In Project Zomboid, ensuring the safety of your base is important.
As you spend most of your time fortifying your stronghold and gathering resources to survive, what happens if you see the undead wandering in your base?
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In other words, can zombies spawn inside your base?
In Project Zomboid, zombies can’t spawn inside your base by default. However, if you leave the door or windows open or have a gap between fences or walls, they can get inside and harm you.
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Can Zombies Spawn Inside Your Base in Project Zomboid?
The presence of zombies inside your base raises several concerns. They may suddenly attack you when you’re healing, sleeping, or recovering.
By default, if you have high walls, closed doors, and closed windows enclosing an area, zombies won’t spawn inside your base.
But what’s a base in Project Zomboid?
For now, there’s no actual definition of a base in Project Zomboid. That said, your base can be either the whole world, a 10 by 10 area, or a house.
Once spawned, zombies will then wander to the next available spot, searching for a path to move around. So, make sure to create a barrier of obstacles to prevent zombies from spawning inside your desired areas.
Understand the Spawning Mechanic
Before understanding the zombie spawning mechanic, let’s learn some basic terms first!
First, enable debug mode and open the debug menu (mosquito icon in the top-left corner). Then click on the Dev tab and choose the Zombie Population item.
- Cell (300×300 tiles): is the larger square with white numbers in the top-left corner, indicating the actual zombies, desired zombie count, and the respawn timer in that cell.
- Chunk (175×175 tiles): the smaller, brighter white square that moves with you across the map. It could represent your potential maximum vision cone. Chunks are smaller map pieces.
- Tile: the smallest square unit in the world. You can see a tile by selecting various actions, such as the Walk To or Extinguishing a Fire action.
When zombies spawn, they appear outside of the areas you are currently in (outside of the chunk) and start moving around.
The zombie spawning process chooses chunks inside the cells where you aren’t currently in. This process starts at the edge of the map, then slowly moves toward the chosen chunk.
The spawning mechanics will check if zombies can spawn in a selected chunk (note that at this time, the spawning mechanics are trying to evaluate the possible path, zombies haven’t spawned yet).
If the area is inaccessible, the spawning mechanic tries another place or goes from different edges of the map until it finds an open chunk to spawn zombies.
Although the game offers spawning settings (Advanced Zombie Options) in Custom Sandbox, you can prevent the undead from spawning by building a completely high wall area and ensuring there’s no single gap.
This method results in creating a specific area in the world where there are no zombies at all unless they hear the sound or one part of the wall/fence is broken.
That’s all you need to know about whether or not zombies can spawn inside your base!
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