Project Zomboid Basements: 43 Fixed Coordinates (B42)
Short answer: searching house by house is the wrong way to find a basement. Build 42 has two kinds. Some are baked into the map data and appear in the same spot in every world; the rest are placed by your world seed when the save is created. Only the first kind can be looked up in advance. Below are the 43 fixed basements whose coordinates can be verified on the wiki, the sandbox setting that controls how often the random ones appear, and the structural problem that makes basements weak as bases: you cannot add an exit to one.
Written against Build 42.20.4, the stable release from 26 August 2026 (confirmed in The Indie Stone's own announcement). Basements are a Build 42 feature and do not exist in Build 41. Mechanics come from the official Features Overview for Build 42.20 and pzwiki.net's Basement page. Note that each wiki page was last verified against a different build — Basement 42.12.3, Server settings 42.20.0, Generator 42.13.1, Military Research Facility 42.19.0 — which matters for the coordinates; see the caveat below.
Fixed basements versus procedural ones
The official feature list describes them together:
Technical improvements have allowed us to greatly exceed our map's previous height limits, allowing basements and very tall buildings. Underground, as well as basements, you can find bunkers, panic rooms and "Wayne's World" style sets underneath suitable houses — via a combination of unique and generated locations that change on each run.
The counts come from the official pre-launch announcement "42.20: The Big Glow Up": 400 procedural basements and 75 unique ones. For the procedural half, the same overview explains what decides placement:
World seeds now determine the locations of some generated elements like basements, zombie distribution, and the wilderness outside of the map's borders. These values can be saved and shared to make locations more consistent for different save files if desired.
So the random basements are not pure luck — the same seed produces the same placement. Turned around, that means a report of a great basement in a particular house cannot be reproduced unless the seed comes with it. Note that the official wording goes as far as "seeds determine the locations" and "these values can be saved and shared"; which screen holds the input field was not something this research could pin down.
| Unique (fixed) | Procedural (random) | |
|---|---|---|
| Official count | 75 | 400 |
| Placement decided by | Baked into map data | World seed, plus whether the building qualifies |
| Reroll the world and | nothing moves | a new seed moves them |
| Can you look it up beforehand? | Yes — see the table below | No shared coordinate list is possible; it depends on the seed |
Per the wiki, entrance positions for the procedural ones are defined in the game's code, and a basement only generates where the building meets the requirements. They come in several shapes and orientations, and some share a layout with different furnishing. Sizes run tiny, small, medium and large, and the contents lean domestic — laundry rooms, home gyms, band practice rooms, game rooms, storage — through to bars, trophy rooms, and large layouts with bunks, a bathroom and even a medical room. A basement is not automatically a loot jackpot: empty variants exist at every size.
The sandbox setting that controls basement frequency
Build 42's server settings include a dedicated Basement section that sets how often random basements appear, on a seven-step scale. From pzwiki.net Server settings (verified against 42.20.0):
| Value | Meaning |
|---|---|
1 | Never |
2 | Extremely Rare |
3 | Rare |
4 | Sometimes (default) |
5 | Often |
6 | Very Often |
7 | Always |
The key is Basement.SpawnFrequency and the default is 4. Read the description carefully: it governs "how frequently basements spawn at random locations". Setting it to 1 does not remove the fixed basements — everything in the table below exists at any setting. Equally, 7 will not put a basement under a building that does not qualify.
The 43 basements that are in every world
These come from the Static section of pzwiki.net's Basement page, filtered to entries with usable coordinates. Append them to pzmap.org as a query string — ?1663x5748 — to open that spot directly.
| Area | Building | Coordinates |
|---|---|---|
| Brandenburg | Gas station | 1663x5748 |
| P.S. Delilah (paddle steamer) | 2045x5687 | |
| Empty store | 2111x5785 | |
| Music bar | 2424x5797 | |
| Grocery store | 2073x5957 | |
| Chili restaurant | 2067x6314 | |
| Prison | 1389x5874 | |
| Destroyed building | 2235x6414 | |
| Echo Creek | Ovo Farms | 3999x10750 |
| Gas station | 3566x10896 | |
| Cult farm | 3816x12309 | |
| Ekron | Church | 450x9930 |
| Farmhouse | 278x9811 | |
| Community college | 739x9827 | |
| Fire station | 768x9769 | |
| House | 929x9917 | |
| House | 848x9720 | |
| Irvington | Irvington Gun Club | 1860x14166 |
| School | 2235x14334 | |
| King of the Hill | 2229x14226 | |
| Church | 2417x14248 | |
| Bank | 2427x13983 | |
| Store | 2521x14061 | |
| Apartments | 2641x14462 | |
| March Ridge | Cold War bunker | 9898x12626 |
| Muldraugh | Police station | 10640x10404 |
| The Rusty Rifle (bar) | 10764x10546 | |
| Riverside | Shop storage | 6362x5319 |
| Bank | 6501x5299 | |
| Construction site | 6708x5251 | |
| Rosewood | Gas station | 8177x11264 |
| Bowling alley | 8085x11517 | |
| Workshop | 8082x11604 | |
| West Point | Shop storage | 11906x6855 |
| Office space | 11981x6941 | |
| Police station | 11892x6940 | |
| General store | 11834x6915 | |
| Outside the towns | Lake gas station (Big Spring) | 8727x14088 |
| Farmhouse | 1901x9955 | |
| Sanatorium | 4104x6534 | |
| Abandoned factory | 3832x6219 | |
| Doe Valley bunker | 5578x9373 | |
| Military Research Facility (17 levels down) | 5687x12472 |
That is short of the official 75, and here is the arithmetic. The wiki's Static section carries 47 entries with a coordinate; removing the four bad coordinates explained in the next section leaves 43. Rosewood's "Kentucky state prison morgue" is absent for a different reason — the wiki gives it no coordinate at all. The section also still carries incomplete-section tags on Brandenburg, Ekron, Rosewood, "Other" and the Military Research Facility. So 43 is the count the wiki has filled in with usable coordinates, not the number that exists in the game.
