Infection Free Zone – Starter Guide

Guide for New Players to Stay Alive

Before you start you need to choose a HQ. Big buildings let you house more workers, store more goods and form more squads. If you choose really big buildings the building will only be partially turned into HQ. You can later in the game, no hurry, choose to convert all of the building into HQ. This is done in the same mode as you convert any other buildings.

Choose a HQ that has 10-15 mid-large buildings in a as possible secluded area as you can. This will save you work later. The HQ should be a building in one of the corners of the group of buildings you choose. As Squads need to get more ammo from either warehouses or HQ’s. It will also let your workers run shorter routes to gather or collect materials from dismantling and building/converting.

When you start, form your second squad ASAP. Send both of them out to find food. Houses that contain food have three small cylinders.

Convert a building into shelter.

Convert a building into warehouse. But try to keep the buildings tight and the more they can cover each other with fire the better.

As the game turns to night it’s time to head back to your base. Don’t stack your units in one building. Try to cover all routes of approach with the units you have. Or move your units around way ahead of the infected reaching your base. When the infected are close they will be drawn to movement and noise. In that order. If you run outside, they will come for you. You do NOT want to be caught out in the open. Poking your nose outside can however be a good move to get the infected to stop bashing down the door of a very damaged building.

If you can’t cover all approaches to your buildings a tower might be nice. The smaller towers need two guns. If you only have pistols, choose pistols. Otherwise you might end up with some unarmed guys sitting in a tower doing no good.

In early game you want to get some food production running. I have no idea, yet, how many fields is a good starting point. They however cost Tools to build and the Tools can be hard to get your hands on. Look for buildings that have something looking like Wheat and Tools on the roof. (I can’t really remember how it looks as I only got two or three buildings with it).

You also want to raid old police stations. As they have a better chance of providing more guns and ammo. The police stations or military buildings are marked with a badge. Look closely as the Oildrum of gas stations look quite similar.

When you find a car, snatch it as soon as you safely can reach it during daylight hours. It will greatly help your looting and exploring. It can even be used as a zombie plow in a tight spot, but be careful so that it doesn’t break down in a horde.

Don’t hesitate to make a third squad or even a forth, when you have the manpower and guns available.

The best way to get resources for converting and building, is to dismantle buildings. It however uses lots of manpower, so consider pausing other projects. Leave the buildings within your little enclave as you will need room to expand, and you will at least want 10 buildings in your cluster.

Dismantling buildings can also open up better fields of fire for towers or squads. However dismantle with caution as you can funnel infected hordes into kill zones with buildings.

Convert the corner buildings into Warehouses or HQ’s. You can have more than one HQ to create more squads. This is not needed in the early game, if you started in a big enough building.

By now, you should have a fairly good idea of which way the infected approaches you. No is the time to start building walls and towers. Don’t bother building anything else than brick walls, until you have researched better walls. Wood and metal won’t really stop the infected long enough to seriously hurt them.

You might be tempted to switch out all guns in a squad to assault rifles. Don’t do that until you have plenty ammunition, as they really chew through bullets.

By reading this and playing the game with the tutorial turned on, you should now have a good idea of what you need to do to stay alive.

And finally, the only game stopping bug I have found is that some players encounters problems reloading saves when they are playing downloaded maps. I.E. all maps that are NOT the pre-loaded ones. The developers are aware of this bug and working on it. Otherwise I have once had a crash to desktop, in startup, but nothing else.

And yes, I recommend the game! It is not at all as hard as many reviews make it sound, if you approach it cautiously. I feel that it is well worth your time and effort if you want to play a little rough and sometimes hard survive the apocalypse strategy game.

Egor Opleuha
About Egor Opleuha 4471 Articles
Egor Opleuha, also known as Juzzzie, is the Editor-in-Chief of Gameplay Tips. He is a writer with more than 12 years of experience in writing and editing online content. His favorite game was and still is the third part of the legendary Heroes of Might and Magic saga. He prefers to spend all his free time playing retro games and new indie games.

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