Knox Infection

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“

The Knox Infection's final stage is one of violence.

— Kirsty Cormick

Knox Infection (commonly known as zombie infection) is a highly contagious disease contracted only by humans. This disease is very different to the common cold, food poisoning or wound infection, in that it has a 0% survival rate.

Transmission

The Knox Infection is observed to have two separate forms of transmission, meaning there are likely two strains of the pathogen, both resulting in death and reanimation.

Strain 1

This strain is observed to be transmitted through fluid contact: being bites and scratches. Scratches must be caused by the infected, however with only a 25% chance of being transmitted, it is therefore likely to survive a scratch. Bites, however, have a 100% transmission rate, meaning a bite will always result in death and reanimation.

Strain 2

This strain is observed to have a high mortality rate - transmitting through the air. Most people that come in contact with this strain contract the disease, however few people have survived exposure, said to be immune to this strain. These people make up the player and other survivors, and are the last people left to survive the Knox Event.

Infection

The game will never outright tell you that you are infected, you will instead receive two moodles - of Pain (immediately) and of Sick (after 0-48 hours) after a physical damage carried out from contact with the Zombie. The progressing Sick moodle, increasing Pain and decreasing Health are a giveaway for progressing zombie infection.

Getting bitten has originally 100% chance (since patch 0.1.4a) of you being infected by a zombie infection, but later possibly modified to unknown value (since patch 0.1.4a?). Majority of players claim it to be around 96%. There are no known and validated characters, who survived the zombie bite - but some claim to have survived. There is no exact official developer response regarding the chance.

Getting scratched by a zombie has a 25% chance of receiving the zombie infection, but may be as well slightly modified since version 0.1.4?. To put the chance on the scale of things, scratches are more dangerous than playing a classic Russian Roulette.

Spoiler warning!

The following contains unhidden spoilers pertaining to the story of Project Zomboid. Proceed at your own risk.

From the partially open game code is seen that the bite and infection are handled separately: infection is internally a non-lethal wound infection and zombie infection is a bite. The file ISHealthPanel.lua references two internal functions: bodyPart:bitten() returning a boolean value and bodyPart:getBiteTime() which returns integer value. There are no known open functions that return the chance or probability to survive the bite, thus the bite is considered to be 100% fatal.

Spoiler end.

Having the Pain or Sick moodles or decreasing Health alone does not necessary mean you are zombie-infected though:

Deep infected wounds or serious flu may start to slowly drain you health, but it can be compensated and overcome by staying well-fed, performing the wound disinfection and/or stitching, removing the glass fragments from the wound and having plenty of sleep. Eventually the Health will stop draining and condition will improve.
Cleaning the wound with alcohol or disinfectant, stitching the wound also cause temporary pain.
The regular flu by being too long out in the rain causes Sick moodle.

True zombie infection will not stop draining health and will continuously intensify over time. There is currently no chance to cure the infection and no known survivors of the bite.

Hypochondriac

The hypochondriac trait will cause the player to occasionally get the symptoms of the zombie infection after receiving a scratch, without actually being infected. However, as the player's "fake infection" reaches critical levels, the player will seem to be "cured" and will regain health.

Trivia

A rumour that there is a small chance to survive a zombie bite has been very popular among the community. However, this is referring to a previous bug that resulted in a 96% chance of surviving a zombie bite, and has since been fixed, making a zombie bite 100% lethal.
Infection lore is heavily based off of George A. Romero zombies, with some very minor alterations to lore.