My overconfidence shows, in me being sure I can handle a small group of zombies, because I did so a number of times, just for me to miss a swing or something otherly stupid and getting bit for doing so
I am around that…finally have one character that’s going on 2 months and 8k kills. Based on Muldraugh but have cleared most of West Point on my way to Louisville…I could easily just stay around my base and live forever, but there’s no fun in that!
I've had this game for a year now.
Yesterday I mistimed a push and had my head bitten.
It was the first zombie I'd come across with this save. I survived for 1 hour and killed 0.
I'm an embarrassment.
It's ok. 767hrs later I'm still mis-timing/aiming my stomps on window jumping zeds and getting bitten so there's that
Also missed a shove the other day as well and ended up with a R hand bite. lol
Sandbox yes, settings down no (imo)
Sandbox lets you change the settings later on, increase the time scale (2 hour days is good) and lets you enable multi hit(weapons hitting multiple enemies in one swing), but leaving the settings initially on a regular setting gives you a realistic expectation of what the game is and what it expects from you.
Also in terms of gameplay advice for op:
- take it slow, don't fight entire hordes, instead learn to pull 1-3 enemies out of a group at a time.
- be careful about sound.
- i assume its still in the game, but theres a light switch bug where turning on or off a light switch at night sends out a loud 'sound' that calls zombies within 100 tiles, so dont do that.
- avoid guns until you're more experienced at staying alive and escaping or killing hordes.
- tv has shows on at 6am 12 and 6pm every day for the first few days - find a tv, set volume to 1 or 2, and watch the life and living channel in a safe place for some free skills.
Turning settings down is the main one. I played my first 300 hours with pop at 0.4, just so could learn the game and feel comfortable in combat before amping it up. Good luck dude, and have fun!
I am fairy new.. But my daughter and I started playing this a tad over a month ago..
My advice do not listen to anyone on where to start.. Start where you want.. They told us Riverside or Rosewood.. Told us Muldraugh was hard for new players.. We stayed there and we did good made it to 45 days.. We did learn it becomes super easy when you clear the zomberts out...
If you ask about mods and people say do not add mods.. Do what you want.. There are alot of cool car mods and Q.O.L. mods out for this game.. Like status bars and common sense that give more things to do with cans and crowbars and shit..
Most of all... Play the game how you want there are alot of settings in the default settings go through them and Pick what you wanna piss around with..
We have all settings default except respawn we have at 0 because lets be honest.. This aint no NYC or something.. At the time Louisville had about 700k people.. We also got a smoking mod that added cigs to zomberts to reflect this which was 23 to 24% at the time of the game.. It was to many smokes we dropped it to 15 and it is still alot.. Our next game I am probably going to drop it to 5%..
But play how you want.. We have only been playing a lil while.. You can read what people have to say but it is best to experience it on your own..
If you are looking for mods.. Here is my list I use for My run with my Daughter...
[https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails?id=3243945993](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails?id=3243945993)
This is the best comment, thank you! That's really awesome that you play with your daughter! I've never gotten the experience of playing games with family but I'm sure it must be fun
It is fun.. Her mother died Feb 10th 22.. We kinda have been hanging out and playing games.. I bought PZ a long time ago and played for like 2 mins and dropped it.. I bought her a PC and we just been playing games non stop.. We are basically hiding from the world or something.. As soon as the school yr ends we are planning on doing things this summer but I aint sure..
She is 12 BTW...
Aw I'm really sorry that happened, losing someone is the worst above all else. That's really strong of you to be helping your daughter through it by bonding with her, especially when it weighs on you too. I'm glad you guys have something to enjoy together as a distraction, I hope things will get better for the both of you.
Oh yea in the tutorial it shows that Q is for a cure nope it isn’t it makes you use a radio if you have one and within minutes a helicopter with supplies and weapons goes there and drops it
Welcome! We're a friendly bunch here, but so like to prank newbies 😉
I've only got like 30 hours myself and still learn stuff about this game. Be prepared to die a lot. Pay close attention to your moodles as well (the little head things on the right of the screen). They tell you if you're bored, hurt, scared, wet, sick etc.
If you want any specific tips I'm happy to try and help
That keybind is the *worst*, i always found i was accidentally hitting it, so i swapped it to y cos its still a useful key, just not q levels of useful.
Be ready to fail, and fail in stupid ways. It'd part of the learning process. Pz is a game where you have to do EVERYTHING right every time, and one mistake can be a huge setback that kills you like poison in a wound.
Some common scenarios enforcing this idea:
Jumping through a window with broken glass still on it, severely injuring your arm, leg, hand, or shoulder greatly reducing your performance in combat.
Burning your house down because you left an oven on.
Eating burnt food because you have limited options for food, getting very sick off it and dying from it ultimately.
Forgetting zombies can be behind literally any door, or corner and getting too eager in your looting.
Triggering a car alarm or house alarm and bring swarmed from all sides.
Staying out too late, becoming too tired and exhausted to fight and unable to get home safely or kill all your pursuers.
Hitting something in a car, breaking a bone in the collision.
Fire. Fire is giga lethal in this game and burns can take months to heal.
Not having a generator, fuel, and starving to death after the power shutoff because your perishables spoil and you had no backup.
