PZ: My first five days -NEED HELP

[ManBearPig87]

Hey everyone, I've started a new series of PZ videos in a kind of survivors diary format. I'm new to the game but enjoying it greatly. I just need some help with building and fortifying. If anyone could post any tips of where or what to do next, I would be very grateful The first three videos are below:

 

[Aardman55]

It looks pretty cool to me, subbed you hoping for moar

[ManBearPig87]

It looks pretty cool to me, subbed you hoping for moar

Thank you very much! Should have the next two days up tomorrow.

[ManBearPig87]

It looks pretty cool to me, subbed you hoping for moar

This is how I died, such a bad death haha

[Zach]

 

It looks pretty cool to me, subbed you hoping for moar

This is how I died, such a bad death haha

 

 

If your tired then stop running. One of the reasons why that zombie caught you was because you were exhausted.

[ManBearPig87]

 

 

It looks pretty cool to me, subbed you hoping for moar

This is how I died, such a bad death haha

 

 

If your tired then stop running. One of the reasons why that zombie caught you was because you were exhausted.

 

I know, I've learnt this the hard way. Could you help me with some things? I found a carpentry for beginners book, but the game wont let me learn it, so I can't build or fortify. Any ideas?

[rorschach]

Okay, here are some of my thoughts on things that might help you (apologies if it seems like I'm teaching you to suck eggs, I'm just pointing out things that I might've done differently to your play style.

 

Which level of book did you find, and what skill levels are you? There are five levels of books for each of the carpentry, farming and cooking skills. You can only read the level of book that is one higher than the skill level you already achieved. So, if you're level 0 (i.e. no skill points allocated to that skill yet) you can read the level 1 book, and so on.

 

Carpentry: the tools you need for this are an axe (easiest way to chop trees), saw, hammer and nails. You'll find them all in crates in places such as warehouses, the larger houses (especially those with garages), and certain shops.

You have an axe, so you can obviously chop trees down, but without a saw the best option at the start of the game is to chop down doors. This way you get instant access to planks, plus you'll get 0-2 door hinges and/or 0-1 doorknobs (you don't seem to find these anywhere except by destroying doors). When zombies destroy doors, they seem to leave behind all the components that went into making it (a higher drop rate, it seems) so looting houses that were previously ravaged by hordes of the hinges and doorknobs is an easy way to pick these items up.

Collect all the nails you find, keep a few in main inventory just in case (think 'sheet ropes') and box the rest up when you get more than 100.

 

Burglar alarms are one of the main ways to migrate zombies across the map. Therefore, if you happen to trigger one, you ought to assume that at least a couple of zombies will show up to see what the fuss is about. If you're in the centre of Muldraugh, or pretty much anywhere in WP, you may well get a lot more arriving. My favoured tactic upon setting off an alarm is to get outside, circle the building that just drew zombies in and, if it's only a couple of Z's, pick off one by one. If you see a horde heading your way, try to lose their line-of-sight by running around corners, through trees (not a whole forest's worth, just a few) or, my favourite, go through a house via window or door and out the other side. A whole horde will bash windows and even doors down in a short time. If you are hiding upstairs and make any noise, it is more likely than not that zombies will start coming up the stairs to investigate. If this happens, you may have to fight a whole gang of them just to escape. Being able to make sheet ropes quickly is a godsend - jumping out of first floor (or higher) windows is not to be recommended!

 

I'll come back to this if I think of anything else.

 

Okay, so I didn't watch the 4th video yet, but this is what else I picked up on after watching the first three....

 

Some of the windows that you try to open in your videos are not the kind that can be opened. Shop windows, just like IRL, cannot be opened. The wide double windows of ‘houses’ in the trailer park can’t be opened, only the narrow double windows that slide across each other.

Regarding water, you ought to keep a water container in your inventory at all times so that your character doesn’t suffer from thirst. As long as there's water in it, your character will drink from it automatically. This can be a water bottle, but it can also be a mayonnaise jar that you ‘pour on ground’ and refill from a tap, or a mug, bowl, kettle, cooking pot or whiskey bottle. Regular water bottles are the best since they hold the most for their size and only weigh 0.1 when empty.

Sneaking a skill that should be used whenever you’re near lots of zombies. For every zombie you can successfully sneak past without being detected, your XP in the sneak and lightfooted skills will rise.

