The 8 Best Negative Traits In Project Zomboid

Project Zomboid offers thousands of combinations to alternate your character and playstyle to fit your ideal zombie apocalypse scenario and survive just one more day than your previous run. The main way Project Zomboid offers in-depth customization is with traits that significantly improve or weaken your character.

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With each trait costing or granting you points, you will have to pick some negative traits in order to gain positive ones, which can feel like shooting yourself in the foot with some of the options. Although some negative traits are downright killer, a handful can be easily worked around or might not even be considered negative at all.

1

Slow Reader

Slow Reader is a simple trait that slows down your reading speed. This may seem like a straight time-waster at first, but considering that you can simply fast-forward in singleplayer means you will only have to wait marginally longer to get the skill boost effect.

However, this trait may not be good for multiplayer, as you can’t fast-forward, so make sure that server settings have reduced reading times before you take this trait. Also, taking a little longer to read means you can sit in front of TVs and replay VHS tapes or watch Life and Living to grind skill points.

2

Smoker

With the smoker trait, your character will have to smoke cigarettes every few in-game hours or become stressed, which can raise unhappiness and slightly reduce your weapon damage. These negative effects do not exist as long as your character has access to cigarettes.

Unless you modify the loot to be extremely rare, you will not have trouble finding hundreds of cigarettes and more than a few lighters and matches to light them. This trait only becomes a problem for very long-lived characters, as lighters and matches become a pain to loot for.

With the Smoker trait, your character also loses a bit of unhappiness from smoking.

3

Short Sighted

Short Sighted is another negative trait with an easy solution to reduce its negative effects, the effect being it reduces your foraging radius permanently. However, as long as your character is wearing glasses, this trait is simply negated and allows you to return to normal.

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The downside to this trait is that sometimes your glasses can fall off when attacked by a zombie and force you to find a new pair if they become lost, which is hardly a problem that isn’t worth two points. Since all eyewear reduces foraging radius by a minuscule amount, don’t pick this trait if you want to focus on foraging the whole game.

4

Weak Stomach

Weak Stomach is a trait that will give you a 100 percent chance of becoming ill while eating rotten or raw food. While illnesses in Project Zomboid can certainly kill you, the easiest way to avoid food illness is to just not eat rotten or uncooked food.

Even if there is extremely rare loot on your server, you can get around this by fishing and cooking your catch. It’s rare in a normal playthrough to ever be forced to eat rotten food, so Weak Stomach can be considered free points with the knowledge that you really shouldn’t scarf down that moldy piece of cheese.

5

Prone To Illness

Prone to Illness technically has two negative traits, the main one being that it will be more likely for your character to catch a cold, and it will be worse when they do. This can be combated the normal way you avoid colds, by keeping warm with the right clothes and a nearby fire or car heater.

If you take the Outdoorsman trait, you can completely negate being prone to the cold while still keeping two positive trait points. The other effect of Prone to Illness is that you become a zombie faster, which kills you either way, so the speed at which it kills you hardly matters.

6

Conspicuous

Conspicuous makes it 100 percent more likely for zombies to spot you visually. While this sounds like an awful trait to have, it works for two reasons. The first is that the way stealth works in Project Zomboid, zombies will almost always visually spot you within a second anyway.

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Second, this doesn’t increase the view cone or distance of zombies, meaning that you will still have to use the same stealth strategies as normal. The only time this trait can really hurt you is if you walk past a window a zombie already happens to be looking through and spots you.

Conspicuous does not make it easier for zombies to hear you, meaning your Stealth skill will still benefit you.

7

Thin-Skinned

Compared to other negative traits which have an easy workaround, Thin-skinned might give you a little more pause, but the eight positive trait points are worth it. Mostly, Thin-skinned makes it easier for your character to get scratched, bitten, or lacerated by trees and zombies.

Avoiding cuts from trees is a non-issue, as it will only be a problem when escaping a horde at full sprint. With zombies, the additional chance is a small percentage of a small percentage to avoid bites and scratches, meaning you will already be prioritizing not getting hit in the first place.

Outdoorsman can be taken to reduce cuts from trees and bushes, still giving you six positive trait points.

8

Hard Of Hearing

Of all the negative traits, hard of hearing is the only one you can’t escape with easy solutions or an alternate playstyle, it simply makes the game a little harder. It does this by muffling all noises you hear from any source without outright making you deaf.

However, this trait isn’t enough to get you killed outright, as you can still hear when zombies are on the other side of doors, when house alarms go off, or when the helicopter arrives. Unless you are on an active Discord call or are listening to music full blast, you shouldn’t be caught by surprise too often.