With the new multiplayer patch out (b41.60) this video is no longer accurate unless you are playing on b41.56 which will not be available in the future.

the most chad level you can get is if you choose your traits based on yourself, including negative parts

i can't play without wakeful - Char wake up at 9am and need to sleep at 3pm it's horrible, wakeful makes things a lot closer to reality - wake up at 6 am and goes trough the day doing stuff and get tired around 10 pm - but you can keep pushing it until 3am - (it's the fckng apocalypse, can't you stay awake a little???)

I think skill experience multipliers are severely under-rated. I used to think that slow learner was a good trait because I could just survive for x months and gain skills over time. What I didn't realize (until your videos) is that skill gain becomes so far between skills that it's nearly impossible without multipliers.

With Claustrophobic there's an easy exploit with sleeping. Be outside the bedroom (it's usually a bigger room where panic level drops), right-click bed when panic moodle disappears, step inside bedroom, click sleep. You'll go to sleep even with the highest panic level. You can also use beta blockers or sleeping pills.

The levels you get in carpentry from carpenter don't matter at all. What matters is that you started at +2 so get a 100% boost to gains for carpentry. Halfing the xp you need to get up to t2 rain collectors and stairs matters. Especially since it stacks with books and works on life and living carpentry gains. Using it as my profession and the trait together stacked with fast learner I've hit 10 carpentry before power went out before. Yes I found all the carpentry books, but still.

Outdoorsman is a pretty good trait. being effectively immune to sickness due to weather is pretty useful, especially if you make your permanent base out in the wilderness.

i do like organized as positive trait, where every container has 30% more capacity. it counts for backpacks, car trunks, or crates. so you can store more stuff in your base and transfer more items on your loot runs.

"The rest of the positive traits are uninteresting." Excuse me, sir. I will NEVER make a character without Organized, unless I'm doing some memey challenge playthrough where I deliberately gimp myself. Organized (that +30% storage capacity is incredible), Wakeful/Dextrous (because you're getting so much out of a 2-point trait from each of them) and Fast Learner (because the game is a mindless, tedious slog without it) are hands down the four best traits in the game.

You forgot Construction Worker. Outright starts with +3 Short blunt. Combine that with Strong traits,and find a lead pipe. You'll be mowing down zombies with it

What I feel the game doesn't communicate well, is that base skill gain is 25%. Which means that the skill points 75% skill gain is *huge*. It triples or quadruples (depending on who you ask, I haven't read the code carefully) xp gain.

Minor correction on the Pacifist/Fast Learner combo; It's multiplicative, not additive. so we'll say 1 is the base, 0.75 = -25%, and 1.3 = +30% 1*0.75=0.75*1.3=.975 or 97.5%. So with the combo, you do earn 2.5% less weapon exp, but but you get +30 exp in everything else which seems hella worth it to me

Woah woah woah. Wakeful increases stamina regen? That could most definitely make a difference.

I love cats eye and keen hearing and basically will never make a survivor who doesn't have those traits... they are just amazing so you dont need to have a flashlight to go out at night and can "see" zombies even if they are behind you giving you time to react.

high thrist is free point too, it's way too easy to get water hearty appetite is also pretty much free points because you gonna have to eat more than what your character needs anyway to get enough calories to not go underweight. i also take sleepyhead because nights are dangerous so I spend them by sleeping which means I don't need cat eyes and obviously not wakeful

I would add 8 points to the cost of all occupations since Unemployed starts with 8 points. So mechanics doesn't cost 4 points, it costs 12 points. Otherwise, this is pretty spot on, good job

simple, direct and to the point - just how I like a guide. No bullshtting around, cheers mate

Oh boy, this is a really informative video, thank you dude!

