the purpose of creating wire via drawing. However, there is no recipe for crafting wire in this way, so it's totally useless.
Useless Useful Spell:
- Cooking skill is almost entirely redundant in the vanilla game. It governs three things, all three equally useless: an extra bonus to hunger reduction from cooked meals^noteNot only it is minuscule, but has zero practical application anyway, as you can't exactly eat smaller portions than default ones, amount of ingredients used up when cooking^noteLate game you are going to be notoriously over-hunting and potentially also over-farming, so by then saving on ingredients is useless and as far as level seven, offering an ability to tell apart poisonous berries from the edible ones^noteAn ability a common magazine can provide in less than 30 in-game minutes. Although recent builds have made it scarcer, if you don't start as a Cook you're likely to find a magazine by level 7 Cooking.. Notably, you can't fail preparing a meal due to low or complete lack of Cooking skill.
  - Later updates allowed a character with Cooking lvl 7 to safely use bits and pieces out of rotten food, which by itself isn't all that bad, but once you reach such competence, you will most likely not have any issues with keeping your ingredients fresh.
- Reloading is for years now a legacy skill from the pre-build 41 mechanics, when reloading firearms was handled differently. From build 41 onward (which came out in the tail end of 2021), that skill serves pretty much no purpose at all, as all it does is provide a minuscule bonus to faster reloading speed. On top of that, since the skill can be cranked up to level 5 in about a single day of just looping through loading and unloading rounds into a magazine (after which both the experience gain and reload speed bonus get massively reduced), it's not even particularly hard to grind it and then forget it's even a thing. And even then, carrying spare, loose ammo and trying to reload it in the middle of a firefight with a zombie horde is bound to fail, while mags can be loaded in advance and simply carried in abundance.
Useless Useful Stealth: Pre-build 42, trying to sneak around was a rather daunting task, given zombies had auto-detection based on distance to the player and a 360-degree view, which rendered most of stealth useless. It was mostly up to dumb luck to actually avoid being spotted, and perks like Inconspicuous were virtually useless. With build 42, both stealth and detection have been almost completely reworked, allowing to now just ninja your way through danger.
Utility Weapon: This one is played to the hilt, since the "weapons" without non-combat uses are outnumbered by those that can serve much more mundane purposes. Pans for frying, knives for slicing, hammers for hammering: you name it, it can be used to save your life by destroying zombie brains, or by doing what it was made for.
Variable Mix: Project Zomboid's music in Build 41.69 became dynamic with combat music swelling the more undead are on the screen, and there are future plans to make the music more dynamic in the future.
Victory Is Boring: Big time, and as an actual intended design choice of the devs. If you know what you are doing (and even if you don't), you can secure a safe haven for yourself with relative ease, and there is nothing left to do but simply repeat a daily routine of perimeter maintenance, checking traps and your vegetable farming, water purification and... waiting for the next day. Once you start this loop, it never really ends, and the alternative is utterly pointless and avoidable roaming of Knox County for the sake of excitement and potential death or taking it easy, where the most exciting thing to do will be going for a fishing trip. The struggle with ennui tends to be the biggest cause of player death after surviving the first month, for it leads to deliberately taking risk just to break the routine.
Video Game Time: When a game combines homemaking activities that would not be out of place in The Sims (and yes, the dev team has background as The Sims modders) with zombie pounding combat of a similar feel to Dead Island, it's only natural that finding the right timescale would be a tricky thing. If the same scale were used for everything, then either cooking a stew would take literally hours of your life away, or running from zombies would look like The Flash. The balance here lies in an In-Universe Game Clock that runs twenty-four times faster than real time (play one day per hour, adjustable in Sandbox or multi-player), and an Acceptable Break from that Reality when it comes to tactical movement and combat. Moving and fighting look like normal speed, though according to the clock they are happening much too slowly. More relaxed activities take a fairly plausible amount of in-game time to complete, as do gradual changes like getting hungry or tired. Since some of these activities would still take an unreasonable amount of real time to complete, like reading a 300-page how-to book or getting a night's sleep, single-player allows you to switch into some "fast-forward" speeds. Doing this with even the slightest chance of being approached by a zombie is an easy way to die.
- Some activities, on the other hand, take bizarre amounts of in-game time. One of the worst offenders is filling firearm magazines. Presumably because the developers wanted this to happen in "tactical" time, it takes more than thirteen minutes of game time to get fifteen rounds into a pistol mag—more if panicked.
- When multi-player was introduced, there was the obvious question of how to handle sleeping, since time could not be sped for some players and not others. Originally the answer was to disable tiredness and sleeping altogether, but that caused a different sort of tedium. Nighttime can get dark enough that some players would consider it too risky to venture out, so being awake was just as boring. Later, the option to allow/require sleeping was added to multi-player, with the convenience that if all players on the server are asleep at the same time, time will in fact speed up.
