In Project Zomboid, survival is the ultimate goal, and acquiring skills is crucial for increasing your chances of staying alive. As you progress through the game, you’ll have the opportunity to improve various skills, each offering unique advantages and abilities.
However, determining the best skill to level up is vital since it saves time and ensures an efficient process.
Recommended Read: How to Use the Rainwater Collector in Project Zomboid
This post will show you the best skills to level up in Project Zomboid.
In Project Zomboid, determining which skills to level up is subjective and depends on your preferences. Our picks for the best skills to level up include Fitness, Strength, Sprinting, Nimble, Axe, Long Blade, Spear, Maintenance, Carpentry, Cooking, Farming, First Aid, Mechanics, Aiming, Reloading, Fishing, and Foraging.
Table of Contents
Best Skills To Level Up in Project Zomboid
First and foremost, the best skills to level up in Project Zomboid are subjective and depend on your taste. Also, previous experience, playstyle, and advantages contribute to determining the most relevant skill to level up.
In Project Zomboid, there are 26 skills categorized into 6 sections.
To check the skill lists and skill levels, click on the heart icon on the left side of the screen, then select the Skills tab or press “L” to open it quickly.
Although you should level up all skills available in-game, it’s impossible because you’ll lose them all after death.
It’s also advisable to level up skills spontaneously during your journey and avoid paying too much attention to one skill.
In each skill section, we’ll recommend which ones are best to focus on and how to level them up quickly.
1. Passive Skills
The passive skill contains Fitness and Strength, which are worth leveling up. Both skills are involved in all your daily activities and can be leveled up effortlessly.
Fitness
Fitness significantly impacts how fast your endurance recovers. It also increases attack and exercise speed and reduces physical damage, such as falling.
The most efficient way to level up Fitness is to sprint as much as possible. Also, exercising and using weapons when not overexerted will help you gain more levels.
Strength
Strength is involved in all physical actions. It increases carry weight, the chance to open the locked door, and melee damage. It also affects how you hit the zombies (push knockback, push knockdown).
Strength is passively increased when you exercise, carry over 50% of your weight capacity, swing zombies with melee weapons, or run.
2. Agility Skills
Agility skills are sets of skills that support you, mostly in dealing with the undead. By leveling up these skills, you have a higher chance of survival when chased by the horde.
Sprinting
The higher level of sprinting allows a better speed. Thus, you will find it easier to stay away from the undead or to loot the houses.
As its name suggests, running or sprinting can level up sprinting skills. Sprinting also increases Fitness levels.
Nimble
Nimble is one of the best skills you should level up. It affects how fast you can move while crouched or prone, how quickly you can dodge zombies, and how you climb over fences or windows.
The fastest way to level up Nimble is to walk in a combat stance. You can hold right-click and press the left control to enable a combat stance.
3. Combat Skills
Combat skills increase attack speed, damage, critical chance, and the chance to push zombies away with the corresponding weapons they support (Axe skill for axes, spear skill for spears, etc.).
Axe
An axe is one of the best weapons in Project Zomboid, as it can kill zombies and cut down trees effectively. To master the Axe skill, you need to find and use your axe daily, although its density is a big obstacle.
Long Blade
Long blade weapons include Katana and Machete, the highest-damage weapons in Project Zomboid. This skill is only leveled up whenever you use a katana or machete, so find them first and try to use them as much as possible.
Spear
Leveling up spear skill is more manageable than leveling up the axe or long blade, as you need to equip and use spears, the most craftable weapon in the game.
Any variant of the spear, when used, can level up the spear’s skill. Additionally, closed umbrellas are also counted as spear weapons, but they have terrible damage.
Maintenance
All weapons have conditions that decrease depending on how frequently you use them. By leveling up maintenance, you can maintain your weapon conditions longer, which reduces the time spent fixing them.
To train maintenance, you should use any weapon that is hard to break (axe, crowbar, hammer, etc.). Note that maintenance doesn’t apply to guns or firearms.
