How to Play inZOI: A Beginner's Guide
inZOI throws a lot at you in the first ten minutes. Character creator with a hundred sliders, a city you can rewrite the weather in, a build mode deep enough to lose an evening to. This guide covers what you need for your first few hours and flags what you can safely ignore until later.
Creating your first Zoi
You start by making one Zoi, or a household of up to eight. The creator is genuinely deep, so the trap here is spending an hour on cheekbones before you've played a minute.
Pick a face you like, choose a trait and two characteristics, and move on. Most of it can be undone later anyway:
- Traits can be changed afterwards with the
setTraitcheat, and since June 2026 a trait will drift on its own if your Zoi keeps acting against it. - Gender identity and romantic attraction can be changed at any point, a change that landed in June 2025.
- Ambitions are yours to pick at creation, and swappable later from the Zoi Card.
Facial sculpting and age group are the parts that genuinely stick.
Full walkthrough: How to Create Your First Zoi.
Finding your way around the interface
Four things matter early. The needs icons by your Zoi's portrait, the Zoi Card (O) for traits, skills, ambitions and the family tree, the Relationships panel (R), and the smartphone (P), which is where jobs, shopping, events, and travel all live.
Press F1 for Psycat's Guide if you get stuck. And since March 2026 you can remap every key from the Game Menu, so if the defaults annoy you, change them rather than adapting.
Keeping your Zois alive
Zois need food, sleep, hygiene, fun, company, and a few other things. Three ways to handle that:
- Double-click a need icon and your Zoi goes and sorts it out.
- Click the object directly. A fridge for hunger, a bed for sleep.
- Leave autonomy on and they mostly look after themselves.
Neglect kills. Starvation and sleep deprivation are real causes of death, and so are house fires, car accidents, and heatwaves.
With autonomy off, your Zois will sit and starve rather than feed themselves. Turn it off later when you want tight control over a scene or a skill grind, but not while you're still learning where everything is.
One thing to know if you're following an older guide: the default in-game day is 48 minutes, halved in October 2025, and needs were rebalanced around it. Naps now top you up for about an hour rather than fully restoring. Zois also wake at a sensible time after a late night.
Detail: How to Manage Zoi Needs.
Building relationships
Family, Romance, Friendship, and Business are tracked separately, so two Zois can be solid business partners who can't stand each other socially.
Talk to people. Positive interactions build the meter, arguments tear it down, and conversations marked with a key icon unlock details about the other Zoi. Since December 2025 the outcome of a conversation depends on your Zoi's characteristics, current emotion, and how the relationship already stands, so the same interaction won't land the same way twice.
Then: Romance and Dating, Tips for Fast Relationship Building.
Making money
The currency is Meow. Early on, a job is the reliable answer.
Open the Career app on the smartphone and apply. Six of the newer roles make you attend an interview first, and once you're hired there's a real structure around it: daily pay, paid leave, team projects, and consequences for turning up late.
Other routes, roughly in order of how soon they're worth your time:
- Sell what you make. Paintings, books, music, software. Skill level drives the price.
- Sell what you gather. Crops, fish, minerals. Use a market stand or the Resale Store, where delivery prices shift daily.
- Freelance work, added April 2026. Get a licence on the computer, then take Delivery, Creative, or Publishing contracts.
- Run a business once you have capital. Cafes, bakeries, hair salons, flower shops.
- Crime, if you fancy it. Theft and scams pay well right up until you're caught, at which point you're posting bail, hiring a lawyer, and losing in court.
Loans exist and will chase you. Fall behind and your family and friends start hearing about the debt, which damages those relationships.
Plenty of guides still tell you to click Use Money Cheat in Psycat's Guide for 100,000 Meow. That button was retired in June 2025. Enable cheats in Psycat's Advice, press Ctrl + Shift + C, and type addMoney 500000 instead.
More: Early Game Money Tips, Money Strategies.
Your first house
Press I for Build Mode. If building from scratch sounds like work, place a property preset and adjust it, or download someone's house off Canvas.
Walls, handrails, rooms, platforms and roofs are free to place since December 2025, and doors, windows and stairs cost far less than they used to. Building a basic house early costs almost nothing now.
Worth knowing: furniture performance scales with price, so the cheap bed genuinely restores sleep more slowly than the expensive one.
Then: Building Your First Home.
Editing the city
The city map (M) lets you change weather, seasons, plants, animals, and billboards, plus place decorations and effects.
Underneath that sit the stability sliders. These decide how often Zois pick fights, whether romances take hold easily, and the background rate of kitchen fires. Push romance success up for a soap opera. Drop safety for chaos.
Public lots marked (Editable) can be redecorated at no cost to your household.
Ambitions and urges
Ambitions are long-term goals with levelled tasks, chosen at creation and changeable from the Zoi Card. Teenagers can pick them too, as of June 2026.
Urges are short-term wants that pay out Meow Coins when you satisfy them in time. They're now shaped by age, relationships, situation, and personality, so a Recluse and a Socialite in the same room want different things.
Desired Life sits above both as a general philosophy. It's optional, and safe to skip on a first playthrough.
Two systems that changed since most guides were written
Karma is gone. The score, the blue and red interaction icons, the Karma Report, and the Karma donuts were all removed in October 2025. If a guide tells you to manage your Zoi's Karma to avoid ghosts, it predates that. See what's left.
You keep playing after a death. When a Zoi dies you can choose "On to the Afterlife" and keep playing them as a ghost for three in-game days, unlocking ghost-only skills tied to how they died. Funeral homes and cemeteries exist in all three cities. Full detail on Death & Ghosts.
What to ignore for now
Businesses, crime and trials, high school, freelance licences, AI Build, and the ModKit are all worth your time eventually, and all of them will make your first hour worse. Get a Zoi housed, fed, and employed first.
Save often, and back up Documents\inZOI\SaveGames before installing mods.
Where to go next
Update history
- June 13, 2025. v0.2.0 retired the one-click money cheat button, added the cheat console, and made gender identity and attraction changeable at any time.
- August 20, 2025. v0.3.0 added swimming, fishing, farming, mining, loans, and travel between cities.
- October 30, 2025. v0.4.0 removed Karma, added playable ghosts, halved the day length, and rebuilt personality around traits and characteristics.
- December 23, 2025. v0.5.0 added businesses and crime, and made basic building free.
- April 29, 2026. v0.8.0 rebuilt careers around interviews and added freelance work.
- June 19, 2026. v0.9.0 added playable high school and teenage ambitions.