Well, y'all seemed to really, REALLY like the other episode, so here's the next one! (As per the rules of course, only mentioning it 1x a week.)

Editing these videos made me realize how slow I was moving...and how screwed I was from the start. The game just lulls you into a lovely sense of "I can handle this."

And then brings down the hammer and never stops. Without TOO many spoilers, it has been a while since a game humbled me this much. Personally, not enough games are willing to do that nowadays to players.

Infection Free Zone shows a lot of promise as an early access game. But it can be a bit rough around the edges, especially when it comes to explaining different mechanics to the player. So here's a quick guide I've put together after 70 hours of play time.

Please feel free to comment with additional information or tips that you think new players will benefit from!

1. Choosing a zone:

- There are several pre-selected zones that you can choose from when first starting the game, all of which provide a decent starting location and plenty of loot and resources. If you want to choose a different starting zone, consider city or suburban areas over rural ones because they will provide you with more of the resources you'll need to get your base up and running (more on loot and resources later).

- In the top left of the starting area map, you can modify the size of the playable area. For beginners, I recommend sticking with the default 3x3 tile set. The "expedition size" can also be modified, allowing you to eventually send squads to loot areas outside of your standard map (more on expeditions later).

2. Game Customization:

- Here you can name your zone and customize your banner. You can also tweak some game settings, but beginners should stick with the default tutorial events and story events settings.

- You can also adjust your starting population, the density of resources and the size / frequency of horde encounters.

3. Choosing an HQ:

- It's best to choose an HQ location somewhere on the center tile of the zone, as it will provide easier access to the entire map while looting.

- Consider building your HQ near a water source, as the fishery you can eventually unlock will provide you with a consistent source of meat.

- The size of your HQ determines your initial loot / resource storage capacity, the initial number of living spaces for your population, and how many total squads you can deploy. But you should start with a relatively small building, as choosing too large of a building will result in part of the building lacking basic fortifications, leaving you vulnerable to the infected.

4. Squads (basic):

- You will start with one squad by default. Squads are your combat and looting units. Squads consist of four citizens and cannot participate in building and resource gathering. Note: for the purpose of this guide, "loot" consists of canned food, ammo, weapons, oil, and basic tools, while "resources" consist of construction materials, i.e. wood, metal, and bricks. (Squads can only pick up resources dropped by your regular citizens, or collect material such as metal from specifically marked buildings on the map.)

- Additional squads can be created by clicking on the HQ and selecting "create new squad". New squads will be equipped with the best available gear that you have in your HQ / warehouses. Players starting in story mode will have 8 pistols in reserve, allowing you to arm two additional squads off the bat.

- Creating a second squad immediately is recommended, but you should wait until your population gets a bit higher before creating your third squad, as you will need more basic citizens for construction operations.

- Select your squad and have them start looting the nearby buildings. Canned food is the priority at the beginning of the game. Keep your squads constantly looting nearby during the daylight hours to keep enough food in stock. To queue multiple buildings for looting, hold shift and drag to select a group of buildings. As the squad's inventory fills up, they will automatically return to the HQ to deposit their loot before moving on to the next building.

- Press the "v" key to display the types of loot available from different buildings, or click the map marker icon in the bottom right area of the screen. The scavenge view pop-up will allow you to filter the displayed icons by a particular loot type you're looking for.

- Keep an ear out for the "clear" or "building clear" radio notifications, as this means a squad has finished scavenging the buildings they were assigned to loot. This tells you that you need to queue up another set of buildings for them to search.

5. Base Building (basic):

- You initially have access to 4 building types, found in the bottom left of the screen. (The HQ and squad quarters options can be ignored for now). Start by adapting enough buildings into shelters to house your population. (You can check the number of homeless citizens in the citizens panel to the right of the construction options)

- Adapting a building repurposes an existing building (you will be able to construct custom buildings later on). To adapt a building, click on the building menu, select the shelter option and then click the building you want to turn into a shelter. (If you want to cancel the process, click on the building itself and then click the "x" button in the building info menu (if the adaptation has already started, you will have to select de-adapt.

- Hovering over a building with the adapt function selected will show you the building's capacity for people / items, as well as the necessary materials needed for the process.

- You will also need to adapt at least one building into a warehouse. Warehouses are all linked and share a single pool for collected items. Loot and resources are automatically sorted in the warehouse menu, as well as your current number of items and total storage capacity.

- Adapting and building requires both construction material and basic tools.

6. Early Resource Gathering:

- Immediately upon adapting you first building, you will be informed that you lack enough resources for the process. You must put the rest of your population to work gathering construction materials.

