When you are new to Night of the Dead you might be overhelmed buy the different build menues and crafting tables. While the ingame tutorial picks you up from the start and teaches you what to craft next sometimes, a real beginners tutorial is what a lot of our readers have been looking for. So here it is – The first Beginners Guide from Nightofthedead.org

At the very beginning:

• Use your knife to gather resources from bushes and small trees.
• Pick up small stones.
• Go to your inventory screen (TAB key) and craft a Felling axe (for chopping down trees), a Pickaxe (for quarry work, mining ore) and a Claw hammer (to dismantle buildings, traps)

Use your knife to kill zombies. Use the slash and avoid tactic. Hit them with your knife then fall back or move sidewards to avoid getting hit by their attacks. Apple

Don’t approach large groups of zombies at the beginning. You can do that later as soon as you have manufactured your first bow at the equipment table or upgraded your melee skill tree (research table) and found or crafted a better weapon.

The axe and other tools are capable of chopping down zombies as well. But remember, these tools aren’t made for fighting and therefore are slow in terms of attack speed and don’t deal much damage as well. You’ll be better off using the knife at first!

Gather resources for your first build

Have a look for cars and brake them (break them – F key). You will need these resources for building your base.
Have a look for paper card boxes. These contain cloth and research material, which is very important to upgrade your skill tree.
Break metal barrels on your way to obtain some metal.
Chop down trees and bushes with your Felling Axe to obtain Logs, Tree Branches, Vines, Seeds (used as a bait in animal traps), Fruits and Leaves

Use your Pickaxe to mine some stone material like Boulder and Stone from common rocks (grey rocks). The grey rocks with yellow spots contain Lime Stone as a plus besides Boulder and Stone. If you manage to find black rocks mine them for iron and copper ore. They might also contain Gun Powder or a Piece of Iron.

Hit Point Management

Your Life points or Hit Points are marked with a cross symbol and they are correlating with your Condition Bar (Heart symbol). The Strengh Bar (Biceps symbol) correlates to your condition bar as well. So always keep your condition at max.

You have to understand the simple mechanic of the Condition Bar limiting your Health Points as well as your Strength. With simple food that is edible in an unprocessed state (like fruits, white mushrooms for example) you can only raise your health to the maximum amount limited by your condition.

You can regain condition by eating more or less healthy food. The best way to regain a lot of health and condition simultaneously is to eat an energy bar from your inventory by right clicking on it. They look like snickers and can be found within houses. But don’t waste them at the beginning. They are very useful in fights or at the night time, when hordes of zombies are attacking you. So use them only if needed!

At day time it is best to regain condition by eating meals or meat. To produce meals, you need to have the Cooking table. Here you can cook meals by processing mixed mushrooms, chunks of meat and so on.

Building Tutorial for your first base

As the first nights aren’t that hard to complete, you may just build a temporary base and use it until you find a much better spot within the first 2 days. So don’t by too choosy. By using the Claw hammer you can dismantle structures again later.

Now start building your base within some smaller building. This gives you some kind of a safe spot as the zombies can’t (yet) break the walls of existing buildings. Unfortunately they can hit and attack through walls. Remember to place your crafting tables and storage boxes out of reach from the zeds so keep some distance between your buildings and the outer walls.

By placing some items near walls, this tactic can also be used to collect groups of zombies at certain spots that can be defended from a distance and/or placement of traps at the outside of the outer walls. Remember, the goal of the zombies is to eat your brain so the positioning of your character might have a significant influence on which path the zombies choose.

Build crafting benches

Build a Material production table (build menu – B key – click on the anvil and hammer symbol, choose Craft and click on Material Production Table)
The Material Bench is needed to process natural materials like wooden logs to trimmed logs, wooden planks and lumbers. You can also craft Tree Branches from Vines. These are the most important materials at the beginning. You need them to build your base, traps and in the case of Tree Branches as well for reloading the traps that have a limited amount of attacks.

Build an Equipment production table (build menu – B key – click on the anvil and hammer symbol, choose Equipment and build the Equipment Production Table)
Once build, use it to craft your first bow. Drag it with your mouse to put it in the quick use slot while you are in your inventory screen (TAB key).
Craft arrows for your bow. You can craft bows in the handmade build menu that is showed on the right side of your inventory screen. You need small stones and tree branches to craft arrows.

At the very beginning 30 arrows are enough for the first night. Remember to regain your arrows from killed enemies and animals by pressing T key (Take all) or F key to pick up single arrows. You are now able to fight zombies from a distance, which makes it much easier to clear crowded areas. Shoot the zombies from far away and keep attacking them until they come too close. Run away from them and keep attacking until they are down. On lower difficulties, the bow is even capable of cleaning houses and other buildings (where the good loot is at).

These two tables are the most important ones at first. You need more crafting tables afterwards but it’s best to start building some basic traps that hinder the zombies from getting in to your base and destroy everything in their way. So gather more resources if you already ran out of the most common ones like logs, tree branches, vines, or cloth. You need cloths to produce ropes on your Crafting Table and ropes are needed to build even the simplest kinds of traps. So building a Crafting Bench soon is a good way to go once you have enough resources. But lets focus on defending the base first.

