If you are going to do slow-moving foraging, crouching gives a 10% radius bonus. But combat stance gives a massive 33% bonus and lets you grind nimble at the same time.

First aid leveling is so ridiculous. Imagine waking up and one day and being like “I don’t think I’m good enough at removing glass shards from my feet… I’m gonna practice on myself til I am”

Just a tip when you come to levelling Tailoring. Ripping clothes for XP can leave you with a lot of materials and it can be surprising how much space (weight) this takes up in your inventory. Each item of thread has multiple uses, and all the thread you gain from ripping clothes is partial - if you expand the stack of thread you'll see that each item is mostly only 25-50% of it's full capacity, but it still takes up 0.1 units of encumbrance. If you combine the stack (right click and choose "Add to" > "Consolidate all") you can reduce the number of thread items to a fraction of the original stack.

BIG tip for electrical leveling: The disassembling the big industrial stoves and stove hoods surprisingly gives electrical exp and not metalworking. A LOT of electrical exp per disassemble. Far more than anything else. So it is very worth it to read the beginner electrical book, and hit up restaurant kitchens and school cafeterias and you can get 1 or 2 levels surprisingly fast. No tedious watch disassembly needed.(and the stoves and hoods never have loot in them, so this should be a MP friendly tip as well)

Another suggestion for quick Carpentry leveling; if you're in a location away from base and don't want to lug a bunch of planks back; use the wood and nails to construct a bunch of crates. Then deconstruct them. Then use the remaining pieces to build them up again. Repeat until there are not enough planks or nails. Works great in places like restaurants, bars, or offices where there is a ton of wood furniture around to stock into one safe place in the building so you can construct in peace.

Stick traps have one advantage over crate traps: birds and mice are the only animals that can be found in urban zones. If you're based up in an urban location, you can set up stick traps close to your home(or on your rooftop garden) before going out on a loot run, then return to a hopefully full source of poultry. Bait is also incredibly easy to get - just dig up as much dirt near you for worms.

As a Zomboid player with over 1000 hours into the game. You taught me a couple new things. Very informative video. 10/10!

I would like to mention as well that VHS tapes for Carpentry, Cooking and Survival (Fishing, Foraging, Trapping) are SINLE USE per character even after watching it previously in the first 8-9 days. So it might be worth trying to watch the shows as early as possible and keeping the tapes on hand if you want to try and max out a skill that is difficult to level.

in all my years.. well, 2 years of playing this game, i've never gotten all skills to level 10, not that you even need them all at level 10, but gaining this knowledge will help out a lot

I also point out, with higher levels of first aid or if your a doctor it also tells you a bit more detail of your wounds. How severe they are and if there at a chance of infection.

A Key detail you didn't mention about Cooking; cooking XP is the same for every ingredient or unit of items cooked, so multiple items/ingredients gives multiple XP rewards, thus higher overall XP per cooking session. I find some of the best items to make for cooking xp is Bacon Bits. you need a kitchen knife or hunting knife, but with it, you can cut 1 Bacon into 4 bacon strips, and then 16 bacon bits, thus getting 16 XP rewards for essentially cooking one bacon. further, bacon bits become a spice item, so you can add them to virtually anything, and they're even usable as bait in traps. aside from that, foraging a high number of bugs and roasting them all at once can grant many XP rewards. the game doesn't care *what* you're cooking, only that it *can* be cooked, and then *is* cooked.

Tip for foraging. If you take the fisherman job, you have a +50% chance to find bait in applicable biomes. Some other jobs give bonuses to foraging chance, but not many of them and none so potent as the fisherman bait bonus.

use foraging near cars there is a chance you can find keys i have found several so far

Starting skills are much more valuable than they seem on the character creation screen. The xp bonus for 1 point says +75%, but it's actually changing the xp multiplyer from .25 to 1. It's actually a 4x increase for that skill. Each starting point after that is +25%.

You also get XP for discarding when foraging. No need to pick up every single thing if you don't need it.

Currently I’m doing a long term survival game and one tip I have is that spear fishing is good because of its junk items, from what I know shoes are completely useless but socks can be ripped into 2 ripped sheets, if you forage for a tree branch and chipped stone you can make a knife or an axe which are both really useful, knives can be used to sharpen tree branches into spears for weapons or more fishing and the axe is great for chopping down trees to get fire wood for winter or cooking

For first aid i full sprint along hedges tripping over, when you fall over you get scratched and you can scratch the same area repeatedly and bandage for xp every time also you only get scratches from this so all you need are ripped sheets and you're good to go, rather than needing tweezers needle etc for the window technique.

