Field Manual

01 / Getting in

One address, one password, no application.

In Project Zomboid, hit Join → Internet and search for BADLANDS, or use Favourites → Add server and paste the address above. Favourites is more reliable — the public browser depends on Steam's list and occasionally lies about who's online.

Your first connection will download the server's mods automatically. It's ten items and a couple of minutes; don't kill the client because the progress bar sits still for a while.

02 / The deal

You are playing a survivor. That survivor is not you.

They get tired, frightened and stupid. They make decisions at 3am on no sleep with a fever coming on. The best stories on this server come from those limits working against the player holding the mouse.

• You won't always win. You'll get bitten, robbed, cornered. That's the server working, not breaking.
• Take the L when the L makes sense. Three armed people want your bag — give them the bag. Bags are replaceable; forty hours of skills aren't.
• Fear is the genre. Nobody in a zombie film sprints into a horde to prove a point. They back off and leave the loot.
• Dying well beats surviving boringly. Nobody tells the story about six weeks indoors eating tinned peaches.

03 / Your first night

The first two hours decide whether you get a character or an anecdote.

1. Get off the main road. Spawn towns are picked over and busy. Walk until the houses thin out.
2. Walk, don't run. These are fast shamblers — quicker than the classic shuffle and quite capable of catching you in the open. Hold Shift to move quietly.
3. Curtains, then doors. Close the curtains before you put a light on. You won't be sleeping — sleep is switched off on this server, so night is for staying still, not skipping ahead.
4. Find a bag first. Inventory space is the real early-game upgrade, not weapons. You spawn with matches, a bandage, a full water bottle, a notebook and a pen — nothing else.
5. Eat and drink before you're desperate. Fridges still work while the power's on. That won't last.
6. Do not fire a gun. Not on day one. Every zombie within a very generous radius is now walking towards you and they do not get bored.

04 / Building a character

Build for the story you want, not the stat line.

Character creation gives you 40 free points on top of the usual budget, so you don't have to gut your character with negative traits to afford anything. Build the person you want to play. A few things still matter more here than in single-player:

Give them a name that isn't a joke, and decide one thing about them before you spawn — where they were when it started, and who they're looking for. That's enough to roleplay from.

05 / Death

Respawning as yourself is switched off. When you die, that person is gone.

No corpse run, no skill recovery, no "my character survived somehow". You make someone new, and that someone knows nothing — not your base, not your stash, not the name of whoever killed you.

You're welcome to make the new character related to the old one — a brother, a friend from the same town — but they arrive with no knowledge the old one had. That's the rule that makes permadeath mean anything.

06 / Safehouses

Claim what you use. Defend what you claim.

The safehouse system lets you claim a building and add other players to it, so the server knows whose home is whose. You can claim from your first day, but residential buildings only — no warehouses, shops or factories. Claim the place you actually live in, not eleven buildings you'll never visit.

• Loot inside is shared with everyone on the claim. Choose housemates accordingly.
• A claim is not a locked door. Trespassing is allowed — the claim records whose house it is, it doesn't keep anyone out.
• Go quiet and you lose it. Six days without anyone on the claim logging in and the safehouse is released.
• Raids need a reason — a feud, a debt, a rumour. "It was there" isn't one.
• Take, don't level. Loot a raided base and leave the structure standing. Burning it down is griefing.
• Build somewhere boring. The heavily fortified place on the main road announces itself. The unremarkable house two streets back does not.

07 / Other survivors

PVP is on, but it's tuned so that talking still works.

Melee lands at 30% damage and firearms at 50%. Fights take longer than you expect, which is deliberate — it leaves room for someone to surrender, negotiate or run instead of dying in one exchange.

The safety system is on: you cannot hurt another player until you deliberately switch your safety off, and everyone can see when you have. Nobody dies here by accident, and flipping safety off in front of somebody is itself an act of roleplay — it's the equivalent of drawing.

Proximity voice is enabled and positional — audible from roughly 10 metres out to 100. Talking is the primary tool, not a fallback.

• Speak before you swing. A threat, a demand, anything. No silent axe to the back of the head.
• Hands up means hands off. You cannot kill someone who has surrendered and complied.
• Take what you came for and go. Stripping someone naked and leaving them in a horde isn't roleplay, it's cruelty with extra steps.
• New arrivals are off-limits. Spawn camping people with nothing worth taking gets you removed.

Most of the memorable encounters on a server like this are the ones where nobody swung at all — a tense trade at a roadblock, a stranger let into a house for a night. Shooting is the least interesting thing you can do to another player.

08 / Server specifics

Every value below is read straight out of the live server config.

Mods

10 workshop items, 11 mod IDs, downloaded automatically on first join: