diff --git a/meta/conf/bitbake.conf b/meta/conf/bitbake.conf
index 4cfa8b10b58b..cda980358fd6 100644
--- a/meta/conf/bitbake.conf
+++ b/meta/conf/bitbake.conf
@@ -159,9 +159,10 @@ XZ_DEFAULTS[vardepsexclude] += "XZ_MEMLIMIT XZ_THREADS"
 # Default parallelism for zstd
 ZSTD_THREADS ?= "${@oe.utils.cpu_count(at_least=2)}"
 ZSTD_THREADS[vardepvalue] = "1"
-ZSTD_LEVEL ?= "19"
-ZSTD_DEFAULTS ?= "--rsyncable -${ZSTD_LEVEL} --threads=${ZSTD_THREADS}"
-ZSTD_DEFAULTS[vardepsexclude] += "ZSTD_LEVEL ZSTD_THREADS"
+
+ZSTD_COMPRESSION_LEVEL ?= "-3"
+ZSTD_DEFAULTS ?= "--threads=${ZSTD_THREADS} ${ZSTD_COMPRESSION_LEVEL}"
+ZSTD_DEFAULTS[vardepsexclude] = "ZSTD_THREADS"

 # Default compression settings for zchunk
 ZCK_DEFAULTS ?= ""