Project Zomboid Base Defense Guide

in Project zomboid the best and probably even easiest way to keep your base safe from zombies is just to kill all the zombies in the nearby area many players will have noted the irony that by time they finish that big beautiful wall around their base there just aren't any more zombies around a full clear the area isn't always going to be practical however and even if it is your goal you're still probably going to need to sleep in infested areas of the map from time to time this guide will cover some basic Advanced and even cheesy options for fortifying a base for the purpose of this guide when I'm talking about a bass I'm just referring to any building where you can sleep in store gear it could be a storage container or a sprawling Mansion though in most cases your early contemporary bases will be Second Story residences I would divide base defense into three distinct categories we have defenses that will alert you to zombies and hopefully hold them in place long enough for you to get out there and deal with them yourself defenses that will assist you in killing zombies and then there are defenses that will completely prevent zombies from reaching you let's begin with things that will prevent zombies from reaching you which is where most of the cheese results here we have to talk about indestructible barricades indestructible for the purpose of this guide means impervious to being broken to the point of being Parable by zombies for example walls and Tall fences that already exist in the world are indestructible one player made indestructible barrier is the low fence followed up by a path blocking object zombies cannot directly attack the low fence but they can't Vault over it either if there's a path blocking object behind it zombie crawlers can destroy a low fence however allowing The Horde to penetrate the Gap in your defenses a second option for player made indestructible barrier is the composter or rather a virgin composter that is a composter that the player has built but has never moved from its initial location for some reason if you pick up a composter and move it then it becomes vulnerable to zombies a virgin composter is entirely impervious to solve the attack the downside of this barrier is you cannot build it beneath the roof you cannot Vault over it and obviously you cannot move it once you've built it I will take time to note that there is also the option in the sandbox settings to make zombies unable to damage any player constructions it's a pretty solid argument that if you're going to use some of these cheesy barricades then you may as well just alter this sandbox setting if you want a zombroid experience where decaying zombies don't just slap away at your wooden and metal walls till they quickly break this might be the option for you while car bodies can't be completely destroyed by zombies they are not strictly path blocking as zombies can crawl under them even if you try parking the car flush up against the player constructed wall zombies can actually rip the wall to shreds while laying under the car the last method of keeping zombies away from your base is to take advantage of the fact that they cannot climb sheetrobe usually this manifests as a flying fortress that is a base with no staircase leading off the ground floor zombies are unable to overcome this defense Anna has the advantage of being something that ought to be perfectly reasonable under the circumstances of a zombie apocalypse the most common way for people to achieve this is to destroy the stairs of a building with a sledgehammer but most of the time it's going to be much more efficient to Simply destroy some of the floor tiles at the top of the stairs this can be done with much more readily available tools and is more easily reversed for people living in a flying fortress beware that zombies can destroy your sheet rope potentially leaving you stranded outside the people who smashed at the stairs this can be a real pain and even unassailable if you can't yet build stairs the people who instead just remove some floor boring it's only a minor pain let's move on to the more basic defenses you're likely to start with which more or less just hope to hold a zombie in place long enough for you to get out there and do something about it yourself doors windows and Furniture can all be destroyed as can player constructive walls for this reason I would avoid replacing any of the existing ground floor walls of a base with player constructed walls or at least not doing so without plenty of consideration above the ground floor this is far less of a concern so you're free to knock walls out and rebuild them as necessary the classic two-story residence is going to consist of a perimeter of indestructible walls dotted with breakable doors and fragile Windows your first effort at some sort of fortification is likely going to involve doing something about these weak points let's talk about Windows first thing you can do is close the curtains so the zombies can't see in though this also means you can't see out this is something you might do in the opening minute of a game but it's not really even a short-term strategy if you need more curtains you can hang sheets you finding containers or pinch curtains from other windows the first real upgrade to your defense we're going to talk about is moving furniture you can block doors hallways and windows with Furniture but it's more complicated than it seems and if you do it wrong you could put yourself in a lot of Danger first note that some objects will require various tools to pick up and some will have a percentage break chance each and every time you move them based off your carpentry skill obviously you want to move these objects around as little as possible some objects when picked up instead fall to the floor in two to four pieces to reassemble these objects in a new location you need the full set of pieces on the floor or in your main inventory with at least one of the pieces in your main inventory when placing an object you can hold the left Mouse button and drag to control the facing of the item it takes a while to pick up and put down furniture and it can be noisy so watch out for that even with these caveats you can build up a poor man's barricade fairly easily given that the walls of a house are already indestructible it's the doorways and windows you've got to block up and here's your big problem path blocking items placed adjacent Windows become pathable both for you and zombies so while this looks like an impromptu barricade it is completely useless and would have been a great way to get yourself killed some rare pieces of furniture can block windows without wickling passable such as the tall bookshelf with sides but most houses are going to have more windows than bookshelves and they have a high brake chance to move so really the math just isn't there with Furniture largely unable to protect those vulnerable windows in a house this is why you probably want to make use of a two-story house we only need to protect the staircase a single path blocking chair placed at the bottom of the stairs is enough to stop a curious zombie just wandering upstairs with no brake percentage chance as you move it you can just pick up and put down the chair as you come and go through your chair lock note you can't place furniture on the Square at the very top of a staircase meaning the arrangement of the nearby walls can make it easy or difficult to barricade moving on from furniture let's talk about boarding up doors and windows you can put up to four Planks on a single window and you can even barricade both sides for Extra Protection I don't think the specifics of how strong things are really matters as once again the point is just to hold something at Bay until you get out there and deal with it when barricading Windows any more than two boards on one side of the window will cause line of sight to be blocked even just three boards are enough to stop a zombie peeking through