State of Decay 2 – Tips for Collecting Boons (Lethal Difficulty)

How to Collect Boons on Lethal Difficulty

If you have trader boon in any non-lethal difficulty and want to start a new game on lethal, you can start your community on the difficulty your trader boon is in (to get 4000 influence) and while in-game, open the menu tab by pressing B (or whatever keybind you set in into), go to difficulty settings, slide all three difficulty sliders all the way to lethal and choose restart map, you now have 4000 influence.

You have to slide all the three difficulty sliders into lethal to make your game eligible for lethal zone boon, if you have 1 or 2 difficulty sliders on lethal but the rest is in nightmare, then you will only be rewarded with nightmare zone boon upon finishing your playthough. This method will only works on trader boon.

For example: start in green zone with trader boon active, open the menu tab, change all the difficulty sliders into lethal and choose restart map.

If you already have a well established community (fully geared survivors, fully stacked on high-end weapons, throwables and consumables) on non-lethal zone difficulty, you can change the game difficulty of that community mid-game by doing what i have told you previously.

If you want to ease your lethal playthrough even further, do the followings:

1. Roll a survivor with “blood plague survivor” trait, any survivor with this trait is 100% immune to blood plague. Once you have them, do all the plague heart killings using said survivor
2. Buy the Impaler or upgrade a norma and always use the back of your car to kill everyhing (except bloaters ofc)
3. Look for enclave benefits (in the form of radio commands) such as:

A. Plague Heart Supplies (give one of the followings:

• 1 Meds Rucksack + 1 Ammo Rucksack + 3 Strong Painkillers + 2 Tubes of Fireworks + 3 Soda Can Bombs; or
• 1 Meds Rucksack + 1 Fuel Rucksack + 3 Bandages + 1 Boombox + 3 Fuel Bomb; or
• 2 Meds Rucksacks + 1 First Aid Kit + 2 Firecrackers + 3 Pipe Bombs.

B. Roadside Assistance (gives 2 toolkits/1 advance toolkit + 2x Gas Cans)

C. Combat Resupply (gives one of the followings:

• 3 Road Flares + 3 Fuel Bombs + Police Baton + ammunitions of the firearm you have equipped when activating the command; or
• 3 Smoke Bombs + 3 Frag Grenades + Machete + ammunitions of …; or
• 3x Soda Can Bombs + 3x Tubes of Fireworks + Metal Bat + ammunitions …

Useful Tips

1. Always use grab and push move and do execution immediately once the zombies are knocked down from your push. Always refrain from swinging your weapon at zombies if you can help it, since zombies on lethal are much more resistant to melee hits, blunt weapon knockdown and bladed weapon lethality, and you will end up burning so much stamina and stamina items just to kill small number of zombies. You can safely ignore this one if you’re trying to level up your survivor’s fighting skill.
2. Unequip your melee weapon, it’s slowing you down, seriously. Execution animations for non-close combat weapons are very long and they also do not have any crouch execution move like non-close combat weapon does. Also, execution from all melee weapons will create noise right? Wrong, crouch execution is 100% silent and it’s the only execution that doesn’t make any noise (sometimes a noise shockwave will appear on your minimap but it doesn’t actually make any noise), however, crouch execution can only be performed using close combat weapon and you don’t need to have close combat specialization skill to perform crouch execution. On top of that, when doing crouch execution, you will start recovering your stamina almost instantly, unlike standing execution where you will have fairly long delay before you start recovering your stamina after doing standing execution. Crouch execution is doing execution while you’re in crouching position. Having empty melee weapon slot will also make your survivor stay lightweight and will allow you to carry one more loot of melee weapon type when scavenging.
3. When you can, always pick powerhouse, stealth, endurance and gunslinging. Out of all these 4 specialization skills, powerhouse and gunslinging are the hardest one to find, this is due to how low the number of traits associated with powerhouse and gunslinging, yes, specialization skill options are tied to survivors’ traits, same goes for leader types. Powerhouse skill will unlock jump kick ability upon choosing the specialization and power/charged attack using heavy weapon and ability to grab zombies from the front upon having maxed powerhouse. With jump kick ability you won’t have trouble dealing with lone blood feral when you’re on-foot and don’t have any supressed firearm, also jump kick is 100% silent. Endurance specialization will give your character a huge HP increase (max +80 health) and injury severity reduction (max -50% injury severity), higher hp and injury reduction means your character will be able to sustain more punishment if things go wrong, and trust me, in lethal, when things go wrong, they go wrong really fast and really dangerous. Other fighting specializations only give you slight convenience improvement for killing zombies but really minor health increase and 0 injury severity reduction. Reasons why you should pick gunslinging is because you get significant reload speed increase and you will also unlock aim snap ability.
4. Heavy weapon is the most efficient melee weapon type when it comes to killing plague hearts, even when you r survivors don’t have powerhouse or haven’t maxed powerhouse thus have not unlocked power attack.
5. Power attack is the golden ticket to achieve maximum efficiency when destroying plague hearts using melee, as lethal plague hearts will die in just 9 power attacks.
6. When you have stealth specialization skill, always use crouch sprint instead of running. You don’t want to know how many times stealth had saved me from insane and dangerous situations.
7. Always travel on a car instead of on-foot, especially when you’re trying to destroy a plague heart. When trying to destroy a plague, you should always bring car and park it in a position that will block the driver-side door and the front of the car (the engine), some cars like Impaler, upgraded norma (forgot what it’s called) and utility truck have a plow on the front of the car and will completely prevent zombies from ever latching onto the front of the car/the engine.

The way I kill plague hearts is by first clearing all zombies near the plague heart either through stealth kills or running them over with the back of my car.

Once that’s done, i will do 4 power attacks before the plague cloud appears (plague cloud will be emits shortly after the third power attacks, but you can sneak one more power attack before it appears and not get hit by it).

After the zombies spawned by plague cloud, I’ll run to my car and run over all the zombies using the back of my car yet again, once cleared then I’ll just finish the job.