State of Decay: Choice and Consequence

There’s a very interesting “Survival Handbook” blog post over on the official State of Decay website, in which the game’s “survivors” offer a descriptive account of some of the tough choices we’ll have to make in the zombie-focused RPG and the potential consequences attached to them. For example:

CRISES AND CHALLENGES

Pay attention, even to the whiners. That’s the universe giving your punk ass fair notice.Will’s right that people are happier if they’re getting shit done, and it’s going well. No fucking duh. But you’ve gotta look at the big picture too, cuz the Lord may provide, but as far as I can tell, he’s mostly interesting in providing one mess after another. Here’s my advice.

Watch your resource stockpiles. People always try to make shit too complicated. Way I see it, it comes down to five categories:

Food (and Water) This has to be priority number one. If you don’t keep this stocked people will take all kinds of risks on their own. Plus hunger makes people weak and a lot more vulnerable to Zeds. (And by people, I mean you, asshole. You aren’t immune to any of these effects just because you think you’re a tough guy.)

Medicine One bite probably ain’t gonna kill you. Unless it goes septic. Then you’re fucked. Oh, and then there was poor fucking Brent with his weak-ass immune system. How you gonna die of pneumonia? Long story short: everyone’s paranoid about every sneeze or cough now, so you’ll find your antibiotics, antihistamines, cough suppressants, and everything else disappearing mysteriously whenever anyone feels a tiny tickle in the back of their throat.

Ammo Hey, I enjoy bashing in a Zed skull as much as anyone, but if you’re up close enough to hit them, you’re close enough for them to grab you, right? When everyone has guns and ammo, staying alive is a hell of a lot easier. (Just make sure your people attach suppressors to their guns. Some people are dumb enough to think they can walk into town, go all Expendables, and not get mobbed.)

Building materials I used to live in this shithole apartment down in Marshall. Damn roof would leak every winter. Had this one window that wouldn’t shut right. And that was without psycho flesh-eating Hordes attacking multiple times a day. Point is, you want to make sure you’ve got that angle bracket and those nails handy in advance. Don’t worry about putting together a specific shopping list, just get building Materials of every kind you can find so that no matter what happens, you’ll have it covered. (Plus, you should consider some construction projects, like maybe a locked Storage area. I bet that’d slow down how fast everything gets used up if people had to be more conspicuous about grabbing stuff.)

Fuel I’m not really worried about any cars running out of gas just yet, but a good old-fashioned Molotov full of gasoline instead of alcohol is the shit. Plus if we ever want to get some power tools working up in here, we’re going to need some gas-powered generators, I’m pretty sure.

A couple more points:

Make sure you have enough beds Yeah, you’re gonna have a hard time getting people to stick around if they’re all sleeping on floors or sharing some nasty-ass bed that hasn’t had a proper wash since god knows when. And tired people are cranky. But that’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that if you don’t get enough rest, you’re tired. And that, my friends, is the number one risk to your health when you are out and about.

Electricity Honestly, you get used to not having electricity a lot quicker than I would have expected, but like I said before I know there are things we could do if we had some generators.

Pay attention Fact of the matter is: bad shit is gonna happen, but we’re getting better at seeing it coming. So when you identify a problem, like some whiner starts crying about a really feral, aggressive-looking Zed near the church (or wherever), it doesn’t matter that you know he’s a coward. That’s the universe giving your punk ass fair notice. Hunt it down and kill it or set up some defenses for it or, well, do SOMETHING, cuz otherwise, you’re probably gonna find it ate two of your friends while you were sleeping.