Hello Dustland newbies, welcome to my guide. Here I will be posting some well-known tricks and strategies that have been spread and tested on the game's official discord channel that haven't made its way yet to the official forums.

Due to the nature of the players on the Discord channel, we're way more interested in stress testing and poking around for exploits than sharing. Its not that we don't want to, its just a very small circle of hardcore optimizers and what we find out becomes adopted quickly.

Thats why today I'm going to compile some basic strats that we've all sort of agreed upon are best in practice.

Please Remember to like and favourite!

You can cook Rations.

This will turn Rations into cooked rations, which don't have the stress penalty. Cooking custom meals in general will create unique foods that lower stress.

The higher your Cooking Skill, the higher the stress BONUS is that food have.

Get raw food ingredients and cook em. With a high Cooking level, you'll never eat rations or be stressed again!

Once you get a dining table for your truck, not only will food lower stress, it'll lower fatigue too!

Some other important foods to bring with you are Alcohol and Caffeine.

Beer and other alcoholic beverages reduce stress while out on the road but will make your character drunk, so make sure you have another driver. Coffee resets fatigue on a crewmember. A dining table and exquisite dining table also reduces fatigue whenever you eat. Paired with legendary food, you could stay on the road for extended periods of time so long as you have these items.

Chat with convoys or look up the official dev guide on Steam to find new recipes. You could also do trial and error.

For your PC, you want Defence, Intelligence, and Cooking.

As the PC, another one of your main stats is Speech.

You will level speech up throughout the game through bargaining. A pet parrot will help boost your Speech and is what I'd suggest you get.

There is no natural way to increase your natural defence outside of character creation. Only armor boosts it after that. As the PC, its important to boost your natural defence. Intelligence determines how much exp you get which is why its important to all builds. And as the PC, it would make sense for you to have Cooking as the person in your party the most.

Defence:16
Intelligence: 16
Cooking: 13

These are the stats I use for my games and are what I suggest you should use too. If you use these stats, you'll have 4 extra points. its not enough to level any of these stats further but you can level Attack and one extra stat once.

I suggest Husbandry due to how it determines the stat boost to your pet. I'd aim for something like Husbandry 13 and then dump everything else into Cooking until you get cooking 30-35 throughout a playthrough.

The best companions in the game are the Technician, the Rancher and the Instructor.

The Technician Fulfils the role of the designated Crafter and Designated Focus crewmember. With a Falcon pet and a husbandry of 13, you can easily reach 40 Focus before any leveling, and makes the S-Tier Focus-based crewmembers redundant. 40 Focus is enough to solve most focus checks in the game. If its not enough, you can give her the Focus Glasses item to boost her even further.

But Technician's main skill is Crafting. Crafting 30-35 along with a crowbar and Engineer Hat will let her craft legendary gear by the end of the game.

The Rancher is secretly the best combat character in the game. Due to how Pets work, his massive Husbandry stat gets dumped right into Attack once you get an attack pet. Even Attack NPCs like the Enigma don't hold a candle to this guy. The Rancher also has the added benefit of being able to talk to animals, an oddly specific yet overly useful skill in the game. It unlocks secret options that have incredible benefits for your playthroughs.

The Rancher also has a relatively high intelligence and focus, creating a very balanced build that doesn't require a lot of points to get going.

Lastly the Instructor with his base 50 Intelligence covers the hardest intelligence checks in the game as a forth and final standard member. He is also very low maintenance and you dont have to spend any more points on stats, going straight to traits instead.

Generally for NPC crewmembers, you want 13 Husbandry and 13 Intelligence. Which is roughly the cost of 1 positive trait per skill, or roughly 2 levels into each skill.

Veteran Driver/Ex-Racer and Night Driver are considered the more important traits because they give you a flat speed bonus.

I personally take Ex-Racer and Night Driver for that sweet 20% speed boost at night. Gourmand can help if you're struggling with stress at the start by eating food.

Besides those, it depends on your playthrough. You might want Violent if you want to focus on killing zombies or Monogamist if you dont want relationship drama.

One of the better negative traits to take is teetotaler, nobody cares if your character stays drunk longer.

Some truly awful negative traits are Accident-Prone, Stinky and Troublemaker. These will disrupt your gameplay.

There are players who swear by the -3 rheumatism negative trait. Rain makes you very stressed, but in a build with ex-racer and night driver, the -3 lets you take powerful traits like Bloodthirsty which lowers stress from killing things in melee or the Faithful trait which is one of the few skills that reduces how much stress you gain in the first place. Experienced players take this negative trait early on and get rid of it ASAP once they level up a few times.

The secret to breaking the game is making your first settlement and trading with surrounding towns.

Make sure your town can produce all the needs of the first 1-3 towns near you completely. Make sure to make your own ammo, building materials and tires for sustainability.

Once you have a base that can make everything the other npc towns need, you can start using the trade function and sign an agreement to trade with those towns.

You will start making passive income and you'll transition from selling things between towns to raiding zombie hotspots for resources, which is funner!

