i have never survived more than a day. every time i get swarmed and die. any tips to not die
Try to stay as light as you can on your feet and legs. Your starting sneakers are a godsend, they by themselves increase your speed by 10% over open ground thanks to their -2 to encumbrance.
Don’t fight unless you must, any little bit of damage causes pain, and pain slows you down. And as long as you are in good shape you can easily outrun 90% of the zeds. If you absolutely must fight something fight it so it has a disadvantage. Make that fast zombie fight you while it’s standing on a window tile, that will give you a few good early hits.
Guns let you kill zombies without a chance to hit back, but guns are loud, shotguns are notoriously so, but firing any gun should be close to a last resort. The bigger the gun the louder it is, the louder it is the more zeds that will be breathing down your neck. If you are firing any gun bigger than a .22 handgun unsilenced you want to get the hell outta dodge immediately after you fire it. Especially shotguns or high powered rifles like the SKS or Browning BLR. Silencers don’t completely silence guns either, silenced guns still make noise, just not as much. A silenced SKS is still louder than an unsilenced .22.
A good way to lose a horde is to use a crowbar or picklock on the front door of a house, running through the house (closing doors as you go) and escaping through a back window. Going through a house breaks line of sight, and it takes them so long to break down doors your scent is muddled after the first or second door, often breaking pursuit. Try to keep them out of sight while running once you get out of the house though, or they will pick pursuit back up.
The wilderness has different threats than the city. In the wilderness noise isn’t as much of an issue, so feel free to blow away those wolves with the biggest gun you have if you are well away from the city. Most wilderness stuff doesn’t care as much about noise. However there are still some special mobs that do, but they don’t appear everywhere. Usually within a dozen or so tiles of a special map structure.
If you see mounds of dirt popping up and moving about, trifflids, or fungaloids, you wanna be silent as you can be, or they will spawn just like zombies do in the city. And those things make zombies look like pansies.
Avoid parks if you can, child zombies are fast little buggers, also avoid large area of swamp. Swamp bugs are capable of wrecking even well equipped survivors. And the swamps themselves sometimes have sinkholes which are invisible to anyone with less than 10 perception. Falling into a sinkhole has a 100% death rate.
Vehicles are also godsends when you’re new to the game like me. You can usually drive through a town without the zombies getting you.
Get food and either find a cabin, a farm or a shelter. bring a weapon as the first two often have not-so-nice former inhabitants still there. sewage plants can be nice, but dont play in the sewage.
I leave the town.
Staying inside the town means that you have to be rather familiar with smells sounds and general zombie behavior in order to pick a safe spot that conceals you, and be good enough at combat to kill any zombie that does try, and never, ever, ever step outside in the town during the daytime unless you have road runner and some adderall or other powerful stimulant. Chances are if one zombie finds your hideout within the boundaries of a town it’ll attract the rest by bashing the door down. A row of pits is helpful, but has this tendency to only stop me from digging when a Hulk punches me in the face, and that is a sketchy situation to be in.
Go out of the town after 9:30 AM - bring a knife of some kind to butcher with, and you can kill woodland creatures for food. Rocks can be thrown repeatedly to keep smaller packs of wolves at bay while they try to surround you and eventually kill them, and Cougars that usually travel alone are also vulnerable to unskilled rock barrages. Carry like 4 rocks and keep picking them back up as you throw, until you find a good melee weapon like a machete or a baseball bat.
Sewage treatment plants, houses in the forest ( they spawn there regularly) and several other locations outside of town make excellent places to camp out in relative safety (usually, watch out for anything that seems fungus-y.)
The first day from the time you escape the town to the time night falls, read books, eat food, build up some experience, and then that night go into town with an empty inventory, all your clothing from the first morning, and start stocking up on things you think you’ll need. You may want a vehicle and some jerry-cans to fill with water if you’re living far from a toilet or other water source.
Ideally you’re going to want to find a hardware store and clothing store as soon as you pop into existence, or get a book on mechanics so you can make a crowbar. If you don’t want to make a lot of noise a crowbar is pretty much necessary. Also if you do end up coming across a lot of zombies, you can usually kill them pretty easily if you trick them into bashing through a window(not a glass wall) to get to you, since it gives you 3 or 4 melee attacks on average against them. If you stay near a window doing this against a small horde, you can pretty much get out unscathed unless you’re wielding something horrible.
Also once you have enough of everything and are loaded up with food and drink and a book, you should probably head back to the survival shelter you came from(finishing the NPC’s quest is also a + since you can have them teach you things. Always make sure they do it right there) unless it’s only one or two tiles from the city, a swamp or something else that you don’t want to be next to.
