Project Zomboid is a game all about survival and nothing screams survival like needing to forage in the woods. In this case, survival can mean doing whatever you can. From barricading windows to keep yourself safe to hotwiring a car for a quick getaway. All you need to worry about in Project Zomboid is staying alive. In this quest to stay alive, you may sometimes find yourself in the middle of the woods and need to make temporary shelter and find food. If you want to have any chance of completing these goals you are going to need to forage. Let’s go over how you can forage in Project Zomboid.
How to Forage in Project Zomboid
In order to begin foraging, you will need to toggle on “Investigate Area”. This can be done by clicking the spyglass icon. This brings up a new overlay showing the terrain type, position of the sun in the sky, and a button for activating “Search Mode”. While Search Mode is activated, the screen will blur except for a “Target Radius” around you which will grow as your foraging skill increases.
While walking around in this mode, items should spawn around you. As you approach the target radius distance of an item that you have the requisite skill level to find, an eyeball icon will appear over your character. Remaining near the item for a short amount of time will make the item’s icon appear. At that point, you should gain a small amount of XP.
If you double-click the item icon you will store it in your inventory. Right-clicking will give the option to gather or discard the item. Additional XP is granted regardless of which option is chosen.
Depending on your foraging level, you will be able to find more items. Not all the items you find while foraging are nature-related, you can find some pretty useful stuff while foraging. Here is a quick list of what you can find at different foraging levels.
- Level 0-1 Foraging: Junk Items, Berries, Mushrooms, Chipped Stone, Stone, Tree Branch, Twigs, Violets.
- Level 2 Foraging: Wild Vegetables, Grape Leaves, Worms.
- Level 3 Foraging: Wild Onions, Logs.
- Level 4 Foraging: Recipe Magazines, Valuable Junk Items, Cherries, Cricket, Rosehips.
- Level 5 Foraging: Dead Rat, Oranges.
- Level 6 Foraging: Insects, Jalapenos, Habaneros, Limes, Lemons.
- Level 7 Foraging: Frogs, Dead Birds, Grapes.
- Level 8 Foraging: Dead Squirrels, Strawberries, Pears, Grapefruits, Corn, Eggs & Wild Eggs.
- Level 10 Foraging: Dead Rabbits.
Different starting jobs will either provide points to your foraging skill or add range to your “Investigate Area” mode. Positive traits can also add tiles to your search mode and some of the negative traits will remove tiles from it. If you do plan on using foraging as a primary source of items it is important to keep in mind these effects when making your character. If you have any more trouble with Project Zomboid make sure to check out our other guides.
Project Zomboid is available now on PC.
