All About Weight & Calories in Project Zomboid's Nutrition

project zomboid has a problem and if you don't know about it this might save your life now I'm not talking about the thousands of zombies outside your door no I'm talking about something you almost can't even see it's hidden right here in this little arrow I call it your Weight Watcher and if you keep an eye on it you can get better damage better endurance and a better idea of how to manage your food sources the problem is the details on how to do all this are hidden inside the game files and with a recent change to this system under the hood it is getting deadlier than ever so I cracked open the files I stole their secrets and I did a bunch of testing now let's talk about weight and calories in Project zomboid we'll start with the basics let's go back to that Arrow if it's going up you're gaining weight if it's going down you're losing both directions can get bad fast your character starts with a weight of 80 kilograms but they start becoming underweight at 75 kilos and overweight at 85 kilos the short version of the story here is that overweight characters have up to a 60 penalty on endurance recovery they take more fall damage they're more prone to fractures and they have a slower movement speed but underweight characters have it tough too because they deal up to 60 percent less damage they're more likely to get knocked down when bumping into Zeds and their endurance recovery is up to 70 percent worse so you can see if you want to stay alive you'll get a big Advantage just from maintaining the right weight so our first Zomboy nutrition topic here is going to be calories because calories control your weight first you need to know that your character carries an internal calorie balance they gain calories by eating food and they lose calories by well living if at any time you don't have enough calories in the bank your weight will go down if you have too many calories your weight will go up this calorie system is actually the cause of a major problem that was introduced just over a month ago where we now spend calories like crazy drop a comment if you came here because you are always underweight I'll bet there's a lot of you so let's see how we spend calories and find where the problem is here's where we start if your calorie Bank dips below zero you will lose weight and if it goes above 1600 you will gain weight easy right wrong this is Project Zomboy fool and nothing is easy your calorie needs will actually change depending on your weight if you are underweight you will need fewer calories to gain weight and you can carry a lower negative calorie balance before you lose weight for example here a character who's 40 kilograms can have negative 800 calories and still not lose weight and they will gain weight if they have only 150 calories in the bank meanwhile if you're overweight you still need less and zero calories to lose weight that doesn't change but you will need more calories to gain weight for example if you're 120 kilos you need about 3 200 kilograms in the bank to gain weight so since your target calories here is always changing don't worry about it instead when you notice you have a problem with weight let me tell you how to fix it first let's talk about how we reduce calories and help you lose weight at any given moment your character is burning calories based on three main factors the first and most significant factor is your movement activity and this is also the source of a problem that is making us all super underweight the game will spend a number of calories per second based on what type of movement you're doing to help us compare these costs I've translated these costs per second into costs per hour so here we go sleeping Burns only 10.8 calories per hour then for idling just standing there your hourly burn rate is 57.6 walking your rate is 280.8 if you're climbing a fence or a window you'll burn 460 calories per hour but of course it doesn't take an hour to climb a fence so that's just a short spike in your burn rate then running you burn 468 and sprinting will burn a massive 608.4 calories per second so you see running and sprinting are the highest cost activities here when we measure calorie spending over time but many people on Steam Reddit and YouTube have all noticed that if we measure calories over distance instead of time there is a problem in general these testers have found that walking a distance actually costs about 10 percent more calories than running does because calories are reduced over time and running just covers more distance in less time check out retinard's video in the description for some very clear testing on this and check out the calorie fix mod in the description by dreadlord Naf this mod changes the walking cost to about one third of the rate so from 280 calories per hour down to a lovely 103. I think it's a great fix and it feels like it plays really well check that out okay so whether or not you try that mod remember movement is not the only calorie Factor here so let's move on to our second big factor in calorie burn you'll see my mod here has something called metabolism in the game code it is actually your energy level multiplier this multiplier gets applied to your calorie burn so if it's high you've earn more calories and if it's low you burn less now you can see from my tests that just by getting a little bit cold I was able to get a 1.1 multiplier on my calorie burn it didn't take long to get this but that's