Short sighted is also one I love, because you can completely negate it with glasses. So its really only an issue if you trip and lose the glasses but zombies wearing glasses are pretty plentiful

For long-term survival I take Athletic and Feeble combination. 9 fitness is incredible and 3 strength while being noticeable downside early on, after you find dumbbell or barbell you can exercise for a week and you end up with the default 5 strength and if you have enough food you can even get up to strength 7 in another few weeks. Thanks to having that high fitness you have higher endurance and you can exercise longer = more experience points. Good to combine this with reading skill books and/or farming. Also use up your painkillers on this if you raided your local pharmacy. From agony level of pain you need to consume painkiller 2-3 times to lower the pain in order to continue exercising. This is the only activity in the game that allows you to use them in large quantities so don't consider it a waste. Keep in mind you will need a lot of food and a good bed in a safe location as you will get tired and hungry much faster from all the exercising and you'll be near useless in combat so before you begin, make sure you won't need to leave the safehouse for the next week.

This looks very close to what I run all the time. Good Job!

I've been using inconspicuous+Graceful for positive traits, and I don't know if it's a false positive or not but I find that I do tend to go unnoticed, which paves the way to better lightfooted and sneaking to only further improve my odds. I don't know the percentages, and given they're % chance traits for stealth checks I don't know if you can test them, but if it turns out they're not as good that'll free up points.

Hey, I wanted to ask since you seem to know about this stuff. Can you rate a build of mine? I wanted to get Athletic and Strong in a single build so I stretched pretty thin, but I think I did good. The occupancy I picked was unemployed. The negative traits I picked are: -Thin-skinned (You'll see why in the positives.) -High thirst (Simple enough, even after three months in-game thirst was never an issue with this trait for me.) -Slow healer (I don't know how much of an effect this has because I simply never get sick.) -Underweight (Just eating as much as I can for the first few days easily gets rid of this.) -Hearty Appetite (This actually helps me maintain my weight since it lets me eat more. -Prone to Illness (Again, never got sick so I can't say.) -Weak Stomach (You can swallow kilos of lemon grass to negate this.) -Slow reader (I speed up time when reading books anyway, so doesn't feel like much of a debuff.) And the positives are: -Speed Demon (Has 1 point left so might as well. Noticeably helps with first gear acceleration.) -Dextrous (Like you said, really helps. I'm sure it saved me a hour in real time in total during my very long runs due to how much I move things around.) -Wakeful (Like you've said, the difference is massive.) -Graceful (I play with very high population so more stealth helps a fair bit.) -Eagle Eyed (This, along with Keen Hearing, is what justifies Thin-skinned for me.) -Keen hearing. (This actually makes you see 3-4 tiles behind you and I've yet to be surprised from behind using this.) -Organized (I like to loot. Strong also adds some inventor capacity so you can really haul quite a lot.) -Athletic -Strong (Self-explanatory. I want to avoid the athletic grind.)

Keen hearing lets you see zombies immediately behind you, it's essential

I have been playing with the Better/More/Dynamic Occupations and Traits mods so I'm a little rusty specifically on vanilla traits at this point. However as I've become more proficient with the game, I've reached a new sort of meta on traits/skills occupations. The best positive traits are ones which you effectively cannot replicate through game play. For example gymnast, which is +1 Nimble and +1 Lightfooted, simply allows you to skip over the grinding you'd need to do go get those two skills upped by +1 each. Keen hearing on the other hand, or Cat's eyes: give you character abilities which you cannot gain through game play. With this in mind my favored lists are: Dextrous, Organized, Wakeful, Fast Learner, Keen Hearing, etc.

It is still weird for me to pick my traits in the beginning, because yeah, i can handle most of them, but for the most part there is no way to remove the trait in longer sessions. At least for what i know a smoker can never become a not smoker, even when i spend time and nervs to not smoke for a while. Some Traits can be removed, quite easily to the point that i dont think they should be worth any points. There is also no way to gain traits later in the game. A Lumberjack with the AxeMan trait will always be better than every other job with the axe, even on max level. So i think there should be ways to remove or gain traits as you play, like you can with your weight-traits. Like chop down 1000 tress to gain AxeMan, kill 100.000 zombies to become a veteran and so on... and only give a lot of points for traits that cannot be removed, like shortsighted and way less for traits that can be manipulated.

