Beyond the first day

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We all know how to beat down a zombie and maybe do a few crafts or two, but most characters don't survive for longer than a day. However, if your character does survive longer than that, and you have no clue, this guide is for you!

Planning

Plan! PLAN! PLAN!!! You are going to think about everything! Plan your scavenging, plan how to handle dangerous situations and emergencies, plan everything! If you charge into everything without an idea of what you're doing, expect lots of pain. Obviously you don't need to call a meeting of the greatest minds of the generation to raid a house, but you should know what to do when something unexpected inevitably shows up. As you raid, make note of escape routes from structures as you go. Running may not be honorable, but when a giant hulking mass of muscle is trying to rip you in half, it's good to know where to run out. For larger expeditions, plot out the path you will take, and what you plan to do, what buildings you'll raid, etc. Bring food and water for longer trips, and manage inventory space. Planning can also help you find something to do in the end of days. Set yourself a goal for your character or your base, and start thinking about how you're going to accomplish it.

Bases and you

Unless you choose some sort of nomadic lifestyle you will need to set up a base somewhere.

In general, you should consider looking for another location if your current base is less than 6-10 map tiles away from the nearest town, or close (20 map tiles, minimum safe distance) to swamps, fungal spires or triffid groves. Those areas spawn dangerous critters, which will eventually grind down your defenses and kill you. If that isn't enough reason to relocate, they'll surely hinder your ability to scavenge the nearby area too. Nearby slime pits will spawn the relatively harmless blob monster, which will crowd out other spawn types - this can be a good thing for easy training and preventing Zombear ambushes, but it will also reduce the number of handy Deer spawns you'll want for your cooked meat supplies.

With the proper gear, though, you can shut down the Spires and the Groves. Swamps are inactive in Winter^{Verify (Doublecheck - Venera3's PRs)}, so if you need to make a temporary winter camp to warm up *now* it's OK to pitch your tent near the swamp.

Food and water sources

A water source can either be a river, lakes (River tiles without an actual River), the swimming pools of a nearby mansion or funnels. Some kinds of houses and LMOE shelters also have streams of infinite (unclean) water. Funnels collect infinite water from the rain, but make you dependent on the weather to survive.

Food is easy to acquire but is not as easy as you might think. Foraging provides some food early on, but random veggies and wild herbs can only last you so long. Find and hold onto non-perishables for rainy days or winter. Foraging or finding a book on cooking can give you the skills and material to craft delicious, more nutritious stuff. Also, keep in mind spoilage. Until you get the infrastructure for large scale food preservation, monitor how your food is spoiling. You might be able to kill a Deer and cut it up, but what good is all that meat if it spoils in a couple days?

If you're hunting and without a ranged weapon (like a bow), then you should know that most of the wildlife critters are faster than you and you'll never be able to catch up. The solution to this is to hunt for (weak) hostile animals who won't run away from you like giant spiders and flies; just be careful not to get bitten! Some can be venomous and dangerous if you let them rip you apart.

General base needs

In order to set up any base you will want, unless stated otherwise:

• A fireplace or wood stove for cooking food and heating indoors without burning the building to ashes. Cooking inside a town or forest is dangerous, so if you don't have one of these try to cook only in the middle of open fields. A deployed brazier will contain the fire but not the smoke, so if you have a gas mask and don't mind wearing it indoors for the foreseeable future, it can suffice.
• For cooking outside, a (deep) pit will keep fire from spreading, so a shovel or entrenching tool is advisable. Deep pits are also incredibly useful for defense and trapping purposes. You can craft a stone shovel with survival level 2 and construction level 1 - if you don't find any early on, these are good priorities for early game skills.
• A chainsaw or wood axe (or a stone axe if you haven't found any) and a nearby forest to supply you with enough wood to feed your cooking/heating device. If you are near a town, smashing or deconstructing doors, furniture, and fences can get enough wood for quite a while, and also provide nails.
• A nearby water source and a nearby food source. If these are not available, try to keep at least 10 portions of food and 10 portions of water stored so that you have enough to go get more without going hungry.
• A comfortable place to sleep on. Couches and car-seats also count as they're equivalent to a bed. If you don't have one of these then you should try crafting a makeshift-bed (requires 2 Construction) as soon as possible since it's really hard to sleep at night on the rock floor of your basement. Though for the first night you can probably manage without a bed by sleeping on a pile of clothes (blankets, etc.).
• A light source. Your fire can provide this, but if you don't want to waste wood or need light elsewhere a gas or electric lantern can be useful. If you can find or craft one, an Atomic lamp provides infinite light anywhere you want.

Emergency Shelter

Emergency shelters (like the one you spawn in) can be a good candidate for your base.

They have a basement for expanded storage, which you can expand by digging with a jackhammer. They have exits on each side, offering you many escape routes in case of fire or a critter attack. The computer console located in the upper right corner also acts as a permanent light source: by standing next to it, you can read and sew in low light level conditions (such as nighttime, rainstorms, etc).

Keep in mind that the shelter, being built of wood, is extremely susceptible to fires. So be very careful when starting one inside or near it.

Town buildings

[including suburban houses, stores, etc] A house with a basement can make an excellent base, as long as you have access to water. Wrecked RVs are a good source of water, and electricity for cooking.

Churches

Churches of the smaller variety make decent bases. Benefits:

• They have a console, similar to the Emergency Shelter, which provide a good source of light.
• They are made of stone and come with two Braziers, which allow for immediate indoor cooking.
• The large number of pews are an excellent source of wood and nails.
• They have three doors, each facing a different direction.

Drawbacks:

• Though there is more than one toilet, churches don't provide an inexhaustible source of water.
• They are often dangerously deep in a town.

Mansion

These large structures have more room than is absolutely necessary; in fact, most players end up sealing off areas they don't use, lest critters get in. You can also find comfy furniture (couches, king-size beds, etc) here if you've gotten tired of your rollmat.

Mansions can also have swimming pools, which are a practically-inexhaustible source of water, and courtyards, which may give you a place to try farming with less worries about critter attacks.

Unfortunately, Mansions also have plenty of zeds around, so you'll have to clean house before setting up. Further, they're wooden, so don't play with matches.

Apart from the general needs for any base, you should take this in consideration for this particular one:

• The pool can be boiled, but farming will take a while to show results. Fortunately Mansions can occur in the middle of the woods, so you can find plenty of food that way, and the kitchens ought to have some non-perishable goods left.
• Sleeping in a Mansion is rather unadvised unless you barricade unused rooms and either board or tape up windows as wildlife can and will spawn inside.

LMOE Shelter

LMOE Shelters have one small stone room on the surface, with steel door as the entrance. The main area is the basement, which has a bed, a wood stove for fires, various other furniture, and some random items already stored (guns, medicine, books, food, clothing, etc.) An underground stream runs through the basement near the wood stove, providing an infinite water supply. There is more than enough space to store lots of items, 2-3x the area of an evacuation shelter's basement, and the furniture can be disassembled for firewood and nails. With the addition of fishing to the game, the LMOE can provide infinite food and water in complete safety, giving you plenty of time to build a generator and work on your skills. The main drawback is getting to and from the shelter; they generally are far from towns, so you might want a secondary base somewhere closer to the town you are raiding, or a vehicle.

Cabin

Isolated and mostly self sufficient, this is the perfect choice for an innawoods character. Find a reliable water source nearby and hunt game for meat stores. Expect few zombies, but the wildlife has not been unaffected by the cataclysm. You may supplement your diet of meat with abundant forage, but you may want to find multivitamins to supplement your nutrient poor diet if foraging doesn't cut it. Some notable downsides are also the benefits of using a cabin. The isolation means it's gonna be a trip to scavenge actual towns, and vehicles are probably out of the question. Also, modern crafting materials will be hard to come by, and annoying to haul into your cabin. If a quiet woodland life is your dream, this is the base for you.

Farm

Farms provide one of the best ways to sustain yourself, provided you have access to water and a few essentials to build: there is a huge field protected by barbed wire and a rather small and easy to defend house with a few amenities. Some farms have a built-in water well, providing an inexhaustible source of (non-clean) water. If you can fetch the materials, building a water container and a solar-powered fridge will let you keep the produce you find fresh for a long time, and there is plenty of space to set up defenses such as pits and turrets. Also, the field is often visited by small animals you can kill for food. The main drawback is the lack of useful materials you will find, and the field's sheer size which makes it difficult to defend efficiently; you might want to fence in the section you actually need and use the rest of the field to lay traps.

Lab

The top (surface) level of a Lab can make an ideal living space, if you get a bunkroom and chemical-workroom. Dissection facilities are less-optimal (though in an emergency, you could try luring intruders through the dissector) and Blob rooms are right out.

The concrete structure is somewhat more fire-resistant than your average building, and the metal doors will hold up to typical critters. Dig two pits to replace the front door (leave a two by four to bridge as needed) and if you're concerned about pursuers from below, set up your favorite traps in the hallway. At this point, you're pretty well set for security, and can plumb the depths as desired.