Violation of Common Sense:
- Trying to make use of stale baked goods by frying them, a common, popular real life technique and a source of quite a few popular recipes? Not in this game. Making a burger, taco, sandwich, or hot dog with stale bread/hamburger bun/hot dog bun/taco shell and then adding additional ingredients and/or condiments makes the food's unhappiness and boredom values increase by combining values of all the ingredients used, even if all the other stuff was varied and fresh. Your grilled cheese must be made using fresh bread (and fresh cheese).
- Prior to Build 42, where the traits were removed, there was nothing preventing players from starting as Fitness Instructor and picking traits like Obese or Unfit. In fact, a combination of Fitness Instructor and Obese allowed the player to ignore the opening penalties of that trait, while keeping all the benefits of the occupation (particularly the quality-of-life Nutritionist occupation trait) and making it much easier to raise Fitness, one of the slowest-growing skills.
The Virus: The Knox Virus, responsible for the Zombie Apocalypse. What makes it much worse is the fact that it's an airborne, incurable disease with impossible, 100% lethality for everyone who isn't immune to that particular way of transmission, effectively wiping out most of humanity within the initial few weeks.
Virtual Paper Doll: The game has hundreds of articles of clothing and armor, with various color variations for some of them, which can be combined in many ways with each other.
Walking Armory: If you equip as many items that grant you hotbar slots as possible, you can have one large weapon on the back, two small-to-medium melee weapons on the belt, two handguns in the belt holster, one handgun in the shoulder holster, a snub-nosed revolver in the ankle holster, and two knives in the ALICE belt and suspenders. All of that is modeled on your character.
Weapon Specialization: Weapon skills are divided into Aiming + Reloading (for guns), Axe, Spear, Short Blunt, Long Blunt, Short Blade, and Long Blade. Professions and traits can give you a boost with some of these skills, encouraging you to stick to specific types of weapons.
We Need a Distraction: The zombies like to investigate sources of noise, and so sometimes the best way to survive the hordes is to make a distraction for yourself. Fortunately, there are many ways to do so. Set a building on fire, set down a radio cranked to max volume and holler into a two-way radio on the same frequency, drive around honking your car's horn and then flank back around... it pays to play it smart.
Weak, but Skilled: Some of the easiest source of points during character creation is picking negative traits that affect your strength, weight or stamina. In the short term, surviving the first two weeks is a massive gambit, even if you know what you're doing. In the long term, it's the only way to get certain powerful traits and eventually ascend to Genius Bruiser territory. But the early game will be worse than hell.
Weapons of Their Trade: Many occupations give weapon skills that can be used with their tools.
Welcome to Hell: 7 days after the game's start, Judge Matt Hass will recite an odd poem about zombies, ending it with "Welcome to Hell, America."
Wham Episode: 5-6 days after the start of the game, the military camp at Louisville gets breached by zombies, who go on to destroy the entire city, and news come out that the infection spreads by air. Things spiral down from there, and on the next day, it's said that the infection has spread over the entire world, with TV and radio channels going silent shortly afterwards. If you ever had any hope of rescue or of the outbreak being successfully contained, it's completely gone now.
Wholesome Crossdresser: The clothing options in the game are not restricted by gender, meaning that a male Survivor can wear feminine clothes like skirts, bras, and dresses, as well as using lipstick and makeup.
The Wild West: Coalfield is a tourist attraction in the form of a mock Wild West town, allegedly built on the ruins of a real Ghost Town, with the brochure saying that the town will have a weekly reenactment of a shootout between a gang and the local lawmen. For a survivor, it mainly poses interest in the form of antique stoves and advanced crafting stations and tools, especially the ones for blacksmithing, but it doesn't have any good loot otherwise. Oh, and remember — you are in Kentucky, making it a classic case of a tourist trap, at least pre-apocalypse.
With This Herring:
- Played with. Even though you start with no items as you spawn, you spawn in a random home location with local items just so happened to be available for you to survive, but it's possible that the house has barely any useful loot, or that zombies will swarm your location and force you to run. Pray to the gods that you'll get a some manner of bag or pack to carry all the stuff you need, or at least a sheet to tie into a makeshift one.
- For a proper aversion, one can also enable the starter kit setting, in which case you'll start with a baseball bat and hammer (both being decent weapons, with the latter necessary for carpentry), chips and a water bottle, and a school bag to store your stuff. Despite sounding like nothing, this significantly helps your survival for the first few days, especially on higher difficulties or when applying lower loot spawning rates.
- The "A Really CD DA" scenario starts you off with no clothes and in a house that is currently burning down, so you'll likely end up running out into the streets with nothing, unless you take the risky decision of looting the building.
Wizard Needs Food Badly:
- Finding food is a constant concern. Start going hungry, your strength goes down, and your healing speed decreases. Starve yourself, and you begin losing health, along with a massive decrease in strength.
