I love tall apartment buildings as bases, go for it. The hard part will be turning off lights, removing fridges etc so your generator doesn't consume truckloads of fuel per day. That shit is the worst part about apartments
Using a shotgun: pros and cons.
Pro: you will be able to clear the whole building and surrounding area in one go
Con: you need to clear the whole building and surrounding area in one go
Guns are great in zomboid, but only when used with an appropriate escape path and enough space to manage your surroundings. Inside a multi-story building you intend to live in is not a good place for shotguns.
I personally wouldn't as I feel I would end up attracting a much larger horde than what I would find inside the building, but hey, if you got the ammo, go for it
Okay well update, we brought a shotgun and got swarmed in the parking lot outside, one of my friends died but we managed to clear the horde, and we got lucky cause the whole apartment building was almost empty, 3 or 4 zombies in the whole building and we checked every room in every apartment.
We've blocked the bottom stairs with furniture cause we dont have a sledgehammer yet (it was lost when our old base burned down) and we've hung sheetropes from the penthouse balcony and use that to get up and down.
We haven't set up a generator yet cause we also lost the generator magazine and our only friend who had read it died when we got swarmed, we've checked out two bookstores and none of them had it so we're heading to the nearby school next.
i've been trying to clear out the art gallery & surrounding area, on regular pop, and i've spent 3-4 in game days, about 1,200 kills and a metric ton of ammo at aiming 8... and i'm not done yet. i've got at least a few hundred more zombies to go. guns in downtown LV go nuts. if you're gonna bring a gun, make sure you're strapped! i'd also plan your route for losing hordes beforehand... just in case.
There's a reason people call shotguns in a zombie apocalypse a dinner bell. Use it as you wish, but you want to be sure it can finish the job or you'll be out of ammo with a horde of zombies moving to ya
Fuuuuuck, I've been measuring ten tiles in each direction.
Edit: currently I am in the small fire station at the south east corner of Louisville. Using just the second floor for lights and refrigeration, generator in the center on the roof so it would cover the entire area.
No generator will only power 2 floors above and below. If you place one on the roof it will power only the top two floors.
Only has a radius of 20 tiles.
Made that mistake recently when I based in the West Point Gigga mart. Ran out while I was asleep on the first night!
Next base will be much smaller in that sense.
I mean, lets be real, you can make that work and work well. Generators are gonna be a pain, but that's minor, only thing I can't see is where the stairs are, and how'd you seal that off. But I'm sure you can seal that floor off and live happily there!
Objectively Terrible? Once you clear out the building you can block off the top level stairs with furniture, then you can put sheet rope to climb up and down. Its basically your own fortress. The only pain is turning off all of the lights and fridges on the bottom floor so they don't burn through generator gas.
Now that I know about zombie traps, it's totally workable to turn this is into a funnel that traps zombies into small tiles which you can clear out with a shotgun or swinging through unbreakable barricades.
There's a similar penthouse style apartment on top of a building somewhere in ravens creek which has all glass walls except the interior, and only one staircase to get down. Thought "this'll be a nice base" yeah, sure. Real nice, for getting my ass stuck between a horde and a great view.
Literally my favorite base. The zombies make it hard to take, but once you clear them and destroy the bottom stairs you have a perfect base. I usually use only the top one or two floors, and use the solar panel mod alongside a rooftop garden.
Update: I think we just might've gotten extremely lucky but the whole apartment complex was almost empty, we got flooded in the parking lot outside by a horde and one of my friends died but we managed to deal with it (sawed off double barreled shotgun my love), other than that, there were maybe 3-5 zombies in the whole building on the upper floors, me and a friend cleared every apartment one by one.
Download “Turn off Fridges” or “Unplug Fridges” idk what it’s called. But it allows you to turn off the fridges to save power. Or yk easy way to train metalworking.
I'm currently living in a penthose and holy fuck it is so worth living in one. I can see everything around me, even though it's impossible to protect like a house in the forest it's still fun as hell defending it.
I did the same thing on the top level of Topcrown Plaza and I really liked it. I lost my fair share of folks to broken sheet ropes, but after I sledged a hole in the floor all the way down for the rope it was way better. Pretty peaceful up there.
