Occupation Tier List for Project Zomboid B42.13.1

After choosing a spawn location and modifying your game settings to your liking, the next screen you’ll see, will ask you to choose an occupation. Occupations are basically a character preset, although you can give yourself (almost) any combination of traits. All occupations increase a set of skills to a level between one and four, while at the same time giving you an experience boost in that particular skill. Some occupations also come with unique traits. The higher the given skill level is, the higher the experience boost. To be precise, an increase to level one of a skill granted by an occupation will translate into a 75% increase in experience gain. Two levels translate into a 100% increase, three or more levels translate into a 125% increase. However, the standard experience modifier at level zero, that every character receives regardless of occupation, is at 25%.

However, these experience boost don’t work as indicated. Lets look at the action “building a log fence” for 5 carpentry experience. A character with no boost to their carpentry skill, will gain 1.3 experience points (= 5 * 0.25; rounded up). A character with a level one boost will just gain 5 experience points (= 5 * 1.0). That means, the 75% increase is added on top of the 25% to give you a 100% boost to experience gain. But this does not mean double the experience, but that you’ll gain the “normal” amount of experience any given action would provide. A character with a two level boost will gain 6.6 experience points, which is actually a 133% boost. It is also not equivalent to the simple addition, as that would mean one would receive 125% of the experience. Similarly, a three level boost will net you 8.3 experience points or 166% more experience. I have no clue why this was designed this way.

Because you can gain experience boost for almost every skill later in the game through skill books, levelling up your skills becomes easier the further into a play-through you are. Therefore, the best occupations excel in the early game, when resources are still limited. Some occupation also come with a “cost”, so to speak, requiring you to take a negative trait to offset the point penalty. However, even the worst occupation is little more than a mild hindrance to overcome, so you really can’t go all that wrong. Also, the ranking of occupations does not consider multiplayer and those that make the game easier for beginners will be ranked higher. Speed-running will also not really be considered, except for when comparing how difficult one trait is to grind to level ten compared to another. Unemployed or “Custom Occupation” will not be ranked here. The reason being, that I personally think it has no need to exist. +8 points in the character creator is just not worth it and no matter which combination of traits you’ll choose, it will almost definitely be worse than the occupation you’re trying to emulate. If this occupation had a flat experience multiplier for every skill, I could see choosing this. But it doesn’t, so its honestly not worth discussing.

The tiers here are not as trennscharf (I know that’s a German word, but the English language lacks a word for what I’m trying to express) as they may be in other tier lists, as particularly in the middle you could argue either or. Due to Project Zomboids sandbox nature, there are too many variables to keep in mind when discussing much of anything really and the occupations become less and less important the longer you play. As a result, my primary metric which decided tie breakers and the nature of the tiers was how much fun it is to play with this occupation and how beginner friendly the occupation is. “S-Tier” therefore holds the occupations that are borderline broken and make for a truly enjoyable experience early on. “D-Tier” holds the occupations that make little to no difference in gameplay or could be substituted easily with another occupation plus a trait.
This tier list was made with the latest version of Project Zomboid in mind, which is B42.13.1. Project Zomboid is a game still in development, so the details in this guide may be subject to change in the future.

Carpenter is rightfully at the top just for the huge amount of skill bonuses you’ll get while also getting one free point to spend. And if that wasn’t enough, the carpenter also comes with a lot of crafting recipes pre-learned, meaning you won’t need to hunt down the required magazines. With this occupation, you can basically build your base immediately with only minimal preparations. Carpentry is also needed to construct the obligatory equipment for farming and animal husbandry. The large boost to your carpentry experience gain and skill, which affects all wood constructions, also means, you do not necessarily need the skill books to grind up your carpentry level to the maximum. Wood constructions at higher levels have higher durability, more capacity and look better, making a high carpentry level almost a necessity when building your base as wood will most likely be your primary construction material. The first level of masonry is also very useful, because then you can immediately craft stone blocks, which you need for most masonry constructions. Grinding up to level one is really annoying, because the only way to gain experience at level zero is breaking rocks or building a stone shelve, both of which take ages.

Carpenter is not a combat focus occupation, but despite that gains a notable increase to maintenance and carving. Maintenance dictates how fast your weapons degrade and also allows you to repair them better. Carving is needed to craft new handles for your weapons, among other things. Maintenance is terrible to grind, so any boost up front is very much appreciated. Meaning, even if you do not use short blunt weapons, such as hammers, with your carpenter character, you’ll still be at an advantage with every type of melee weapon because they degrade slower and repairing them will be at a higher quality. The only notable downside – and calling it a “downside” is a stretch – is that short blunt weapons, while plentiful, are not particularly amazing compared to the other melee weapons. The only real stand-out among them is the police baton/nightstick with good availability and durability, relatively low weight and good damage.

The Lumberjack, as the name and symbol implies, is an axe-centric play style. Probably the most specific of all the top-tier occupations, but the thing is: Axes are really, really good. Probably the best melee weapons, but that’s up for debate. On top of coming with a free two to the axe skill plus a large experience multiplier, the lumberjack also gets the “Ax-pert” traits, which makes him swing axes faster and do more damage. Combine that with the increased strength, you will destroy zombies once you get your hands on an axe. Strength is also one of the few skills, for which no skill books exist, meaning you cannot get an experience multiplayer through any means, making it a lot harder to grind then most other skills. Lumberjack is basically a “juggernaut” build. Unless you play with the toughest zombies, small groups will no longer pose much of threat (if you know, what your doing, that is). The Lumberjack is also more proficient at felling trees, gets a major bonus to foraging and moves quicker through woodlands. All very useful traits, if you want to build your base in the woods. The Lumberjack also comes with an even point score, meaning you wont need to pick unfavourable traits to offset the penalty.