For me the "best" negative traits are: -Conspicuous(+4), by the way the zombies spot you it doesn't make really a big difference and I usually play with guns so zombies are going to spot me anyway. -High Thirst(+6) I just keep 1 extra bottle. -Pacifist(+4) if you combine it with fast learner you learn so much quicker everything and your xp gained for guns will be 97.5% (almost 100%) -Prone to Illness(+4) I don't usually play enough to get in to the winter but you can easyly contrarest it by just wearing enough clothes. -Short Sighted(+2) Just affects the search radius, if you are gonna search wear glasses. -Slow Healer(+6) I never die form wounds, only for zombification and a broken leg is always a dead game. -Slow Reader (+2) I always play in servers with friends the reading speed is really high so I don't care loosing an extra 10s reading every book. Weak Stomach(+3) just don't eat rotten food. Smoker(+4) once yo get cigarettes its actually op to be able to reduce all stress by just smoking. Thats +35 points easy

Personally, i usually go with wakefull and restles sleeper. I have noticed that with these traits your character takes longer to get sleepy but also sleeps longer. Idk if restles sleeper has other drawbacks but so far it has been working (unless you play with sleep events, i tried it once and it wasnt pleasant). Since restless sleeper is +6 and wakefull is - 2, you will have 4 extra points wich you can use on anything you like.

Your video on Wakeful is pretty much what made me try it and I definitely love it, my guy never gets tired and I go scavenge and fight a lot on my first week. And I'm kinda surprised to not see High Thirst and Lucky mentioned here, most builds I see usually have them, any reason? Maybe you change my mind and the first is too crippling and the second is too useless

Most fun I had was starting with an unemployed, out of shape, alcoholic smoker with no life skills, but starts with a small car, no fuel, an empty gas can and a suitcase of clothes in the boot, stranded by the roadside in the middle of nowhere. Also a mod that turns zombies into sprinters at night.

Burglar with these traits, gymnest, graciful, and inconspicous is a great choice for sneaking around and not wanting zombies finding you.

I can't believe you didn't mention construction worker for that incredible short blunt bonus. Because it does make every hammer a viable weapon and they last forever.

I though the Subscribe notification that popped up was an error when you went to sleep, tripped me out.

I've played with hemophobic once, it was a nightmare. Every now and then I missed a spot of blood on my clothes, go to sleep and as a result I wake up a nervous wreck. Just flat out washing your entire gear after every outing costs so much time.

When I clicked on this vid I was expecting to hear some bs but I found myself agreeing with 95% of things you said. Well done.

people are literally out there writing a whole ass dissertation on a video game mechanics. Love it.

Mechanic doesn't cost 4 points, it costs 12 points and the inability to pick another occupation, since you start out with 8 points.

Good to know some perks I can take to better make a character based on me. Been floating a couple negatives, even with running Severely Underweight (IRL 6'02 and 52 kilo) and slow reader (Dyslexia).

Great video

Thin Skinned is also a good pick. It provides a tiny debuff, and you should be relying on clothes armour and good judgement, not on bare skin. Restless Sleeper is a bit annoying, but you just have to make sure you keep going back to sleep until it says 'not tired' rather than 'can't get back t osleep'. Also worth noting Hemophobic is not really viable anymore too so these are good pickups. And high thirst is obviously an essential, the weight of the extra water on long trips is the only real downside but take more strength with the points if it really bothers you.

2:47 "it gives you the same ability as reading a magazine" Me, who went through and stripped through 3 different cities to find the damn thing, and still no dice - yeah... Real easy to find

Will you be making another of this type of vid for the newer patches?

hunter trait is slept on. 4 skill bonuses of some really good skills like aiming plus knowing the trapping recipes ahead of time. if i want to play a character that will use guns eventually at all i always pick hunter so i get to the good aiming lvls faster

Thanks for this. I've heard conflicting info about permanent handicaps with the weight traits and was wondering if it's true. From what I understand obese/very underweight is -2 fitness that can't be regained...