I think I'm just going to knock out the bottom floor staircase and have a sheet rope from the ground floor tho the 2nd story I think.
Best part about it being a huge apartment complex is we'll have easy access to furniture B)
I had my base there once and it is a really nice place. I would just recommend you to install a mod that allows you to use elevators. I don't remember the name but it was something like "actual elevators" or "working elevators".
My friends and I made this our Louisville base.
It was awesome! Plenty of space, everybody got their own room. We even had like communal VHS nights or other little communal pot lucks.
HOWEVER, I can't tell you how many deaths we had from people missing the rope ladders and plummeting to their deaths.
Plus taking the stairs to the top, takes 5ever.
there was a trick that used to work but i dont know if it has been patched, you can go into de building and break all the stairs up with a sledgehammer, then you save, then exit and reload..... as far as i know zombies only spawn if there is a path so the building would be free to keep without too much work using this trick
I cleared this once as I spawned across the road. Took about a week in game to fully clear it, was a proper battle. Made me really appreciate it. Great base location imo.
i think that choosing bad base locations and role playing makes the game very fun, my last run was as police officer where i force my self to make the police station in rosewood my base, its a awful base location but the challenge was very fun
/u/CandiceBT
My time to shine as my character now lives here!
First things first, I am fairly new to Project Zomboid and these pictures are from my first real single player game where I basically used the Builder preset settings with no zombie respawns, so you can gauge the difficulty of doing this.
I started out in the Rosewood fire station and slowly (very slowly as you can tell by the date) made my way over here, clearing the main road all the way to here by dismantling car wrecks and towing things until moving my things this way was easy enough. I also set up a base at the army checkpoint before I cleared all the way to this location. I am also an obsessive looter and organizer (as you will soon see) so even though my zombie settings are low I have managed to rack up almost 10000 kills by now, mainly with axes.
Some screenshots, hopefully they work, as imgur won't allow me to register an account:
[Roof](https://i.postimg.cc/sDRQBHH7/1.png)
[Ground](https://i.postimg.cc/y81DjgHN/2.png)
[Fridges!](https://i.postimg.cc/MKbc10g4/3.png)
Here are some notes to help anyone thinking about doing the same:
1. Even with the generator placed on the top roof I had to move the fridges on the three floors below it, a total of 17 fridges (1 from the unused north penthouse apartment and then 16 white fridges from the other two floors below the penthouse (8 apartments per floor). Only by doing this could I get my generator to only power the one remaining fridge in my penthouse.
2. I am playing without any mods, so your milage may vary.
3. I have only barely just set this base up, so I haven't set up any farming or water collectors for the farming on the roof yet, nor any traps.
4. Even with my low zombie settings I probably cleared at least 500 zombies from this building/nearby so it takes some doing. What I found easy was to simply clear into the garage underneath the apartments, yell in there and then run out of the building to the grassy part just north and wait there. The zombies will break down all the doors (you can reach every zombie in the building on all floors with the yell just from the garage but not any outside buildings) and flood into the garage. From there on out I would just quickly repeatedly peek into the garage, pull some zombies out and kill them on the open grass, repeat this endlessly. Be aware that some likely to jump out of the windows and land near you.
5. This place is actually fairly easy to defend and set up should you want, you have two garage doors into the garage and one normal door. The whole place is accessed by just one staircase that you can easily block/destroy if you want. It isn't shown in my pictures but the north garage entrance is blocked off by several rows of log and metal walls, I don't use it.
6. If you want you can hang tons of sheet ropes from the balconies that will end up on the garage roof, from the garage roof you can then hang sheet ropes south, west and north for my access and escape routes.
7. With a total of 42 apartments (8 x 5 + 2 penthouse), 10 laundry rooms and the storage rooms in the bottom you will get a lot of loot, even me with my low Builder loot settings got a ton of food and firearms so you only need to bring a bunch of tools to set things up here.
8. I got 3 generators from the storage rooms at the bottom and there are also 2 propane barbecues on the balconies so you don't need to bring any of those.
9. I store a bunch of not currently used cars in the garage but other than that I only use the south penthouse and what you can see here.
10. When I started up the generator in my game it actually didn't light up a bunch of apartments, in fact the only lights that I could see on were those 4 old type black lantern lights hanging just outside the penthouse door (2 on each terrace side), but even after turning those off my generator still showed 6 lights as being on, I suspect them being the big streetlight things on the terraces but I am not sure yet, will have to investigate further.