The obvious downside to this occupation is that axes are the second rarest melee weapon. Unless you start somewhere with a near-guaranteed spawn location such as Rosewood or Muldraugh, you may not even be able to use all of your bonuses until way later in a play-through. However, Lumberjack comes with an increase to maintenance. The higher your maintenance and your specific weapon skill is, the lower the chance your weapon will loose condition on hit. With just the starting bonuses the lumberjack gets, you will already have a minor increase to your condition. That means, if you’ve finally found an axe, it will hold longer.

My personal favourite, the fire officer, is sadly strictly worse than the Lumberjack for an axe-centric play style. That, however, does not mean it is bad by any means. The Fire officer is more of a generalist, coming with an also even point score, but much lower bonus to axe skill and no maintenance increase. Instead, the firefighter comes with increases to the fitness skills, making getting fatigue slower, while being able to hit as hard and carry as much as the lumberjack. This makes for a competent combatant with every melee weapon, not just axes. The occupation also comes with an increase to running and an experience multiplier, making your getaways safer and being able to cover more ground quicker, when the areas is already cleared. The minor boost to foraging is also appreciated, but is negligible compared to the lumberjack. There is however one more major advantage the firefighter has that no other occupation can offer. In the character creator, the firefighter and the firefighter alone can choose to wear firefighter pants and military boots. Both amazing, mid to late game armour you’ll get for free right at the start. The military boots in particular are probably the single best shoes in the game. The fire officer also has the chance of spawning directly in the fire department when choosing Rosewood, offsetting the difficulty of finding axes to use as weapons entirely.

However, even all that makes the fire officer just “boring good”, so to speak. The fire officer has probably the best early game out of any occupation, but drops of the later the game goes on. Once you’ll start building your base, the fire officer offers almost nothing any more. The bonus to running is also not that useful in combat, as sprinting makes a lot of noise and tires you out quickly. Shamblers are also so slow, that you can outpace them by simply walking. It is however a godsend when trying to get cover ground quickly where you cannot or do not want to drive with your car. The lack of maintenance is also a large flaw of this occupation, due to maintenance being difficult to grind and to get any reduction in condition decrease you’ll need to grind your weapon and maintenance skill to level two at the very least, which may take a while.

Park Ranger is basically a variant of lumberjack with a larger focus on foraging. The park ranger offers almost nothing in terms of combat viability except for a minor boost to axes, but is notably worse at using axes than the fire officer or the lumberjack due to not coming with any bonus to strength, fitness or maintenance. If you play the park ranger, you play off the grid in the woods. There, the park ranger is the undisputed champion. Because of the movement bonus in woods, you aren’t slowed down all that much by trees, making the woods safer to traverse, as you can escape surprise zombies more reliably. Foraging is also really good, as you can generate items basically for free by just wandering around in search mode. And the park ranger comes with the largest bonuses to foraging of any occupation. The increase to the trapping and carpentry skills are also just enough to craft the box trap with which you can catch squirrels and rabbits, the most valuable animals to catch and butcher. Rabbits can even be caught alive and bred to get a sustainable food source.

For whatever reason, the park ranger by itself CANNOT identify if the collected berries or mushrooms are poisonous, making it a lot harder to generate food. If you want to play a foraging play style, you are almost forced to take the herbalist or wilderness knowledge trait or play with the wiki open constantly, which puts you even further in the negative. Speaking of which, park ranger is really expensive with a starting point score of -4. While being able to start trapping right away without the need to find magazines or grind skills is nice, trapping is generally inferior to fishing in my opinion when it comes to getting fresh meat. To catch squirrels and rabbits you’ll need very specific bait, which you cannot find through foraging easily and must either grow yourself or find in containers. The second option is however quite time sensitive, as the fresh produce will rot quickly. Rotten food cannot be used as bait! The plus one to carpentry is also almost useless as carpentry can be ground on any character extremely quickly with very easy set-ups. An occupation with some really strong upsides, but also somewhat specific and not suitable for every player.

The gun occupation. That is pretty much it.

The above statement isn’t even an exaggeration. Every bonus this occupation gets revolves around gun use. I would even go as far as to say, that if you want to use guns at all, choosing either police officer or veteran is almost required. Unlike melee weapons, gun have completely separate skills that affect only guns and nothing else: Aiming and Reloading. Aiming affects almost everything: Accuracy (the basic chance for a fired shot to hit), precision (chance of a critical hit), range (how far away a zombie can be for you to still be able to hit it), firing angle (basically gun spread), aiming time (basically aim stability) and recoil (time between shots). Aiming also reduces the amount of condition lost on each shot. Reloading is less impactful as it just affects the speed of reloading-related task, such as inserting a magazine into your weapon. The bonuses are so large, that the police officer can immediately use guns to clear groups of zombies relatively effectively. Guns also do a lot of damage, most zombies drop in one or two head-shots. A head-shot will also always knock down a zombie, so even if you don’t immediately kill them, you’ll slow them down at the very least. Grinding aiming and reloading without the large experience multipliers is also hell, because you’ll hit nothing with your guns at level zero, but only gain experience when your hits land. The bonus to nimble also means that you’ll move a little quicker when aiming your gun.

However, guns are still difficult to use. The largest and most obvious downside is that the shots make a lot of noises, luring zombies to your position. The radius, in which your shots are heard, is also really large, meaning often hundreds of zombies will be closing in onto your location after just a few shots. That means that clearing anything stealthily is basically out of the question when using guns primarily. The next downside is that you’ll need ammunition. Ammunition is relatively plentiful and can be acquired through foraging, so it’s nearly infinite. However, you still need to carry it in your inventory alongside your gun, reducing the amount of loot you can carry. That can be problematic particularly on longer outings, because as soon as you run out of ammo, your riffle is dead weight. Guns also suffer a massive reduction at large distances, meaning to use them effectively, you need to be in melee range. And “at a large distance” means about five tiles away, so really not that far away. Guns even get a “point-blank” accuracy bonus when in close-range. Which is a really strange choice design-wise, because isn’t the point of firearms that you can – you know – use them at range? That makes guns just strictly worse in a lot of scenarios than melee weapons. They only exceed melee weapons when clearing large groups of zombies, however there are other ways to get rid of large groups including luring them away with your shots. Something, any build can do.

Still, with the bonuses the police officer occupations grants, you can immediately start blasting and clear medium groups effectively. To grind aiming and reloading is also such an immense pain, that using guns at all becomes realistic only with this occupation. -4 starting score is also manageable. You’ll be fine as soon as you have a sufficient reserve of firearms and ammunition. Just get used to running away as soon as you run out of ammunition and a thousand zombies are closing in.

Being a strictly worse version of the carpenter is still pretty good. DIY-Expert gets the same bonuses to carpentry, masonry, short blunt and carving, while trading two carpentry for one maintenance and a very small boost to foraging for junk and trash. The DIY-Expert also knows all weapon recipes from the start, however so does the Carpenter. The large boost to maintenance is also very much appreciated for all melee builds. Maintenance is a pain to grind and DIY-Expert comes with the largest experience multiplier to it out of all occupations.

Everything that is good about the carpenter is also good about the DIY-Expert. However, unlike with the carpenter, you have a starting point score of -4, forcing you to pick an undesirable negative trait. Honestly, not worth picking as long as Carpenter exists, but still provides a lot of useful bonuses.

Being the second strictly worse version of the carpenter is still pretty good. Honestly, it’s a toss-up between construction worker and DIY-Expert. Both are equally good when compared to all occupations, but equally superfluous due to carpenter existing. Construction worker does not gain a bonus to carving and – when compared to carpenter – trades two points in carpentry for one point in masonry and two points in short blunt. The occupations boost to foraging is also a lot smaller than both DIY-Expert and Carpenter, has no crafting recipes unlocked at the start and still sets you back -2 points in the character creator.

Masonry sounds nice, but is really inferior compared to carpentry in almost all aspects. You’ll need both of course to build a fully autonomous base, but you’ll be able to build everything you could want at masonry level 2, which is absolutely no problem to grind to even with no experience multiplier whatsoever. Every level after that just makes your stone walls more durable and allows you to forge tool heads from stone, which is nice, but not required if you loot diligently. To build the base building itself and the defences for it, you’ll absolutely want to use wood, due to it being infinitely easier to acquire. Felling a single tree will get you between two to four logs, which can be crafted into three planks each. To build a single wooden wall, you’ll need two planks and four nails. Nails can be found in the hundreds if not thousands almost everywhere. To build a single stone wall in comparison, you’ll need six stones and two concrete. Stones either need to be foraged or picked up from the ground individually. Concrete either needs to be looted or crafted with clay and sand or grass cuttings. The stone wall is a lot more durable then a wooden wall, but building one takes you much, much longer. If you want to build a large base, which you likely would want to do if you pick construction worker, you’ll safe yourself so much of your real-life time building with wood. After plastering the walls, they’ll look identical anyway and if zombies try to break down your wall, you’ll notice them long before they’ve broken down even a wooden wall, so the added durability of the stone wall is seldom useful.

Short blunt is also just an okay melee weapons type. Its main advantage over spears and axes is just how plentiful this weapon type is. You’ll always have a short blunt weapon at the ready, no matter where you start. However, they are noticeably weaker than axes and have less range than long blunt or spears. Using short blunt weapons, such as a hammer, also causes less muscle strain and can be swung faster. Due to their weaker base damage and the lack of an instant-kill critical hit, they are unsuited for clearing large groups unless you’re really good at kiting and serve more as an early game weapon or a sidearm. The construction workers bonus to short blunt is however the single largest weapon skill increase of any occupation, so they are REALLY amazing at using a mediocre weapon type. Just pick carpenter.

Burglar, I believe, is somewhat overhyped. The bonuses burglar gets revolve around stealth almost exclusively. Lightfooted causes your steps to make less sound. Its basically a worse version of nimble, as nimble also reduces the amount of noise your steps makes while also increasing your movement speed while aiming your weapon. They do stack however. Sneak, as the name implies, only affects sneaking, making you harder to detect when sneaking. With bonuses of +2 to all of these skills and a large experience multiplier, the burglar will be really good at stealthily moving about. The burglar is also less likely to break window locks, meaning you’ll be able to get into buildings more reliably. This occupation also comes with a minor boost when foraging in darkness or bad weather and with some crafting recipes already learned, although none of them are particularly noteworthy except for the armour crafted from bulletproof vests.

However, this is not Skyrim. Stealth works quite differently in Project Zomboid. For once, zombies will basically always spot you, if you enter their visual detection range, which is – as I understand – their cone of vision in front of them similar to how the players cone of vision works. Nimble, lightfooded and sneak do not affect that whatsoever. Those three only affect a zombies auditive detection range, which is a circle around them. Which means, if you want to sneak around hordes, you’ll need cover and keep your distance as you cannot guarantee that all zombies of a horde will face away from you. Your steps are already relatively quite when sneaking even with zero levels in any stealth related skills. You will only really need the immediate bonuses form stealth skills when walking through dark buildings as to not alert zombies deeper in the building or when trying to run away without alerting as many zombies in the area.

But you do not play the burglar for its bonuses to stealth, but for its ability to hot-wire cars. All you need for that is a screwdriver, alleviating the need to find the right key for cars. Vehicular manslaughter is one of the safest ways to get rid of large zombie hordes, so using hot-wiring to quickly use any car with fuel for an emergency hit-and-run is at least appreciated. Turning on the light bar and siren on an emergency service car is also “cheaper”, so to speak, when your able to use any car immediately. However, you can also acquire this ability at level 1 electrical and level 2 mechanics. Hot-wiring cars is however not a necessity and is really useful only in the very early game. Sure, it may suck that you cannot get the cool sports car because no key exists or you cannot find it because its undead owner wandered away. But you will eventually find car keys en masse if you kill zombies diligently, search on the ground in parking lots and enter every car you see. And in single-player in particular, you really do not need more than one good car. You’ll also have to pay for these mediocre upsides with -6 starting points in the character creator, the second largest cost out of all occupations. Burglar just feels a little underwhelming honestly for the large cost.

Speaking of expensive, the veteran is the single most expensive occupation, costing you a total of -8 points. In return, you’ll get the desensitised trait, making you completely immune to panic from all sources. That is particularly useful for gun-centric play styles as panic reduces your accuracy massively, even at the first stage, and reduced the chance of successfully clearing your weapon jam. Panic also reduces critical hit chance and damage with melee weapons. However, only looking at the starting bonuses, the veteran is strictly worse at zero panic compared to the police officer, gaining only +2 aiming and reloading vs. the police officers +3 aiming, +2 reloading and +1 nimble. As a result, the veteran also gains aiming experience slower. Veteran comes with a notably larger bonus to foraging though. The usefulness of that boost is questionable however, as only the bonus to finding ammunition is really useful, because ammunition and guns cannot be crafted and guns require a second copy of the same model to be repaired, effectively forcing any gun user to focus on urban settings and a looting play-style.

Veteran in and of itself is not a bad occupation, as it is a less specialised version of the police officer, but its just WAY to expensive. A police officer with the brave trait has the same -8 point score. And even without brave, beta blockers and alcohol are so plentiful, that you can very effectively manage your panic. On top, if you remain alive long enough, your panic accumulation from seeing zombies will slow down with every day. Even after just a short while, you’ll really notice the difference and your character will get panicked much slower. As a result, with every day you’re playing, the value of the desensitised trait decreases. The police officer is also just three aiming levels away from panic stopping to affect gun use at all, although grinding to every level after level 5 aiming is a nightmare, because experience is hugely reduced after reaching level 5. The same is also true for the reloading skill, but that one is far less impactful.

I also want to hammer home again just how expensive -8 points is. Veteran locks you out of all panic increasing negative traits, so you cannot get any negative trait for free. While -8 can be offset with negative traits that are relatively free, such as conspicuous + weak stomach + high thirst, the police officer with the same trait combination could pick brave and be honestly better than the veteran from the beginning of the game.

Perhaps a bit of a strange choice, but the burger flipper is one of single most versatile occupations. The primary reason is that you start with a point score of +2 when choosing this occupation. Because of that, you can actually pick a lot of positive traits without going to far into the negative and turn the burger flipper into better variants of many of the following occupations. One example is the handy trait, which would set the score to -6 points. With the handy trait, the burger flipper comes with +1 carpentry, carving, short blade and masonry and +2 cooking and maintenance, which is a really good point to start off with. In comparison, the DIY-Expert has the same bonuses to carpentry, carving, maintenance and masonry while starting off at -4 points with no bonus to cooking and short blade. The burger flipper is also a lot better at foraging for food and even knows all cooking recipes immediately.

However: Every occupation can pick the handy trait. At a cost of -8, handy is extremely expensive which makes it a tough choice for expensive occupations like veteran or burglar, but everyone else can offset the negative points relatively comfortably. Plus, occupations like farmer and tailor, that also start at a point score of +2 can do the very same. Burger Flipper is also only saved by the fact, that maintenance is really good and the bonuses to foraging for food are useful for any play-through. The bonuses to Cooking is almost completely superfluous. Cooking is probably the easiest skill to level-up quickly. The speed-run for levelling cooking to level 10 sits at just 5:01 minutes. If you don’t mind wasting some food, you’ll be at level two cooking in a day even without advanced speed-run techniques. Cooking is also not particularly strong. You can absolutely play the game successfully without gaining even a single cooking experience point. Canned food, sweets and soft drinks are just so powerful and plentiful, that they almost invalidate the need to cook. Cooking becomes only necessary way later in a play-through once your reserves start running dry and your looting radius becomes bigger.

In terms of short blades only the hunting knife, handguard dagger and fighting knife are really worth using. Both hunting and fighting knives are relatively rare and the handguard dagger requires blacksmithing level 6 to craft and cannot be obtained in any other way. Most of the time you’ll be forced to poke zombies with a mediocre kitchen knife. Knives were made for cutting bread not for stabbing people and honestly best put on a long stick to fashion a spear out of.

Security Guard may sound interesting, but is really mid in practice. +2 Running and +1 Light footed is not awful. However aside from making your getaways more reliable, it does pretty little for you. The Security Guard also gets the exact same bonuses to foraging as the police officer. The bonus to finding ammunition is pretty useless though without any bonuses to aiming or reloading. This occupations selling point is the night owl trait, which is certainly one of the traits of all time. Night Owl makes sleep more efficient, but doesn’t decrease the actually duration. Tiredness is the most negatively impactful of the moodles, decreasing your fighting capabilities and perceptivity quite harshly even at the first stage. So avoiding tiredness can save your life. However, night owl does nothing to decrease your fatigue gain. Also, night owl becomes increasingly less useful the more tired you are before going to sleep. It basically only does anything of note when your sleep is interrupted for some reason or when you want to sleep when you’re just drowsy. However, YOU choose when and where to sleep. If your sleep is interrupted because of zombies nearby, perhaps you shouldn’t have slept there. And sleeping pills can be taken to decrease your fatigue to either very tired or ridiculously tired before going to bed if you really need to sleep for some reason. In most cases, just being active all day long will get you to tired at dusk no problem.

A criminally underpowered and therefore altogether middling occupation. At the very least it’s cheap at just -2.

Chef is just Burger Flipper but worse. That may sound strange, because the chef has +3 cooking (compared to the burger flippers’ +2) and gets +1 to butchering on top. However, the chef also starts with a starting of points score of -4, which means 6 points less than the burger flipper before choosing even a single trait. Cooking, as explained in the burger flippers’ section, is not a particularly useful skill to have and can be ground on any character extremely quickly. So the additional +1 to cooking may as well not exist and you would hardly notice. Butchering affects the quality of the meat cuts. With higher levels, you’ll get better and more meat from butchering animals. “Better” means a higher quality of the cut, increasing the amount of hunger that the specific slice of meat will reduce. The “prime” cuts’ hunger reduction is about triple that of the worst cut, the “poor” cut, which is admittedly substantial. However, it’s not like you’ll get no meat when butchering at level zero. You’ll gain a perfectly serviceable amount of meat regardless to satiate your hunger, particularly from fishing. On top of that, the chef gets zero bonuses to any of the skill needed to even acquire animals to butcher such as fishing or trapping.

A burger flipper with the hunter trait is essentially an infinitely superior version of the chef starting at just two less points than the chef at base. The chef is saved by the maintenance bonus, which makes it just barely better than what’s coming after.

Engineer main claim to fame is that fact, that you can pick the illiterate trait for +8 points and still be able to operate generators. Picking the engineer occupation is also the only way to obtain the throw-able bombs, which can cause huge damage to whole hordes of zombies. The magazine which could teach you the bomb recipes does exist in the code, but doesn’t seem to actually spawn in the current version, but that may be subject to chance in the future. The engineer also gets a plus one to electrical, arguably the hardest skill to grind in the game. For comparison, the current world record speed-run for maxing electrical sits at 1 hour, 16 minutes and 48s, being almost four times as long as the next longest speed-run for tailoring at 24 minutes and 13s. The plus one to carpentry is negligible honestly. If you want to play as a builder, just pick carpenter.

Bombs sound amazing, but are kind “eh” when actually playing with them. The material for the bombs can be easily acquired in large quantities when looting diligently, but without bombs the engineer is relatively defenceless early on as it comes with no bonus to any weapon type nor to maintenance. Even after crafting them, you still need to carry them around in your inventory, taking up space where you could have stored loot. Bombs are also unnecessarily heavy, meaning you won’t be caring many anyway. Bombs are – unsurprisingly – very loud, so once thrown, zombies from all over will home in on your position and often, the bombs won’t kill the entire horde, meaning the horde chasing you will increase in size with every throw. Additionally, bombs will also light fires which can spread, destroying whole neighbourhoods and the loot therein if your unlucky. They are also completely unsuited for close-quarters or indoor combat because nine times out of ten, you’ll just injure yourself severely while barely harming the zombies. The best bomb is the smoke bomb, due to it being able to blind zombies for a while, allowing you to get away easily. But that one can be learned by any one through a magazine, so it’s hardly a point in favour of the engineer. The bombs may just be more effective at luring away zombies from the position you actually want to loot than at killing them. Vehicular manslaughter is also still the most reliable and safest way to clear large hordes of zombies and is available to every occupation.

An occupation really not worth choosing unless you absolutely want to play with bombs for some reason.

From now one, we will get into the one-trick-ponies-occupations, except that their tricks are boring and/or done better by another occupation. The exact placement between the remaining occupations in C-Tier are honestly up to preference. The rancher edges out the highest placement among the rubbish largely only because grinding animal care and butchering is a bit of a pain. Animal care, as the name implies, affects how much resources you’ll get from shearing sheep and milking cattle and makes those action more reliable. It seems do nothing when caring for chickens, turkeys, pigs or rabbits and also doesn’t appear to affect stress gain or loss for the animals in any way. Stressed animals produce less resources, can injure you or break things. Animals at high stress will also actively pursue you in an attempt to kill you, so keeping them in a stress free environment (meaning providing shelter, food, water, tranquillity and safety from zombies) is a must when trying to keep livestock. However, the livestock farmer gets NOTHING to facilitate such an environment. This occupation even lacks the level one carpentry required for crafting a feeding through. Which means, if you want to play as the rancher, you’re almost required to play on of the pre-existing farms. That isn’t to much of an issue, as there is a relatively large farm in the starting town of Muldraugh with loads of animals.

Its clear however, that livestock farming in general is useful only in multiplayer. Food is pretty abundant and keeping a large amount of animals will just produce way to much fresh edibles. One player alone cannot consume all of it and becoming overweight is really undesirable, so you either have to store it somehow, necessitating electricity which requires the use of a generator later on once the electricity is cut off. But to what end would you want to store all of it for just yourself when butchering the next animals will provide you with sustenance for at the very least one entire day. Even if you would want to live entirely of the grid, you will need to do looting trips occasionally for fuel to power your freezers as there is currently no other way to preserve meat. So you’ll need to jump through a lot of hoops to make livestock farming viable. For single-player purposes fishing + farming is absolutely enough to sustain yourself indefinitely and takes a lot less time.

Rancher therefore is a great role-play occupation or as the designated animal farmer in multiplayer, but does precious little for making your play-through any more enjoyable.

A bit of a meme occupation really, which is kinda sad as starting with eight fitness right away is absolutely amazing. High fitness makes you better at fighting, causes you to tire slower and recovers endurance faster. With high fitness, climbing tall fences also becomes more reliable and makes tripping rarer. With the +2 to running the fitness instructor will zoom across the map and won’t get tired. However, that is it. You’re REALLY good at running away, which is not terrible, but doesn’t help you get any loot. At some point, you will need to fight and even with the generic boosts from fitness to your combat, the fitness instructor is strictly worse at combat than the fire officer or lumberjack (if they’re using axes that is).

Nutritionist is also a complete joke of a trait. The nutrition of canned or packaged food can be seen by everyone and every edible item has an indication of how much hunger it will reduce. Having even the most modest amount of common sense will completely negate the need to pick nutritionist. When your loosing weight, just eat more sugary treats, drink soda or eat more meat. You don’t need a trait to tell you that you should eat potatoes instead of berries when trying to satiate your hunger. The impact of the actual composition of nutrients in food items is also minimal. Only protein gives you a boost to exercise when you eat enough and only calories affect your hunger. The rest is flavour text. A completely useless trait.

Fitness instructor would already be mediocre if it would start at zero points in the character creator, but for some reason, it sets you back -6 points, making it one of the four second most expensive occupations. You could choose burger flipper with the athletic trait, which would honestly be a lot better, and just be -8 points in debt.

Another instance of a “burger flipper + trait, but worse”-occupation. In this case, its burger flipper + blacksmith knowledge. The blacksmith comes with +4 blacksmithing, +1 maintenance and the blacksmith knowledge trait at a starting point score of -6. Compare that with the burger flipper with the blacksmith knowledge, who would come with +2 cooking, +2 maintenance, +2 blacksmithing and +1 short blade and only -4 points in the negative. Blacksmithing is a pretty good skill, as its is necessary to craft weapons and tools as well as high quality armour that is very strong, notably stronger even than the best armour you can find through looting. Crafting your own weapons is particularly useful when you intend to mainly use one weapon type, such as axes. Finding a sufficient amount of axes, particularly when wanting to build your own base, can be quite the daunting task. So blacksmithing can alleviate the pressure of leaving your base to find necessary items.

However, blacksmithing is by far the most involved crafting mechanic currently in the game. First, you need to scavenge for steel by f. ex. dismantling cars. Then you need to craft charcoal for which you need plenty of wood and a charcoal burning pile. To actually smelt the iron, you need a furnace. The highest tier of furnace, which is required to access all recipes, additionally requires level one carpentry and masonry to build. Same goes for the highest tier of forge. Then you also need pottery to craft crucibles and cast molds. So once you’ve acquired sufficient iron and charcoal, build your furnace, your kiln for firing pottery items and the forge, you’ll come to horrifying realisation, that the blacksmith does not come with any of the blacksmithing recipes pre-learned. So you still need to go out and find all the magazines to craft anything of value.

Because of this, blacksmithing in general can really only be done effectively in the late-game, once your all set-up with a functioning base and a large quantity of resources in storage. However at that point, your starting occupation usually has become less and less impactful. I’m certain that, with enough set-up, you can get to blacksmithing level four reasonably quickly on any character. Blacksmith only edges out a higher placement than what comes below because of the +1 to maintenance.

The mechanic is good at repairing and maintaining cars and therefore gains a large bonus of +3 to mechanics. Which means that (almost) all bonuses this occupation provides, only come into effect when you’re around cars. Cars are an important part of gameplay, due to the size of the map. You can cover the whole map on foot if you so desire, but you cannot bring all the loot with you. Choosing a base location is of course not mandatory, you can play as a nomad if you want, but that locks you out of many gameplay features such as the above mentioned blacksmithing or keeping livestock. Therefore, a car becomes almost a necessity after you exhausted all loot spawns in your immediate vicinity. However, you must use cars smartly. While yes, this game takes place in the USA, driving everywhere all the time is not actually advisable. Cars make a lot of noise and consume fuel, which you either need to siphon from other cars or from gas stations. Plus, if your swarmed by zombies, cars can become death traps. Cars are at their most effective when being used to transfer large quantities of loot from secondary or temporary bases to your main base over large distances. Or for clearing large groups of zombies by means of vehicular manslaughter. However, for that you don’t a car in great condition. In fact, you basically only need a single car in good condition, which can be found if you look diligently.