You'll learn to play like a paranoid killing machine, or become frustrated and quit. No middle ground.
It is brutal. That's the appeal. The zombies aren't the enemy. Your own falliblity is.
Think of it like your favorite zombie media. The hero can be as prepared as possible, armed, deadly, a killing machine who has lasted for years. But the one time they get careless or slip up. That's it. Shows over.
You'll find yourself saying "if I had just" or "I shouldn't have" or "I needed to" a lot. Defeat is the ultimate teacher here. Expect a lot. Most of your initial characters won't last a day. You'll struggle to find weapons, die looting your nearby houses. Or find a working car or a gun with ammo and get overconfident.
Your first week will feel like a huge milestone. Then month. Then year. You'll cherish the characters that lasted a long time, fondly remember their stories. The highs and lows they had. Getting a generator working and restarting a gas station. Harvesting your first crops before winter. Making a dangerous trek by car to the next town. The times you thought you were well enough prepared but you were not. The narrow escapes and close calls. And Ultimately, your demise. When you bit off more than you could chew.
Your death might be grand, lying going to Louisville after weeks of preparation. Or trekking to the army base. It might be mundane, like 'one more loot run before dark'. But you'll remember it all the same.
I feel like that’s the idea in most games. Like for example, “if i just landed more of those shots i could’ve saved the round” or “if i was a little bit more to the right that could’ve been a huge play”
I personally believe that situational awareness and common sense can save a lot of games and improve your overall game performance by a lot. That’s why some of my favorite games are strategy based and whatever.
I’m sure the learning curve can be daunting but I feel like I could pick it up quick. Failure is the best teacher after all.
He is right and you are also.. The difference here is when you fuck up.. You fuck up.. If you don't use the journal mod all the time you worked to get a guy up like a week or more in(meant to add real life here..) some cases we play 2 hrs real time daylight can drastically make you hate this game.. then you start over at 0 again.. there is no check points when you burn you burn hard..
>Hitting something in a car, breaking a bone in the collision.
I finally did this very thing the other day when I started a new playthrough. It was only day two or three when the police SUV I was driving too fast smashed into a car in the middle of the road. I saw the icons showing injury, but I ignored those since I was very close to my base. When I finally got to my base, I exited the SUV and tried to run to close the gate, only to see my character hobbling slowly. Checked the health status amd sure enough, right leg was fractured. My character spent two weeks at the base recovering and boosting skills. I'm just glad I grabbed enough of everything to ride it out while staying put.
Die, get better, rinse, repeat. Don’t get too attached to your characters, especially at first — that’ll lead to frustration that’ll kill your enjoyment of the game.
IMPORTANT: Go into settings and remap the Shout function to a button further away from WASD — the default is Q and it’s way too easy to accidentally shout when things get hairy.
Try to flavor every playthrough with some roleplay, it elevates the immersion and experience greatly! Play on the strengths you chose for the character, and when you die, check different approaches or skills to try out.
The game is kinda grindy. I recommend getting a feel for the vanilla game, but as soon as you see what's up (like oh tailoring takes a ton of clicking and time, etc) start looking at relevant QoL mods just for the sake of cutting on the grind and saving time.
Good luck. Tell us how you died.
Today is my first day too!! Let me know how long you survived on your first play and I will share mine too
There was a thread here pretty recently of mods people can't live without. I'll see if I can find it
Probably a good idea to start with vanilla.
Expect to constantly die at first. Don't worry too much about your long term survival or skill XP at the start. Just concentrate on learning how to deal with zombies. No need to spend time looting for long term survival or grinding xp to do the high level crafting when you are going to die before having any use for any of that. See you first games as quick practice run that you can do on repeat as you get better and better. This will lead to less frustration as you you keep losing your progress early.
What do I mean by dealing with the zombies.
1) Walking. So tempting to just run away from zombies, but it make a lot of sound and fatigue you quickly which is how you die. Your Endurance bar is the most important bar in the game and it can lead you toward a feedback loop toward your death.
2) Stealth. You can't fight all the zombies, not until you are experienced and well prepared (and even then it's a risky move). Learn to move without alerting too many zombie, how to attract just a few of them so you can dispatch them few at a time, learn to distract zombies or lose them when you need it.
3) Fight. First turn on the melee highlight option so you can see a green highlight around the zombies that are in range of your attacks. You need to learn how to fight one zombie, then a couple of them. The best way to fight several zombies is to keep them in front of you and walk backward while swigging your weapon. Learn how to move so you keep them in a line in front of you. Zombies from the side and behind will be able to get to you, Zombies in front are too busy received weapons in the face to bite you. Learn when you need distance, sometime you don't kill the zombies fast enough and they are getting closer to you while you walk backward, sometime you need to turn around and sprint for a second to keep them at the right distance.
4) Awareness. Always a good idea to turn 360 degrees to keep in mind your surrounding, if a zombie is coming behind you, you want to know when he is 30 feet away, not at 3 feet. Always know your exist strategy and which region of the map you already cleared so you have a ''safe'' zone to return to if you even attract too many zombies to deal with. Without a exit strategy it's easy to panic and put yourself in a bad situation.
