The developers themselves have made a list of suggestions for cities you should start your first playthrough in, but this game also allows you to pick any city on the planet, even your hometown. The reasons why the recommended cities are the best options for your first start are the same as in real estate: Location, Location, and Location.


By starting in this italian city the game sets me up at a cozy position which provides me with the strategic location of being in the middle of a huge scavenging zone, while also giving me great tactical options for defense against raids by the infected. Medieval walls, river channels and bridges all provide numerous advantages I wouldn’t otherwise get if I chose a random location on the world map.

Since Infection Free Zone gives you controls over the flow of time, you should always use the pause key Space or time controls F1,2 and so forth to prevent stuff happening during exposition and story events.

This also lets you take stock of your surroundings and think on your first moves. If you have left the option for tutorial events On, you will have some direction of what and when to do, but even those won’t properly prepare you for what is to come.

You are given by default a squad of armed civilians to use as your scouts, scavengers and fighters and if you manage to keep them alive, they will earn experience and level up boosting their stats in combat and mentioned scavenging.

Common sense might lead you to start scavenging right next to your starting location, but in fact, because of how more likely you are to be attacked by the hordes of infected at night, you are better off leaving those buildings closest to your base for scavenging at night, and use the daylight to venture out to a greater distance. Do note your squads don’t have needs for food or sleep, so you can keep them outside for as long as you can keep them alive.

Buildings marked with question marks offer unknown loot, while those with clear markings, like these stacks of cans of food on all the other buildings offer exactly what is advertised. This is where you want to send your squads to scavenge first and secure your food.

The white line shows you the path the squad will take and also the place where it can enter the building. This is actually very important to remember because squads can only enter and exit buildings at these specific points and when you are running away from mutant devil dogs you don’t want to send your squad walking around a whole block to find shelter.

The time it takes to scavenge a building depends on three factors. How big the buildings are, how many squad members you have, and what is their veterancy level. For fast scavenging you want a small building, full 4 people in a squad and some chevrons on them. That does mean less loot but also quicker turnabouts and supply deliveries.

Since you need room to grow your community of survivors you will need to send out builders to convert ruins into habitable buildings by using the build UI menu at the bottom left of the screen. This costs resources based on what you are constructing. Wood, metal, bricks, all of which is presented in drop down menus at the resource bar at the top right of the screen. The game will automatically add your population to tasks but you can manually edit the number of people on each task by using the last menu icon of the three at the bottom left.

If you want to create more squads to scavenge your surroundings faster and fight off the infected, you need weapons to arm them with and the ammo for those guns. The HQ building has a few extra ones in stock but these are just handguns which aren’t very effective. What you need are automatic rifles and higher caliber rounds. These you can get by scavenging buildings which have the police shield icon above them.

Once night falls the roaming hordes of the infected come out to play and it is not safe to be outside scavenging. Even in the first few days of a playthrough. Luckily you have a save and load option so just make sure to use it before you go on nightly looting missions.

Each squad can only carry up to four items of loot, so get used to constantly sending them out and bringing them back to deliver found goods to the HQ building. This becomes easier later on with vehicles and their extra capacity for loot as well as by using the shift key to give a chain of orders to squads.

Don’t expect your first night to go by silently, as you can find yourself under attack in no time. Safest way to fight off an infected horde attack is to be indoors and shoot at them while they are trying to break in.

Since you now have more guns and ammo and need to both defend and scavenge you also need more than just one squad. You can create additional squads by using the squad interface over to the top right and clicking on the green walking icon to switch to the squad list and click on the create new squad option.

The game will automatically give the new squad the most powerful weapons available at the HQ and you should use this new squad as your main combat group considering their firepower. They do carry a limited amount of ammo, so after scavenging around and when you send them back to the HQ building they will automatically reload and restock on ammo.

To gain more population you will have to find more survivors, those that are willing to join anyway. They are most often marked with yellow cards and won’t move around the map during the night. You will have to go to them, send them on their way to your HQ and clear a path for them.

