YMMV / Project Zomboid

• Accidental Aesop:
  • The game does this with "Reading Is Cool" Aesop. It's one of the best sources of entertainment and stress-relief in the game, along with making your life and survival not only easier, but more esoteric skills and abilities possible. Being illiterate gives a whopping 8 extra points during character creation and is considered a serious Self-Imposed Challenge.
  • Over-reliance on modern amenities is dangerous. The game is designed in such a way that most modern products will disappear as time goes on. Running water and electricity shut off, complex weapons break down, cars run out of spare parts, gas stations run dry, food spoils, etc. The only true way to survive indefinitely is to transition to more primitive ways of life, and those who fail to do so are doomed to perish.
• Angst? What Angst?: Unless the Survivor is bored for an extended period of time or eats something bad, they never actually become sad despite being right in the centre of a zombie apocalypse.
• Awesome Music:
  • Main Menu music
  • Maybe We Can Win This
• Cheese Strategy: Sneaking is normally pretty tough to rise. However, the game takes into account the player characters being hidden from the zombies, not the zeds looking for the PCs. So things like just crouching on a rooftop, while a horde is passing down the street allow you to score a few ranks of the skill within mere seconds, as there is, in theory, a huge crowd that you've just managed to successfully "sneak" past. In fact, the normally dreadful helicopter event can be milked for loads of easy Sneaking experience, as all it takes is being inside any given building and watching the horde passing through from a second store window or a balcony - the zombies won't even bother raising their heads. Multiplayer makes it all that cheesier, because you can artificially herd a horde with friends.
• Come for the Game, Stay for the Mods: The game has a massive modding community that often develops certain mechanics years ahead of the dev team and keeps expanding the scope and range of the game and the gameplay way past the vanilla experience. Some of those mods also focus on the Wide-Open Sandbox experience, removing the premise of the zombie apocalypse.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • The Life and Living meta. At the start of the game, the player can tune in on the eponymous TV channel to get free skill points. Virtually every playthrough starts with the player keeping up with a schedule so they can consistently watch the show. The devs eventually acknowledged this and implemented video tapes that could do the same thing, freeing up players to focus on other tasks in the first week. This is very useful for new characters in multiplayer, or scenarios with later starting dates where the power and water are already out. There are also tapes that cover skills that just don't exist on normal channels, such as the rare home-made tapes that cover First Aid, Metalworking, Tailoring, and Electrical.
  • If one plans to ever use firearms, it is of utmost importance to get either an occupation that provides a starting Aiming skill (Police Officer, Veteran) or at least get the Hunter trait. This makes the difference between firearms being somewhat decent right from the start and getting at least a neat exp multiplier, or making it significantly more difficult to use them and to rank up Aiming itself.
  • The crowbar is a weapon that may be borderline overpowered due to its good damage and having the most durability out of all the vanilla weapons, not helped by the fact that it only has a 1 in 70 chance of losing its durability even when the player's long blunt and maintenance skill is at 0.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Woodcraft host on the Life and Living channel is well liked by fans for his affable personality, plus the fact he increases the carpentry skill which is arguably one of the most important skills in the game seems to further help his popularity amongst the playerbase.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Baldspot for the original tutorial player character.
  • Zomboids for the zombies. For obvious reasons.
• Funny Moments: Even though Project Zomboid has a very grim atmosphere, there's still some humor hidden in the game.
  • When searching a house, there's a possibly that every single container will be filled with toilet paper as a nod to the panicked mass-buying of toilet paper during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • If you sprint into a wall, you get to watch your survivor flop backwards onto the ground like a ragdoll before getting back up like nothing happened.
  • You can occasionally find "stories" such as a Jason Voorhees-like zombie with a machete embedded in their torso, the previously mentioned hoards of toilet paper, and zombies dressed only in their underwear with clothes strewn about in a bedroom.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Cooperative Multiplayer makes multiple aspects of the game significantly easier. Not only is playing alongside friends a great way to break the gameplay's tension, it makes combat, scavenging, base-building and defense much less challenging simply by basic teamwork and having extra hands to work it. Futhermore, co-op play is one of the best ways to bypass Anti-Grinding, since you and each of your allies can specialize in a single field.
  • In the land of melee weapons, the crowbar and fire axe are kings. Both have very high durability, great reach and damage (to the point you can knock down and even kill a zombie in a single blow if you're lucky enough). The only weapon with nominally better stats is the Katana, however, the crowbar and fire axe are much more common across the map and have uses outside of combat.
• Good Bad Bugs: If there is a working tap, it will always provide purified water. including situations in which it is connected to a rain barrel placed on the roof and is thus gravity-fed with raw water. This is not an intended feature, but so far, no patch over the years since gravity-fed taps were introduced has addressed it. The bug is obviously highly-useful to players, as it removes the tedious process of purifying water and the barrel can always be manually refilled, even without rain.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • A certain dedicated player decided to track accomplishments of his personal life along the development of the game, to mock the glacial pace of progress going. Thus each of his regular posts consisted of ever-increasing list of his life goals being fulfilled: he managed to finish college, find a girlfriend, find new job, find new girlfriend, marry her, move to different place, find another job, eventually have a son, get promoted, years later said son entering elementary school... always with the punchline of "and Project Zomboid is still in development". Even if the story is a full-cloth fabrication, it reached a meme status within the players' community.
