Death Road to Canada – Secret Tips and Tricks

A lot of people are having a hard time trying to make it to Canada. They get themselves in a pickle, their poor decisions get punished.

Death Road to Canada is a unique game that is tricky to figure out, but I can help you out with that. As someone who enjoys Death Road to Canada enough to pour hundreds of hours into it and learn its secrets, I will share you those secrets… the secrets to surviving the death road.

Secrets of Death Road

All credit goes to TrailDash!

Chainsaws Aren’t That Good

So everyone is saying that chainsaws are the best weapons in the game, so it must be true… right?

That’s a nope from me, dawg. You can beat the most difficult modes without using one, and I honestly only pick them up just to sell them. They’re worth good amounts of food and if you already have a strong group with guns and ammo, you’re never gonna need to use a chainsaw.

Sure they’re powerful, but they consume gas, a resource you need to make it to Canada and a resource that keeps you from having to walk a dangerous path. Players always tell me that chainsaws are pretty much mandatory yet they also always tell me that they keep taking a ton of hits or dying when they run out of gas or lose their car.

You know what cars don’t need? Ammo. Use them. You can survive a morale siege in Marathon mode using only the most common guns in the game. I sure as hell have. You really only need to use weapons like chainsaws and guns for actual emergencies, most of your problems can be handled with melee. But if you already have guns, then why use a chainsaw?

Also unlike chainsaws, you don’t need to rev up guns. You pull them out, they shoot. You can equip your entire group with guns and have them all shoot by changing their fighting style in the menu at any time. Unless if you’re solo-running a character in a difficult run and you don’t have any good guns and you find yourself in a difficult siege or cornered, then maybe that would be a good time to use a chainsaw? That or Quick Death mode. Of course there are more ways to survive a siege than by just pulling out a certain weapon, but we’ll get to that part later.

To be blunt, you don’t really ever need to use a chainsaw and you should just sell them, especially if you’re already doing fine in the emergency weapons department. Everyone is already complaining about not finding enough food so hey… you’re welcome. It’s easy to get a large group and guns and ammo aren’t that rare. You can find chainsaws in cabins and hardware stores.

In short, use chainsaw money to buy better guns lol.

The Best Locations

Now let us go over all the best locations for what they give and what you need.

Lets start with the best starting location: Rest Stop. They give you food, gas, weapons of all kinds. Rest Stop is awesome, always go Rest Stop for the first location. If the option to go there isn’t available, Yall-mart will be the next best thing.

So with the starting location out of the way, lets go over all of the other locations you should be covering in your journey.

Food

• Grocery Store.
• Grocery Rescue.
• Big Grocery Store.
• Packed Grocery Store.
• Untouched Grocery Store.
• Restaurant.
• Convenience Mart.
• Concrete Bunker.
• Hunting Lodge.
• Fishing Cabins.
• Gothic Farm.
• Hazardous Materials.

Gas

• Hardware Store.
• Gas Station [Siege].
• Gas Station rescue [Siege].
• City Row with car.
• Cabin with car.
• Junkyard with car.
• Rest Stop with car.
• Arcade. (High mechanical required).
• Dead Arcade. (High mechanical required).
• Swarmed Arcade. (High mechanical required).

Medical Supplies

• Pharmacy.
• Medical Clinic.
• Hospital Raid.
• Hazardous Materials.

Ammo

Ammo is easy to find and you almost never have to use guns even in the more difficult modes.

Special locations

Most of them are good so I’m only gonna list the ones that I don’t think are worth going to.

• Kung Fu master.
• Malicious House.
• Mystery Factory.
• Museum (It’s bugged).

Hybrid loot

• Yall-Mart.
• Crowded Yall-Mart.
• Deadly Yall-Mart.
• Cabin.
• Cabin rescue.
• Stash in the woods.
• Rest Stop.
• Swarmed Rest Stop.
• Roadside Rescue [Siege].
• Commercial row.

