How to Cure Sickness in Project Zomboid
"Sick" is a category in Project Zomboid, not a single condition. The cure depends entirely on which type. Diagnosing the cause first is half the work - apply the wrong cure and you waste resources while the real cause kills you.
The Five Types of Sickness
| Type | Source | Cure |
|---|---|---|
| Food Poisoning | Rotten food, raw meat, undercooked food, poisonous mushrooms/berries, unboiled water | Wait + well-fed + rested. Lemongrass speeds recovery. |
| Corpse Decay Sickness | Spent time with more than five rotting corpses counted around you; it grows with every extra body up to 25 | Move away, then burn or bury the corpses. The meter drains once nothing feeds it. |
| Cold / Flu | Got wet or chilled, especially while exhausted | Get warm, dry, sleep. Common Mallow directly reduces cold/flu illness level. |
| Smoking-induced | Smoked as a non-smoker | Stop. Clears in a few in-game hours. |
| Knox Virus (zombification) | Bite (100%), zombie laceration (25%), zombie scratch (7%) | None. Fatal in vanilla settings. |
Cure 1: Food Poisoning
- Stop eating contaminated food. Inspect every food item - fresh = green, fresh-but-aging = yellow, rotten = red.
- Stay Well-Fed (dark green hunger moodle).
- Stay rested - sleep removes the Tired moodle, which compounds with sickness.
- Eat Lemongrass if available. It significantly reduces food-poisoning severity. Forage it in grasslands and forests, or grow it:
Base.LemonGrassSeedis in the build. Note that it has no drying recipe, unlike the medicinal herbs below, so it will not keep. - The Herbalist trait + Herbalist magazine teaches you to identify Lemongrass before eating; without them, you may misidentify wild plants.
Cure 2: Corpse Decay Sickness
- Count the bodies. In the Build 42.21 code nothing happens with five or fewer corpses counted around you; from the sixth the sickness builds, faster with every extra body up to 25. Only corpses on your floor count, and indoors only the ones inside the same building.
- Move away first: the sickness meter only drains while no corpses are feeding it and you have no food poisoning. Lemongrass lowers the same meter.
- Then get rid of the bodies. Hold the Interact key (E) to drag a corpse; to burn it, hold a lighter or matches and a container of petrol (0.1 L per corpse); to bury it, dig a grave with a spade or shovel (5 corpses per grave).
- A gas mask or half mask respirator with a filter blocks corpse sickness completely while the filter lasts; a bandana or dust mask only blocks 25%.
- Stay well-fed and rested while it clears. Full numbers, the counting area and server settings are in our corpse sickness guide.
Cure 3: Cold / Flu
- Get inside, dry off (change clothes if wet), warm up next to a fireplace or wear thicker layers.
- Eat Common Mallow if foraged - it directly lowers the cold/flu illness level.
- Sleep. Cold/flu severity decays during sleep and clears within a few in-game days.
The Medicinal Herbs, Read From Build 42
Every value in this table is read directly from the shipped files of the current Build 42 Stable server we run (build 24909836), not from memory or an older wiki. All five are filed under the FirstAid category in-game, so they appear in the same inventory tab as bandages and pills.
| Herb | Item ID | Weight | Fresh for | Rotten at | Makes tea |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Common Mallow | Base.CommonMallow | 0.1 | 6 days | 10 days | Yes |
| Black Sage | Base.BlackSage | 0.1 | 6 days | 10 days | Yes |
| Ginseng | Base.Ginseng | 0.1 | 14 days | 28 days | Yes |
| Plantain | Base.Plantain | 0.1 | 6 days | 10 days | No |
| Comfrey | Base.Comfrey | 0.1 | 6 days | 10 days | No |
Ginseng keeps more than twice as long as everything else. If you are packing one herb for a long trip away from base, that is the one that survives it.
Drying Doubles as Storage
Every herb in the game shares one drying recipe length: 86,400, and all 25 drying recipes in Build 42 carry exactly that number. It reads as a day because the game's other passive recipes come in at 172,800 and 604,800, which is the same scale giving two days and seven days. Active crafting sits at 500 to 600 by comparison, so drying is a set-and-forget process, not something you stand and wait for.
Drying is free storage. Dried Common Mallow and dried Black Sage keep the herbal-tea property, and dried Plantain and dried Comfrey keep their own tags for poultices, so nothing is lost except the wait.
Poultices Must Be Learned First
The three poultice recipes, for Comfrey, Plantain and Wild Garlic, each take 60 seconds to craft and every one of them is flagged as needing to be learned. You will not find them in your crafting menu by default: read the Herbalist magazine or take the trait first.
Four of the Five Grow From Seed
Common Mallow, Black Sage, Broadleaf Plantain and Comfrey each ship a seed item in the Gardening category at 0.02 weight, so a medicine garden is a real option rather than a foraging lottery. Ginseng is the exception. There is no Ginseng seed anywhere in the build under any id, which makes the longest-keeping herb the one you cannot farm. Forage it and dry it.
Cure 4: Knox Virus (No Cure)
If your queasy/nauseous moodle followed a confirmed zombie bite or laceration in the last 24 hours, this is the Knox Virus. There is no cure in vanilla settings - the moodles will worsen until your character dies and reanimates. See our laceration guide for infection chance per wound type.
Prevention Checklist
- Cook meat thoroughly. Raw = guaranteed queasy.
- Boil river water and rain water before drinking.
- Burn or move corpses regularly around your base: more than five on your floor starts corpse sickness.
- Pack rain ponchos and dry spare clothes for long expeditions.
- Don't smoke if you don't have the Smoker trait.
- Foraging without Herbalist? Eat only the plants you've identified before - wrong wild mushrooms are a death sentence.
Don't get sick. Host a Project Zomboid server with Supercraft and survive Knox Country with friends.