Project Zomboid

Apocalypsing the zombie again

Day One:

Something has gone terribly wrong.

I woke up this morning and was about to leave to get breakfast, but I hesitated at the door. Things were quiet, so very, very quiet. No cars, no sounds in the distance. Nothing.

How often does that happen? I mean, really. There’s always some kind of sound going on in the background, cars honking, engine’s running, people talking, or the train whistle off in the distance. There’s always something. But the only thing I could hear was the sound of the wind, quiet and restless, blowing against the walls of my house.

I thought about spending another day inside and decided against it. I’ve been holed up for the past week or so, eating canned food and isolating myself from the outside world. I don’t like going outside in the best of times.

Agoraphobia sucks, by the way.

I had to go out today, though. I was running out of food. So despite my misgivings, I grabbed my vest and my keys and I stepped out into the cold, unforgiving world.

Thirty seconds later I was back inside, holding the door shut, my heart pounding in my ears as I fought to control my panic. This alone isn’t all that unusual for me, but what I found waiting in my driveway certainly was.

This can’t be happening.

Even now, as I write these words on the page, I have a hard time comprehending exactly what it is that I saw. What it is that’s out there, waiting for me should I ever step outside again...but how can I not? Is a slow death by starvation preferable to being torn apart by those things out there?

I suppose there’s no way around it. I hesitate to call the blood soaked monstrosity that lurked in my driveway a human, but that is what it must have once resembled. No longer, though. It reached for me with gore streaked fingers, opening its mouth to emit a sound unlike any that I have ever heard before. A sort of groaning, deathless moan that I can hear even now if I close my eyes and listen hard.

You see, I thought it was just the wind, before.

It isn’t.

The door shuddered behind me and I bit back a scream. Once, twice, three times, then nothing. Just as I was convincing myself it had wandered off, it struck again. How much longer could the door withstand this assault? I had to find a weapon, some way of defending myself. I searched frantically through the house, before I remembered the golf club I still had from that time I went to a driving range with my sister, three years ago. It was in the closet, but what to do with the weapon now that I was armed? The thought of opening the door and letting that thing into the house was more than I could bear, so I slipped quietly out the back door and snuck around the side.

It was still there, slamming its head every so often against the door. That then, was the rhythmic pounding noise. I had no real plans other than to drive it off, but I panicked when it turned and began to shamble towards me. I still have no idea how many times I hit it with the golf club, but eventually it stopped moving and I scurried back inside, locking both the doors and drawing the curtains.

Did I kill it? I...must have, though it sickens me to admit it. I have never been a violent person, but you would have done the same if you saw something like that coming towards you. I tried to call the police, the fire department, my family, my friends, anyone and everyone I could think of, but there was no answer. There are no broadcasts on the TV, and there’s only static on the old radio my dad gave me. Of course the internet doesn’t work either.

What that could mean, I shudder to think of.

I have to leave. I have to go out tomorrow to try to get help. Someone else has to still be alive. I need to find them, or at least find more food. Turned off all of the lights in the house now, don’t want to attract any attention to myself. I don’t trust that my front door can take much more abuse without giving way.

I can hear them, outside now. That low moaning sound. Just under the wind.

How many more of them are out there, to make enough noise for me to hear them like this?

How many?

I guess I’ll find out tomorrow....

Day Two:

God help me.

I can’t stop shaking. The answer to the question I ended my journal with yesterday is A LOT. More than I care to attempt to count at the moment, thank you very much.

They’re all around me, in every direction I tried to go. I’ve never been more thankful for the fence than I am right now...or more angry about the large hole in it where the driveway is.

I...killed more of them. Five? Six? It’s a horrible blur, trying to remember. I broke into one of my neighbor’s houses and there were more of them, inside. They almost got me, but I found a baseball bat and used that to fight my way out.

