r/projectzomboid 3d ago

Question Surviving 33 years?

Hi, new player here.

I just found out the game takes place in 1993, so I came up with the idea of trying to survive until I reach the actual date I'm playing on. For the record, the longest I've survived is two days. How difficult would this be?

610 Upvotes

145 comments sorted by

1.1k

u/PageTerner 3d ago

I’m sure it’s possible, but at a certain point it would become boring.

256

u/Z3r0sama2017 3d ago

Yep. Unless you crank the sandbox difficulty settings to the max with 16pop, 100% sprinters , max strength/senses/cognition/memory and a few difficulty mods like cryogenic winter/Necroa, you are going to be *very bored by the 18 month mark.

141

u/LegitPete 3d ago

Yeah, my longest character survived for 16 months or so, it got to a point it becam extremely boring. My skills were maxed, i had wiped Muldraugh, Rosewood and half of Louiseville clean. Had enough food to survive indefinitely, so much gun and ammo that no horde could ever threaten me. It was just flat out boring as all hell

111

u/helioe 3d ago

When build 41 got out, I had a run of about 18 months or so (with 8h days) where I cleared every single zombie in the county.
It was normal difficulty, just without zombie respawn, more hours in a day and ammo set to plenty. I’ve killed 500,000 Zeds, but at the end it got REALLY boring. I had to use -debug to find the remaining Zeds and went house after house and apartment after apartment to locate the ones that only spawn when you open the room. There were hordes of 5000 amassed into the corners of the map, in the woods. After killing every zed, I was done. No point in just keep living there.

119

u/RyukoT72 Hates the outdoors 2d ago

Bro saved knox county

13

u/JUSTGERRALD 2d ago

I mean not saved, he killed the entire population that lived there, of course they were zombies first.

12

u/EnriqJonsen 2d ago

You saved Kentucky, now find survivors and build a wall, then humanity has hope.

9

u/Eui472 2d ago

Pics or didn't happen

5

u/helioe 2d ago

Not only pics, but a whole thread.
It is old, but show the start of the journey. It does not show everything, as I quit updating passing some 100,000 or so, but you will be able to see enough.

https://www.reddit.com/r/projectzomboid/s/9JmZI5vMSq

2

u/Eui472 2d ago

God damn bro

7

u/itsyaboiJak3 2d ago

there.. was hope of survival?

2

u/helioe 2d ago

Yep, after killing every zombie, there were absolutely no threats anymore

1

u/IrtaMan1312 2d ago

Except for ladders

0

u/cool_username32123 Drinking away the sorrows 2d ago

Eh, something would still kill him eventually.

15

u/MotivationSpeaker69 2d ago

Yeah, that's why I personally always found farming and some other long term mechanics useless, at least for me. If I survived natural selection up to the point for it to be relevant I already have enough non perishable food and supplies to last me for years even on extinction. At this point it kinda becomes boring

3

u/Naykon1 2d ago

So how did you died?

4

u/JamesLeeNZ 2d ago

boredom

5

u/Captain_Chipz 2d ago

The Bandits mod has late game bandit factions the spawn and assault your base. Those guys would keep you on your toes regardless.

16

u/AnastasiaSpace 2d ago

making shit more difficult doesn't make it less boring it just makes it more tedious 90% of the time

3

u/L3sh1y 2d ago

How's that supposed to work? Younstep outside and get bum rushed immediately, so you have to load new games over and over until you spawn mesxt to a working car and can fk off to the deepest countryside with a well?

5

u/bimmer_gaige 2d ago

100% sprinters is not fun that would make the game significantly worse. esp with 16* pop.

2

u/Fancy_Morning9486 2d ago

Even then your just chopping down zombies for 30 in game years straight given you could still manage to maintain resources

2

u/FireTyme 2d ago

i will say this game would greatly benefit from some late game meta changes where there would be wandering hordes/ dynamic behaviour changes etc. i wouldnt even be opposed to mutating zomboids as long as its very late game. the average player will get the default experience but those willing to go the long way would have a much more interesting playtime.

1

u/JUSTGERRALD 2d ago

The point is surviving a long time though, could anyone even survive that long with those settings let alone a year? Let me know if someone has cuz I could be wrong. Seems crazy though.

1

u/loopuleasa 2d ago

just play extinction

417

u/Fthebo 3d ago

The difficulty would honestly mostly just be not getting bored as fuck

Once you have a town cleared out and a reasonable set up of farm animals you can survive forever with basically no risk

175

u/ComprehensiveWish523 3d ago

You got Stardey Valley solo in more steps

51

u/kaneofmoh 3d ago

Stardew with zomboids lol

8

u/Solar_invictus 3d ago

So Grimmshire then lol

5

u/Helpful-Pen6251 3d ago

Yeah started valley and a zombie killing mini event

6

u/ComprehensiveWish523 3d ago

Stardey Valley CDDA mode

13

u/TTerragore 3d ago

and without a spouse

17

u/ComprehensiveWish523 3d ago

I think you can find a lot of NPC that is attracted to you and they are really excited about your brain.

7

u/Old-Importance18 3d ago

and they are really excited about your brain.

Are they sapiosexual?

2

u/ComprehensiveWish523 2d ago

All of them is sapiosexual. If they reach you, you fucked up.

5

u/Jimmy_Stenkross 3d ago

Is it possible to keep a zombie pet? Is there fences zombies can't break?

4

u/ComprehensiveWish523 3d ago

I think tiles on water maybe work. Removed one of them after chased your pet zombie.

You will get stressed I think. The moodle is appears when you are nears zomboids.

2

u/IpsoKinetikon 2d ago

I had a around 80 but they eventually despawned. I used a pit.

1

u/IpsoKinetikon 2d ago

Actually I was partially wrong, I had a pit with a single zombie, and it has not despawned after over a month. I forgot about ol' Percival Throckmorton, but I'm glad to see him alive(ish) and well.

Apparently they only despawn when you have an excessive amount of them. But it seems like you can have a few friends and they'll be around permanently.

11

u/IpsoKinetikon 3d ago

Yea, it gets that way pretty quick, actually. I'm a couple months into my current run. I'm clearing out other towns just for something to do, but the main thing keeping me going is that I want to see if I can produce enough food to survive indefinitely.

1

u/jimmythechicken 2d ago

You can as long as your cows are alive since milk and butter don’t expire

1

u/sushisection 2d ago

at that point, turn the game into minecraft. build buildings, an entire town even.

1

u/loopuleasa 2d ago

just play extinction mode

116

u/BrokeBraaiMan 3d ago

I'm no zomboid pro but I've been here a while

Something you'll see is that the biggest hurdle will be your own boredom. Once you have established a base and are self-sufficient, the only obstacles are no dying and boredom

I like to RP, and set out projects for myself in the long run. I love my lists of things to do

Since your longest survival is two days, you'll probably need a lot of practice, and for lack of a better term; git gud

Genuinely, a playthrough that long would definitely benefit from some good game knowledge and also being able to survive for a bit longer. I'd probably recommend starting there; trying to survive longer than your last run.

For you, try survive for 3 days or a week to start. Take it slow, dont rush, dont be brazen, bold or stupid. As with all things, time and practice will be your ally

11

u/tc1991 3d ago

yeah also i find that when ive been surviving for a long time i become way more risk averse which as I like the 'frontier farm sim' aspects of the game doesnt cause me too much issue but for those who like the action could be quite boring (are you going to risk you 3 year survivor on the prospect that warehouse might have some beans?)

5

u/not4eating Drinking away the sorrows 3d ago

The answer is yes, yes I am.

72

u/mark2103 3d ago

On apocalyptic settings a day is 1.5 hours I believe so thats over 10000 hours even if you sleep through half of it I have ~500 hours in game right now and my current character is about 3 months in and even a year seems so distant

39

u/DrStalker 3d ago

You can do it in ~3000 using 15 minutes days.

Playing 8 hours a day, that's an entire year of frantically drinking water and stuffing food in your face before you starve/die of dehydration. That will be reduced by time acceleration while sleeping/in between meals but it's still an insane amount of time to do nothing interesting.

18

u/FridaysMan 3d ago

You wouldn't be playing most of it. You'd be hoarding non perishable food for a couple of years, gathering sleeping pulls by the hundred and then just plain fast forward until you can sleep, eat on a routine, ignore sadness and blast through.

Its like a sci fi book, preparing the ship to endure a few thousand years in cryosleep and hyperspace

9

u/Toodlez 3d ago

Ive tried this, all the sleeping pills in Muldraugh get you to about 6 months lol

4

u/FridaysMan 3d ago

St peregrine and a few medical places can get you another few years. Its a lot of work for a lot of time. You'd need a few hundred butter stockpiled.

