Best Starting Locations in Project Zomboid – High Ground Gaming
Choosing the best starting location to establish your initial safehouse is one of the first challenges of the zombie apocalypse sim, Project Zomboid . Provided you haven’t installed any of the numerous mods for the game, you’ll be presented with four options up top as to locations you can go to.
We’ll break down all four of these different starting spawn locations in Project Zomboid with pros and cons. Additionally , we’ll also pinpoint a structure or two in each area that will work the best for beginning your new life and surviving the horrors of a zombified Kentucky.
Let’s get started!
Muldraugh (Default Design)
Muldraugh is the original starting location for Project Zomboid , available the longest out of the 4 default beginning options.
Pros
One of the most appealing things about Muldraugh is that it has a lot of warehouses full of various tools. This makes it one of the best places to get a quick start, gearing yourself up with a lot of good equipment like crowbars, axes, and saws. You can find metalworking equipment inside crates in these areas, letting you get started on higher-level barricades earlier on.
Cons
In exchange, it can be really tough to get early skill books, since the school and library are deep in the undead-infested territory. Additionally , If you are starting on one of the normal difficulty settings like Apocalypse, you’ll find Muldraugh to be more populated with zombies than most of the other starting areas. However , while it is heavily populated, the infected are largely centered around the urban core of the town rather than further out within the more rural farmlands.
Tips
Close to the center of town is a large urban warehouse sharing a fenced-in lot with a self-storage facility. This is a great place with regard to looting some of the aforementioned equipment, while also being a fairly defensible location. When you’re looking for a new safe base, you’re going to want at least two entrances/exits, with minimal windows. Any windows you do have, you are going to want to barricade so the zombies just get stuck outside banging on wood or metal panels instead of being able to break the window plus eat you while you sleep. If you can get into the particular storage service, you have a chance at finding a generator or even other valuable loot.
Muldraugh is also a great place to find a car and get it working again since there are gas stations on both ends of city, and there are typically a good number of cars available in the southern area of town. Once you’ve got a car ready though, a good alternative to the warehouse as a base will be heading out west until you find the farmland having a well. Make sure you have plenty of gas, as you’ll become driving around in the backwoods areas for quite a while until you find it. These farmlands have some huge advantages over other bases, with the well, in particular, providing you with an infinite supply of water for drinking and cooking.
Nearby you’ll be able to find a huge stash of food, with seeds and lots of available farmland as well. The downsides to this base are the remoteness makes driving into town regarding loot runs an all-day ordeal, and fencing the place in to make it truly secure will require quite a lot of materials plus time. But , it can be a long-time base if you want it to become. Farming is usually tough but rewarding in Project Zomboid , and this base provides plenty of room to be able to farm to your highest potential.
The cultivated fields outside of town is bound to become even more useful and sought after in future updates when the developers plan to add plantation animals to the game. You can already see the barn that you’ll be able to use to store cattle and the chicken coop alongside your own farmhouse. With numerous small warehouses placed far apart from each other, the farms in the middle of the particular map would be the most stable location intended for looting Muldraugh long-term before you start to expand outward in to other parts of the map. This can also be a fantastic location for a big multiplayer base, as it’s far enough from the main looting pathways that will you’re unlikely to be attacked at random.
Riverside (Safer Start)
Riverside is arguably the safest starting area in Task Zomboid , as you always have a river barrier to your north.
Pros
If you’re ever in trouble in the city of Riverside, you can run to the eponymous river and you’re consistently unlikely to encounter a horde of the walking dead. If you run low upon food, the river can also be an endless source of fish, as well as the riverbank is also a great place to start a farm. Numerous houses exist within Riverside, with the eastern part of the town having tall, unbreakable metal fences surrounding a gated community. The flowing river nearby also provides you with an unlimited supply of drinking water, provided you keep enough wood on hand to light a fire, and a vessel to boil the water in to sanitize this.
Negatives
On the downside, the town associated with Riverside has few opportunities for the guaranteed collection of weapons, with no military presence or heavy police armory. Your best bet for good weapons is to stick to baseball bats or other close-range weaponry, while furthermore checking the bedrooms of the gated community homes for heavier firearms. The infinite supply of water doesn’t really matter at the very start of the game, given that the water supply generally stays functional for a while unless you get very unlucky.
Tips
There are numerous houses in the western chunk of town where you might spawn if you choose to come up in Riverside, and these tend to be more defensible at first compared to the wealthier eastern side, so board one of them up to come back to it before you head towards the gated local community. The west side associated with town also has a fishing supply shop with everything you’ll need to start catching fish.
If you don’t love the idea of staying in the slums or camping on the riverbank, you can also head to the Riverside post office. A very popular strategy for foundation defense in Project Zomboid is to use the sledgehammer in order to smash the bottom levels of a staircase after nailing sheet ropes to the windows above. These sheets can be ascended by human characters yet zombies can’t climb them at all, just pull all of them down if they can reach them. The post office only has one staircase leading upstairs, plus it’s thin enough that you can smash this.
