What's the very first thing you do when starting a new game?

Find a house for some basic clothing/food/water, then hit the roads looking for corpses to loot.

I make myself a wooden shovel, dig a few traps and proceed to lure any dumb zombie into them before whacking them over the head.

It is a real shame that I can’t bury my fallen enemies afterwards~

I go to my already made base, stocked with whatever I need by a highly skilled character. Don my newly created on in whatever I feel he/she is going to play as for the day (archer, kung fu artist, pyromaniac, etc) then send then ramapage them thru a major part of town, a fungal spire, or just about anything i feel worthy of calling “The Gauntlet”. Occasionally I’ll put few points into skills during chargen or feed them a mutagen or two before hand but for the most part it ends with me creating a new “hero” attempting to survive and possibly picking out a new location due to persistence taking its tool and a location actually getting cleared.

[quote=“Aggrons_shell, post:16, topic:1967”]I combined all the sensible ideas in here, with 24 points and basicly gave myself scoundrel, good archer setup, krav mega with 4 in unarmed, and made all the stone tools. Wanna know what killed me while i was looking for water? Heres a hint.
J. I always find these guys, and they always ruin my day. Another good ting that people should post here is their starting setup, like stats and skills and mutations, ect.[/quote]
Jabberwocks are heavily damaged by fire, put something on fire between you and him.

I have been leaving NPCs off since the option was added. have they improved? They were buggy.

I always start with archery .bows are rare finds and 1 archery and 1 survival you can craft them. they are the best weapon. My start

  1. get a rock and bash a bench, make a point stick
    2 go in windows and collect 4 rocks (its all I can carry), get close to rabbits and throw to kill (turn off throw training). Butcher to get to survivval 1.
  2. find a large stick. go to town and bash 2 windows to get 2 string. go back to shelter and make a bow and some arrows
  3. then go look for a pot/pan for water and cloths so I can stuff.
  4. once survival is at 1, i disable the training of it for a while.
  5. prefer to raid town at night and explore during the day.

in .6 the base arrows suck vs. zombies. You need a hammer to get better arrows. also not sure how much better a short bow is than a self bow. when i tried making a short bow I lost all my EQ. its not hard to get a bunch of string (now that you can get it from smashing windows) so I could try this, but youneed a hammer now for arrows good enough to kill zombies.

getting archery to 1 so you can craft bows and arrows is tedious. bows are very rare finds in town (rarely in houses and not very common in sporting goods stores). you can find crossbows in traps, but generally they have 1 bolt. That takes alot to train it. So you kind of need archery to start. Atleast i do.

You should always start with at least one level in survival, archery and traps. I tend to put three levels in archery, one level in survival and one level in traps.

With three levels in archery you will be able to craft a longbow that you can use until you find a compound bow. Survival will be quickly raised while you butcher corpses. Traps are good because you can easily raise it by making snares, trip wires and nailboard traps. If you got a level in mechanics (which you can raise by simply dissembling stuff) you can even make a bear traps. :slight_smile:

[quote=“Accursed91, post:26, topic:1967”]You should always start with at least one level in survival, archery and traps. I tend to put three levels in archery, one level in survival and one level in traps.

With three levels in archery you will be able to craft a longbow that you can use until you find a compound bow. Survival will be quickly raised while you butcher corpses. Traps are good because you can easily raise it by making snares, trip wires and nailboard traps. If you got a level in mechanics (which you can raise by simply dissembling stuff) you can even make a bear traps. :)[/quote]

1 pt in mechanics means you can craft a crowbar right at the start. Throwing + a sling/slingshot is good for hunting small animals/normal Zs, Throwing + javelins is good for killing bigger things.

Throwing is ridiculously easy to train: grab a pile of rocks and throw them at a wall.

I typically smash the shit out of everything in the evac shelter, and use the string, sticks, and a rock from outside to make myself a stone hammer, and a digging stick.

Collect a bunch of berries and maybe loot one house for water. After that, I get to work. Goodies in the basement determines if this goes more easily ofc.

I board up almost all of the doors and some of the windows, and depending on how close town is, I go salvage more. I use the evac shelter as my fort and a dropoff point for goods between town raids.

I like to work my way through a town, clearing it out with a good ol’ caveman hammer and increasing the awesomeness of my evac fort. Not much of a vehicle guy yet.

Smash locker, acquire rock, make crowbar

Raid nearby (usually residential) buildings for supplies and better clothing

Run from the inevitable horde of zombies converging on my position

Find a way to the nearest useful store and loot it

Continue looting and killing things until sundown

End of day 1

I smash a locker, get a pipe, and make a crowbar. It works as a decent low tier melee weapon and also allows entry to use windows and locked doors as an egress.

Gotta have a point in Mechanics skill, though.

I usually smash the lockers for a pipe then run to the edge of town and break into a few houses on the edge and let the zombies come to me through I window and kill them. Get books, clothing and spend a few days just surviving till my skills are higher

I close all the blinds on the windows in the emergency bunker.