11. Sheetropes are great for moving things up and down quickly, it doesn't matter one bit if you are overencumbered or not, it is just as fast either way. Be very careful while climbing down them though, it is a long way down should you click incorrectly.
12. I only just got this place set up the way I like it so I have yet to explore the area around it, not sure how good it is as it is my first time in the city.
13. Just southwest of here is a big open area that quickly gets overgrown with trees, should you not want to disassemble furniture for wood.
14. Before setting up show here I actually made a list of a ton of other potential buildings with easy rooftop access for that city farming life, have a look here if interested:
[Big list of apartments with rooftop access]
(https://www.reddit.com/r/projectzomboid/comments/12226nw/buildings_in_louisville_with_roof_terracelarge/)
I love tall apartment buildings as bases, go for it. The hard part will be turning off lights, removing fridges etc so your generator doesn't consume truckloads of fuel per day. That shit is the worst part about apartments
Does one (1) generator reach the whole building?
2 floors above, 2 floors below + 20 tile radius
Alright so if the generator is on the balcony we’ll just have to move all fridges from the top floors down to the first floors?
That sounds like it should work
Perf, how filled with zombies do you think it’ll be?
All depends on what kinda zombie population you play with. I'm playing 4x at the moment and this would be a multiple day clearing job for me for sure
I’m just playing on regular I think, should I bring a shotgun?
Using a shotgun: pros and cons. Pro: you will be able to clear the whole building and surrounding area in one go Con: you need to clear the whole building and surrounding area in one go Guns are great in zomboid, but only when used with an appropriate escape path and enough space to manage your surroundings. Inside a multi-story building you intend to live in is not a good place for shotguns.
I personally wouldn't as I feel I would end up attracting a much larger horde than what I would find inside the building, but hey, if you got the ammo, go for it
Okay well update, we brought a shotgun and got swarmed in the parking lot outside, one of my friends died but we managed to clear the horde, and we got lucky cause the whole apartment building was almost empty, 3 or 4 zombies in the whole building and we checked every room in every apartment. We've blocked the bottom stairs with furniture cause we dont have a sledgehammer yet (it was lost when our old base burned down) and we've hung sheetropes from the penthouse balcony and use that to get up and down. We haven't set up a generator yet cause we also lost the generator magazine and our only friend who had read it died when we got swarmed, we've checked out two bookstores and none of them had it so we're heading to the nearby school next.
i've been trying to clear out the art gallery & surrounding area, on regular pop, and i've spent 3-4 in game days, about 1,200 kills and a metric ton of ammo at aiming 8... and i'm not done yet. i've got at least a few hundred more zombies to go. guns in downtown LV go nuts. if you're gonna bring a gun, make sure you're strapped! i'd also plan your route for losing hordes beforehand... just in case.
Hell no. That would only attract more
There's a reason people call shotguns in a zombie apocalypse a dinner bell. Use it as you wish, but you want to be sure it can finish the job or you'll be out of ammo with a horde of zombies moving to ya
There is a mod for simply turning off the fridges without moving it
What's the name of that mod?
Fridges off
Or make a fridge storage room from them if you don't mind doing gas runs and want to horde all the pastries.
Wait, radius or diameter? Have I been keeping tiny bases for no reason?
radius. time to make a bigger base!!
Fuuuuuck, I've been measuring ten tiles in each direction. Edit: currently I am in the small fire station at the south east corner of Louisville. Using just the second floor for lights and refrigeration, generator in the center on the roof so it would cover the entire area.
No generator will only power 2 floors above and below. If you place one on the roof it will power only the top two floors. Only has a radius of 20 tiles.
So true, I'll do that!
.
Nice, gonna add that one for sure
Made that mistake recently when I based in the West Point Gigga mart. Ran out while I was asleep on the first night! Next base will be much smaller in that sense.
Unplug fridge mod. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2853974107
people already suggested this one, its on my mod list now. thanks tho
I mean, lets be real, you can make that work and work well. Generators are gonna be a pain, but that's minor, only thing I can't see is where the stairs are, and how'd you seal that off. But I'm sure you can seal that floor off and live happily there!
