Project Zomboid
Rowan Dowler and Eljoe Miron
Basic Game Information/Introduction (Rowan)
Project Zomboid is an early access game that was first released to the public in 2013 by The Indie Stone. It can be played on Steam Deck, or desktop computer through Steam and GOG.com.
As the name may suggest, Project Zomboid is a zombie game. More than just a zombie game though, it is at its core a sandbox survival game. All semblances of a story are behind radio and tv broadcasts. Engaging with them is completely optional, but they paint the following picture: in 1993, a virus called the “Knox Infection” spread through the fictionalized “Knox Country” area of rural Kentucky. In earlier versions of the game, it was called Knox County but due to the real Knox County being in Tennessee the developers changed it. The game’s map imitates several real life locations; including Louisville, the small towns of Muldraugh and West Point, among many others. In 1993, the Knox Infection started spreading. The player is given free reign to explore this area, though most of it is teeming with undead hordes.
Why this game matters/Autoethnographic Component (Rowan)
The quest set out by the developers was to make the ultimate zombie survival simulator. To me, they have succeeded already even though the game is still incomplete. I would describe Project Zomboid as being Survival (Horror) rather than (Survival) Horror. All horror elements are in service to the survival gameplay, but I think both actually contribute to the effectiveness of the other. Something utterly crucial to the Zomboid experience is that all death is permanent. You make your character, and if they die, they’re gone forever. Scratch that, they’re actually a zombie wandering around the world now. That’s how the survival elements of the game amplify the horror: in any other horror game, your character dies and you respawn. In a survival game like Zomboid, dying means losing possibly tens of hours of your life. The stakes are much higher than a typical survival horror game. The game also does a great job of simulating what we often see in zombie movies, so that every playthrough feels like it could be an episode of The Walking Dead. The game also has a very customizable sandbox, so that you can adjust the settings for your playthrough to imitate whatever your preferred zombie movie is. The standard settings are heavily inspired by George A. Romero's films, but anything is possible with the right combination of settings (and sometimes mods). Zomboid’s subreddit often has users posting about their latest death, and there’s always a story attached. As is Project Zomboid tradition, I’ll provide a story of my own:
Personal Story of the Game
John Yap (I often choose silly character names) lived in Riverside when the Knox Infection hit. He decided to hole up in his house for the time being. Before long, each of his neighbours had succumbed to the infection and shambled around the streets. On July 9th, he decided to venture out to gather supplies. Looting his neighbours' houses, he bashed in heads with a crowbar and gathered food, planning to make a break for it and get out of town. Maybe Brandenburg was still safe? He eventually found a functioning car and a couple days later had packed all the essentials into the trunk, ready to leave.
Off he drove, swerving to avoid zombies as he sped down the highway. Eventually, he came across a fence blocking the way and trees too thick to drive around. Evidently, Brandenburg was not in the exclusion zone set up by the military to contain the infection. With zombies closing in and nowhere to go, John started to panic. In a rush he tried to do a quick 3-point turn on the narrow road, accidentally totaling the car. Unwilling to leave his gear behind, John decided to stand and fight. Hundreds of the undead closed in around him, but John fought till his bones ached with each agonizing swing of his crowbar. By the time night fell, he knew he’d be lucky to survive, let alone hold onto any of the supplies he’d spent the last week gathering.
At that moment, he knew that he could still walk faster than the dead so that’s what he did. He walked for miles back the way he came, with the undead trailing behind him. Covered head to toe in blood and guts, the exhausted John stumbled just barely fast enough to keep pace with the horde. John has hemophobia, the fear of blood; so he was a nervous wreck, shaking to his bones as he walked through the dark, the sound of growling never more than five feet behind him. He would cut through the trees, in hopes of losing them, but to no avail.
Eventually, John reached a small town. At the edge of that small town on the side of the Ohio river there was a fishing shop. Hoping he could lose them by climbing the second floor, John went inside. Alarms blared as he climbed through the shattered window, drawing each and every shambling corpse to his location. The walk resumed. John then saw his final hope: a tall wooden fence, too tall for the dead to climb over but short enough that with luck he himself may find salvation. With the reaching grubby hands closer than ever he made a break for it. His aching limbs would only give him one chance. Even a second of lost time would put him in the clutches of the undead horde but as the morning sun broke he knew it was his only hope. So with what he thought was the last of the strength left in his arms and legs he jumped and his outstretched hands reached the tip of the fence and with one mighty heave he pulled himself over.
