Zombies find you two ways and the two do not share a number. Sound is a footstep radius: how far the noise you make travels. Sight is a spotting chance: whether a zombie that can see you rolls you as spotted. Crouching improves both, but almost everything else you can choose improves exactly one of them, and beginners routinely stack four modifiers that all hit the same channel while the other stays wide open.
This is a Build 42 page, checked against 42.20.3 stable. The multiplier tables below come from wiki pages stamped 42.18.0, so treat them as very likely current rather than certain.
The matrix: which channel does each thing touch?
| What you choose or do | Sound channel | Sight channel | Awareness (your own) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crouching (C) | 20% footstep radius before skill | 40% detection chance before skill | — |
| Sneaking skill 0 → 10 | 120% → 40% footstep multiplier | 114% → 48% detection multiplier | — |
| Lightfooted 0 → 10 | 99% → 20% footstep multiplier | — | — |
| Lightfooted 0 → 10, while sneaking | 75% → 92% chance a footstep is ignored outright | — | — |
| Graceful (cost 4) | 60% footstep radius | — | — |
| Clumsy (refund 2) | 120% footstep radius | — | — |
| Inconspicuous (cost 4) | — | 50% chance of being spotted | — |
| Conspicuous (refund 4) | — | 200% chance of being spotted | — |
| Cat’s Eyes (cost 3) | — | — | +20% night vision |
| Eagle Eyed (cost 4) | — | — | Wider field of view, faster visibility fade |
| Keen Hearing (cost 6) | — | — | 200% perception radius |
| Hard of Hearing (refund 4) | — | — | Reduced perception radius, muffled sound |
| Deaf (refund 12) | — | — | No hearing at all |
| Taking your shoes off | Halves footstep sound radius | — | — |
Three things fall out of that table immediately.
Lightfooted and Sneaking are not the same skill. Lightfooted is pure volume — it works whether you are walking, running or crouching. Sneaking only applies while crouched, but it is the only one of the two that touches the spotting roll. If you want to be harder to see, levelling Lightfooted does nothing for you.
Three of the strongest traits are awareness, not stealth. Keen Hearing, Eagle Eyed and Cat’s Eyes do not make zombies less likely to find you. They make you more likely to find them first, which is a different and often better purchase — most beginner deaths are the zombie you did not know was there, not the one you failed to sneak past.
Shoes are a free 50%. Removing your shoes halves footstep sound radius, which is a larger effect than several traits you would pay four points for. The wiki’s own caveat is the obvious one: broken glass.
The sound numbers, worked out
Crouching applies a base 20% multiplier to your footstep radius, and your Sneaking level multiplies that. At Sneaking 0 the level multiplier is 120%, so crouching leaves you at 20% × 120% = 24% of normal footstep radius. At Sneaking 10 it is 20% × 40% = 8%.
| Sneaking level | Level multiplier | Effective crouched footstep radius | Crouched detection chance |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 120% | 24% | 114% |
| 2 | 80% | 16% | 96% |
| 4 | 70% | 14% | 84% |
| 6 | 60% | 12% | 72% |
| 8 | 50% | 10% | 60% |
| 10 | 40% | 8% | 48% |
Look at the detection column at level 0: 114%. Crouching at Sneaking 0 makes you more likely to be spotted than the crouch bonus alone implies, because the skill multiplier is above 100 until level 2. Crouching still helps overall — the 40% crouch base is doing the work — but the first two levels of Sneaking are buying back a penalty rather than adding a bonus, which is not what the skill description leads you to expect.
Lightfooted stacks separately, and its second row is the interesting one. Even at level 0, a crouched footstep has a 75% chance of being ignored by a zombie that hears it; at level 10 that is 92%. When you are not crouched, the wiki records the default as a 50% chance for a zombie to hear a footfall within its hearing range at all. That 50/75 gap is the real mechanical argument for crouching in a building you are looting, independent of any skill level.
Where beginners actually lose this
Stacking one channel. Graceful plus Clumsy-avoidance plus Lightfooted grinding is a very quiet character who is exactly as visible as before. Inconspicuous is the only cheap trait that halves the sight roll, and it is the one people skip.
Sprinting inside. Every multiplier above is a multiplier on a base that running raises. Quiet skills do not make running quiet, they make it less loud.
Treating perception traits as luxuries. Keen Hearing at 6 points is expensive next to Inconspicuous at 4, but it changes what you know rather than what the game rolls. If you are dying without ever seeing what killed you, that is an awareness problem, and the no-visible-wound cause finder is worth running before you conclude it was stealth at all. If the picture is fine on screen and you are still getting hit, on a server the answer is often latency rather than mechanics — the six-step server lag checklist sorts that.
Assuming Build 41 stealth advice carries over. Enough changed that remembered numbers are a bad guide; which Build 41 knowledge expired covers the general failure mode.
Training these skills without dying
Both Sneaking and Lightfooted level from crouching near zombies while undetected, and the XP scales with how many zombies are nearby. The wiki notes that XP still accrues in combat stance provided you were crouching beforehand, and that gathering zombies with a noisemaker such as an alarm clock is an efficient way to farm it. That is also, obviously, the single most dangerous training method in the game, and the reason it works — you are paid in XP for standing near the thing that kills you.
The safe version is simply to crouch by default whenever you are indoors and not in a hurry. The XP is slower and you keep your character.
What we could not verify
We did not confirm any multiplier against the game files. The Sneaking and Lightfooted pages are stamped 42.18.0 against 42.20.3 stable; the Trait page is stamped 42.19.0. We found no primary source giving the absolute base spotting distance in tiles, the hearing radius of specific noises such as gunshots or car horns, or how zombie sight cones behave at night, so none of those appear above. The percentages here are all relative multipliers, which is what the sources actually state.
Sources
- PZwiki, Sneaking — footstep sound radius multiplier and detection chance multiplier per level, the 20% / 40% crouch base multipliers, and the XP mechanics. Page stamped 42.18.0
- PZwiki, Lightfooted — footstep sound radius per level, chance a footstep is ignored while sneaking, the 50% default chance a zombie hears an un-crouched footfall, and the shoes-off halving. Page stamped 42.18.0
- PZwiki, Trait — point costs and effects for Graceful, Clumsy, Inconspicuous, Conspicuous, Keen Hearing, Hard of Hearing, Deaf, Cat’s Eyes and Eagle Eyed. Page stamped 42.19.0
- Steam news, 42.20.3 STABLE Hotfix Released (17 August 2026) — establishes 42.20.3 as the current stable build