I also found a duffel bag and used that to raid their refrigerator and cupboards. Got more food and supplies, but it won’t be enough. Tomorrow I’m going to go to another one and get more. Too shook up right now for another attempt.

I still can’t get through to anyone on the phone, or raise any stations on the TV or radio. Just how widespread is this thing? I have no idea, but I have to find some way out of here or at the very least find some way to make myself safer.

More later.

Day Six:

I’ve cleaned out most of my neighbors’ houses. It’s almost like that old game, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, I think it was? Never played it, but no more undead abominations knocking on my door asking for a cup of sugar, no sir.

The fridge is starting to get full and I found a handgun. Never shot one before in my life and I’m afraid of what might get drawn by the noise, but I’m still grateful to have it. Never been much of a fan of the second amendment before now, but now I’m beginning to see the sense in it.

Hopefully I won’t have to use it.

I’ve stopped trying to use the phone and I’ve started filling containers with fresh water from the sink. Who knows how long the water will remain on for? I mean, I haven’t even paid the bill this month....

Ha ha.

Day Seven:

A burglar alarm went off as I was breaking into the last house on the street.

This is bad.

Very bad.

I was right about the noise. The blaring alarm drew them down on the house like a swarm of angry hornets. I lit out of there as fast as I could and hid in the house across the street, watching from an upstairs window. The crowd of zombies surged around the walls, smashing through the windows and breaking down the doors. I shudder to think of what would have happened if I had still been inside.

Eventually the alarm died, but those things are all still over there as far as I know.

I made a makeshift rope out of the bed sheets and climbed down out of the window without any of them noticing me.

I hope.

Day Eight:

It’s raining and I’m staying inside for a while. I have enough food and water to last me for a good bit. I think I’ll read up on some long term solutions for some very pressing problems. Found some books on carpentry and gardening and I’ve boarded up all the windows. I have some good ideas about collecting rainwater. I don’t think it needs to be purified if I do that, but I’m not really sure. I need to find out more.

Thankfully, none of those things show any real interest in coming over here and as long as I’m quiet they won’t even know I’m inside.

For the first time in a week, I’m finally starting to feel safe.

Day Sixteen:

I extended the fence. Pretty sure it’s too tall for them to climb over, so I should be safer now. Found a barbeque and a propane tank in one of the neighbor’s backyard, hauled them both over here. Started cutting down trees for firewood, so even if the electricity goes, I’ll still have some way of cooking things.

By the way, I’m really starting to hate canned food.

Day Twenty:

Investigated the nearby pharmacy and a food warehouse. It was full of fruit, most of which has gone quite bad by now. The smell was tremendous. The pharmacy was much more lucrative. I found vitamins and some other useful things there. Managed to construct some rain barrels and storage crates. Now I have somewhere to put all my stockpiled bottles of water.

I’m much better at sneaking around those things out there. Most of the time they never even notice me. Of course, the makeshift spiked bat I made is quite useful if any of them do notice me.

I wonder if anyone else is holed up at the nearby motel or supermarket? Maybe I’ll go check tomorrow.

Day Twenty-One:

Heard a helicopter today on my way to the supermarket.

So did EVERYONE ELSE.

As an aside, a handgun makes for really poor crowd control and tends to bring all sorts of unwanted attention on oneself. I’m also a really lousy shot with it. I really think I need a shotgun. Stupid liberal elitist neighborhood. Where are all the gun toting rednecks when you really need them? Holed up in their basements with a thousand rounds of ammunition and more food than I’ve managed to scrounge for the last three weeks, probably.

I managed to lose them in the trees. Took me a while to make it back.

Man, I’m tired.

Day Twenty-Eight:

Right, so.

The motel was a bust.

The other tenants were awful and they made a lot of noise while I was trying to sleep. I also have a bone to pick with the maid service. The bed linens were none too clean, the towels were scratchy, and you should have seen the mess that was in my bathroom! Never going back again and the manager’s attitude certainly didn’t help any when I went to his office to complain.