If you’re holding an axe, you should probably hold it with both hands (right click option) to get the best damage effect from it. The only real reason to be holding it with only one hand is either because you’re holding a torch in the other hand to light your way or, more likely, that you’re holding a bag in your secondary slot to carry more loot back to your safehouse.

Renaming your bags is something I always do. I put a number at the start of the name, this keeps the bag at the top of your inventory where it’s easy to find. Something like this:
1 - Big Hiking Bag - MAIN
2 - Duffelbag - LOOT
You ideally want two of the biggest bags you can find - big hiking bags are the best - keep on looting until you find them, but maybe grab another one or two to keep back at base, if you find them.

I keep my main inventory as empty as possible with just clothes, weapons, nails, maybe a hammer (for quick barricading), water bottle and beta blockers. The rest goes either in my main bag (which is where I keep all my kit for surviving at least two days away from home) or my loot bag. Since you’re not playing with the strong or stout traits, you need to keep a close eye on how much you carry so as not to end up overloaded.

Ham is an excellent food to keep for when you’re out looting. It weighs 0.3 but reduces hunger by 30, that’s good bang for your buck. Chips, chocolate and beef jerky are also good. None of these perish, that’s an important consideration.

Get familiar with the C, H and J keys - these bring up your character’s skill, health and journal windows, respectively. I normally leave the skill window open in the bottom left of the screen so I can which skills I can level up and which need work. That’s just a personal preference.

When your character gets the ‘exhausted’ moodle, it doesn’t currently do anything like making you pass out (even though it implies this in the moodle text), so don’t worry too much about it. What you do need to be aware of is that it reduces your arc of vision substantially - zombies can approach you from directions that, if you were not tired, you would see them easily. For this reason it’s necessary to check your six frequently when you are either tired or in a heavily Z-populated area. Just do a 360 degree twirl now and then and you should be good.

Something I noticed you mentioned in your second video: crafting beds. You can’t do that, you need to find a bed or chair already in the game to sleep in, or collect 4 tent pegs, 4 sheets and 2 sturdy sticks (you make these with planks and a saw) and craft a tent kit. Tent kits lets you sleep pretty much anywhere, but they’re no protection against zombies so don’t set them up in an unprotected area.

When you were in the gas station and two zombies attacked you from the toilet, after you killed them you forgot to loot all the containers, shelves, and counters. You complained later on in the video that you had no food on you, but I’m sure those containers would have had chips and/or other foods in them, and a bunch of other stuff too. I make it a habit to loot all the good stuff from every container in any building I enter, and arrive there with the bag space to carry at least most (if not all) of it away.

 

Do you know about the PZ Map Project? Check it out here, it's the best way to learn what is where. You won't end up running off into the wilderness by mistake when you're really looking for the town centre!

 

Th-th-th-that's all, folks... (for now).

[ManBearPig87]

Okay, here are some of my thoughts on things that might help you (apologies if it seems like I'm teaching you to suck eggs, I'm just pointing out things that I might've done differently to your play style.

 

Which level of book did you find, and what skill levels are you? There are five levels of books for each of the carpentry, farming and cooking skills. You can only read the level of book that is one higher than the skill level you already achieved. So, if you're level 0 (i.e. no skill points allocated to that skill yet) you can read the level 1 book, and so on.

 

Carpentry: the tools you need for this are an axe (easiest way to chop trees), saw, hammer and nails. You'll find them all in crates in places such as warehouses, the larger houses (especially those with garages), and certain shops.

You have an axe, so you can obviously chop trees down, but without a saw the best option at the start of the game is to chop down doors. This way you get instant access to planks, plus you'll get 0-2 door hinges and/or 0-1 doorknobs (you don't seem to find these anywhere except by destroying doors). When zombies destroy doors, they seem to leave behind all the components that went into making it (a higher drop rate, it seems) so looting houses that were previously ravaged by hordes of the hinges and doorknobs is an easy way to pick these items up.

Collect all the nails you find, keep a few in main inventory just in case (think 'sheet ropes') and box the rest up when you get more than 100.

