Loot respawn in Project Zomboid

No, not by default. Every official Build 42 preset ships with Hours for Loot Respawn set to 0, which means respawn is off. Once you empty a cabinet, it stays empty for the rest of the save. Zombies follow their own rules, covered in zombie respawn, and the two systems are set separately.

You can turn loot respawn on when you create a world in custom sandbox, or by editing the sandbox file of a server. It is a blunt tool: it only refills certain containers, and several rules quietly stop it. Read the conditions below before you rely on it. For the full sandbox menu, see sandbox settings, and for the presets themselves, game modes.

Build 42 controls loot respawn with four settings on the Loot page of the sandbox menu. The defaults below are the same in all presets, according to both a preset-file listing and a Build 42 respawn guide.

Build 41 also had a Loot Respawn dropdown with choices such as Every Day, Every Week and Every Month. In Build 42 the hours field is the setting that matters, and the dropdown does not appear in the preset listings we checked. Some hosting guides still mix the two up, or confuse the old dropdown with loot rarity, so trust the hours value. One host guide gives the max items default as 4, which looks like the older Build 41 value.

Turning on the timer is not enough. A container only refills when all of these are true:

• It is in a town or trailer park zone. The in-game description limits respawn to those zone types, so a farmhouse cupboard out in the country may never refill.
• It has been looted at least once. An untouched container is not part of the cycle.
• It holds fewer items than the max items value. With the default of 5, a box you left 5 junk items in will not refill. Empty it fully if you want it back.
• Nobody has been nearby recently, if the seen hours setting is above 0. Players report that the zone is larger than a single house, so leaving town for a while is the safe way to reset it.
• No one has built or barricaded in that zone, while construction prevention is on. This is why your base and any house you barricaded stop refilling.

Players report that respawn happens when the area loads, so you generally need to leave and come back before you see new items. Respawned loot is rolled from the normal loot tables for that room, so a kitchen still gets kitchen items. For where the good rooms are, see loot locations.

Build 42 replaced the single loot slider with a separate multiplier for each category, each from 0 to 4. A higher number means more of that category spawns. Respawned loot is rolled from the same tables, so expect stingy settings to give stingy refills too. The official presets set these values, shown here for the main categories. Two sources agree on these figures.

Other categories include non-perishable food, literature, recipe resources, survival gear, mechanics, clothing, bags, keys, media, mementos, cookware and farming. One listing also shows a fifth preset, Six Months, with 0.6 in every category (one source).

The dropdown names map to tier factors. One source gives Insanely Rare 0.05, Extremely Rare 0.2, Rare 0.6, Normal 1, Common 2 and Abundant 3 (one source). Another guide calls 0.6 Normal, so sources disagree on which label 0.6 carries. Either way, the number is what the game uses.

Yes, slowly, on most presets. Build 42 has a diminished loot setting that cuts how much new loot spawns as days pass. It ramps up to its maximum over a set number of days. A second pair of settings makes it more likely that a building you enter has already been looted by other survivors.

These figures come from one preset listing (one source); a second guide confirms that Extinction turns diminished loot off and that Apocalypse uses a rural multiplier of 0.5. On Apocalypse, the 20 percent cut builds up over ten in-game years, so you will barely notice it in a normal game. The looted-building chance matters more, because it climbs over the first 90 days and affects buildings you have not yet opened.

On a dedicated server the same keys live in the sandbox file, named after the server, for example servertest_SandboxVars.lua. Stop the server before editing it. See hosting a server for where the files sit.

• Safehouses: the server setting SafehousePreventsLootRespawn is on by default, so a claimed safehouse never refills (one source).
• Shared timer: with many players, the seen hours rule can stop busy towns from refilling at all. Admins often leave it at 0 or keep it short.
• Changing mid-save: server admins can raise the hours value on a running world when it gets thin. Players report that this takes effect without a wipe, but test it on your own server.

For group play in general, see multiplayer.

Opinion For a solo or co-op game meant to last a year or more, these choices work well:

1. Keep respawn off and plan to produce. Loot is a head start, not an income. Shift early to farming, fishing, trapping and foraging.
2. If you want respawn, make it slow. A value between 168 hours (one week) and 720 hours (about a month) keeps scavenging worth doing without flooding the map. Set max items to 5 or higher and seen hours to 0 or a day.
3. Raise only the categories you fear running out of. Medical and ammo are the usual pain points. Bumping them to 1.0 does more than lifting everything.
4. Set diminished loot to 0 if you plan to play for years and want the late game to match the early one.
5. Leave towns unbuilt. Put your base outside the town zones you plan to farm for loot, or construction prevention will stop those zones refilling.

Whatever you choose, store what you find. The storage guide covers keeping a big stockpile organized.