One out of five stars. If I could rate it lower I would. Will avoid in the future.

In all seriousness, I did get stuck there overnight. Luckily I had earplugs and I managed to get a little sleep after barricading the door. Barely anything worth scavenging, unless you count the bath towels. I’ve picked up quite a bit of first aid the last few weeks and I can make a mean makeshift bandage if I need to. Haven’t needed one yet and I hope to never have to put the skill to the test, but at least I have a pretty good idea of what to do, just in case.

The supermarket now...that was a really terrible idea.

There must have been over three hundred of those things between me and the front doors. I considered sneaking around the back but the front glass was already broken in several places. If there’s anyone alive inside, I can’t get to them and they can’t get out.

There were just too many of them.

I got out of there as quietly as I could. No reason to go back into that wretched motel either.

On the plus side, I’m getting better at killing them and I’ve started searching the bodies for supplies. Most of it is pretty useless though. What do I need wallets and keys and non-working cell phones for? All these credit cards and cash.

Pointless.

Hell, maybe it always was. Maybe we just never noticed. Too caught up in our own private little concerns to pay attention to what was happening to us.

Survival now, that’s the important thing. And I’m getting better at it all the time.

It still frightens me to go outside, but I do it anyway. It’s them or me and I’m still alive.

I plan to keep it that way.

Day Thirty-Two:

It’s dark.

So very, very dark. Dark in here, dark out there. You get so used to the lights being on all the time. I was just getting used to the quiet, no noise, no machines...and now this. I’m writing by the fading light of the sun from the window. I have to fight the urge to hide inside till my supplies run out again. I have to go back out, but only during the day. It’s too dangerous at night, especially now.

I’ll just have to collect flashlights and batteries and candles. It’ll be kind of romantic, right?

Right.

Day Thirty-Eight:

This is it.

It’s finally over.

The power’s out. The water’s no longer running. I’ve collected all I can from the pipes and set up rain barrels outside to collect water.

I’ve made some makeshift lamps for myself.

I can’t do this much longer. I have to get out of here. If I stay here I’m going to run out of supplies and die. There’s just no way to get renewable food or water here. I need a stream or a well or something. Someplace where I can try to grow all these seed packets I’ve found, but not here. Not in the middle of zombie central, surrounded on all sides by the hordes of undead, hemming me in.

How long until they find me?

I have to get away.

I’ve decided. There’s a small farm I know about a couple miles outside of town. I’ve been by the place often enough before, without really looking at it. I’m sure they have a well and I know how to get there. I’ll be able to grow my own food and live off the land away from all of these horrible monsters surrounding me. I’m packing all the necessary supplies in two duffle bags and I’m leaving first thing tomorrow morning.

The only question is, can I make it?

Got to keep quiet and I’ve got to keep moving.

This is my last chance.

I’m getting out of this nightmare, one way or another.

Spoiler alert: Things...didn’t go well.

And thus ended my first run in Project Zomboid, one of the most authentic zombie apocalypse survival simulators I’ve ever played.

If you’re still curious as to exactly how my first character met her gruesome end, let’s just say that if you are too loaded down with crap you get encumbered and that makes it harder for you to run away from, say, the large crowd of two hundred plus zombies I stumbled into when I tried to make my way out of the city. The tiny shed in the backyard I holed up in was not enough to prevent the ravenous hordes from dragging my poor, bedraggled character down to an early grave.

Alas poor Yorrick, and all that.

Project Zomboid is isometric, top down, and third person, with pixel art type graphics that look like something spawned out of the early nineties. It’s also an Early Access game, which if you’re familiar at all with Steam’s Early Access program this will immediately start setting off alarm bells in your head. That’s alright though. From what I’ve seen, this is Early Access as it’s supposed to work. The developers release a build of the game, the players play it and give them feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Then the developers change it and release a new build, constantly improving on the experience.