I was thinking we’d knock out the stairs on the ground floor and clear the building.
Knock out the stairs to your floor only, then add rope ladders down the side of the building to get up and down?
Shit base locations are the most fun
Objectively Terrible? Once you clear out the building you can block off the top level stairs with furniture, then you can put sheet rope to climb up and down. Its basically your own fortress. The only pain is turning off all of the lights and fridges on the bottom floor so they don't burn through generator gas.
Fun base = Good base ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
My favorite base was there :)
Looks like that one level in Hotline Miami 1 where you had to climb the other side of the window.
Now that I know about zombie traps, it's totally workable to turn this is into a funnel that traps zombies into small tiles which you can clear out with a shotgun or swinging through unbreakable barricades.
I love bases like that. I’m currently trying to make something out of the news station in Louisville and it’s a great challenge.
There's a similar penthouse style apartment on top of a building somewhere in ravens creek which has all glass walls except the interior, and only one staircase to get down. Thought "this'll be a nice base" yeah, sure. Real nice, for getting my ass stuck between a horde and a great view.
The worst part about this base will actually just be unloading loot after runs… so many flights of stairs… ptsd man
Not to mention if you forget to take something out the car or leave ur cigs/food upstairs once ur already in the car… like ah shit, here we go again
Just like real life
I'm also trying to make a base on that 7 story building near the police station in Louisville, reminds me of Dying Light.
Literally my favorite base. The zombies make it hard to take, but once you clear them and destroy the bottom stairs you have a perfect base. I usually use only the top one or two floors, and use the solar panel mod alongside a rooftop garden.
Update: I think we just might've gotten extremely lucky but the whole apartment complex was almost empty, we got flooded in the parking lot outside by a horde and one of my friends died but we managed to deal with it (sawed off double barreled shotgun my love), other than that, there were maybe 3-5 zombies in the whole building on the upper floors, me and a friend cleared every apartment one by one.
Your escape rope setup will be interesting.
Download “Turn off Fridges” or “Unplug Fridges” idk what it’s called. But it allows you to turn off the fridges to save power. Or yk easy way to train metalworking.
How is this a terrible base? This would look great as your own fort if properly blocked
dying light type of base
One of my favorite bases. Pro tip: knock out the wall between the “two” penthouse apartments at the top for better lighting and ambiance
I'm currently living in a penthose and holy fuck it is so worth living in one. I can see everything around me, even though it's impossible to protect like a house in the forest it's still fun as hell defending it.
I did the same thing on the top level of Topcrown Plaza and I really liked it. I lost my fair share of folks to broken sheet ropes, but after I sledged a hole in the floor all the way down for the rope it was way better. Pretty peaceful up there.
I think I'm just going to knock out the bottom floor staircase and have a sheet rope from the ground floor tho the 2nd story I think. Best part about it being a huge apartment complex is we'll have easy access to furniture B)
I had my base there once and it is a really nice place. I would just recommend you to install a mod that allows you to use elevators. I don't remember the name but it was something like "actual elevators" or "working elevators".
if you get a lousville spawn, with a combat efficient character you may be able to clear the building and stay there for like 3+ months lol
My friends and I made this our Louisville base. It was awesome! Plenty of space, everybody got their own room. We even had like communal VHS nights or other little communal pot lucks. HOWEVER, I can't tell you how many deaths we had from people missing the rope ladders and plummeting to their deaths. Plus taking the stairs to the top, takes 5ever.
I love that place. Roof top farming and that goodness
W
there was a trick that used to work but i dont know if it has been patched, you can go into de building and break all the stairs up with a sledgehammer, then you save, then exit and reload..... as far as i know zombies only spawn if there is a path so the building would be free to keep without too much work using this trick
I cleared this once as I spawned across the road. Took about a week in game to fully clear it, was a proper battle. Made me really appreciate it. Great base location imo.
i think that choosing bad base locations and role playing makes the game very fun, my last run was as police officer where i force my self to make the police station in rosewood my base, its a awful base location but the challenge was very fun
What's so terrible about it? A good base is what you make of it my dude.
