Project Zomboid – How to Clean Blood

Learning how to clean blood in Project Zomboid can be useful so you don’t have a messy base bringing your character down. This can lead to negative moodles that make your character sick or unhappy. And there are plenty of other negatives coming with future updates.

Our Project Zomboid guide covers how to clean blood on the floor, on walls, and also how to clean yourself. Aside from lowering your infection chance, you can also make your base look nicer. And it doesn’t hurt to know how to wash your clothes since this plays a role in many mechanics.

How to Clean Blood in Project Zomboid

Finding the Items You Need First

Before you can start wiping away all those blood stains, you’ll need certain items.

Before you can clean blood on floors or walls, you’ll need the right items in your inventory. Otherwise, you won’t see the option to clean a floor when right-clicking it. Fortunately, there are a few items even though every single one requires having Bleach available. One of the annoying parts of Bleach is that you can’t easily tell how long the bottle will last.

For those wondering how long Bleach lasts, you can try to eyeball it by watching how much it weighs after each use. It seems to drop in weight by .11 or .12 after each cleaning. While a full bottle of Bleach seems to weigh 1.6, it can go as low as .31 before becoming empty. At which point, it will then weigh .2.

Once you have the right items for cleaning up, you don’t need to equip them to use them.

Regardless, you’ll need one of the following items below so you can start cleaning blood in Project Zomboid.

• Bath Towel with Bleach
• Dish Towel with Bleach
• Mop with Bleach

You can relatively easily find Bath and Dish Towels in many bathrooms and kitchen cabinets. However, you may have a more difficult time finding a mop since they seem to be much rarer. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to matter which you use as all three items don’t have durability. So it’s not like you’re going to break a Bath Towel or Mop the same way you would a Saucepan.

How to Use Your Cleaning Items in Project Zomboid

Once you have the right items in your inventory, you can simply right-click a red stain to wipe it away.

Now that you have the right tools, let’s get to cleaning up that blood. Here’s a quick walkthrough of the steps you’ll need to follow:

1. Right-click the floor or next to a wall where you want to clean.
2. As long as there’s blood here or nearby, you should see an option that says, “Clean Blood”.
3. After clicking this option, you’ll need to select a specific tile. This will clean that spot and the area adjacent to it as well. So this is why it helps to pick the center of a mess rather than the edge. If the grid outline appears red, you won’t be able to click there.
4. Once you’ve finished cleaning an area, you can right-click to remove the grid outline.

How to Clean Clothes in Project Zomboid

Sinks and bathtubs are your best friend until the water is shut off.

This is much easier to do than cleaning blood off the floor or a wall. All you need to do is find a source of water and then right-click it to find an option labeled, “Wash”. Then, you can choose to wash yourself, all clothing, specific items of clothing, or even a weapon of yours. Hovering over each choice will show dirty you are, how bloody, and how much Soap you need to speed up the process.

It’s important to note that you will need to have the Soap in your inventory for it to work. Otherwise, you’ll clean yourself much slower with a message saying, “Not Enough Soap”. This may change at a later time since Project Zomboid does take advantage of using items from containers. So it doesn’t make much sense why you can’t use Soap the same way.

If your clothing is completely torn to shreds, you may have a bigger problem than needing to clean up.

The main reason to clean your clothes is to lower infection chances. According to Build 38, wearing dirty or bloody clothing over an open wound increases your chance of infection. This is specifically for a normal infection, not zombification from a bite.

Another mechanic that doesn’t seem to be in the game at the time of publishing this article is zombies having a sense of smell. The same way they can see and hear you, they’ll be able to smell you too. Having dirty and bloody clothing will likely play a role. Especially since you make your clothes wet from sweating.

Who knew smelling bad in Project Zomboid could be deadly?

That’s all there is to this Project Zomboid guide on how to clean blood. Cleaning blood is bound to have a more significant impact as this game continues to grow. Be sure to visit some of the other guides I’ve written listed below. 

• What Happens When You Die
• What to Do When Bitten
• What Does a Soft Reset Do

Jeffrey Lerman

Jeff is a journalist with over 10 years of experience writing, streaming, and making content about video games. With an associate degree in journalism, he’s a sucker for RPGs, survival games, roguelikes, and more.