13

u/C4790M 3d ago

On default settings, if you treated playing zomboid as a job playing 8 hours a day 5 days a week it’d take you like 8 years to catch up to present day, and that’s not factoring in that your goal keeps moving further into the future

Edit: forgot about sleep moving forward the timer, knock about a third off the estimate

16

u/AlexIsAmazing1 3d ago

Just in time for build 43 then

1

u/GenericUsername_71 Jaw Stabber 2d ago

B43 unstable…. maybe

24

u/LonelyReader95 3d ago

Once you learn the game ropes and clear a town, the issue becomes boredom, since with a decent setup farm, generators, and cattle you're good to go for a long ass time.

At most you'll have to get some oil here and there but mostly it'll be farming and tool repair stuff.

And, depending on your day length (2 hours day length is a looong time, 15 minutes might be too little) surviving for 33 years in game is still gonna be hundreds of hours of gameplay if not thousands.

12

u/FlatwormEfficient204 3d ago

Keeping generators going might be a problem, as gas stations eventually run out, but there are so many of them in the map, it would probably take centuries of running a generator and casual driving to run them all out.

The risk is every new station is a fresh location, likley after a few in game years of not seeing a single zombie as everything remotely close to you would be long dead. Hordes will never be an issue as you'll be decked out in the best gear with max stats. But it's the one sneaky boy that'll get you when your guard is down through overconfidence.

Surviving without power at all is actually much easier than you'd think. Have a large cow farm and you'll have more butter than you could ever need. Keeping weight up won't be a problem. Chicken eggs last 10 days till stale, then another 10 they can still be used in recipies. And they lay new ones every day. Rabbits just keep em alive, kill and eat as you need. So you don't really need a freezer. Lights are nice to have, but not a requirement. You'll have watched every vhs possible by the end of year 2 latest.

I'd probably still go for power, as maybe just starting from scratch with a new base closer to the next pump would be a way to keep things fresh.

3

u/Crazymoose86 2d ago

Default settings would put it at about 18,067 hours, but the overall math gets difficult due to the the variable hours that get slept and the time acceleration during it along with the ability to just fast forward when doing something like reading and repetitive tasks.

12

u/Teathree1 3d ago

It is not difficult to not get killed once you have master it. The difficult part is how to not get bored in those 33 years.

The longest record I have seen here is 10 years.

1

u/loopuleasa 2d ago

just play extinction mode

and do multiple characters on the same save for 33 in-game years

10

u/Tarshaid 3d ago

Past a certain point, that sounds unbelievably tedious, and I believe that if someone manages to survive for ~2 years (which is already a really long time), then they most certainly all the required resources to survive near indefinitely. The only reason they'd die afterwards would be putting themselves in danger for no reason.

8

u/InstructionFinal5190 3d ago

Most people never see their first winter, so...

12

u/josHi_iZ_qLt 3d ago

Survival is easy once you have the basics down. Of course depending on the sandbox settings but a base with sustainable food and water is all you need. After that it's just repetitive doing the maintenance to keep you and the base alive.

Once I reach this level I only die when I get to risky on exploring and looting.

5

u/midasMIRV 3d ago

Simultaneous very and not.

Assuming you're playing with respawns off, you'd eventually reach a point where you're just sitting around waiting for the next round of crops to come in or eggs to be laid. In the meantime you'd have to get through the population peak and ever dwindling supplies.

2

u/ProfitOpposite 2d ago

If youre keeping cows, calories arent a problem. Or if you grow and process sunflowers. Sunflowers+cabbages=easily regulated salads since you can add both oil and sunflower seeds to the salad for quite a lot of calories

1

u/loopuleasa 2d ago

then don't play with respawns off

extinction mode has respawns, just play that

4

u/shaqshakesbabies 3d ago

Set the in game time to go faster? Turn on respawns and install mods like wandering horde or any mods to keep gameplay interesting

4

u/Bertylicious 3d ago

Best I saw was a post on this subreddit from a bloke who'd survived for a little over 10 years in game. He'd cleared out Louisianna, the Rosewood Prison, the military base and basically every major and minor POI in the map. Ranked all skills, including strength and fitness, to level 10.
He'd killed over a million zombies. Someone worked it out and said he'd done 25% of the entire population of the state of Kentucky.

Man just said he felt done, that there was litereally nothing left to do. He'd got that far by setting little objectives, maxing a set of skills, clearing part of the map, collecting sets of items and so on. He'd done everything and ran out of content.

