Getting Started

Your first hour, and the basics that carry through the whole game

Priorities, in order

1. Punch trees and rocks for basic wood/stone — you don't need a tool to start gathering, just time.
2. Craft a stone axe and a campfire as soon as you have materials — a stone axe is noticeably faster at gathering than bare hands, and the campfire lets you cook and boil water, both of which you need almost immediately.
3. Find or dig a defensible starting shelter before your first night. A half-collapsed building you can seal off beats building from scratch on day one — you're racing the clock, not trying to build something pretty yet.
4. Sort out a water source. Boil murky water at the campfire before drinking it — raw murky water can make you sick, and getting sick early with no medicine yet is a rough spiral to climb out of.
5. Don't wander far from your shelter on day one. Getting lost after dark with no light source is how most early deaths happen — night visibility is bad, zombies are more active, and you likely don't have a weapon that can handle a real fight yet.

Your stats, with real numbers

Health, Stamina, Food, and Water all cap at 100. Knowing the real mechanics behind them — not just "don't let them hit zero" — makes the early game a lot less mysterious:

• Food and Water drain passively even standing still. From completely full, that passive drain alone gives you roughly 3.3 real hours before Food hits zero, and about 2.5 real hours before Water does. Any activity drains both faster on top of that — these numbers are your absolute ceiling, not a realistic estimate of how long a full bar actually lasts you.
• Being active drains Food and Water faster than standing around. Regenerating Stamina itself consumes both — so a fight, a long sprint, or a mining session burns through your supplies noticeably faster than idling does. If your hunger or thirst seems to "spike" some days, it's not random — it's tied to how much stamina-intensive activity you've been doing.
• Healing costs Water. Regenerating Health consumes Water at a fixed rate per point healed, so running your Water down to the wire also quietly weakens your healing right when you need it most — like mid-fight.
• Jumping costs a flat 20 Stamina; swimming costs 40 up front, plus a much steeper ongoing drain than walking or even running. Wading around open water is almost always cheaper than swimming across it.
• Sprinting drains Stamina much faster than it naturally regenerates. Treat a sprint as a short burst to close distance or escape, not a default travel method — especially if you might need Stamina for a fight right after.
• Lesser-known: crouch-walking costs meaningfully less Stamina than walking upright. If you're covering ground slowly anyway — scouting, sneaking past a horde — crouching isn't just about stealth, it's cheaper on your Stamina bar too.
• Temperature still applies debuffs on top of all this if you're caught in extreme heat/cold unprepared — check gear insulation before biome trips, see World & Biomes.

Inventory, encumbrance and backpacks (V3.3)

V3.3 reworked the inventory. Your bag is now an 8×6 grid of 48 slots (it was 9×5, 45 slots), and a new Backpack equipment slot can add up to 48 more, for a maximum of 96 slots.

• Encumbrance: the first 32 slots are free (was 27; servers can scale this with the carry sandbox setting). Every item in a slot past that costs 1.1% movement speed (was 2.6%), so a completely full 48-slot bag with no perks is about 18% slower.
• Backpacks add slots, not free slots. A backpack's extra space still counts toward encumbrance. Raise the free limit with Pack Mule (+4 / +12 / +24 / +40 / +56 free slots by rank), armor pocket mods (+1 to +4 each), clothing with pockets, or temporarily with Chicken Nuggets (+48) or Steroids (no limit).

Getting one: craft it at a Workbench once you've raised the new Backpacks crafting skill by reading Pack Rat magazines (each quality step needs 5 more levels; Large reaches Q6 at 100). Small costs a Sewing Kit and Cloth, Medium and Large need Leather, Forged Iron or Steel and more Sewing Kits, and a Q6 Large also takes a Legendary Part. You can also loot them from Savage Country crates. (The patch notes mention buying them from traders, but none of the 3.3 trader stock lists include backpacks.) Pack Rat magazines turn up across most loot (bookshelves, file cabinets and zombie loot bags are good spots), traders sell 1–3, and each Pack Mule rank makes them more likely to drop until your Backpacks skill hits 100.

Basic crafting path

• Stone Axe — faster wood/resource gathering than punching.
• Campfire — cooking, boiling water, early light source.
• Bedroll — sets your respawn point; place it somewhere defensible.
• Wood Frames — patch shelter holes or start a basic base.
• Forge — unlocks metal tools and iron-tier gear once you have the resources. A big early power spike.

See Crafting & Tools for the full progression, the Crafting Browser for exact recipes and unlock requirements, and Food & Farming for what to cook first.

Hidden controls the game doesn't tell you

A handful of inventory and crafting shortcuts aren't explained anywhere in-game, but they'll save you a lot of manual dragging once you know them.

• Shift + Left Click — instantly moves an item between your backpack and your toolbelt, in either direction. No dragging needed — just shift-click something in your inventory to send it to the belt, or shift-click a belt slot to send it back.
• R — while a chest or other container is open, pulls everything from it straight into your inventory in one press (space permitting).
• Right-click a stack — splits it in half. Right-click again while holding the split half — drops a single item at a time, useful for doling out exact amounts.
• Click a recipe you've already crafted once — queues up another craft of it. Shift + Click a recipe — queues up as many as your current materials allow, instead of clicking one at a time.
• Crafting keeps going with your inventory closed — once something's queued, you can close the menu and keep exploring or fighting; it'll finish in the background.

Hidden perk effects the game doesn't mention

Checked every perk in the game that touches magazine loot odds against its own in-game description. Every weapon-type perk explicitly names the main magazine it boosts (Dead Eye names Rifle World, Boomstick names Shotgun Weekly, and so on) — but that's not the whole story. 17 different perks also carry a second, completely undisclosed bonus: a temporary boost toward the "Vol 1" book of that perk's own matching mastery challenge (Sniper, Shotgun Messiah, Bar Brawling, Lucky Looter, and 13 others), which turns off once you've actually completed that challenge. None of these are mentioned in any of the 17 perks' own descriptions — not even a hint.

The clearest example is Lock Picking, which hides two effects at once: a boost to Forge Ahead magazine odds (turns off once your Forge Ahead progress passes level 12) and a boost to "The Great Heist Vol 1" specifically (turns off once you finish the Great Heist challenge). Every other affected perk follows the same "Vol 1, until challenge complete" pattern — see the Perk Planner, where every affected perk now shows its real hidden bonus labeled explicitly, rank by rank.

Common early mistakes

• Looting loudly during the day — gunfire and power tools attract zombies from well outside your view.
• Hoarding low-value junk instead of managing inventory space. Sell or scrap what you're not using.
• Ignoring temperature gear on biome trips — easy to underestimate until you're already debuffed.
• Fighting a horde in the open instead of falling back to a prepared position. See Combat and Base Building.
• Letting Water run low before a fight or a heal-heavy stretch — since healing itself costs Water, running dry mid-fight means your bandages and first aid won't work as well as they should.
• Sprinting everywhere to save time — it costs more Stamina (and by extension more Food and Water) than the time saved is usually worth, especially early when supplies are thin.