the window but on the other hand you could put two boards on the inside and two on the outside and you've got some protection while also being able to keep tabs on what's going on out there each side of window can support a single metal sheet which always blocks line of sight finally there is the oft forgotten option of welding metal bars over a window this requires more resources and less readily available resources than your other barricading options in exchange you get a strong barricade that doesn't block line of sight though you still can't shoot through it of course if you do want to block line of sight you can just install a curtain as well for maximum flexibility you you can also board up doors in a similar fashion personally I'm pretty paranoid so when sleeping away from my main base I don't mind throwing up at least a single board over the bedroom door before I go to bed last but not least we have the various flavors of player constructed War some people get lost in the weeds as to which type of walls strongest and whether or not you can make a wall Stronger by upgrading it versus building it at its maximum tier but as far as I'm concerned this is all wildly unimportant if a wall isn't indestructible then it is by definition destructible that means the wall is just there to slow things down until you get outside and shoot smash or stab the zombie beating on it the wall is at best a distraction for the zombie it isn't supposed to last two days or even 10 hours with this view that the health of the wall is largely irrelevant and not taking Aesthetics into account this leaves convenience as the most important factor for wall building metal is much harder to collect in large quantities which essentially rules out metal fences right away the amount of wood required to build a log wall would be enough to build three sections of wooden wall which is kind of a big deal the only time I would recommend building log walls is if you don't even have the humble level 2 carpentry required to build a wooden wall or more likely if you lack a sufficient quantity of nails to do so rather than Nails log walls require rip sheets which are plentiful provided you have any zombies in the area the one exception I would make over just sticking to wooden walls is the big wire fence and big pole fence for a metal look these are path blocking though still destructible but you can also see through them and more importantly shoot through them this can be a significant addition to your base defense unfortunately the negatives are quite extensive the big wire fence requires you to have level 5 metal working which is a skill I imagine most people do not bother with you also need to read a skill magazine it also uses a prohibitively high amount of resources for just one single section of fence as such even if you can build one of these fences Walling off an entire perimeter with them is going to be more of a flex than anything practical I would instead recommend using just one or two sections of this fencing in areas where you can then shoot zombies that are so melting your walls or sneakily lingering outside a gate this is actually moving into our third category of Base defenses things that will actually assist you with killing zombies as opposed to just holding them in place until you deal with them of all the three rough categories I'm outlining I feel this is probably the most interesting creative and overlooked these suggestions are there to make it easier or even just possible to kill more zombies than you can usually manage in the course of normal play a skilled player can kill an extreme number of zombies at once provided you have enough space to dance them around if you don't have that space which is often the case inside buildings then suddenly one or two dozen zombies can be a death sentence additionally if you're playing with sprinters then you can't just get them to form a neat Congo line as you back pedal and smite them one at a time defenses like these are your only chance of standing toe-to-toe with more than two or three sprinters starting with the most readily available defense this is probably the window and the low fence readily available because even before you're already built your own base there are usually plenty of these around Zombies 4 tone off the climbing Trail window or hauling their meat over a low fence and they become extremely vulnerable to melee and gun attacks this doesn't just let you kill them faster it's more than that if you kill a zombie in one swing of a baseball bat as opposed to five you've saved all that stamina all that weapon durability and the minutes of light and wakefulness that you can use to kill even more zombies versus sprinters this is even more critical and I'd consider going hand to hand with three to four sprinters on open ground to be a death sentence whereas you can leave Roy into a dozen or more of them so long as you've got a good low fence to drag them over rather than just use whatever fence you find you can quite easily build more of your own a series of low fences forces zombies to pour over the first line stand up and then hurl themselves over the second line and so forth this drastically slows our Advance probably by more than 10 or 20 times when dealing with sprinters you can fight at each line of fences with drawing as the pressure builds or you can just use guns and blow zombies away as they stagger stagger crawl their way towards you Windows my might actually work better here though they do require more resources to build one advantage of Windows is that if enough zombies go over a low fence it will eventually break but this is not the case of Windows the downside would be that windows are a little more Awkward to move through in a hurry for the player one subtle comment I'll make about fences is that fences that you can see through as in literally see the zombies after they've fallen down are better than opaque fences this also means low fence fighting is somewhat directional where it's easy to fight zombies on the side of the fence where they are more visible while you could build mesh fences as discussed earlier there are just too many downsides to this cars are another great way to get zombies to lay down so you can lay the smack down if you block up a choke point with cars zombies will crawl under the cars to reach the other side leaving them vulnerable much like low fence fighting it's going to be easy to kill the Zombies on the side of the car where they aren't most visible but this is more likely to be dictated by the design of the area you're set up in and where the gaps in its pre-existing indestructible fence lay going back to Furniture barricades rather than just using a pile of furniture as a barricade to alert you to a zombie attack a more clever constructed barricade can be used as a fighting platform a table or two blocking the hallway can turn a gunfight versus a dozen ravenous printers from a butt clenching bad time into a turkey shoot even versus Shameless a pile of furniture can slow them down long enough for you to kill literally hundreds with a shotgun these barriers have a place in Malay combat as well weapon length matters here but if you build a barricade in a staggered fashion taking advantage of the fact that zombies can't move through corners then you can get into reach of attacking zombies while staying out of their range the barrier will be eventually destroyed but it might just give you the edge you need before it goes down I'm Carl Middleton and I hope you found some of this advice helpful I've tried my best not to tell you how you have to play the game and I'm really just trying to give you advice on how you might want to play the game but it's your game have fun foreign

Channel: Kyle Middleton

Views: 252,470

Keywords: Zombies, Project Zomboid, Zomboid, Day 1, Advice, Help, Tips, Tricks, Beginner, Guide, Defense, Defence, Base

Id: myMrXwfyEdM

Length: 13min 49sec (829 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 17 2023