Easter eggs and secrets in Project Zomboid

Spiffo the raccoon is the mascot of the game and of The Indie Stone. He is older than Project Zomboid: he comes from PAWS, an earlier Indie Stone game about woodland animals, and was added there because the team wanted a Canadian character. When the artist was drawing tiles for a fast food chain, she reused him as its mascot, and Spiffo's was the result. The studio says nods to its other games are scattered through Project Zomboid, and Spiffo is the most obvious.

PZwiki lists Spiffo's restaurants in Muldraugh, West Point, Riverside, Rosewood, Dixie and the Crossroads Mall food court (one source). That list was written for Build 41, so the larger Build 42 map may hold more. Things to look for:

• Spiffo suit. A head, body and tail. In Build 42 the pieces come from a very rare mascot zombie in Spiffo's zones, not from containers, and the head is only on the zombie half the time (one source). It is a collectible: the head cuts vision and hearing and the body slows running. See clothing.
• Spiffo plushie and Big Spiffo. Junk items with no use, found at low odds in bedrooms, closets, daycares and Spiffo's kitchens, and as a very rare foraging find (one source).
• "kirrus" graffiti. Painted on the back fence of the West Point Spiffo's, for the studio's system administrator (one source).

Knox Country is built on the real area around Fort Knox and Louisville in northern Kentucky. Muldraugh, West Point, Valley Station and Louisville are real places, and Dixie takes its name from the real Dixie Highway. Rosewood and Riverside are invented. Street plans are the game's own, so use the map page to navigate, not a road atlas. Fort Knox is named in media and flavor text but is not a playable base on the default map.

Bob "Baldspot" Smith and his wife Kate were the leads of the original tutorial story, 'Til Death Us Do Part. Bob nursed Kate's broken leg, boarded up a house and faced a raider, who gave him the nickname. The story and its NPCs were removed in 2013 with RC 2.9. They still turn up today:

• The main menu shows Bob tending Kate, then a lightning flash shows him zombified.
• The game's modding documentation lists a random house story named for Kate and Baldspot. What the scene contains was not confirmed for this page.
• A Bob outfit exists and can be spawned in debug mode (one source).

The wider background is on the lore page.

Rows marked as one source rest on a single wiki or guide page.

The same wiki list names more Louisville shops after staff, among them Zac's Hardware, Cafe d'Eris, The Blue Fox, Beever's nightclub and Tim's Bakery and graffiti tags such as NasKo and RingoD (one source). Rare T-shirts carry The Indie Stone logo, and one lunchbox design shows a developer's face (one source).

The game drops small scripted scenes into the world when an area first loads. They differ in every save, so no map can mark them.

The modding documentation may predate Build 42, and newer scenes may exist. Wedding and picnic scenes are often mentioned by players, but none of the lists read for this page names them, so they are left out of the table.

Opinion Stories are worth a stop. A barricaded safehouse or a table kit can hand you tools early. Crash wrecks cannot be driven and will hurt you if you hit them at speed. Fixed pileups, such as the one between Rosewood and Muldraugh, are part of the map and not stories.

In-game media is full of invented shows. Retail tapes in Build 42 include The Dog Goblin and its sequels, Home Invaders 2: Lost in Louisville, Ghoul Stoppers, Cyberkiller 2: Redemption Road, The Thompsons and Operation Fort Knox. Several titles read like nods to real films and shows, but no source used here confirms which, so this page does not pair them up. The full list is on the TV and VHS page.

• Dog Goblin II. A lore tape: the lone survivor of the first film travels to an Alpine village where locals speak of "der Hundekobold". Each line watched lowers boredom (one source).
• The Moderators. A TV series named after a forum moderation mistake that once made a user an admin (one source).
• TURBO TV. A channel named for developer TurboTuTone (one source).
• The conspiracy tape. A home VHS that talks about a restricted zone near Rosewood whose staff leave before the town wakes (one source).
• Radio adverts. A Spiffo's ad for the bacon upgrade ends with "Unleash the Bacon", and KnoxTalk callers suggest the chain's meat is tied to the infection (one source).
• Hidden stations. One guide lists 91.2 (a survivor's daily diary), 107.6 (a quarantine zone account on day 3) and 95.0 (numbers that convert to Fort Knox coordinates) (one source).

Tuning and equipment are covered on the radio page.

The secret base is the Military Research Facility, hidden in the woods west of Rosewood. No in-game map marks it. You reach it by dirt roads with dead-end branches, so take a full tank and supplies. It is packed with zombies.

In Build 41 the site was surface buildings plus an elevator that went nowhere, which hinted at lower levels. Two Build 42 sources agree that the facility now has underground research levels reached by a stairwell, in line with the new basement system. One guide describes it as an upside-down tower of 17 floors with labs, barracks and a morgue (one source). Another warns that floor counts can change between patches.

Routes and loot are on the military bases page, and other additions are on the Build 42 page.

Not confirmed: no source read for this page describes the garden gnome, so it is not in the table. No new Build 42 easter egg could be confirmed apart from the facility's underground levels and the mascot zombie rules for the Spiffo suit.