The increase of propane use regarding metalworking could make for some interesting MP economy. Metalworkers trading their skill and expertise for supplies perhaps. Also, regarding the foraging XP, discarding the item will also yield XP :)

About Carpentry, keep in mind that that different objects give different amounts of XP when disassembling. The bigger the better, so try to find places with lots of large furniture, like bookshelves in bookstores or those booth seats in restaurants. Crates in warhouses work pretty well too, just throw all the contents on the ground, disassemble them, then use the planks and nails they produced to build walls, then disassemble the walls, repeat until you run out of materials

Ive been playing single player for the first time the last 6 weeks. Have a fire station in Rose walled off and considering adopting a pet rock for company. Thanks for this guide.

For carpentry, I usually go to the mass genfac co warehouse at the top of muldraugh. Hit the school or book store beforehand, and you can usually hit level 5 or 6 from the whole building. Plus you have water, a bit of food there and a chair to sleep in, so you can easily just post up for a while to grind your carpentry level out. Plus you're getting all that warehouse loot too, which can be machetes, tools, glue, tape, metal and plenty of other stuff too. Edit: A good note on the first aid training, you can queue the removal while you're still doing the other foot. Makes it a lot faster since there's no delay on doing the next foot.

This is so helpful! I didn't even know where to begin with metalworking. The generator tip with electricity was really helpful too. Cheers!

For mechanics and tailoring, it’s faster to use clothing scrap to repair car seats

There's a small thing note about leveling your medical skill the slow healer trait indirectly gives you more experience from tending to your injuries (by making your injuries heal slower you will need to tend to your injuries more which will give you more experience) however the fast healer trait indirectly lowers the experience gain from tending to your injuries (by having your injuries heal faster you need to tend to your injuries less often which means it will lower the amount of experience you will end up with) the ironic thing about this though is even with max level medical skill the slow healer trait still makes it take a certain amount longer than it would have to heal but with max level medical skill and fast healer you will heal most injuries within a few days so long as you used a bandage on it (this basically means if you take fast healer you will gain levels in the medical skill slower but those levels are somewhat better at healing you than without fast healer)

I have waited a long time for this good comprehensive guide, updated for the latest version of the game! Thumbs up!!

For levelling Metalworking: If you plan on making the journey to Louisville, you can disassemble the metal fences at the checkpoint. I'd recommend disassembling only the fences inside the checkpoint so you can keep working and going through the place relatively safely. If you read all the books when hitting the new levels, you can get to around level 6 or 7 in this location alone.

Discarding the item found while foraging still gives you the XP for it, better items (like berries and mushrooms) give way more xp than stuff like sticks and stones.

For cooking, I found that filleting fish and skinning animals gives MASSIVE exp, especially if they weigh a lot/have more nutrition. Much much faster to level up than... actually cooking food.

The full body long johns are also great for working that tailoring. Great Guide!

One extra info for ya'll: There's also an episode/tape of Exposure Survival that gives Carpentry XP, on day 8 at 6PM.

There are some other video tapes that can help increase your skills. Granny Nanni is a video that can help with tailoring, as is the video Tailoring 101, and there is a sock cars video that can help with mechanics a little. There are other videos that can help with a few of your other skills too. I've not done much trapping, but stick traps are easier to make and can be placed many places that the other traps won't work, like in town. I think birds are more numerous and easier to catch, plus you are likely to have worms. You can get worms quickly and easily too. Takes a while to grow cabbages and carrots! Has anyone done a lot of trapping? I'd love to hear about your experiences.

Bonus tips for Fishing: - Between 04:00-06:00 and 18:00-20:00 you get a slight bonus to fishing - Fishing Tackle has a lower base catch chance, but scales better with fishing level. Live bait has a higher base chance, but scales worse. The formula is 10 + fishing_lvl *2.5 for tackle and 20 + fishing_lvl * 1.5 for live bait. Generally if you have live bait on hand, use that. Unless you have fishing 10, then it does not matter.

im currently in a multiplayer game with 2 friends and we were having trouble with some skills, thank you for this

A foraging XP trick I use is just to keep Search Enabled during my daily routine, the chance of finding something is low but if you are walking around anyway then you are getting free XP every time you see something and the chance grows with every level you gain. (Also Free Stuff!)

I've found the quickest way to level up carpentry (alongside books) is to find and disassemble wooden fences. These can be found outside many houses, just make sure to clear the area first!

Something I missed? Find this video useful? Let me know in the comments below!

Re: Electrical leveling, you can and should craft Makeshift Ham Radios for the biggest possible electrical experience. I went from level 8 to 10 in 16 crafts alone, which was insanely fast and the materials which came from (a) dismantling TV/radios (for receiver/transmitter) and (b) dismantling stuff for leveling metalwork to obtain aluminum. Worth noting though I took electrician occupation to level up faster with the exp boost.