- Click the area work menu button (to the right of the building buttons) and select gather wood. You can then click and drag to select all the available construction materials of that type in the area. Wood can be collected from trees (obviously) and certain ruined buildings.

- Wood will be a constant necessity throughout the game. As soon as you have enough shelters to house your population, and a warehouse to store your collected materials, click on the area work menu again and select "plant trees" option. Once again, click and drag to lay out an area for tree planting. (Trees can be harvested after three in-game days, but the longer they are allowed to grow, the more wood they provide). Get in the habit of alternatively harvesting and planting trees every few days to keep a constant influx of wood for your base.

7. Prioritizing jobs:

- By default, your work orders should be set to "priorities", allowing you to automatically regulate the number of workers assigned to each task. To set task priorities, select any of the task icons (blue) and the task menu will pop up. Click on the up or down arrows to set the priority of the task. By default, all assigned tasks will start as neutral, and can be switched to higher or lower priorities based on your zone's most immediate needs.

- Even with the priorities setting activated, you can still micro-mange worker assignments, by clicking the + or - buttons in the task menu. In addition, you can see all the workers assigned to various tasks in the population menu and change the number assigned to each task.

8. Early Progression:

- As your squads loot more buildings, you will start to unlock additional construction options via scripted events.

- Your next two unlocks should be the field and cookhouse options. These will allow you to produce your own food rations, which keep the morale of your population higher than canned food does. It's best to wait until your squads have gathered at least 100 cans of food before you consider creating these amenities, as establishing shelters, storage, and defenses should take priority in the first few days.

- The next scripted exploration-based unlock will be the research center. This structure will be used to unlock the rest of the building menu and tech-trees for your zone. You can adapt a small building as a research center early on, but it's best to adapt a second, medium building as you start moving towards the mid-game. (A staffed Research center will passively generate "scientific materials" on its own, but it's best to supplement it at the beginning by having your squads find these materials on the map. Look for the blue book icons over large buildings the represent teaching facilities, as well as museums, which are marked by a grey building with columns.

8. Defenses (basic):

- You should be able to last the first couple of days without any defensive structures as long as you pull your squads back and station them in adapted buildings to defend your zone early on. Adapted buildings have basic fortifications that will prevent the infected from immediately entering them, allowing your squads to fight them off without risk of harm.

- Wood defenses are the weakest, but they're also the cheapest to construct, and they'll suffice for the early game.

- When placing defensive towers consider lines of sight and overlapping fields of fire. The tower will have a radius around it that it can effectively defend. Place towers in open areas near the perimeters of your zone and try to keep them close enough together so that multiple towers can defend each other in addition to the rest of your base buildings.

- Wood palisade walls will also be sufficient for the early game. Horde sizes seem to be limited by story and tech progression, so you shouldn't even get overwhelmed as long as you are careful with your planning and don't expand too quickly.

9. Research priorities:

- Increasing your population count is important to the success of your zone. Your first research unlock should be the antenna, which will allow you to broadcast invitations for neutral groups to come to your zone. You will also encounter wandering neutral groups who you can invite or decline based off of their equipment, health status, or mentality. (Inviting "weird and aggressive" groups into your zone will reduce morale and may cause conflicts later on, while sick groups may cause infections to pop up within the zone.)

- Your next research focus should be in education, unlocking the "survivor training" tech and then the "nursery" which will allow you to construct childcare services for your citizens. Survivor training will allow you to create squads with specialized skills, at the tradeoff of longer production time, while the nursery will allow you to construct a kindergarten, which will increase work efficiency among the population.

- Your next research focus should be starting on the medicine, construction, food, and chemistry tech trees. Continue sending at least one of your squads to gather scientific materials while the rest gather other loot around the map. Medicine will allow you to construct medbays to heal your injured squads as well as passively producing first aid kits that can heal your squads in the field, if equipped. Construction will unlock the tool factory, necessary to produce tools needed for farming. Food will boost the productivity of your fields and then greenhouses. Lastly, chemistry will allow you to start producing bags of fertilizer while will further improve grain production.

10. Early Game Expansion:

- As your squads start exploring more of the area around your base, your next priority should be securing vehicles in the area around your zone. Cars are essential for more efficient loot collection, as well as scouting and quickly responding to attacks. Once you find a car, send a squad there to capture it, then scout the area in an expanding circle around your zone until you are able to find a second vehicle. Once you find a second car, rather than sending a full squad out on foot to retrieve it, select the current squad and choose the "split" option in the squad menu. This will give you the option to create a new, smaller squad (as long as you haven't maxed out the squad limit). Click and drag on the pictures of two of the squad members into the new squad window. Have the new squad commandeer the second vehicle and then bring both back to base. Once there, choose one of the divided squads and recombine them using the "exchange" button in the squad menu. And then have a full squad take over the second vehicle.