Training

• Arcade.
• Dead Arcade.
• Swarmed Arcade.
• Strength & Fitness Gym.
• Swarmed Gym.
• Gym apartment.
• Hermit’s Cabin.
• Hunting Lodge.
• Fishing Cabins.
• Gothic Farm.
• Danger Rangers.
• Junkyard Pals.
• Frozen Friend.
• Spooky Graveyard.
• Hazardous Materials.

Weapons

• Police Headquarters.
• Dark Mansion.
• Haunted Mansion.
• Rest Stop.
• Swarmed Rest Stop.
• Roadside Rescue [Siege].
• Concrete Bunker.

So I think that is all of the best locations, but I have one final tip for you when it comes to looting: Loot. Every. Building. And. Room.

Don’t be a wuss wuss, just be quick before more zombies arrive.

Bandits Can Always Be Dealt With

There are more solutions to your bandit problems than there are bandit problems. You can always find enough food to pay off bandits, a single food-focused location alone can give you over 20 food. Med supplies are also not too hard to come by, you typically find them in bathrooms and a med-focused location is enough to keep you stocked for a good while as long as you’re not one to always get bit. With enough med supplies, you can survive a bandit shoot-out.

There are also a lot of different personality trait combos that can handle bandits for you. Civilized is already an OP support trait that gives you a high boost in Medical AND has a personality trait combo that that can help you in most if not every bandit situation. So if you really hate bandits that much, just start your party with a Civilized in the group.

You can make more familiar characters and hope that you pick up a Paranoid or Oblivious character in your run. But remember, if you have lots of food AND lots of med supplies and you run into a regular bandit text event, pay the food. Med supplies are emergency resources, they can save your party later in the run from something just as dangerous if not even more dangerous, so only use them when nothing else can save you.

Sieges Shmieges

I’m only gonna go over some of the more dangerous/important sieges as the regular are easier to survive and much more obvious. If you follow the other sections in this guide, then you’ll be able to survive the more basic sieges with guns. Otherwise, just kite or sacrifice someone useless.

Gas station siege

This is a siege that you’re gonna have to go to when you’re low on gas, and trust me: You always need gas.

So when you start off in the siege, look for the propane tanks and avoid them. Get inside the building as soon as you can, kill any zombie that is in your way. Once you’re inside, throw both of the propane tanks out. If you can’t throw them out, throw them on the left or right side and run to the side opposite of where the propane tanks are. Wait until they blow up and just kill every zombie that comes through. Hide behind a horizontal wall if you have to, it’ll make the siege easier. After the siege is done, kill the rest of the zombies in the building and collect all the loot.

Mall siege

Hide behind horizontal wall. easy.

No I’m dead serious, as soon as I learned that horizontal walls were your best friends in the mall siege, I never died to those sieges ever again. Zombies will try to go through them rather than going around them and you can pick off one zombie at a time that are on the outside going towards you.

Morale siege

Honestly, they’re just harder version of normal sieges. You can survive them with regular strategies and maybe you can use vertical walls to your advantage a bit. But let’s be real here, if you were already good at morale management, you would never run into these sieges. That’s a fact.

Final siege

I think the best way to survive this is to get a large group with overall good melee power, run into a building as fast as you can, and just stay there and pick off every zombie that comes through the door or drops down. You’re not gonna find any zombies that were already in the building so the only zombies you have to deal with are zombies that are going through the door, you can easily pick them off as they are in a tight spot, and all the zombies that drop through the ceiling are gonna be knocked out so they are also easy to pick off. Once the siege is done, just leave. This strategy works even in the more difficult modes.

If you don’t have a large group, then another way you can survive the siege is by just doing the world’s slowest kiting. Have the horde slowly walk behind you and don’t go too far unless if you have to or until the siege is over. Don’t waste your ammo, again, use them when you really need to.

My Favorite Strategy

If you really wanna know what my strategy is for winning Death Road to Canada, then here it is.