Very first thing? Check the map.
Then it’s time to close the windows and craft a crowbar.

SMASH EVERYTHING!

See if I can make anything remotely useful with all the crap lying around.

ADVENTURE!

Die.

Repeat.

Smash benches; make pointy stick, make skewers. Lots of skewers. Smash windows and get strings and sheets and sticks. Deconstruct string into smaller strings and a bit of thread. Craft stone hammer. Board up windows. If there’s any alternative footwear, slice up my dress shoes (chain smokers dress nice so they’ll have a pocket in their shirt for cigs?) for hopefully leather scraps. Make sling. Make lots of pebbles. Wield sling. Find rabbit or squirrel that’s barely within range. Lean on “f” key until I hit. Repeat until throwing and firearms are decent.

Go to town. Use sling to hit zeds, fires (drop 1 skewer) to roast zombie dogs, brutes, hulks, or hordes of zeds. Run around smashing windows till nightfall, then circle around and silently clean the broken windows and enter the houses. Check fridges and dressers first-- storage and food are top priorities. Close curtains and/or board up windows. As soon as I have another leather scrap, smash a fridge and take the rubber hose to craft a slingshot. Use slingshot to train archery. Craft longbow and arrow shafts and field tip arrows… add fletching when practical. Clear out small areas, boarding up houses as emergency safehouses. Sleep in houses during the day (Light Step helps). Practice tailoring. Craft backpacks and reinforce all wearable gear. Clear and loot town. Improve arrows as archery skill increases.

Gather hacksaw and wrench and pull apart cars until Mechanics is usable. Craft brazier (and get filter mask). Boil water (this is why I like houses better than evac shelter, long term…) Find garage and get welder. Find the best truck in town and get to work on it, pulling good parts off of bad cars and bad parts off good ones. Siphon gas from any vehicle I don’t intend to use. Remember to take my vitamins, and always mark where I parked on the map.

New idea: Make great archer -> Longbow, smash all counters and make into arrow shafts -> Light Evac shelter on fire -> Make fire hardened arrows -> Go to river near town and train swimming to ~2 -> Take longbow and arrows and stand two blocks away from the river coast -> Shoot incoming zombies -> ??? -> Profit! (backpacks :D)
Also, upon character creation give yourself lots of perception, martial arts training (Melee wep, doesn’t take up space) and start as a scoundrel. That +1 melee skill and TWENTY ONE volume, and marijuanna for moral boost, and a picklock kit! When did you last see one of those?!?.
tl:dr archer camp in river with OP scoundrel class.

The first thing that needs to be done, IMHO, is to examine the starter NPC and check if the guy has a gun or not. If not, skip to the second paragraph. Otherwise, I’ll beat him to death and loot his corpse in a completely disrespectful way. Or if it’s not a guy, I’ll still beat her to death but then I’ll loot her corpse more respectfully. (E.G; I’ll let her clothes be.)

The town is first in my list of places-to-visit, as I always just take a bottle of clean water and go find a farm to live in. Cue a boring existence.

[quote=“Aggrons_shell, post:36, topic:1967”]New idea: Make great archer -> Longbow, smash all counters and make into arrow shafts -> Light Evac shelter on fire -> Make fire hardened arrows -> Go to river near town and train swimming to ~2 -> Take longbow and arrows and stand two blocks away from the river coast -> Shoot incoming zombies -> ??? -> Profit! (backpacks :D)
Also, upon character creation give yourself lots of perception, martial arts training (Melee wep, doesn’t take up space) and start as a scoundrel. That +1 melee skill and TWENTY ONE volume, and marijuanna for moral boost, and a picklock kit! When did you last see one of those?!?.
tl:dr archer camp in river with OP scoundrel class.[/quote]

Skill points are great for starting out, but terrible long-term, as you’ve wasted points on something you could have easily trained yourself. (That’s why I also no longer take Fast Learner unless I have skill rust enabled…)

Your archer would be better starting with 0 points in archery, and put those points into strength. That way, even when slightly weakened, your character can still use a bow.

  1. Smash locker
  2. Take pipe
  3. Step outside shelter looking for rock.
  4. Craft crowbar.
  5. Start looking for backpack/poch/bag/rucksack

Everytime .

Be a fist fighting class, check the map for any good stores, see a clothing store, mil surplus, and gunstore. Start running, punching any kid zombies in my way. Get a trenchcoat and a better shirt (chain smoker ftw) and maybe some pants and some kind of storage. Everything starts spawning so I start running through houses and whatnot, still be there way past zombie spawning time, loot the rest of the city, find a car, find a jerrycan, have to carry it with my hand and have to drop it when fighting something, yell at screen for the item limit of 75, conflicted on what to drop, drop things, find gas station and fill up jerrycan, run through more houses to loose the horde, fill car up, and drive out of there running over zombos. Four times our of ten the car will not have an engine.