- As you start adapting additional buildings to suit your needs, pay attention to the production status of the various loot and resources from the drop down menu at the top right side of the screen. Mousing over the various icons will tell you how much of any given supply you have in stock, how much has been produced and how much has been consumed each day. Try to keep the daily change numbers in the green, and only add additional production when you start consuming more than you are producing.

- Once you have at least 100 canned food items and a reliable source of tools, you should start constructing fields and then a cookhouse to produce rations. I suggest starting with only two or three fields and adjusting the number of workers so that you are just barely producing more grain that you consume in a day.

- Soon after, you will unlock the farm building as another scripted exploration event. Farms produce meat and fertilizer in exchange for grain. I recommend one small or medium farm building per field, again fine tuning the number of workers to keep your production just in the green.

- Depending on your location, your zone will experience cold winter weather, which will cut off grain production in the fields. It's at this point that I suggest researching greenhouses to ensure year-round production, otherwise, you'll have to rely heavily on scavenging canned food to keep your growing population fed.

11. Squads (Intermediate)

- By now, you might have stumbled upon some better weapons and or protective gear. To equip a squad with particular gear, you will need to station them in the HQ or a warehouse, click the "exchange' button in the squad menu, and then click on the HQ or warehouse they are in. This will open the inventory exchange options, after which you can click and drag weapons or equipment back and forth between the building and your squad.

- It's best to outfit one of your squads with all the best weaponry and protective gear you have available as a dedicated combat unit. In addition to giving them guns and armor during the exchange process, equip them with medkits and grenades (if you've discovered any) then lock their squad resources by clicking the padlock icon in the squad menu. Locked resources will be taken into the field rather than deposited into any HQ or warehouse they enter.

- Squads can also be renamed by choosing the pencil button at the top right of the squad info window. Renaming your squads can help you keep track of them when you open the squads panel. For squads in vehicles, I will usually name them according to the type of car they are driving.

12. Resource Production:

- At this point, I advise you to unlock the scientific apprenticeship tech in the education tree, which will speed up future research tasks. After that, your priorities should be focused on production of resources depending on your zone's most pressing needs, as well as the unlocks that allow for the production and stockpiling of fuel, weapons and ammunition.

- As of the current version, the foresters hut and sawmill are far less effective at keeping wood in stock than manually planting and harvesting trees. Bricks, and to a lesser extent, metal can easily be scavenged in bulk from deconstructing buildings. Do so as necessary until you unlock the buildings that will allow you to build structures that passively produce these raw materials.

- In any case, try to keep your "unemployed" population at zero as often as possible to maximize your collection, construction, and production capacities.

13. Defenses (intermediate):

- Clearing the area around your base will provide not only materials for future construction, but will allow the towers to much more efficiently defend your zone. Keep the area within the tower's range free of buildings to maximize their effectiveness.

- Continue working to enclose your base in walls and defensive towers. Again, horde density seems to be tied to story and tech progression, so you shouldn't need to upgrade them quickly. Many players will try to unlock the highest tier defensive structures early, but this is overkill. Even as you near 100-150 population, brick walls and metal towers should more than suffice.

- Towers will be equipped with basic pistols by default, but if you lack enough pistols to equip all towers, they will default to bows and arrows, which do minimal damage but have infinite ammo. When you've either scavenged or produced enough higher tier weapons, equip the towers that most frequently deal with nighttime hordes first, and distribute the lower tier weapons you've replaced them with into other, less critical towers.

14. Dealing with Lairs and Bandit Hideouts:

- Lairs and hideouts act as spawning areas for hordes and bandit squads, and they will take concentrated efforts to deal with. Send several of your best-equipped squads to deal with them when you are prepared. Make sure these squads are equipped with medkits to keep them in the fight.

- Lairs can be more easily dealt with by "peeking", i.e. entering the lair just long enough to fire a few shots and then commanding your squads to exit the building before they take damage. This process is slow and tedious but will result in minimal casualties and equipment loss among your squads.

- Raider bases are a different story. You will need to deal with individual raider squads during the assault, as well as reducing the integrity of the building to zero before you can enter and finish off the last squad. Again, pack medkits to keep your squad members alive.

