Technical World Maintenance: Soft Resets
A Soft Reset is a important maintenance and diagnostic procedure for long-running Project Zomboid (PZ) servers. Over weeks of active community play, the world accumulates significant amounts of “World Noise” - including thousands of zombie corpses, excessive blood splatters, and items discarded on the ground. This data bloat can lead to server-side “Hitching” and increased world-loading times for clients. A soft reset programmatically purges this temporary data to restore peak performance, while crucially preserving character skills, player inventories, and all custom-built safehouses.Difficulty
Intermediate
Time
5 Minutes
The Professional Reset Procedure
To ensure data integrity, you must use the official engine flag rather than manually manipulating binary files within the world directory.Initialize Maintenance
Log in to the Game Panel and Stop your server. Ensure the process is completely offline before proceeding.
Execute and Monitor
Start the server. Monitor the Console tab; you will observe the log entry:
Soft-Resetting Map.... Once the world finishes initializing, the cleanup is complete.Cleanup and Revert
Critical Step: Stop the server again. Remove the
-Dsoftreset flag from your Startup settings. If you neglect this, the server will reset the world on every subsequent reboot.Technical Scoping: What is Purged?
Understanding the technical boundaries of a soft reset helps you manage community expectations.- Purged Data
- Preserved Data
- All biological remains (Zombie and Player corpses).
- Environmental blood splatters and debris.
- Loose items situated on the floor/ground (excluding containers).
- Unfinished fire pits and localized biological waste.
Need Extra Help?
If you encounter any issues, our support team is ready to assist:- Live Chat: Quick assistance via our website.
- Support Ticket: Open a Ticket
- Discord: Join our Community
- Email: [email protected]
Last Updated: January 2026 | Project Zomboid: World state refreshed.