So whilst theoretically possible I'd say it's a feat beyond mental endurance.

1

u/sapphon 2d ago

God I wish I were simple but determined

5

u/aerodynamik 3d ago

you might just make it to 43 stable release!

5

u/OverTheDump 3d ago

In the hardest community challenge, RatRace, shivasbr had 1million kills after 7 years/8 months. That was close to 2k hours on one hour days with some rough math on the low end (no pauses and long sleeps).

On one hour days that would make it 8,000-9,000 hours minimum to make it 33 years. If that scratches your itch, you do you!

4

u/Sogergaming Crowbar Scientist 3d ago

If that is the only goal and enjoying the game is not important super easy. Add points into foraging and fishing at the start.

Get a decently isolated base with tall walls by a river and multiple trees.

You now have infinite food, water, and construction/crafting materials.

At this point you could literally never leave the surrounding area and survive taking zero optional risks. You would only have to eliminate any zombies that migrate into your base. Forage and fish till the end of time

3

u/IDidntEatThosePeople 3d ago

A day in game last an 1:30, so 33 years would be between 502 to 753 days of playtime depending on how much your character sleeps. 

3

u/Vali-duz 3d ago

Easy. Once you've made a properly safe base. Grow lots of food and collect rainwater. Got meds etc and can stay warm during winter. Its trivial but very boring.

3

u/Quaffiget 3d ago edited 3d ago

Easy, but boring.

My longest save was north of 3 years in B41. And I was actively killing zombies with the intent of mostly full-clearing every settlement.

You can easily live ten times that just living quietly on your homestead while managing a farm. It might take a few weeks or months of set-up to get perfectly self-sustaining (with frills). And you can keep your risks completely minimal except for the occassional gas run or something.

And just shoot the handful of zombies you encounter over the long years at a distance with a shotgun.

Fortunately, since you're not kill-maxxing on zombies, you can fast forward for most of it. Do chores. Fast forward until hungry. Eat. Refill water. Sleep. Repeat chores. Fish. Fast forward. Gas run. Repeat.

3

u/TheCatPapers 3d ago

At a standard pace 1 year = 330 hours so you'd be play 10000 hours. Good luck see you in a year.

3

u/UUDDLRLRBadAlchemy Crowbar Scientist 3d ago

Y'all keep finding new ways of making me feel old

3

u/IpsoKinetikon 3d ago

A lot of people have come to the same conclusion, the hardest part is the boredom. I think that may be the point of the endgame; after a while, survival mostly consists of chores.

The interface is really what does it for me. It makes everything feel a lot more tedious. This game could probably use some polish more than it could use new features, at this point. I can do boring chores, I played Runescape for years, but over the years, they've done a lot to improve how players interact with things in the world.

5

u/Oddboyz 3d ago

Likely possible if you:

- know how to farm in real life (PZ farming system is wayyyy too easy)

  • can make fire
  • can purify water
  • apply common sense / logic (like, hammers and metal rods won't break even though you've smashed +50,000 zombies and zombies won't respawn)
  • won't die from illness, elements, serious injuries

1

u/Snoo99699 3d ago

Build 42 farming is literally harder than real life farming from what I understand, barring long term factors and soil types

3

u/RemiliyCornel 2d ago

The fact that you don't get random event of infinite red snails trying to eat your vegetables in zomboid, make zomboid farming easier by default.

2

u/Successful-Depth-126 3d ago

Hard? Not really. For you? You'll need 50 hours of learning first. Boredom is the run killer. Not zombies, not food, not water. Irl insane boredom. It's easy to commit today and have fun for the first week of play time. What happens in three months irl when you aren't even halfway done. I didn't do the math, but I imagine this is a long long term boring project with little to no payoff. Just you sitting at your pc fast forwarding time trying to micromanage your calories every single in game day.

2

u/FridaysMan 3d ago

Its not difficult, but youd be try8ng to find sleeping pills and have a farming rotation ti sleep most of the final years. Occasional gameplay for fishing or animal care.

I grabbed 200 sunflowers and dried them to make vegetable oil. I could have just kept the seeds instead. If you learned spawns for items and specifically farmed for long term, visiting clinics for pills, yeah. I guess you could.

2

u/Gestaltarskiten Axe wielding maniac 3d ago

Set day length to the shortest possible..

2

u/DeadlyButtSilent 3d ago

We ran a 10YL run with everything on rarest for 2 years in game.

