[B41] The Greg Arthur Survival Guide! (Work in progress!)

In doing so, you not only keep the window intact for later which could possibly save you by letting you know of invading zombies breaking through, but an open window is a lot better to exit through than one covered in glass shards that you either cut yourself with or spend more time removing. Fighting near doorways is asking for failure, your line of sight with doorways is extremely restricted and nearby zombies will be notably quieter, you may end up putting yourself in harms way. Always maintain at least some distance from doorways. Steer clear from trees, these peaceful looking pieces of wood and leaves are extremely deceiving and deadly, and that's pushing aside that they can scratch you. Zombies are much quieter and can be easily concealed by these things, fighting near them is much like fighting near doorways, you are setting yourself up for failure. When it comes to checking rooms safely in untouched houses, you might ask yourself whether or not it's worth slowly creeping round doorways/corners or running straight into the room. Here's my best way to go about it, it varies based on the doorway position. If the doorway is in a corner of the room, you can creep through and check near the door as you walk in. But if it isn't, you're more safe by running straight into the room, as checking one side of the door could leave you open to attacks from the other. There's banging at a door near you, you're thinking, and you're tryna think smart. If I swing right as I open the door, that zombie is so screwed. Welp, what about the other zombies that are there? Huh? There aren't any? Are you certain though? Do you think it's really worth risking your life for that? Yeah, that's why we don't do that. Oddly enough, there is a longer period of time after a swing before you can shove zombies if you keep pressing left click. However if you spam space instead, you'll notice your character is sooner able to shove zombies, potentially saving you in those hairy scenarios. In reality this goes with every weapon, but spears in particular the most due to their long stab animations that leave you unable to move for prolonged time. If you aren't watching your back, a zombie could soon be eating it while your spear is in another one's eye socket. If you don't know, panic is gained upon sight of a zombie as well as some remaining buildup of 1.75% per second when staring at a zombie (adds up for each zombie), from my estimations it is around 10%, seemingly doubled if they come into view from behind. Your panic is constantly trying to decrease at a varying rate, starting at around 5.5% on day 1 all the way up to 55% by day 150. However, even if brief, looking away from a zombie and then looking back will redo the same panic gain from looking at them. If possible, you should try avoid looking away from the zombies and shove back close ones instead, ONLY if it doesn't seem like it would risk your life, this will allow you to keep lowering your panic levels to keep melee damage and crit chance. The reason why is unlike eating and drinking from a bottle, drinking from water sources directly and stopping without finishing does not scale with how far in you were into the action, being 95% through the drinking action but stopping means you gained nothing. However, this does not apply to the action of filling up a bottle, which infact scales based on how full the bottle already is and how far in you got, allowing you to stop halfway and still get to drink the water you obtained in the bottle. The reason why is that for some reason, any actions you were doing with the car, will immediately be stuck while reloading the gun, until you finish or cancel the reload action, all the while any other ones you do during it will be ignored. Simply put, if you were accelerating when you start reloading, you're gonna keep doing that til you finish, same with turning. You will crash, and that's not fun.
Seemingly, unloading a gun, and loading rounds into a magazine are fine, but actually putting a mag in a gun, or rounds into them, will do this. Yup, it all goes back to trees. You'd be surprised how well zombies can hide behind and inside these things. Even a single tree can conceal dozens of zombies, it HAS happened to me. This is very big when it comes to checking out barricaded houses, you might think "hm, a barricaded house with one window unbarricaded would be easy to loot cause the zombies take time to break the barricades!" Think again, time is limited, but so is an exit's ability to be safely used. You got in through a window? Don't forget a single zombie being at the window is a time sink you'll have to deal with before you can use it yourself, and even then, what if the window is broken? You'll have to cut yourself or spend more time removing the glass, what if you climb through and there's a zombie next to it who then eats your arms right off? If the window is swarmed, what other window can you use? None, they're all barricaded. This is why you wanna make them available, and if possible, use a door instead. Doors are tougher, can be opened/closed instantly as opposed to over time like windows and you can easily run through a couple zombies at one unlike windows. A favorite of mine, let's say you spot a zombie out in the crowd that you in particular really want dead but there's lots of zombies and you've got nothing but your measley wooden mallet with a quarter durability left, maybe he's got another weapon that could keep you going, maybe he's wearing a large backpack you want, maybe he's just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ugly. Of course, trying to actually get to him is no easy task, a few hits into the other zombies and suddenly your mallet is broken and you've accomplished nothing, but maybe there's a way you can. Introducing my "pick a target" technique, you pick out your target, note down their physical appearance so they're easy to catch out from other zombies, and proceed to shove away other zombies until the one infront of you is none other than the target, then you give them a whack, and repeat until they're dead. Once that's done, get the other zombies a bit away, circle them and grab what you needed from your target. Even outside of specific targets, this is a good way to maximise your usage of a weapon that you're worried won't last a full fight, dealing 10 damage to 20 zombies is arguably not as great as dealing 200 to 1, because then at least someone's actually died that isn't you. Zombies can climb over small fences and through windows, obviously, but there's a little tidbit to know about it. If you're close enough to a window as a zombie climbs through, they might just quickly crawl and try grab your ankles, you DON'T want that, you'll fall over like an idiot for several seconds and be extremely vulnerable. Staying away from the window will often have them just crawl like normal and try get up, but there's more to know. If a collidable object is infront of the window, they do a different climb, taking longer to do and ontop of that, they never go for your ankles in doing so.

