In tough mode, the first 3 survivors are critical. Choose the following survivors.

1. A Defender with holy warrior + any other good traits you might get on the Defender. Late game you will need a tank and the holy warrior Defender can equip the best late game gear. You might rescue one, but there is no guarantee and re-rolling with a ritual is hit-or-miss. When leveling, give the Defender 2 points in melee defense, 3 points each in stalwart and resilient, with the other 4 points in evasion choosing the 40% cover bonus as it is very very helpful when you properly position the Defender.

2. A scout/samuri/fighter/survivalist with 2 of spotter/huntsmen/perceptive + retreat/disappear for the vision, sniper rifles, and disappear/retreat that is the key ability that makes solo scavenging possible + any other good traits you might find.

3. A survivalist with naturalist + other good traits. This gives you the entangle ability, which will really help with the first few assaults against your base.

Both scouts and survivalists can put points in gather, which will greatly help with rescue missions and is very useful for solo scavenging. Choose 1 of those two and put points in gather right away - probably the scout, but if the survivalists has good gather skills already, then choose the survivalist. A combat knife is very useful - see solo scavenging below.

Rolling these 3 will probably take you 20-30 minutes of constant re-rolling. I save this file separately so if I really mess up I can restart without doing the dice rolls.

Some players like to find a good researcher/constructor/crafter, but you can find all the gear you need scavenging and trading, plus those traits are fairly common anyway.

Click on the photo to see larger images.

To start just hide between your starting buildings and farms with melee survivors on each end - ranged in the middle. You should have quarter staffs and basic bows by the first attack against your settlement. By the 3rd attack, you should have scavenged some basic rifles and leather jackets. The kill box becomes necessary when ghosts start to appear. Before ghosts, you should be able to manage the fights just fine with pause.

This is an early day-25 kill box. The kill box is at the T-intersection of the 3 middle cabins. Eventually you will want to transition to kill box designs depicted lower.





The above is what you eventually want for your kill box. The design below is almost as effective (it lacks some barricades & sandbags), and shows an actual attack.



The sandbags are necessary because they give survivors bonus accuracy. The designs funnel attacks into 1 kill box that can be hit by 6 survivors from the front 2 rows on either side of the kill box and many more from the rows farther back - it just depends on the range of their weapons. Since survivors simultaneously hit attackers from 2 sides, attackers suffer bonus flanked damage. It gives the enemies no cover bonus, unless they survive the kill box and advance. The first row is also far enough from the kill box to force short-range attackers to advance 1 space out of the kill box before they can fire.

Give the 1st row survivors evasion/armor items, most of the 2nd row survivors medpacks and the 3rd row survivors protection spells, with a sprinkling of Eye of Horus charms in the 2nd and 3rd rows. Use your attack speed and accuracy items on your most deadly survivors.

If it comes to it, then you can retreat injured survivors into the buildings for protection.

You must ensure that survivors in their defensive positions cannot be hit by any ranged attacks, except from the kill box. The barrels block ranged attacks as do buildings, but the rain barrels and look-out posts do not. Use rain barrels (at least 1 for each survivor), look-out posts (goal is 8 awareness), and buildings to circle the entire base so survivors can harvest resources without too much walking. Place beds and food tables in buildings near where you harvest to reduce travel time. Ice boxes and pendents of insight are good investments.

IN DESERT SURVIVAL MODE ON TOUGH THIS TECHNIQUE IS MANDATORY!

In tough mode it is very important to quickly send your best gatherer/scavenger to solo scavenge high level gear - the "?" camps. Use the "R" key or the microscope icon to filter the camps. Remember you can selected any camp even when it is faint because it is not in the filter so be careful where you click. Still, you can cancel the fight if you mis-click.

The most important gear for a solo scavenger is a combat knife (or Demonite Knife/Wakizashi) for the move speed and retreat ability (ninja, ronin, fencer, conspiracy theorist & a melee weapon of any kind, if you lack a knife/Wakizashi). Without a melee weapon skills like retreat do not work. You must gather enough scraps/sell enough items with the first trader to buy such a knife - or maybe you will get lucky on the first few camps you actually fight and find one, unless of course, you have a survivor with gather and retreat. Binoculars are also useful. As you might notice in the below screenshot, my solo scavenger, on day 25, already has tier 5 rare armor that I scavenged. Once you can find/buy a rocket suit or better yet samuri armor, then you will have an additional escape ability and can take much greater risks.

Once you identify a "?" camp "fight" it, but obviously avoid actually fighting the enemies. Circle the edge of the map looking for crates and scouting enemies' patrol routes. It is helpful to follow them around so you know when you can stop and loot a crate. Enemies' vision range is depicted by the small transparent monster head icons inside diamonds as shown below. Each hex with an icon in it means the enemy has vision on that space. If one spots you, then either save scum or use disappear to avoid attacks and then retreat. The music will change when you are spotted. If you have both charge and disappear, then pause when spotted, activate charge, unpause very briefly so the charge activates, then pause again (might be many pauses) to activate disappear, and finally guide your survivor to the exit and just click exit at the top when you have a clear route to the exit. You also might need to save scum if you run into an encounter, but usually you can pause, disappear, & retreat from an encounter.



