Fear the Night – Murder Island and Big Cargo

A resource map to the new Murder Island zone, and information about the new drivable robot Big Cargo.

Murder Island

All credit goes to william_es!

Murder Island is a new zone (#11) out in the middle of the river that currently forms the northernmost edge of the playable map.

This zone is accessed by a bridge that connects to zone 5.

That shows three well known landmarks near the island.

The red circles with an “E” are patrols areas of enforcers!

Beware of the one between the cooling towers, he patrols on the other side of a concrete wall, and can pop right over it at you. Most of the rest you will be able to see patrolling around from far far away.

The orange dots are locations of wrecked “Big Cargo” robots, which you can harvest for parts

Located all around the map are other resources, that spawn randomly (same place, but can be different resources each visit).

The blue rectangle on the west side of the map is the building that has the special crafting station to make “Big Cargo”.

Enemies

So far, on surface of the island the only enemies are the regular humanoid zombies, and enforcers

Regular human zombies mostly around the bridge, on and under it. If you get away from the bridge (east or west), zombies almost never spawn, except for packs of runners at dusk and dawn.

Enforcers patrol the red circled areas on the map.

The mine has almost entirely elite zombies: gas, spider, and armored.

Big Cargo

This zone contains unique resources and a crafting station for making a new vehicle called “Big Cargo”. The vehicle is basically one of the mini-shipping container houses, with 4 mechanical “legs” made from bucket crane arms.

Yeah, yeah, it looks goofy. But it’s actually hell of a lot of fun to drive, and…

• It carries 100,000 lbs of stuff. One. Hundred. Thousand. WTF!
• It has 1,000,000 hit points (YES, one million).
• Zombies won’t attack it (or you) while you’re driving it.
• When you stop driving it, you will be standing on top of a mini fort.
• If you park it in a PVE area, no one can hurt it, and you can store all your stuff in it. Even if you stop playing, and someone has taken over your base.

I call that a win, even if it looks goofy.

A player posted a youtube video, showing them crafting it and driving it around (hope you don’t mind me reposting that here).

Crafting Big Cargo

To craft “Big Cargo” you have to be level 40, to unlock the recipe.

Crafting “Big Cargo” can only be done at the special crafting station. It’s the blue rectangle on the west end of the island on the map at the start of the guide.

You will need the following:

• 110 Big Cargo parts (found on the island only)
• 120 Aluminum Alloy
• 50 Mechanical Parts

It take 20 seconds to make, and will end up as an item called “Big Cargo” in your inventory. The Item weighs only 0.5 lbs in your inventory.

You put the Big Cargo item on a hot bar slot, press that # to instantly spawn it in front of you. There’s no prompt, no outline, no nothing. Just WHAM, Big Cargo.

Once taken out and deployed, you CANNOT put it back in your inventory.

To power up Big Cargo, you need a special fuel called “zobi-gasoline”, which can be found pre-made in small amounts on murder island, or crafted from resources found only on the island (you need to be level 40 to craft the fuel). If you plan to drive it off the island, it’s best to have a stack of zobi-gasoline not just a few units you scavenged from containers. You can make zobi-gasoline at the special crafting station too (if you have zomsidian).

Nothing bad happened when I crafted Big Cargo, no attack, no swarms of zombies.

The Big Cargo Spawn Item Can Be Given to Other Players

The item that spawns Big Cargo can be dropped on the ground, and picked up.

Which means…

It can be given to other players. They can pick it up, and spawn it. They don’t have to be level 40 to do that.

I gave someone on my server a Big Cargo, they’re level 38, and they could deploy it fine. Thank you devs.