Apart from the general needs for any base, you should take this in consideration for this particular one:

• Labs typically contain hotplates and other battery-equipped devices, so you may be able to use one of those too. You could get lucky and find bionics to handle the job, too...
• You may be able to rustle up bottled water from downstairs, but in general Labs aren't good places to find food.

Military bunker

If you can acquire a military id, these can be secure, and aren't susceptible to fires. But to fully access them, you need 7 military IDs or an electrohack and sufficient skills, or some high-powered explosives. Many bunkers will have stashes of C4, so it might just take two ID cards to raid them completely.

The Base life

Once you got a base, you will have many things to do. You need to maintain your stock of items, and that means ammunition for whatever guns you keep, non-perishing food, water, etc. For that, you need to do expeditions in nearby towns. Towns are full of supplies, but also zombies, and zombies are dangerous - they can quickly surround you, they hunt in packs and one zombie rarely comes alone.

Planning your expedition

Before you even think of going out, you should take a moment and think. Where am I going? For what purpose? What will I need to fulfill the purpose of this expedition? What are potential threats? What will I do to handle those potential threats? Regardless of what you are going to do, you will need some basic supplies with you.

• Healing items: Bring bandages or rags with you to stop any bleeding (rags will also be needed to repair your clothes). Aspirin, Oxycodone, and, really, any painkiller can be life-saving as pain can be quite crippling. They are your main life savers after a tough fights, fighting smokers without a filter mask, or casually strolling over land mine fields or other traps. Also bring at least one bottle of disinfectant and some antibiotics. The former so you don't have to cauterize yourself constantly (which is extremely painful), and the latter if you ever get stuck and didn't manage to clean or didn't notice your bite wound.
• Smoke protection: Always wear a filter mask to avoid any possible smoke inhalation (which can kill you). They are also quite easy to craft. Beware mouth encumbrance. The higher it is, the slower you replenish stamina. You may choose to hold onto the mask instead of wearing it, but beware you may not always have time to put it on when you need it, and it will take up valuable storage space. Gas masks are better, but they encumber you too much. You can bring one with you instead of a filter mask, and only wear it when needed, though. Dust masks and bandanas are useless. Only wear those to increase your mouth's warmth.
• Free storage space: Unless this is your first time outside and you are going specifically after backpacks, make sure you have enough inventory space for whatever you are looking for. A vehicle can greatly assist in this, any kind, really. One of your earliest raiding priorities should be a grocery store; not only for enough food that you can prioritize other needs, but a shopping trolley or wheelbarrow will exponentially increase your storage without sacrificing your speed, maneuverability and stealth.
• A ranged weapon and ammo: Unless you think you will be faster than everything out there, do keep a ranged weapon on you. Rifles are pretty good for self defense, even against NPC survivors. Bows, while not as powerful at low skill levels, are a good, silent alternative. Besides your main weapon, always keep a handgun on you in case you forget to bring your weapon or run out of ammunition. A revolver (such as S&W 619) is even better as it has the advantage of not having to manage magazines. Don't forget ammunition for said weapon!
• Illumination device: Always bring a flashlight with you, as you don't know if that particular house has a basement with interesting goodies in it, or if you might stumble upon a lab you might want to explore. Or simply if your scavenging takes longer than planned and you're forced to go back to base at night. You may also want to bring also an extra stack of batteries (100 units), so you don't run out of them in the worst moment possible or if you use the flashlight often. Electronics stores also sometimes contain wearable flashlights, or you can craft them yourself.
• Means to repair your clothing and gear: Bring a sewing kit or bone needle (fully loaded) and some rags or leather patches to repair your clothing and gear when damaged. You can skip the two latter if you're sure you'll find some clothing in your scavenging that you'll be able to cut. You might also want to bring some kevlar plates or plastic chunks and some soldering iron to repair gear made of those materials. Always repair your clothing and gear back to reinforced before starting, regardless. The higher the repair level of equipment the better protection it provides. Note that this is probably the least necessary item on this list. You may choose to leave this behind for space, but you should be cautious you don't get your wardrobe torn off of you while you're scavenging.
• Food and water for the day: Usually two or three pieces of cooked meat should be enough. Two bottles of clean water, or a filled waterskin or plastic canteen, will also last for a whole day. If possible, bring some extra supplies in case you get stuck. Always eat and drink to Full before starting, regardless. If you're going out specifically to find food, you probably don't need rations for your trip. Houses also often have some basic food, so if you aren't going far you don't need to waste space with food.
• Mechanics tools and fuel: If using a vehicle, always keep a basic toolkit on it (in a seat, trunk or box), as it sucks to have your truck break down in the middle of a zombie-flooded city. The kit would consist of a jack, a wrench, a hacksaw and a welder (plus enough batteries to keep it powered) and welding goggles, or lots of Duct tape. You might also want to pack one or two extra wheels and make sure the gas tanks are full before moving on. Consider bringing extra gasoline, stored in some kind of water tight container (the bigger the better), if only so you can refill it at a gas station, or extra batteries if the vehicle uses an electric motor.