Four wiki coordinates were dropped
The list above is not a straight copy. These four entries carry coordinates that cannot be right, so they were excluded — treat them with suspicion if you meet them elsewhere.
| Wiki entry | Why it was dropped |
|---|---|
Muldraugh / Bank 1389x5874 | Muldraugh's town centre is 10593x9738 — over 9,000 tiles away on the x axis. This is a different part of the map. |
Rosewood / School floors 1 and 2 1389x5874 | Rosewood's centre is 8105x11578. Same problem; the value appears to have been copied from the Brandenburg prison entry. |
Ekron / Bar 8728x14085 | Ekron's centre is 546x9891. The coordinate is within three tiles of the same page's "Lake gas station" at 8727x14088, so it looks like a mix-up. |
Three of the surviving entries were confirmed against town pages that were written independently. Muldraugh Police Department reads 10640x10404 on the Basement page and 10638x10407 on the Muldraugh page. The Rusty Rifle: 10764x10546 against 10760x10547. Irvington Gun Club: 1860x14166 against 1857x14170. Those gaps are the difference between a doorway and a building centre.
Two entries use a dedicated page's coordinate instead. The March Ridge bunker reads 9922x12624 on the Basement page, but 9898x12626 on both its own page and the March Ridge town page. The Military Research Facility reads 5593x12517 on the Basement page and 5687x12472 on its own. The table takes the dedicated pages in both cases, as they are verified against newer builds (42.18.0 and 42.19.0).
Freshness is a separate question. The Basement page is verified against 42.12.3, which predates the 42.20 "Big Glow Up". The developers state that 42.20 rebuilt Riverside, West Point, Rosewood, Fallas Lake, Muldraugh, Ekron and Dixie from the ground up, so coordinates in those towns may have shifted. The page itself was edited on 11 September 2026, so it is not abandoned. Brandenburg, Irvington, Echo Creek and March Ridge were not on the rebuild list and are correspondingly safer bets.
The two bunkers worth a trip
March Ridge: the Cold War bunker
Its own wiki page (verified 42.18.0) gives 9898x12626, 5671 Folger Street, inside the March Ridge School grounds. A long staircase from the surface leads into an entrance tunnel, beyond which sit a decontamination room, power room, dining hall, gym, HVAC room, sick bay, armory, rec room, several storage rooms, dormitories, bathrooms, laundries and offices. In-game material dates its decommissioning to 1991, two years before the Knox Event.
Temper your expectations. The wiki says plainly that there is not much loot down there — leftover military gear in the lockers (ALICE belt and suspenders, military backpacks), canned food, and some antibiotics and bandages. The real obstacle is architectural: three large garage doors in the entrance tunnel will make entry difficult without a key if they are closed.
Hog Wallow Forest: the Military Research Facility, 17 levels down
The deepest place in Knox Country. The wiki page (verified 42.19.0) gives 5687x12472, deep in Hog Wallow Forest west of Rosewood: two surface floors over seventeen basement levels. Only the bottom five hold rooms; reaching them means descending thirteen flights of stairs. There is an elevator on the surface, but it does not work even when powered from the grid or a generator.
| Level | Contents |
|---|---|
-1 to -12 | Stairs only |
-13 | Decontamination room, security room, large storage room, private bedrooms with their own toilets |
-14 | Bunk rooms, two bathrooms, two locker rooms, laundry |
-15 | Mess hall, lounge, boxing ring, offices, archives, large boardroom |
-16 | Laboratories behind a decontamination chamber, security room, large armory, animal kennel, morgue, MRI room |
-17 | Power generation room and a cave system sealed behind three doors, ending in a survivor camp with "HAVE HOPE" on the wall |
The wiki calls this basement "one of, if not the most dangerous areas in Knox Country" — cramped corridors, total darkness, and soldier zombies that spawn with military backpacks and ALICE belts and occasionally carry an M16 Assault Rifle. Access has a deadline, too: once erosion sets in and trees take over the dirt roads, getting there becomes close to impossible. Secure the route early if you intend to go.