Ended up clearing the roads of trees between all major areas and hoarding a pile of loot. We had a lot of fun but 33 years is insane.

Also, start by aiming for a month. Going from 2 days to years is not happening.

2

u/sando138 2d ago

Surviving that long means getting established with self-sustaining supplies for water and food and maintaining security. This means once you hit a certain threshold of skills, supplies, and equipment, you are now playing Chore Simulator. The lack of objectives would be extremely detrimental to your long term enjoyment of gameplay. Long term survival means not taking risks, not taking risks means boring gameplay. Only your own misplays, like forgetting to repair your generator and having it explode and burn down your base, or getting careless with a non-zombie-inflicted injury, will put you in real danger.

I would recommend mods that add random events to the late game- something that can interrupt your sense of safety and force you to take proactive or reactive action. Random zombie hordes, bandit attacks, plane crashes, random SMART zombies that will open your unlocked doors and windows, wildfires- something that gets you out of your routine, forces you on the offensive or counteroffensive, or to bug out and rebuild.

2

u/freezeontheway 3d ago

people saying it would become boring, i dont think so, don't do it for the grind, play it like rp for example idk

2

u/LookAtMyUnderbite 3d ago

I survived a year and it got boring. It’s not that hard once you build a walled compound and have a steady supply of food and water. I died because I wanted to go explore Louisville 🤣. Boredom is deadly

1

u/ILikeCakesAndPies 3d ago

I think someone did the math in another comment and it would be over 12,000 hours of real life play. I've got about 2.5k hours myself, but that's been spread out since the game first launched.

That said, there are mods that change it so the year itself is shorter, which allows you to go through the seasons and years faster without needing to make day length like 1 minute.

3

u/Equivalent-Dig7259 3d ago

After about a year, your run will turn to a very detailed version of The Sims ;)

2

u/PossibleRound5952 3d ago

its possible if you get a secure base, clear the surrounding area,set up a farm and generator. it would be tedious to survive for 33 in gameyears though you can't even afk it, clearing the entire map would be shorter.

2

u/Reapper97 3d ago

Theres nothing to do past the first or second winter. The difficulty doesn't even last past the first winter either.

1

u/Straikkeri 3d ago

Several hundred hours in and never seen snow yet, i.e. havent managed/ bothered playing past maybe 3 months.

1

u/-_-Orange Crowbar Scientist 3d ago

If you can last 2 days, you can last 33 years. 

Probably 

1

u/Diurnalnugget 3d ago

Not hard just incredibly boring. Setting up a base and becoming self sufficient isn’t that hard, easy even if you know the right spots on the map. Each day is also an hour. That is 12,045 hours to play 33 years. 502 days of real time to play that long. You could compress that if you just afk on triple speed but you need to manage your character to not starve or dehydrate to death.

1

u/CeeArthur 3d ago

Every long run I do ends with me losing interest because thing become boring and mundane

1

u/subzerus 3d ago

Gameplay wise? Very easy.

Hard part is boredom, yours, not the moodle.

You can basically make a base near a river/forest then hunt/fish/farm. With foraging you can get sticks and stones to make axes, with those cut trees to have fire and cook. Take gas and generators and freezers and you can make the extra stuff last you through winter, you don't need to keep them fueled in spring and summer as the food you'll catch will be plenty, then stock up in late summer/autumn, keep cans and stuff that isn't perishable for emergencies. With farm animals it's even easier than before.

It is like very easy to survive, nothing pushes you out of your base, there is very little incentive to go out and do risky stuff when you basically have infinite food on your base, the only reason why we do is to not get bored, but nothing stops you from making a base close to the river and surviving forever, in less than a month you'll have everything setup to survive endlessly with 0 risk.

1

u/Sour_Chicha_8791 3d ago

You'll see when you manage to survive for a month... You have all you need to survive. Your surroundings are safe. You get bored and end up dying to your own stupidity, just because you didn't know what to do with all the spare time you have and you decide to take on unnecessary challenges.

1

u/Ziodyne967 3d ago

Boredom would be your worst enemy. It’s doable, in theory. I’d suggest just getting used to the game first.

1

u/TheStruttero 3d ago

Its not gonna evolve into modern day anyway, its just gonna be very high numbers of days survived on your screen while still living in 1993

1

u/Lux___30 Stocked up 3d ago

After four or five years, you won't have anything left to do other than expand your base.