 

Burglar alarms are one of the main ways to migrate zombies across the map. Therefore, if you happen to trigger one, you ought to assume that at least a couple of zombies will show up to see what the fuss is about. If you're in the centre of Muldraugh, or pretty much anywhere in WP, you may well get a lot more arriving. My favoured tactic upon setting off an alarm is to get outside, circle the building that just drew zombies in and, if it's only a couple of Z's, pick off one by one. If you see a horde heading your way, try to lose their line-of-sight by running around corners, through trees (not a whole forest's worth, just a few) or, my favourite, go through a house via window or door and out the other side. A whole horde will bash windows and even doors down in a short time. If you are hiding upstairs and make any noise, it is more likely than not that zombies will start coming up the stairs to investigate. If this happens, you may have to fight a whole gang of them just to escape. Being able to make sheet ropes quickly is a godsend - jumping out of first floor (or higher) windows is not to be recommended!

 

I'll come back to this if I think of anything else.

 

Okay, so I didn't watch the 4th video yet, but this is what else I picked up on after watching the first three....

 

Some of the windows that you try to open in your videos are not the kind that can be opened. Shop windows, just like IRL, cannot be opened. The wide double windows of ‘houses’ in the trailer park can’t be opened, only the narrow double windows that slide across each other.

Regarding water, you ought to keep a water container in your inventory at all times so that your character doesn’t suffer from thirst. As long as there's water in it, your character will drink from it automatically. This can be a water bottle, but it can also be a mayonnaise jar that you ‘pour on ground’ and refill from a tap, or a mug, bowl, kettle, cooking pot or whiskey bottle. Regular water bottles are the best since they hold the most for their size and only weigh 0.1 when empty.

Sneaking a skill that should be used whenever you’re near lots of zombies. For every zombie you can successfully sneak past without being detected, your XP in the sneak and lightfooted skills will rise.

If you’re holding an axe, you should probably hold it with both hands (right click option) to get the best damage effect from it. The only real reason to be holding it with only one hand is either because you’re holding a torch in the other hand to light your way or, more likely, that you’re holding a bag in your secondary slot to carry more loot back to your safehouse.

Renaming your bags is something I always do. I put a number at the start of the name, this keeps the bag at the top of your inventory where it’s easy to find. Something like this:

1 - Big Hiking Bag - MAIN

2 - Duffelbag - LOOT

You ideally want two of the biggest bags you can find - big hiking bags are the best - keep on looting until you find them, but maybe grab another one or two to keep back at base, if you find them.

I keep my main inventory as empty as possible with just clothes, weapons, nails, maybe a hammer (for quick barricading), water bottle and beta blockers. The rest goes either in my main bag (which is where I keep all my kit for surviving at least two days away from home) or my loot bag. Since you’re not playing with the strong or stout traits, you need to keep a close eye on how much you carry so as not to end up overloaded.

Ham is an excellent food to keep for when you’re out looting. It weighs 0.3 but reduces hunger by 30, that’s good bang for your buck. Chips, chocolate and beef jerky are also good. None of these perish, that’s an important consideration.

Get familiar with the C, H and J keys - these bring up your character’s skill, health and journal windows, respectively. I normally leave the skill window open in the bottom left of the screen so I can which skills I can level up and which need work. That’s just a personal preference.

When your character gets the ‘exhausted’ moodle, it doesn’t currently do anything like making you pass out (even though it implies this in the moodle text), so don’t worry too much about it. What you do need to be aware of is that it reduces your arc of vision substantially - zombies can approach you from directions that, if you were not tired, you would see them easily. For this reason it’s necessary to check your six frequently when you are either tired or in a heavily Z-populated area. Just do a 360 degree twirl now and then and you should be good.

Something I noticed you mentioned in your second video: crafting beds. You can’t do that, you need to find a bed or chair already in the game to sleep in, or collect 4 tent pegs, 4 sheets and 2 sturdy sticks (you make these with planks and a saw) and craft a tent kit. Tent kits lets you sleep pretty much anywhere, but they’re no protection against zombies so don’t set them up in an unprotected area.

When you were in the gas station and two zombies attacked you from the toilet, after you killed them you forgot to loot all the containers, shelves, and counters. You complained later on in the video that you had no food on you, but I’m sure those containers would have had chips and/or other foods in them, and a bunch of other stuff too. I make it a habit to loot all the good stuff from every container in any building I enter, and arrive there with the bag space to carry at least most (if not all) of it away.

 

Do you know about the PZ Map Project? Check it out here, it's the best way to learn what is where. You won't end up running off into the wilderness by mistake when you're really looking for the town centre!

 

Th-th-th-that's all, folks... (for now).

