PUBG – Survival Tips & Tricks (Guide to Chicken Dinner)

This is a guide for PUBG, it contains information on how to do pretty much everything, I like to think of it as an instruction manual.

Written by a PUBG player with over one hundred wins, one thousand hours of gameplay and three thousand kills. I highly suggest you read it, you might just pick up a trick or two.

Introduction

All credit goes to Wastelander!

Welcome! This is a guide that contains the essential knowledge needed to earn you those chicken dinners. There are seven categories that contain the information, tips and tricks to help you improve, learn new skills, and most importantly, achieve chicken dinners so much easier!

Setting Up & Basic Controls

• Remember to put away your weapon (the X key on PC), by doing this you will sprint six percent faster. 
• Take off your shoes! Barefoot running is the same speed as running with shoes on and you are quieter on most surfaces. 
• Get a fuel can! These are so common and they come in handy, if you’re stuck outside the zone and you find a car without fuel, trust me when I say you will be wishing you had a gas cannister in your inventory. 
• Use map markers! These are useful when dropping from the plane and when you plan your next move, also read specific directions such as the numbers on the compass as well as North/East/South/West) when in a team. 
• Put voice mode on all, as you will occasionally overhear enemy teams that have forgotten to set theirs to private. 
• Toggle your rate of fire! Shooting at targets a few hundred meters away with auto is a complete joke, it is not worth it! Fire on single as this is more accurate and you can control the recoil better. 
• Learn how to aim with the three types of aiming. Hip fire is when you just click the shoot button, good for in houses, then there is a more accurate hip-fire (holding right mouse-button) and shooting, then finally aiming-down-sights (‘ADS’, by tapping right mouse-button). ADS is hard to control and takes time to master, but it guarantees pinpoint aim!

Strategies & Priorities

• Different places have different loot chance, for example if you drop at the Military base, then you will find powerful loot compared to what you would find from a farmhouse in a field. But remember that these are dangerous places to drop! Lot’s of experianced players drop in the ‘hot’ zones for kills and good loot. For the best chance of success, find small clusters of buildings right at the edge of parachuting range, that way there is less chance of you being disturbed. 
• The key items you want to find as soon as possible are assault rifles (AR’s), as these are good in almost every situation. A backpack, healing items, a bulletproof vest, and a helmet are all necessities, if you get into a fight without a helmet all it takes is a single bullet to your head and it will be lights out, without a vest, you’d be lucky to survive anymore than four rounds from an AR. 
• Close the doors! Every door on every house, apartment or complex in the game is closed from the start. If a door is open, someone’s been there. If you leave a door open, you’re telling the world you’ve been there too, don’t do it! 
• There is fall damage, which occurs from jumping around two stories, with more damage the higher the fall, don’t jump out from a moving vehicle or skydive from a cliff otherwise it’s… splat! 
• If you take fire from an ememy but don’t know where it’s from, do not go prone! This is the worst possible choice you could make, by going prone you make yourself a sitting duck. Instead I would recommend a zig-zag sprint until you get to cover and break line of sight. Don’t just think you need to reach a rock or a tree, mounds and ditches work just as well! 
• Always clear buildings, treat the game like it is reality when looting. Would you really open a door and walk right in? No, you would check the corners, rooms and roof, clear the building! I would possibly even use a flashbang if I thought someone was inside. Just because a medkit is on the ground dosen’t mean no one is hiding inside, it can be bait and this could be a trap! 
• When fighting multiple enemies, ignore any that you down! I always see people down a guy and then they proceed to waste their remaining ammo into them. Do not do it! They can’t get up unless rescued, so prioritise the ones who can still attack you. You are putting your ammo into something that isn’t a threat and making yourself reload. It is beyond stupid! 
• Vehicles are great at covering large distances quickly, but they are loud and can be heard over a large distance. Use them wisely. 
• Vehicles will roll down hills if you don’t apply the handbreak (press the spacebar), and they will explode if they hit things at speed. Drive carefully, and remember that the handbreak can also be used to drift! 
• Learn the helmet damage table, and check the durability of your helmet after fights. For example, the Kar98k is a sniper which is quite common that can kill you with a single bullet if it connects with the level one or two helmet on your head. Level three helmets can take a Kar98k shot, but this will drop your health seriously low. 
• After the beginning the game, pistols are really do become pointless, their damage is weak and they have bad accuracy. Drop your pistol and the ammo if you have a better weapon as pistol ammo is wasting precious inventory space. 
• Remember to check durability! Damaged high-level armour is often worse than undamaged low-level armour. Look at the number next to it in your inventory for a comparison, I see so many people pick up damaged high level armour and they end up dying quicker than they would if they had used low level armour. 
• Avoid bridges! There are almost always people waiting on them to kill you, when a bridge is a necessary route to get to the safe zone you can almost guarantee people will be waiting in ambush. Get to the zone early, and take the longer safer routes! 
• Always move! Even when looting, it stops someone picking you off with an easy headshot, which happens really often. Just move side to side or keep crouching and standing up. Do not take this lightly, headshots are lethal!