3 Guards/1 Wall is the optimal split for defence btw.

You need the resource "Building Materials" to upgrade your structures and plots. You get these by buying them from npc towns. Some of the things you can build will have a minimum "Prosperity" requirement before you can upgrade them.

You build prosperity by upgrading other smaller, less advanced structures first. You can tell how much prosperity and building materials you have or need on the city management window.

Be warned that you will start getting raided once your town reaches 10 Prosperity.

You will need a Trapper Hat and Tactical Wear. They both provide +2 Fitness. You want 5 Fitness for this trick to work.

Focus: Get a zombie to wound you during combat. 5 Fitness prevents you from being infected.
Speech: Fail bargaining checks.
Intelligence: Fail learning recipes.
Crafting: Fail crafting checks.

Pick recipes and crafting items with the lowest chances to increase your odds of failing.

Youll notice that there is a banking system in the game. Travel to these locations in person if you can help it, the fees are killer.

The best way to break the bank is to deposit scraps and let it gain interest. Investing is a trap, you more often than not, break even at best or lose money. The other option is to get Loans to get you over that last hurdle setting up your settlement. They can also turn your scrap to credits.

Besides that, the bank is kind of a trap mechanic meant to make you poor. It starts paying off when you're rich already and have your first 10,000 scraps deposited, gaining interest for you per day.

in no particular order:

• Winch
  
• Improved Tire Chains
  
• Caterpillar Treads
  
• Mudproofing Kit
  
• bouyancy kit
  
• Engine heating vent
  
• heavy duty tarpaulin
  
• reinforced windshield
  
• Dust Filter
  
• Improved Insulator

Get Dining Table + Exquisite Dining Table for that Fatigue reduction bonus when eating.

Due to the nature of the Sheol map and how you spend most of the game underground on paved road, these upgrades become less important and you can get them as needed instead.

Lastly, you can use Cores to buy more upgrade slots to add to your truck.

You can take on missions in bars from NPCs. some of them will give you bounty missions which is about killing zombies and relatively quick and easy. Other NPCs will ask you to deliver custom items to different towns, which is more money if youre heading there anyways.

make sure you convert scraps to creds to save on weight. Yes, the money lost in conversion is part of the game. thats why we have faction reputation. if youre in a town you have a good faction rep with, those fees decrease.

You can also sell crafting items in towns.

You can potentially have a Light Truck going 96km/h.

if youre willing to deal with the headache at the start, pick this one over the normal or heavy one.

You can find Ancient Core to upgrade your truck on the map or by doing main story and side story missions.

If you have the junk material, you can craft Ancient cores now.

The Light Truck is notably terrible on the Sheol map. Its still the best truck in the game, but its devastatingly bad at the start of Sheol.

For less experienced players, I highly recommend the default truck or the combat truck for this particular map. The Light Truck is great in short bursts thanks to its speed and fuel efficiency, but Sheol tests the endurance of the trucks which the Light Truck simply does not have until fully upgraded.

Go chat with one and pick the trade option to see whats in their inventory. Sometimes they'll surprise you. You can also buy crafting ingredients from them in general. Groovy!

I'll let you guys discover these on your own!

A good portion of the Ruin-specific mechanics are, from what I've seen, purely optional. Carrying certain gear or Ruins skills will make Ruins easier but you can totally go through the largest Ruin in the game and not need them. What matters most is scouting a ruin efficiently.

Ruin skills are character-specific skills you can activate or are passively active in the Ruins that confer some sort of advantage such as lowering group stress or giving a passive buff to your party's stats.

The true king of going through Ruins is Carry Capacity. The higher your Fitness is, the more you can carry in and out of the ruins. You will need to carry LOTS of Ammo and a few Medkits. Usually 10 water and 10 food per character is enough for a single run.

Combat-centric Crewmembers like the Veteran tend to have naturally high Fitness, ranging from 3-4. You can bring multiple crewmembers and create more than one team to do Ruins but considering theres no real penalty to leaving a dungeon and trying again after camping, there isn't really a need to bring any more than your standard party.

Crewmembers with 1 Fitness can barely carry their own gear but that can be fixed with wearing Fitness increasing Gear like the Trapper Hat. This also makes the Backpacks the most important Ruins gear in the game. Theres also that one flashlight helmet you can craft that increases your scout radius by one. Very useful but not mandatory either.

The best Backpack is the Military Backpack which you can only find in Ruins. A crewmember with naturally high fitness, wearing a Trapper Hat and Military Backpack is good enough. Even better if they have a Ruin Skill.

You can also avoid combat in general and focus on finding loot stashes around the map or scouting it as fast as possible. Mobs drop some interesting loot though so there is a reason to fight them from time to time. You can find some really strong weapons in the Ruins that beat out even the endgame craftable weapons.

As of the time of this writing, the DLC just dropped so these advice are subject to change. I'm confident with my initial assessment of the new ruins mechanic but I'll update this as more information comes out.

And thats all from me for now. If you have any other insights you want to add, feel free to leave a comment.

Hopefully these tips will help you get out of the buying and selling trade loop, slaving for wages from these greedy wasteland bastard city-slickers and their cheapskate costumers. They can go straight back to hell, you got your own town now.