Fighting zombies, wildlife, and surviving a horde
Two overlays can appear on almost any zombie type — learn to recognize them at a glance:
| Variant | Tell | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Feral | Glowing orange eyes | Hits harder, more health, sprints — including during the day. No warning shuffle first. |
| Radiated | Faint green glow, visible at range | Hits hard, takes more damage to put down, and regenerates health over time. Needs sustained burst damage, not chip damage. |
Most zombies just shuffle at you and hit. These six don't — each has a specific mechanic that can catch you off guard the first time, and a specific counter once you know it's coming.
Screamers aren't dangerous themselves — low health, slow, easy to drop. The danger is what they call. Screamers spawn in response to your "heat" (a hidden meter that rises from mining, running a forge or chemistry station, gunfire, and other loud activity in an area). Once one spots you, it lets out a scream that summons a small horde — and it can keep screaming roughly every 20 seconds, pulling in more zombies (sometimes nastier ones, like Dogs or Cops) until it's killed or hits its scream limit. The fix: kill it the moment you see it, ideally before it notices you. If you're doing something heat-heavy (forge running, lots of mining) for a while, expect one to show up and keep an eye out.
Bloated, slow, and easy to spot in its uniform — but has a lot of health and a nasty ranged attack: an arcing glob of acidic vomit that chews through blocks and hurts badly at close range. Keep moving sideways rather than standing still to make it miss. When it drops low on health, listen for a rapid heartbeat and pained groan — that's your cue it's about to charge and self-destruct in a large, block-and-player-damaging explosion. The fix: keep your distance while it's healthy (the vomit has real range, so "far" means further than you'd think), and the second you hear the heartbeat, either finish it fast or put real distance between you and it.
Not an actual spider — a zombie that moves on all fours, fast, and can leap surprising distances to close the gap even over obstacles you'd expect to block it. Its attacks target your legs, and repeated hits can cripple your movement, which is a real problem if you're trying to disengage from a bigger fight. The fix: don't assume a wall or ledge keeps you safe from the jump, and prioritize killing it before it gets a few leg hits in — a crippled sprint away from a horde goes badly.
A weaker, slower zombie that always moves low to the ground — which sounds harmless until you realize it can slip through single-block gaps that stop every other zombie, letting it flank or ambush from spots you assumed were sealed. Like the Spider, its attacks go for your legs. The fix: when base-proofing, don't assume a one-block gap is safe just because "zombies can't fit" — Crawlers can, and they're easy to miss at ground level in dim POIs.
Found in the burnt forest biome (and burnt-themed POIs). Slow and not especially tough, but its attacks can set you on fire, and burning does real ongoing damage if you don't deal with it fast. The fix: drink something (water, any beverage) the moment you catch fire to put it out — don't try to just tank the burn.
A late-game horde-night tank with a visible explosive charge strapped to its chest. It hits hard and shrugs off a lot of damage on its own — but shooting the charge directly detonates it early, which is usually much better than fighting it head-on. If you don't pop the charge, it'll eventually explode on its own once damaged enough, dealing serious damage to anything (and any base wall) nearby. The fix: spot the glowing charge, put a shot directly on it from a safe distance, and get clear — don't let this one get close to your base walls.
Roughly, in order of when you'll get access to each:
Not everything that attacks you is undead. Wolves, bears, and mountain lions are aggressive wildlife found across biomes (with tougher zombified versions of some — see Bestiary). They hit hard for their size and often travel in packs (wolves especially) — treat a wolf pack with the same caution as a small horde.