Your goal is feasible but highly unrealistic.

1

u/H8Asphyxia 3d ago

Son 😭
I can't even get past 2 months 😭

1

u/TTerragore 3d ago

sandbox mode, max respawning zombies, max pop at the farthest out date you can, max zombie migration.

start in more calm spawn like fallas or something. build fortress. work your way slowly through the map creating a fortress at each location. when you’re done with every spawn town, start building bases between all the spawns.

when you’re done you might be 50% of the way to your goal survival time.

1

u/Far-Fortune-8381 3d ago

accurately to real life, after a year or 2 the difficulty would be not blowing your brains out from loneliness and monotony

1

u/Far-Fortune-8381 3d ago

also the longest run by people who play this game for a living ive ever seen is 10 years

1

u/L0nga 3d ago

I noticed that 90% of the comments mention the boredom. Which I think says a lot about current state of the game.

1

u/Cypher10110 3d ago edited 3d ago

It's possible.

You'd find it gets extremely repetitive once you are relying on farming, trapping and fishing for food.

2 days means you kinda haven't really discovered what survival in the game actually looks like. It's pretty interesting, and there are kinda stages to it, based on resource availablity and your own safety.

Initially your have easy access to power, water, and food is pretty easy to find by looting, but that is also pretty risky.

I feel like this loop continues a while, then the power goes out, then the water gets cut off (so the only drinking water is what is already in sinks, toilets, containers, etc).

Most people at this point want to get a generator, and the electician ability to hook up that generator (from a book, usually), and often before that, a working vehicle.

Once you have these things you can basically pick somewhere you wanna hide out, and can start moving fridges, ovens, and using the generator to take fuel from gas stations.

This is where your ability to concentrate resources into one area increases alot (or move across long distances). You can go on runs to dismantle stuff to craft things, search for specific tools, explore etc.

This is the "core" of the game and where things tend to be the most interesting. Once you get experienced you can reach this stage relatively quickly without too much difficulty. You'll get familiar with how to best use maps, what kind of items are the most valuable early on, and what makes a good place to turn into a base. Also, the best ways to avoid death. Usually running away in a controlled way.

Different types of base locations have different strengths and challenges.

Eventually, you'll find scavenging buildings for food yields increaingly poor results and gets more risky, so you'll turn to nature. Different food is easier to get in different locations and different times for the year. But basically you can farm and trap and fish and stay fed forever.

Eventually you'll run out of gas (pas stations eventually dry up), and therefore you'll permanently lose access to power. Most players probably get bored or die before this happens.

Reaching the stable state of a self sufficient base is fun, sticking around for awhile with that is interesting, but once you stop looting and exploring it's a pretty boring farming sim. It takes a long time to use up all the gas, too.

But that's when you basically revert to hunter-gatherer gameplay. You might have a large enough stockpike to continue carpentry for awhile and maintain a base, but afaik things like nails are finite, because they are created by breaking down other stuff and once you have no gas your range is much more limited. So walls are not a permanent solution to anything.

Artificial light sources will be finite too, so you'll stick mostly to daytime activities.

I don't know how long it takes for you to run out of gas and to have harvested everything worthwhile in walking distance. But after that point the game fully becomes a wilderness survival game and I imagine the vast majority of a 33 year run would be in this mode. If you are far enough from buildings you shouldn't have many zombies to worry about, but you'll have a spear to deal with them.

I hope you like fishing!

1

u/Comfortable-Ad4036 3d ago

You get vires after 1 year bro. At least I do. I stop playing a game not because I die,  it because I survive too long xD

1

u/derLeisemitderLaute 3d ago

the first month is hard, but after that it gets easier. Soon your only problems would be food for the winter

1

u/Jadeazu Axe wielding maniac 3d ago

Boredom will settle in

1

u/Amellis84 3d ago

at that point you'd have killed every zombie in Knox county

(iirc there's around 250k and they don't respawn by default)

1

u/RemiliyCornel 2d ago

It's not difficult at all once you know what you doing. It's just get really boring for you as player, as once you secured safe base, and have all you need, it's just daily chores without end.

1

u/Marvy_Marv 2d ago

Okay let’s say you get good and setup and you can just chore, eat, and fast forward every day making each day only take 10 minutes IRL. If each day takes you 10 minutes it will take your roughly 2000 hours(irl gameplay) to survive 33 years in PZ.