If you ran out of cloth already go loot some cars or paper card boxes. You might as well kill some zombies, they sometimes drop bags which contain Research material and Cloth.

Defend your Base / Trap Building

To defend your base on lower difficulties, you can do so by only using Barbed Fence melee traps in the first nights. Try to build some kind of labyrinth where the zombies have to march through in order to get to you or your base. In the current state of the game, the zombies usually don’t attack these traps as long as there is a way to get to you or into your base. Remember, zombies aren’t that bright. If you make your labyrinth to obscure, they might attack the barriers and break through at a point which is too close to your entrance.

Even if your building of choice has a door, build a Door Wall (Build menu – B Key – click on the house symbol, choose Wall and build the second door) behind the original door. This way you can close the door from within if the zombies somehow manage to pass your trap area in front of the house. As long as you have enough tree branches in your inventor, you can keep repairing the door from the inside of your base to gain time. If this happens, prepare yourself to open the door as soon as your weapon is ready and your health is full to fight off the horde. You might even as well place some additional traps within your base once the horde has reached your door. So always keep a stack of trimmed logs, lumber, nails, rope, tree branches, vines at night to be capable of building some basic traps at night.

For more security, you can place some Barbed Fence melee traps within your house as well but remember, you get hurt by getting in contact with this kind of traps. Some other traps like Pendulum or compressor only spin when a zombie is close but you usually can’t place them within smaller buildings regarding to the limited height indoors. If you have enough material try to build the Cutter trap or Spiked floor trap inside.

This is it. Your base is safe for the first nights on easy difficulty and now its up to you to explore the island and make a fortress out of your base. Enjoy this well made game!

Your next steps…

• Build a Cooking Station! Because unprepared food just replenishes your health bar but not your condition. Since max health and condition is linked together like I mentioned earlier in this Tutorial, you should build a Cooking Station as soon as possible. This way you can roast Small meat from rabbits, foxes or Bird meat and regain Health and Condition at the same time!

• Build some basic Animal traps! These are very helpful at the beginning to gather packages of Small meat as well as Rabbit Skins. Rabbis Skins are used to make processed leather which is needed to upgrade Chests or build some items later on in the game. You can’t start soon enough to keep a stock on these (Alpha Version of the Game). To build a Small animal trap you need nothing more than 1 Boulder (Pickaxe + Rock), 4x Tree branch, 2x Seed and 20 Leaves. You should have these already gathered by cutting down trees and bushes. I would recommend about 3-4 Small animal traps around your base.

• Build a Crafting Table because you need to process a lot of raw material into processed materials or goods later on in the game. So build this table as soon as your base is safe and you have enough resources. With the materials and products crafted here, you soon will be able to build more advanced traps. Since you need Gear and a Trap machine for building better traps, the Crafting Bench is essential to keep progressing.

• Upgrade your crafting table as soon as possible. By reaching level II you can process leaves and obtain research material by dooing so. Leaves are a very common item, as they are obtained as a byproduct (trees, bushes)

• Upgrade your skill tree at the research table. Research Porter and Scavenger Skill Tree ASAP. With Porter you can collect more items by increasing the max amount of carried items while Scavenger Skill tree will help you a lot in terms of gathering resources faster. Forest Worker skill tree is important even so for gathering wood based materials.

• Upgrade your Builder skill tree to save resources like wood and stone based materials when building items and traps.

• Get more Research material to be able to level your Skill tree even further. Loot cars, laptops in the Science center and get the upgrade which enables you to produce Research material from Leaves.

• Always keep your stack of a tree branches at a high amount. This way you can repair and reload traps while the zombie wave is ongooing. Stay safe at night.

• Have energy bars in your quick slot to regain health and condition immediately if needed in fights.

• Have roasted meat or other meals ready that regain condition and health.

Best day to day routine

Early morning
Repair and reload all traps. Lonesome zombies as well as some zombie groups might arrive at your base, even at daytime.
Rebuild traps that have been destroyed or change your build setup to a more stable one.
Gather meat and resources from your animal traps. Reload them with seeds.

Morning
Go for the loot, scout the map and go to places that have not been looted yet.
Break into every car, truck that you see and take valuable resources with you.
Clear buildings from zombies to get your hands on high value loot like weapons and energy bars.
Hunt deer, wolves, boars and take their resources with you.

Afternoon
Return to your base area. Check your animal traps, skin trapped animals and reload the traps.
Gather raw materials by chopping down trees, bushes. Use the axe for this.
Gather more materials from rocks. Use your pickaxe to obtain iron and copper ore.

Evening
Build new traps, change your setup, craft ammunition, restock treebranches and repair and reload all traps. Harvest your fruits and vegetables if you already have the farm build and prepare meals at the Cooking station. Turn on the radio, sit down in your chair and relax until the horde comes after you.