Very nice video Mr. Duck, I learned a ton. Love the consistency 👌

A side note for cooking. Foraging and fishing is great for levelling cooking. When you catch teh animals, get a knife and "fillet" them. Then cook them, for massive batches of XP. Furthermore any excess food you can't eat in time, that goes rotten, use compost bins, for two reasons firstly, this will help farming. Second the compost bins will provide worms for use in fishing. It's kind of a "circle of life" thing. Fish>compost>farm>repeat.

What this video neglects to mention, picking a skill at the start gives you a 4 times XP boost. The default XP gain is 25%. One point at the start adds 75% to it, to make 100% XP gain, what's meant to be the default XP gain.

2:09 Another tip! The wood axe is better than the red axe you find typically in the fire stations. It lasts longer for carpentry leveling

Something about foraging. It seems that fatigue effects the search radius. To maximize your radius foaring for food or mats in morning right after you wake you. As you stay awake the search radius goes down to a minimum of 3. At least that's my experience with it

Very descriptive video! Thanks! 👍

Thanks for your guides. Always learn something new. Thumbs up 👍

That house you were doing carpentry in, I've been living in that house most of my games for about a decade now, since build 27

I've not seen anyone mention this before, but dismantling those long store shelves gives a RIDICULOUS amount of xp. To the point where I think it may be bugged. Btw the shelves I'm talking about are like, the ones you find in West Point mechanics. The long ones where most of the store things are (there's more in a store opposite the gas station with a living quarters upstairs)

330hours in and I'm only just realising you can use rotten food at high cooking levels. Great video thankyou sir!

There is Z.Squad episode 3 VHS that gives you one experience tick on Mechanics and Metalworking, not much but still something. Other than that, some Home VHS tapes can also help level up the skills, but they are super rare and can spawn only once per world.

Bit of a tip, starting level 8 in cooking, you can see if food has been poisoned or not. Unsure if handy or not because either you messed up the recipe and added bleach by accident or if someone else is messing with you and trying to kill you. But in a PvE place, you WANT to work together because zombies are a pain already, and in PvP, everyone shoots first, loots later. So the whole poison thing comes as a bit of a redudancy.

If you have a farm set up you can easily max your cooking on just your first crop by making multiple stir-fries with one ingredient and cooking them. This probably is a bit slower than cramming your stir-fry full but it's a lot more resource efficient since you get the same exp from cooking regardless of how many ingredients is in the food. You will need a lot of frying pans though.

here's a tip. you can level up cooking reasonably quicky by fishing for extended periods. filleting the fish and cooking them all at once. i got to level 4 in a few days living in the abandoned buildings next to the lake south of muldraugh. no XP boost or books read!

I tend to play long games with extremely rare loot spawns. With that being said, I tend to go against the grain and skip life and living in the first 9 days altogether so that I can be actually sure I'll have the XP bonuses when I do find the tapes. Even on ER loot, you find those tapes eventually, and it pays off big time. Especially once you already have a few levels in a given skill and then the additional bonuses. It makes the early game harder, but that's a lot of the fun for me. I tend to find a car as soon as I can and go driving around all over the map. So this works really well if you go for the nomad life.

Damn alot of info packed into this video, nice man

Literally grabbed paper and took notes. Thanks duck!

Another way to raise metalwork is with the magazine to make metal sheets, once you reach lvl4 transform all the small sheets into large sheets and vice versa, if my memory serves me correctly it gives you the same experience as dismantling a vehicle but it's faster and does not consume all the propane from the torch

So a tip to level up your farming early on: there are plenty of Seed bearing plants in set spawn locations, mostly in back yards. You might benefit from planning out your trips there before you start the game, using the interactive map found online.

For First aid, you can keep it unsutured and just bandage them to gain health and once you've recovered, you can rinse repeat. Easiest way to powerfarm to level 10

I'm watching this video on repeat at work and it's just as entertaining each time

I usually spend the first 4-5 days ingame speed reading all the skil lbooks I can find and watching Life and Living.

Seriously needed this video for certain skills I've never used even as a veteran.

Carpentry show on Life and Living comes on at noon only the first seven days. On the eighth day it airs at 6pm (18:00 military time) thought it's not worth many XP ticks.

You can loot foraging items by just left-clicking on the item icon. No need to open context menu and click pickup. Saves a click every time.

For foraging, discarding the item rather than picking it up will give the same xp, you just have to interact with it.

Congratulations, very nice video!

So helpful, thank you!

I truly like your videos & wanted to add a critical comment on fishing. You highly recommend using the lure early, however . . . without personal knowledge. . . I have heard it is best to wait until level 4 before using lures as there is a chance that diminishes of losing the lire on a snapped line.

