Quick Answer
Week one runs on three deadlines. TV skill shows air at 06:00, 12:00 and 18:00 for nine days, then never again — plan each day around the next slot, and fill every pot and bathtub while the taps work: the water shutoff lands on any day inside two months, unannounced. From day 5 listen to the 07:00 AEBS radio — 'Air Activity Detected' means the helicopter comes today (days 6-9): stay inside, sheets up, lights off. Fight with push-then-stomp, never let a zombie behind you; a bite is always fatal, lacerations 25%, scratches 7%.
Table of Contents
First week priorities
Four windows, in order. Each row is the short version: the goal, the concrete way to reach it, and the signal that it's time to change the plan.
| Window | The goal | How you get there | Change the plan when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 1 (9 AM start) | Secure the start building, find a TV before noon, fill every container with tap water | Clear every room first, bathroom included — zombies spawn inside closets. Sheet the windows, loot the two or three houses nearest your start for a bag, a blunt weapon, and a can opener, then fill every pot and bottle from the tap. | You still don't have a weapon after the 12:00 Carpentry show |
| Days 2-5 | Watch all three TV slots, run one loot loop near base, read the Volume I book for your main skill | Be home at 06:00, 12:00, and 18:00 for the Life and Living slots; keep loot loops within two streets of base; read Volume I before practising the skill — the book multiplies TV XP too. | You're skipping shows to loot one more street |
| Days 6-9 | Survive the helicopter window: radio check at 7 AM, then hide inside or drive out for the day | Battery radio on at 07:00 every morning from day 5 — 'Air Activity Detected' at the end of the AEBS broadcast means it's today. Then either lock down (sheets up, lights off, a day's food and water inside) or drive into the wilderness and keep moving. | You're looting far from home without a vehicle |
| End of week one | Water buffer, a fallback building, weapon #2, and a repeatable route home | One loot category per trip so you never cross 100% carry capacity; mark a fallback building two doors down and sleep upstairs at base; keep a backup weapon above half condition. | The base depends on one blocked approach |
Day one, hour by hour
The default Apocalypse game starts at 9 AM on the 9th of the month, and that start time quietly sets your whole first day. You have three hours before the noon Life and Living Carpentry show, which is the first TV slot a new character can realistically catch. So the opening hour is not a loot sweep — it's this: clear the building you start in, close the curtains, and figure out which neighbor has a TV.
Between shows, work the houses immediately around your start point. The day-one kit is boring on purpose: a big bag, a water bottle, a blunt weapon, a can opener, and any food that doesn't need a fridge. Skip the gun store, skip the pharmacy, skip anything that needs a car ride. Every extra street you walk on day one is a street you have to walk back through, tired, in the dark.
In the evening, pick your shelter before 18:00 so you can watch the third TV slot from home. A two-story house on the edge of town beats a storefront in the middle: you want sheets on the windows, a door you can barricade, and stairs — zombies climb them badly, and you can hear anything coming up. Fill every pot and bottle from the tap before you sleep, because the water shutoff gives no warning and can land on any day inside the first two months.
One quiet rule for the day: if the way home starts filling up, break off. A dead character doesn't get a second day.
How to actually win your first fights
Most week-one deaths aren't hordes — they're one zombie, fought badly, with no endurance left. The melee loop is learnable in an afternoon and it is the single highest-value skill of your first seven days.
The core loop against a single zombie: let it walk to you, shove it down with the push attack (default keybind Space while targeting it), then either finish it with a stomp while it's on the ground or back off and repeat. A downed zombie being stomped can't grab you; a standing zombie being swung at sometimes can. Push-stomp is slower than swinging, but it costs less endurance and almost no weapon condition, and against one or two zombies 'slower' is exactly what you want.
Two rules decide every fight before it starts. First, never let a zombie stand behind you: attacks from the rear have a significantly higher chance of severe injury, and a zombie behind you is one you've stopped tracking. Fight in doorways and hallways where they can only come from one side. Second, count before you commit: one zombie is free, two is fine, three is a maybe, four or more is a jog away and a fence between you. Fight at the edge of your stamina, not the edge of your health.
