[Noob] Survival mode is insane for me and I love it - some questions.

[Vintrius]

Hi,

 

I am playing on survival mode after trying the first week (too easy) and six months later (to insanely hard at the beginning for me). I find it quite challenging, therefore I have some questions towards some more experienced zomboid survivors.

 

1. How do you loot on survival after the peak day. I need some supplies, because the winter is coming. My biggest mistake was grinding Metalworking and Carpentry while doing some looting. Then I broke my characters leg while building the second floor of my safehouse (took around 6 weeks to heal - Slow Healer perk). Managed to go to The Mall (aka. nopeland) and brought 1 bag of non-perishable food supplies and one bag of other stuff (nails, fishing supplies etc.). Went there 2 more times and I'm wondering how I got in the first time. Once again - any strategies for looting on Survival mode (West Point - I'm holed up in house by the lake date is 29/09).

 

2. I have a limited supply of lighters and matches and there is a stove in the shack. Is there any way to light a fire in the stove once my supply is gone? Same qyestion for cigarettes.

 

3. Is there any convenient way to grind fishing and trapping (I am unable to catch anything - 2 squirrels so far) or should I just use it on a daily basis. So far my rod breaks every day and at this pace I will run out of supplies to fix it quickly. The game is a test game to further find out the mechanics behind the gameplay, so I won't matter whether anything gets broken by bad advice.

 

Questions above are the ones I cannot find a straight answer to or can't come up with one myself.

 

Thanks in advance for all the answers.

[FireOnAsphalt]

1. Looting after the peak day requires patience, particularly in urban areas and residential areas. The way zombie migration works will eventually provide you with a window to loot a place of choice. It's just a matter of timing; make too much noise, and you'll gather groups too quickly to dispatch easily and you'll end up abandoning your attempt in frustration.

 

Personally, I usually set up an encounter area where I will spend a day or so luring zombies from the surrounding area to fight safely. By creating a pocket free from zombies in one area, zombies from other areas will fill in the gaps and reduce density, creating an easier time finding windows. This requires fighting the infected though, so the potential risk is of course death.

 

Another wrench the game can throw into the cogs is simply a meta event; meta events can make or break a looting attempt. I've spent an entire day killing zombies just to have some jackass scream his lungs out a street away and erase nearly all my work, leaving me exhausted, hungry and angry at the small army of zombies plodding over their recently fallen ilk. Just remember that meta events only affect zombies around you, so you actually have to spend time near an area you wish to loot for a meta event to do anything of significance there, good or otherwise.

 

2. Lighters and matches are common enough to find that I've never had any issues retaining a supply of them for lighting fires and smoking cigarettes. Perhaps that isn't the case for everybody, but I don't have any advice to give other than search every corpse you add to the ground and every closet of every building you enter. 

 

3. Having never been a fisherman or trapper, I also have limited advice to give in this realm. Make sure you read the appropriate skill books prior to using those skills to make sure you learn the most with what supplies the game gives you. Also, you can always hunt for quality of life mods on the Steam Workshop or forums. It will "corrupt" your vanilla game experience, but if you search diligently enough you'll discover mods that add practical solutions for problems you face in the game that just simply haven't been added by the developers themselves. A few such mods I use that I would consider to be pretty lightweight are Sweaters to Strings, Pump Power, Chip a Stone and Secondhand Loots. They add a lot by how little they add. 

 

Edit: Oh! And BookCollection V3! This mod simply changes the names of books so that they're organized more neatly in the UI. Extremely helpful in my opinion.

[TheWraithPlayer]

1. I'm always very cautious from the beginning, and usually my sneaking is high enough to make virtually no noise. In case I have to deal with a large horde of zombies I always have a few bases in case one gets compromised.

2. I don't think so with the stove, but if you have a grill and charcoal it'll serve the same purpose.

3. Don't have much experience in this, just a lot of setting mouse traps, baiting them with chips and getting squat.

[ChatNoir]

2. You can craft a kindle with a notched wooden plank (plank + screwdriver or any kind of knife or chipped stone) and a sturdy stick (saw + plank). This can be used to light a fire. And if I remember right, the stove in your shack is one that works with wood. So you can use it similar to a campfire.