Which is kind of a weird thing if you pay full price for an incomplete game, but it does allow you to be a part of the development process and to see real changes based on your feedback. It also turns everyone who buys the game during these stages into beta testers who pay the developer for the privilege of doing so in the hopes that we all won’t get ripped off. This hasn’t happened with Project Zomboid, so far. The devs keep releasing new builds and the game changes each time.

It’s a very organic process. Feels strange to be a part of it, but it’s pretty cool. When will they be done? Who the hell knows? The game’s been in Early Access for over a year now and I stopped playing a while back. I think they got multiplayer working a while ago, which just sounds like a terrible, terrible idea. If it’s one thing I’ve learned playing survival simulators, unless you can have a private server with only close, trusted friends playing with you, the operative word is, don’t.

Only the most malignant, monstrous entities roam the horrid pathways of your average MMO survival sim, and no I’m not talking about anything controlled by the AI. Other players are pure evil and will hunt you relentlessly for whatever meager supplies you’ve managed to scrounge together. You’ll be summarily executed in a dog-eat-dog bid for survival before you can blink...and the longer you play, the more you’ll start to act the same way.

I don’t see the appeal.

Knowing that my actions directly cost another player items, experience, game time, and custom built characters just leaves the worst taste in my mouth. It’s one thing if you’re playing pvp in a game and there are no real consequences to losing a match, like in most competitive FPS games and third person action titles, but this?

No thank you.

I’ll see a game on Steam and go, ooh, this looks cool. Big, open ended world, loads of exploration and collecting supplies and—MMO survival sim? Nope. Removed from my queue. In those games, people are scum. Avoid them if at all possible.

Thankfully, Project Zomboid has a robust, single player experience.

This game has almost everything people have been wishing for in a zombie apocalypse game since they started making video games and Romero fans looked at that and said, “You know what? We should make this stuff into a game. It would be so cool.”

First things first, what mode should you play?

Well, there’s basic Survival mode. This was the hardest difficulty at the time I was playing it and from what I’ve read, it’s only gotten harder. This was also the first difficulty I tried and you already know how that ended up.

Since there’s no real story and there were no NPC’s of any sort during the time I played, (apparently there were, but they were buggy so they removed them and they may have since put them back in) Project Zomboid is a pure Last Man on Earth scenario. There were two towns you could choose to spawn in when I first started playing, Muldrough and West Point, but the interesting thing is, both places exist in the same game world, which is legitimately HUGE. In fact, this game may have the largest game world I’ve ever seen that isn’t infinitely generated...and that’s really saying something.

Go on Google maps and change it to satellite view, and then zoom in on your location as far as you can go. Now zoom out till you can see your entire city/town. Now zoom out a bit more till you can see a neighboring one that’s at least a couple miles away, but you can’t really make out any individual characteristics like houses. Okay, now you’ve got a pretty good idea how large the game world of Project Zomboid is. What’s that you say? It doesn’t seem that large to you? Okay, now imagine traveling everywhere on foot.

Ah, but we’re not quite done yet. Imagine the Black Friday shopping rush after Thanksgiving. The press of the crowds, the mad dash for the best deal, the fanatical consumerism fueled by corporate greed. Now, imagine that you, yes you, have the very last Flat Screen TV at Wal-Mart. A hundred heads turn towards you as you attempt to navigate your way to the register with your bulky prize.

The air churns with barely repressed violence and seething envy. Madness ensues.

The chase is on.

Project Zomboid is a little like that. Getting through all the zombies in one piece is quite difficult and it can sometimes take herculean efforts just to get out of the neighborhood you start in.

Muldrough is a relatively small town and West Point has a larger urban center. The number of zombies in West Point is pretty much insane, so I usually don’t spawn there. Most of the game world is covered in trees with roads leading between the two towns and paths that lead off into the wilderness. You could strike out into the wilds if you want to, but there’s not really anything you can eat or drink out there and you’ll likely die in short order. Pretty sure there aren’t many zombies out in the dense woods, but it would take a long bloody time to trek out there and find out, so I never have.