Weapon condition is the silent killer. Every swing wears the weapon; a bat at 10% condition breaks mid-fight and leaves you swinging fists. Check the condition bar whenever you loot a weapon, carry a backup (a crowbar lasts nearly forever, a spare plank costs nothing), and stop swinging at crawlers — non-fatal hits don't knock them back, and their lunge has a much higher bite chance than a walker's grab. Back away from a crawler and finish it from behind only when it's the only zombie left.
What a hit means, in plain numbers: a bite is 100% fatal Knox infection by default — there is no cure, that character is done. A laceration carries 25% infection odds, a scratch 7%. Quarantine the character, mark the day, and if the Queasy moodle shows up and worsens over days, it was the bite. Bandage everything: a bleeding wound left open kills slower than the infection, but it still kills.
- Push (Space) → stomp the downed zombie: cheapest loop in the game, works all week one
- Doorways and fences funnel zombies into single file — fight them there, never in open rooms
- Fences and windows: zombies stumble vaulting through, giving you free hits or a clean exit
- A zombie eating a corpse or sitting against a wall is a free kill or a free pass — don't wake it by accident
- Crowbar: slow, heavy on endurance, but the most durable common weapon. Baseball bat: the week-one standard. Avoid the sledgehammer until you have the strength to swing it
The three moodles that kill new players
Panic, Endurance, and Heavy load stack multiplicatively against you, and all three are invisible until you learn to read them. The numbers below are the wiki-recorded penalties per level — internalize the thresholds, because the game only shows you a moodle icon after the penalty is already applied.
| Moodle / trigger | What it costs you | The habit that prevents it |
|---|---|---|
| Panic — each visible zombie adds ~3%, keeps climbing while seen | Melee crit chance -1.3 to -5.2 points, melee damage -0.2 to -0.4 per swing, vision cone narrows at Terrified; decays ~1.75%/s on day 1, faster as you survive (caps at 150 days) | Zoom in before fighting to 'see' fewer zombies; keep beta blockers from any medicine cabinet; accept panic early — it fades with survival days |
| Endurance — 25% used (Out of Breath) | Melee damage -50%, speed -19%, blocking -2% | Walk between fights; one shove-stomp loop instead of five swings |
| Endurance — 50% used (High Exertion) | Melee damage -80%, sprint disabled, speed -37% | This is the tripwire: at half bar, stop fighting and disengage |
| Endurance — 75%/90% used | Damage -90%/-95%, then running disabled and walking 75% slower — being chased here is how characters die | Never open a door or round a corner below half endurance |
| Heavy load — over 100% carry capacity | Speed -19%, attack speed -7%, endurance recovery reduced | Loot one category per trip: food run, tool run, not 'everything run' |
| Heavy load — over 150% capacity | Running disabled, endurance recovery stops entirely, continuous damage down to 75% health (sitting halts it) | Drop the loot. Nothing in a bag is worth dying in a street for |
Noise and senses: why they found you
Zombies pick their target by sight first and sound second. Break line of sight — a wall, a hedge, a corner — and they lose interest in seconds unless you keep making noise. But hearing is the long-range sense: car engines, radios, alarms, and gunfire pull zombies from far beyond what you can see, and they walk straight at the noise, through whatever is in the way, including you. The quiet week-one rule is therefore simple: sprint less, close doors behind you, and never test a car horn in town.
The map is also playing its own game. Hordes wander with a leader zombie, and at irregular intervals metagame events — a distant dog bark, gunshots from an unseen survivor, the helicopter — redistribute them across the map. That's why a street you cleared yesterday can be busy this morning, and why the default urban population keeps growing for the first 30 days. 'Cleared' is a snapshot, not a promise.
Two ambush patterns account for most jump-scares. Zombies spawn inside enclosed spaces — bathrooms, closets — so clear every room before you call a building safe. And crawlers play dead: a body on the ground that you didn't kill is not a body. Approach corpses from behind, or better, past them, and never step over one to fight something else.