Thank you very much for your help, it has been incredibly helpful already. I have just got to grasp of the book/learning situation. I have managed to barricade a few windows of the Cortman medical centre in which I plan to fortify. The house alarm migration is something I will also definitely try. I am reasonably new to PZ and am enjoying every minute. My last character died, so I started a new one, which has already started better as I have more of a grasp on what I'm doing. The one thing that baffles me (in the video below or current character) is that the army have arrived? I think? Thanks again for your help, I greatly appreciate it!

[rorschach]

There is no army in the game, the noises that you heard in the video are meta-events. They are used to make the zombies migrate towards the source of the noise, partly because NPCs are not in the game yet. Zombie migrations are a very cool feature of PZ, especially when you see a whole group of them charging across the map, like you did at 3:43 in your video, and you said, "Fuck! What the fuck was that?!"

 

If you have any more questions, keep 'em coming... ciao!

[ManBearPig87]

There is no army in the game, the noises that you heard in the video are meta-events. They are used to make the zombies migrate towards the source of the noise, partly because NPCs are not in the game yet. Zombie migrations are a very cool feature of PZ, especially when you see a whole group of them charging across the map, like you did at 3:43 in your video, and you said, "Fuck! What the fuck was that?!"

 

If you have any more questions, keep 'em coming... ciao!

Ah okay, I was hesitant to look for the army incase they would mistake for one of the undead haha. So basically I need to fortify my area as sooner or later the zombies will end up have a social event outside my house?

[rorschach]

Ah okay, I was hesitant to look for the army incase they would mistake for one of the undead haha. So basically I need to fortify my area as sooner or later the zombies will end up have a social event outside my house?

 

 

It's a pretty good idea to fortify wherever you end up calling your safehouse, yes.

Especially if you end up staying in Cortman Medical, because that area seems to have a pretty high zombie density.

 

When you feel up to the challenge though I would suggest giving West Point a go, because there are a lot high-value buildings there, with lots of loot. But a lot more zombies as well... I prefer it over Muldraugh.

[ManBearPig87]

 

Ah okay, I was hesitant to look for the army incase they would mistake for one of the undead haha. So basically I need to fortify my area as sooner or later the zombies will end up have a social event outside my house?

 

 

It's a pretty good idea to fortify wherever you end up calling your safehouse, yes.

Especially if you end up staying in Cortman Medical, because that area seems to have a pretty high zombie density.

 

When you feel up to the challenge though I would suggest giving West Point a go, because there are a lot high-value buildings there, with lots of loot. But a lot more zombies as well... I prefer it over Muldraugh.

 

Will probably do that when my character dies. Gonna do some multiplayer too, but all my friends are recording shy haha.

[rorschach]

Yeah, once they combine single and multiplayer into the same build, that's going to be good.

 

You won't have any trouble finding people to play MP with, it's hugely popular already and MP has only been available for less than two weeks. Who knows, we might run into each on the same server..!

[ManBearPig87]

Yeah, once they combine single and multiplayer into the same build, that's going to be good.

 

You won't have any trouble finding people to play MP with, it's hugely popular already and MP has only been available for less than two weeks. Who knows, we might run into each on the same server..!

I'm having trouble finding servers. Any ideas?

[rorschach]

For the latest list of all the (known) servers, this is probably the best place to look, I think.

Seems to be quite a wide selection of different server locations too. The list will only keep growing as PZ moves out of alpha and becomes more popular.

[ManBearPig87]

For the latest list of all the (known) servers, this is probably the best place to look, I think.

Seems to be quite a wide selection of different server locations too. The list will only keep growing as PZ moves out of alpha and becomes more popular.

Thanks again bud.

[ManBearPig87]

Fort is getting there now. Well, its not really a fort, but I've managed to build a fence with gates and planted a farm section.

[speckle77]

Cool videos! I always die before I get a chance to build anything. The best I've done was collect everything besides an axe....still haven't found an axe...

 

Except that one time when I found an axe, and then immediately died. That was fun.

 

I hate this game.

 

I love this game.

[ManBearPig87]

Cool videos! I always die before I get a chance to build anything. The best I've done was collect everything besides an axe....still haven't found an axe...

 

Except that one time when I found an axe, and then immediately died. That was fun.

 

I hate this game.

 

I love this game.

Thanks mate. haha yeah, axes are almost an end game, but they're actually the beginning of the game, if you know what I mean. My new video is below, which is some multiplayer footage.