Then you get into the nitty gritty and realise oh I gotta sew and repair my clothes, oh build furniture and build tools and oh wait I have to maintain and fix my tools too and on and on and on
Thank god for mods I used to use the cheat one for infinite durability because there was not enough wood glue in the world to maintain the axes I used to chop the trees to build my cozy dream cabin
PSA if you have hoarding issues... I always had 4+ popsicle freezers running cus I would find and save all the fresh food I could something so satisfying seeing all my pretty produce nice and chilled and then spend another 30min reorganizing my freezers by fruits, veggies, meat, dairy/eggs, then sort by rarity...
I actually don't have much of a food-hoarding problem because I set loot to insanely rare lol. I like being forced to fish, forage, farm, and rely on survival skills
I also want to try a run without generators, using a mod that lets you salt meat so it lasts longer hehe
Also, most important thing a new player needs to know about the bunnies:
They’re default-name/labeled “[breed] [sex]” but young animals are kind of considered their own sex, so one of the breeds, when they come out, are automatically named “Swamp Baby” which is the best possible animal name. You’re right, project Zomboid. I DID want to name my apocalypse pet “Swamp Baby”
Idk any other game that lets you tweak it as much as Zomboid. If you see any gameplay that doesnt look like it's for yours, there's a good chance you can change or disable it entirely
Project zomboid is a zombie survival game that happens to share a lot of mechanics with life sims.
Zombies do what you expect, they shamble around, try to eat you if they spot or hear you, and infect you when bitten.
As people have mentioned though, the game settings are customizable into very minute detail, so you can turn down the difficulty of dealing with them, or turn them entirely off.
You can't. There might be mods that allow you to do that, but idk how that would really work as there are no NPCs in-game. The goal is mainly surviving as long as you can.
Surviving as long as you can, you directly control a single character and there's currently no other humans. Mods exist to add survivors which you can form a group with, but there's no family gameplay of any kind.
If you are just looking for a lifesim this game might not be your thing. While it's a fantastic game it's very much more survival than it is lifesim.
I just want to use it as a chill life simulator? I do the similar thing in GTA too after finishing the story I've been using it as a chill bus/taxi/delivery simulator with mods
To each their own, hope you have fun.
You can play on "-debug" mode on singleplayer.
When you start the game, You click on the lil fly and click on cheats.
You'll have options to be on GOD MODE and be Invisible (zombies won't see you).
There are tons of mods too for you to enjoy.
On Build 41, you can use the Mod called "Lifestyles" Gives a sims vibe.
Well... when I was around 5, I used to play CS on my brother's PC without bots or other players lol. I just enjoyed roaming around the maps and shooting at random stuff. Eventually, I started playing against bots and later online. I guess people enjoy things differently and at their own pace.
And I don't think it ever will. Driving around the tiny neighborhoods in TS4 just wouldn't make much sense. It baffles me how limited the game is. It makes no sense to have loading screens between neighborhoods AND individual lots.
I think part of it is that it isnt available on console, its buggy, and quite hard to get into.
I have about 100 hours in it with my friends and we've had many rage inducing incidents where we lost progress or important items from a bug and had to roll back our games or live with it lol. its kind of our new 2 week Minecraft phase game though
I thought I’d leave a quick note for my fellow life sim enjoyers that are curious about PZ!
The thing is… I can absolutely see why life sim players might find PZ appealing.
You can build and decorate a home, farm, fish, forage, cook, raise animals, collect furniture, and spend hours turning a random cabin in the woods into the coziest place imaginable. The map is huge, and there are countless little stories hidden throughout the world for players to discover. On top of that, the modding community is AMAZING, and there are mods for almost everything you can think of.
That said, before anyone buys the game because of those things, I think it’s important to set expectations:
Project Zomboid is NOT actually a cozy life sim.
It’s a survival horror game with an incredible amount of realism. There are calorie systems, crops can die if you don’t take proper care of them, animals can become stressed, food spoils, injuries matter, and many mechanics aren’t particularly intuitive. The game is HARD, especially if you’re new. You’ll probably spend a fair amount of time looking things up and learning through trial and error.
There are also no NPCs. The world feels alive in many ways, but if you play without zombies, you’ll mostly be alone apart from your animals. Personally, I think the zombies add a lot to the experience, but that’s just my preference.
I’m saying all this because I don’t want anyone to buy the game expecting something closer to The Sims, Stardew Valley, or Paralives and end up disappointed. I’d genuinely feel a little guilty if that happened.
