First steps

You are not going to win the apocalypse in your first evening. You are going to stay alive, find a bottle of water, and learn which noises matter. Here is the order to worry about things in.

#Water first, then food

Thirst falls faster than hunger: about 1.2 a minute against 0.8. From full that is roughly an hour and twenty minutes of water and two hours of food. Below 5 on either you cannot sprint, which is usually how new survivors die. At 0 you take damage every single minute until you fix it.

Bottled water, canned food and the odd burger turn up in buildings, on bodies and on traders' shelves. Dirty water works, and about a third of the time it makes you ill. Drink it when the alternative is worse, not because it was free.

#Stay out of the hot zones

Some places are hot. Radiation climbs while you are inside one and only creeps back down once you leave. At 400 you are properly sick: damage every minute, and your immunity draining while it lasts. Immunity is what holds an infection back, so radiation is what turns a survivable bite into a fatal one.

Rad pills purge radiation faster than waiting. If your Geiger is ticking, you are still in it.

#The dead

• Walkers are slow and everywhere. A bite from one has a real chance of infecting you.
• Runners are fast and die quickly. They are the reason you do not sprint through alleys.
• Brutes take a lot of putting down, hit hard and knock you over. Fighting one in the open is a choice.

They see and they hear. Darkness, fog and crouching make you harder to spot; flashlights and vehicles make you easier. A rifle shot carries a very long way, a suppressed shot barely at all, sprinting a little, an engine or a horn a lot. A melee weapon brings one zombie. A gun brings the street.

Bites also infect. Armour helps, and the right skills help more.

#Scavenging

• Search dead zombies. It takes a few seconds and the body is only there for a minute or two. Expect scrap, garbage, a bandage, water, a lockpick, sometimes cash. Brutes are worth more.
• Your inventory is a grid, so shape matters as much as weight. A backpack adds a second grid underneath your own.
• Always keep room for a bandage and a bottle of water. Always.
• Junk is not junk. Scrap metal is the backbone of crafting, and traders buy whole categories of things you would otherwise leave behind.
• Craft by hand with J. Better recipes want a workbench or a campfire, and some want a blueprint you have to find.

#Meeting people

Most fights start because nobody said anything. Talk first; it is free.

• A party is up to four survivors (F6). Within 100 m you share XP, and corpse loot gets dealt out between you instead of going to whoever searched first. You see each other on the map.
• A group is the lasting version, made with /group create TAG Name. Groups hold bases and vehicles between sessions.

#Your first base

You need a building plan. Using it opens the build menu, and the first thing you plant is a base flag: it claims about 35 m around itself for you or your group. Flags have to be 90 m apart, so somewhere quiet beats somewhere convenient.

• Inside your territory you can build walls, gates, storage crates, a workbench, a campfire, a generator and lights, up to 150 pieces in all.
• Bases need upkeep, paid in materials at the flag. You start with a few days in hand and can bank up to a fortnight. Let it run out and the base decays a fifth of every piece's health each day.
• Bases can be raided: crowbars are slow and loud and draw the dead, breach charges have a twelve second fuse. Nowhere is safe. Keep your best gear where losing it will not end you.

Then go read the rules, and if you have not connected yet, how to join.