When you have returned

So you finally returned with everything you needed, yes? Fine! Okay now you need to sort it. It is a good idea to sort perishable and non-perishable food in two stacks. This way you will have an easier time eating food before it rots, keep non perishing foods (canned, salted, etc.) for food emergencies. Do also drink other beverages before clean water. Orange juice is tasty and rots, water cannot. You will need those morale boosts.

Sort crafting materials in one stack, food in another, books in another, eg. If you really care much, you can sort crafting materials in different stashes for different disciplines of crafting, such as a chemistry lab, a kitchen, a wood workshop, a metal workshop and an electronics crafting bench. Whether you keep everything in a pile or sort it, keep it close to your light source for crafting.

Long term survival

Cataclysm: The DDA world is big, very very big. The map itself expands infinitely as you travel. This offers you endless sources of scavenging. Once you deplete the resources in one place, just move to another, though doing so repeatedly can eventually make save files load very slowly. Once you have setup a base and have a few skills, you can safely survive on a water source and wild animals for food while staying in the same place. So, yes, you can survive indefinitely in this game. Provided that your own stupidity or simple bad luck doesn't kill you first. To avoid the former there's a few tips below that cover some essential points. You will still die, but you'll do so a bit later than before.

• Essential skills: Survival and tailoring skills are mandatory. Practice them early and practice them often. Cooking can be neglected in the early game, as you'll inevitably increase it simply by cooking raw meat or boiling water. But later it can be particularly useful, allowing you to create more elaborate meals (which can give you higher morale boosts and more nutrition), chems (painkillers like aspirin and poppy painkiller) and other more exotic stuff (mutagen?).
  • Tailoring: Always repair your clothing and gear back to reinforced after a fight (always reinforce them, regardless). If you want to be extra cautious, create or gather duplicates of your most valuable clothing and keep them stored at your base. If you run out of thread you can create new one by disassembling ropes, rags or strings, or you can just use sinew or plant fibre instead. If you were undisciplined or unlucky enough to have to repair or create new clothing there's a lot of ways to get rags and leather patches (see the FAQ). The higher your repair level of clothing the better protection it provides. Eventually, though, your dodge skill will be so high that you will barely take any hit, which will reduce the damage done to your clothes to almost zero.
• Essential tools: If you haven't found any after a few days of scavenging create makeshift versions of essential tools (like stone shovel if you don't have a shovel, stone pot if no pots, stone axe if no wood axes, waterskin if no plastic canteens and bone needle if no sewing kits). You'll need to increase your survival skill to craft all this.
• Seasons:
  • Summer: Min-max your carried gear and clothes so they reach a good balance between protection and carrying capacity, while keeping your body temperature at "comfortable". With that said, allow yourself some "warm" if it helps you enhance your protection (like wearing long leather pants). Bring extra clean water with you in your expeditions, as you will consume more than usual. Also note that, due to the increased heat, food will rot quicker than in other seasons.
  • Winter: Reaching a comfortable temperature should be your priority, and to avoid allowing your body parts to freeze (which reduces your mobility and damages you, killing you in some extreme cases). That will increase your encumbrance but, at this point, your fighting skills (mainly dodge) should be high enough for this not being an issue any more. Canning food in previous seasons might sound like a good option but, as of now, there's no reason to do so. There's plenty of food (forest animals), even in this season. Underground areas do not change temperature much from the seasons, so if you lack gear go to a basement.
  • Spring and Autumn: The easiest seasons to survive in and the ones you should know all there is to know about by now, as your character starts at Spring and both are essentially the same.
• Pits: Digging deep pits or spiked pits around your base won't only enhance your defenses, but will provide you with a passive source of food, as critters tend to fall into them constantly. To dig pits in asphalt you'll need to use a jackhammer instead of a shovel. You can cover and uncover pits by examining them while carrying a two by four, creating a bridge for yourself and removing it once you're inside your defenses.
• Firearms: Firearms are nice and powerful, but they're limited by the amount of ammo you can find/create and are significantly noisy without a suppressor, so use them only when facing particularly strong or dangerous enemies (such as zombie hulks). While higher calibers might be desired, a 9mm SMG in burst mode can give you the same results. The turrets found in labs and military outposts can drop 9mm ammo after being destroyed, so it will become the most available ammunition later in the game. Firearms also require maintenance so have a firearm repair kit (supplied with batteries) handy as ordinary tools (like soldering iron or basic repair kit) cannot repair them.