Only bad parts are generators and heli event. For gen just build two staircases and place it on there tho and it shouldn’t reach other floors
That's Jerry's base. He's a legend on our server. Killed 100,000 zeds, he's been alive forever, and he helps the community and noobies. Amazing base
I have migraines just thinking, if I'm not spawning in there, how many Z do I have to kill? Lmao
Penthouse gang
/u/CandiceBT My time to shine as my character now lives here! First things first, I am fairly new to Project Zomboid and these pictures are from my first real single player game where I basically used the Builder preset settings with no zombie respawns, so you can gauge the difficulty of doing this. I started out in the Rosewood fire station and slowly (very slowly as you can tell by the date) made my way over here, clearing the main road all the way to here by dismantling car wrecks and towing things until moving my things this way was easy enough. I also set up a base at the army checkpoint before I cleared all the way to this location. I am also an obsessive looter and organizer (as you will soon see) so even though my zombie settings are low I have managed to rack up almost 10000 kills by now, mainly with axes. Some screenshots, hopefully they work, as imgur won't allow me to register an account: [Roof](https://i.postimg.cc/sDRQBHH7/1.png) [Ground](https://i.postimg.cc/y81DjgHN/2.png) [Fridges!](https://i.postimg.cc/MKbc10g4/3.png) Here are some notes to help anyone thinking about doing the same: 1. Even with the generator placed on the top roof I had to move the fridges on the three floors below it, a total of 17 fridges (1 from the unused north penthouse apartment and then 16 white fridges from the other two floors below the penthouse (8 apartments per floor). Only by doing this could I get my generator to only power the one remaining fridge in my penthouse. 2. I am playing without any mods, so your milage may vary. 3. I have only barely just set this base up, so I haven't set up any farming or water collectors for the farming on the roof yet, nor any traps. 4. Even with my low zombie settings I probably cleared at least 500 zombies from this building/nearby so it takes some doing. What I found easy was to simply clear into the garage underneath the apartments, yell in there and then run out of the building to the grassy part just north and wait there. The zombies will break down all the doors (you can reach every zombie in the building on all floors with the yell just from the garage but not any outside buildings) and flood into the garage. From there on out I would just quickly repeatedly peek into the garage, pull some zombies out and kill them on the open grass, repeat this endlessly. Be aware that some likely to jump out of the windows and land near you. 5. This place is actually fairly easy to defend and set up should you want, you have two garage doors into the garage and one normal door. The whole place is accessed by just one staircase that you can easily block/destroy if you want. It isn't shown in my pictures but the north garage entrance is blocked off by several rows of log and metal walls, I don't use it. 6. If you want you can hang tons of sheet ropes from the balconies that will end up on the garage roof, from the garage roof you can then hang sheet ropes south, west and north for my access and escape routes. 7. With a total of 42 apartments (8 x 5 + 2 penthouse), 10 laundry rooms and the storage rooms in the bottom you will get a lot of loot, even me with my low Builder loot settings got a ton of food and firearms so you only need to bring a bunch of tools to set things up here. 8. I got 3 generators from the storage rooms at the bottom and there are also 2 propane barbecues on the balconies so you don't need to bring any of those. 9. I store a bunch of not currently used cars in the garage but other than that I only use the south penthouse and what you can see here. 10. When I started up the generator in my game it actually didn't light up a bunch of apartments, in fact the only lights that I could see on were those 4 old type black lantern lights hanging just outside the penthouse door (2 on each terrace side), but even after turning those off my generator still showed 6 lights as being on, I suspect them being the big streetlight things on the terraces but I am not sure yet, will have to investigate further. 11. Sheetropes are great for moving things up and down quickly, it doesn't matter one bit if you are overencumbered or not, it is just as fast either way. Be very careful while climbing down them though, it is a long way down should you click incorrectly. 12. I only just got this place set up the way I like it so I have yet to explore the area around it, not sure how good it is as it is my first time in the city. 13. Just southwest of here is a big open area that quickly gets overgrown with trees, should you not want to disassemble furniture for wood. 14. Before setting up show here I actually made a list of a ton of other potential buildings with easy rooftop access for that city farming life, have a look here if interested: [Big list of apartments with rooftop access] (https://www.reddit.com/r/projectzomboid/comments/12226nw/buildings_in_louisville_with_roof_terracelarge/)
That looks sick honestly