• First character: Hidden Potential + Specialist.
• Second character: Gungineer + Civilized.

Give the first character the strongest melee weapon you can get and never take it off. The first character is focused on Strength and Fitness while the second character is focused on everything else. Keep both characters alive, especially the second character. The mechanical and personality trait combo is important.

Goal: Get a group of 4 people and keep training them all with Strength and Fitness. Get them all a good melee weapon. You only to give the second character Mechanical training once and it’s easy to come by so don’t bother paying food for one. Have the second character keep training for Medical and use charming for it.

Whenever you get to choose your stat boost reward whenever you beat a mandatory siege or sewer/factory/tunnel sprint, always choose Strength for everyone if you can, but if you can’t, then choose Fitness for everyone, but if you can’t, then shoot Random skill & Morale for everyone or Shooting for everyone.

Make sure you have a group of four good melee fighters by the time you reach the final siege.

But I’m sure a lot of you are asking: Why not use TSTC, Berserk, or Car Nut?

Why Not Use TSTC, Berserk, or Car Nut?

TSTC

TSTC has less long-term power than Hidden Potential does which is more important than short-term power because every location, sprint, and siege is gonna last longer than a minute which is where Hidden Potential surpasses TSTC. TSTC is also harder and slower to train since you can only train Strength. Hidden Potential and other good melee perks can be boosted with both Strength and Fitness. To everyone who is saying that using furniture is what makes TSTC good, no. Furniture is niche and isn’t going to be in every location.

The only furniture that matters are the more durable ones like the fridge, but the thing is, the fridge is not in most sieges and there is not a single strong furniture that you can find in locations where melee fighters are the most useful: Sprints. Sewer, Factory, and Tunnel sprints.

Plus even in regular locations, you don’t have a guaranteed chance of finding a fridge in a building and you have to go through a bunch of zombies before you even get them. The one and only situation where I can see TSTC being genuinely useful is the cabin siege, which is nowhere near enough to make up for its flaws and to keep up with Hidden Potential. Even toilets and sinks break quickly when fighting chunky hordes. Besides, why use furniture when you already have a large cleaving melee weapon?

Berserk

Berserk is a good trait if used right, don’t get me wrong, but the risk that comes with it is way higher than it comes with Specialist. One hp and super low personality stats can screw you over in more ways than one if you’re not playing pitch perfectly (Humans are flawed creatures). I prefer something more reliable, and Specialist has the same potential power as Berserk does. Sure you have weaker starting stats, but so what? You can train very quickly in this game. With Specialist, you can take more risks and survive situations that would’ve otherwise killed you if you were using Berserk.

The personality trait combo that comes with Berserk can’t even be used that many times, there is really only like one or two traders you can rob and they don’t make a run all that much better. You also don’t wanna screw up the morale on the Civilized character.

Plus if you use my strategy with a Specialist character, it’s not even gonna have any downsides. Yes one inventory space isn’t something people are gonna like, but the goal is to have a large group anyway and 3 good shooters with guns is more than enough to survive scary sieges and locations in DRTC. You don’t ever have to switch to another weapon when playing as a Specialist, that big melee weapon is all you need. Your group can shoot for you. I don’t use this strategy and use a Specialist with it because I “suck at kiting”, I use this strategy with these characters because I want the highest possible chance of making it to Canada and winning.

Car Nut

The best and most OP support trait in the entire game is Civilized, and that personality trait combo alongside the chunky Mechanical and Medical boost is amazing, but Gungineer is a lot better with it than Car Nut is. I’d rather have a +2 boost in Shooting than have a car that isn’t even going to last for a while and a +1 higher boost in Mechanical which could’ve easily been boosted early in the run with a text event anyway.

Car Nut is better paired up with a trait like Practical since Car Nut already has high boost in Mechanical and Practical can give you a bit extra points into Mechanical and give you a few other points into your fighting stats. Not much else to say here, but Gungineer + Civilized is the ultimate support combo.