[2020] Best skills to level up first? And what's the best way to get exp?

Originally posted by Highlander: Best way for EXP kill Zombies

Best way to gain exp is mining and building. Killing zombies can't hold a candle to just mining alone, let alone mining and then building. I made a post breaking it down a bit elsewhere which I'll link below.

But the main cutout is this:
A zombie yields 413 experience (Stronger ones yield more, but take longer to kill as well; so we'll use the base value.)

You can earn around 1000 exp per 30 seconds with a modded iron pickaxe and no skills while mining stone. This is around 120,000 exp an hour. Add in skills and you can gain quite a lot more. Averaging it out at the lowest value and you'll be getting around 33.3 exp per second. In order to beat out baseline mining exp, You'd have to be killing a zombie every 12.4 seconds over the course of an hour or whatever period of time you're grinding exp for. But this is pretty unlikely- You'll basically always have more stone to dig, but it's very easy to run out of zombies on any night but horde night.

Upgrading from Flagstone to Cobblestone yields 120 exp; 4 upgrades will give you more exp than a zombie kill, and it takes 5~ seconmds to upgrade 4 blocks with a claw hammer- Could be even faster with a nailgun. But with a clawhammer, you'll be getting about 96 exp per second. Cobble to concrete gives 240 exp, and takes about 2.5 seconds per 2 blocks upgraded, resulting in around 192 exp per second. Concrete to reinforced also gives 240 exp, so it gets the same 192 per second.

Just to break even with spamming flagstone->cobble you'd need to be killing a zombie every 3.4 seconds. Mix in concrete and you need to kill a zombie every 2~ seconds.


In summary, Mining for an hour will get you 120,000 exp and the material for crafting around 1,000 flagstone blocks + upgrades to cobble + extra material, which itself will yield an additional 120,000 experience over the course of about 10 minutes. So for every hour and ten minutes, you'll get 240,000~ exp, which equates to 240,000~ exp. With even the barest skills applied towards mining and stamina recovery, you can accomplish the full task within an hour, so lets just say it's 240,000 exp an hour. Averaged out, you're getting 66.6 exp per second, requiring you to be killing a zombie every 6.2~ seconds to keep pace. Add in concrete upgrades and...well. The exp/sec just gets higher.


Now here's the thing, Both tasks will require momentary downtime because of repairs/eating/drinking, so I didn't factor that in. You will invariably run out of zombies to kill- Even using screamer grinding you just won't be able to kill a zombie every 6.2 seconds without stopping,. But you can mine more stone/clay/iron/lead/etc almost indefinitely (the amount of time it would take to legitimately strip the world of stone and clay is...insane.), and build basically indefinitely. Plus, one requires you to expend WAY more materials in order to keep up with the task (Ammunition, explosives, trap repairs,etc), the other really only expends repair kits.


TL;DR: Killing zombies is absolutely not the fastest nor most consistent way to gain exp.
(https://steamcommunity.com/app/251570/discussions/4/2934616148069410083/#c2934616148072790365)