Can you live down there? You cannot add an exit
An enclosed space sounds ideal for defence. Three things get in the way.
1. You cannot build or extend a basement. The wiki states that the player currently cannot create their own basements. It also records that breaking a basement wall and walking into the void teleports you back to ground level (logged as a bug as of 42.12.3). So the usual escape route — knock through a wall and leave in another direction — is not available. Above ground that option exists; underground it does not.
To be precise about what is not established: no source confirms that every basement has exactly one staircase. The wiki's own catalogue includes large multi-room layouts. The reliable statement is not about the number of exits but about your inability to add one.
2. Losing your line of retreat is therefore hard to recover from. The wiki gives this advice for the research facility specifically: kill everything on the surface before you go down, to avoid being trapped. It is written about that facility, but since the inability to cut a new exit is common to basements, clearing the surface first is sound practice anywhere underground.
3. Power only reaches so deep. This part is exact. Per the wiki generator page, a generator powers a cylinder of radius 20 tiles, extending three floors above and three below (height 7, base diameter 41) — matching the server values GeneratorTileRange = 20 and GeneratorVerticalPowerRange = 3.
And generators do not belong indoors. Strictly you can place one inside, but you should not: the wiki warns that generator exhaust drives your health down to 1 very quickly in a structure you are occupying. Leaving stops the damage, but the building stays unsafe until the generator is switched off.
| Basement depth | Reachable by a generator outside at ground level? |
|---|---|
-1 to -3 (ordinary house basements) | Yes — within the default three-floor reach. Keep it inside 20 tiles horizontally. |
-4 and below | Not by default. GeneratorVerticalPowerRange can be raised to 15. |
-16 and -17 (research facility) | Never from the surface — even the maximum of 15 only reaches -15. |
That ceiling is exactly why the wiki says the facility is "far too deep for any generators on the surface to reach" and that flashlights are mandatory after the power goes out. For a normal house basement, though, a generator outside will run your lights and your fridge. Connecting one needs Electrical 3, or Electrical 2 with the Inventive trait, the electrician or engineer occupation, or a read copy of the How to Use Generators magazine.
When to go
| Stage | Target | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Early | Random basements near your base | Lit while the grid still runs, and close enough to keep a retreat open. Expect plenty of misses, and note that sizes run from tiny to large — be ready to turn around once you see the layout. |
| Mid | Fixed town basements — police stations, banks, shop storage | Known coordinates let you pick a destination before setting out, though towns rebuilt in 42.20 need confirming on the ground. |
| Mid to late | March Ridge bunker, Doe Valley bunker | Bring melee, light and an exit plan. The wiki states outright that there is not much loot in the March Ridge bunker; the Doe Valley one is undocumented here. |
| Late | Military Research Facility | Soldier zombies, thirteen flights of stairs, total darkness — and a route that closes as erosion advances. |
One item is common to all of them: a light source. Going down after the power cut without one is not just dark — with the default MapNeedsLight setting enabled, you cannot read your map either.
Summary
Three things matter. First, separate fixed from procedural. Only the fixed ones can be targeted by coordinate, and the 43 in the table above are what the wiki currently documents. Second, the procedural ones follow the seed — someone else's lucky house is unreproducible unless the seed came with it, and Basement.SpawnFrequency (default 4) changes how many there are in the first place. Third, you cannot add an exit to a basement. The above-ground habit of knocking through a wall to leave another way does not work down there, which makes clearing the surface before you descend your practical insurance.
Sources
- The Indie Stone — 42.20.4 STABLE & 42.19.2 UNSTABLE & 41.78.21 LEGACY Hotfixes Released (target build and release date)
- Project Zomboid — Features Overview: Build 42.20 (BASEMENTS AND SKYSCRAPERS and SEED SAVING sections; basements as a sandbox option)
- Steam announcement — 42.20: The Big Glow Up (the 75 unique / 400 procedural figures, and the list of towns rebuilt in 42.20)
- PZwiki — Basement (fixed basement coordinates, size tiers and furnishing of random ones, the fact that players cannot build them, and the void-teleport behaviour / verified 42.12.3, last edited 11 September 2026 as revision 1515575)
- PZwiki — Server settings (
Basement.SpawnFrequencyscale and default,GeneratorTileRange,GeneratorVerticalPowerRange,MapNeedsLight/ verified 42.20.0) - PZwiki — Generator (powered cylinder, indoor exhaust damage, Electrical requirement to connect / verified 42.13.1)
- PZwiki — Military Research Facility (the seventeen levels, thirteen flights of stairs, dead elevator, soldier zombies, erosion closing the access roads / verified 42.19.0)
- PZwiki — Cold War bunker (March Ridge coordinates, address, interior, garage doors, limited loot / verified 42.18.0)
- PZwiki town pages for Muldraugh, Rosewood, Irvington, Ekron, Brandenburg, Echo Creek, March Ridge, West Point and Riverside (used to cross-check coordinates)
