Best FPS settings for Project Zomboid

Though it might not look like it at a glance, Project Zomboid is actually a very performance-hungry game. This is all bound to change once Build 42 comes out (on top of improving graphics), but in the interim, getting the best FPS settings nailed down is a big chore.

That’s where this article comes into the picture, of course. If you’re sick and tired of having a shoddy performance in Project Zomboid and want to do something about it, you’re in the right place. Down below, I’ve assembled as comprehensive of a list of performance tips, tweaks, and improvements I could vouch for, and they’re practically guaranteed to help you out in some way, shape, or form.

The thing to keep in mind is that mods can and will affect your performance to some extent in this game. The specifics of these problems go beyond anything this guide can help you out with, and I recommend referring to the mods’ specific developer pages for assistance. The mods featured on our best-of list should cause you no problems, however, so don’t worry about those!

How to improve performance in Project Zomboid

Whereas the majority of modern games have a fairly standardized and sensible graphics settings menu to go off of, Project Zomboid is in a category of its own. The bit to understand is that lowering your resolution, for example, won’t do much at all to improve how the game runs. In most cases, Project Zomboid is CPU-bottlenecked, and so unless you’ve got a really, really low-end graphics card, you’re going to want to focus on CPU problems for the most part.

You’re going to want to open the in-game options menu and choose the very first “Display” tab. Here’s what I recommend you tweak to get the best FPS settings for Project Zomboid:

• Set the “Screen Mode” option to full screen
• Texture Compression: ON
• Double-sized Textures: OFF
• Wind effects on Sprites: OFF
• Blood Stains: OFF (anything related to gore gets out of hand in this game quickly if you crank it up high enough)
• Corpse Shadows: OFF
• Lighting Quality: Very Low
• Dynamic Sky: OFF
• Show 3D Objects: OFF (but only if you’re at the extreme low-end hardware spectrum; this massively reduces the game’s visual quality)
• Zoom: 150% at the maximum

On top of tweaking these settings accordingly, I also recommend creating custom survival scenarios that won’t overburden your rig. The two most important settings by far have to do with zombie population sizes and the corpse decay timer.

Generally, you’re going to want to reduce the zombie population size to a reasonable minimum, and it may take some trial and error before you figure out just how small you want your hordes to be. Obviously, crank them down low enough and you won’t be finding many zombies at all. Yet, the more zombies the game has to keep track of, the harder it will be to run, so give this a shot for sure.

Similarly, corpses are functionally dynamic storage items that change over time (via decay) and stress your machine further still. This is why you’re also going to want to make corpse decomposition a fair bit faster than it is by default so that the game doesn’t have to keep track of too many bodies/decals all at once. Conversely, this also means you may lose out on some loot, but it’s a give-and-take.

With all of that out of the way, if you’re still having problems with Project Zomboid I wouldn’t fret too much. Build 42 is on the horizon in closed beta testing, and it’s getting some rave “reviews” already. The simple truth is that, as of Build 41, Project Zomboid is a fairly janky and unoptimized piece of software with a questionable rendering pipeline. The developer Indie Stone is delivering some monumental improvements in this regard with B42, so I highly recommend revisiting the game after that comes out. As for when exactly that might happen, however… we’ll just have to wait and see.