DONT BANDGE A STICHED WOUND, it increases the chance of infection and increases the recovery time by 6 days instead disinfect before stitching and you should be good

you can hold shift and use your mousewheel to skip between zombie loot. you dont need to click every single zombie :)

I didn't know that there was a vhs tape for mechanics, until now. Thanks for the vid

It's grindy af but it awakens something primal inside me 😤

Noise makers can be used to draw zombies away from a area be sure to place it where you want them to be

Thk alot the tips i need :D

Thanks for this!

This is helpful, I will likely come back to it for reference.

New to PZ. And this has been invaluable to me. 😮

This helped out I'm playing ona server with a few friend a and we just had some deaths so getting levels back are going to be faster

Another good thing about leveling mechanics is that when stripping out all of the parts out of a car, all removed parts go straight to your inventory, ignoring your weight restrictions. You can easily exceed your weight cap by 150 or 200 through this, as long as you dont mind taking a bit of damage for being overburdened. If you have the Workshop mod, much of the car parts you remove can be broken down into scrap for extra XP. Makes for easy leveling, just keep the parts which weren't damaged too much from your efforts and break down the rest.

Awesome content!

great guide!

i'm a simple man, i see a zomboid video from atomicduck, i like it

tnaks the was realy help full!

I find with carpentry, along with beds and large dressers, you can disassemble white picket fences to level up your carpentry skill. Paired with the appropriate skill book, your golden…

What i consider the BEST way to get levels of cooking in the early game, aside from shows, is to cook all the boxes of eggs you find. They cook super fast and each egg gives individual xp. And great if you picked underwheight, as 6+ eggs get you to weight increase.

The best way i found to level carpentry is to go to a school, I recommend the Riverside school, and read the skill books and disassemble the cafeteria tables, for some reason they give you a LOT of exp especially when reading the books and you can get to level 10 in just a few days. (granted I was a carpenter and started with some levels already in carpentry.

I think a great change to First Aid would be the ability to perform autopsys or fake medicine on dead zombies. Like training to wrap a bandage around the wounds we inflicted on the dead body so you are prepared for the real case scenario when you are unfornatly injured for real due to a mistake

This is good stuff!

Potential first aid fix: At higher levels, say 8 or above, disinfecting or bleaching any wound from zombies, including bites, within a minute of receiving the wound will prevent you from contracting the virus in exchange for maintaining the sickness buildup and eventual fever which the virus normally provides, having to fight the onset condition of illness as if they had caught a cold. Something like this could turn the worst skill into one of the best. I don't think it would ruin the mortal danger of the game, as there is still a sense of urgency in disinfecting the wound and getting yourself in a position where a nasty cold won't mean your doom. There would also be an incentive to picking the doctor and nurse professions, as they would much sooner be able to reach the life-saving ranks of first aid when compared to other professions.

For those doing tailoring. I've noticed the higher the level the more often you get thread from ripping clothes. So I recommend using the thread you get at lower levels asap so you get that xp faster. Then the thread will start to roll in quicker. Don't forget to right click the thread to consolidate it down! Otherwise it is inventory space wasted.

For electrical skill, you could actually craft a makeshift radio to gain much more exp than repair generator or dismantling. However you will need to read a magazine first.

I guess disassembling every staircase I see isn't as funny to the rest of the server as it is to me.

very good video , only recently started playing online

Kitchen hoods and air fryers are electrical too and give a lot of exp

Stick traps are the most reliable trap imho, i normally use 4. i place bait in the morning, go scavenging and when i come home 5-10 hours later and there's a bird in all of them. I could never really get the box trap to work even if it was half an hours walk away from the base.

8:30 I feels the pain just listen to that Great tips

Best way I found to level tailoring is you make sheet rope out of all the zombie cloths then reclaim the sheets from it cuz it will clean them all then after reclaiming all the sheets make thread out of it, you get 13xp per thread you make as long as you read the book for it, then after you make enough thread you can make I wanna say yarn or something after that and that also give you 13xp per each one made. I had about 78 sheets I made into thread then yarn and I got almost all of level 4 tailoring done with just thos

Cheers for the vid.

You should be able to train first aid skill on corpses. Also, I wish it wasnt first aid, and was instead medicine. I would like to be able to craft some cool medical things from level 6/7 onwards. Things like stimulents, more advanced medicines/drugs, body mods and prosthetics that allow for more customised playstyles on more difficult sandbox settings. Imagine a flamethrower arm. Could also add a new research system to make it more difficult to get your hands on these things.

thank you😁

Good info!

My tips: If you are in Muldraugh for the sake of Farming there are 2 farm plots that begin the game with crops you can harvest for lots of XP. For electric skills the best bet is to disassemble phonebooths, security consoles and computers. You can get XP from the TV shows live and on VHS both so no need to choose. As for Cooking get a bowl and turn everything into a salad or cook all of those insects they really add up. Also, most people don't realize that the books make the higher level gains almost as easy as lvl 1 and 2 because of the multiplyer making them even more important later.