Project Zomboid

These are the end-times.
There was no hope of survival.
This is how you died.

Project Zomboid is an isometric zombie survival RPG created by a four person team from Britain. It takes inspiration from games like Survival Crisis Z and X-COM. Currently the map features a suburban area, diner, a housing development, shopping district, and other buildings you would expect to find in a small town. The developers are planning on releasing periodic updates Minecraft style, with each update adding a feature or two to the game. Features to be added include randomly generated quests and NPCs, perks and skills system, more weapons, more craftable items, and more survival needs like thirst, sanity, and hygiene.

Notable for having extremely bad luck, but still managing to get the pre-public demo out on schedule, give or take a few months. You can play the demo here.

Tropes used in Project Zomboid include:
  • The Alcoholic: The character can get drunk in order to reduce panic. If you get drunk enough, your character will randomly stumble around.
  • Action Survivor
  • Awesome but Impractical: Combat, full stop. While a competent player will have no trouble with a half-dozen or so zombies, any more than that and the best option is usually to just run, no matter how well equipped you are. Melee combat is silent but extremely dangerous (a single bite or scratch could result in you eventually zombifying), the shotgun is devastating and safe to use but it attracts zombies from all over the map to your position, and Molotov cocktails attract zombies and run the risk of burning down your safehouse, as well as potentially killing you.
  • Big No: The player character gets one when the raider shoots your wife.
  • 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 Park Ranger profession. While it doesn't help with combat or barricading, given how much it rains in Knox County, the weather resistance is actually pretty handy.
  • Crazy Survivalist: The raiders. You can be this as well.
  • Darker and Edgier: The final game, as currently advertised, looks as though it will essentially be a grittier, more realistic Survival Crisis Z.
  • Disposable Woman: Subverted in that it's entirely possible for her to survive (and, in fact, be perfectly fine aside from the leg injury), depending on the player's actions. If she does die, however, your character pretty much immediately forgets about her.
  • Death Is a Slap on The Wrist: Averted. Once you die, your game resets.
  • The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: It's impossible to take damage from the zombie in the "Fast Food" quest, he just stands there and waits for you to kill him. This is so you can learn the melee system.
    • Leaving the oven on while you run off to listen to the radio will result in your house burning down.
    • If you get spotted by a bunch of zombies and run inside the zombies will start banging on your door,the bangs and the door breaking gradually down actually makes Baldspot get scared and eventually panic.
    • 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.
  • Do Not Run with a Gun: Applies to the player, you can't fire your shotgun or swing your bat while moving.
  • Downer Beginning: You start off the tutorial with your things stolen, no food, a wife with a broken leg, and zombies everywhere.
  • Downer Ending: There’s no chance of rescue or a game win screen, you will die eventually.
  • 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.
  • Everything Fades: Completely averted. In later versions bodies will remain on the map until they gradually decay (leaving skeletons behind which will never disappear unless taken) and rain will eventually be able to wash away any outdoor bloodstains, but in the current version, every single corpse, bit of gore, and blood spatter will remain on the map permanently, providing a rather satisfying visual record of the player's exploits.
  • Failure Is the Only Option: You will die, despite your best efforts.
  • Fan Nickname: Baldspot for the player character.
  • Gateless Ghetto: Justified in that the town is under quarantine. As the game goes on, the infection will spread, the quarantine lines will either expand outward or be overrun, and more areas of the map will thus become open for player exploration.
  • Ghost Town: Eventually. At the start of the outbreak the town is fairly heavily populated with NPCs, but the vast majority of them die in the first few days and the rest will hole up and hide, leaving the streets deathly quiet.
  • 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, using pills to treat any pain.
  • 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.
  • Hyperactive Metabolism: Averted. Eating will increase healing rate, but will not give you instant health.
  • Improvised Weapon: Baseball bats, a hammer, and boards of wood can be used as weapons. Get some nails, and you can have yourself a spiked bat. Get an empty bottle, a rag, a torn sheet, or a sock, along with some gasoline, and you have a molotov cocktail.
  • In-Universe Game Clock: Six hours of real world time equals about a month in game time.
  • Isometric Projection
  • Item Crafting: Used to make several items in the game, as well as upgrading existing ones.
  • It Got Worse: Paypal decides to limit their account. Then Google Checkout decides to mess with them. Then a there was a car bombing near their flat. Then two of the devs were robbed.
    • Can occur in-game very quickly.
  • Kill It with Fire: How? Why, with Molotovs of course!
  • Mercy Kill: How do you skip the tutorial? Smothering your wife with a pillow. You Bastard.
  • Molotov Cocktail: One of the weapons in the game.
  • Press X to Die: Flashlights are in-game, usable, and fairly common. Note that just because you can use them does not mean they're a good idea - they have all the zombie-attracting power of a shotgun with none of the usefulness, and turning one on at night for even a second will attract every zombie in the city to your position.
  • 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.
  • Schedule Slip: The general rule of thumb is that an update will never be released on the day it's scheduled to be released on, and might take anywhere from weeks to months more than originally intended.
  • Sanity Slippage: Planned to be implemented in future releases; there is an extremely basic version present now, but it has no noticeable in-game effects beyond making the player character much more susceptible to panic.
  • Save Scumming: The game autosaves every time you sleep or close the game, so this is extremely difficult to do, although still hypothetically possible if you manually back up your savegame files.
  • 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 has survived in the current version? Over eleven months. Worth noting that the eventual cause of his demise was not the zombies, but rather the fact that there was no more food left on the map and farming and hunting haven't been implemented yet.
  • Short-Range Shotgun: The shotgun is really only useful up to a few feet.
  • Spread Shot: The shotgun is basically a wedge of death.
    • Currently, the shotgun is only a Wedge Of Death because there's no code for 'slight damage' on zombies with ranged weapon.
  • Sprint Meter: If you run around a lot, you will get a exhausted moodlet that will prevent you from running, and will make your melee attacks weaker. If you do so while heavily encumbered with loot you can actually injure your back.
  • Too Awesome to Use: In some ways, the shotgun. Its noise will attract zombies from all about, making it more useful when there already is a zombie horde, not to mention ammo is somewhat rare.
  • Wizard Needs Food Badly: As the game goes on, you will need to look for food to eat. Start going hungry, and your strength goes down, and your healing time increases. Starve yourself, and you start losing health, along with a massive decrease in strength.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: Using pure Max Brooks rules - no fast infected, no special infected, no zombified animals, only headshots kill, 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.
  • Zombie Infectee: Getting bitten will cause this. Getting scratched has less of a chance. Once infected however, it is only a matter of time before you join the zombie ranks.
  • Zombie Gait
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