3. Best traps to start with are stick traps (sturdy stick and twine) to catch birds with worms. Worms are easy to get either by foraging or digging in the ground. Place 3-4 in proper distance from your safehouse, check and refill them every 1-2 days. To determine the proper distance, use a planted crop next to your safehouse and right click on it to get the farming info, then walk away till the farming info pop up disappear. You have the right distance now cause animals are shy and avoid the traps if you are near them.

For fishing, try to craft fishing rods with twine or fishing line and sturdy sticks. The fishing net trap can also be useful if you have low level fishing.

 

[Vintrius]

17 hours ago, ChatNoir said:

To determine the proper distance, use a planted crop next to your safehouse and right click on it to get the farming info, then walk away till the farming info pop up disappear. You have the right distance now cause animals are shy and avoid the traps if you are near them.

Thanks for the trapping advice, I don't think I would have figured it by myself. Amazing. I was sitting with PZ map and determining the distance of 75 squares (wiki info I think).

 

17 hours ago, TheWraithPlayer said:

I'm always very cautious from the beginning, and usually my sneaking is high enough to make virtually no noise. In case I have to deal with a large horde of zombies I always have a few bases in case one gets compromised.

Well seems to be my mistake. I have one base and it is going to be compromised within a month probably. Thought house by the lake west of West Point was safe. Well not on survival. I started seeing small groups in the forest around 100 squares from my base. At the beginning of the game the nearest groups  were around 450-500 squares from my place. West Point oustkirts distance is 750.

 

18 hours ago, FireOnAsphalt said:

Also, you can always hunt for quality of life mods on the Steam Workshop or forums. It will "corrupt" your vanilla game experience, but if you search diligently enough you'll discover mods that add practical solutions for problems you face in the game that just simply haven't been added by the developers themselves.

Thanks for the mod advice 3 of them will come in handy and will not break vanilla experience totally. I am not sure what Secondhand Loots does. I will be lucky enough if I get to a generator and move it to a gas station. Right now a move to the outskirts of rosewood makes even more sense. There is a large gas station to the south of Rosewood and a small lake + enormous foraging areas and proximity to loads of loot in Rosewood and March Ridge (a backup plan if or rather when my current base gets compromised).

 

Also this will be a great opportunity to test all the looting advice. I think a meta event actually helped me loot the Crossroads Mall. When I was going there for the first time and was aroun 150 sqares away from the destination the helicopter event trigerred. It made me curse and walk around for three in-game hours avoiding massive hordes coming from every direction. Two times it seemed the helicopter has flown away and two times it returned. When I got to the mall there were still zombies outside but I presume less than I would have encountered if the event did not trigger. As I could not take them on I lured them away. cleared a safe zone went to sleep and on the second day fought zombies inside and sneaked past the ones I did not have two fight. This gave me two full Big Hiking Bags of loot. So what at the beginning seemed like a loss became a huge win. The issue for me is looting tight downtown areas with nowhere to run (West Point, maybe Rosewood - haven't been there).

[JM_Forest_64]

1.) Solution to looting a heavy area:

Start with a...

shotgun blast (here) ---> (then here) ---> (here) ---> (here) ---> (here) ---> and (here) ---> run into forest

                                                                                                                                                 |

   (start looting)                                                                                                                        V

             ^                                                                                                                              run through forest

        (WALK)                                                                                                                              |

             |                                                                                                                                   V

  turn towards starting point here  <------------(WALK this way)------------------------------ run out of forest

 

2.) Ditto with FireOnAsphalt, check every zombie, search every kitchen cabinet.  Maybe, if things become desperate, your fire will just be something that you'll become attached to, and you'll have to just fuel that mo'fo every couple of hours.

 

3.) No advice on grinding, either.  During character creation, you should determine which survivalist method you're going to use to feed your face for the long term: farming, fishing, trapping, or foraging.  Make sure you give yourself at least one skill point--preferably two--in that area, and concentrate on that.  You could probably, with help from books, get at least two skills points in all the areas pretty easily.  With those intermediate skills, you could use all the food gathering methods to help supplement your main food making method.

[explorator]

This thread reminds me of how much fun I had playing on Survival. That's all.