Safe at last, a house with a comfortable bed awaited him just across the yard he’d found himself within. But in that house was one remaining occupant, eager for a meal so with strength he didn’t know he had John pushed the corpse to the floor then stamped the heel of his boot on its skull again and again and again until it finally stopped moving, and he could finally rest. Imagine how heavenly that pillow must have felt to him. Exhausted, starving and dying of thirst, finally taking a sip of water from what's left in the sink and collapsing on the bed, not caring if he was found or not.
That whole gameplay experience took me about two hours of real time. I was sweating and very lightly shaking by the end of it, but my character survived and that is my longest running save to date. He’s currently been surviving the apocalypse for almost two months.
Project Zomboid Spares No One: the living or the dead. (Eljoe)
The game embodies a harsh existential reality where no one is truly spared, neither the living struggling to adapt and endure, nor the unyielding hordes of the dead. This brutal dynamic of survival references the philosophical perspectives of existential nihilism and optimistic nihilism that grapple with the meaning of living and existence.
Within the bleak world of Project Zomboid, every waking day surmounts new dangers. Resources are scarce, and your death is truly inevitable. We are forced to confront this nihilistic reality head-on. This is fundamentally enforced by the game's core mechanic of perma-death. You lose your life, you lose all your hard-earned progress. Even basic survival itself holds no greater significance because any progress is subject to your inevitable loss. The game’s unforgiving sandbox forces players to continuously fight with endurance: even if you manage to make a zombie-proof refuge, the environment itself offers nothing for your salvation. In this sense, the endgame of Project Zomboid is explicitly philosophical: it is about finding or creating meaning in a zombie filled universe. The game design of Project Zomboid by making the stakes of surviving very personal where all efforts are futile in the long run.
Yet Project Zomboid’s design also aligns with the principles of optimistic nihilism, which is recognition of life’s pointlessness to create subjective meaning and joy. As Dr. Steve Parker articulates, the absence of cosmic purpose empowers individuals to paint their life’s canvas with values they choose (Parker). Similarly, within the constraints of Project Zomboid, players craft their own narrative and legacy. The game "does a great job of simulating what we often see in zombie movies, so that every playthrough feels like it could be an episode of The Walking Dead," encouraging us to author our own stories. This is evidenced by the community tradition of sharing tales, like the story of our own John Yap. His desperate flight, narrow escape over the fence, and final, exhausting victory in a random house were not scripted but a narrative created through gameplay. Furthermore, Project Zomboid’s gameplay is a blend of cognitive problem-solving and emotional engagement with a hostile environment. Players experience moments of dread and terror found in survival horror games described by Bernard Perron (Perron). Perron describes survival terror as the psychological dread that players feel, creating a solitary and immersive experience. This tension between the looming threat of the undead, and finding safety creates this emotional oscillation between terror and hope. For example, after John Yaps’ plans failed and his car was totaled, his decision was not to succumb to despair but to survive and fight. This moment embodied the absurd hero who insists on persevering within a meaningless situation.
From a psychological perspective, the struggle for survival in Project Zomboid connects deeply with human motivational theories, such as the evolved hierarchy of needs revisited by Kenrick et al., which highlights that fundamental needs like physiological safety and self-protection are prioritised in threatening environments (Kenrick et al.). The game reflects this by centering players’ focus on survival. John Yap's journey was not about self-actualization but about the basic needs by finding sustenance, and to find safety. Furthermore, the game's portrayal of mental strain can be linked to depictions of mental illness in media (Marwick et al.). Project Zomboid incorporates this directly through in-game traits like hemophobia (the fear of blood) that illustrate the psychological challenges that compound the threats of survival.
Thus, in the world of Project Zomboid, the living and the dead are intertwined in a narrative of survival terror and existential confrontation. No one is spared: the living endure the hopeless fight for life, while the dead symbolize your own end. This duality, powered by mechanics like perma-death and storytelling, is deeply intertwined with the philosophies of existential and optimistic nihilism, psychological motivation, and mental health narratives in media. Ultimately, the game challenges players to find personal purpose in a universe that refuses inherent meaning.
