Overview
A few tips to keep in mind when starting out – those little things can save lives!
Tips for the Beginners
Here are some community-proven tips that should help anyone to survive the first day in the inhospitable wastes of post-apocalyptic Michigan.
- Stay warm: The early game can be a bit random, making hypothermia quite hard to avoid. One option is to repair the HVAC heater inside the Cryo Facility if you have the Mechanic skill, and the parts needed. Sleeping bags are also a handy trick to remember. Finding one of those and putting it in a camp nearly guarantees warmth. Corn-a-cola is another possibility, as the sugar high will temporarily warm you. The subsequent crash can be dangerous, but you might be able to drink another right away until finding clothes. Also, shelter mitigates rain, so if you find a camp with good shelter (including the Cryo Facility), it can sometimes tip the scales.
- Build up your strength first: Find some good loot, use Exam Room 17 in the Cryo Facility as a base to sleep in and to store your stuff. Once you have good clothes, a few suitable weapons, lot of food and water, medicine, and other survival tools go out and explore.
- Run away: If the fight looks too tough, it most likely is. For added success rates, choose “Athletic” as an ability. It reduces chances of tripping, and gives you the “Sprint Away” battle move.
- Hide: There’s an art to this, but it is viable. Each tile has a hiding rating, depending on the campsites available. If you have the Hiding skill, you can see the rating. AI will have a chance at seeing you hiding in a tile based on your camp’s rating. Certain things will give you away, though, like fires, tarp shelters, bleeding, and diarrhea/vomiting. Certain things make it harder for them, too, like illness, pain, darkness, etc.
- Cover your tracks: Hiding tracks helps to shake off pursuing enemies, much more so with the Tracking skill. However, hiding tracks right underneath you while nearby hexes still contain tracks leading to you probably won’t help as much.
- Lure them away: Circle back on another set of tracks to try and get enemies to follow another creature. Lead “looter” types into an area with loot, and then hide, making the loot the most visible opportunity to them. Keep track of where the big threats live. If you lead a mob of bandits into a dogman’s lair, you can bet the dogman is going to deal with them first.
- Be careful when scavenging: When scavenging, take note of the condition of the structure. If it looks like it’s about to collapse, it probably will.
- Check what you’re about to eat: Drinking dirty water and eating unidentified mushrooms, berries or spoiled meat can be harmful or even deadly. It is important to boil your water to purify it. The Botany skill is useful for identifying wild edibles (blue berries are always edible). Of course when you are dying of thirst, the boiling part can be skipped.
- Be cautious in all your actions!: If you feel doubt about an action, most times the best choice will be to avoid it. There are old scavengers, there are bold scavengers, but there are few old, bold scavengers.
- Try to look threatening: If you seem strong and well armed, your enemy is more likely to run away.
- First rule of combat – Don’t get hit. All other goals are secondary. The vanilla “attack” and “flurry attack” moves should only be used sparingly. Instead, a combatant should spend a lot of time setting up their next attack. Use “parry” to mitigate an inevitable attack, opening up the enemy to “vulnerable” status. Or use special abilities like “tackle” or “lure” to incapacitate the enemy, and then attack them.
- Go southeast: Following “the glow” takes you closer to the DMC, where looters are the most common enemy. Looters are hostile, but also fairly cowardly and weak. The down-side here is the lack of scavengeable resources in the DMC’s sphere of influence. (Note: In Demo mode you can only go so far to the southeast before you have to buy the full game to continue)