In Project Zomboid, clothing can define your style and appearance and bring additional protection to your body. Thanks to tailoring skills, you can customize your clothes depending on your tastes. However, not all players know how to level up tailoring skill effectively.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to level up tailoring skill in Project Zomboid.
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In Project Zomboid, you have 3 options to level up your tailoring skill: ripping clothes, adding padding, and repairing holes in clothes. Ripping clothes is the easiest option since it doesn’t require many tools and skills, while adding padding and repairing holes requires a needle, scissors, thread, and one of the ripped sheets, ripped denim, or leather strips.
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How to Level Up Tailoring in Project Zomboid
Tailoring skill refers to using tools and materials to overhaul your clothing and make it more protective against damage from the undead.
Unfortunately, unlike carpentry or metalworking, you can’t gain tailoring skills by choosing any occupation in the early game. So, there are only 2 ways to level up your tailoring skill:
- Rip clothes (only when you obtain a thread after that).
- Add padding or patch holes.
However, you need tools and materials to do this. So let’s see what we need first!
Prerequisite Items for Leveling Up Tailoring in Project Zomboid
Here are tools, materials, and valuable items you should gather to tailor:
- Needle: if carpentry skill requires a hammer, metalworking needs a welder mask and a propane torch, then the needle is a must for tailoring skills. You can find the needle in medicine cabinets and sewing kits on counters.
- Thread: Thread is drainable material acquired by ripping clothes or finding them in sheds and stores.
- Scissors: Clothes with denim or feathers require scissors to tear off. You’ll receive denim strips and leather strips after that. Scissors typically spawn in lockers, desks, or drawers.
- Ripped Sheets, Denim, and Leather Strips: Used to fortify your clothes. The best way to obtain ripped sheets is to rip clothing. The rest can be acquired by ripping denim or leather clothes.
Moreover, reading tailoring skill books to multiply the XP gained is advisable. All books can be found in post offices and randomly in mailboxes, bookshelves, etc.
1. Rip Clothes
Ripping clothes is simpler than adding padding or patching holes, as you need nothing to tear them off (except for denim and leather clothes, for which you need the scissors in your inventory or the ripping option is unavailable).
To tear the clothes off, right-click on them in your inventory and select “Rip Clothing” => “One” or “All”. You’ll obtain several ripped sheets, denim strips (if ripped clothes are denim), leather strips (if ripped clothes are leather), and thread.
Although you’ll get ripped sheets, denim strips, and leather strips every time you rip your clothes, there’s no guarantee that you’ll receive thread afterward. And without thread as a reward, you can’t gain tailoring XP by ripping clothes.
In other words, you must obtain spread after tearing off clothes to earn tailoring XP.
The chance of receiving a spread will increase when you level up your tailoring skill. At level 5, you’ll almost get thread each time you rip your clothes.
Each ripped piece of clothing (with spread) provides 0.25 XP, regardless of your current tailoring level. At the lower levels of tailoring skill (levels 1-4), we strongly recommend reading tailoring skill books and ripping as many clothes as possible.
Ripping clothing at levels 1-2 with tailoring skill book vol. 1 offers you 0.75 XP (instead of 0.25), while at levels 3-4, the number of XP received after reading tailoring skill book vol. 2 is 1.25. Those numbers mean a lot to reach level 5.
2. Add Padding or Repair Holes
As mentioned, you should rip as many clothes as possible to acquire materials (thread, ripped sheets, denim, and leather strips), as you need them to fortify your clothes. Additionally, make sure you’ve got a needle in your inventory.
To add padding, right-click on your clothes and select “Inspect”, there’s a small window that has the cloth preview and some values:
- Cloth’s name and icon.
- Body Part: Indicate all parts of the cloth that you can repair or add padding.
- Bite/Scratch/Bullet: Indicate the defense percentage against damage caused by biting, scratching, or being hit by a bullet.
- Condition: The current condition of the cloth.
- Global Blood Level: Indicate the amount of blood on your clothes, which can come from zombies or your own injuries.
- Global Dirtyness: Indicate how dirty your cloth is. Global Dirtyness increases as soon as you walk around or fall on the ground.
At the Body Part section, right-click on each position and select “Add Padding”, then choose the materials in your inventory. You can also apply one material to all cloth parts by selecting the “Add Padding to all using Material Name” option.
Each material offers a different Bite/Scratch/Bullet defense percentage (the ripped sheets only increase the defense percentage caused by scratching).
The higher your tailoring skill is, the higher the percentage each material offers. The following table shows the details:
| Tailoring Level | Ripped Sheets | Denim Strips | Leather Strips |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1% | 1%/1%/1% | 1%/2%/1% |
| 1 | 1% | 1%/1%/1% | 1%/2%/1% |
| 2 | 1% | 1%/2%/1% | 2%/4%/2% |
| 3 | 1% | 2%/3%/2% | 3%/6%/3% |
| 4 | 2% | 2%/4%/2% | 4%/8%/4% |
| 5 | 2% | 2%/5%/2% | 5%/10%/5% |
| 6 | 3% | 3%/6%/3% | 6%/12%/6% |
| 7 | 3% | 3%/7%/3% | 7%/14%/7% |
| 8 | 4% | 4%/8%/4% | 8%/16%/8% |
| 9 | 4% | 4%/9%/4% | 9%/18%/9% |
| 10 | 5% | 5%/10%/5% | 10%/20%/10% |
As you can see, the leather strips have the best defense percentage among the others. After all, you can press “H” and select the Protection tab to check the total defense percentage of each body part.
Remember that you can only add padding to clothing, pants, and socks. Other parts, such as belts or sneakers, can’t be applied.
You’ll receive 0.5 XP after adding padding, regardless of which materials you use and your tailoring skill level.
If you want to change the padding material, right-click on the body part section and select “Remove Patch”. This action also earns tailoring XP, with 1 XP if you receive the padding material back and 0.25 XP if you retrieve nothing.
The chance of getting the padding material back increases when your tailoring skill level increases, which you can see while selecting “Remove Patch”. When you’re at level 10, there’s up to a 60% chance of materials being brought back.
When you have excessive materials, you can add padding and remove it time after time. This method earns XP even faster than ripping clothes.
Moreover, at tailoring level 8, you can fully fix holes in clothes using the right materials (for example, denim cloth requires denim strips, etc.), restoring their defense, condition, and insulation.
Fixing holes offers the same XP as adding padding, with 0.5 XP per hole. But note that certain clothing items, like firefighter pants or military boots, cannot be repaired even at level 8 or higher.
That’s how to level up tailoring in Project Zomboid.
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