- Sight > hearing: break line of sight first, then go quiet for ten seconds — most single pursuers lose you
- Running indoors is louder than you think: doors, bumps, and knocking furniture all carry
- Pop density peaks at 30 days by default — the town you loot on day 2 is denser on day 20
- Any unmoving body on the floor may be a playing-dead crawler; treat ground-level zombies as live until proven otherwise
- Cars are noise magnets: an engine idling outside a house fills that house's street while you loot it
The TV schedule that runs itself dry
Life and Living (channel 203) airs skill shows for nine days in fixed 06:00 / 12:00 / 18:00 slots, then stops forever. Full viewing is worth about 762.5 Cooking and 650 Carpentry XP — but TV XP stops counting once a skill passes level 3, so a late start loses less than you'd think. Recipes (Fishing Rod, Pie Dough, Cake Batter) are still learned even past the cap. Base XP per slot shown; skill books multiply it.
| Day | 06:00 | 12:00 | 18:00 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cooking — 112.5 XP (needs a TV within 3 hours) | Carpentry — 75 XP | Fishing — 62.5 XP |
| 2 | Cooking — 75 XP | Carpentry — 75 XP | Agriculture — 75 XP (the only Agriculture episode) |
| 3 | Cooking — 62.5 XP | Carpentry — 100 XP | Fishing — 75 XP + Fishing Rod recipe |
| 4 | Cooking — 87.5 XP | Carpentry — 75 XP | — |
| 5 | Cooking — 75 XP | Carpentry — 100 XP | Foraging — 50 XP |
| 6 | Cooking — 62.5 XP + Pie Dough recipe | Carpentry — 75 XP | Trapping — 100 XP (the only Trapping episode) |
| 7 | Cooking — 87.5 XP + Cake Batter recipe | Carpentry — 112.5 XP | Foraging — 100 XP |
| 8 | Cooking — 125 XP | no noon show | Carpentry — 37.5 XP |
| 9 | Cooking — 75 XP (last show ever) | — | — |
The helicopter is coming (days 6-9)
This is the event new players don't see coming, and it kills more week-one characters than any horde.
Somewhere between day 6 and day 9, a helicopter crosses the map toward you, between 9 AM and 6 PM. You won't see it — there's no model — but the zombies hear it. Its noise radius is 500, roughly six times the pull of a shotgun blast, and it drags every zombie in your region toward wherever it lingers. If it spots you, it hovers for about a minute; either way it can come back hours later.
Your warning system is the Automated Emergency Broadcast System. From day 5 onward, make the 07:00 broadcast part of your morning and stay tuned a few extra seconds after the weather report: on the day of the event the bulletin ends with the text 'Air Activity Detected', and that line is easy to miss if you switch the radio off early. It repeats through the day, but the 07:00 run is the one that gives you time to plan.
- Hide (safest for new players): sheets on every window, lights off, a day's food and water inside, and something to fight boredom — skill books or VHS tapes. Stay away from windows; a basement is even better.
- Run (needs a vehicle): load a day's supplies, drive into the wilderness, and keep moving. The helicopter will probably spot you, but the zombies it drags end up in the middle of nowhere instead of around your base.
- Aftermath either way: treat every previously-cleared street as re-infested. The migration the helicopter causes keeps paying out for days.
- The noise math: helicopter 500 vs shotgun 200 — if you wouldn't fire a shotgun outside your base, don't be seen by the helicopter either.
Water and power: the clock nobody shows you
In the default Apocalypse sandbox both shutoffs roll somewhere inside 0-2 months, and no broadcast warns you about either. Work the table top to bottom — it's the order the utilities actually die in.