Additionally , early on in the game, you’re going to want to be spending much of your character’s downtime reading books, giving you massive ability multipliers that only get better the more books you read. The post office has a huge supply of many different kinds of publications in its backstock. Once you have the second story set up the way you want it, you can sit upward there and read all day long.
Riverside can be a great pit stop, but of all the beginning locations, it’s difficult to stay here for the long term since you will eventually run out of tools. Riverside is a great place to get a bearing on how the game functions and how to sneak around big groups of the living dead, since they don’t get big enough to be real threats, and you can always simply run to the particular river if you absolutely need to.
Rosewood (Best Overall)
Rosewood is largely the very best starting place for Project Zomboid in a lot of ways since the living dead population is largely concentrated in particular areas like the church or the penitentiary. This starting location also has the benefit of possessing a great balance plus variety of different kinds of weapons and equipment, with no real major cons in order to detract from choosing it.
Near the southwest part of town, you can find a huge service district with a fire station across the street from a large police HQ. Not too far south from your fire station is a huge lumber yard filled with pre-chopped logs for all your carpentry needs, along with a good chance of finding some valuable leather gloves.
Suggestions
This fire station is among the best and most popular safehouses in the game, especially in the early game. It’s relatively easy to clear out, plus you are guaranteed to find a good variety of helpful equipment. The back storeroom from the main garage area is full of equipment and axes, and right next to this you can find a small medical space full of bandages, antiseptics, surgical supplies, plus plenty of different types of pills.
Meanwhile, upstairs you can find more lockers full of some of the most powerful armor in the game, the firefighter’s jacket and pants. While these slow you down and heat you up immensely, making them almost unwearable during the hotter months of the year, they also make it a lot more difficult for any zombie to break through plus deliver the fatal bite. You can also find a full kitchen upward here, usually complete with a coffeemaker, and a rec room using a television so you can get all the early-game skill boosts you need to succeed.
Right across the street through the fire train station is a huge law enforcement department. Bring a hammer and screwdriver in case you can not find a key to be able to open the security doors in the back of the building. If you’re in a rush and willing to make some noise, an axe works to get breaking down doorways too, and you’re sure to have plenty of them in the fire department. Far in the back of this police station is really a small armory, potentially filled with very powerful guns and lots of ammo.
Another great spot to shack up in Rosewood is the northmost gas station. It has a single staircase top upstairs, making it possible for you to demolish the only zombie-accessible path upwards. It’s also right next to the highway and the woods, so the population of zombies isn’t too hard to clear through. This spot is better to take over once you’ve already got a working car since it’ll let you top off the gas tank often , and you’ll want a vehicle to get into the rest of town easily.
Luckily the particular gas place is also really close to a little mechanics shop. Once you’ve done enough scavenging to be able to repair a car, you can find a lot of the other resources you’ll need inside this particular mechanics store. Being near the highway means you can be ready to get out of your own starter city as soon as you’re ready. Just make sure you bring enough canned food, and a few extra axes to boot! The last note about Riverside is it can be a lot easier to find a generator here compared to some other starting locations.
West Point (Dangerous Start)
By its nature, Task Zomboid is a sandbox sport, built to allow you to envision a gritty, bleak, but rewarding end of times for mankind. And one from the ways this is evident is definitely by the simple fact that the online game lets you start in West Stage, with its large zombie populace and minimum cover. West Point is by far the most harmful area of the video game if you don’t count the city associated with Louisville in order to its northeast. Clearing Western Point is excellent practice pertaining to sending your beloved survivor into the blighted city hell of Louisville.
Ideas
West Point is incredibly difficult to get a newer player, and we’d only recommend selecting it if you want a significant challenge, or even if you’re on a multiplayer server that’s already been active long enough for some additional team associated with players to clear the majority of the walking dead away from the area. Just like Riverside, West Stage is bordered by a water to the north, but the population of zombies means running upward there meant for cover is more likely to get you surrounded rather than being a safe getaway plan.
West Point does have a gun shop in its city limits, and while this usually has an alarm active, breaking into it can often help you get ahead in early stages, or at the very least it might help you replenish the ammo you spend trying to take the town center. Far towards the west end of the town, you can find a few solitary mansions with massive metal fencing, all of which are usually flanking the lake where you can fish plus gather fresh water.
Conclusion: What is the Best Starting Location within Project Zomboid?
Out of all of the starting locations, Rosewood or Riverside will likely be your best starting area as a first-time player in Project Zomboid . Muldraugh will be a little tougher for less experienced players, and West Point is really a death wish for all but the most experienced gamers. Don’t forget your character can always visit all of these locations in time, as they all exist on the same map, alongside a few other towns and the “final boss” of the sport, Louisville . Whether you are alone out there fighting designed for survival, or you’ve found a clan to help you tame the newly wild suburbs of Knox County, this guide to beginning locations can help you take the high ground.
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We hope our guide on the best starting locations within Project Zomboid help you establish a successful start to your desperate struggle to survive. Let us know what you think about our own choices within the comments below.
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