In the hardcore survival game of Project Zomboid you combine deep mechanics and a large array of items to survive. Some items can be used in ways you wouldn’t imagine. The list of crafting recipes is huge. For every action you will need the appropriate item. For example, to take apart a walkie-talkie you’ll need a screwdriver. Occasionally you may see random jewelry around, but what is tit used for?
How to Find Jewelry in Project Zomboid
Jewelry can be found around the map in Project Zomboid. There are a few places that you can find different types of jewelry. Generally, if you loot the corpses of zombies you will find jewelry on about half of them. This can range from gold rings, to earrings and necklaces. This is the easiest way to find jewelry and seemingly never-ending. Depending on your zombie spawn settings you may have zombies endlessly respawning.
Another place you can find jewelry is in certain containers in houses. The richer the house the more likely you are to find jewelry in it. Most of the time you can find necklaces and the like in bedside tables and in wardrobes. In general, anywhere you can find clothing you may find jewelry in a house. Don’t feel bad about taking it, they won’t need it any more!
What is Jewelry Used For in Project Zomboid
You might be wondering what the use of the jewelry you can find in the game is. You may have thought of melting it down to craft. Perhaps to trade it for goods? To be completely blunt, jewelry does not have a purpose in the current version (build 41) of Project Zomboid. Whether the developers have just added this in as a feature of customization or they have future plans for jewelry we do not know. Perhaps in the future there will be NPC traders which use different jewelry as a currency. We do not know.
The one use jewelry actually has is for customizing your character. All of the jewelry you find can be equipped to your character. This will also show on their character model when equipped. The best use of jewelry therefore is as a role-play mechanism. Once multiplayer finally drops maybe you want to be the guy that trades food away to stockpile gold jewelry. In general the jewelry items that can be found in Project Zomboid are for customization only. That being said, they do have their own weight so you can equip them to level up your strength skill faster. This is because carrying heavy weights passively levels strength. They do not weigh much though.
A Mod for Recycling Jewelry
There is a mod on the Project Zomboid steam workshop which aims to make use of unwanted jewelry. The mod Currency Variety Mod creates a system where gold and silver items can be scrapped down to gold. This gold can then be traded for rare items. This adds a great new system to the game and gives the player a reason to actually hoard jewelry. The author has even created in-game sprites for these gold scrap and bar items. You can see a good amount of effort has gone into the mod so check it out if you are interested. Having not used the mod myself, I can’t comment on how it works.
The Future of Jewelry in Project Zomboid
There seems to be a great variety of jewelry in the game. For that reason I think that the developers have a plan for jewelry. I would not think that they had spent the time to draw and program in all of these necklaces for nothing. The mod above is a great example of what could be a use for jewelry. That being said it is still very basic. Maybe when we see the inclusion on official NPCs in Project Zomboid a reason will show itself. Until then, what do you think jewelry is for in the game? Let me know in the comments below.