As far as I'm aware, when zombies break windows, it doesn't do anything to the behavior or other zombies and they simply ignore it. However, if you break the window yourself, nearby ones will seemingly notice the sound and investigate.

It's dangerous, beyond dangerous when you're doing this obviously, it's already been stated twice before of course that trees aren't your friend. Holding right click will allow you to immediately face your character whichever direction you need to the moment you start moving, facing the zombies is obviously more ideal, not just because you can hit them, but also because you have a higher chance of being bitten and hurt when facing away from them.

This is what I refer to as for a specific move I make in the early game of any run I do for CDDA, it mostly relates to when the power is off and resources become harder to obtain. Picture the scenario, you found a generator but of course it's empty, you managed to finally find a car with a little bit of gas in it and a key or you hotwired it, the gas obviously isn't gonna get you to another town or anywhere special, what do you do? Of all things, your saviour right now can quite literally be an empty plastic bottle, here's what you do. Take the generator with you in the car to the gas station with an empty bottle, drive next to a pump and drop the generator, connect it to the area, siphon the little gas in your car with your empty bottle and now pour it into the generator, switch on the generator, now use the pumps to directly fuel your car until it's full, then fill the bottle with gas and turn the generator off to pour more gas in it then turn it back on and repeat until full. You've just entered this gas station with an empty generator and barely usable car, and left it with a full tank and generator, hence, "The Takeoff". Tryna find a car with gas in the early game can be a bit tedious at times, especially when you have zombies on your tail that you can't afford to give time to. Opening a hood and checking the fuel tank takes a good several seconds and requires you to be at the front of the car, but you know what saves the day once again? That's right, the handy empty plastic bottle. Without knowing the exact amount, you can still use a plastic bottle to INSTANTLY check if a car actually has gas by simply walking right up to it and pressing V, if the radial menu shows an option to siphon gas, congrats! It has gas! If not, better luck next time. This one is a little obvious but it's good to keep yourself in check, it's much more preferable to get it out the way when nothing's happening than later when you're stretched for time cause of nearby zombies. Besides, you never know when you're just gonna have to dive out that window, at least save your arms the pain. Exertion is a potentially powerful foe, often not having as much harmful effect as other moodles in most cases but it certainly pushes against your melee damage with a hefty -50% on just the first stage. Although it's unlisted, exertion actually does affect your energy usage which in turn makes it even harder to get back out of exertion, a notable example is that in the 2nd stage of exertion, even just walking will now use energy over time on high fitness levels, and the penalties to trip chance certainly aren't pleasant. Energy Regen varies based on fitness levels much like energy consumption, walking with high fitness levels will very slowly regen energy, standing still more, sitting down even more, and resting just a tiny bit more. However unbeknownst to a lot of people, you can sit down and rest at the same time for even further increased energy regen, it certainly makes chairs a nice sight. This will save you inventory space, a line in your inventory, and even some time when it comes to infected wounds and such. Pouring disinfectant on sheets is a much better way to use disinfectant than pouring it in the wound instead. On a side note, did you know that with a some containers like cooking pots or saucepans, you can fill them with water and boil them to disinfect sheets too? This is just a grand rule for everything really. Waiting for food to cook? Read a book while it's waiting, even if only a few pages. Watching TV for XP? Do some tailoring if you've got thread. Waiting for a wound to heal overnight? Might as well get some exercise done just for that strength and fitness XP. There's lots you can do while waiting in this game. Oddly enough, not all timed actions are the same, but there are some patterns. Farming actions can't be queued which is annoying and makes anything farming related take even longer, opening canned food can be done while driving despite being a crafting action technically. You can unpack canned food from bags while moving, but can only open them while stood still, but can eat them while moving again. Drinking from an on-person item and eating food can be stopped halfway and will change stats accordingly but drinking from a water source like a tap and stopping halfway will result in nothing happening. All timed actions can seemingly be done while climbing a fence or through a window and when opening or closing a window. Actions that can be done while walking will still for some reason stop if you stand up when you were doing them sat down. You cannot bandage your thighs or anywhere lower on your body while moving, only everywhere above the thighs. Certain electronic items take several seconds to dismantle but can be done much quicker if picked up and disassembled from the inventory, lamps seem to be exempt from this though.