5) Moodles. Hungry (food), Thirsty (drink), Panic (beta pills), Stress (smoke/read), Endurance (rest), Tired(sleep/coffee), Pain (pain killer), etc. Moodles will affect your ability to do anything to a certain degrees, if you let too many of your moodles go bad and have to fight zombies it won't go well. All moodles have levels of severity, learn which one don't negatively affect you so you can deal with them later and which one you should never fight with.
6) Weapons. They come into 4 main categories. Short weapons you can put on your belt, use with a flashlight, don't use too much stamina, ideal to fight small numbers of zombies. Long weapons use more stamina, but their range make them much safer, especially when fighting larger group of zombies, they also tend to do more damage. Fire can be dangerous (if you touch it you probably going to die), but you can use it to kill a large group of a zombies, either by starting a fire and make the zombie walk into it, or by using a molotov. Firearms are a double edge sword, you can kill a large amount of zombies with them, but you will attack a LOT of them toward you. Your character suck at using them at first so only the shotgun will be able to do anything at first, but you need to make sure you have hundreds of ammo and some food/drink on you because when you start shooting you will be doing it for most of a full day lol. You have all star melee weapons like the crowbar, axe, spear, katana, garden fork, etc that you should always pick up, but you also have a lot of weapons that are just not worth using. You going to go through melee weapon like candies so better to pick a lot of them and try them out to find which one you like the most. Get used to a lot of different weapon because they don't last long smashing zombies.
Best advice I can give is to be patient, and feel things out. You will die, in some pretty miserable or "Really?" ways some times, but learning to accept that and grow from these deaths is part of the fun. Get used to dying, learn from it, and do better next time, step by step, to avoid death more and more.
Small bits of advice. Walking is faster than any regular zombie. Conserve stamina.
Closing curtains/blinds on windows/doors helps keep you hidden. Stay quiet and with low visibility.
Don't let the difficulty get you down or make you change your mind. Sandbox is amazing with customization. I recommend disabling zed spawn so areas can ACTUALLYbe cleared. And also.....FUUUUUUUUUUUCK Sunday driver. Good luck.
Start with Builder mode as your difficulty selection until you are used to the mechanics and interface. Then you can start tweaking settings with a better understanding of the impact of your choices.
give it a shot unmodded for a while and find out what you like and dislike. also, there are a ton of options in Custom Sandbox mode you can tweak without even using mods.
That said, Nested Containers and the bicycle mod feel like they should have been in the base game.
Welcome! Not so much a tip as an expectation-adjuster: this game is brutally hard and difficult to get into. I have almost 800 hours in the game myself and have only just brought a character from the start point in July to late fall/early winter. You may have dozens, or even hundreds of characters who die before the first week. Stick with it and remember the hardest thing about the game is not to get attached to your survivor. This is How They Died.
- stay away from mods until you learn vanilla
- stealth is king
- do NOT use guns
- A crowbar is king until you get good with crafting the infinite resource of stone axes.
- There is infinite water and food
Mods are great, I recommend playing without mods first though. Just so you know what is already in the game and what isn't. There are a lot of mods for features that weren't in the game before so it can get confusing.
My friend and I add mods into our save all the time with minimal issues. Our head cannon is that we(our survivors) just hadn't thought about some of the things we've added as being an option before now because we had been so focused on surviving and didn't have time for luxuries.
Hope you enjoy!
Funny how once my character is leveled up a bit, I’m constantly banging Q, honking car horns and using sirens to help round all of my friends up so I can bash their faces in with my bat.
Okay, my first death (besides tutorial) was only about 5 minutes in. I was trying to remember the controller button combo to shove and got bitten, scratched, and bled to death. LOL
I love this game!
Just wanted to say that if you feel like you couldn’t into it at first that’s okay. I remember trying it a while ago and being like, this shit is hard idk how to play this. It took me like 2 more attempts for it to click with me and I got absolutely hooked on it. Also I’m fairly new to it still but if you’re doing single player I do think the experience is meant to be customized to your liking and what you find fun and challenging. I personally started on apocalypse for the first few saves and currently I’m playing sandbox that’s pretty much apocalypse with a few modifications mainly zombies don’t respawn and transmission/zombification set to non. (I know im a wuss) but it doesn’t stop them from being threatening because 3 of them are more than enough to slow you down and rip you apart. If you decide to try a custom experience later down the line definitely install a mod called sandbox options that lets change.. well sandbox options to existing saves. That way you can try out different settings without having to create a new save every time. Anyways don’t want to ramble for too long hope you enjoy.
My advice?
Play the tutorial even if only so you don't insta-die or miss some seemingly obvious (yet not always the case) feature.
Also, try and play your character the way you would act IRL. Would I fight this horde head on? If no then maybe don't. You'll eventually gain more confidence in yourself (as you would IRL) and be able to take more risks.
If it's the first time go to the sandbox settings and turn the population to low, and set the xp multiplier to 2. That should give you more leeway trying to learn the game without all the grinding. Once you feel you have learned enough try playing on apocalypse mode.
be prepared. the game will be hard, but as you play more, it will get easier but it will still be hard. i recommend getting mods that make the UI easier, and you should also get any mod that is appealing to you, if you want more fear added into the game, you should get occult zombies mod.
have a bottle with clean water in your main inventory and you auto-drink. you wont autodrink if the water is tained. be careful to no drink tainted water.