Unfortunately, there is no in-game map. If you want to figure out where the heck you are, you need to go into a browser and load up the player made one and zoom in till you find what looks like a match for where you are. The Steam overlay is quite helpful for this purpose.

Let’s see, I believe they’ve reinstated the infamous tutorial level, which I’ve only heard about, since I stopped playing, so I can’t really comment on that, but it might be available now.

The other game mode and my personal favorite, is the Sandbox mode.

In the Sandbox, you can customize just about anything you want to. As there’s no story mode and no real win condition to the game, I cannot recommend Sandbox mode enough. Survival mode is for masochists.

The first and most important thing you’ll immediately want to decide upon is the time ratio setting. Basically, this adjusts how much real time it takes for game time to pass by. It can get pretty darn boring to run the game in real time, I’ll tell you that much now, but if you want the easiest experience, setting the game so that twenty four hours actually takes twenty four hours to pass is the way to go.

This is rather cool and I’ve never seen another survival simulator that let me do this. Most of them have severe time dilation. Day might last ten minutes like in Don’t Starve, giving you an itty bitty amount of time to run around like a maniac collecting resources before night comes. In Survival mode, at the time I played it, the day lasted about an hour, so I had to run around, fight and collect food, eat, drink, and heal myself if necessary, all before night came and I needed to sleep.

I will say that setting Project Zomboid to real time can make for some rather amusing in-game survival lengths. Yeah, I only lasted a day and a half. No no, you don’t understand. I was playing for thirty six hours. During that time though, I killed more zombies than in my first playthrough where my character lived for over a month. Funny, eh?

In effect, the more severe the time dilation, the harder the game is. You’re pretty much moving in extreme slow motion, but your body will require all the food and water and sleep it would normally need, so you have much less time to do everything, while your stats are constantly draining at hyper speed. By contrast, setting the game to real time means you only need to eat like, twice a day and you have loads of time to go out and get more supplies. You’ll pretty much never starve, doing this.

The second thing you’ll decide upon for Sandbox mode is what type of zombies you want to appear in your game. You can have slow, shambling types ala ‘classic’ zombies, or you can have running ones. But that’s not all! You can also decide if your zombies are smart or stupid, if they can remember where you went when you hide from them, whether they can smell you or not, how good their hearing is, if they can open doors, how strong and hard hitting they are, and whether or not you want them to be super tough or extremely fragile. Lastly, you can decide how many of them there are. You can even opt for a zombie free world if you want all the fun of the survival simulator elements and none of the ‘zombie apocalypse’ ones.

So, if you wanted to, you could set the number of zombies to ‘insane,’ make them all super smart, super strong, super tough, door opening, sprinting, bloodhound zombies who can hear a pin drop ten yards away through the walls.

I...don’t recommend this. I don’t care how good you are at killing zombies. You’ve just made the game impossible for yourself.

Usually I play with massive hordes of slow, shambling, stupid zombies who are relatively easy to kill, but super strong. Since there are so many of them, I set their senses to be as dull as possible and do a lot of sneaking around and hiding in houses while the horde slowly surrounds me, moaning outside the walls, giving me that truly classic ‘zombie apocalypse’ experience.

It’s fun!

You can basically customize the zombies to be whatever you want them to be.

The other major thing to look at here is transmission vector. Basically, do you want to be able to get infected and die from a single bite or scratch, just like they do in the movies and our favorite TV series?

Answer?

HELL NO.

There’s a reason why most zombie games don’t have this mechanic, no matter how many people get infected and zombified in the cutscenes and movie sequences.

That reason?

It’s incredibly unfun.