The first stage of hunger, thirst, boredom, stress, wet, injured, and hypothermia all do nothing and are merely there as an indicator of stats changing.
Hunger will progressively decrease your strength, body heat and healing before very slowly draining hp at the final stage, thirst works the same except raising body heat and draining hp faster. Each level of panic reduces weapon crit chance by 1.3%, and the 2nd level onwards adds -10% melee damage, the last stage reduces the width of your vision cone. Boredom is gained from spending long indoors and just starts making you slowly depressed, it is removed instantly by having at least stage 1 panic. Stress reduces melee damage by 10% for each level starting at 2 and slowly makes you depressed with it speeding up as stress rises. Depression makes most times actions take longer, in most cases this isn't a big problem as it'll be outside combat but could make you take longer to equip weapons or pick up items in a fight. Drunk doesn't actually affect accuracy, and it doesn't say it but it seemingly improves panic loss rate or reduces panic gain, it can lower body temperatures if not from bourbon but will do the opposite if it is, it also makes driving a car an absolute nightmare so don't do it.
Encumbrance is a harsh moodle, affecting move speed, attack speed, energy consumption on everything, climb chance, trip chance, and crit chance, it also drains hp when level 3 or 4 but will not drain below 75% hp so seemingly isn't a problem for that. Stage 2 encumbrance will have you losing energy from just walking with high fitness.
Exertion can heavily affect melee damage, and have some small effect to attack speed, climb chance, trip chance and energy consumption.
Hypothermia as mentioned does nothing at level 1, but at level 2 or above will heavily hinder move speed and attack speed and can give you a cold, hyperthermia increases thirst from level 1 onwards and has similar penalties to hypothermia but cannot give you a cold.
Injured just reduces your strength slightly based on health values.
Level 1 of pain is just a tiny 5% trip chance increase, however level 2 onwards has increasing penalties which also include attack damage and attack speed penalties. Players also cannot exercise when in agony.
Having a cold makes you cough and sneeze a lot, and extremely loudly. Having tissues or toilet paper equipped will mute them but it's not advised to actually rely on them as they run out extremely fast. You can get rid of a cold only when indoors and by not being hungry (stage 2 or above), thirsty (stage 2 or above), hot, cold, wet, or at 50% fatigue or above. The first stage of a cold is only visible at 20% so don't think you're safe the moment the moodle is gone, give it time.
Sickness increases your body temperature and can lower strength, at max sickness you will begin losing health extremely fast.

If you haven't already found this, you may notice that trying to climb a large fence while holding a bag in your secondary will have you drop the bag before climbing the fence, which is obviously not ideal. You can deal with this by simply just right clicking the bag in your inventory and clicking "unequip" to keep it out your hand before you climb the fence, and then re-equip it after you're finished. Be aware that when unequipped, bags will not reduce item weight so you may have an encumbrance penalty which will infact lower your chances of climbing the fence.