Project Zomboid on Risk Management, RNG, and Probability Fallacies. (Rowan)
All games will have some sort of balance of risk and reward, and Zomboid is no exception. Every choice you as a player make is, to some extent, putting your character at risk. Every building you loot, every door you open, bears the risk of losing everything. With so much on the line, one might expect players to act with extreme caution. While they do sometimes, a core part of the Zomboid experience is the one where you become over-confident in your abilities and bring about your own downfall.
Gambler's Fallacy
There is a phenomenon called the “Gambler’s Fallacy” that exists, as the name suggests, primarily in gambling situations like games of chance. However, this misconception about the way our world works is present in all walks of life. In essence, the gambler’s fallacy is the notion that when dealing with independent events relying on chance, past results can skew the future. If you toss a coin and get heads, you are more likely to get tails on your next toss. If you’ve tossed 4 heads in a row, you are more likely to get a tails result because according to probability, the tails should balance out the heads. In truth, each toss of the coin is completely independent of the previous ones. You have a 50% chance of getting tails each throw, regardless of how many times you got heads. Yes, it is unlikely to toss 4 heads in a row, but it happening has no bearing on any future events since it’s already happened. This is explained in detail, including why it is fallacious, in Joseph L. Cowan’s The Gambler’s Fallacy, from the Philosophy and Phenomenological Research journal.
How does this relate to Zomboid? In Project Zomboid, there are many elements of random number generation (RNG). Perhaps the most impactful is the infection chance that comes with every wound as a result of a zombie. Unlike many zombie apocalypse games, in Project Zomboid, the player character is not immune to the infection. If you get hit by a zombie, there is a chance of the resulting wound being either a scratch, a laceration, or a bite. Each of these wound types carry different chances of infecting you with the Knox Virus. A scratch is only a 7% chance; you are fairly likely to shrug it off, though not guaranteed. A laceration carries with it a 25% chance of infection, which would mean a slow death over the course of two to three days in standard settings. Finally, a bite is guaranteed infection and death (unless of course, you install the very popular “The Only Cure” mod, which adds amputation, and potential survival of a bite, to the game). It’s easy to imagine how the gambler’s fallacy might influence a player’s decision making. If you’ve gotten decently lucky and your character has survived 3 lacerations over the last month without being infected, how sure are you that this 4th one won’t be the one to end your run? Should you prepare for the inevitable, or are you more than likely to survive since it’s only a 25% chance of infection?
However, there is another layer to RNG’s impacts on player behaviour in Zomboid that relates to taking risks. There are two popular philosophies when it comes to how one dresses their character in Zomboid. Many players believe it is smart to wear the most protective clothing possible: firefighter uniforms, bulletproof vests, a motorcycle helmet, etc. Others think it’s wiser to be wearing as little as possible, to maximise your stamina and keep your weight down. There isn’t really a “right” answer to this question, either. I have my own opinions on it, which I could defend, but there are equally valid points on the other side. Wearing protective clothing offers a chance of any hit from a zombie being negated, and the article of clothing that protected you may become torn. For example, a bulletproof police vest offers a 55% chance of blocking any scratches to your torso, and a 30% chance of blocking bites. Additionally, your character's strength and weapon skills each offer a chance at automatically pushing away a zombie trying to hit you. But how high of a block chance is high enough that you would be willing to take a risk and allow a zombie to potentially hit you? There’s always a chance they manage to land a bite. Sure, it can be quite unlikely, but the odds are never zero.
That brings us to the other school of thought when it comes to protection: ignoring protection values, and optimising for insulation and minimal weight. The early game, and therefore most of many players’ experience, is during the summer in game and thus wearing protective gear bears the cost of causing you to sweat and eventually suffer from heatstroke. Because Project Zomboid is nothing if not meticulous when it comes to finding realistic ways to punish the player. Many players, myself included, believe that no chance of blocking is high enough and instead opt to wear what will be best for the current weather and will have the least weight possible. Any time a zombie gets the chance to bite us is a mistake and near death experience. Players who follow this school of thought will also say traits like “Slow Healer” (which is self explanatory) and “Thin Skinned” (which makes wounds more likely) are “free points”. In the context of Project Zomboid, the term “free points” is a phrase come up with by the community that refers to the character creation process. Players must balance an array of positive and negative traits, Slow Healer and Thin Skinned being negative traits, so that their character is balanced with strengths and weaknesses. The downsides of some negative traits are easy enough to overcome that they may be considered “free points”, allowing you to take more positive traits at a negligible cost. For players who think any chance of getting hit is a mistake, these traits are free points because you shouldn’t be getting hit anyway so it doesn’t matter if getting hit is more likely to give you a scratch or a bite, or that said wound will take longer to heal.