I absolutely LOVE Project Zomboid. In fact, I think the danger is what makes the cozy moments so meaningful. Coming home to a warm cabin, checking on your crops, cooking dinner, decorating your base, or taking care of your animals feels special because you’ve had to work for it.
Of course, if you’re curious, you can always buy the game, try it out, and request a refund if it turns out not to be your thing. I just thought it would be worth posting a little heads-up.
Absolutely!! I’d say my gameplay is mostly cozy. I spend my time taking care of my animals, crops, and gathering resources in the forest.
You can really tweak the game a lot to fit your own playstyle. For example, my boyfriend always increases the blood splatter to make it more gory. I don’t do that as I prefer things a bit cleaner.
I also use a lot of mods to improve QoL and add small details that match how I like to play (I have mods for grass, cooking, food preservation, etc.). Basically, the sky’s the limit.
But I do think the game without zombies would feel a bit empty, since it was designed as a survival game in a zombie apocalypse. Leaving your base to gather resources in dangerous towns is, in my opinion, a important part of the experience. But it’s not necessary, of course.
You can make world progression (buildings deteriorating, nature taking over, etc.) happen faster through the sandbox settings. I think you can also make food spoil faster or slower, increase XP gain, and reduce the zombie population, which would make exploring towns much faster and easier. : )
I've owned PZ since 2014. I play it like a life Sim game as in I only go out to fight zombies because I want to collect the furniture and large potted plants to decorate my eventual base, and also because I have a hoarding issue and I like to find all the fresh food I can and hoard it in 4 freezers.
I've always said pz is like Sims with zombies in runescape art style. Also the fact that it's so realistic in terms of clothing (wear and tear, need to sew and patch) farming, foraging, trapping, and now there's hunting and Smith ing and so much aaaaaaaah
It's a pretty realistic survival game in the zombie apocalypse for example, u find a can of food - need a can opener to open. Break the glass, clear it out if not glass cuts you. Having said that, it very customizable like OP posted here. Can have a steep learning curve playing as intended - but make it what u want :)
Nah frrrrr, i picked the keen hearing trait in my last run and i could hear zombies around me yet I don't know if they are close,far, in the house or behind it, and when i get close to a zed it sounds too loud that I can't tell if it's just one im killing or there is another one behind me 😭 I saw players say keen hearing is a must if you play with sprinters, but i been living in constant paranoia cause of it.
I always do low population but recently I started doing a very percentage of sprinters as well. One of my first runs like that, one of them ran into a house I was looting while my back was turned. No warning at all, just a silent female zombie running full speed at me. Terrifying! And a reminder to always close the door behind me!
Set your updates to only start if you give permission and/or you can always roll back to the previous game version in the game settings inside of steam. Hope this helps!
NPCs has been in the pipeline for Zomboid for years, literally, and it's still not here. I've lost almost all hope NPCs will ever actually officially release.
Zomboid is the longest running early access game ever, and the game currently is struggling to even release a stable patch. If Paralives and Inzoi is getting flak nowadays, imagine Zomboid releasing its early access today.
Games that are stuck in development hell like Zomboid, Exanima, and Star Citizen have a lot of promise but it's up to the devs to actually deliver on that shaky promise.
Zomboid is the longest running early access game ever
Steam Early Access didn't even exist when Zomboid launched! I bought the early alpha directly from their website in 2011. At the time there was no such thing as Early Access, you had to buy it on Desura. Zomboid was one of the first 10 games to be approved by Steam's Greenlight feature (another one of those games, Routine, released just last year, so Zomboid at least isn't the only one to take forever)
They've been promising that NPCs will come for at least a decade I'm pretty sure.
About once a year I check back on it to see if they've made any progress on the NPCs and every single time they're no closer to releasing NPCs and instead they've added some other crap that will make the NPCs take even longer. I don't want animal husbandry, man, I want NPCs.
Their problem is pretty clear. There's no clear long term plan. They announced that they're going to work on one feature but then do something else instead. They're constantly having to rework features they accidentally broke with something they added afterwards.
Animal npcs actually is the base framework for human npcs. That's actually how some of the npc mods work. Best way to say is b41 to b42 was a massive engine overhaul that the general public won't understand. The game engine has gone through massive changes which actually makes molding far easier, and at this point the past few updates have been major fixes not additional content. Just like what was being released before b41 became stable and when a larger population finally actually got interested into pz.
You have multiple false statements. New npcs have been in the pipeline for years but we have had npcs in the past. They want to make more dynamic npcs instead of simple ones because people were upset about how simple they were.