C1) Water bottles will automatically save a single unit of water in them when being drunk from, the reason for this is so they are still named "water bottle" instead of becoming an empty bottle so that you can easily choose to fill that specific bottle at a water source instead of a random bottle which could possibly be an unpreferable choice, like a beer bottle (which is very inefficient for water to weight ratio!)

C2) When barricading a window, planks block sound/sight once there's 3 or more planks on any given side, but this is separate per side. If you put 4 planks on one side then it will block sight and sound, but if you put 2 on one side and 2 on the other, it won't block them while still being just as durable. Use this when you want to choose whether or not to block sight/sound!

C3) Touching on that, yes, you can barricade both sides of doors and windows. You can border a window with up to 8 planks because of it, making it extremely durable.

C4) When making an escape rope, it requires one nail and 2 sheet ropes, with an extra sheet rope per floor traversed above just the one. For example, you just need two ropes to traverse a floor, but 3 to traverse 2 floors, 4 to traverse 3 floors and so on. Climbing a sheet rope doesn't run any check for weight or endurance and can be done no matter what, even if you're holding a generator, sheet ropes will break if you swing a weapon around them or if a zombie hits them.

C5) Exercise fatigue will still affect you even if you use painkillers to drown the pain, this is very notable on the arms where downing painkillers after 5000 push ups will not stop you from being useless in combat despite not being in pain.

C6) The endurance cost for swinging a weapon is dependant on the weapon type as well as the weight. Most weapons have a multiplier of 1, heavy ones like a wood axe and sledgehammer have 3, short blades have 0.5, as mentioned earlier the weight will also factor in which is why a nightstick may use stamina faster than a hammer despite both being short blunts.

C7) Cars are more likely to fail a startup in the winter, and their chance isn't actually affected by engine condition, but rather engine quality which is a more hidden stat you can see by clicking the engine.

C8) The best times to fish are 4-7am and 6-9pm, this will increase your chance to catch fish by 10%, but seemingly this is a multiplier off your base chance after other calculations are done like level or bait type or season, which is why you still can't spear fish in winter until you're level 7 in fishing. And yes, winter will screw over your fishing chances, seemingly you can't get fish with a rod in winter until you're level 1.

C9)You can sit down while disassembling or building things, visually you'll be stood up but mechanically you are still sat down which helps with stamina regen but you'll take a second to get back up if you move. You can also do this while sawing logs, ripping clothes, opening a car hood, and more, try experiment!

C10) Holding shift when trying to move while sat down will let you get up quickly as if you are panicked, which is good for just being careful or saving a tiny bit of time.

C11) When eating more food than you need to, how long you stay full and how full you are isn't dependent on how much you overate, but rather how big the thing you just ate was. Eating a bag of chips for -15 hunger when you only had 1 hunger will not last longer than you eating a -60 burger at exactly 60 hunger, the burger will keep you full longer purely because it was a bigger snack, keep this in mind for what order you eat multiple snacks in if you plan to be full.

C12) Sawing logs is faster when they're in your inventory compared to on the ground for some reason, although it takes longer to pick up an already dropped log then saw it.

C13) Plan for what time you exercise, muscle fatigue kicks in for each rep after 12 hours have passed, and lasts 6 hours from what I can remember. Only exercise at 6pm if you can handle the fatigue during the day, be it that the fatigue is anywhere but the arms, or that you're simply just not going out that day and doing something like base renovations and such. Exercising at 6am will help ensure that the fatigue hits right as you're hitting night time and will likely be in a safe area waiting for time to pass.

C14) Courtesy of my friend Crystal, when going out on long drives and such, try bringing a cooking pot full of water in your car incase of emergencies, you never know when trying to get a quick refill somewhere could be a problem. Other items to keep in the back of your car could be a Lug Wrench, Screw Driver, Tire Pump (although this is rather minimal), Spare engine parts if you have any and are level 4 or above in mechanics, An empty gas can (an empty plastic bottle can suffice but will make fueling/siphoning repeatedly slower), an axe incase of possible emergencies with trees, a jack, a spare weapon and a couple non-perishable/long lasting foods incase of emergencies.