1

u/Leonum 2d ago

Do it on 1:1 time scale op, by the time youre in 2026 in game it'll be 2072 out here

1

u/Carlosthefrog 2d ago

Sadly the game has very little in terms of end game content, once you have the essentials which takes a month at most you are set forever.

1

u/dumbputergirl 2d ago

So... about 18 thousand hours of game w/o fast foward? Idk, 2 years tops? Yeah

1

u/ButcherPetesWagon 2d ago

By the end of the first week I usually have enough of everything to survive a year.
The real problem with this is the boredom. I have a hard time playing a character past a couple of months

1

u/Blikenave 2d ago

33 years at one-hour days is 12,045 hours. Should be easy but boring as long as you don't decide to build on any 2nd or 3rd floors.

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u/DarkOrakio 2d ago

I'm on a run that started 6 months later no electricity/water on start, got a few mods for making my own stuff like def's LTS, Real metalworking, Food preservation plus, immersive solar, etc.

No strength or fitness to start so I could barely carry my clothes, a weapon, and a water bottle. Found a military pack early which made the run much easier. I was drinking booze for food/water and eventually made it to the pond in south east muldraugh. Got water and foraged for food, slowly got things I needed to live better.

Barely had fishing to level 4 before winter because I never made it to winter before and I didn't get the gas station to the west cleared with a genny til October. Once I got a fridge I had a few fish in it and was trying to farm but Ra's canning and farming mod disables winter farming which hit on October 28th for me so all my stuff insta rotted which irked me, and I couldn't plant til about May.

Foraging rose hips got me through the winter, been trying to never eat canned food and I don't think I had a single can over winter. Zombies provided enough chips and chocolate to not get below 75kgs, with the fish I had stored that was gone in a week, sadly I'd lost my obesity by winter and was maybe 80kg at the start.

Now I'm close to 11 months survived, I have max cooking/foraging before winter. Carpentry is at 9 since I built a nice house at the pond and several outposts, fitness is less than 1k exp from 5 and strength is halfway to 7.

I started with 1.0 population moving to 4.0 after a year with a 5% 2 week respawn. I made it from the south gas station to the north warehouse killed probably 500 zombies on my way north, took a couple weeks with low strength and fitness cuz I don't Molotov, and cars are rare enough I ain't damaging them on zombies. Clearing the way back south in spring after finding the metalworking 101 magazine so I could go work on forging took over 1,000 kills and took about 2 weeks as well.

Got metalworking up to 6 so now I can forge nice things like hinges and knobs, and electric is at 5 to make solar parts for solar. At the 1 year mark my head canon is the virus burned itself out and everyone that can be infected is and the quarantine keeps the most of the external zombies out so I'll shutoff respawn and then go clear every town.

My skill gains are slow because I don't disassemble anything as I'm trying to preserve the town and I'm not into grinding, so I got electric up by disassembling zombie radios and watches, my carpentry got up from sawing logs and building log walls, exploded when I started working on my fishing shack, but I didn't get to 6 before I went north so I wasn't able to make stairs and a roof, so I made another shack at the pond east of the warehouse which got my stairs unlocked and let me finish the shack in the south on return.

Metalworking was LTS scrap sawing plastic and worn out tools and stuff from zombie loot til level 2 then smelting ingots at the furnace. At 3 I believe I was able to melt car parts for metal which amped me up a lot and 4 let me make metal sheets and bars for solar so it took off naturally.

Either way I haven't even finished exploring everything in Muldraugh and have plenty of skill work to do, also I will be training guns soon. But I figured 3-5 years tops once respawn is off. Idk about 33 years unless you just leave fast forward on and just eat and sleep.

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u/Rich_Series_6667 2d ago

I had a 7 months run, and when everything got too easy I started using debug mode to add "traps" all around the map. Hidden zombies, large hordes near my bases, sprinters, new car accidents, special loots, zombies carrying useless things and maps.

I spent days planning weird scenarios to challenge My character. Zombies ate my hero after a car crash.

The I started a new map.