Controls & Hotkeys

• Hold ‘Alt’ to look around without moving, this is great if you’re camping, and also while falling from the plane. 
• You can dive underwater by holding ‘C’ while swimming, and rise to the surface by holding ‘Space’. If people are shooting at you then diving underwater will give you complete protection, just remember that this dosen’t work forever, you have lungs that need air. 
• Don’t jump out of the passenger seat and move around to the driving seat when you want to swap seats, this will expose you and put you in danger. Instead toggle seats in a vehicle with ‘Ctrl+1/2/3/4/5/6’, with ‘Ctrl+1’ taking you to the driving seat. 
• You can auto-sprint by pressing ‘=’ which is helpful when making those long runs to the zone, don’t run in a straight line though, zig zag slightly with the mouse, anyone can headshot a guy that moves in a line, so be unpredictable and don’t make it easy for them! 
• Lean left with ‘Q’, or right with ‘E’, while aiming. Use these controls to look and shoot around walls without exposing yourself too much, you can show the top part of your body, but your lower part will be hidden. Better to lean around a wall that walk around it exposing your whole body. The more skilled players will lean mid-combat to make themselves more awkward to hit, get used to leaning first, then try it out in combat. The recoil is harder to control when you’re leaning. I recommend leaning for confident players only. 
• Hold ‘Shift’ to boost vehicles, if you are trying to scale a hill with a ten tonne camper van, then you will probably be going at an incredibly slow speed, so use boost to help! Also remember that boosting will empty the fuel levels faster. 
• Use a vehicle’s handbrake for a more aggressive turn or hardbreak with ‘Space’. 
• Controlling bikes in the air is an important skill to have, the default controls are incredibly awkward so I would suggest using the arrow keys, left key for a left lean, right for right lean, up for up tilt and so on and so forth. 
• Toggle first and third person by pressing ‘V’. Using first person puts you at a disadvantage as you have to expose your head to peak over walls, unlike third person, but when in houses first person can help give you a clear view. 
• Hold your breath while aiming with ‘Shift’ (only in ADS). This holds the weapon more steady, allowing better accuracy. 
• Watch your bullet drop while aiming by holding ‘Left Mouse-Button’ to shoot instead of tapping it. Good when using snipers or DMR’s (designated marksman rifle). 
• Change weapon zeroing (when the weapon/sight permits, for use over different long ranges) with ‘Page Up’ and ‘Page Down’, this is very technical and isn’t that important unless you want to become pro, I use it and even with one thousand hours I still struggle. 

Advanced Survival

• You can make more difficult jumps between roofs by crouch-jumping onto railings or raised areas and running along them, too. 
• You can jump considerably further than usual by running away from a grenade and jumping as it explodes, good too know when you are in a battle. 
• There are only two ways to heal yourself back to full health, the very rare medkit, which instantly heals you to full health after ten seconds, and boost items like energy drinks and painkillers, which will heal you to full over time. 
• Both bandages and first aid kits get you back to seventy five percent health, but first aid kits work instantly after the five or so seconds of application, whilst bandages require multiple applications and heal over time, taking up to about a minute. Use bandages early on, when in a safe location as they take time, and save first aid kits for a helping hand during those late-game firefights. 
• When a healing item you’re using is down to 0.5 seconds left on the timer, you can start moving without cancelling it, it will be applied. 