Of course, Project Zomboid is not an action game. It’s a survival game, and far more time will be spent managing supplies than fighting zombies. RNG also plays a major role in looting. There are a few items which are considered essential for long term survival, which cannot be crafted and must be found in the world, namely: generators and sledgehammers. While there are other items that are incredibly important and must be found, these two are unique in that they are offered a high rarity making them much harder to find than other supplies like a water bottle, or a digital watch. There is an inside joke in the community that the moment the apocalypse struck, every resident in Kentucky threw their sledgehammers into the Ohio river given how rare they are in game. Still, despite their rarity, items like sledgehammers and generators, among other things, can be found in predictable locations. Generators are more likely to be found in self storage container depots. Additionally, such a location will also tend to have multiple storage containers each with a chance of containing a generator, making them great places to look for one. However, once again, the gambler’s fallacy can come into play: after searching a dozen storage containers, a player might begin to think that the next place they check must be guaranteed to have a generator. I myself have fallen into this trap with John Yap, whom I drove all over the map searching for an axe. After searching the hardware stores in 3 separate towns, I figured, “surely the Rosewood fire station must have one”. My thinking was partially logical: the fire station is indeed a great location to find an axe, there are often multiple. However, me having failed to find one in previous locations had nothing to do with whether or not I would find one in the fire station. Instead, I pushed my luck and drove out far from my home base to go search a dangerous location because I wrongly assumed it would be more likely to have an axe than it was. John Yap almost died that day, he received a wound on one of his hands that could have easily gotten infected and that would have been the end. There weren’t even any axes in the fire station. This is an example of Zomboid using a fairly intuitive game mechanic, higher reward areas have higher risks associated with them, and using phenomena like the gambler’s fallacy to manipulate players into putting themselves in greater danger, and granting more opportunities for horror, made all the better by the fact the player is exposing themself to these dangers willingly and is forced to sit with their decisions they’ve made, and consider whether or not they could have survived if they’d made better ones.
Hot Hand Fallacy
This brings us to another, similar, fallacy called the “Hot Hand Fallacy”. This is, in a way, the opposite of the gambler’s fallacy because it is the belief that in a string of unlikely events, these past events will make the unlikely thing more likely to happen. In a word: winstreaks. The term “originates from basketball and describes the common belief that players who are on a streak of scoring are more likely to score on their next shot.” (Williams, et al.). According to a study conducted on risk and reward balancing in video games, up to 91% of basketball fans believe in hot hands. The fact is, that as long as circumstances are changing, there is no such thing as “winstreaks” or “losestreaks”. Yet, the belief is incredibly common. This is perhaps the single most common killer of experienced players in Zomboid. There is a sentiment in the community that “confidence is killer”, as so many experienced and skilled players will lose their character simply because they became too confident in their abilities and allowed themselves to make a lethal mistake. Nothing hits quite like the regret of having gotten sloppy with your movement when you see your character you spent fifty hours playing as being torn to shreds by zombies that you know you could have easily dispatched. A player who has gotten the hang of combat in Zomboid may be able to fight a horde of a hundred zombies at once. There’s really no difference in the tactics you must use whether you’re fighting twenty or a hundred zombies, the only difference is how consistent you have to be with your movement and spacing. This is where the hot hand fallacy comes in. If you’ve been fighting a massive horde of zombies, and you’ve spent half an hour in real time killing them, you may start to get sloppy and eventually they’ll catch you. You’re lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that you’ve done this many times before, and you’ve been doing just fine up until now. A core part of the design philosophy in Zomboid is that it can often take only one mistake to lose your character. Sometimes, one mistimed swing of your weapon can be the difference between life and death. But of course, you’ve swung your weapon hundreds of times in a row without missing a single one. What are the chances your next swing will miss?