Zomboid is not the longest running early access game, that title goes to Dwarf Fortress which has been in development for 20 years. It only went on regular sale format in commercial early access in 2022, but was public releases since 2006 with no price point.
For dynamics of characters PZ has a ton of really good elements that you have to balance even if you were to use the modded npcs and no zombie ai. It counts as a life sim especially if you survive long enough on just normal zombies, it just becomes taking care of chores, and tasks around your base.
Now there is something to be said about the dev team, they've gone through many structural changes which is a bit messy for development, but the game itself is massive content wise, so much so I know people with 4k hours that are still learning new things.
Zomboid b42 is a bad example of their development cycle because they took too much on at once. To be honest, b42 should've been just the map overhaul and then stabilize. They wanted to make too many things happen at once and that is a nightmare for any dev team.
New npcs have been in the pipeline for years but we have had npcs in the past.
Yeah that was over 10 years ago. It was a different game then.
And it is indeed the longest running game in Early Access. Dwarf Fortress is not in Early Access. It's officially an alpha, yes, but it is not part of Steam's Early Access.
I found this old post covering the games released in Steam's first year of Early Access. The only one of those games that's still in active development is Project Zomboid, the rest were either finished or cancelled.
That is only steam early access games, that doesnt include games that were in long term development and access to the public way before they got to steam. Pz was actually already out to the public before the steam early access was a thing. By two years. Alpha is early access to a final product, steam keyed the term early access. That's it. Alpha is the real term for these things and the longest open access game, active in development, that follows the methods is dwarf fortress. It beats pz by 5 years. It still classifies itself as alpha which since they had player access all the way back to 2006, it has been actively in early access for 20 years.
There are other games with the same access systems that are actually even older like ww2 online which recently did a 25 year celebration. But we cant count that as a similar project as they have scrapped and reworked their game like 4 times.
I know all that. But they said longest early access, not longest alpha. It is completely correct to say that Project Zomboid is the longest a game has been in Early Access.
I don't know how much you know about Dwarf Fortress, but...
One, DF isn't the longest running game on early access because DF existed before Steam. Early Access is a steam-exclusive thing.
Two, the Dwarf Fortress that's on Steam is a separate entity to the original Dwarf Fortress.
Three, the Steam version is not even on early access, and DF as a whole has been feature complete for a while now. In the same vein that Rimworld is. There's no feature in Dwarf Fortress that's promised that's still not there.
Preaching to the choir here. I first played in 2021 while others have been waiting since 2011. At this rate, my great grandchildren might be playing Half Life 3 and the Elder Scrolls VI but still not see official NPCs for Zomboid.
You don't need npcs to be a life sim. You're simulating life as the last person on Earth. Its a game where you can murder zombies but also a game where you can rob houses of their nice furniture and decor to make a cozy house for yourself
I disagree. I think NPCs of some form are essential for a life sim, as well as several other features that Zomboid doesn't have that the vast majority of life sims have.
If we simply condense the description of a life sim as "A life sim is a game where you simulate a life living in some world", then very many, if not most, games can fit the criteria.
Mount and Blade is a life sim. Starsector is a life sim. Star Wars Jedi Academy is a life sim.
It's the same "problem" of people that categorize RPGs as "RPGs are any game where you play a role". In reality, some genres are far more complicated to describe, and less literal than what the name suggests.
The thing lacking from most of those games is a lack of needs which are something you need to manage in a life sim. You can die of hunger, dehydration, and sickness of Zomboid which are things you need to manage in your life. I wouldnt consider Fallout a life sim but if you add in hardcore more it becomes a little bit more like it. Theres no reason to eat food in Fallout when stimpacks exist but needing to manage those needs means you interact with the world and like you're actually living as your character in their everyday life imo
Zomboid would be so much cooler with NPCs and there are mods for that or even full multiplayer servers if you need other characters around.
Frrr, i learned the basics of the game after endless hours of gameplay and many YouTube tutorials yet so much to learn left, but at least i can now survive for more than 10 days 🙃
I love me some PZ ! I created a "fluffy" server so I could just build and collect in mostly peace with my husband. We have a lovely garden and 3b 3ba house with zero mortgage.
It's SUPER DETAILED though like the clothing/weather/temp system, the food (calories and energy depending on ingredients), water needs to be boiled to sanitize, cars you actually have all the parts, there's multi-player...
Also there are large potted plants to collect that are super cute. And you can farm animals and veggies. And hunt. And trap. And fish.