| Step | Do exactly this | Why / the numbers |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1, before looting | Fill every container from the tap: bottles, pots, buckets, cooking pots — and the bathtub itself. Store the filled containers at your shelter, not in the looted house. | The shutoff can land any day from day 1. Clean stored water never needs boiling; this is the cheapest security in the game. |
| While taps still work | Sweep the kitchens and bathrooms around your shelter for more containers. After the shutoff, a sink or toilet still holds about 20 units, a bathtub 100, a water dispenser 250 — but all of it is tainted. | Fixture water is a reserve you must boil before drinking; bottled clean water is what you drink on the move. |
| When the power dies | Eat the fresh food first, move the rest to freezers, and keep boiling water on the stove while it still runs. After that, boiling needs a campfire, a BBQ, or an antique stove. | The power shutoff is its own 0-2 month roll. A generator needs fuel and Electrical skill — that's a week-two project, not a day-one plan. |
| Week 2 project: rain | Build a rain collector barrel (Carpentry 5, holds 600 units) under open sky. Rainwater it catches is tainted, but it's fine for watering crops and washing; plumb the barrel to a sink and that sink's water is safe to drink without boiling. | Barrels only fill while it rains — build two, not one, before you rely on them. |
| The permanent fix | Scout the nearest well (farm properties usually have one) and the nearest lake or river, and note the walk from your shelter. | Wells and open water never shut off — but both are tainted, so boiling stays mandatory for drinking. |
Read the right book before you grind
Skill books multiply every point of XP a skill earns while it's inside the book's level range — TV show XP included. Week one is mostly TV XP, so the reading order is decided for you: the first books you want are Carpentry Vol. I and Cooking Vol. I, the two skills with a show every single day.
Timing the reading is the part new players miss. A Volume I book takes about 7 hours 20 minutes of in-game reading, so you cannot finish one before the day-one noon show — and that's fine. Start reading at 9 AM when the game opens, finish around 16:20, and the 18:00 show already counts at full multiplier. The bonus also builds as you read: a half-finished Vol. I pays about x2 of its eventual x3, so even a partial read before a slot beats no read.
When a skill crosses into the next level band, the volume you're holding stops applying — that's the moment to switch books, not to keep grinding. TV can carry a skill to level 3 (the TV cap), so the practical week-one pairing is Vol. I (levels 1-2) first, then Vol. II (levels 3-4, x5) once the skill reaches level 3. Don't waste Vol. II hours on a skill still at level 1.
Books are everywhere and free to take: house bookshelves, schools, libraries, mailboxes. Grab every book you pass in week one and sort them at base — a bag of future multipliers beats leaving them to rot in an empty town. The Fast Reader trait speeds up every session if you know reading is your style.
- Vol. I covers levels 1-2 at x3 — 220 pages, ~7h 20m. The default week-one buy
- Vol. II covers levels 3-4 at x5 — 260 pages, ~8h 40m. Switch the moment the skill reaches level 3
- Vol. III covers levels 5-6 at x8, Vol. IV levels 7-8 at x12, Vol. V levels 9-10 at x16 — week-two problems, don't hoard them in the week-one bag
- Read between TV slots, never through one: 7+ hours of reading still fits twice around three shows
- A half-read book already pays a partial multiplier — start reading now, finish later
Watch your weight before it locks your fitness
Check the number on the Info panel (J key) every two or three days — the default start is 80. Weight moves on a calorie pool that fills when you eat more than you burn (it caps at 3,700 and bottoms out at -2,200): your weight rises while the pool sits above roughly 1,000 + 40 per point over 80, and falls once it drops below (weight - 70) × 30. Any band outside 75.1-84.9 counts as 'weight trouble' and stops fitness XP past level 6; the extreme bands stop it entirely. One freebie while you're in there: a protein level between 50 and 300 multiplies strength XP by 1.5.
| Band | Range | What it costs you | How to move out of it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Very Low Weight | 50.1-65 | Very low strength and endurance, prone to injury, no fitness XP at all | Eat calorie-dense food every day — butter, lard, peanut butter, ice cream. Walk instead of sprinting and sleep often: sleeping burns the fewest calories of anything you do |
| Low Weight | 65.1-75 | Reduced strength and endurance, fitness XP capped at level 6 | Stop skipping meals: eat the canned mains and any meat you loot, not just vegetables, until the scale passes 75 |
| Normal | 75.1-84.9 | No penalty — this is where you want to live | Maintain it: eat the fresh perishables first (they rot anyway) and bank the canned staples for after the power dies |
| High Weight | 85-99.9 | Slower running, tire faster, fitness XP capped at level 6 | Diet on low-calorie vegetables — radishes, tomatoes, broccoli, carrots, onions, berries — and burn the pool down: sprint, climb fences, chop trees |
| Very High Weight | 100+ | All of the above plus zero fitness XP until you drop below 100 | Same vegetable diet, held for days — the pool takes time to drain, so weigh yourself (J) every couple of days instead of guessing |
Stop conditions
A loot trip ends on a signal, not on a full bag. Every row below is a 'go home now' — and every one of them is cheaper than the death it prevents.
