Infected & Hordes — Project Lazarus Original Wiki

The Infected

Original is Rust after the collapse. Civilian towns, roads and monuments are crawling with infected — and they are not just re-skinned scientists. They see you with a real field of view, hear the noise you make, call each other in, and chase you down before leashing back home.

Treat every scavenging run as a stealth problem. A crouched, quiet player can slip past most of a pack; a player sprinting and firing an AK becomes a magnet that pulls the whole street. The infected are dangerous, but they are readable — you can almost always tell what gave you away.

Infected variants

Infected in a horde

Headshots

Kill fastest

A bite can infect youGetting hit by the infected can pass on the infection — a sickness that follows you across death until you cure it. See Infection & Medical for how to treat it before it turns you.

The Five Variants

Every infected belongs to one of five archetypes. They are a genuine spread — not health-bar clones. A horde is a mix, mostly Walkers with a scatter of the nastier types, so no two fights read the same.

Variant	Health	Speed	What makes it dangerous	Horde share
Walker	Low	Slow	The classic shambler — slow, half-blind and forgetful. Easy alone, but they make up the bulk of every horde, so numbers are the threat.	56%
Feral	Low	Fast	The hunter. Sprints at running speed, the widest eyes and the longest memory — once a Feral locks on, you outplay it with cover, not with your legs.	18%
Rotter	High	Medium	A tough bruiser that soaks damage. Doesn't sprint, but keeps coming — don't get pinned trading shots with it in the open.	14%
Sawbones	Medium	Medium	A mid-tier hospital-born infected that shows up around medical sites. Dangerous in a pack more than one-on-one.	7%
Brute	Very high	Slowest	Area denial. The slowest infected but a huge health pool — a Brute in a doorway is a wall. Kite it, don't brawl it.	5%

Stealth is rewarded on purposeWalkers are 56% of a horde and are the slow, near-blind type — so crouching quietly past the bulk of a pack genuinely works. The design rewards patience over raw firepower.

How They Hunt You

The infected run a real senses model. Understanding it is the difference between a clean run and a screaming pack on your back.

Sight is honest — they can't see through wallsAn infected only locks on when you are inside its field of view and it has line of sight. Break the line — duck behind a wall or a rock — and you drop out of its eyes. Flanking works.
Noise is what usually gives you awayThey hear you. Crouching cuts your noise roughly in half, so a crouched player outside their view can creep surprisingly close. Sprinting, gunfire, harvesting and explosions are loud and pull them toward the sound.
One that spots you calls the othersHurt or alert one infected and nearby infected converge on you. That's the "you shot one, now they all turn" moment — brilliant in the open, deadly in a choke point.
They chase, then give upLose line of sight and put distance between you and a chaser and it eventually leashes back toward where it started. You can shake a chase — you just have to break contact, not sprint forever.

Gunfire is a dinner bell near monumentsSustained shooting close to a monument can draw extra infected in from the surrounding ground — they shamble in toward the noise. A single shot is nothing; emptying mags is an invitation. Suppressed weapons and bows stay quiet.

Road pressure is boundedRoadside junkpiles produce one ambient infected at a time, new ambient spawns are capped at three within 150 metres, and ordinary road infected leash back instead of chasing forever. Horde infected are the deliberate event-grade exception.

Monument Hordes

Sometimes an area doesn't just have a few infected — it has an outbreak. A horde is a bounded, scary event: a wave of mixed infected floods one monument, a red marker drops on the map, and the area is a no-go until you contain it. It's not just "kill zombies for loot" — it's a short containment operation with a boss at the end.

Kills to contain (solo)

350 HP

Horde Brute finale

Cash

Paid to everyone who fights

Cache Key

From the Brute's corpse

Outbreaks only break out at authored monuments — the hospital, Lazaria Town, coastal town, the mansion and the motel — never in the middle of nowhere. Here's how one plays out:

Outbreak detectedAn OUTBREAK DETECTED alert fires with a red HORDE marker and danger radius on the monument. The alert previews the cash payout so you know what you're fighting for before you commit.
Contain the waveKill the target count — 16 for a solo outbreak, more if a squad is on it. Infected already at the monument are counted into the same tally, so a top-center CONTAINED bar tracks progress and you never have to guess which ones count.
Seal the breachesIf a SEAL BREACH shield appears, stand inside its red capture sphere and hold for ~20 seconds to seal an infected spawn route. Sealing advances containment, pays participation credit, and pauses the next wave.
Kill the Horde BruteNear the end the regular waves stop and one 350 HP Horde Brute rises as the finale — you'll get a warning and a ping over it. Drop the Brute and any stragglers to purge the outbreak.
Get paidA clean clear fires OUTBREAK PURGED and pays everyone who fought — a base reward plus per-kill cash (capped), with an extra bonus for the Brute-slayer. The Brute's corpse holds a guaranteed Survivor Cache Key, your entry to the Survivor Bunker heist.

Type /horde for live statusIt shows the location, kills remaining, Brute state, timer and your pending reward. You don't need the killing blows either — holding the area for ~45 seconds earns you a share. If the timer runs out or the sun comes up the outbreak scatters instead of paying — and hordes lean harder into Night Surge nights.

Fighting Back

You will not out-DPS a full horde in the open. Win with positioning, sound discipline and headshots.

Aim for the head. Headshots drop infected far faster than body shots — ammo is a resource, so make it count.
Use doorways and high ground. Funnel a horde so only one or two can reach you at once. A Brute in the door buys you time on everything behind it.
Don't wake the town. If you're scavenging a monument, a suppressor or a bow keeps you off the infected's radar. Save the loud guns for when you've already been seen.
Break line of sight to lose a chase instead of sprinting in a straight line forever.

Bring your own muscle: /protectmeThe Infected Package lets you summon elite Guardian Brutes with /protectme — zombie bodyguards that fight for you and turn a horde from a death sentence into a brawl you can win.

What They Drop

Clearing infected isn't just survival — their corpses are a genuine loot route. Infected and infected soldiers can drop medical supplies, making a cleared town one of the better places to restock bandages and blood without diving a full monument. They also drop trophies and research samples you can sell or hand in.

Zombie FleshSell at the Outpost

Field DressingCorpse medical loot

Blood BagRarer corpse loot

Infected TissueResearch sample

Infected BloodResearch sample

Click any item for its full details. For treating the wounds and infection you'll pick up fighting them, see Infection & Medical; for where the dead are thickest, see Monuments.