How loot works on ZA-Z, from loot settings to loot respawn and rare finds
Loot on ZA-Z is set to Normal in every category, which is richer than Build 42's own default of Rare, with guns a notch higher again. Every container rolls its loot once, the first time someone opens it. Town containers can refill in a server-wide loot respawn wave every 30 in-game days (90 real hours), but only if they were looted down to 4 items or fewer and nobody has been in the area for 12 in-game hours. On top of that, the server hides things no other server has: South African food, the Knox Antidote, Smoker's Pack seeds, coloured ZA-Z's Tracers, and mythic ZA-Z's Gear at 1 in 10,000 containers.
#What are ZA-Z's loot settings?
| Loot | ZA-Z | Build 42 default |
|---|---|---|
| Ranged weapons and attachments | 1.2 | 1.2 |
| Everything else: food, canned food, medical, melee weapons, ammo, tools, clothing, bags, books, skill books, keys, media, farming, mechanics | 1.0 (Normal) | mostly 0.6 (Rare); perishable food and miscellaneous 0.8, keys 0.4 |
| Rolls per container | 1.0 | 1.0 |
| Extra loot near big hordes | off | off |
- Already-looted buildings: the chance that a building is picked clean before you get there rises to 25% by day 90, half that out in the country. Buildings with more than 50 rooms are never pre-looted.
- Diminishing loot: fresh containers thin out by at most 20% over ten in-game years, so you will not notice it.
#When does a container get its loot?
Once, when a player first opens it. The server rolls the container's loot table right then and sends you everything in it. After that the container only changes when people take things out, put things in, or a loot respawn refills it. Ground nobody has opened yet still rolls with today's tables, which is why new loot (like the mods added on 30 September 2026) turns up first in places nobody has been.
#Does loot respawn on ZA-Z?
Yes, in a server-wide wave every 720 in-game hours (30 in-game days, 90 real hours). The waves land at 07:00 in-game on Day 31, 61, 91, 121, 151 and so on. Areas that are loaded at that moment are checked on the spot; everywhere else is checked the next time a player brings it into view.
A container refills only if all of this is true:
- It sits in a town or trailer park (farms and the wilds never refill).
- Nobody has been in that part of town for 12 in-game hours (90 real minutes).
- No player has built or barricaded in that part of town.
- It is not inside a safehouse.
- It is not player-built, a corpse or a composter.
- It was opened and looted at least once, and now holds 4 items or fewer. Any item counts, junk included.
A refill is one normal loot roll on top of whatever is left. An area that fails the check at its wave misses that wave completely and waits 30 more days, so the town you live in will rarely refill. Loot towns you do not live in and come back after the next wave. Leaving 5 or more items in a container, even junk, stops it refilling. Buildings can hand out their door keys again after each wave too.
#Town restocks
Now and then the server gives one town a light extra refill with the game's own loot tables. Rosewood had the first, in September 2026. Each eligible container gets one fresh roll and keeps 20 to 30% of it, once per container per restock. The rules are the loot-respawn rules above (explored, looted, under 5 items, in a town room, no safehouse), except that players standing in the town do not block it.
#ZA-Z's own loot
| What | Where it turns up | How rare |
|---|---|---|
| South African Food | fridges, kitchens, shops, butchers, bakeries, vending machines | 3% to 45% per container, one to four items |
| Knox Antidote, the zombie cure | fridges only | 1 in 100 medical fridges, 1 in 2,000 others, one per 14 in-game days server-wide |
| ZA-Z's Tracers (green, blue, red, gold, pink) | wherever plain 9mm, .45, .44, .38, .357, 5.56, .308 or 7.62x39 ammo spawns | about one for every ten plain spawns of that calibre |
| ZA-Z's Smoker's Pack | next to the vanilla items each piece resembles (below) | a share of that item's weight |
| Micro Torch, from ZA-Z's Gear and Clothing | wherever angle-head flashlights spawn | a quarter of their weight |
| Mythics, from ZA-Z's Gear and Clothing | any world container, whenever the game fills it | 1 in 10,000 |
| A piece of ZA-Z kit | any container, on its own separate roll | 1 in 10,000 |
Smoker's Pack placement: seed packets turn up wherever hemp seeds do (drug shacks, police evidence rooms, the university art rooms) and, at half the tomato-seed weight, wherever vegetable seed packets do (farm and garden stores, homesteads, glove boxes, farmer zombies). Buds, joints, blunts, the bong, the grinder and the stash tin sit next to loose tobacco, cigarette packs, cigars, pipes and rolling papers at 10 to 50% of their weight. The strain is random. Full detail on the Smoker's Pack page.
#How rare are the mythics, really?
The game's loot tables cannot go rarer than 1 in 10,000 per roll: any item listed at all passes when the dice land on zero. Twenty-odd mythics in a table would hand one out every hundred containers or so. So the mythics skip the tables. Every time the game fills a container (first opening or a loot-respawn refill), the server makes two separate rolls:
- Mythic roll, 1 in 10,000: one of 22 mythics at random: 12 bags, 3 pairs of boots, 4 pairs of gloves, the Gold Desert Eagle and 2 shoulder holsters. Any one named mythic is about 1 in 220,000.
- Kit roll, 1 in 10,000: one random piece of rarer ZA-Z kit, on its own roll so it never thins out the mythics.
In a test of 5 million container fills the mythic roll paid out 479 times. Corpses and bags do not roll. See ZA-Z's Gear and Clothing for what each mythic does.
#What about places I explored before the new loot?
Containers roll once, so ground opened before 30 September 2026 held none of the new mod loot. To make up for it, the server seeds explored ground as players move through it: each explored container in a map room gets one fresh roll, and only the new mod items from it are kept (Smoker's Pack, tracers, the Micro Torch, and a mythic or kit piece if the 1 in 10,000 rolls hit). Nothing vanilla is added. It happens once per container, ever, and skips safehouses and anything player-built.