Being in a zombie apocalypse isn’t exactly easy to be in, and you’d better be prepared to take them on, whether it’s a lone stray or a full-blown death ball. Given the hordes of zombies you face in the game, you’ll be greeted with the tough task of dismantling them as quickly as possible, without sacrificing your life to the situation. Weapons, tools, and even unexpected occurrences can aid you in your survival, but only if you use them wisely.
First off, in the vanilla game, you have no health bar for the zombies, making the judgment of how close to death the undead is very tough. These situations make you decide on if the weapon or method is super effective or completely useless in terms of efficiency and overall risk and time. Sure, a dead zombie is a dead zombie at the end, but if it gets you closer to your death, you need to make sure every method is used in its appropriate reason, which we’ll touch on in this list.
For this list, the list is made at the time of the games’ latest version (ver. 41.73 Steam) and is based on my experience in a friend-hosted multiplayer server, and the items listed are from the vanilla version of the game, meaning no mod items are included. The list shown has been tested in either single-player or multiplayer campaigns and is mostly recorded from the player’s personal experience. The order of the entries is based on a mix of time efficiency, effectiveness, and general safety.
5. Fire
Why is Fire Great?
This is the most tedious and elaborate way to kill a zombie in the sense that it’s a lot of prep and has a whole lot of risk but that’s a surefire way (pun intended) to dispose of a body after death. Having this method means you know what you’ll be in for, that being risking a whole block, and possibly your life all for the sake of this method of eliminating zeds. To get a grasp on how this goes, we’ll have to establish a few things.
When you do get grabbed by a burning zombie, your character will also likely transmit the burn, and with how fast it damages you and your items, you’ll have character statuses that will leave you dead, cremated, and unlikely to salvage your loot in one swift mistake, and that mental burn of losing both your character and hard farmed items can never heal quick. As far as how to send the dead into the flames, your choice is either a burning building that can naturally occur or a homemade Molotov cocktail, which you’ll have to be smart about when throwing out.
To make a molly, you’ll need to find a water bottle, specifically a breakable one, which the game icons can pick up, in case you don’t know which one is which. Next would be to get gas, found in, you guessed it, the gas station. After that, a source to ignite the fire, specifically a Lighter, which is a bonus for the smokers in this game. Last, but not least, a piece of ripped sheet, which is sourced from you ripping clothing off your inventory or corpses as if it was like Hulk Hogan. When all is gathered and combined, put that molly in the primary equipment, with the lighter on the secondary, and aim at your location.
A perfect, toasty, and frankly dangerous option, but for those wanting destruction, this is how to kill zeds with a warm reception.
How it Works:
- Grab gasoline from the Gas Station or siphon from a vehicle
- Pour gas into a breakable bottle
- Get Ripped Sheets and make a Molotov Cocktail with the bottle of gas
- Equip the Molotov on the primary and a Lighter on the secondary
- Aim at a direction and throw the Molotov
- Guide the zombies through the flames until they die
4. Vehicle Damage
Why is Vehicle Damage Great?
This method has its challenges and setbacks, but here’s an overview of how it can be done, with the most obvious, yet tedious start is getting a vehicle, and depending on your luck or what you have, this may prove either easy or hard, such as the key for the car. There is also the important aspect of checking if your vehicle is roadworthy in the first place, which is as easy as pressing E on the highlighted area by the engine of the car.
You have to make sure that many of the parts, if not everything are all prepped and good denoted by either the color of the parts or hovering your mouse and left-clicking to check the percentage number of the part. You’ll also need to grab some gas for said car, which is easy for the beginning of the game as the electricity is still up which powers the pumps of any gas station, ready to be collected with either an empty bottle or better, an Empty Gas Can. Next would be ways to get the car started and going.
If you picked up the Burglar occupation, you’ll be greeted with the immediate ability to pick a locked door and more importantly, hotwire a vehicle immediately, provided you have a screwdriver with you. If you choose any other profession, it will be a lot more involved and more grind-intensive as you still need a screwdriver, but you can’t hotwire a vehicle until you have both, Level 1 Electrical and Level 2 Mechanics skills achieved, which is a whole different discussion for another day.
Once you do the hotwiring mini-game, you’ll be left with a purring or roaring road-rager that can run over any zombie, provided they don’t clump up to a pseudo brick wall. Speaking of walls, things like trees, walls, and other obstacles can hurt your hood, and eventually, the engine leads to frequent cutoffs and difficulty starting, making one too many zombies killed bad for your car, and coincidently, bad for your life. Next time you think about driving over an eventual undead speedbump, check up on your car and do some repairs if necessary.
That may be a lot to take in, but that’s the nature of fleeting a vehicle for murder, so drive responsibly, and kill efficiently road warriors!
How it Works:
- Grab gasoline from the Gas Station or siphon from a vehicle
- Inspect your vehicle of choice and gas up the vehicle using a gas can or refueling
- Look for a key first, normally found near the building it’s parked, the trunk, or the glove box
- In case it doesn’t have a key, hotwire by pressing V and do the mini-game to start it
- Drive through a zombie fast to instantly kill it, or run over multiple times for low speed
3. Shove and Stomp
Why is the Shove and Stomp Great?
When you start the game, there’s a high chance that the server will not give you any weapons, or at least make-shift weapons for you to use, and that also means you’ll immediately be exposed to any zombie attacks the moment you leave spawn. Thankfully the game doesn’t make you absolute trash and useless when faced with the undead as this is a mechanic that exists for the player to use. It’s pretty simple to use and is foolproof, as long as you follow a few things.