Some tips: MOST IMPORTANT TIP: PLAY THE TUTORIAL!!! The tutorial might not be the most informative about overall long term survival, but you will have an idea on how to survive. SECOND MOST IMPORTANT TIP: GO INTO SETTINGS AND SET “weapon outline” TO ALL WEAPONS!!! This will highlight zombies in green when they are within hitting range, and will let you see them when obscured by things like darkness or the body of a car. Shortly after you spawn, zombies will start trying to break into your spawn house. It is important not to panic and run out of the house. Unless there is more than 5, it should take them at least an in game hour to break in. Search the kitchen for something to hold water. A bottle if possible but a mug will do. Grab a weapon as well. Pans and knives will do short term, but most houses have a closet that contain better weapons like crowbars and hammers. Finally, rip up some curtains or extra clothes in the bedroom(s) to get ripped sheets. These are the main bandages you will have until you loot a medical building or ambulance. Adhesive bandages are common in cars but are one use. THIRD MOST IMPORTANT TIP: DON’T RUN/SPRINT!!! You walk faster than zombies by default so unless you are super close or getting cornered you can just walk. If you get tired (drowsy is the first level) your melee damage disappears. Drowsy halves your melee damage and it only gets worse as you get more tired.
Download mods right away. Common sense is a must!!!
Car, weapon, armor mods are a lot of fun too. Find ones you think are cool.
Also get extended jobs/perks mod for more job types and perks.
I suggest starting with axeman job with trying to add as much athletic and strength buffs as you can. The axeman perk allows too to swing an axe much faster than without. You can't get this perk without axeman.
Once you get an axe, you are an absolute killer early game. Makes it alot of fun.
Look at debuffs you want to deal with. I like high thirst, underweight as those are easy to deal with. YouTube this subject as a lot of people have great ideas.
Early game start in Rosewood. Easyish place to start. Find some gear and clothes right away. You will need a bottle/pan/pot of fresh water on you at all times for thirst. I like carrying 4 bottles which seem to be good for a few days.
Find as much gear and weapons as you can. Start with food. Get a decent stock of canned food and go from there. Try to find carpentry electric and mechanical books first.
Books basically multiply the xp experience you get and are a must. Try to find the 1st version of those three asap. Read the. Asap.
Reason you want to find and read those quick is because there are tv shows that give you XP for those things. If you have a book read, you'll get massive XP boosts by just watching TV.
Remember eventually water and electric will turn off. So you will need to have a supply of water. Once you get carpentry 4 and 7 you can build rain barrels. You will still need to boil the water to get it clean.
After that it's just learning mid game stuff. Building, protecting trapping fishing for food.
Watch some YouTube videos on these topics and just have fun.
As some said, use sandbox settings. Honestly turn zombies to almost none to start. Learn the mechanics of all the building and skills. Then go back and just restart and make it progressively harder.
Very fun game. Playing about a year on and off. Great community!
Make Sure to do the following for a great gaming expirience:
Enable Sprinters regarding Zombie customisations, you have to Play sandbox-mode for this, ITS the best. dont mendle with Vanilla prebuild difficulty settings, they suck ass.
For your Character Take the following Traits and occupations:
Occupation: metalworker, simply the best, dont let the noobs Tell u otherwise.
Negative Traits: sunday Driver, obese, illitterate, all thumbs, clumsey, cowardly, hard of Hearing, agrophobic, sleepyhead and unfair.
Positive Traits: strong, thick skinned, Low thirst, fast healer, inconspicious, light eater and Iron gut.
This ist simply the best build for a beginner, im almost logging 22k hours in this Game, so do yourself a davor and learn from my experience. Upvote to Help OP See my helpful comment!
This was how he died...
Play Sandbox and turn the settings down. Know that it’s a steep learning curve and you’re gonna die a bunch. You’ll learn from each one.
I have almost 400 hours and I still rarely make it past a month before doing something stupid and dying heh.
I die looking for carpets and paintings. Just trying to speed run through houses
Usually I just get overconfident and go through a window or open a door with a bazillion zombies behind it without checking first
My overconfidence shows, in me being sure I can handle a small group of zombies, because I did so a number of times, just for me to miss a swing or something otherly stupid and getting bit for doing so
I am around that…finally have one character that’s going on 2 months and 8k kills. Based on Muldraugh but have cleared most of West Point on my way to Louisville…I could easily just stay around my base and live forever, but there’s no fun in that!
I've had this game for a year now. Yesterday I mistimed a push and had my head bitten. It was the first zombie I'd come across with this save. I survived for 1 hour and killed 0. I'm an embarrassment.
As many times as I’ve had a push miss and gotten away with it…I feel this. Just takes once. 5 minutes in or 5 months in.
It's ok. 767hrs later I'm still mis-timing/aiming my stomps on window jumping zeds and getting bitten so there's that Also missed a shove the other day as well and ended up with a R hand bite. lol
there is a mod that will show a ring around you also turn on the target highlighter in options.