So that raises the question of what mechanics does at all. A high level of mechanics by itself basically only grants you the ability to repair engines with salvaged spare engine parts as for every other repair you need welding. Higher levels of mechanics make the installation more reliable, but its not impossible at lower levels, although there is a higher chance, that you may severely damage the part you were trying to swap out or repair. Car parts can also not be crafted and must be found in the world. Mechanics is also one of those skills, that can be easily ground by dismantling cars with a propane torch. Just find a scrap yard or some wrecked cars, read the appropriate skill book before and scrap away. You’ll likely be able to do everything you could want with cars at level three honestly.

That leaves the mechanic with +1 short blunt and the ability to repair all cars without the need to find and read the appropriate magazine. Finding the magazines is not that difficult as there are only three, really only the heavy-duty one is particularly useful and I found them to spawn relatively plentifully in common locations. So that leaves the +1 short blunt, which is certainly a bonus. Honestly just pick carpenter plus vehicle knowledge and you’ll be just -2 points in the negative compared to the mechanics -4.

Electrician is basically just a less versatile version of the engineer, coming with nothing but a +3 to electrical. Just like engineer, the electrician can also operate generators without reading the required magazine and comes with some recipes pre-learned, a third of which is almost completely useless because the electrician cannot craft bombs. At level one electronics and level two mechanics you can hot-wire cars, but the electrician is not further away from that goal than the engineer or the mechanic. The only real highlight of a high electrical skill is that at level 5 you can craft battery powered lamps, which means you can light your house without needing to power on the generator, saving on fuel. However, you do not need electrical whatsoever to set up and maintain your generator or connect electronic items to it. All you need to have done is to have read the “How to use a generator” magazine and that is it.

While it’s kinda cute that the electrician can craft ham radios and walkie-talkies with which you can communicate in-game in multiplayer, this can also be done with a discord call with your friend(s) in it. Honestly, the electrician is only the best of the worst occupations because grinding your electrical skill is a complete nightmare and takes forever. You basically have to dismantle electronics en masse and for each you get a pitiful amount of experience. Unlike with carpentry, where wooden furniture are plentiful, most houses only have a small handful of electronic devices and you do not gain any experience when failing to dismantle the object. So even grinding to just the first level, after which successfully dismantling electronics becomes more likely, takes ages. There is also no trait which boost electrical, making the bonus granted by the occupation a little more valuable. Although, you can play for hours upon hours on end and won’t even notice the electrical skill existing, so its hardly worth choosing if making your gameplay experience more enjoyable is the goal.

These two are essentially the same occupation, so they will be discussed together here. They both specialise in first aid, arguably the least useful skill in the entire game due how terribly underpowered it is. You’ll barely notice a difference between level zero first aid and level ten. Firstly, your scratches, wounds or lacerations do not heal faster with higher first aid levels, only fractures do. Nor will first aid reduce the chance of catching the zombie virus. The only bonus you may notice is that your bandages and poultices will last longer before needing to be changed. However, you can also use rags as bandages which can be acquired almost infinitely and extremely quickly to just replace the bandage every time its gets dirty. You can also do every operation on yourself regardless of first aid level and first aid will do nothing to make these operations more reliable or effective. The only real boon is that fractures heal faster, but you should avoid fractures AT ALL COSTS, because with a fracture all you can do is sit around and wait for it to heal, first aid skill or not, which is terribly boring. Just avoid jumping down from a first floor unless it is an absolute emergency and car crashes and you’ll never even need to worry about fracture heal speed.

Both occupations also gain a sizeable bonus to foraging for medical items and herbs, which is at the very least appreciated. Doctor comes with a +1 to short blade, which is something, but as stated in the burger flippers section, short blade is probably the worst weapon skill. Nurse comes with a +1 to lightfooted, which is also not particularly impactful by itself as explained in the burglars discussion. The only real boon of the occupation is granting a high first aid skill is that you don’t need to grind for. You can only gain first aid experience when performing medical actions on yourself, meaning you actively need to damage yourself if you want to grind this skill, which is unsurprisingly extremely undesirable. At the very least both occupations are very cheap and grant you an additional +2 points in the character creator. But if your after that, just pick the burger flipper with really ANY other trait and you’ll be better off than playing either nurse or doctor.

Fishing is probably the best of the survivalist skills as it is far less involved than trapping or keeping livestock and will grant you access to a reliable source of protein in the form of fish fillets. The entry hurdle is also laughably low as you can craft a fishing rod from a nail, a twain and a stick and also repair it with the very same ingredients. If you have not chosen the angler as your occupation, you just need the required magazines for the crafting recipes. However, just focusing on fishing and nothing else is just not worth it. Fishing can be ground very easily and you would want to engage in it anyway, regardless of occupation, so the experience will come by itself. A higher fishing skill does affect the quality of fish that you can catch, but not the quantity or type of fish. Higher levels of fishing however make it more likely you’ll get a fish to bite, reducing waiting time. Even at level zero though patiently fishing will allow you to catch enough fish to sustain yourself quite comfortably. So the +3 fishing this occupation grants is complete overkill.

That leaves the angler with a +1 to foraging and some surprisingly strong boost to foraging. However, as a pure foraging build, the angler is easily outclassed by the park ranger. Insects to use as bait can also be farmed almost infinitely from corpses, as maggots will have spawned if you leave them out to rot for a sufficient amount of time. So the boost to finding insects is negligible. Probably one the least impactful occupations in the game and at a cost of -2 points honestly hardly worth choosing.