an extra 10 burn and over time it could quickly have you losing weight it is harder to do this with an overweight character because they have a higher body temperature but stripped down and stakehold and maybe that'll be a good way for you to lose some extra weight the thing is though it appears that this multiplier only gets used when you are sleeping or idling if you are doing any sort of movement it uses your movement cost alone with no other multiplier okay so despite that our third calorie Factor here is actually just being idle because if your movement is Idle there are still things you can actually do in that state and this will affect your calorie cost here's what I found first doing exercise will approximately triple your idle calorie burn second having High Hunger or high fatigue will slow down your calorie burn by about one percent each it's very small but there you go finally here's a big one attacking with weapons will increase your idle calorie burn by two to eight times in general one-handed weapons burn around three to four times the calories while two-handed weapons seem to burn six to eight times the usual amount I couldn't find great consistency here with the weapon weights I'm not sure exactly where the weapons come from but both one-handed and two-handed weapons increase your calorie burn and I did notice that if you're carrying too much weight anything over maximum capacity this will add about 10 percent to this kind of combat calorie cost it doesn't matter how much weight you have as long as it is over your capacity you will see this added calorie cost but now very important if you do any sort of movement while you attack the game seems to revert back to your movement cost alone so if you're moving it does not care about Hunger or temperature or combat or inventory only cares about your movement cost so basically if you really want to maximize your calorie loss in a day you should fight from a standstill use two-headed weapons when you can make sure you're not hungry not tired and you should be very very cold and if you want to keep calories then just do the opposite of all that okay so now let's forget calories for a moment you have other nutrition scores as well did you know that your score is in fat and carbohydrates can dramatically increase your weight gain if you have at least 400 fat or 400 carbohydrates in the bank you get a times 2 multiplier on your weight gain but if you have at least 700 fat and 700 carbs you get a three times multiplier on your weight gain so this only applies when you're gaining weight from calories but this is huge for starving characters who need to boost their weight quickly or for players who like to take under weight in character creation just for those juicy starting points and the game will tell you when you have one of these multipliers because if you have either two times or three times multiplier on the game will show you you have two Weight Watcher arrows instead of one but sadly there is no such mult multiplier when it comes to losing weight so what can you do well maybe you can eat salad to lose weight actually no don't eat salad if you eat prepared food it actually gives you more calories more fat more carbs and more protein based on the cooking level of whoever makes it so if you want to keep your calories down just eat unprepared foods that are low in fats or carbs like lettuce and eggplants yummy all right so once you are losing calories they're going to keep going down until the limit of negative 2200 that is the lowest they will go but your weight will continue to go down then if you ever want to gain weight again just keep eating calories until you see your Weight Watcher arrow pointing up alright let's put it all together now let's talk about meal planning how many calories should you eat every day to maintain your weight well assuming you weigh around 80 kilos take an average day of activity with walking some running a good sleep and some idle activities as a very rough figure you'll probably burn 2200 to 3 600 calories over the course of the day so eat that much 2200 to 36 600 and finally now an announcement this is pretty cool for me I made a game that's right I finally learned enough programming to make a game of my own and it's called Gaia snake I'm told that it's very Zen very atmospheric with the music and pretty addictive I'm really excited to start sharing it with people and if you want you can get it on itch.io right now it's pay what you want starting at zero dollars so free game it's out for PC I put the link in the description for you and if you do download it I really appreciate any honest comments or ratings that you can leave me there on itch I have another nutrition video coming soon survivors so until then keep safe in the end times thanks for watching and now check out these next videos if you want more project zomboid

Channel: Trombonaut

Views: 34,937

Keywords: project zomboid, zomboid, zombie survival, survival game, project zomboid walkthrough, project zomboid guide, project zomboid tutorial, project zomboid 2023, project zomboid nutrition, project zomboid calories, project zomboid hunger, project zomboid weight, project zomboid starving, project zomboid cooking, project zomboid eggplant, project zobmoid, project zobmoid food, project zomboid food, zomboid food guide, best traits, underweight, overweight, skills, leveling, sprint

Id: bVdGPo73R_8

Length: 8min 55sec (535 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2023