Do not be afraid to retreat from a camp and then "fight" the same camp again to find a more favorable map. You might have to save scum a few times until you get the hang of avoiding enemies while you find and open the crates. "Fight" the camps at night (21:00 - 6:00) to reduce the enemies' vision range. Once you successfully open a crate, consider retreating to secure the loot and then "fight" the camp again to find more crates. Remember to pause the game between "fights". The remaining crates will still be there, but the map will change. Taking loot this way will take time and thus it is more useful to "fight" very hard camps without any or with only few fallen angels/morax both of whom have very long vision and are difficult to avoid. The camp disappears when all its crates are gone.

Once you find good armor, the solo scavenger might be able to tank attacks while opening a crate and then use the disappear ability to retreat.

1 tank with the best armor/evasion/health available & a melee weapon + shield mainly for the shield block chance, which requires a melee weapon.
2 snipers
2-4 dps (depending on your research level) & 1 with high gather/scavenge for rescue missions

When you are tired of solo scavenging, this is the team for scavenging hard camps. Also, do not forget to auto-resolve easier camps to and from the camps you actually want to scavenge. It does not take any extra game time and the loot is very useful for trading and xp farming. In fact, you will want a combat team just to auto-resolve easy camps for loot. Looting easy camps is far more game time efficient than crafting. To speed up auto-resolves, pre-click where the "x" is on the final screen to close it faster, but you won't see the loot results or just turn off combat results in settings. After you finish a camp - ALWAYS pause so you do not waste in-game time.

It's a good idea to put debuff/buff skills on the tank since otherwise there's not much for him/her to do, except soak damage behind cover. Do your best to give the tank armor, a shield or both with the "harden" ability (although the best armor is the Crystal Guard so use it late game). On the short-range dps put a medpack, eye of horus, a protection spell, and other attack/speed accuracy items. Always give binoculars to the survivor with the longest vision; vision is very very useful in deciding how and when to attack.

Use a sniper to lure attackers into your squad. Send your longest range or fastest survivor out to hit 1 enemy and pull back behind your tank. Arrange your squad so nobody will be hit by ranged attacks except the tank. Pull the enemy (preferably only 1 group) into your squad so your tank has cover for the ranged attacks and your dps is as close as possible. Once your tank has all the attacks focused on him/her, you can move your dps/snipers closer as enemies fall - especially to keep your shorter ranged dps active. It's good too keep your snipers focused on long-range enemies that your short range dps cannot reach.

Once you have the hex ability on some survivors (the hex that puts -50% attack speed and -50% accuracy), then you can hex very dangerous enemies and leave them as last to kill - the Belials for instance do 75% lasting damage so hexing them is great.

One technique is to hide short range dps behind a corner while your tank is visible to the enemy and closer to the corner. It's important that your tank is closer so the enemies do not aggro on your short range dps. Keep your long range dps behind the tank and use them to pull the enemy toward the corner. Your short range dps will gain flanking damage against advancing units once they pass the corner. Just ensure you know your short range dps is not in danger of being attacked from behind by another enemy group.

You need to adapt the focus of your dps using the pause function to handle situations where your tank is taking too much damage or about to be overrun. Entangle is often very useful to lower enemy dps and prevent melee units from overrunning your tank.

Drop the tank (or give him/her a dps weapon instead of a melee evasion/armor weapon) when you want to auto-resolve fights instead of manually fighting. The extra dps helps reduce the damage your squad takes in auto-resolve. However, tanky melee units often weigh too heavily in auto-resolve fights, so you will take less damage by manually fighting against legions for instance.

Lastly, note you can assign survivors to control groups by selecting the desired ones and pressing "ctrl + #" (1-9) so those survivors are assigned to that number key. At any time, "q" selects all survivors on the screen.

Do not greet other survivor camps until late game when you have more loot than you know what to do with. They are difficult to appease and rescue missions are frequent enough. The only real benefit to greeting a survivor camp is the possibility of recruiting a high quality survivor. Some high quality survivors only spawn at friendly survivor camps, but when they become unfriendly, their attacks are brutal and tough mode already is tough enough.

Traders are also common enough that you do not need additional traders from other survivor camps.

Of course, if you do greet a camp that becomes troublesome, you may go wipe it out - though it might not be so easy.

The key to tough mode is solo scavenging high level gear plus effective base design. The hardest part is surviving the first 20 days or so. Once your tank has high tier gear, attacks will be much easier to handle. The tedious part is constantly retreating with the solo scavenger - often without collecting any loot.