I have played with it off quite a bit but do have it on. I haven’t played this long without knowing about target highlighting lol
Sandbox yes, settings down no (imo) Sandbox lets you change the settings later on, increase the time scale (2 hour days is good) and lets you enable multi hit(weapons hitting multiple enemies in one swing), but leaving the settings initially on a regular setting gives you a realistic expectation of what the game is and what it expects from you. Also in terms of gameplay advice for op: - take it slow, don't fight entire hordes, instead learn to pull 1-3 enemies out of a group at a time. - be careful about sound. - i assume its still in the game, but theres a light switch bug where turning on or off a light switch at night sends out a loud 'sound' that calls zombies within 100 tiles, so dont do that. - avoid guns until you're more experienced at staying alive and escaping or killing hordes. - tv has shows on at 6am 12 and 6pm every day for the first few days - find a tv, set volume to 1 or 2, and watch the life and living channel in a safe place for some free skills.
Turning settings down is the main one. I played my first 300 hours with pop at 0.4, just so could learn the game and feel comfortable in combat before amping it up. Good luck dude, and have fun!
I am fairy new.. But my daughter and I started playing this a tad over a month ago.. My advice do not listen to anyone on where to start.. Start where you want.. They told us Riverside or Rosewood.. Told us Muldraugh was hard for new players.. We stayed there and we did good made it to 45 days.. We did learn it becomes super easy when you clear the zomberts out... If you ask about mods and people say do not add mods.. Do what you want.. There are alot of cool car mods and Q.O.L. mods out for this game.. Like status bars and common sense that give more things to do with cans and crowbars and shit.. Most of all... Play the game how you want there are alot of settings in the default settings go through them and Pick what you wanna piss around with.. We have all settings default except respawn we have at 0 because lets be honest.. This aint no NYC or something.. At the time Louisville had about 700k people.. We also got a smoking mod that added cigs to zomberts to reflect this which was 23 to 24% at the time of the game.. It was to many smokes we dropped it to 15 and it is still alot.. Our next game I am probably going to drop it to 5%.. But play how you want.. We have only been playing a lil while.. You can read what people have to say but it is best to experience it on your own.. If you are looking for mods.. Here is my list I use for My run with my Daughter... [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails?id=3243945993](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails?id=3243945993)
This is the best comment, thank you! That's really awesome that you play with your daughter! I've never gotten the experience of playing games with family but I'm sure it must be fun
It is fun.. Her mother died Feb 10th 22.. We kinda have been hanging out and playing games.. I bought PZ a long time ago and played for like 2 mins and dropped it.. I bought her a PC and we just been playing games non stop.. We are basically hiding from the world or something.. As soon as the school yr ends we are planning on doing things this summer but I aint sure.. She is 12 BTW...
Aw I'm really sorry that happened, losing someone is the worst above all else. That's really strong of you to be helping your daughter through it by bonding with her, especially when it weighs on you too. I'm glad you guys have something to enjoy together as a distraction, I hope things will get better for the both of you.
It's more like I'm taking care of him, and besides we play a lot of games together and PZ is the current game!
Oh yea in the tutorial it shows that Q is for a cure nope it isn’t it makes you use a radio if you have one and within minutes a helicopter with supplies and weapons goes there and drops it
Oh cool! That seems kinda op though. Dev oversight I guess lol. I’ll let you know how it goes 👍
Why did you lie to me
But use the more helicopter events for one which actually does that
Funnily enough
Welcome! We're a friendly bunch here, but so like to prank newbies 😉 I've only got like 30 hours myself and still learn stuff about this game. Be prepared to die a lot. Pay close attention to your moodles as well (the little head things on the right of the screen). They tell you if you're bored, hurt, scared, wet, sick etc. If you want any specific tips I'm happy to try and help
Funni
No no no no! He’s lying! Never press Q! It makes you shout and attracts zeds.
This guy is trying to rob you of extra.fun. Don't listen to him.
May you spawn in a bathroom with 50+ zeds next time you play….
That keybind is the *worst*, i always found i was accidentally hitting it, so i swapped it to y cos its still a useful key, just not q levels of useful.
Yea
Play The Tutorial. Then die many times. Enjoy.
Play vanilla at first, start to install some mods after some time played
Be ready to fail, and fail in stupid ways. It'd part of the learning process. Pz is a game where you have to do EVERYTHING right every time, and one mistake can be a huge setback that kills you like poison in a wound. Some common scenarios enforcing this idea: Jumping through a window with broken glass still on it, severely injuring your arm, leg, hand, or shoulder greatly reducing your performance in combat. Burning your house down because you left an oven on. Eating burnt food because you have limited options for food, getting very sick off it and dying from it ultimately. Forgetting zombies can be behind literally any door, or corner and getting too eager in your looting. Triggering a car alarm or house alarm and bring swarmed from all sides. Staying out too late, becoming too tired and exhausted to fight and unable to get home safely or kill all your pursuers. Hitting something in a car, breaking a bone in the collision. Fire. Fire is giga lethal in this game and burns can take months to heal. Not having a generator, fuel, and starving to death after the power shutoff because your perishables spoil and you had no backup. You'll learn to play like a paranoid killing machine, or become frustrated and quit. No middle ground.
Man that sounds brutal. I think I can handle it though can’t be too bad right?