After Actually Crafting Big Cargo

Driving Big Cargo:

• Only goes forward and backwards. No other direction keys have any effect.
• Only steers while going forward, and it auto turns to follow aim view. Steer with the mouse!
• Holding the sprint key makes it go faster. A LOT faster. Does not seem to burn fuel any faster.
• The shipping container body can collide with cars, walls, or enforcers (hostile or tamed).
• When the body hits some objects, it will bounce up over them: For example, the two 18-wheeler trucks at the loading docks of Bosco’s might as well be a ramp. You can hit them at ANY angle, even t-bone the trailers straight on and you will drive right up onto the roof.
• The legs clip right through stuff normally.
• Can make multi-point turns (back up, turn going forward, repeat) in a fairly small space.
• You can target the body (but not legs) from the ground and select “drive”, and you’re instantly popped up top (drive is only an option if it’s started up).
• Zombies don’t attack you while driving, but will suddenly agro on you when you do stop driving.
• The folding stairs on the left side are buggy. Sometimes you will just slide down them over and over and over. If you don’t want to waste fuel starting it up (see fuel economy section below), you can go to back end of Big Cargo. Jump up onto the red tank, then the bigger tank to the left, then to the top platform.
• If you leave where Big Cargo is parked, and then come back, it’s not visible from far away. Don’t freak out, your robot isn’t gone. It suddenly pops in when you get into range. You have to be real close, see the shots below. (whenever it pops in, it does it’s little shutdown stomp dance, which is cool)

Fuel Economy:

• It uses 1 unit of zobi-gasoline every single time you start it up. So starting and stopping a lot wastes fuel
• When turned on and not moving, it still uses fuel (but slowly).
• I went from the junkyard to the hardware store in zone 8, and only used 6 units of zobi-gasoline. That is… not bad. especially considering that I cleaned the entire hardware store out, every single item, and then went to metal mine in zone 2 and took out 10490 units of metal, and 2764 sand too. In one trip. Total round trip was 18 fuel (I shut it down and restarted a few times).

Structures and Cargo:

• You can’t put doors on it, they won’t snap to the openings.
• And as it turns out, ya don’t need doors. Zombies cannot enter the lower part of the shipping container, even though there are no doors. They hit and slide sideways. You stand inside, you’re safe. Zombies CAN clip partially through the walls, so if you stand right next to one, you can get whacked even though they’re outside.
• It has no slots for structures (crafting benches, etc) inside, BUT…

• You CAN snap some structures to the wooden platform up top! With some careful positioning, I did that above. Hoping that will protect me from getting sniped at by enforcers (or other players). Plus it just makes the ridiculous topside look better. I did that to both Big Cargoes before I thought to see if a watch tower would fit there. That would be so idiotic looking, but so damned cool. Structures on top do not affect movement, or speed, but when it starts up and shuts down, they appear to float in midair for a second while the robot moves and tilts under them, then snap down to the wooden platform. This is only on startup/shutdown, when I was driving it the attached fences were rock solid.
• Edit: The next time I logged in after putting fences around the top, when I drove off the fences remaining floating in midair. I bumped into invisible fences all around the top of Big Cargo, couldn’t open them or destroy them (couldn’t select them). A quick re-log fixed it, and the fences were back on top. This is the same bug that caused players logging in to appear on the roofs of their shelters. I leave you to decide if you want to deal with the flakiness. I think they’re worth it (they are 2000% worth it).
• Robots cannot go up the stairs to the top. You can’t designate any part of Big Cargo with a “move to” command. I got a UA Scout inside the lower box (by having it auto-follow me), but as soon as I started it up, the Scout sank right through the floor of Big Cargo, and hit the ground. Sigh.
• I got an enforcer on top of Big Cargo (wow, that was not easy), but found that with an enforcer on top of it, it acted like it was one hair away from completely immobilized. In about 5 minutes of trying to move forward, I covered about 10 feet. Took the enforcer off, back to normal. Also, as Big Cargo moved, the enforcers was noticeably sliding around on top. Sigh, there goes the idea of “arming” big cargo with enforcers as gun turrets.
• The weight always says Zero, no matter how much stuff you put in it.
• There is a limit on total slots though, making the weight limit a complete joke. Inventory is 6 columns across, and apparently only 49 (??) rows down. So, you can only have 294 (??) stacks of things. Regardless of the exact number, there’s a max limit on slots. Once you hit that limit, you can’t put anything else in the Big Cargo. Inventory still has the bug that it can hold more items then it can display on the inventory screen (the rest will be off screen). You have to remove and put back stuff to shuffle things to the viewable area. Annoying.
• If you’re doing a lot of crafting at a shelter, park Big Cargo so one of it’s legs clips into the house. You will be able to access the inventory by clicking on the leg, saving trips back and forth outside. If the leg is right next to the station you need to use, you can unload items until you’re immobilized and can’t move. Then just rotate until you can access the crafting station, and craft all