C15) Items to have on your person at all times/most of the time: Screwdriver, a hammer, 2x suture needles + a holder if you want to use them faster or a needle and some thread (especially if you plan to do tailoring!), 4 or 5 of any bandage, scissors if you want to cut denim/leather clothes, a spare pair of glasses if using short sighted, matches/lighter + spare if using smoker, soap if you want to reduce cleaning time, can opener, saw/garden saw (preferably normal saw as it can saw shotgun barrels unlike garden saw), beta blockers + spare if the pack is under half full (situational depending on how long you've lived and whether or not you have brave/cowardly/desensitised), an assortment of pens/pencil/eraser if you plan on marking your map a lot with different colours, hand torch/flashlight if you think you'll be doing some things in the dark and can one-hand a weapon, spare bag if you're using one-handed weapons, an empty plastic bottle to quickly check cars for gas or do some siphoning, nails if you build things a lot or to make escape ropes, a bowl if you wanna passively grind cooking xp or deal with stale food, spare footwear if your current footwear has low condition, a spare weapon, tweezers.

C16) Things to have at your base: Spare hammer, sledgehammer, spare screwdriver, spare nails, spare gas can or empty plastic bottle, one of every cooking utensil if you plan to maximise your cooking potential, welding tools/materials if you feel as though they are needed, one of every book/VHS/Magazine (knowing which VHSs give XP will help you cut down on bloat and time), a few normal books/comic books for depression, a weapon's magazine or a rounds-reload weapon if you want to farm reloading xp (preferably rounds-reload weapon as they give you xp far quicker), some form of axe (the stronger the better), a single piece of furniture that allows you to use the "rest" option to gain energy back quicker, any garbage bags you've collected for water collectors so they don't consume valuable inventory space, spiffo plush.

C17) Do you want to properly min-max your water consumption? Because of a limited water supply? A long journey out? Or do you simply just wanna have to refill less and be smarter? Start carrying around the likes of a glass/cup or such with you. The reason why is because 1 "unit" of water will quench 10% of your thirst, and 2 will quench 20% and so on. You cannot drink out of any on-hand container until you're at 11% thirst because of this, however there's nothing stopping you from drinking at the likes of 12% thirst and using 2 units of water when that amount could easily have satisfied up to 20% which is a very large difference in efficiency. As to why a cup/glass or such could help with this is because they can usually hold 1 or 2 units of water, which can be used to fine tune your water consumption while still staying below thresholds where penalties come in. Here's an example, I have my full water bottle on me, I have 15% thirst, I pour water into a teacup until it's full which is worth 1 unit of water and then I drink it which takes me from 15% to 5% thirst, and then I'll wait until I'm at 11% to drink again, all of this costing a measly 0.1 weight in my inventory, that's a pretty good bargain for maximum hydration/water bottle efficiency. As for what specifically to bring, here's a list of things I've tested, ranked in terms of weight and amount of water stored, it's important that you only pour into these things when you need to drink and not pre-emptively as they will take up additional weight in your inventory:

Wine glass: 1 unit of water, 0.1 weight empty, 0.3 weight full
Plastic cup/Tumbler: 2 units of water, 0.1 weight empty, 0.3 weight full (ranked below wine glass as wine glass is more lenient)
Teacup: 1 unit of water, 0.1 weight empty, 0.4 weight full
Mug: 1 unit of water, 0.2 weight empty, 0.8 weight full

C18) If you are thinking of using alcohol to let you sleep while in pain, just know that the game only checks if you have any amount of drunkness at all to allow you to do so, and not for a specific amount. Because of this, just with 1 bottle/can of any kind of alcohol, it can easily last very long and for multiple uses to allow you to sleep if you simply click to drink 1/4th of it and cancel partially through it, taking what I call a "micro-sip", just make sure you don't daudle and actually go to sleep in the next few seconds or so.

C19) Did you know you can open car doors? Just open them and not get in? It's not a very obvious feature but you can do so by pressing V and looking for it on the radial wheel when outside the car. What does this do? Well for a while I thought it was useless until I realised that open car doors will allow you to access the seat as a container without you having to actually be in the car. This means for example, if you were to have a bunch of guns and ammo on the back seats and you have the back doors just open, you can easily immediately start grabbing said guns/ammo if you need to when approaching the car. The best part of all of this is it seemingly doesn't have a downside, as the open doors do not change the car's hitbox. It's also the only way to use the back of a police car as storage, since you cannot switch to/access the back seats from the front.