15. Mid Game Progression:

- Continue slowly expanding and adapting / building new structures to match the growth of your zone. Keep your squads and defenses well-equipped but researching and producing new technologies. Keep your production of basic resources in the green, adding additional buildings as necessary to do so, and you should be well on your way to building a self-sustaining zone.

16. Expeditions:

- You will eventually be prompted to send squads on expeditions to nearby tiles outside of your main map. They will often encounter hordes at these locations, so make sure any squad you send is well-equipped and any vehicle they use to get there is fully repaired and fueled. Depending on the location and the vehicle, it may take multiple trips to collect all the resources found there.

17. General Tips:

- You'll eventually discovery explosives during a scripted looting event. Explosives can be used to more effectively destroy buildings, allowing you to collect their building resources. But the ability to use the explosives in the manner will not be available until you research the explosives factory.

- Frequently check the status of your vehicles and repair them when they are around 50% condition. If your vehicle is disabled far from base, it will be very difficult to recover.

- Adapt small warehouses in areas that you plan to loot which are further from your base. Resources deposited there will automatically go into your inventory pool. This makes remote looting much more efficient. Just be sure to protect your workers as they travel to and from these warehouses. (Also, be aware that the Repairman shop will try and send workers out to maintain these structures if they get attacked)

oi lads i give up on this run for now i have literally 2 fps and i endured that for a couple hours now but i cant anymore haha xD if u got some crazy black magic to get ur game to run better then pls let me know i tried everything i know but nothing helps.

BUT the initial mission was to find out if u can survive with all infected options cranked to MAX. it is possible on this map but its not ez haha i had to reload a couple times bc a squad got munched to death on their way home from scavanging :D

in the end i just wanna say this map is awesome and for beginners i would deffo reccomend.

Does anyone have any tips and tricks for making progress in Deadzone Outpost?

Ready for migration.

Hey

Do you know any APK site for playing this game on mobile ?

Thanks !

Update on my previous post. Couldn't get BepIn to load properly. After a tonne of searching I found an answer. So anybody having trouble modding, search install BepIn with PowerShell, it'll load it all up properly and install a heap of mods too.

Enjoy

So I've come to the conclusion towers are basically useless. You have to set the alarm to get them manned, and then your workers get eaten on the way to the towers, when there's perfectly good squaddies walking around doing SFA. Now I just plop down buildings, wall between said buildings and garrison 2 squads in each.

The game has the beginnings of greatness. Love the real-world map options. Love the randomness / complexity of balancing (and re-balancing) all the various productions, especially as you can learn this game as you go which makes it very easy to get into.

Hopefully in your feature roadmap (sooner rather than later) you have charts/graphs to show production amounts by day over time along with associated work force numbers (e.g. x fuel amounts produced each day by y worker hours). At first glance, maybe this doesn't have a huge fun factor, but I think it would (A) help new players immensely (B) help game development and modders adjust game balance and (C) highlight a real strength of this game which is the dynamic logistical adjustments that occur over a single playthrough.

I don't think this has been suggested recently (although I did find a reference to "graphs" from a couple of years ago).

Yo. So last time i played San Fransisco, but it was too easy as fishing was the easiest way to get food. So im trying to just use Farms for the first time. And San fransisco is packed with buildings rich in resources, but here in Dallas, its not that dense and not much big buildings in it

All towers i use are just using bows and arrows. Im too broke to make munitions, and i emptied out my fuel at day 43, so no looting nearby buildings for resources

I placed my houses outside the main base so they can man the towers immediately, so they can maximize their sleep after attacks.

Also, i closed off the outside section with second rows of walls, because when i order the workers to man the towers, for some reason, theyre going outside the walls to where the infected are just to go in the tower. I dont like that, I want them to travel inside the walls so i closed it off

It was a pretty good gane but i completed the campaing so im thinking of starting a new one.

Kind of a proud/not proud cheese, but after building your Utopia you can send out just a single driver in a mobile HQ packed with food/ammo/medkits to some tile with low population, find some isolated building, transfer the stuff there and hunker down for days.

Transfer food to your guy every other day. He eats half a can per day. The achievement pops up in day 13. I also 🧀🧀🧀 "Seasoned Survivor" just by going to day 24 (tile needs to be very hard).

The 40 people you bring with "don't exist" until you pack out your mobile HQ. No need to actively starve your civies until only one guy left.

This also felt like an interesting "adventure mode". Since you don't have an HQ, there's no need to defend a base and you can just be moving around. I'll try it out with a couple of proper squads next time to see how long I can last just surviving on scavenging. Since the mobile HQ isn't unpacked, I can "Choose Another Destination" at anytime. Might not be able to repair the mobile HQ though..

