Rules
Community maintained rulesets for Call of Duty: Zombies
Full gameplay is MANDATORY. Small amounts of missing footage because of a stream cutting out is fine - as long as no crucial moments in the game are missed.
You can avoid missing footage by recording at the same time.
This rule is very broad, but it applies whenever you cannot find an information about something specific. In some categories, you'll find rules that are essentially a duplication of this one, but for something specific, this means, the community discussed that one specific thing.
Emulator definition ambiguity
This rule technically makes playing on Linux unlegit, because the game is ran through an emulation layer. This has never been enforced, but the rule has not been updated either.
BO1 explicitly voted in:
sv_cheats DVAR to 1 is NOT ALLOWED unless otherwise specified.
Substituting a player in a coop game is NOT ALLOWED.
Substituting a player means a different person joining for another session within the same game, the same set of players need to play throughout the entire game.
Fast Knife exploit is ALLOWED.
Fast knifing is holding the fire button and then knifing rapidly
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Abusing fast nades glitch is NOT ALLOWED
Fast nades is when due to pressing the nade button in a very specific interval nades are thrown at a faster rate. This is unavoidable in normal games, this just prevents abuse using external software.
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| Platform | Rule |
|---|---|
| Steam | ALLOWED |
| Plutonium | ALLOWED |
| BGamer | ALLOWED |
| Xbox 360 / One / Series | ALLOWED |
| PS3 | ALLOWED |
| PS4 / PS5 | ALLOWED |
| Wii | NOT ALLOWED |
For Steam/BGamer games, host player is REQUIRED to include showing files from the zone/Common directory and launch the game via the executable directly in the game files (not a shortcut). Option to show hidden files MUST be enabled in Windows explorer settings.
You can enable showing hidden files here

Rule was added without a vote in the attempt to counter stealth patching, while today we know it is not really effective, players excercise it and expect it to be still done in steam games.
For Plutonium games, covering the anticheat output on the gameplay is NOT ALLOWED. The output is the text in the upper right corner on the screen, and list of checksums listed in the upper left part of the screen.
If you are not using CT5 plugin, you MUST enable the anticheat manually

Check your stream overlay alignment BEFORE starting the game, make sure it does not cover any of important information on the screen.
These are the protected elements

Rule was added without a vote to ensure minimal effectiveness of the anticheat, similar to showing files for Steam a year earlier.
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Players never voted on it explicitly, nor opted out of the 2025 BO1 vote, therefore the result from that vote applies for the time being.
Plugin download
Download latest CT5Voted in:
Fixed Backspeed is ALLOWED in solo and NOT ALLOWED in co-op.
Fixing backspeed means changing the player_backspeedscale and player_strafespeedscale values
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Similar effect can also be achieved using the g_useholdtime dvar, is is however very controversial to use it. First Room players have not yet agreed to either officialy allow or ban it.
Bypassing the 25 day Black Screen is ALLOWED.
BIOS method is allowed, but it can be done with the following command:
fade 0 0 0 0 0
Never discussed for First Room due to low relevance, however due to the discovery about the command the fix is now trivial and easily available to every version of the game, there appears to be no reason to disallow it.
Multiple games/categories had a discussion about make it clearer what is and is not allowed in terms of textures. Most notably BO2 First Room and BO1 High Rounds both implemented clearer guidelines, this was not however discussed for BO1 First Room yet.
The use of the pause_hard command is ALLOWED.
This command freezes your game to prevent certain things from crashing it, and allows for Co-Op pausing without leaving the game.
Players never voted on it explicitly, therefore the standards from the main game rules apply here until it is discussed.
Disabling Mule Kick is ALLOWED for solo games, but NOT ALLOWED for co-op.
On Steam you can achieve it by launching the game while in Steam offline mode. Plutonium has a dedicated option for it in the menu.
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This rule forbids the use of HealthBar app
Boarding strategy is ALLOWED.
Boarding strategy means progressing the round by letting zombies bleed out behind windows when played don't do any additional actions to push the round, such as doing a horde up, forcing power ups or shotting windows
Boarding strategy has never been discussed for Black Ops 1 First Room, it therefore applies the general BO1 rule about this topic for the time being.
Twitch Integration Mod (TIM) is ALLOWED.
Using TIM may invalidate the game, due to the fact the program writes to game memory in unsafe ways, which causes the Plutonium anticheat to show inconsistencies in memory state checksums.
Campaign difficulty exploit is NOT ALLOWED.
Difficulty settings can carry over between campaign and zombies, which changes player statistics. Zombies is meant to be played on "Regular" by default.
Players do not need to do anything unless they loaded a mission beforehand, in which case just restart the game on PC, for console however you will need to load a campaign mission on the "Regular" difficulty, as it will save to your config.