• Bows: Consider training your archery skill as soon as possible and devote to it if you want a reliable and sustainable ranged weapon. At high levels they are as powerful as most low-caliber handguns, with the advantage that you'll never run out of ammo. The heavy sticks needed to create the arrow shafts can be easily obtained by smashing young trees, ideally while wielding something sharp like a wood axe. (examine the resulting bush to find them). Crossbows are also an extremely powerful tool, particularly the repeating crossbow which provide enough damage and range to easily handle most threats. As a bonus, both crossbows and their ammunition can be crafted from ubiquitous materials if you have the recipe and skills. Otherwise sporting goods stores may spawn what you require, even the pistol crossbow is serviceable and light enough to get the job done if you lack other ranged options.
• Batteries: Consider crafting them as soon as you can. You'll need concentrated acid (which can be acquired from disassembling car batteries whilst carrying a container like a gallon jug, or crafted with a Chemistry set and water with the proper skills) or vinegar (which you can ferment yourself if necessary), chunks of steel or scrap metal (by smashing metal furniture, Disassembling electronic devices, or merging at steel compactors), and aluminum and tin cans. Your priority is to keep your flashlight always charged, so you can explore in darkness (night time, labs, etc), but they are also necessary for mp3 players (easy morale boosts) and hotplates and water purifiers (so you can cook and drink whatever the circumstances). Additionally, you can find batteries in the hundreds (sometimes thousands) in labs and electronics stores and by unloading them from flashlights and other electronics, which can be found almost anywhere. Towards late-game, batteries will become plentiful (and soon obsolete) as alternatives like the UPS, atomic battery mod, UPS conversion mod, etc. become easy to craft with proper skills.
• Vehicles: Find mechanics related books to boost that skill to 6 or more, so you can repair and install any imaginable vehicle part. If you haven't found any, you can still slowly raise it by removing parts of wrecked vehicles. You can severely reduce the need for extra fuel by replacing your main vehicle's engine with a minireactor, provided you find one (that and plutonium cells), though these are generally much rarer than fuel. Another easier alternative is adding solar panels which will charge your car-batteries in clear or sunny weather and, in turn, can power a vehicle welding rig or an electric motor. Batteries to power your welder and gasoline for your engine will be your main limiting factors related to vehicles so making your vehicle solar (or at least partially solar) is a good idea. Also, and this goes without saying, avoid collisions unless you are intentionally trying to kill enemies by running them over. Collisions not only damage your vehicle, but can potentially kill you.
  • Backup: Try to find or build yourself a bicycle, and make sure your character has a strength of 10 or more so you can drive it fast enough. They will become extremely handy if you ever run out of gasoline/batteries or if your car breaks down, and are a nice backup regardless. Just make sure you never drive off-road, as the chances of damaging it or getting it stuck are quite high. It's recommended that you create a folding bicycle, as it has the particular advantage that you can carry it with you anywhere (by placing it on your main vehicle's trunk).
• Map notes: Make a habit of placing notes in your map about interesting things you want to remind yourself of. This is particularly important when planning on making your character to survive as long as possible, which can lead to game sessions lasting from days to weeks or months. You can both create New notes and Delete them when the map is displayed (via m). You can also change the default map note icon by starting your note with a letter or symbol followed by a : (example: T: traps and some food would change the icon from the default N to a T). Establish your own map icon codes when tagging notes and stick to it (example: D for dead groups of soldiers, scientists, etc, ! for anything dangerous (enemies, traps, etc), H for your bases, etc). Important things you might want to mark are: location of traps and other environmental hazards, particularly dangerous enemies (fungaloids, hulks, etc), location of dead scientists, thugs or soldier patrols, working vehicles, etc. You can also use E to mark explored structures.
• Farming: Allows you to grow your own plants and vegetables, which increases your food sources even further. Hunting and scavenging will generally be more than sufficient to sustain all but the hungriest characters, however.
• Metalworking: It's a really expensive thing to start up with and will almost unavoidable require you to find and power a welder. Building a charcoal forge and kiln is recommended, as wood items are really easy to find, and should you ever run out of trees, bone can also be used to make charcoal. This will allow you to craft weapons like a rapier and heavy armor, if you can find books with the recipes.