- Applies even in the long term with the nutrition system. You can subsist for a while on worms and crickets you can forage in the woods, but over the weeks you'll lose weight and turn malnourished, weak, or even dead by emaciation despite having a full belly.
Workplace-Acquired Abilities: A survivor's occupation will grant them a bonus to a skill (along with a permanent experience boost), and potentially give them a trait. A burglar, for instance, has stealth-related skills and the ability to hotwire vehicles without learning the prerequisite skills.
Worthless Currency: Money can sometimes be found in cash registers but there is no way to use it as society has completely collapsed due to the Knox Event. Also downplayed as it is possible to use money to start a fire so it is not completely useless. Player-minted gold and silver coins, though, are completely worthless and purely for roleplay purposes.
Wrench Wench: None of the occupations are gender-restricted so it's entirely possible to make a female Survivor who is also a mechanic.
Wrench Whack: Regular, pipe, and ratchet wrenches can all be used as solid Short Blunt weapons. The pipe wrench, in particular, is pretty durable.
Wrong Genre Savvy: You can occasionally find a zombie shambling about with a Wooden Stake rammed into its heart, indicating that somebody who tried to kill it thought it obeyed vampire rules. (Could also double as a Shout-Out to Left 4 Dead 2.)
You All Look Familiar: All characters have the exact same face and physique, though the isometric view hides this somewhat. Due to the sheer amount of zombies you encounter, it's also inevitable that you'll find one who looks just like your character.
You Have Researched Breathing:
- A glass shiv (a shard of glass wrapped with tape, fabric, or twine) can only be made if you read a specific magazine or reach level 3 in Maintenance or Short Blade.
- A crowbar can only be crafted at Blackmithing 9, even though the recipe amounts to you bending a steel bar. The steel bar itself can be forged at Blacksmithing 0.
Your Days Are Numbered: Going by the standard game rules, if you get bit by a zombie, then you have just a couple of days before you die and reanimate.
You Shouldn't Know This Already: Annotated maps will typically point you towards the location of a stash. In most cases, the stash will only be filled with loot once a player reads the map.
Zerg Rush: The biggest threat posed by the undead are their numbers, as while a couple or even a few can be managed, once more and more begin to join to form a horde, you'll most likely have to cut your losses and try to break line of sight before they wear you down and go for the kill.
Zombie Apocalypse: The game's zombies operate under pure Max Brooks rules, with no fast infected, no special infected, no zombified animals, Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain being the only way to put them down for good, and no immunity — a single bite will infect you, no exceptions, with the only currently confirmed cure for a zombie bite being immediate amputation of the affected limb. The only thing separating it from Brooks' rules is that there is an airborne strain of The Virus that the player character is immune to, to explain how society collapsed so quickly.
Zombie Infectee: Getting bitten will always cause this. Getting scratched or lacerated has less of a chance. Once infected however, it is only a matter of time before you join the zombie ranks as there is no cure for the infection. This is why in multi-player one would generally be expected to follow through on the trope: Get some distance from other survivors and do the honorable thing. (Leaving your loot behind, of course.)
- Brilliantly, this seems to work even if you get infected and then die from a different cause (certainly not from accidentally setting yourself on fire with a carelessly-thrown molotov, that's for sure); watch your character collapse...and then get back up, with the permanent "Zombiefied" moodlet.
- Varying on your choice to edit the world prior to launch, you can choose how bad infections are: They can be instant, take hours, days or weeks. Or if you really just want to increase your survival chances, disable infections altogether. Doesn't stop you from getting gangrene or the common cold, though.
- Speaking of colds, there's the (currently disabled) Hypochondriac trait. Getting a cold as a hypochondriac will net you fake moodles about being zombie-infected. It's not hard to see through this as a player, but far more sinister is that the same thing can happen after you've suffered a skin-breaking wound, whether the wound caused a zombie-infection or not. One of the moodlets that gets steadily worse over the course of a real or fake infection is "stress", and in the hypochondriac's case it's likely to directly reflect the player's state of mind, as they wait for these all-too-familiar effects to either blow over or lead to their demise—all over the course of days.
Zombie Gait: Officially, the game observes this. Zombies can vary in speed, and they lurch faster when they go for the kill, but even the fastest are very easy to outrun, assuming you're not winded, wounded, or overburdened. However in Sandbox mode, or when configuring a server for multiplayer, there are many parameters of "Zombie Lore" that you can tune to your preference. The "Proper Zombies" preset uses "fast shamblers" for speed, but you can dial it up to "sprinters" if you want a workout and/or heart attack. You can also choose several levels of intelligence for zombie pathfinding, if you aren't utterly terrified at the thought of zombies using doorknobs.

Project Zomboid

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Project Zomboid

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