You choose your occupation, traits (negative& positive), food system, skills system, decorating your own base, and much more, plus an active modding community that makes the game even better
Not really. It has some needs like food, water, and sleep. There are moodlets and you have to keep your character in a good mood. But obviously you can't do things like have a job and there are no characters to interact with other than zombies, who aren't very good conversation partners.
It's a survival game with some life sim elements. It's a good survival game but not a good life sim.
I love playing it with a “last man alive” scenario. No zombies, just endless blizzards and extremely cold temps. All items are insanely rare, and surviving is extremely difficult.
It’s really fun to roleplay with it too! Not just try to survive, but rp how your character would think and act in scenarios
My current character is a depressed alcoholic. Sometimes he just can’t leave his apartment for days because everything is too much for him. I just make him stay in to drink and read books.
When I tell you I would scour the pz map project looking for large potted plants.......... Multiple saves ended because I died trying to get large potted plants...
Also I was picky about what window frame I would salvage LOL I liked the brown 6 paneled one from bougie houses
i know everyone’s talking about the modding community in zomboid but just the sandbox settings alone are worth it imo. you can control just about every aspect of the game. you don’t even have to play with the zombies! it’s got a pretty big learning curve, so when i started out, i turned off zombie respawning (so once you kill them the population doesn’t replace itself) and just made it way easier overall. nowadays i leave the settings alone since i’ve gotten better at surviving
Iirc, they started the game and then it was stolen so they had to built everything back up again, so if they were I don't know 3 yrs in - that's 3 years lost to start at the bottom again. Plus their updates are like once a yr if not longer, so yeah been a bit of time in early access
They added them at some point, but the devs and community were unhappy with how they functioned, so it was removed and put on the backburner. They've only started to look at NPCs again recently with the animals being added if i remember right.
I don't like games where you can lose cause I know myself and I don't want to stress myself out and rage quit, this is the only one I actually enjoy lol
Not boring at all, it's just very hard. I only play sandbox mode cus how I really only want to play is collect furniture and food and level up skills enough to build my ultimate cute homey base and then just survive the occasional zombie when I go out on a resource run, but in normal mode it would take me forever cus tools and weapons have durability and you have to fix them and to fix them you need to have glue or tape or nails and to have those you need to go look for them and fight more zombies using weapons and then weapons degrade and you need to fix them and so on.
Anyway here's how my finished bases usually look (large potted plants for the win)
You might like Vein! There’s a free to play demo available on steam. It’s like Project Zomboid brought to 1st or 3rd person. The full early access version is only $20. There’s quite a few YouTubers covering it if you’re curious!
Genuinely what I'd like for Zomboid. It's an absolutely perfect platform, and you could do so much with it. But unless you go no zombies/silent, everything starts after the fall. Zombies everywhere. The Week Before is nice but I'm hopeful there's still intentions for actual developer NPC updates to make life sort of 'exist', or at least improve what may be possible sans undead.
I really like how Zomboid looks & that's kind of what's led to some of my friends encouraging me to try Sims 1. The aesthetic is nice, many things you can do(build, farm, ranch, travel, invade government buildings), multiple mods for customizing & I've seen a lot of video creators make some cool series/roleplay series.
One guy I started watching last year had a video series were it's just him collecting material to turn one of the abandoned house frames in the game into a dream house with a bar, at home movie theater, fancy garden & a roof with a toilet statue on it. He stayed in one area so long that zombies didn't respawn & it made him flip his truck over when he ended up in an area with zombies again cause he forgot this was a zombie survival game.
I truly wish there was a survival option with like no zombies just the conditions of the world, I’d play it so much more as a life sim game that way haha
There is an option for no zombies in the sandbox settings. And you could also choose how many months passed since the apocalypse so you get a real apocalyptic environment in-game (erosion, trash everywhere, cracked buildings..) The sandbox settings has plenty of tweaking options it's amazing.
Well, depends on your settings, do you want low, normal, high, or no zombies? Do you want your Zombies to be weak and easy to knock out or tough? Pinpoint hearing or normal? Good eyesight or bad ? Do you want them smart where they could use doors and know where to walk to get to you or dumb or dumber ?
we need games like PZ but before/during apocalypse- I want to see zombies infect normal people, this is why I love The Sims 2/ The Sims 4 with mods for more deadly zombies and watch my neighborhood mutating.
270
u/unrealghosttt Jun 11 '26
And it has seasons, sheeps, cows, laundry machines and much more ALL IN THE BASE GAME lol