| The signal | Do this now |
|---|---|
| Endurance below half (High Exertion moodle) | Stop fighting and break contact behind a fence or a corner. At 50% endurance your melee damage is already down 80% and sprinting is disabled — you cannot win the next fight |
| Carry weight past 100% capacity | Drop the duplicates on the spot. Past 100% you're 19% slower and lose endurance recovery; past 125% you can't sprint. Nothing in the bag is worth being caught walking |
| You're bleeding or a wound is unbandaged | Bandage it and end the trip. An injured character fights at a fraction, and one more hit can turn a scratch into a bite |
| It's past 17:00 and you're more than two streets from home | Go home while it's daylight. A fight in the dark is a fight where you don't see the second zombie join |
| A TV slot starts within 30 minutes and you're not home | Turn around. XP that airs once beats loot you can grab tomorrow — check the schedule table above |
| 'Air Activity Detected' played on the 07:00 radio | Cancel everything outside: today is a hide day or a drive day, not a loot day |
| You were bitten | That character is done — bites are 100% fatal Knox infection by default. Lacerations carry 25% and scratches 7%: quarantine the character, mark the day, and watch for the Queasy moodle |
FAQ
What should I actually do on day one in Project Zomboid?
Clear and curtain the building you start in, find a TV before the noon Life and Living Carpentry show (the default start is 9 AM, so you have three hours), loot the nearest houses for a bag, water bottle, weapon, and can opener, then claim a two-story house on the edge of town and fill every container with tap water. Skip the gun store and the pharmacy — they're day-three problems.
Does it matter if I miss the Life and Living TV shows?
Somewhat, less than you'd think. Each episode airs once and the schedule dies after day 9, but TV XP stops counting once a skill passes level 3 — so if you're already level 2 Carpentry from disassembling furniture, you only soak up part of the shows anyway. The recipes (Fishing Rod on day 3, Pie Dough on day 6, Cake Batter on day 7) are still learned even past the XP cap, so those three evenings matter most.
When does the helicopter event happen?
Between day 6 and day 9, from 9 AM to 6 PM, in the default game modes. Listen to a battery radio at 7 AM from day 5 onward: when the AEBS broadcast ends with 'Air Activity Detected', that's the day. Hide inside with sheets up and lights off, or drive into the wilderness and keep moving — the helicopter's noise radius (500) pulls zombies from about six times the area of a shotgun blast.
When do the water and power shut off?
In the default Apocalypse sandbox both are set to 0-2 months — any day inside that window, with no warning broadcast. Fill every container on day one. After the shutoff, sinks and toilets still hold about 20 units each and bathtubs 100, but that water is tainted and must be boiled before drinking.
How many zombies can I fight at once?
One or two comfortably, three if you have full endurance and a doorway to funnel them through, four or more almost never — jog away and put a fence between you. The real limit is your endurance bar, not the zombie count: at half endurance your melee damage is down 80% and sprinting is disabled, so disengage at the half bar, not when things look bad.
What's the best weapon for the first week?
A baseball bat at good condition is the week-one standard: solid damage, decent reach, reasonable durability. A crowbar swings slower and tires you faster but barely wears out, which makes it the best backup. Avoid the sledgehammer entirely until your strength is up, and never trust a weapon below half condition without a spare in the bag.
I got scratched — am I going to die?
Not necessarily. A bite is 100% fatal Knox infection by default — that character is done. A laceration carries a 25% infection chance and a scratch only 7%. Bandage the wound, watch for the Queasy moodle over the following days, and don't burn the character's gear just yet.