A good starting defensive option are wooden towers, which have a certain range of fire and can be built almost anywhere. They take some wood, a few guns and some people to act as guards inside them.

To collect more wood you have to use the resource collection tool and choose the gather wood option on nearby trees to harvest logs from them. This is the part where I get reminded of Going Medieval gameplay very much. The task of woodcutting is something your population will do but only during the day, and as soon as dusk starts falling they will run back to the HQ building leaving everything behind.

To clear out stubborn infected hordes which have taken up residence in your newly live neighborhood you have to walk a squad right into them. There is just no other option, and you don’t want to leave them there to attack your defenseless workers as they chop down trees for example.

As you explore these once great cities you will come across abandoned vehicles which are in working condition, with full tanks of gas. You can immediately take over these vehicles and use them to great effect. And here you can see an example of the problem of single entrance point buildings where a squad in close combat with the infected gets a lot of damage before it can take cover. These abandoned buildings are also not as defensible as your own remodeled HQ or shelters so expect to take damage when defending from inside them.

Once other survivors have been met and you have accepted them into your population you should make sure their path to your HQ is clear of hordes of infected. Back at the HQ my builders have finished the wooden tower and it is already showing its usefulness by stopping the nightly attack far from my main buildings.

You can see as day breaks the new survivors want to go to my HQ but can’t pass a building filled with the infected. Only after I came back, removed the infected, and cleared that building did they start moving towards my HQ building again.

The next construction project for your new settlement are fields for growing crops. These are fundamental food producing plots of land you should keep close to your most fortified buildings. The crop harvested here can later be used to cook fresh meals. Better food actually influences the mood of your population and it is an important game mechanic for mid and late game.

With more available population you can add one more additional squad, and especially if you have found more assault rifles for them to use. Once you have these three squads I would suggest not using up more of your core population for this use and focus on collecting wood and metal from the environment while farming, and building more defenses.

The vehicles are of great use here as you can cover a lot of the city fast, and go to distant locations for more rare loot. Like books used for research of technology for example, or medical supplies.

Converting one of the abandoned buildings into a cookhouse is a necessity to turn the sacks of grain into edible meals for your population. A bigger cookhouse now is a good investment as you won’t have to add another later as your population grows.

infected than you have defended against in the past. As soon as you see them all converging on your HQ you have to call back all your squads and combine their cones of fire to quickly kill off the attackers before they do permanent damage to your settlement like tearing down buildings you can’t afford to spend a lot of resources on constructing again.

Losing a defensive tower or even two is a small price to pay and it is what they are there for. Later when you put up some walls and gates those will be destroyed less often. A very good tactic is to try and attack the hordes of infected from multiple directions and stop them from overrunning a single location with sheer numbers.

Sooner or later you will run into hostile humans as well. These can be armed with all sorts of weapons and will use similar tactics to yours. Think wisely is the effort of killing them worth the expanse in lives and gear.

Other types of enemies include infected dogs which are very fast, can show up out of nowhere and bite whole squads to death if they catch them in the open. Running them over with a vehicle is not a bad idea, as long as you have the resources to repair the vehicle afterwards as it will take damage from them.

To finally get research going you need to choose one of the abandoned buildings as a future research center and once it is completed a few of your survivors will work there during the day shift hours and finish the research projects you choose using the top left research menu. This requires the mentioned books so make sure to scavenge in libraries, universities and schools for them.

When facing a huge and bunched up horde of enemies coming your way, you can try using the vehicle as a battering ram and drive through them dealing lots of damage but the health of the vehicle will suffer a lot in return and it might quickly lead to your squad's unfortunate demise.

An alternative to straight up ramming into a bunch of infected groups is to use the vehicle's speed and maneuverability to draw the infected away from your HQ. By keeping it just a few steps away from the leading group of the infected you can keep pulling them away from your settlement and into another direction while also shooting them from inside the vehicle and cutting down their numbers.

There is certainly a lot more to see, experience and learn in Infection Free Zone like the massive single infected brutes which show up in later days, and the cool winter weather that stops you from growing food outside but I will leave these and other subjects for a future more advanced guide.