The second character I made spawned in West Point and I had a rousing good game of ‘run like hell’ in the beginning when the house I was in got broken into and the burglar alarm went off. Needless to say, I eventually settled somewhere else, far from that place and I set about zombie killing and supply collecting. I survived for weeks, until I got jumped by two zombies waiting on either side of a doorway. I beat them to death with my baseball bat, but my character had gotten scratched by one of them. I bandaged myself and retreated to my base.

Over the course of the next day or so, my character got sicker and sicker, panicked and worried and terrified over what was happening, but there was nothing I could do. There is no cure, either. You get bit and you slowly die, before coming back as one of the living dead.

I found this incredibly disheartening. It’s one thing if I’m stupid and run into a crowd of zombies or get killed fighting the horde in epic combat, but a single scratch? Authentic, but not what I consider a good time, so I disabled it completely thereafter.

Now, I should mention that you can respawn in a world after you die as another survivor, but you’ll have no supplies and most of the food in the world will likely have gone bad if you’ve been playing for a while by that point. You’ll also have to find your first base, which may be nowhere near you. Oh and the power and water may be out too.

I usually just start an entirely new game world after my character dies.

There’s a bunch of other stuff to tweak too, but it’s not nearly as important as the stuff I just mentioned, so you can do what you want with it.

Now, onto the custom character creator.

Since the graphics are pretty pixely, choosing your character’s appearance is pretty meh. There are a few different options, but it’s not going to be like an Elder Scrolls game or anything like that. Of far more interest is the trait system. You basically start with a score of zero. Positive character traits give you bonuses to survival and combat, while negative character traits are handicaps. Each one is worth a certain amount of points. The negative traits are worth negative points and the positive ones are positive. The trick is to get yourself back to zero after you’ve picked everything. Choose wisely, as some of the negative traits are pretty debilitating, while the best combinations of positive ones are super expensive. There’s also a job system, where you can pick what sort of occupation your character had before the apocalypse. Some jobs come with certain stat bonuses and positive character traits.

It’s pretty involved and I had a lot of fun picking the negative character traits to I could purchase positive ones. For instance, my first character was agoraphobic. She became panicked whenever I went outside. The interesting thing is that panic immediately banishes boredom, but it reduces your accuracy with firearms and makes you hit harder with melee weapons.

You could pick nearsightedness, but that reduces your field of vision, so there might be a LOT more zombies on screen than you think there are.

On the flipside of things, you can purchase traits that make your character tougher, stronger, run farther, and eat less, among others.

The game keeps track of your character’s status with little emoji type things called moodles. They’re basically little unhappy faces, since most of the moodles are bad ones, though there are some specific ones which show when you’re injured or wet or have a cold or something.

Whenever you do anything in the game that has to do with a specific skill, you’ll gain experience. You don’t actually level up in this sense, but you do gain skill points you can apply to get better at doing stuff. The only way to get better at some stuff is by doing it, like melee combat or sneaking around, or shooting things, but you can rapidly increase the rate you gain skill points in other ways. Mostly this means holing up somewhere and reading skill books. They take a while to get through and you’ll need to stop frequently, because the game thinks people have the attention span of goldfish and get bored after ten minutes of being inside with nothing trying to kill them. If you’re bored for too long, you get severely bored, and then you’ll get depressed and ravaged by sadness. I don’t think this actually caused any sort of negative effect, but it annoyed me. If I want to hide inside my base, cataloguing how many spoons I’ve collected, the game shouldn’t attempt to arbitrarily punish me for it. “You’re being boring.” says the game. “Stop it!”

Screw you, Project Zomboid. Some of us like reading.

You can increase your mood by eating things like ice cream or ironically enough, reading anything other than the skill books. So it’s a micromanaging chore to get through the darn things, but the reward is pretty good. A completely read skill book grants you a triple experience bonus to that particular skill at that level. Finding them is somewhat haphazard though, and you might actually level yourself out of the lower level skill books.