There is a house in Muldraugh with a backyard garden full of crops that are guaranteed to spawn. If you have read the first skill book and then harvest that field, you’ll probably be at level three farming on every character in five minutes or less. +3 agriculture is a complete joke. Honestly, farmer could grant +5 agriculture or more and still be underpowered. Grinding agriculture experience is just so unbelievably easy that any bonus you get from traits or occupations is almost worthless. The bonuses of a high agriculture skill are at the very least notable, reducing the chance of your crops being “cursed” (“cursed” = less health, more sickly, less yield) if planted in unideal conditions. A higher agriculture skill also increases the yield, health and decreases the illness severity linearly. Similar to the angler, the crop farmer also comes with a pretty sizeable bonus to foraging, in particular for crops.

However, similarly to keeping livestock (although to a lesser extent) farming becomes relevant only towards the advanced hours of any play-through. Your crops require a safe, in the best case fenced off, area to grow. Zombies will damage your crops if they come into contact. So you’ll have to have your base already set-up before starting to farm. Farming also requires a lot of tools, a large quantity of seed packages to start you of and eight different magazines to learn all the required recipes. The crop farmer at the very least starts of with all recipes pre-learned, saving you the need to loot libraries and book shops. But seeds and tools need to looted or foraged for by any occupation before you can get going. Playing on an already spawned farm may allow you to side step the need to look for seeds though.

Farmer does absolutely nothing for you the second you step away from your fields to do literally anything else, which is honestly 95% of gameplay. With a miniscule bonus to the second easiest skill to grind, the crop farmer also offers nothing to offset that. At the very least its cheap and grants you an additional +2 points in the character creator, allowing you to choose traits more comfortable, many of which are on their own better than anything crop farmer can offer.

Gaining +3 welding at the cost of -6 points in the character creator is a complete joke. How +3 welding is comparable to the +2 to lightfooted, nimble and sneaking of the burglar occupation with the same negative starting point score is beyond me. Welding, in terms of building structures, is just strictly worse than carpentry. The structures are minimally more durable then wood structures, but acquiring the materials, such as steel sheets or rods, is a lot more difficult and to craft anything requires welding mask and a propane torch with fuel. To craft many of the items required for welding, you’ll need a full blacksmithing set-up and some levels in the skill. Otherwise, you’re forced to search for the material or dismantle cars. Acquiring a sufficient amount of propane is also not trivial, as it spawns relatively rarely. Compare that with carpentry that requires a hammer and nails, which are extremely plentiful, and wood, which can be farmed very easily in forests with just an axe and a saw. There is also a singular piece of furniture that can be crafted by welding that does not have a carpentry equivalent, which is the metal barrel oven. An item, you’ll never need, because the antique oven, that has many guaranteed spawns, is just a strictly better version and can be picked up by anyone.

When it comes to crafting, welding is actually quite strong. The scrap metal armour is pretty good, but does require a level in tailoring if you want to craft it. However, the scrap metal armour is a strictly worse version of the full-metal armour you can craft through blacksmithing. Blacksmithing also grants you access to even better armour variant, the articulated metal armour. Welding only gets to fix spikes to that armour, but does nothing in its creation. As dismantling cars also grants welding experience, you can use them same method as grinding up mechanics easily to also grind up welding. The speed-run for grinding welding to level ten sits at just 8 minutes and 58s, so its a quick grind.

A laughably awful occupation, saved only by the fact that welding, although always secondary to carpentry, is at the very least versatile, which cannot be said about our last occupation.

Gaining +4 to a skill and having +2 starting point score sure sounds great, except that skill is tailoring and is therefore terrible. Tailoring is not completely useless, but in every instance tailoring is useful, it is in combination with another skill such as when trying to craft the aforementioned articulated metal armour. Even if you want to craft your own clothes, you need to acquire the necessary material from other skills such as yarn from sheep (animal care), leather from game (butchering) or burlap/twine from hemp (agriculture). Unless you want to role-play as “four acre, self-sufficient farm owner”, crafting your own clothes is borderline superfluous because clothing is extremely plentiful. The only thing that tailoring does on its own is applying patches to your clothes to increase its scratch and bite resistance. And yes, at the highest levels, a piece of clothing that is fully patched with leather straps is pretty decent at defending yourself from bites and scratches. However, if you somehow managed to find the patience to grind up to such high levels of tailoring, just use that skill to craft any of the metal armours, which while heavier, protect you infinitely better. Or, I don’t know, raid a fire station for the fire fighter clothes and military boots or just start of as the fire officer and you wont need to think about protection until way later in the game. The only positive thing about the tailor occupation is that tailoring is one of the harder skills to effectively grind, but that doesn’t mean that with sufficient preparation you can’t quickly reach level four tailoring, which gives you everything you could want from this skill.

Any occupation with the sewer trait is better than this complete joke of an occupation.

And with that, it is finished.

I do hope, you have enjoyed my tier list. Starting to play Project Zomboid can be daunting and overwhelming due to all the choices and the completely open sandbox. If anyone has found choosing an occupation less overwhelming due to my tier list, it was worth writing.

Keep in mind, that this tier list was made with B42.13.1 in mind. Project Zomboid is a game still in development, so the details in this guide may be subject to change in the future.

I fact-checked everything thoroughly, but the Wiki is kinda eh, so please point it out if I made a mistake.