All you need to know, to not die the first night Tips The squads job is 99% scavenging Don't let the squad attack open field, they will die in most cases Use any advantage you can get in a fight. Which means, get them into a building or vehicle, before you start the fight As long as you have fuel, use cars (normal car<SUV<Van) You will love them Your squads should scavenge all the time, even if that means, going further distances You don't need to loot specialised buildings for specific items. You get most items from the generic ? buildings. Spare the specialised buildings for, when you really desperatly need something or if you have enough ressources, so it wouldn't make a big difference Specialised buildings are not guaranteed to have dozens of items, so take them with care Only loot big buildings, if your ressource count allows it. The bigger the building, the longer the scavenge takes Building and gathering ressources as well as dismantling buildings is done by citizens only, as well as occupying guard towers, so manage your citizens well, where you put them As soon as you can, get some gear for your squads. Gear is not necessary, but it helps, keeping your squads healthy in dangerous situations Infected are faster than your squad most of the times, so get into a building asap, when you get attacked outside Only pull your squads to base, if it's too dangerous You can use your squads to better defend your base. If infected attack one of your buildings, get one squad out of the base building its in. Infected attack squads first, always. So they will run towards the squad. Then put them back in and the squad fires at the infected from inside Walls are extremely ressource heavy, so focus on guard towers in the beginning. Wood towers are cheap and easy to maintain Citizens are less productive when in a bad mood. Enough food and shelter already does the trick, so take care of enough shelter as soon as possible Don't pick the biggest building as HQ Pick the biggest building close to your HQ as your storage, trust me, you need the storage Don't sweat over food. Yes, you won't get that much food in the beginning, but if you choose a dense enough area, there should be no problem getting enough food with at least 2 squads. So don't throw all your citizens into food production immediately in the beginning. In the beginning, that's a waste of time. Concentrate on storage, shelter and defense first Hospitals are vital. As soon as you can afford it, research the hospital and build it. This will reduce healing time for your squads a lot A fuel truck is very usefull for delivering fuel, if your squad runs out, but you probably won't need more than one Don't take every car to your HQ. It's not necessary. Just let it sit, where it is and get your squad there, when you actually need it It takes some time, to build a decent food production, so don't sweat it Wood is the only respawning ressource. You can get the other ressources through scrapping the surroundings, like stone piles, cars, street lights or buildings, but those don't respawn, so be carefull with them Your citizens can't use cars, so they have to travel further, the more you scrap in your surroundings You can cancel every scavenging anytime You only have the 9 squares around your base to free use, so be carefull You can travel outside these 9 squares, but only with your squads You can only scavenge these outside squares and this takes a lot and I mean A LOT of time, so plan ahead, before doing this Before you actually scrap usable buildings, check, if there are very small buildings. If a building is small enough, it can't be used at all, only for demolishing, So use these tiny buildings first, before you demolish usable buildings Tool-/Can-/Weaponfactories take metal, which is pretty rare, so use these buildings wisely If you build walls, either use wood or directly build extremely tough buildings Plan ahead, before building. Building takes some time, especially if the building is bigger A tougher tower doesn't make it stronger, just tougher. The different weapons make the strength difference Be carefull with transmissions, it can attract bad guys Yellow squads are independent people. You can walk to them and recruit them as citizens, but beware, not everyone is friendly Scavening a building can trigger an event in rare cases, some are good, some are bad, choose wisely in the bad events, they can turn out worse than you think The weather station is not very important until late mid game The flag pole is purely decorative, but cheap and looks nice, so go ahead I would recommend to have all filters/layers activated all at once. They are very helpfull and show you, which buildings are already scavenged (The one's without any mark) Ammunition is not that rare. You can multiply the ammunition number in the top hud by 100. The number is the number of ammunition cases, not bullets Building material doesn't has the biggest priority in the beginning First two things to do: Storage and shelter Always keep enough towers to secure your buildings, but don't overdo it, they need 2 citizens and 2 guns for every tower Towers don't need guns to defend, but without they are much weaker Repair towers only in the day and when the health drops below 1500 Day and Night don't change immediatly. It takes about 1-2 hours for day to change to night and from night to day Days are dependent on locale and can vary by an hour or more. Day usually starts in US 0600/0700 or so and lasts to roughly 1800/1900. The foreman(woman) of your survivor group civilians will call quitting time at roughly 1700(last errands) and wake-up at roughly 0600 Infected can't roam in full moons, but they can roam at day during rain Don't pick a too rural area. If you play in the middle of the woods, it's basically your death sentence. Always make sure at least half of the 9 squares is filled with buildings, you need them to do anything in this game Even if it doesn't look that way, 100 citizens isn't that much. You will quickly learn, that your starting 50 citizens is no way near enough to get a running settlement Towers have a shooting range, just like squads. And just like squads, this shooting range get's disturbed by other buildings, so put that into your defence plan Thanks for reading my guide. I hope it helped Please like and share my guide