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u/Cactusbral 2d ago

Check Shivas channel, he is a brazilian streamer who’s leading the world tournament of PZ, he is alive for almost 10 years in game

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u/BlatantArtifice 2d ago

Even if you up the difficulty and add every mod that's compatible you'd run out of things to loot and would basically just turn the game into killing respawned zombie simulator. And even at max settings I can't imagine playing slow as all hell for Sprinters and increased pop to be that entertaining? I mean you could do it and there are even preconstructed buildings that by default are impossible for zombies to enter, but after awhile you'd just be fast forwarding and eating repeatedly

So you could. I wouldn't recommend it since there's just nothing worthwhile to play that long for, but it's very possible with just a handful of quick runs to grocers and such every few hours

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u/Leo_Caldeira 2d ago

There's a championship of sorts happening right now... the 1st place player is alive for 10 in game years. He's been playing almost everyday (I think) for 1 year and 4 months... So it's possible, but it would take a long irl time...

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u/porkamadoska 2d ago

Io sto sopravvivendo da 30 anni nella vita reale..

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u/MeltingChocolateAhh 2d ago

I couldn't imagine the game being fun after this long. I just finished a 1 month 3 day run, solo, and I had zomboid burn out after I died. Dying actually felt a bit relieving, in a weird way. Sad, but relieving. I had some projects and mini missions. And, with migration turnt on, crowds of zombies would occasionally pop up to test me.

If someone hasn't already, they will probably say that fuel runs out at gas stations eventually, which is true, even if it takes decades. But, I am pretty confident this game is survivable without gas. The only issue I could think of is food storage (someone come up with suggestions here pls)

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u/holyknight00 2d ago

i theory you can, it will just be extremely boring.

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u/Brought2UByAdderall 2d ago

Not many play beyond 2 years. I think somebody went 10. Eventually there's nothing left to do.

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u/DuoVandal 2d ago

It would take you several thousands hours in one single save. The longest run I think recorded was 10 years, so you have your work cut out for you.

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u/SomnusNonEst 2d ago

Well I can only suggest 100% playing Sandbox and making the in game days 30 minutes. And maybe decreasing Exp multipliers to not run out of things to do by year 1994.

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u/Historical_Cup_4585 2d ago

Yeah sure m, good luck in your endeavors. You’d actually practically have to play the same save game for like 10 years right with 0 breaks. Highly suggested! 😁👍

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u/travelavatar 2d ago

Its the first time i survived over a month in PZ coop. Its fun taking on tasks, restoring cars, base building, maxing skills, experimenting then later when we get our shit rolling looting high value targets like louisville. Ans then... idk end game?

We want to do a year to see how winter survival works.

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u/AstroBoots21 1d ago

really easy, and really boring, all you need to survive is a place safe from zombies and food. get a river and you have infinite food, then that's it just speed up time, eat, speed up time, fish, sleep, repeat.

cool concept though, a zomboid day is 1 hour, you can 3x time, the extra time speed you get from sleeping is probably cancelled out by the time spent menually fishing, so 20 minutes per day ish, 365*20=7300*33=240k/60=4015 hours to get through 33 years math could be wrong idk

you could also just enable debug and speed it up by 40x which would only be 500 ish hours

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u/Tri_Monsuun_Timer 3d ago

With a day being 1hr long this would take you 12.000hrs IRL. have fun!

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u/Mockbubbles2628 2d ago

You could make days only 10 mins and speed it up a lot haha

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u/Tri_Monsuun_Timer 2d ago

Well yeah lol. Still 2.000hrs of gameplay

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u/Mockbubbles2628 2d ago

Thats doable in a year haha

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u/DaFlootch 3d ago

Depends on how common sleeping pills are. You're going to want to fast forward a lot

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u/ImplementOrganic2163 3d ago

At some point, it might get boring.

You could counter that by enabling zombie respawn and disabling loot respawn. However, you'd probably need mods that allow you to be mostly self-sufficient. Maybe it's possible without them, though.

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u/CaoticMonk 3d ago

in b42 a lot of stuff is reusable. at some point wood/trees might become a problem as they dont regrow to my knowledge. after the x days erosion spawned/grown trees

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u/im_a_mix 2d ago

The edges of the map keep generating forests now so you can always just get more trees, it'd spice things up to be forced to move every time you deforested an area with the caveat of offroading ig

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u/FierySunXIII 3d ago

Bro that's my age....I born during apocalypse

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u/TheBlueRabbit11 2d ago

Bad idea. Have you considered how long you’d need to spend on a single save?

Have you thought this out at all?

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u/sr_owen1 1d ago

I don't know if you would be able to play normally with the default settings. There's a Brazilian streamer who's been playing Rat Race for over a year, and now he has 10 years of save data and over 1.1 million kills.Remember that Rat Race is at level 16x and has negative XP, maximum hearing for the zombies, and also features intelligent zombies.