Organized is very underrated. I love the extra storage. A big bag from 27 to 35 is really huge and and the militairy bag from 28 to 36. Also a trait I never hear people about is unlucky. Its 10% less loot and but its not noticable. I have found sledge hammers in random houses. I have spawned in houses that had like a fire axe in it. The unlucky trait is just free points. Loot is everywhere and if you know roughly where to look you will find everything you want very easy with this trait. Also smoker is my go to. Just make sure you smoke in down time. Also take a smoke before fight or right after eating. The smoking takes some time but its not that big of a deal if you manage it. Sigarettes are everywhere I have found like 700 in a month, and you only need like 2-3 a day so its easy+ lighters and maches are everywhere and you just have to make sure you always have some on you.

Underweight is better than overweight for the points. High thirst is good too, just carry two bottles. I always take the one's you first mentioned. Engineer is my fav profession, because you can build traps that there are no mags for, and eventually (with some elec. grinding lvl6) make battery connectors to make battery powered lamps. Pipe and fire bombs are awesome too! Have been trying hemophobic since I usually clean myself regularly, can cause some probs tho. Now I skip it and never clean 🤘🏻

If i can sugest biger hunger and thirst are free skill points in long term. Shure it can be a pain in ass first 3 days, but soon as you secure sorce of food and water you are set. The same slowl reader, difrence with slowl reader and with out it is minimal for me.

Because the park ranger gets double XP for foraging with the master foraging book read it is a 32x experience gain. I leveled up from the start of level 9 all the way to level 10 in about 5-6 minutes of foraging in the woods.

Hope you make a new one like this soon!

high thirst in must-have

Last build I used Graceful and Inconspicuous. I couldn't notice a difference

Since fitness and strength are the hardest things to level, you can honestly forget about any other perks besides maintenance. The other levels will come eventually, which usually leads to me going burger flipper for the cheap maintenance point and then str + athletic, and no underweight/overweight. The loss of that fitness point just is not worth it. Sure it might be nice to have graceful for leveling those traits, but I have had no issues avoiding zeds even with full conspic and clumsy when I chose those for dump stats. If anything, it saves having to press Q to lead zombies into another block or some trees. Ive recently started to not take hemophobic and started to take hard of hearing instead simply because I was tired of the loss of damage/xp gain from melee when my character got super anxious about the deluge of blood covering me at all times and did not want to waste the water on constantly cleaning myself. If you get run up on by a zombie and need a larger perception radius to save you, you are not being vigilant enough. Back attacks are death and you should always be aware of your surroundings. Same concept for damage/xp loss goes for claustrophobic or the other one, but I am well aware that the issues with that go away after the first few months and you can always pop some beta blockers if you need to fight in the location you are weak in. I simply like getting into the meatgrinder and not having to worry about my character imploding from either going outside or walking into a room. Fast learner is pretty much a must and pacifist is an easy 4 points since you can always spend more time bashing a zombie down with the bonus for maintenance keeping the weapons in good condition. I usually start my run with metal pipes or bars due to the durability and before ive even broken two or three i usually am well on my way into maintenance 3. I understand that this combo means something like 93% xp for weapons, but that is a small price to pay when you are already getting full xp values for the only really important weapon skill and the 2 point cost equivalent is amazing considering the bonus you get to the other skills. My next run I am probably going to take wakeful instead of outdoorsman since I consider that a must and want to try other options, but I honestly like the bonus of not having to care about the weather all too much. Speed demon is a trap however. You really do not need the speed unless you are planning on running over hordes and will most likely result in you smacking into a roadblock you only had a few seconds to comprehend was there. I have never tried smoker, and it could honestly be a simple way to get 4 points, but you might as well take high thirst for an option that will automatically take care of itself rather than a trait that requires you to go into your inventory to mess around with a tar stick and a lighter. Clean water is not hard to come across and provided you find literally any metal water container, you can drink water from anywhere. There are lakes or rivers near most towns now. (After reading other comments I have seen organized get mentioned over and over. Build more boxes. Get another freezer. I can see this trait being useful if you plan to live out of your car, but for carrying supplies simply get another bag into your secondary. Half of my loot runs in my current life, I am coming back with a pipe in one hand and a duffel bag in the other. 6 points is a lot for such a miniscule gain. Id rather take lucky and cats eyes for those points. Although, I have not looked up the lucky perk since I started playing way back when and I don't know if its the end all be all it used to be anymore, but it just makes me feel... Lucky)

