State of Decay 2 - Time is your worst enemy

The entire point of the game are the stories that are created playing it. I could totally see why someone wouldn’t like it, but man the pain of losing someone in that game is real. :)

It’s not really that type of game. It’s more of a sim, a zombie apocalypse community survival sim. There’s nothing else quite like it!

I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily that dated, but the series has always had a certain level of jank to it for sure.

Maybe number 3 will be bigger budget!

I hope it won’t, because it has been so immersive despite the jank in those two games, I don’t need more anxiety or terror :O

The new one is perfectly fine to me the way it is after all the updates that they have done. Maybe I’m missing something, but I would like to have the first few missions not always be the same. Not a huge deal, but kind of goes against the sandbox nature of the rest of it. Oh great new map I have to get kill a bunch of zombies again to get the blood cure…

Yeah, there’s always that baked-in tutorial at the start every time that I wish could be disabled. Then it’s weird how you can just never do that initial neighbour mission if you want to disable the missions!

No way to sleep through the night despite there being beds around the base? It became night very quickly and seems to last much longer than daylight. Ouch. I’d rather not go exploring for the first time, at night.

this is why i liked the controversial always moving clock better.

But nighttime is ideal for some cardio training around your base!

You can also use the headlights of your parked car when exploring at night.

This bugged me too. I played this game for awhile but I felt like I was running errands more than I was killing the Zeds.

So I played for a bit. Scavenged the surrounding adjacent areas. Built a workshop and a garden. Established an outpost, the one the tutorial suggested so I get ammo, although food and meds seem way more important. Also I guess people get tired and you need to switch between them. My main guys stamina cap was getting really low.

Right now there is a infestation + a host blood plague properties just south of the base. Should I take care of these? I guess I am still in tutorial land as I have a permanent tooltip in the center of the screen that won’t go away saying to contact survivors using the radio.

From memory, the tutorial ‘friendly neighbour’ mission has you deal with your first plague heart, so best get up to that before tackling it. It might even be connected to that radio mission you have sitting there.

so, I wouldn’t worry about infestations until you get several on the map, and everyone’s mood is like -8 or above. Then you can go and clean them up. P.S. molotovs and firecrackers are geat for this =)

For plague hearts, I would definitely wait until you can equip two survivors with decent guns, and explosives if possible. Then you can take out the first one.

Shh, don’t spoil the fun of the first expeditionning fiasco!

Well I completed the “tutorial” and moved base to the Fortified Truckstop, but now I had to rebuild everything although I don’t have a workshop anymore, but an autoshop…and I don’t have enough beds for everyone so morale is down. I used two build slots just for beds. BEDS!

The game basically tells you are free to explore and do random missions / companion missions, but if you wanna progress the “story” kill them plague hearts. So if I just beeline for all the plague hearts…game done then?

The plague hearts increase in strength and ferocity as you destroy them. Destroying the first one is pretty easy, by the time you get to the 8th or 9th then they are a much sterner test…

Yes, everything in State of Decay 2 is a slow build-up, a careful logistical stew of having the right survivors with useful skills, the right size base with proper construction, outposts and mods, the right weapons, vehicles and equipment, and making friends with the right enclaves (to get their bonuses). As these things fall into place you can tackle tougher and tougher challenges. That first plague heart may be doable with you, your follower and a member of the neighboring enclave hacking at it with mower blade swords, but they’re going to require more preparation and better equipment as you progress. (I prefer pipe bombs myself…through a nearby window is best.)

For infestations your vehicle is often your best weapon. Pull up in front of the house/building and honk the horn a couple of times. Zoms will start spilling out the windows and busting through the doors, and you can mow them down with your car doors open. When the screamers finally come out you know you’ve reached the end of the infestation. Take 'em out with a headshot and infestation cleared.

I ran over something that flooded the vehicle with poison gas and we had to bail. After it dissipated and we took out the local zoms, riding back to base the right passenger door decided to fall off.

Is there a way to check a vehicles health/damage? I’ve been using toolkits blind to repair the car, mostly because I don’t want to be out and about around town when my car becomes a dead stick.

Listen for rattles and clunks. Black smoke is always a dead giveaway.

There’s no percentage meter or anything like that.

And don’t run over bloaters

I was going off the shattered windows and beat up zom-blood stained body, but I guess it has more mileage then that.

I usually don’t burn a repair kit until the engine starts throwing off steam. Even then you can keep running for awhile, but if the engine actually starts catching fire you need to bail out and use a repair kit ASAP. I always try to keep one, along with a spare gas can, in the trunk of every vehicle at my base. Nothing sucks worse than realizing you’re in the middle of nowhere with a busted or out-of-gas vehicle.

If you get lucky and find an enclave or a trader with vehicle upgrade kits, grab one if you can (you can also create them yourself if you have an auto shop at your base and someone with the skills to use it properly). Upgrading vehicles gives them more durability and a greater range (fuel efficiency). Upgrades come in Light, Medium and Heavy, and each works on a corresponding vehicle type. My personal favorite is using the Heavy kit to upgrade an SUV into a Smashwagon, which gives you the best combination of zom crushing ability with decent fuel range in my opinion, although the snow plow on the front of upgraded pickup trucks is lots of fun as well.