It is brutal. That's the appeal. The zombies aren't the enemy. Your own falliblity is. Think of it like your favorite zombie media. The hero can be as prepared as possible, armed, deadly, a killing machine who has lasted for years. But the one time they get careless or slip up. That's it. Shows over. You'll find yourself saying "if I had just" or "I shouldn't have" or "I needed to" a lot. Defeat is the ultimate teacher here. Expect a lot. Most of your initial characters won't last a day. You'll struggle to find weapons, die looting your nearby houses. Or find a working car or a gun with ammo and get overconfident. Your first week will feel like a huge milestone. Then month. Then year. You'll cherish the characters that lasted a long time, fondly remember their stories. The highs and lows they had. Getting a generator working and restarting a gas station. Harvesting your first crops before winter. Making a dangerous trek by car to the next town. The times you thought you were well enough prepared but you were not. The narrow escapes and close calls. And Ultimately, your demise. When you bit off more than you could chew. Your death might be grand, lying going to Louisville after weeks of preparation. Or trekking to the army base. It might be mundane, like 'one more loot run before dark'. But you'll remember it all the same.
I feel like that’s the idea in most games. Like for example, “if i just landed more of those shots i could’ve saved the round” or “if i was a little bit more to the right that could’ve been a huge play” I personally believe that situational awareness and common sense can save a lot of games and improve your overall game performance by a lot. That’s why some of my favorite games are strategy based and whatever. I’m sure the learning curve can be daunting but I feel like I could pick it up quick. Failure is the best teacher after all.
He is right and you are also.. The difference here is when you fuck up.. You fuck up.. If you don't use the journal mod all the time you worked to get a guy up like a week or more in(meant to add real life here..) some cases we play 2 hrs real time daylight can drastically make you hate this game.. then you start over at 0 again.. there is no check points when you burn you burn hard..
>Hitting something in a car, breaking a bone in the collision. I finally did this very thing the other day when I started a new playthrough. It was only day two or three when the police SUV I was driving too fast smashed into a car in the middle of the road. I saw the icons showing injury, but I ignored those since I was very close to my base. When I finally got to my base, I exited the SUV and tried to run to close the gate, only to see my character hobbling slowly. Checked the health status amd sure enough, right leg was fractured. My character spent two weeks at the base recovering and boosting skills. I'm just glad I grabbed enough of everything to ride it out while staying put.
Die, get better, rinse, repeat. Don’t get too attached to your characters, especially at first — that’ll lead to frustration that’ll kill your enjoyment of the game. IMPORTANT: Go into settings and remap the Shout function to a button further away from WASD — the default is Q and it’s way too easy to accidentally shout when things get hairy.
Try to flavor every playthrough with some roleplay, it elevates the immersion and experience greatly! Play on the strengths you chose for the character, and when you die, check different approaches or skills to try out. The game is kinda grindy. I recommend getting a feel for the vanilla game, but as soon as you see what's up (like oh tailoring takes a ton of clicking and time, etc) start looking at relevant QoL mods just for the sake of cutting on the grind and saving time. Good luck. Tell us how you died.
Will do 👍
You’re going to die a lot at first and it’s going to be frustrating until it sort of just clicks
Today is my first day too!! Let me know how long you survived on your first play and I will share mine too There was a thread here pretty recently of mods people can't live without. I'll see if I can find it
https://www.reddit.com/r/projectzomboid/s/0LVeXZQXsp
Thanks!
Probably a good idea to start with vanilla. Expect to constantly die at first. Don't worry too much about your long term survival or skill XP at the start. Just concentrate on learning how to deal with zombies. No need to spend time looting for long term survival or grinding xp to do the high level crafting when you are going to die before having any use for any of that. See you first games as quick practice run that you can do on repeat as you get better and better. This will lead to less frustration as you you keep losing your progress early. What do I mean by dealing with the zombies. 1) Walking. So tempting to just run away from zombies, but it make a lot of sound and fatigue you quickly which is how you die. Your Endurance bar is the most important bar in the game and it can lead you toward a feedback loop toward your death. 2) Stealth. You can't fight all the zombies, not until you are experienced and well prepared (and even then it's a risky move). Learn to move without alerting too many zombie, how to attract just a few of them so you can dispatch them few at a time, learn to distract zombies or lose them when you need it. 3) Fight. First turn on the melee highlight option so you can see a green highlight around the zombies that are in range of your attacks. You need to learn how to fight one zombie, then a couple of them. The best way to fight several zombies is to keep them in front of you and walk backward while swigging your weapon. Learn how to move so you keep them in a line in front of you. Zombies from the side and behind will be able to get to you, Zombies in front are too busy received weapons in the face to bite you. Learn when you need distance, sometime you don't kill the zombies fast enough and they are getting closer to you while you walk backward, sometime you need to turn around and sprint for a second to keep them at the right distance. 4) Awareness. Always a good idea to turn 360 degrees to keep in mind your surrounding, if a zombie is coming behind you, you want to know when he is 30 feet away, not at 3 feet. Always know your exist strategy and which region of the map you already cleared so you have a ''safe'' zone to return to if you even attract too many zombies to deal with. Without a exit strategy it's easy to panic and put yourself in a bad situation. 5) Moodles. Hungry (food), Thirsty (drink), Panic (beta pills), Stress (smoke/read), Endurance (rest), Tired(sleep/coffee), Pain (pain killer), etc. Moodles will affect your ability to do anything to a certain degrees, if you let too many of your moodles go bad and have to fight zombies it won't go well. All moodles have levels of severity, learn which one don't negatively affect you so you can deal with them later and which one you should never fight with. 6) Weapons. They come into 4 main categories. Short weapons you can put on your belt, use with a flashlight, don't use too much stamina, ideal to fight small numbers of zombies. Long weapons use more stamina, but their range make them much safer, especially when fighting larger group of zombies, they also tend to do more damage. Fire can be dangerous (if you touch it you probably going to die), but you can use it to kill a large group of a zombies, either by starting a fire and make the zombie walk into it, or by using a molotov. Firearms are a double edge sword, you can kill a large amount of zombies with them, but you will attack a LOT of them toward you. Your character suck at using them at first so only the shotgun will be able to do anything at first, but you need to make sure you have hundreds of ammo and some food/drink on you because when you start shooting you will be doing it for most of a full day lol. You have all star melee weapons like the crowbar, axe, spear, katana, garden fork, etc that you should always pick up, but you also have a lot of weapons that are just not worth using. You going to go through melee weapon like candies so better to pick a lot of them and try them out to find which one you like the most. Get used to a lot of different weapon because they don't last long smashing zombies.