Another way complacency kills in Zomboid is actually another aspect of the emergent narrative in the gameplay, that often feels like a scene straight out of a zombie movie: being caught unaware. Death can be as quick and simple as opening a door without hearing the zombie on the other side. There are ways to avoid this of course, some players swear by checking every single door in every single building by attacking the door once first to alert any zombies inside, or by some other strategy (there are many ways to check for zombies on the other side of a door, some are more reliable than others but they are too numerous to explain them all here). But in reality? Williams et al. found that players will naturally gravitate towards a balance of risk and reward, rather than taking the safest route. While their study didn’t specifically concern Zomboid, this is true in this case as well. Even though the stakes are so high, players will often do reckless things or allow themselves to get careless while they loot a building. After all, it takes a lot of time to check each and every door. Most players will decide it’s worth the risk of there being a zombie on the other side, because in most cases, there won’t be. Once again, the game lulls you into a fabricated feeling of safety which makes the inevitable jumpscare when you encounter an infamous bathroom horde all the more effective. To succeed at Zomboid, you must be constantly on edge while not in your home base. You must never let your guard down, and be ever vigilant. One moment of carelessness can always result in a zombie biting you from some corner you forgot to check, or lunging out of a door you didn’t think to be wary of. Of course, this can also tie in with the gambler’s fallacy, even though it and the hot hands fallacy are in some ways opposites. In an attempt to not fall for the hot hands fallacy, by being constantly aware, you make yourself vulnerable to the gambler’s fallacy. The last twenty doors were safe, you’re bound to run into one with a horde behind it sometime soon. It’s the type of game that, the better you play, the more terrifying it is. After all, what’s a more terrifying horror experience than being constantly on edge for hours at a time?
Links to Gameplay Videos.
https://youtu.be/NFGHGU1kf18?si=3y2auR_Njvyl-pYF, Source: The Indie Stone. This footage was a “Thursdoid” (the developers have a blog about progress on the game which releases on Thursdays) from 2024, where they showed demo footage of the new lighting system added in the Build 42 update. The building used to demonstrate the new lighting was the Sanatorium, which is also a new building in Build 42. It happens to be rather creepy.
https://youtu.be/4AMRfgMm9X8 , Eljoe's playthrough of the game's tutorial.
https://youtu.be/4QxkTI2aSrI, Rowan's gameplay in Build 42 (Unstable Beta Version). Please note: I'd already spent a little while on this save. It's still early game, but there have been a few hours spent on it.
https://youtu.be/xhKgNuMzGpg, Rowan's gameplay in Build 41 (Stable Version). Here, I play a "challenge run" of sorts; of course, the game is still a sandbox but I set a custom gamemode using the sandbox settings to emulate the film 28 Days Later as a way of showing how verstaile Zomboid is.
Works Cited
- Cowan, Joseph L. “The gambler’s fallacy.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 30, no. 2, Dec. 1969, p. 238, https://doi.org/10.2307/2106040.
- Kenrick, Douglas T., et al. "Renovating the Pyramid of Needs: Contemporary Extensions Built Upon Ancient Foundations." Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 5, no. 3, 2010, pp. 292-314. PMC, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3161123/
- Marwick, Jessica, et al. "Gaming With Stigma: Analysis of Messages About Mental Illnesses in Video Games." JMIR Mental Health, vol. 6, no. 5, 2019, e12418. JMIR, https://mental.jmir.org/2019/5/e12418/
- Parker, Steve. "Optimistic Nihilism: A Creative Approach to Existence, Provided You Exercise Caution." Medium, 15 Jan. 2025, medium.com/@steveinadelaide/optimistic-nihilism-a-creative-approach-to-existence-provided-you-exercise-caution-a698ff339596.
- Perron, Bernard. Survival Terror. University of Michigan Press, 2012. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv65swb6.5?seq=1
Project Zomboid Wiki - Pzwiki, pzwiki.net/wiki/Project_Zomboid_Wiki. Accessed 29 Oct. 2025. - Smith, Justin E. "Existential Nihilism: The Only Really Serious Philosophical Problem." ResearchGate, 2020, researchgate.net/publication/343851361_Existential_Nihilism_The_Only_Really_Serious_Philosophical_Problem.
- Williams, Paul, et al. “Balancing Risk and Reward to Develop an Optimal Hot-Hand Game.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research, vol. 11, no. 1, Feb. 2011, https://gamestudies.org/1101/articles/williams_nesbitt_eidels_elliott.
AI Disclosure
No AI was used.