Set Your Project Zomboid Spawn Point

New characters on a Project Zomboid server start in a spawn region, a town the game offers as a starting place. You can narrow that to one town, add the towns that Workshop maps bring, or pin every new character to one exact spot. Spawn settings only affect new characters: anyone who already has a character keeps theirs. Checked against Build 42.21, October 2026.

Pick the spawn regions

The Worlds tab has a Maps and spawn regions card with one row per map, and two switches on each: Loaded and Spawn region.

1. Open the Worlds tab and scroll to Maps and spawn regions.
2. Switch Spawn region on for each town you want players to start in. A map that isn't Loaded can't be a spawn region, so unloading a map switches its region off.
3. Press Save maps in the bar that appears.
4. Restart the server. You can save the picker while the server runs, and it applies on the next start.

Muldraugh, KY, the whole vanilla map, is always loaded underneath and shows Always. With no spawn region ticked, new characters start in Muldraugh, KY. The official wiki gives the game's default starting towns as Muldraugh, Riverside, Rosewood and West Point, and says Brandenburg, Echo Creek, Ekron, Fallas Lake, Irvington, March Ridge and Valley Station can be made available through sandbox options. The panel lists every town your build has, each marked KY, so you can switch any of them on.

The panel writes your choice to .cache/Server/<world>_spawnregions.lua. The first time it replaces an existing file it keeps the old one beside it as a .bak.

Add a Workshop map

A map from a Workshop mod can bring its own spawn points. Add the mod in the Mods tab first. Once the server has downloaded it, the Worlds tab shows a banner such as <map> is a map from <mod> with Add map. Pressing it puts the map ahead of Muldraugh, KY, and makes it a spawn region when it ships spawn points. Add Workshop mods to Project Zomboid covers the mod side.

You can also type a map's folder name under Add a Workshop map by its folder name. The mod's Workshop page gives the name.

Pin every new character to one spot

For a single fixed start, set SpawnPoint in the world's settings file. The game describes it as forcing every new player to spawn at these x,y,z world coordinates, and it ignores the value when it is 0,0,0.

1. Find the spot's coordinates on map.projectzomboid.com.
2. Open the File Manager, go to .cache/Server/ and open <world>.ini.
3. Set the line to SpawnPoint= followed by your x, y and z with commas between and no spaces. Use 0 for z unless you want an upper floor. The game's own spawn files use 0 and 1 for z.
4. Save the file and restart the server.

The panel's Server Settings tab doesn't list SpawnPoint, but it leaves lines it doesn't know alone when it saves other settings.

Where characters respawn

Three switches in Server Settings choose where a new character appears after a death. All three are off by default.

Different spawns per profession

The world also has <world>_spawnpoints.lua, which adds spawn points for a given profession. The game writes this default into it:

function SpawnPoints()
	return {
		unemployed = {
			{ worldX = 40, worldY = 22, posX = 67, posY = 201 }
		}
	}
end

Here worldX and worldY pick a map cell of 300 by 300 tiles, and posX and posY are the position inside that cell. The game's own town files write the same kind of spot as absolute coordinates with a floor, such as { posX = 7976, posY = 11402, posZ = 0 }. Add one entry per spot, edit the file in the File Manager, and back the server up first.