Hello All Survivors!

Now that you’ve managed to put some decent time into your Lumberjack and Prospecting skills, (I told you it was Minecraft with blood) you’ll want to focus on the upgrades that you slowly start building up as you level. I’m going to slightly back-track on something that I said earlier about ignoring the shower. Since the new update (v1.4.3) I have noticed that this is something that is a little more important now. Apparently smelling like a hobo’s sweaty crotch is not a good thing.

After a yet undetermined amount of time (not that I’ve noticed) your character; with his glorious beard will start to say that he wants a shower. A little symbol will appear above his head until you take one. Are we playing The Sims now? I haven’t yet dared to see what happens if you don’t have a shower whilst you’re out in the wilderness, but I can only assume that your pleasant new odor will be like a homing beacon for zombies and there’ll be no sneaking up on them anymore! So building the shower is probably going to be quite important. Next off you may want to build the “CB Radio” and see exactly what it does. There is split opinion on whether it is actually worth building it or not, and I happen to be on the “Yes it is” side of the fence.

Once you’ve built the radio, when you go out on to the main map, every now and then the “Dealer” will contact you. (No, it’s not for drugs…. or maybe it is). Basically he drives around in a camper van and parks up somewhere on the map. When you visit him you can speak to him and he will offer you a trade for something. Now, although I’m on the positive side of the fence for the dealer (I love me some drugs) there are a few issues that I have with it. The Devs have been a bit sneaky with it and tempt you to buy more coins! Dun dun dunnnn……

From what I can gather, the dealer will only appear when your Energy is lower than 100. Usually he only turns up when you have below 60ish. The other sneaky sneaky thing the Devs have done is that they place him just far enough away that you will have to use your energy to run there and you cannot walk to him. He is there only for a limited time and it may take 20 minutes to walk to him, yet he has decided that he only wants to hang around for 18 minutes. Convenient…. But saying that there have been a handful of times where he IS within walking distance, but not often. So basically you have to decide whether using energy to get to him is worth it or not. And this brings me on to the other “annoying” part of the dealer….

You don’t know what he is trading until you get there….

That’s right, he tells you he’s there, where he is, how far away he is but not what he’s trading? Seems a bit strange right? Well I think it’s those sneaky Sneaky SNEAKY Devs again getting you to waste energy to then have to maybe buy more of it with coins.

Anyway, if you do decide to visit the dealer, he is usually pedalling weapons. They can be both melee or firearms. He only sells one thing at a time and 9/10 times he only has one of that item. Now this is where I think it is worth it. If you take a look at the screenshot below you can see that a Machete costs:

15 Iron Bars, 3 Pine Planks and 12 Leather. Now obviously, 3 Pine Planks isn’t really too much of a cost but the Iron Bars and the Leather is. Iron is very easy to get from the “Medium” zones, but trying to get a decent amount of leather can be tricky. When you visit a zone there are usually only around 3 Deer and about 4 Wolves at any one time. If you’re lucky they will all drop Animal Skin which you can turn into Leather. If they do and you get 7 Leather, that’s still another 5 to go. You might get lucky and kill a player or two that have some on them, but most of the time you’ll have to go to another zone and find more wildlife.

Now, when you go to the dealer, most of the time he offers weapons such as the Machete for just 20 Pine Planks. Some other weapons (like guns) might cost you 20 Iron Bars or 20 Nails, but that’s also worth it as you cannot currently make your own firearms and the cost of the weapon would be similar to the Machete. So for the sake of chopping down a few trees, which are in abundance, turning them into Planks and getting the Machete. Compared to hunting down 12 Animal Skins, getting 3 Planks and then converting 30 Iron Ore into 15 Iron Bars, it’s usually a better deal. Also Leather comes more in handy when crafting clothes later on, so it’s best to save it as clothes are harder to come by. You’ll be walking around like The Terminator asking for people’s clothes, boots and motorcycle pretty much 24/7.

Finally, if you’ve been playing the way I have, you’ll tend to always have a conveyer-belt of Pine Logs being churned into Pine Planks and some lying around in a box somewhere. So all you have to do is pick them up, take them to the dealer and get yourself a weapon. Time to slice some limbs off some your significant other who just so happens to be a Zombie now, but would that have stopped you anyway?

I hope this helps a few people out there that have either yet to build the CB Radio or visit the Dealer. This was definitely a more specific and in-depth guide to one part of the game. I didn’t actually expect write this much! Thanks again for reading. Good luck with your Heroin addiction!

——– END OF DAY FIVE ——–