This brief guide goes over your health and happiness, and basic priorities and how to manage them.

It does not go over the traits of characters.

A depressed survivor will often cause other survivors to become depressed so it's important to focus on these negative traits. Depression can lead to suicide or theft & abandonment. Depression can also lead to being 'broken' though this isn't a state of happiness, it renders the character uncontrollable and can prevent other survivors from sleeping during the night.

• Content
  
• No visible description
  
• Sad
  
• Depressed

• Killing innocent civillians
  
• Stealing from innocent civllians
  You'll only take a negative hit once. You can leave and return and steal more and you wont further decrease in happiness.
  
• Being raided and having someone become wounded
  
• Being ill
  Caused by lack of food and or cold temprature

• Killing snipers
  While there are few, killing snipers will cause people to be happy. Rest assured you'll be saving more lives than lives taken.
  
• Killing bandits
  You can identify bandits through their dialog prior to engaging in combat with them.
  
• Having lots of furniture.
  This includes chairs, beds, guitars and a radio. Zlata will significantly increase the rate at which the guitar increases happiness over time.
  
• Being well fed
  
• Helping other survivors via the door and objectives while out scavaging

While it's important to keep your survivors fed, it's not the most important thing to focus on. Under most circumstances you'll want to prioritize the sick and injured while keeping everybody else above hungry, though if the opportunity arrises to cure someone of slight wounds or sickness, you should prioritize the sick and injured over an already hungry survivor.

• Well fill
  
• No visible description
  
• Hungry
  
• Very Hungry
  
• Starving

To overcome sickness and injures you generally want to feed said person until they're full and give them pills or bandages and send them to bed. I like to think of it like this; you need to get a repair factor to 2.

Pills / Bandages increase the factor by 1.
Bed increases the factor by 1.
A temprature of 20 or greater increases the factor by 1.

• Slightly wounded
  
• Wounded
  
• Severly wounded
  
• Lethally wounded

• Slightly sick
  
• Sick
  
• Severely sick
  
• Terminally sick

Pills and bandages make extremely good trade commodities which is why it's best to get people healthy ASAP so you can spend all the medical supplies on components, wood and parts.

The roaming house merchant is a Saint and every 3 days at 1120 he'll arrive with some food, components, wood and parts.

The game starts off at a random time during a cycle of summer and winter. If you start during the winter you want to rush for a hatchet as it essentially gets you free lumber and firewood.

Some people don't like to upgrade the furnace if the game starts during winter because by the time they're ready to upgrade it, winter is already over.

I encourage you to do your own thing. This is what I do, and what I've found my friends to do as well when starting a new game.


The first night is standard. Go to the abandoned cottage and get wood and components for two beds and enough food for 2-3 people. If you brought tools, you can always leave them behind and pick them up the following night.

By the second night you want two beds because during day three you'll have two tired people. The scavenger and the guard. I like to return to the abandoned cottage to pick up other important things I missed, like excess wood and water and any tools I left behind.

By the third night you'll want a knife so you can save the girl at the supermarket, or take out bandits at the apartment building. If you wern't able to get a knife, bring a crowbar. If you're going to the apartment building, you may want to assassinate, run and hide as it makes a lot more noise than the knife.

By the fourth night you'll want the home boarded up. If you're lucky you'll have obtained a gun from the supermarket. If not, you can always pick one up at the apartment building tonight. Additionally, Franko comes to visit today and he'll top you up on any food issues you might be having, or component and wood issues. Don't neglect water.