Getting Started

Your first days, in the order they matter

The first hour

• That growl is your dog. A dog finds you when you wake up. When it growls, it's warning you about danger nearby.
• Learn Q immediately. It teleports your companions to you. It can fail while you're holding other movement keys, so stop and press it again.
• Use the dog to pull aggro. Early on you're weak, and a zombie chasing your dog is a zombie not chasing you.
• Place a bedroll as soon as you can. Your dog and any hired survivors respawn there when they die. Place it late and a dead dog will still come back shortly after.
• Follow the quest prompts at the top right. They take you to Briston at the trader and then to a combat trainer, where you pick the class you'll train toward.

Earning your first class

• You need a melee and a ranged starter weapon. The ranged one is a pipe gun, not a higher-tier gun. This is the most common mistake: a Butcher trains with the pipe machine gun, not an assault rifle.
• Headshots and kills give the most progress. Body shots give a little, headshots more, and kills the most. In one test, a fragment took roughly 50–60 kills.
• The shortcut: expertise book fragments. Search mailboxes and newsstands in the nearest town. Enough fragments make a weapon expertise book, and reading the one for your starter weapon completes that half of the class book with no kills needed. Buried Supplies quests are another good source.
• Paper for the class book is easy to salvage from the boxes in houses.

Full details are in Classes.

Craft these two mods early

1. Zed Corpse Auto Loot. Everything a zombie drops goes straight into your inventory, even from a long-range sniper kill, and your dog automatically carries some of it too.
2. Your class Aura mod, as soon as your class is active. It needs molten steel, which the Class Trainers sell early on. In the crafting list it's named after the class ("Hunter Aura Mod"), not the aura's effect ("Rain of Arrows"). The Berserker and Witch Doctor have no aura.

Getting set up to craft

• Build a Toolbox first. Everything else is crafted from it. See Crafting & Benches for which tools each station needs.
• Hand tools — hammers, pliers, screwdrivers — turn up in toolboxes in garages and basements.
• Holding a hammer lets you craft a few basics without a station: building blocks, wooden ladders, spike traps, and claim blocks.
• Building blocks need nails. Break down doors, couches, pallets, and anything else wooden to get nails and screws. Trees don't count.

Food, water, and money

• Boiled water can give you dysentery, but it's still your best early option. Keep distilled water, which is completely safe, for when you get sick. A craftable diaper eases the symptoms. See Survival & Farming.
• Make money by picking things up and selling them. The limit of three of the same item applies per trader, and the extra merchants in a compound buy too — the Class Trainers take a lot of junk — so you can sell more than you'd expect. That cash buys food and supplies from the vending machines.
• Check the vending machines behind Briston. They stock repair kits (including armor and bike repair kits), potassium bicarbonate, and a chance of the hotwire kit you need for vehicle repairs.

Small things that help

• Triple-tap E on corpses and dropped bags to skip the opening animation. It's mainly useful before you have the auto-loot mod.
• Roads are faster. Gravel and asphalt give a 15% movement speed boost, and zombies get it too.
• Shift + Enter drops your whole backpack if a bear has you pinned and overloaded. Go back for it afterward.
• Craft bandages from cloth. They heal 6. Your starting first-aid bandage heals 25.
• Craft arrows at the Toolbox, not in your backpack. The yield doubles.
• Don't raise the XP multiplier to go faster. Zombies scale with your level, so leveling faster makes the game harder.