  • Due to its legendary long development, the game itself has the dishonour of being a poster child of perpetual beta and endless early access for indie games. It is often used as a cautionary tale to never take full release of any project for granted.
  • Jokes that the helicopter event is just Frank West snapping pictures to farm you for PP tend to pop up.
  • Everyone in Knox Country throwing all the sledgehammers into the river^note The rarity of sledgehammers, an important tool in advanced base-building, is jokingly explained as the result of Knox Country's populace throwing all the sledgehammers they could get their hands on into the river at the beginning of the apocalypse.
  • American housing^note Among the non-American part of the player community, it's a running joke that everything has such low durability and can be tear down by a handful of zeds, while there will never be masonry added in the vanilla game - not due to game balance, but because it would be "un-American" to have structures that last. This often leads to in-game absurdities where a barricade made of piled-up chairs is actually better than building a section of a wall.
• Misaimed "Realism":
  • Once the waterworks are out, the player has to scavenge for water and then likely to purify it. However, the water never evaporates and never goes stagnant, meaning that in theory, nothing prevents you from filling up random pots and pans every day while the system is still operating, and use that later. As long as water is drawn from places that were previously hooked up to the county waterworks, the water will be pure, too, no matter how long ago the services went down. Also, the number of things that the game considers to be a water container is pretty limited and weird - you can use a cupboard full of cups, but you can't fill up a bathtub. Drinking any water that wasn't purified will almost instantly give you food poisoning, too, and the only way to purify it is to boil it (whereupon it can be stored for months, too) - and until an update, you could only do so as long as the water was in a specific set of containers (e.g. tin cans can be left out in the rain to collect rain water, but would then require you to pour them into a sauce pan specifically before you could boil that water to purify it).
  • Carry weight capacity is an important element of the game. However, it is directly tied with the weight reduction stat of various bags and containers, rather than anything else - and said stat is fixed. When they are used as backpacks, this works perfectly fine with the logic of using proper strapping and frame to spread the weight of the cargo differently. But it goes completely out of the window the second a backpack is used as a secondary object, carried in one hand, leading to blatantly arbitrary outcomes. For example, a military bag loaded full with 27 units will only take 4 weight units from carry capacity when carried in hand, but a school bag, which can only contains 15 units, will take 6 weight units - solely because the military bag uses the ALICE system. You can end up with a situation where you can transport around 70 units of weight with two military packs, one carried in hand, or get penalties for encumbrance by the weight of two handbags and your weapon at a total weight of 16.
  • The general abstraction of the weight system makes it so your two backpacks can carry more than a trunk of a passenger car or even smaller vans, because weight reduction only applies to bags, but not to containers (such as trunks). It's also possible for a vehicle's maximum weight load to degrade as it takes damage, which leads to cases where a vehicle that's been banged up enough will let you take out a case of ammo, but then won't let you put it back in until you've taken some arbitrary amount of other items out too.
  • There is an entire set of extensive mechanics for growing, hunting for and preserving food. Except if you plan to use just about any other method of preserving than pickling in vinegar in a specific model of jar and (before an update) getting seeds from any other source than a seed packet. This includes even such bizarre situations like the inability to plant potatoes from the tubers or to get seeds from a grown plant rather than finding more seed packs. There is an entire selection of mods dedicated solely to solving the issue of how arbitrary this whole gameplay aspect is.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The uplifting banjo sound that plays when the Survivor reaches a new level in some skill.
• Once Original, Now Common: The game went through a lengthy development time, with the trend of zombie survival games dying out by each passing year. One of the main worries expressed was that by the time of a full release, the game would be promptly ignored due to oversaturation of its genre - until it reached that point while still in development.
• Paranoia Fuel: Getting scratched by zombies. Unlike getting bitten, which is guaranteed to cause infection, scratches or lacerations only have a small chance of being so. However, the game does not tell you if you have been infected or not, so you will have to spend nearly an entire in-game day (1 real-life hour) before knowing for sure.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Playing as either an illiterate, deaf or completely unfit character. Or any combination of those three. In fact, being illiterate will significantly reduce your chances of long-term survival, because whatever abilities you won't start with, you will be unable to gain from manuals and magazines later.
• That One Attack:
  • Zombie attacks can deal four different types of damage: Blunt Trauma, Scratches, Lacerations, and Bites. Of the four, bites are guaranteed to transmit the Knox Infection, meaning that a player who has been bitten is already (un)dead.