For one, the chance of the zombie falling will depend on your character status, such as how tired they are, their starting stats, and even the weight you carrying at the current time. These factors will increase or decrease your chance of survival in the sense that you may need more or fewer shoves to bring a zombie down, not to mention the stamina needed to run and kite if the zombie count does increase. Having said that, the chance of a zombie getting up is also possible, so you may want to do a few of these shoves until they act like a fallen boxer and don’t answer the ten count to get back up.
When they do end up not coming back up, they’ll resort to crawling, which is a fair bit slower than them walking, giving you an avenue to work within a wave situation, but that is crucial as that also turns your shove into a stomp when you are near a downed zombie, making this the damage dealer in your basic combo. Keep stomping on a downed zombie up until you hear the sound of gooey, squishy instant death, and repeat for the remaining zombies that may approach you.
Now, this method is best for individual zombies, but when you get 5 or more zombies chasing you, this method is a hit or miss as the chance for you to shove them efficiently is space dependent. What I mean by this is that the zombies behind the ones you shove in front of you have a window to grab you as they aren’t in the hitbox of shoving, making this a risky instant death moment if you aren’t careful.
Either way, this is a tried and tested small wave method of killing zombies, helping you preserve your weapons for larger-waved threats, making this a valuable mechanic that is free to use anytime you get into a scuffle with the undead.
How it Works:
- Hold right-click and point the mouse to the zombie’s location
- Press space when the zombie gets close enough
- Repeat until the zombie is downed
- Press space again on a downed zombie to stomp them
- Keep stomping until dead
2. Melee Attacks
Why are Melee Attacks Great?
When you happen to be on the flip side of things and have a weapon at your disposal, your survival will depend on your equipped weapon of choice. You have so many choices regarding what you can put in your hand to whack on the dead. From makeshift weapons to purpose-built ones, you’ll have no shortage in terms of damage when you do grab hold of one. We’ll be touching on a few examples below.
For the most part, you can immediately save yourself the grief of sourcing a weapon by enabling a supposed starter kit that includes a school bag with a baseball bat and a hammer, both are good for their respective reasons. The baseball bat is, as you’d expect, a ready-made weapon, which can knock zombies down a few pegs when you hit them with it, and with a multi-hit being present in the server settings, you can bat around multiple zombies in one home run swing. It’s not powerhouse mind you as you’d need a lot of swings, but it does help in the sense that the bat is upgradeable with a few nails to create a spiked bat, which deals more damage, but is still in essence very effective.
On the other hand, is the hammer, which is as you expect, a tool that can be used as a weapon. It’s also a reliable thing to have around as it doubles as a tool to help boost your carpentry when interacting with wooden furniture, certain desks, and other carpentry-enabled items. The byproducts of those will depend on your level, but for the most part, you get wooden planks, which are good for barricading your house if you choose to settle. As a weapon, it may be a more personal distance to connect compared to the bat, but it is ample durable that it can be used for so long before you get an actual weapon in hand.
These are just the “starter” items in the game, and there are a ton more items and weapons that you can use with varying range, use case, and durability as you progress longer. It doesn’t even include the upgrades you can do to some of them and their niches, but for the most part, choose what you fancy and you can fight a horde and dwindle them to a big steaming pile of death on the side of the road. Just be sure to clean up or leave as corpse sickness is a terrible debuff to attend to.
How it Works:
- Put your chosen weapon on your back or belt to access them via number keys on your keyboard
- Equip a weapon and hold right-click to aim in a zombie’s direction
- Left-click to attack and repeat until the zombie is dead
1. Guns
Why are Guns Great?
Simply put, if you want to kill from relative safety, a gun is what you’ll want as the ability to kill zombies from a whole screen away makes your place safer depending on the loudness of the gun. Like real-life, one can’t pull a gun and expect to be super good at hitting the targets first try, unless your character is someone who can control their caliber or is a shotgun user, making this, like any part of the game, a grind to improve. Different guns have different caliber rounds, capacity on their magazines, and loudness to surroundings, making you choose which gun suits you well.
For newbies, a .22 round will be the best actual gun in the game to start with. It’s super quiet, can be helpful with leveling aiming, and can have some damage, albeit puny. Those are good and all, but if you want to really tell someone new to a gun to level their aiming, find a clearing, get a shotgun, and open up the whole area to the sound of a loud bang. It may be counter-intuitive to have a beginner take on a lot of zombies with that loud of a gun, but with another person or two backing you up, you can clear zombies and watch your aiming level go high up quickly, because, let’s face it, who needs to aim a shotgun that can do a spread shot? Clearly, Project Zomboid said that’s you, and you go have fun or die, literally.
For the more controlled, tactical, and precise side to things, when you get to 4-5 levels in aiming, you can start handling rifles that can see enemies from an entire screen away, in either burst/full-auto mode or a more controlled single fire mode with either one ending up one-shotting a zed into the ground, but even that also applies to more powerful pistols, like a .45 round gun. While this is tough to visualize through words, you’ll immediately see the benefit in higher caliber guns with an ample stock of ammo in your inventory that would otherwise be a waste in lower-level aiming loadouts.
As previously stated, each gun has its own sound radius with pistols being relatively quiet while shotguns are full-on hoard magnets. It’s wise to bring the appropriate weapon for the occasion to prevent unnecessary clumping of hoards in tight roads and spaces, or having weak weapons for places that permit a lot of chaos.
This is ultimately a preference decision, and so if you want to kill a few zombies off the side of the road, or a huge mob capable of tearing a whole car to bits, bust out a gun to level them to dust. Just make sure to service that gun and unjam that barrel to prevent that small whoopsy called dying.
How it Works:
- Find a gun in a police station, army surplus, or similar
- (Optional) Change the fire rate of select guns by right-clicking the weapon in the inventory and changing it
- Equip a gun and hold right-click to aim in a zombie’s direction
- Left-click to attack and repeat until the zombie is dead