Combat:

• Like all robots, Big Cargo will auto-heal. As long as it’s still alive, it will heal to full health automatically, with no repair materials needed.
• It heals about every 2-3 seconds,
• It continues auto-healing even while it continues to take damage.
• It seems to have damage reduction built in, with six zombies beating on it, it only took 42 pts of damage, dropping it to 999,958. Then it auto-healed to one million again, continuously. (just say it slowly, “oneeeee milllllioooonnnnnnn”). I’m not saying it can’t be destroyed, I just think it would be a waste of time and ammo to even try. You could troll griefers and pk’ers with this thing, and let them waste their ammo and tear their guns up on it.

Resources

Wrecked big cargo robots, you can harvest for 3-4 big cargo parts. They are the orange dots on the map. You need to attack it with a melee weapon to harvest the parts.

The wrecked Big Cargo robots always spawn in the exact same place, and they respawn pretty quickly (I’ll loot them before work, and they’ll all have respawned when I get off work).

Big Cargo parts stack in 30’s, and each stack weighs 90 lbs.

The observations towers dotted around the island often have a resource spawnpoint inside.

The next three resource items can randomly spawn at points all over the map. The points don’t change, but the majority of them will be empty, and what resources do spawn change all the time.

Zobi-gasoline, found in small round blue containers with a black lid. Slow respawn on these.

Military containers, which contain 1 big cargo part. Also slow respawn.

“Zomsidian” in medical carts. This resource can also be found in the mines, in rock outcroppings.
Zomsidian can be combined with regular gasoline to make “zobi-gasoline”. Though zomsidian is only found on the island, if you’re level 40 and have the recipe unlocked, zobi-gasoline can be crafted at workbenches anywhere in the game (not just the island).

If you completely avoid the enforcers, you can harvest 8 wrecked “Big Cargo” robots, or 14 of them if you want to lock horns with the Enforcers, and 4 more if you go in the mine. Once I started killing the enforcers to get to the wrecks they guarded and to the mine, I had enough parts to build TWO Big Cargo robots in 5 days of only semi-serious farming.

Shelters

There are only four shelters that I have found so far, 1 on the west side, and 3 on the east end of the island.

The west one is a normal mini-shipping container (1 medium slot, 2 small slots).

The 2 east ones closest to the bridge are actually underground, inside the mine!

At the far far east end is another mini-shipping container shelter, which has three wrecked Big Cargo robots right in front of it. This is very close to the mine.

The Mine

The mine entrance.

Okay, I’m gonna say this, just so you know: You can walk enforcer all the way into the mine and out, no problem. They did get stuck on zomsidian nodes a few times, and just had to be led around them. (Yes, I brought enforcers with me).

Getting to the Mine Entrance:

• I fast travel to the shelter at the far east end of the island, and then run to the mine. I mine the whole place out, and then fast travel back from any shelter in the mine.
• I don’t fast travel directly to the shelters in the mine, because of the enforcer that patrols above the mines will detect you and agro. It can’t reach you in the mine, but If you start inside the mine and then try to go to the entrance, the enforcer will FOLLOW YOU THERE.
• I have only seen an enforcer anywhere near the mine entrance ONCE. It wasn’t even the enforcer that guards the narrow canyon that connects the east/west sides of the island, it was the one from the upper northeast corner of the island. He wandered down, and just kept going south, bit by bit every time I visited the island. Eventually I pulled and killed him. He respawned back up where he normally does, never seen him there ever again.