4. Crafting Skills
All crafting skills allow you to interact with items in many ways: crafting, dismantling, growing things up, fixing, etc. As you progress in the game, developing crafting skills becomes an inevitable part of it.
Carpentry
Having a high level of carpentry skills allows you to board up and dismantle wooden pieces of furniture effectively. Moreover, you’ll build faster or make your products more durable.
Two of the best ways to gain a higher carpentry level are to dismantle and saw logs into planks as much as possible. Also, check out this post if you want to figure out methods.
Cooking
Cocking offers more nutrition and calorie dishes. The increased cooking level leads to fewer ingredients required, which helps reduce hunger and raise nutrition.
On top of that, gaining level 7 in cooking allows you to use rotten food (vegetables, meats…) to cook without any negative moodles.
The only way to level up cooking is to cook food in the heat source. To learn cooking, check out this post.
Farming
Farming is necessary to ensure the availability of vegetable sources. Farming skill, although it doesn’t boost the process or give more products, adds more information to your crops, such as grow phase names (level 2), disease names and water level (level 4), and current grow phase (level 5), etc.
You can gain XP for farming skills by harvesting your crop. To learn to farm, check out this post.
First Aid
If you suffer open wounds and bleed after combat with the undead, which is dangerous and can even lead to death, then leveling the first aid skill means a lot.
The higher level of first aid allows you to treat the wounds or bleeding areas faster, all first aid items (bandages and poultices) last longer, and you can also evaluate your injuries better.
To level up first aid skills, you must treat yourself or other players when you have health problems.
Mechanics
Mechanics skill is involved in a car, as increasing the mechanics skill offers a higher success rate in installing or uninstalling any car parts.
As you improve your mechanics skill, you’ll become more skilled at repairing engines using the parts you find. This means you can fix engines in other vehicles more effectively.
Find any cars, try installing, repairing, or removing their parts, and you’ll gain more XP.
5. Firearm Skills
Firearm includes aiming and reloading skills, which significantly affect your gun use. At level 0 or level 1, you may find it challenging to shoot the zombies. However, the higher level will simplify everything.
Aiming
The higher level of aiming skill increases the chance of hitting the target accurately, the opportunity to strike a critical hit, the maximum effective range, the firing angle, the aiming time, and the gun’s condition.
Not to mention that each value above varies and depends on gun types. Also, you need to shoot the zombie successfully to get the XP.
Reloading
The reloading skill affects the speed at which you perform tasks like removing and inserting magazines, loading and unloading bullets into magazines, and loading weapons with a cylinder.
You can improve your reloading skill by inserting bullets into a magazine, reloading firearms with new magazines, or inserting bullets directly into a gun.
Moreover, you can practice this skill by unloading and reloading magazines with bullets and reloading a weapon whenever you’re free.
6. Survivalist Skills
The survivalist skill is vital in the early game, providing essential resources through fishing, trapping, and foraging. Skills in this tab allow you to gather food, supplies, and other valuable items without relying solely on looting or scavenging.
Fishing
The higher level of fishing skill impacts how quickly you can catch a fish, the likelihood of the fishing line breaking, the chance of the fish escaping, the risk of losing bait or tackle, and even the size of the fish that can be caught.
To level up your fishing skill, you must go fishing, and this post will guide you on how to fish effectively.
Foraging
The foraging skill decides what items you can find while searching and the radius of your search, allowing you to cover a larger area.
Additionally, as your foraging skill improves, you’ll unlock more item categories to focus on during your search.
It’s important to note that your foraging skill also affects the chance of poisonous berries or mushrooms.
The higher your foraging level, the lower the risk of consuming poisonous plants. So, by leveling up your foraging skill, you increase your chances of finding valuable items and reduce the risk of eating something harmful.
To level up your foraging skill, you need to enable search mode, walk around, and pick up items.
Those are the best skills to level up in Project Zomboid!
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