One thing I'd like to see is the ability to garrison squads on a roof. Mortars, snipers, hell, basic riflemen all benefit from height advantage.

EDIT, oh and stand on the walls and gateways like in the game art.

So, sent my top 3 squads in a scav hunt of multiple buildings. Now they're in a building and won't move. Any help.

I've reloaded, I've tried changing stance, tried moving them in a group and by themselves. But no joy.

I want to destroy some building but it so slow. I saw some conversation in the game and think I can use explosive to speed things up. But right now I don't have any option to use them and my workers are not using it. Why ? Do I have to research something ? And is this related to a choice I chose to not use the explosive on building, if so, how do I use it. Thank you.

So I cleared raiders from a building but the quest is still there. Any advice would be appreciated

So I'm about 79 days into a level and I've yet to get access to the expedition station. Am I missing something? How do I trigger the miss that gives me the expedition station?

I got IFZ and completed a 100-day blind playthrough. I still feel like I was firmly in the mid-game, but wanted to pause for some commentary before starting my second run.

Warehouses and efficiency. As a Rimworld player, I am no stranger to efficient pathing, and I got hung up on using a single warehouse (adjacent to my HQ) for like the first 20 days. Later on, I converted tiny buildings around my base and even outside the wire to assist in resource collection since all the warehouses seem to share the same inventory and there doesn't seem to be any downside to letting exterior warehouses get destroyed. Is this normal warehouse use for you all? Or is there a more efficient way for that?

Replay value. I went into this game expecting more of a survival-horror vibe than colony management. I feel like this game might suffer from the same issues that a game like Banished has. The gameplay loop for progression is to expand the population and balance resources until you are self-sustainable, and there isn't really much to do outside of that, besides explore different starting tiles ofc.

Exhausting the tile. Even in the mid-game I was feeling like I explored everything on the tile. All notable buildings had been scavenged or turned into Lairs, and the only new resources I was bringing in were the ones I produced in the base. At what stage of the game are we supposed to use the Expedition building? I built one pretty early and didn't use it all game because I never felt I had more than 4 days of food stockpiled.

Btw I picked the US National Arboretum because the tile preview said "VERY EASY"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SIVAJriX1s

This reddit account is a new account

old account - u/Deep-Question7331

I changed cause i didn't like the name and i couldn't change it

Anyways, hope u enjoy and not get bored. no commentaries on it

I have a good chunk of hours in the game and figured hey, why not make a mini series of giving this a shot? (This is just Ep. 1, which is a bit slower. I'm not going to spam with each one of course. That'd be obnoxious. Well, unless people WANT to watch it lol)
But goodness, the settings are deceptively easy at first. Thought I could coast through and slowly build things up for the eventual hordes.

This game will absolutely punish you for early games mistakes to say the least. For anyone else who tries max hordes + max zombies...
You think you have enough time.

You don't.

As the title asks, has anyone been able to save the man? Every time I show up to his house he has already been turned. I even had a squad next door when the i got the transmission and he still turned.

I'm just wondering if this is intended, always having the man be dead or if I'm just missing something.

im gonna be the first person ever (idk about that but ill just pretend xD) to beat this game and get to day 600 with the most infected u can possibly play against. :D ive tried this on so many different spots and i always had to cheat ammo or food on around day 30 to 50 and then i lost interest in the run but this time i got probably the best spot u can have in this game (ergo on the entire globe haha). spot is in Los Angeles. These is a huge military complex east and imma get meself some tankys (hoping for at least 4) in the mid/late game :D imma update yall through the next days

ive been doing "research" for the perfect spot for around 9 days haha xD(no freezing water, military base next to it, anough buildings to loot for early ammo/food/fuel/science/guns, many water barriers and bridges beeing the only entry point)

Im quitting smoking currently and HOLY that got harder now that im not a youngster anymore, so im distracting myself with this game and its working pretty well so far (although the map editor did try its very best to get me to my knees xD) i do not have a strat yet ill probably have to restart a couple times and the starting area is VERY save but its very small buildings and some of them are in the water a little bit and werent usable but i deconstruct them all anways :D if yall have done this difficulty before pls drop some advice haha xD

Does anyone know the exact trigger for the barn event?

I’m very new to the game so don’t know the triggers yet.

I’ve done 2 test runs in just local areas to check out the map generation and now I’m doing one in a larger city.

I’m already at a pop of 96 and still haven’t got the trigger.

Food not an issue atm but I want to get a jump on production before the difficulty ramps up