Some of the most important items in Project Zomboid can be hard to come by. There are tons of stores and homes to loot with all kinds of crafting materials. It may seem hopeless, but you can indeed survive the zombie apocalypse. The key is preparation and proper awareness. Being able to find the tools and food you need to survive is vital to making it out alive.
Hunting loot, just like in a real-world survival scenario, can be pretty tough. You have to keep track of where you’ve been and what’s been picked clean, and that’s true in most games of Project Zomboid. Loot normally doesn’t respawn.
Loot in Project Zomboid doesn’t normally respawn. The items found in each container are set at the time the container is generated. Whatever you find in a container will be what remains there. Food and other perishable items will rot over time, so grabbing these items early in the game can help feed your base early on. If you’re hunting around for crafting supplies like nails, it can be a good idea to grab food while out on supply runs.
So by default, regardless of what difficulty you’re playing on, loot in Project Zomboid will not respawn. This; like many other settings in the game, can be altered at game creation. If you want to have respawning loot, you can change the setting when you’re setting Game Options. When creating a new game, choose Custom Sandbox. Custom Sandbox allows you to change everything about the game. You can alter when utilities are turned off, if loot will respawn, and even the zombie behavior.
How to Make Loot Respawn in Project Zomboid
To respawn loot, change the Loot Respawn option to one of the options aside from None. The setting you choose will alter how long you have to wait. Setting a loot respawn time of Every Day is very aggressive, but will mean supply runs will always yield new items. This can be great for multiplayer games where you have specific conditions that make the need for new loot much more pressing.
The Loot Respawn only affects containers you have already looted.
There are five options, None is set by default:
- None: Loot will never respawn. This is the default setting in Project Zomboid for all difficulty levels.
- Every Day: Loot will respawn every single day.
- Every Week: Every 7 days loot will respawn.
- Every Month: Every 30 in-game days loot respawns.
- Every 2 Months: Every 60 in-game days loot will respawn.
Honestly, unless you’re very new to the game or have a reason to change this, you probably shouldn’t change the loot settings. Having the assurance of new food and building materials can engender some very bad habits when it comes to survival. It’s better to have the skills and knowledge you need to survive trained from day one. If you rely on loot respawn, it will sometimes make you choose poor decisions in later games.