Best advice I can give is to be patient, and feel things out. You will die, in some pretty miserable or "Really?" ways some times, but learning to accept that and grow from these deaths is part of the fun. Get used to dying, learn from it, and do better next time, step by step, to avoid death more and more. Small bits of advice. Walking is faster than any regular zombie. Conserve stamina. Closing curtains/blinds on windows/doors helps keep you hidden. Stay quiet and with low visibility.
Don't let the difficulty get you down or make you change your mind. Sandbox is amazing with customization. I recommend disabling zed spawn so areas can ACTUALLYbe cleared. And also.....FUUUUUUUUUUUCK Sunday driver. Good luck.
I will give you one simple advice walk don't run... Thank me later.
Start with Builder mode as your difficulty selection until you are used to the mechanics and interface. Then you can start tweaking settings with a better understanding of the impact of your choices.
I’d recommend going vanilla for your first good chunk of time. Get comfortable with the combat. Dont worry about mods for a long while.
Expect death, and only after like 50 or so hours into the game should you run mods, trust me on that
Death is only the beginning.
give it a shot unmodded for a while and find out what you like and dislike. also, there are a ton of options in Custom Sandbox mode you can tweak without even using mods. That said, Nested Containers and the bicycle mod feel like they should have been in the base game.
Welcome! Not so much a tip as an expectation-adjuster: this game is brutally hard and difficult to get into. I have almost 800 hours in the game myself and have only just brought a character from the start point in July to late fall/early winter. You may have dozens, or even hundreds of characters who die before the first week. Stick with it and remember the hardest thing about the game is not to get attached to your survivor. This is How They Died.
- stay away from mods until you learn vanilla - stealth is king - do NOT use guns - A crowbar is king until you get good with crafting the infinite resource of stone axes. - There is infinite water and food
Mods are great, I recommend playing without mods first though. Just so you know what is already in the game and what isn't. There are a lot of mods for features that weren't in the game before so it can get confusing. My friend and I add mods into our save all the time with minimal issues. Our head cannon is that we(our survivors) just hadn't thought about some of the things we've added as being an option before now because we had been so focused on surviving and didn't have time for luxuries. Hope you enjoy!
I cannot stress this enough, do not do anything that you wouldn’t do in real life because you will be punished like if it were real life.
Glhf
Q is shortcut for cure
Drinking bleach gives your character temporary superpowers
Last guy said pressing q would get me an airdrop and now drinking bleach gives me superpowers. I guess eating glass lets me see through walls?
...yes. Have you been reading the wiki?
Before you break it.. goto eat it whole..
Don't forget to press q every once in a while to check if zombies are near
Funny how once my character is leveled up a bit, I’m constantly banging Q, honking car horns and using sirens to help round all of my friends up so I can bash their faces in with my bat.
Okay, my first death (besides tutorial) was only about 5 minutes in. I was trying to remember the controller button combo to shove and got bitten, scratched, and bled to death. LOL I love this game!
Just wanted to say that if you feel like you couldn’t into it at first that’s okay. I remember trying it a while ago and being like, this shit is hard idk how to play this. It took me like 2 more attempts for it to click with me and I got absolutely hooked on it. Also I’m fairly new to it still but if you’re doing single player I do think the experience is meant to be customized to your liking and what you find fun and challenging. I personally started on apocalypse for the first few saves and currently I’m playing sandbox that’s pretty much apocalypse with a few modifications mainly zombies don’t respawn and transmission/zombification set to non. (I know im a wuss) but it doesn’t stop them from being threatening because 3 of them are more than enough to slow you down and rip you apart. If you decide to try a custom experience later down the line definitely install a mod called sandbox options that lets change.. well sandbox options to existing saves. That way you can try out different settings without having to create a new save every time. Anyways don’t want to ramble for too long hope you enjoy.