Layout:

The mine is small inside. It slopes down for a bit, and then the rest of the mine is on one level. It’s basically just a long passage with some U-turns in it, that ends in two big caverns. That’s it.

Inside the mine are 2 mini shipping container shelters, and 4 wrecked Big Cargo robots.

I didn’t see any barricade to seal up like in other mines.

Resources:

Zomsidian outcroppings all through the mine. Only resource in the whole mine.

Best tool for mining zomsidian is a breaching sledge (tier 4 harvest tool), you have a chance to get 10-15 zomsidian from each node. If you use a regular sledgehammer (tier 3) you get a flat 10 per node. Breaching sledge will give you about 375 zomsidian, versus 290-320ish on average with a sledgehammer.

Edit: with a breaching sledge, it’s exactly 375 zomsidian every trip to the mine, there’s no RNG. If I have less then 375, I missed a node, find it, end up with 375.

The recipe for zobi-gasoline is 3 zomsidan + 1 regular gasoline, so that will give a ton of zobi-gasoline.

Can’t make a breaching sledge yet? Don’t need too, you can get one for free at boscos. Go to the crazy fort made out of shipping containers in the southwest corner of the parking lot. One spawns on top of a shipping container.

Zombies:

In the mines, the zombies are almost entirely elites: gas, spider, and armored. I saw 1 regular human zombie in the whole mine.

• There are only three places zombies spawn in the mines.
• First U-turn, 1-2 can spawn. Super slow respawn on those.
• Past the U-turns, there’s a small cave with a column of rock in the middle of it. 3-4 spawn there.
• First big cavern you come to (with the first shelter) is always empty.
• Rear Cavern will have 6-8 zombies. They respawn super fast in the rear cavern. I mean, like 5 minutes later, there’s a bunch of gas, spider, and armored back in the cavern again.

This is the shelter in the last cavern. I cleared it, fast traveled out and back less then a minute later. Complete respawn of the zombies.

Seizing Shelters:

Was a hilarious joke. During the occupation, all the zombies coming to attack spawned on the surface, not inside the mine, except for one (1) regular human zombie. One zombie! and that was for seizing both shelters!

Enforcers

The enforcers on the island are all level 40.

Every single #$@# one of them. They are lethal mofo’s.

They will have INSANELY high ranged damage.

Like in the neighborhood of times 500% damage, maybe lower (like 200% or 300%)

Still, they will “one shot” you. I managed to survive a single shot, just once, with about 5 hp left, wearing level 3 plate armor (which means I got shot by a wimpy dud enforcer with low ranged % increase). Every other time I was killed instantly.

Every shot that hits you destroys level 3 plate armor INSTANTLY.

If they catch you, the armor is trashed.
Because of this, I don’t even bother wearing good armor if I’m going to parts of the islands where enforcers spawn. I run around in my underwear, or rags.

They are only slightly tougher then lower level enforcers.

They will only have a few thousand hit points more then lower level ones. I have a tamed level 46 enforcer that started with 9000 hit points. Sounds like a lot? it really isn’t.

I can kill the Murder Island enforcers with about 20-30 shots from a compound bow. I have +140% ranged damage, but still that’s not that much damage. The whole next section of this guide is how to kill them with a compound bow, and no armor.

Murder Island enforcers like to go “walkabout” a lot:

They will sometimes drift out of their normal patrol patterns, and once they begin, they sort of keep going. They go back a little, then go farther away, back a little, farther away next time. Like a swinging pendulum. Once this happens, it doesn’t seem to stop. I’ve seen this a few times on mainland enforcers, but I’m seeing this way more frequently at Murder Island.

Enforcers have two attack stages. The normal one is beserk running, shooting, stomping, you’re dead. Wheee.

But there’s also another level where an enforcer sort of “half detects you” and it will just change direction and slowly walk towards you, very calmly. kind of like a “hey, what’s that over there??” mode. If you move away quickly, they sort of just lose interest, and turn around and go back. That’s how the mainland enforcers work (and still work that way, I tested them at a few locations).

