Starting locations in Project Zomboid

Build 42 has 11 starting regions, all in Knox Country. Four are offered in every game mode. The other seven only appear when you start a Custom Sandbox game, or on a server whose host has enabled them. This is a change from Build 41, which had the four classic towns only. Louisville is not a starting choice in either build.

Sources disagree on one point. Three guides list Echo Creek as Custom Sandbox only, while one presents it next to the classic four without that note. Check the town list on your own new-game screen before you plan a run. The screen now shows a map of Knox Country, so you can see where each town sits. Brandenburg, Irvington and Ekron are the towns The Indie Stone announced as new for Build 42, and Echo Creek is also new to the map.

You choose the town, not the building. The game then places you inside one house from a fixed list for that town.

• In the four classic towns the list is long and depends on your occupation. One guide counts 113 possible houses in Muldraugh, 108 in West Point and 79 in Riverside across the standard occupations (one source). A character with no occupation uses a separate unemployed list.
• Rosewood is the exception among the classic four, with only two houses in practice (one source).
• Each sandbox-only town has a single spawn house (one source), so the start there is the same every time.

Nothing else about the start is promised. The house may be empty or occupied, the street may be quiet or busy, and a car outside is never guaranteed. Zombie placement in Build 42 also depends on the world seed, so the same town can feel different between saves. Plan your first week around the town, and treat the house as a place to check the map and leave.

Guides give no zombie counts per town. Every density rating on this page is relative, at the same population setting.

Rosewood is the quiet one. It is compact, with a fire department and police station close together and the prison outside town. Commercial and industrial loot is thin, and there is no river, so plan water storage early. Suggested bases are the fire department, a secluded house east of town, and the Fossoil gas station on the north edge.

Riverside has a low to medium population and sits on the Ohio River, which solves water and fishing. Loot is food, basic tools and a large warehouse. The gated suburbs east of town are the usual base pick. It is the most remote of the four.

Muldraugh is the central town on the main highway. Loot leans toward tools and warehouses, with the McCoy Logging yard to the north and Cortman Medical in town. Population is medium, and noise on the main street pulls groups quickly. There is no river.

West Point has the densest loot of the four, including a gun shop, a large police station and the GigaMart, and the heaviest crowds. The river houses on the edge of town are the quieter base option. It is the closest standard start to Louisville.

Echo Creek is farm country in the southwest, with low population and limited loot. It has a water tower, a river near the Gas 2 Go station, Ovo Farms for chickens, and a gun store well outside town. A festival area west of the main street is reported to hold a generator.

Ekron is a small town on the far west edge. A wrecked train blocks the main street and leaves one road linking the two halves. It has a gun store, a pharmacy and a steelworks that suits metalwork. Guides disagree on difficulty: one rates it low, another medium to hard.

Brandenburg is a large river town in the northwest, partly wrecked by a tornado. It has many points of interest, including a detention center, a clinic and a military blockade. One guide compares its crowds to Louisville (one source). All sources rate it hard.

Irvington sits in the far southwest near a speedway. It combines a gun store, a hardware store, a farm supply store and cattle farms, which suits livestock runs. Ratings range from medium to hard.

Fallas Lake is a small lakeside settlement between Riverside and Rosewood with few shops. March Ridge is an apartment-heavy community south of Muldraugh. Valley Station is in the northeast on the road toward Louisville, with a mall area, strong loot and higher risk.

Distance is a straight line from each town center to the center of Muldraugh, in thousands of map tiles, worked out from one guide's coordinates (one source). Roads are longer. Use it to judge how far a start is from the middle of the map, where the highway leads north to Louisville.

A river, lake or pool keeps supplying water after the taps stop, but that water is tainted and must be boiled before you drink it. More loot spots for each town are on the loot locations page.

Opinion First run: Rosewood. It is in every mode, it is the quietest of the standard four, and the fire and police stations are close enough to reach on day one. Its weak point is water, so fill containers before the shutoff. Riverside is the second choice if you want the river. In Custom Sandbox, Echo Creek is quieter still, but its thin loot teaches less about looting a town. The beginner's guide covers the first day.

Opinion Challenge: West Point or Brandenburg. West Point is the hard start available without sandbox, with the best loot and the most zombies. Brandenburg adds distance: it is about as far from the central highway as a start gets, and the tornado damage breaks up escape routes.

Opinion Co-op: Muldraugh. A group needs many houses to loot, room for a shared base and short drives in every direction, and Muldraugh's long spawn list still puts everyone in the same town. Riverside works for a calmer group. Sandbox-only towns have one spawn house, so a host who enables one starts the whole group in the same spot. Server spawn options are covered in multiplayer and sandbox settings.