  • A zombie that goes over a fence can lunge at you while it's prone. This attack can stagger you, giving other zombies nearby time to grab onto you. Worse, it can knock you over, possibly scratching you and damaging your clothes while giving other zombies around you an opportunity to get in close.
• That One Disadvantage:
  • Sunday Driver. For 1 point, vehicles you drive have a 40% slower acceleration rate and a max speed of 30 km/h, which seems inconspicuous. In play, however, this massively decreases the usefulness of cars, which are great for escaping hordes, exploring, and moving goods from place to place. With Sunday Driver, not only is it harder to harder to drive away from a horde, but your fuel consumption is doubled and off-roading can end up going badly if you hit a zombie, as it slows you down significantly. It also makes towing almost impossible, as the weight of the towed vehicle slows yours to a crawl.
  • All Thumbs. For 2 points, it triples the time it takes to move items to and from your inventory. It makes looting and stockpiling tedious, and can end up costing you dearly if you ever find yourself ambushed without a weapon on hand.
  • Restless Sleeper lowers the amount of hours you sleep... while also decreasing the amount of tiredness sleeping removes. This means you tire out quicker each day, decreasing the amount of time you can spend looting, crafting, reading, or building. Becoming tired also shrinks your field of vision and weakens you, making it easier for zombies to sneak up.
  • Sleepyhead makes your fatigue go up faster by 30% and makes sleeping 10% less effective. Like Restless Sleeper, it makes the time you have to do things shorter and increases the risk of becoming tired while outside your base, which affects not just your combat abilities but your field of vision, meaning you can be surprised by zombies that you might have seen coming otherwise.
  • Asthmatic increases stamina loss when sprinting or running by 140% and makes swinging your weapon cost 130% more. With this trait, you tire out quickly and zombies take more hits to kill, making combat or escape risky as a misstep can get you swarmed with no way out.
  • Zig-zagged with Slow Reader, which slows your reading speed to 70%. It's 2 free points in single-player, as you can just fast-forward time when reading. In multiplayer, however, you can't do this, so using books for recipes, XP bonuses, and mood boosts takes up more time and you may well lag behind other players in skills.
  • Unfit gives you -4 Endurance and Weak gives you -5 Strength while also weakening your melee attacks by 40%. Both of these negatives lower your rank in two of the hardest skills to level up in the game, skills which affect your ability to fight and escape. The Weak trait also decreases your carrying capacity, meaning it takes less loot to make you overburdened: going over your carrying capacity increases the strain on your stamina and the risk of tripping or injury.
  • Illiterate is one of the two Self-Imposed Challenge traits in the game. For 8 points, you lose the ability to read. This means you can't gain recipes, XP boosts, or mood bonuses from books, which makes mood management and skill grinding much harder than normal. You also lose out on several recipes— including the very useful ability to operate generators gained from the rare generator manual.
  • Deaf gives 12 points— the largest amount of points for a negative trait— in exchange for shrinking your perception radius and removing all sound. This means that unless you have great spatial awareness or pay very close attention, it becomes trivial for a zombie to sneak up on you for a game-ending bite. Worse yet, you won't be able to hear alarms, so every time you break into a building you could be drawing every zombie in earshot to your location and you wouldn't know it until they've flooded in. It's clearly designed to be a Self-Imposed Challenge, only taken if you're super-masochistic or know the game like the back of your hand. If you are actually deaf yourself, though, it's a whopping free 12 points.
• That One Level:
  • Of the four starting towns, West Point is the hardest one to start out in, thanks to a sizable zombie population combined with a scarcity of good weapon spawns and a wealth of tight, cramped alleyways. The early game in this town will pit you against sizable hordes while under-equipped, as whatever weapons you find are only moderately useful at best, and the one kind of weapon that regularly spawns— firearms— are hard to use without a high enough skill rank and will quickly draw those hordes to you. Even if you go into West Point from another town, the sheer number of zombies will end up chewing through your arsenal's durability very quickly.
  • The Scenic Grove Trailer Park in Riverside is easily the worst spawn area in vanilla gameplay. The buildings are very loot-poor and near impossible to fortify and defend, and the place is packed with way more zombies from the get-go that it has any right to be. If you spawn there, be ready to starting moving fast, and you can walk for a really good while until you find somewhere decent.
  • The section of Dixie Highway that runs through Muldraugh. It houses the places in town with the best loot, but also boasts the highest zombie population. Going here will pit you against hundreds of zombies, making melee a losing proposition unless you have highly effective weapons. If you're caught out here during the helicopter event without an easy escape route, it's effectively a death sentence.
  • Louisville. It's the biggest city in the game map, meaning that in default settings it has by far the biggest and most heavily concentrated zombie population you can hope to find. To make matters even worse, the city's buildings are enormous compared to the houses and businesses from other areas, often maze-like on the inside, and quite often infested by zombies too. Louisville's only upside is the abundant loot, where anything and everything you could ever want can be found here. Unless you are desperate or very prepared, though, you're likely to escape with nothing... if you survive, that is.

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