IFZ guide - Breezing through day 50+ on very hard difficulty

[XLR83]

Here's a quick guide to IFZ in case somebody's struggling with it. The lack of tutorial makes the learning curve pretty steep :|

The first important tip for this game is to never, ever fight anything outside of a building. It's awful and you're always going to take casualties, especially against raiders or the military.

The second would be to never make gates. They're very bad. You always want to surround your base with walls, leaving one side of your base completely open to make a hallway of towers there for a kill box. Only use Bows else you'll be dry in ammo.

The third would be to make proxy warehouses. They are stupidly OP and should ALWAYS be made every game. They make all your resource gathering a million times faster. Just make a small warehouse anywhere far away and you'll get a secondary resource drop off for both squads and scavengers.

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Important UI elements: On the bottom left of your screen you can click on the "People" icon that shows your populace in order to reassign jobs instantly. Reassign all guard jobs into laborers at day, and laborers into guards at night. Use bows only for guard towers.

First week priority is to immediately move out and get the initial free car, raid libraries for books and research "Woodworking". Get as many houses (not shelters) as you need for every citizen and immediately you're going to get a massive +40% worker buff. You should never lose this buff, make houses as you gain more citizens.

Make a proxy warehouse and dismantle houses for resources. Scavenge near this proxy for food.

You should also try to research the Antenna and build it to spam "Invite" every day."You won't get many newcomers up until day 30 but any amount is welcome.

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Second week priority is to kill raiders for pistols/rifles. Use the car to find them, enter a house, shoot. They will move away, but then you can just walk out the house and they re-aggro. Garrison inside the house once more for free shots. Rinse and repeat until they all die without shooting your squad once.

Do NOT research anything into the Weapons tree. Producing any weapons before day 40 is a bad idea and you should just steal from the raiders.

Get one/two/three wooden towers hugging your command center and assign guards with bows to it during the night. Probably won't need anybody shooting guns for defence. If infected swing at your buildings, use squads to divert their attention into your towers.

You can get Advanced masonry and all farming upgrades by the end of week 2 if you raid every library in Crofton. Don't use farmers, scavenge for food at night with all your squads going into one neighborhood for extra safety. DO NOT SPLIT THEM INTO SEPARATE CORNERS OF THE TOWN! Use the proxy warehouses and you'll be able to get 2-3 deliveries per squad a night.

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As the third week starts you should have more than just the three wooden towers at your HQ. Make reinforced walls surrounding every building inside your starting neighborhood but DO NOT make a gate! Leave one part completely open for the infected to walk in. Make a hallway of reinforced/metal towers and it will be your kill box.

If any infected try to swing at your walls, use squads to walk close to it and the infected
will stop swinging to go inside your kill box. Only ever use Bows because otherwise you'll be dry in ammunition in one night of 300+ infected kills. It doesn't matter if the towers are destroyed because the people inside it don't die, although you should try to repair because it's much faster than rebuilding.

At day 40+ it gets really rough and you will probably need to enlist all 5 squads to shoot from inside your HQ for the extra DPS. Usually at this point your biggest issue is food because if you've been spamming Invite every day, you should have 100+ people (Don't pick them up, just have them come over and save them with the car squad if necessary) Make extra room with walls for farms and use squads to force the infected to stop swinging at them during the night.

If you've been assigning people to research centers, you should also have most of the research tree except the Weapons done (They produce research books when idle). This is the time to grab the sniper or the shotgun, but I'm not really sure which one is the best option. (I'd assume the shotgun is the better one? Because the main issue is always infected, not raiders but I didn't test and could be wrong).

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Last tips:

I didn't feel the Cannery was worth it but I could be wrong. The initial Crofton neighborhood is too small for it and usually I have 3-4 cookhouses, 2 arms facilities for ammo, 2 research centers, 1 tool workshop, 1 gas plant and houses.

Always farm with fertilizer and use crops for the barns. Cook with meat unless you're desperate for any food.

Only ever use the car squad for important things (unless swimming in gas) such as saving neutral groups, getting research early or killing raiders for pistols. Usually you should scavenge with proxy warehouse at night.

Spam towers when you start getting the military transmission events (50 infected kills? Those guys are pros!) and make a ball of wooden towers. Save scum a few times to learn how you can win against them because stealing their truck or tank is incredibly helpful. You shouldn't have walls or a gate otherwise they can't walk into your ball of towers.

Also they can't shoot towers and will just hang around taking free fire until dead. If they invade one of your buildings, that's even better. Recruit all 5 squads and overpower them. it's fine to lose some people. The truck for example has a massive 40 slot inventory and the tank has a ludicrous 11k hp. Use those for expeditions.

Planning your scavenging nights with the Weather control is VERY powerful. You can go out to scavenge at 6 AM and only stop 1 day and a half later.

Never give food for the raiders who kidnap your survivors. They are always free weapons/ ammo. Send two fully armed squads and you should save your kidnapped people easily with no casualties.

The TAB key cycles through your squads.
Hopefully this is of some help and have fun surviving!

[Rider]

Thanks a lot for this guide, this might help many players!

[Gimpyknee]

As with other games, CTRL+1 etc will assign hotkey to your squads. The map does not auto-center, so hotkey the squad then click the pin icon in the squad pane to move the map. (Edit: note the hotkey assignment is not persistent on save loads, you'll have to reassign. Bug report submitted)

I started in my RL home neighborhood (single family homes) and it didn't work out 3x now. Next map I'll actually start in either a dense apartment complex or a self-storage facility. The buildings are very close together (smaller wall perimeter) and also near a strip shopping center, good food stocks.

I'm also fortunate to be adjacent to a US Navy base (JEB Little Creek), so there's a very nice collection of uniformed services buildings very close by.

[resonance]

Have been using all weapons, and can say that the shotgun is better than the pistol but not quite as good as the assault rifle and definitely worse than the sniper. I think the stats it shows are wrong however, since it says it fires slowly but it seems to fire quite fast actually.

[ル・Ruthile]

not sure if I did something wrong
made without gate once, the infected just start to swing on the walls. even with one squad as bait outside buildings.
so I made gate without any person in so infected can see the bait inside, then they start to make way to opened walls.

[Alukat]

Does the bow tower spam have enough DPS to deal with 600+ infected swarms?

been using 5 AR and 15 pistol squads stack in HQs to deal with those and the ammo consumption is indeed insane (like 20-25 clips for a single swarm). I'm playing atlanta so there's usually enough buildings with ammo around to replenish any used ammo even without ammo facility.

[Shark Hunters]

hold on is it for very hard or for every difficulty

[Blazer]

good job can guarantee it works

[鬼怪自此来]

Cannery is important for maps lacking wood, as only some steel is needed to increase the utilization of wood during cooking by 50%

[kucing oyen garong]

the first tecnology to research is antena, the second is tools and third is house.. you need fast happy mood citizen to get 40% efficiency work.. after you get 40%+, everithing going easy

[Herozath]

If you've been assigning people to research centers, you should also have most of the research tree except the Weapons done (They produce research books when idle).

Now I feel stupid... I always unassigned scientist when my research was done with my found books..... Thank you for the tip.