I like herbalist for certain runs just because I've had terrible luck trying to find the magazine, or because I'm going to need foraging before I'll even get a chance to look for it.

Fun fact:underweight removes one fitness and gives 6 points, and fit cost 6 points while giving 2 fitness. Underweight is the only weight trait that doesn't limit fitness/strength traits Also lumberjack gang

i personally refuse to step outside without inconspicuous

for me shortsighted isnt really that bad. you still can see zombies distance away that you can still avoid

i still remember old time, getting Cowardly + Claustrophobic + Agoraphobic as debuff. and Adrenaline Junkie with lot of fitness... it really make the character run insane fast= = on some server u dont require sleep so this build was broken

after your latest video, do you still recommend using lumberjak?

Really? No High Thirst? That always seemed like the easiest 6 points of my life.

Burger flipper is another notable profession imo, even if only for the bonus maintenance xp gain, with little cost

i can agree that smoker is easy to manage with few drawbacks but damn smoker is such an annoying trait to deal with

What about organized? I think it is a really good trait since literally every container gains extra space for the whole game, which can stack up for every container, backpack, trunk etc that you might use.

Short Sighted may also be a good trait. You will likely to know when a zombie is near by just hearing. And even if you can't see so far, you see far enough to spot zombie.

i tend to always pick smoker and alcoholic with that better traits mod. they are both easily managed and i've never really had to ration the good/bad stuff. cat eyes and dexterious are my go to perks, but ever since you showed it off restful is gonna be my go to perk now. i once tried restless sleeper...what a nightmare.

just started to play and i was so tired of watching videos which explain stuff so slowly and vaguely. You my guy are the best there is: All skill explained, best build and what you could do in under 4 min.

I'm surprised that u didn't mentioned lucky. It's so cheap and useful. Also I like using the +10 underweight thing with the -6 athletic one. Since they both cancel it other it's just +4 points (I personally prefer being slim at the beginning since it's much easier to become more fat than the other way around).

Lucky unlocks an entirely unique item pool that players without said trait will never have access to.

Claustrophobic is a really funny trait to have in multiplayer. My friends made a SMP & we have about 8 guys on a rural farm. They all have rooms in the farmhouse & I live in the barn. While they go out to towns on looting runs, I spend my time; Foraging, cooking, trapping, cutting trees down & upgrading carpentry. Highly recommended.

Even though this contradicts the video, I find herbalist useful, since it's complete rng if you find the magazine, and i think it's one of the rarer ones. Also it let's you begin foraging for, and identifying, berries day one, without risk. Which can be knowledge preserved for the rest of the run if you don't just do a fresh save when you die.

Pacifist makes it impossible to level spears.

Weak full can be a really pain in ass if you plan to level up your fitnes and strenght. Like you said its increas time you need to recover from traning. As result you train more faster, its good right? No as result you can reach point when half of next day you are in agony and cant work at muscel, as result your progres is slower.

I can't play without organized and fast learner anymore.

idk high thirst and high hunger are kind of easy to manage too, there is a lot you can take advantage of

just an idea idk if this works because i dont have the game but if you pick cowardly, claustrophobic, agorophobic, hemophobic then you can get veteran to negate it for like 5 points

my current character who has slow learner, homephobic, high appetite, and high thrist (among others) ive made... questionable choices

Thanks. Ive been taking herbalist not knowing you can just read a magazine for the same benefits

Hey I remember people always saying that its not worth it to take *Desensitized* or *Brave* because eventually in game given enough time or kill enough zombies and you'll be inmune to panic, is that true? I never thought it actually works like that, at best I think your character just recovers from panic moodles faster. There always has been misinformation about panic, I think cowardly actually makes it so you never recover faster from the panic moodle. You wanna test that out?

