Puzzles & Survival World Guide

World Map Navigation

While you’re in your Sanctuary, there will be a map at the bottom left corner labeled ‘World’. This will take you to the overworld which effectively serves as the map for the entire server (known as a State in this game) you’re on.

Here, you can send troops to gather resources, kill zombies, and attack other players. You can tap on the magnifying glass in the bottom left corner to search for specific things near your current location.

If you tap on the folded map in the bottom left, you’ll see a zoomed out version of the world. You’ll be able to see the location of your allies as well as your location in the world.

How to Move Your Base Layout

Typically, you’ll want to move your base into your alliance’s territory, so you can help each other and take advantage of your alliance’s features. You can do this by using a Direct Relocate item to reposition your base’s location in the world. There’s also a Random Relocate item, but as the name suggests…

You can obtain more of both items in your alliance shop’s ‘Other’ tab. The Direct Relocate is by far the more useful option but is a bit pricey at 200k alliance coins a piece. Thankfully, events also reward them rather often, so you can stockpile quite a few.

Marching Queues

Every time you send a regiment of troops out to do something, it’ll take up one of your march slots.

You can unlock up to 4 additional march slots (5 in total) from the following:

1. Research March Queue I (Military tab, requires Research Lab level 6)
   
2. Research March Queue II (Military tab, requires Research Lab level 12)
   
3. Research March Queue III (Military tab, requires Research Lab level 20)
   
4. Reach VIP Level 8

We strongly recommend prioritizing unlocking additional slots as soon as possible, so you can have your troops doing more tasks at once (namely gathering resources).

Zombies, Lairs, and Stamina

Zombies and lairs of any level can spawn anywhere in the world, and you should be able to find your desired target at any time.

If you want to launch an attack on one of them, you’ll have to spend stamina. This is indicated by the yellow bar beneath your profile picture in the top left. The higher the level of your target, the more stamina you have to spend. Failed attacks will refund any spent stamina.

Stamina regenerates slowly over time and caps out at 120. You can conduct research and invest talent points in the Balance tree to increase your stamina regeneration rate. You’ll also occasionally obtain soda can items from events that replenish stamina. However, we strongly suggest saving those for events that require you to spend stamina or defeat lairs.

Rationing Your Stamina

Typically, you’ll want to use up all of your stamina before you log off for the night or for when you’re unavailable for long periods of time. If you tap on your stamina bar, you can see how long it’ll take to fully recharge, so you can plan out when you need to log back onto the game.

Defeating zombies/lairs will grant you antiserum to level up your heroes and other various resources. Lairs always give more rewards but are typically harder and require a rally, so you’ll need at least one other available ally (who also has enough stamina) to join you.

If you’re in an alliance with high level players, they’ll often offer to carry weaker players through high level rallies. This is a fantastic way to quickly gather huge chunks of antiserum to quickly level up your heroes, obtain large quantities of resources, and quickly level up your Commander.

All you have to do is send a single troop to participate and earn credit. If you know your alliance has players offering this service, try to save your stamina for when they’re online and running rallies. If you can, try to always have one march slot available so you can hop in a rally immediately before it fills up

As for individual zombies, you should only go after them when no one else is available for rallies on lairs and you’re about to cap out on stamina. You can only kill higher level zombies after you kill the previous level, so you’ll have to work you way up. Thankfully, the first time you kill a zombie of each level, you’ll receive substantial rewards, including fragments to obtain 5-star hero Requiem.

Gathering Resources & Etiquette

Gathering nodes are a bit of a different case from zombies and lairs. The closer you are to the center of the map, the higher the level of the gathering nodes.

Higher level nodes have more resources in them, so you don’t have to manage your troops as often and can spend less time traveling back and forth between your base. Ideally, your alliance’s territory will be close to the center, so you can feasibly gather at higher level nodes.

Note: Once again, any boosts to gathering speed are applied when you send out your march. This includes items, alliance skills, and Commander talents.

When you tap on a resource node, you’ll see how much is left to gather at that point. If it’s a nice even whole number, no one has been to it yet. As a general rule of thumb, you should not recall your troops from a resource node until it’s been fully emptied. This is because resource nodes do not respawn until they’re cleared out. Otherwise, nodes will respawn approximately every 30 minutes from the hour.

No one likes having to clean up after ‘dirty’ tiles, and if you do it too often, you might become an enemy of the state. Most alliances have rules in place to prevent this and will actually kick you from the alliance if you constantly leave tiles dirty.

When to Recall Your Troops

Of course there are moments where you have to recall, mainly to attend scheduled alliance events. This is generally acceptable as long as your alliance makes an announcement in state chat. You’re expected to head back and clean up your dirty tile afterwards. You can check your gathering reports in your mail to easily keep track of their locations.

Most states (at least the civilized ones) also abide by a ‘first-march rule’ which grants ownership of the tile to the person who sends a march to it first, regardless of its location. Note – This is not ‘arrive first’.

If you and another player happen to send marches at the same time, you can sort it out in a couple ways.

• Have the player who arrives there first recall their troops.
• The player who will arrive second can activate a 2-hour shield and they’ll harmlessly ‘bounce’ off the node without a battle.
• Use the Recall talent skill and pull back immediately. You can also use recall march items, but these are rare/expensive and typically not worth it.

Just send a quick message to the other player to sort out what you’ll do. If a battle does break out, the offending party might be forced to pay healing reparations if it’s brought up to alliance leadership.

Also never try to kick a player out of a resource node by just intentionally killing their troops. This is referred to as ‘tile hitting’, a barbaric practice that just wastes resources on healing, and will quickly earn the (justified) retaliation of an entire alliance. Note: Tile hitting is acceptable on players from other states in certain state versus state events.

What Troops to Use for Resource Gathering

Finally, we’ll go over what troops you should send to gather. Unless you expect to fight at a tile, there’s no reason to send heroes with your march. Most players prefer to use Vehicles, as they have the highest carrying capacity per unit. However, they’re incredibly slow.

Instead, we suggest using Riders. You’ll have to send more of them, but their marching speed is exponentially faster. This makes it easier to recall them if a tile conflict arises or if you need a march slot to become available quickly.

Once you unlock higher tier troops, you probably won’t even have to send a full march to gather all the resources from a node, as they have greater carrying capacities.

Instead, during the troop selection screen you can adjust the slider for number of troops until the gatherable number (bottom right) matches up with the resources left number (bottom left). This is incredibly useful when you’re working with limited troops or don’t want to send too many out in case you need them for something else.