So how does the combat function? Well, you see zombie, hit zombie with whatever happens to be at hand that you can wield. Bats, golf clubs, spoon or fork...whatever man. If you can wield it, you can kill zombies with it. It’s easier to kill zombies if you sneak up on them from behind, too, so remember that if you’re walking, you’re sneaking, and the more you do that the better you are at it. It’s an essential skill for survival.

You do have to ready your weapon by holding down the right mouse button. The more time you do that the harder you hit things, so if you’re frantically hitting something over and over, the less damage you’ll do. In practice, this amounts to a lot of walking backwards and whacking zombies in the face, but be warned, the area you aren’t looking in will be grayed out, so spin around a lot to make sure you aren’t backing straight into a horde of ravenous undead or cornering yourself.

When zombies grab at you, they slow you down. You can push them off with the spacebar and knock them back a little in an emergency, but the longer you fight, the more tired your character gets and you do not want to attempt to fight zombies when you’re fatigued. It’s entirely too easy to exhaust yourself in a prolonged battle and find out the hard way that not only are you too tired to run, you can’t even push them off of you effectively anymore.

Like I said, authentic.

Firearms are a bit easier to use, but you won’t be able to hit things very well without the firearm training trait. They’re really freaking loud though, so use with caution. Opening fire on one zombie can trigger every single zombie in the area to come down on top of you and realizing you’re suddenly surrounded by the horde closing in on your position is pretty intense. You’ll have a better chance of hitting what you’re aiming at, the closer they get to you and of course the shotgun does a ton of damage to the crowds of undead. Finding guns and ammunition in the first place is fairly rare, so use wisely.

Other than combat, the game has pretty standard survival simulator gameplay. Collect food, water, and everything and anything that isn’t nailed down. There are some pretty useless items like wallets and combs and the like and some stuff will kill you if you use it.

Like bleach.

Don’t drink bleach. It won’t help.

There’s also a crafting system, where you can build all sorts of things if you have a high enough skill level and enough wood and nails and a hammer. You can also board up windows and doors, which is pretty neat. Zombies can break through anything you craft, but they’ll mostly leave static barriers that already exist in the world alone. Any fence you make they can break through, but any fence that was there before you were they can’t. They can climb over the smaller ones though.

Giant hordes of zombies will sometimes migrate from one part of the map to another. Yeah, pretty much exactly like a ‘herd’ from The Walking Dead. Nice touch, that. So your defenses might get overwhelmed no matter what you do, but there are several ways to be careful.

First and foremost, find a two story house somewhere with a big yard. Board up the level one doors and windows and use a sheet rope to climb in and out of the house. This is pretty much the safest you can be in the early game. When you can build fences, fence off the areas right in front of the windows and doors, so if something does attempt to get at you, they need to go through the fence and then through the door, which should give you enough time to stop them or draw them off, but mostly, it probably won’t be necessary.

If you’re really quiet, why would they even try to get inside?

After that it’s a matter of securing renewable food by farming, renewable water sources after the water stops working, and single handedly decimating the zombie menace any way you can. If none of the buggers are left alive within a mile of your base, the odds of you getting overrun by a random horde are pretty much nill.

Just don’t go to the mall. It’s a really, really bad idea.

I never did quite manage to get a lock on things, but I’ve survived for quite a while. Long enough to start listening to podcasts while I play, which is a sure sign that I might want to play something else that’s a bit more engaging.

So I stopped.

There’s also apparently a challenge mode of some kind where you spawn in a house and try to hold out against loads of zombies coming at you. Never tried it as it’s not really my thing.

I’m sure the game’s had loads of new content since I stopped playing and I’m sure there are all kinds of new things to do and new places to explore. There are player made maps and a few mods that look intriguing, but I don’t know if I’ll go back to it anytime soon.

I guess I definitely got my money’s worth though, so I’ll recommend it for fans of survival sims or zombie apocalypse scenarios.

But seriously now, don’t go to the mall.

That place is a deathtrap.