Could you test broken leg healing speed with slow healer vs fast healer?

Disorganised reduces your inventory space, but then again strenght xp goes up while carrying more than 50% weight and there is a lot of space on the ground. How about that hunter postive trait though ?

Repairman is great for both solo and multiplayer. Maintenance, carpentry and short blunt are excellent. Short blunt easiest wep to find but gimped without proficiency, Life and Living shows need to be combined with Carpentry skill and/or book to be effective (plus limited window to do that before power goes out, and difficulty of being able to watch TV at exact times of day early game) and Maintenance is an under-appreciated skill that makes those rare weps and repairs last longer.

I managed to eat myself from very uw to just uw, but I remain at three fitness. So I got more melee damage and less tripping chance, but my fitness remains low?

What if I take Herbalist because I want to make a wildman build and I keep getting unlucky with finding herbalist magazines?

I dunno if this is from dynamic trait mod or vanilla but smoker is basically run killer in ccda or six month later if u don't get lucky with cigarettes early.. since being anxious make u drench and ur cold will only got worse..

Wakeful is just too good to be true. I almost never get tired even when doing tiring tasks.

oh, my I almost take athlethe and underweight together. thank for your vid

Player made bases don't trigger claustrophobic trait (at least in the 40. Version)

What do you think of outdoorsman?

No one seems to be mentioning this but you can drink some alcohol before bed to reduce your panic (not the best idea irl lol)

with claustrophobic all you need is 1/4 of any alcoholic drink to be able to sleep the night in any sized room. raid a bar or liquor store, take a bunch of bourbon and wine, pour it into a tumbler or wine glass, and drink 1/4 of your drink per night. sleeping pills and beta blockers also work

I don't like the smoking trait. It means from the start of the game to the end you always need to worry about: Having cigarettes on you, having a lighting method, looting & storing those items, and having to smoke. And even though they are light, they still add some weight. That entire trait feels like a shore, a shore that I can never escape.

I started this game a few weeks ago and when i first made my character i said "naaaa" and made myself the borgar man with good eyes

Basically glass canon traits since you're already a glass cannon. And faster learning / xp and time skills.

I always try to incorporate Inconspicuous too, 50% to not be seem by zombies is a bonus that you cannot get ingame.

Does cat eyes work in pitch black with no power? From what I can tell, its effect is similar to real life where your eyes adjust to darkness - the caveat is that if there is absolutely no light (I.e. no moon out and no stars visible) our eyes have nothing to adjust to. So my question is basically. Is Cats eyes useless without light, given the fact that it seems to be a light multiplier, and you can’t multiply by 0?

Does "desensitized" from the Veteran profession make the panic from claustrophobic void?

With claustrophobic you can also sleep in cars to avoid being panicked.

If you set most loot to ultra rare, and also avoid lucky, and also have a very difficult playthrough, Herbalist can be ok.

I like outdoorsman cause i hate having to just stay inside when it rains. Other than that and wakeful i just try and get as much str and fitness as i can because i hate trying to level those. Every time i get to a point in a game where i try and really commit to leveling them i always get bored and stop playing.

imo construction worker is the most overpowered profession, having 3 short blunt points in the start helps a lot since you find short blunt weapons pretty much everywhere (tool cabinets, garages, kitchens, sheds, etc.) (keep in mind you get the 125% XP bonus), combine this with fast learner and brave (panic reduces crit chance) you will be one hitting zombies constantly with hammers or pipes and it doesn't take much time to get short blunt lvl. 7 (thats when it starts to get really OP) + since the short blunt weapons are one handed you will have a free hand to carry screwdrivers (dismantle watches and other electronics) or carry a suitcase (best handheld bag in the game)

wait, are you sure axe man makes you deal more damage? i thought it was just increased swing speed?