Inventory Tricks & Sneaking

• Different items take up different amounts of space in your inventory, get to know the weight of each item. First aid kits are bigger than bandages, for example. But this also applies to different types of grenades, with frags smaller than smoke and stun grenades. 
• You can carry more by equiping items and by using ammo that’s loaded into your gun as this won’t take up inventory space. If you want to free up a frag sized space for example, equip your smoke or stun grenade. 
• Sneaking your way into the final few players is a good strategy – but it won’t help you master the skills of combat. To learn and improve with firefights drop into busy areas, such as the school or military base. 
• If you do want to stealth your way to the win, then I recommend hiding behind a cliff where no one is likely to go looking, is a fantastic way to avoid being spotted, also go prone and crawl through grass, it will be very hard to see someone in thick grass compared to someone with a hight of 5’6” running. 
• Generally, unless you’re looking for practise, just avoid combat. Only engage if you’re near certain you can win the fight, or if you’re unable to flee. This includes sniping, just because you can see someone five hundred or so meters aways dosen’t mean he needs to be fired at, most likely he isn’t a threat. Don’t take the shot unless you can get the kill, otherwise you’ve given yourself away to both him, and anyone else in the vicinity. 
• If you wish to flee, then zig-zag when you’re on foot, and focus on breaking line of sight. People will only bother chasing you down under specific circumstances. It’s unlikely they will keep in pursuit. Even if you are in a vehicle there’s no point in hopping out to fight if you’ve already been knocked down to low health, just get out of there and take some time to pull yourself together! 
• Don’t worry if your loot is complete garbage, just adapt to what you have. If you have a shotgun, then camp urban areas, if you have a crossbow, then get somewhere high. All it takes is a single kill and you could get a significant amount of loot from someone else, there’s no need to think it’s game over, I for one have won a solo match with just an S12K. 

Combat

• Take time to master the art of leaning. Most weapons have a spray pattern which gose up vertically. By leaning, you make headshots less likely giving you an edge in combat. 
• If you need to sprint across a dangerous open area, and don’t have another choice then use a ‘boost’ item like painkillers or energy drinks, they will heal over time and grant you extra speed, both of these factors can be crucial. 
• Grass only renders at less than one hundred metres away, but players render from far greater distances. In other words, if you’re prone and relying on long grass to hide, a sniper can spot you easily at long range, get some form of cover instead, grass wont stop bullets. 
• Loot, especially healing equipment makes for perfect bait. Leave some on the floor in the middle of a room, you are near to, and when enemies enter they will probably assume the building is safe, making them easy to quickly pick off. But not all players do this, some are aware of the traps. By assuming the worst, you can prepare for it. 
• Use smoke grenades! So many people leave them on the ground, and although they are the heaviest of grenades and take up a lot of loot they are lifesavers. If you team member is down, chuck a smoke at his position, then revive. No one can see you through the smoke. in other words, you are invisible and most likely able to revive. Other times these can be used is if you have to run across an open field. You can smoke a path, so if you are running and get hit, you can hide in the smoke and heal up, then head back out again. 

Final Ten

• When you get to the smaller safe zones, you need to eliminate anyone you see. If you leave an enemy alive, they will eventually spot you or worse, they will kill you. If you have the chance to strike first in these small zones, do it! 
• Do not loot enemies you have killed in the last ten or in small zones unless you absolutely have too! Almost everybody in the zone will have heard you and will be looking in that direction, looting a dead enemy is almost certain death at that stage. 
• Use the zone as your friend! During the late stages of the match, hang around the blue zone edge. If you are in the center of the zone, you will have three hundred and sixty degrees to watch. If you are on the edge of the blue zone, it can cover your rear and possibly sides. Meaning that you won’t have to worry about enemies coming from behind and giving you less of an area to have to watch. 
• Knowledge of the terrain is crucial in PUBG, learn the map as best you can and choose where to go for a reason, rather than on impulse. It really makes a difference. 
• Do not camp in houses! I can’t even begin to explain why this is such a bad choice. Almost every game, during the later stages of the zone people tend to sit in houses and camp. This is all well and good for a while, but when the zone forces you to leave your house you will most likely be killed. There are those that keep a close eye on any buildings and as the blue circle starts to close in, players that are forced out of hiding and into the open will be picked off. Not to mention that if anyone hears you in a house, they will probably head into the zone and overwatch your house, when you have to leave you will be shot. 
• Trees aren’t great cover. I recommend a forest as good visual cover when you need to move long distances, but it is easy to forget that hiding behind a narrow tree still leaves you exposed on three sides, not to mention your vision’s heavily impared by the trunk in front of you. 
• When you get to the final three, and are undiscovered, stay that way. Don’t engage as the remaining two could easily wound and/or kill each other without you needing to risk death yourself. They’ll also give away their positions in the process, which means you of course know where they are for the final face off.