State of Decay 2 – Tips and Tricks to Play Lethal Zone

Starter Tips and Tricks to Win Lethal Zone

In General

1. As long as you don’t build a new facility when you have just moved into the starter base, there will be no other missions spawning. So spend the first hour finding a Crossbow for yourself and good guns (assault rifles, shotguns) for your the two NPC crewmembers. To do so, hit gun shops, military sites and barns. First of all, take your damaged car to a fire station to get the two repair kits + more fuel and even meds (if on Providence Ridge or Trumbull Valley, hit car workshops instead).
2. Then start looting Materials until storage is maxed out, go out and fill the car with rucksacks again, and return before finally building the Infirmary. When it is done, upgrade it to lvl 2. Restock the storage and go out for more materials.
3. Take 2 Plague Samples with you to the new enclave that showed up. After this, the game opens up to regular open world rng.

Combat, infestations and plague hearts

• In general, avoiding waking up Plague Hearts is a good idea early on because the infestations spread everywhere and become annoying, and with only 2 NPCs with suboptimal guns at the base, and you with only a Crossbow (because you won’t really have enough Parts to maintain firearms at this point), a full Siege could actually become a wipe-out threat if you’re unlucky.
• Sneak kills don’t wake up Hearts, so efforts should be made to not alert zombies at all in this initial phase. Take your time.
• Once you have 4 or 5 NPCs at the base and you have at least one .50 gun OR full-auto-only guns (like FBI Fighting Rifle) among your crew, they should be able to mow down any Siege with ease. At that point, you may wake up as many Hearts as you want.
• In this mid-game stage, you should also begin to get good Plague Heart-killing weapons like Fuel Bombs, ScentBlock, Bloater Gas Grenades (ignited) and stuff like that, which will make that part of the game much more effective.

Basically, Lethal is the difficulty where you are rewarded for using all the “tricks up your sleeve”. Planning ahead is rewarded, and so is being cool-headed and tactical. The lower difficulties are letting you get away with doing things “valiantly” and “properly”, But Lethal is bloody unfair, so all that falls away as you learn to not fight fair.