I have found a way to get food in Project Zomboid that absolutely breaks the game. While people grind farming, foraging, or traditional fishing. I simply use the humble and easy to make fishing net. With this, we can easily get a week’s worth of food with almost zero effort. So let’s talk about how this works.
So, why are fishing nets so powerful? Well, that’s because they are one of the most passive food sources in the game. They actually generate their own bait which makes them infinitely sustainable. An unbaited fishing net will produce frogs, small bait fish, and crawfish. All of these can be used with a chum base to create a specific bait. This makes them slightly better than trapping where you always need to find or grow bait.
This increases your efficiency and allows you to spend less time working on chores! We will discuss in some detail later a few ways to acquire chum. One which is more dangerous and the safer but slower way.
So what do we need to get a fishing net or the ability to make them? Well to start off, if we don’t have the fishing guide profession we will need to find the magazine to learn the recipes. The Wiki incorrectly states that you can create them with angler trait, but this is easily proven false.
The best places I have found for finding the magazines were; the fishing shops (obviously), mailrooms which have lots of magazines, and then prayer since finding a specific magazine is very very annoying. We can also automatically learn how to create fishing nets at level 6, or research them from a looted fishing net at level 4 Fishing. Once we know how to create these nets, we can easily make them using only 5 units of wire, and considering a full thing of wire has 10 units. That means each wire we loot (assuming it’s full) is 2 fishing nets. One little tip I will note is that this does work with inventive which lowers all level requirements by 1
So, how do we use these traps? To bait a fishing trap, you will need to create a chum base. This can be dug directly from sand tiles in game or you can add the sand to a bag to create the chum base in a safer location. You will need some item that allows you to dig though. The advantage of creating the chum directly from the ground vs creating it from the bags is that creating it in the wild can leave you exposed to zeds but it is much faster. One little hint for finding sand is to look at the B42map website and look for the preset sand tiles (like and subscribe for more project zomboid hints <3). Other tiles can exist but these ones will ALWAYS exist. Playgrounds are also always a great source of sand!
Once you have your chum base, you can then add various items to it as bait which will create a specific chum bait of that name. A short list of items you can add are: most bugs, small bait fish, crawfish, snails, and other similarly small animals. There are many items you can add, so I recommend experimenting with it some yourself in debug mode.
Now we can really get into the meat(no pun intended) of why fishing nets are SO DAMN GOOD. An unbaited fishing net on average will give you around 150 calories a day from my testing, but this isn’t the key point here. The key is that these unbaited nets return frogs, crawfish, and small bait fish which can all be used in chum to create even MORE powerful chum bait to use in our traps. We can also use this to gather bait for traditional fishing as well! Making fishing nets useful even without chum.
You can further improve the strength of the chum base by adding extra bait as discussed above. But if you are lacking bait, you can use the chum base by itself as well. In my playthroughs I have gotten fish so big they restore 14.5k calories raw. That is literally a week’s worth of food from one net. Fishing nets are extremely broken, that much is true. They have been broken for a long time, so this could be an intended feature honestly.
Now, fishing nets can break and it can be a very annoying situation. So how can we prevent this? Well, while the wire to create nets is very easy to get from disassembling broken nets, looting, or slightly more difficultly from Blacksmithing. The value of just not breaking nets shouldn’t be ignored. If you want to avoid breaking nets you should try to check them within 15 hours. Since fishing nets break in a predictable manner. After 15 hours, there is a 20% chance of a broken net. So, if you are ever in doubt, just always check them each 12-15 hours and it’ll be easy going. This can be much more difficult in MP though since time passes when you’re offline, so do keep that in mind. But, if you do happen to get a broken net or fish one up, you can dismantle them to reclaim some wire at level 7 (or 6 with inventive). You can also research this at level 5 from wire itself. This makes fishing nets renewable as well since we can always fish for broken nets. One quick tip is that if you forget how long your traps have been out. You can always pick them up to avoid breaking them, but you will sacrifice your loot
You can view the video below for my detailed information!