If you trigger that second reaction in a Murder Island enforcer, it will move out of it’s normal patrol pattern, and just… keep going. farther and farther away. And once they’ve come to a new area, expect to find them there every time you return to the island, until you kill it. 

Respawn on enforcers on Murder Island is long.

CRAZY long. Measured in multiple real world days.

They will “camp” your corpse.

If they kill you, they will hang out around your corpse. They will NOT head back to their regular patrol spots.

This happened every time I was killed, when I returned to get my corpse, the enforcers was still around the body.

I lured one to a shelter, and fast travelled off the island. When I fast travelled back to the island the next day (real world day), that #$%&@! was still standing on top of the shelter, waiting for me. Never seen that before.

Edit: I have begun to suspect that what’s really going on, is that time does not pass on murder island unless a player is on it. Things like the despawn timer on your corpse still count down (global timer probably), but nothing else changes until a player is on the island.

So, since the Enforcers are such a pain to fight… that lead to the following…

Super Easy Way to Kill Enforcers

 
There’s a super easy way to kill the enforcers, if there’s a nearby observation tower, like below.

This method pretty much only works well with a compound bow. The railing on the sides of the stairs of the observation towers counts as a solid object, and you can’t shoot through the railing with regular guns (and neither can enforcers).

Get up t o p, and shoot at them. Retreat inside the room at the t o p until they get close. Their AI will make them stomp up underneath the tower. Your line of sight will be blocked by the catwalk around the edge, and you can’t shoot at them anymore.

And they can’t shoot at you either.
They have a horrible elevation on their weapons. They have to be far away to shoot anything up high.

Edge out of the room, wait for the enforcer to get directly under you again. Slowly edge down the stairs, waiting for it to keep re-positioning directly under you. Go down to the lowest landing. It should be following directly under you, and you will literally only be a few feet over it’s head.

Be aware that the enforcers CAN go up the stairs. You need to make sure the enforcers not standing over where the stairs begin, or they will up the stairs as the closest way to get to you.

Lean over the side of the railing with a compound bow. Aim, and you will see the white line aiming far out at the dirt. Move around, and the aiming guideline will suddenly snap all the way down to the enforcer. Shoot. Bam. If you can’t get it to snap to the enforcer, move around a little bit which will cause the enforcer to reposition and stomp around.

The white line that show’s the arrows path is going underneath the stairs. You can barely see the enforcer’s tail boom in the photo, that’s how far the arrow’s guideline has snapped to the enforcer. If you look below the composite axe on the hotbar slot #1, that’s the head of the enforcer (the lens housing). The fact you can barely even see the enforcer in that screenshot is the whole point here.

Red crosshairs, indicating target took damage. Also, +5 Exp gained at the left side of screenshot.

About 15 shots later, dead enforcer. This enforcer never even fired his guns once the entire time. He never had line of sight to me.

This enforcer was the one on the far far west end of the island. I found out he’s guarding TWO big cargo wrecks, so I’m killing him now to get to them.

Refinement: Trying to take a better screenshot, found you can just keep backing down the stairs. I’m still above the elevation of his weapons. Don’t know if the stair block shots too (never found out, since they never once fired at me).

Backing down the stairs even more…

And even farther down the stairs. You can see how close to the ground I am now. If you go down TOO far, the enforcer will run out sideways, from behind the stairs. That’s not good.

And, another dead enforcer, never fired a shot at me.

And… a Dead Teletubby?

What. The. Hell. Is. That.
Some might say it’s a dead scientist in a red biohazard suit. You crazed fools! it’s clearly a dead teletubby! This is how the zombie plague started! Teletubbies caused it!

It looks like he’s having a little picnic! There’s his ice chest, and he’s sitting on his picnic blanket! Dead teletubby picnics! By far, one of the creepiest things in the game.
Not telling you where this is, the fun is finding it.