Zombie

Template:General Zombies are the game's biggest threat, roaming Knox County in the hundreds.

The zombies in the game are traditional and shamble, but newly-turned zombies move faster. Zombies are attracted to noise, bright light (particularly from a flashlight or fire), and the sight of humans.

Humans getting too close to zombies may be bitten, scratched, or otherwise injured. Bites have a 96% change of infection, and scratches have 25%. The sick moodle appears when characters become infected. Characters will develop fevers, and eventually succumb to their infection.

Zombie Mechanics

Pathfinding

Responding to claims of zombies 'cheating' to locate players, Project Zomboid developer Chris "lemmy101" Simpson explained the nature of zombie pathfinding:

Zombies can pathfind a total of 20 tiles to reach you. Seems like a lot but any less than that and they fail miserably to ever come upstairs to get you or to navigate around a gap in a fence or something. This all means that if you're at a window and a zombie sees you from outside, it will attempt to pathfind to your current spot, and if it's under 20 tiles travel distance it will work out a route to get you. A bit too intelligent for a zombie perhaps, but until we can balance it such that the threat is still there without this, then it is necessary. If the zombie is over 20 tiles away from you then it will continue to 'wander'.

If a zombie is within a few tiles distance to you, then instead of path finding it will just lunge at you, moving directly toward you irrespective of things in the way.

If you make a sound that's in range of them (and is the relative loudest sound they hear from their position) they will head to a random point within 50% of the range of the sound. So hearing a shotgun blast from 40 tiles away, they will head to a random location within 20x20 around the source of the sound. If another shot occurs when they are 20 away, they will head to a random point in a 10x10 square around the sound.

So if a zombie hears footsteps coming from a few tiles away, they will pinpoint it accurately enough to head to the door to that room.

Zombies will always head toward the sight of flesh, ignoring all sounds. At moment this only includes player + Kate, but in time any living flesh will be equally attractive.

Horde Behavior

Lemmy also provided further information on the behaviour of zombie hordes:

At the start of the game, there are three hordes. 50% of the total map zombies are put in a horde, the others are randomly distributed around the map.

Zombies not in the horde head toward the nearest horde, while wandering and outside the player's sight. The hordes all move around the map at a slow speed, heading to a random point on the map, then another, then another.

Combat and Damage

Zombies fight by coming up close to the player and then extends its arms. Damages from zombies can result in three ways: bites, scratches, and "punches". Bites are the rarest, but have a 96% chance to infect you. Scratches are quite frequent, but they only have 25% chance to infect you. "Punches" are just wounds that do not break through skin, the thick skinned perk can help you turn bites and scratches into "punches". Punches do not have a chance of infection, and when you hover over the status bar of the body part, it will only say "slight damage", without anything underneath. Unlike bites and scratches, "punches" do not require bandaging or first aid of any kind, just some time to heal.