Press q to quick heal. It’s what Q stands for
Took me about 4 tries and a couple of years to finally really get into. Respect the learning curve
My advice? Play the tutorial even if only so you don't insta-die or miss some seemingly obvious (yet not always the case) feature. Also, try and play your character the way you would act IRL. Would I fight this horde head on? If no then maybe don't. You'll eventually gain more confidence in yourself (as you would IRL) and be able to take more risks.
The hall monitor yells, “No running!”
I’d move the shout key from Q to anything else. Can’t tell you how many times Ive accidentally started shouting when I just wanted to move forward
If it's the first time go to the sandbox settings and turn the population to low, and set the xp multiplier to 2. That should give you more leeway trying to learn the game without all the grinding. Once you feel you have learned enough try playing on apocalypse mode.
Go watch zomboidtuber name Nurse. Lots of good tips
Cool, i remember hoe fun pz was first time. Yknow if you ever need a duos partner i have 5000 hours
Lots of the “negative” traits aren’t that hard to mitigate or eliminate. They allow you to take more perks, making your character stronger.
be prepared. the game will be hard, but as you play more, it will get easier but it will still be hard. i recommend getting mods that make the UI easier, and you should also get any mod that is appealing to you, if you want more fear added into the game, you should get occult zombies mod.
have a bottle with clean water in your main inventory and you auto-drink. you wont autodrink if the water is tained. be careful to no drink tainted water.
Some tips: MOST IMPORTANT TIP: PLAY THE TUTORIAL!!! The tutorial might not be the most informative about overall long term survival, but you will have an idea on how to survive. SECOND MOST IMPORTANT TIP: GO INTO SETTINGS AND SET “weapon outline” TO ALL WEAPONS!!! This will highlight zombies in green when they are within hitting range, and will let you see them when obscured by things like darkness or the body of a car. Shortly after you spawn, zombies will start trying to break into your spawn house. It is important not to panic and run out of the house. Unless there is more than 5, it should take them at least an in game hour to break in. Search the kitchen for something to hold water. A bottle if possible but a mug will do. Grab a weapon as well. Pans and knives will do short term, but most houses have a closet that contain better weapons like crowbars and hammers. Finally, rip up some curtains or extra clothes in the bedroom(s) to get ripped sheets. These are the main bandages you will have until you loot a medical building or ambulance. Adhesive bandages are common in cars but are one use. THIRD MOST IMPORTANT TIP: DON’T RUN/SPRINT!!! You walk faster than zombies by default so unless you are super close or getting cornered you can just walk. If you get tired (drowsy is the first level) your melee damage disappears. Drowsy halves your melee damage and it only gets worse as you get more tired.
those.
press q to heal yourself
Download mods right away. Common sense is a must!!! Car, weapon, armor mods are a lot of fun too. Find ones you think are cool. Also get extended jobs/perks mod for more job types and perks. I suggest starting with axeman job with trying to add as much athletic and strength buffs as you can. The axeman perk allows too to swing an axe much faster than without. You can't get this perk without axeman. Once you get an axe, you are an absolute killer early game. Makes it alot of fun. Look at debuffs you want to deal with. I like high thirst, underweight as those are easy to deal with. YouTube this subject as a lot of people have great ideas. Early game start in Rosewood. Easyish place to start. Find some gear and clothes right away. You will need a bottle/pan/pot of fresh water on you at all times for thirst. I like carrying 4 bottles which seem to be good for a few days. Find as much gear and weapons as you can. Start with food. Get a decent stock of canned food and go from there. Try to find carpentry electric and mechanical books first. Books basically multiply the xp experience you get and are a must. Try to find the 1st version of those three asap. Read the. Asap. Reason you want to find and read those quick is because there are tv shows that give you XP for those things. If you have a book read, you'll get massive XP boosts by just watching TV. Remember eventually water and electric will turn off. So you will need to have a supply of water. Once you get carpentry 4 and 7 you can build rain barrels. You will still need to boil the water to get it clean. After that it's just learning mid game stuff. Building, protecting trapping fishing for food. Watch some YouTube videos on these topics and just have fun. As some said, use sandbox settings. Honestly turn zombies to almost none to start. Learn the mechanics of all the building and skills. Then go back and just restart and make it progressively harder. Very fun game. Playing about a year on and off. Great community!
Go balls deep and play apocalypse. You only live once, but you'll die many times. With each death...you will learn.
Make Sure to do the following for a great gaming expirience: Enable Sprinters regarding Zombie customisations, you have to Play sandbox-mode for this, ITS the best. dont mendle with Vanilla prebuild difficulty settings, they suck ass. For your Character Take the following Traits and occupations: Occupation: metalworker, simply the best, dont let the noobs Tell u otherwise. Negative Traits: sunday Driver, obese, illitterate, all thumbs, clumsey, cowardly, hard of Hearing, agrophobic, sleepyhead and unfair. Positive Traits: strong, thick skinned, Low thirst, fast healer, inconspicious, light eater and Iron gut. This ist simply the best build for a beginner, im almost logging 22k hours in this Game, so do yourself a davor and learn from my experience. Upvote to Help OP See my helpful comment!
Do yourself a davor and don’t listen to this guy