Fight hordes in town at 1 tile wide windows, use a hammer or the like and you can kill 100s as long as you can hide round a corner so spitters/shockers cant see you till they are in the window.
Avoid NPCs for now, they’re super buggy and don’t help you out enough.
(unless you consider firing a .44 wildly at a deer way off the road from them because they considered it a threat, calling in no less than 30 varied Zombies “helping”)
Oh, robots can’t see you in the dark, they rely only on visual confirmation so far. If you are exploring a lab with a flashlight on, turn it off when you see a turret and it won’t be able to fire on you unless you go up to it for a battering.
Zombies are also quite stupid, so the advanced types can wreak havoc among the regular ranks. The hulks won’t care what’s inbetween you and them, they will go straight through their zombie buddies for you. Spitters can also be used like that, other zombies will have to walk through their acid if they spit it at you. Make use of traps and the terrain as well, the dead will gladly walk through a burning house, a pile of jagged metal or barbed wire to get you, even if they are falling to pieces at this point.
And if you have to fight, don’t run into the zombies to attack, they will usually hit first that way. Use the wait button (5 on the numpad) to stay in place, making them expend their turn moving so you can batter their brains in, ideally when using the window tactic.
I would say NPCs are pretty good(but only if you like using them as mobile teachers. This is particularly good if you want to go unarmed, since(not sure if this is applicable anymore) they could teach you martial arts, even some aside from the starting ones), though for a new player any other than the one you start with is probably going to end up robbing or killing you if you’re not careful or used to the game.
Its applicable. i ran in to a leopard style dude.
You can tell them to use only silenced weapons 
I’ve been becoming a big fan of wood spears for fending off annoying wildlife. Wood spears are pretty easy to make – you just need a knife and a tree branch or a two-by-four. They do more damage than rocks and have reasonable range and accuracy. They’re also useful for taking out your slower zombies in small numbers. And since they’re easy to replace, you can always drop them if you need the inventory space, then make new ones once you’ve dropped off your loot. My current character carries three or four with him whenever he’s traveling on foot.
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Bah fuck all that planing just [size=36pt]FUCKING GO FOR IT![/size]
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Until you get good at the game, pretty much every char you make should have quick or fleet footed and the night vision trait, this will mean you can run faster than most stuff, and be able to see a few squares in the dark, which is super useful.
Get 12 points of disadvantages, stuff you don’t think you’ll care about. Ugly, Truth Teller, etc. Get Fleet-Footed and Quick. You want every attribute at least 10. Especially Perception.
Don’t melee unless either you absolutely have to or your enemy is stuck in broken glass. Wood spears are excellent for throwing, steel spears even moreso.
Don’t let NPCs follow you around; they’re liabilities. Either get them killed or ignore them.
Stay away from guns, especially big guns. Your Remington is a dinner bell.
Don’t EVER sleep in town. You see that evac shelter you started out in? That’s your home. Bring your stuff back there, fortify it, etc. Unless it’s too close to houses, in which case it’s not home.
If you see anything you don’t recognize, RUN LIKE HELL. Mounds of dirt headed your way? RUN. Get on the pavement. Strange creatures with names you don’t recognize? Stay far, far away from them. This is not Diablo. You do not level up from fighting things that are bigger than you. If you absolutely must fight them, it’s best if you run them over in a heavily fortified truck going 70 MPH.
I run from everything. I have almost no combat skills except for a shotgun (despite what everyone says, in a pinch they’ve saved my arse many times)
only my own stupidity kills me. This includes Giant Bees…turrets…Giant Mosquito’s…car accidents and the occasional midnight run in with worms.
It’s fine to use shotguns outside of town. You just want to avoid using them inside town because they attract zombies (and cause more zombies to spawn). If you use a shotgun inside town, you had best get clear quickly.
Since shotguns are high damage and, at short ranges, really accurate, they’re great for dealing with wildlife, especially for a beginning character.
Also, if you have built up your shotgun skill, shouldn’t you also have built up your general firearms skill? You’re probably a decent shot with handguns and rifles, if so. Just limit yourself to shooting at point blank range (like 1-2 squares away) until you get up to a skill of like 4 or 5.
On the other hand if you keep using the shotgun inside of town eventually the group population reaches zero and spawning stops as everything is dead.
On the other hand if you keep using the shotgun inside of town eventually the group population reaches zero and spawning stops as everything is dead.[/quote]
Provided the 00 buck holds out long enough
On the other hand if you keep using the shotgun inside of town eventually the group population reaches zero and spawning stops as everything is dead.[/quote]
Can you actually conquer a town? If so does it stay cleared out? (id love to make my base in a garage)