Basic Unturned 3.0+ Guide

[NOTE] This guide is no longer up to date. While it is still partly useable, it is not accurate to the latest versions. Sorry for the inconvenience.

This is a basic guide for Unturned 3.0. It focuses on the basics of survival, looting, and killing zombies. I've released this now for feedback from the community (both players who have experience with Unturned, and those who don't)

The Basics (Like really... the basics)

What is Unturned?

Unturned is a free-to-play 3D Post Apocalyptical Survival game focused on survival and zombie slaying. You start with nothing, weak and frail. You find items on the ground, pick them up and become stronger.

The Controls

The default controls are:
W : walk forward
A : walk left
S : walk backward
D : walk right
Shift: Sprint
Z : Lay down
X : Crouch
Left Click : Regular attack
Right Click : Power attack/scope in
Q : lean left
E : lean right
T : Inspect
G : Inventory
Y : Crafting
U : Skills
M : Map
tab : open HUD (to last open screen)
F : Interact
B : Secondary Action Key

The Five Status Bars

In the bottom left hand corner you should see 5 bars, a red one, and orange one, a light blue one, a green one, and a yellow one. These bars are your health, fullness, hydration, immunity, and stamina respectively.

Health : This is how much life you have... If it hits 0% you die. This can be lost by falling too far, getting hit by zombies/players, or by drowning. Health restores with certain foods and medical supplies. With the Vitality Skill health recovers when both fullness and hydration are close to full.

Fullness : This is how much food you've got in you... 100% is good, 0% is bad. To regain fullness just eat food.

Hydration : This is how much liquid you've got in you... 100% is good, 0% is bad. To regain this just take a drink, and some foods restore a little hydration as well.

Immunity : This is how healthy you are... If this reaches 0% you will periodically take damage and die. This can be lowered if hit by zombies, or by eating certain foods/berries. Some foods and medical supplies restore this. The immunity skill reduces the amount of Immunity lost by various means.

Stamina : This is your energy level. If you have stamina you can run, jump, and do power attacks (Right click) if you don't you can't. Stamina is lost through the processes mentioned above (Less lost if you have the Exercise skill). It regenerates over time (upgradeable by the Cardio Skill), and can be gained instantly by using certain medical supplies or eating certain foods.

Zombies

Zombies are aggressive NPCs that will attack you if you come too close. When nothing is around, zombies seem passive and lazy, infrequently wandering around. But when you come into their attention range they will jump and start to come towards you. There are 4 types of zombies, regular zombies, crawling zombies, sprinting zombies, and mega zombies. Regular zombies have average speed health and damage. Crawling zombies are harder to hit because they're lower on the ground, and have more health, but less damage and less speed. Sprinting zombies have more speed and damage, but very little health (a power attack to the head will almost always instant kill). The last type of zombie, the mega zombie, is the most powerful (by far) of all of them. With exceedingly high high and damage, this zombie takes many hits with the best weapons to kill, however it has a slower movement speed. Killing zombies rewards experience which lets you level up skills which give you bonuses. If a zombie hits you, you will lose some health and immunity, and there is also the possibility to start bleeding. This mean that you will periodically take damage until you either a) use a rag, bandage, dressing, suture kit, of medkit to stop the bleeding, or b) die (probably not the best choice). Always remember... zombies CANNOT swim. So if you get attacked but are ill-equipped to fight just run to the nearest source of water and stay there.

Items

An item is an object which can either spawn in the world, or be crafted by the player. Currently the item types in Unturned are foods, clothes, tools, weapons, ammunitions, attachments, throwables, materials, barricades, and structures. All items can be placed in the player's inventory, and many can be equipped.

Foods : A food is a type of item that restores either fullness or hydration. It can also restore health, immunity, or stamina, or decrease those stats. Some foods (potato, wheat, tomato, carrot, lettuce, corn) can be cultivated by the player.

Clothes : Clothes are any items that can be worn. These include hats/helmets, shirts, pants, vests, backpacks, and neck items (bandanas/earbuds)

Tools : These include items that are used for crafting or gathering resources, such as axes and saws. These also include items that are used for repair.

Weapons : There are two types or weapons, melee and ranged. Both types of weapons must be equipped in one of the two hot bar slots. Melee weapons are hand-to-hand combat weapons. Some of the most common are bats, hockey sticks, and golf clubs. These are good for killing zombies because they make very little noise, and have a power attack (right click). Ranged weapons include bows and guns. Bows are silent, but have less range/damage; guns are very loud, but do very nice damage and have good range.

Ammunitions : These are ammunition for guns and bows.

Attachments : These are additions to guns: lights, lasers, silencers, and scopes.

Throwables: These are smoke grenades (different colored), road flares (different colored), and grenades.

Materials : These are anything that has no actual action itself, but is used to craft something else, including clutch, metal, tape, and nails.

Structures : These are items crafted by a player which are used to build a house, they include walls, floors, pillars, windows, etc., made from the three types of woods.

Barricades : These are structures not made by the player that may or may not serve a defensive purpose. The main barricades are fortifications and barricades, made of the three types of wood, but also crates/lockers (storage) and planters.

First Steps

Spawning In

The very first thing you want to do when you join a world for the first time (either single player OR on a server) is find somewhere to loot. You can use the in game map (M by default) to guide you. I suggest heading to Montague, Charlottetown, Stratford, or Alberton first, however if it seems far any of the farms or campgrounds will do. AVOID the military base, airport, and Scorpio-7 lab at all costs (for now). When you start out you have very little room in your inventory, the way to increase this room is to find and equip clothing which spawns many places throughout the world.

Killing Your First Zombie(s)

When you find your way to a town/camp/farm, you aren't equipped to fight multiple zombies simultaneous, so try to engage them one by one. You can do this by approaching the closest zombie to you until it makes a sound, jumps, and turns toward you. It will begin to move towards you. Take this opportunity to walk away a little bit, as to not chance aggro'ing other zombies during the fight. Fighting zombies can be dangerous at times, but if you do it properly you'll never get hit. When you have no weapons the easiest way to kill a zombie is a series of right and left clicks to the head while walking backwards. The zombie shouldn't be able to hit you, as long as you don't run into anything. after you clear a few zombies, you can move into your first house and start looting. The first things to look for are weapons, clothing, and food.

Nothing Lasts Forever

Most useable items in Unturned have an aspect called quality. This is a type of durability that limits how many times the item can be used or how well them item can be used. For weapons, damage decreases as quality does, making low quality weapons almost useless (ranged weapons also lose accuracy). Food items lose their filling properties, and when below 50% quality they lower the player's immunity. Clothing loses it's armor capacity as the quality goes down (it loses quality from taking damage).

No More Fists!

Throughout the world you can find many melee weapons, the most common being the Hockey Stick, the Baseball Bat, and the Golf Club. All of these are great starting weapons, as they can kill a zombie with two swings (head shots). These weapons are effective, but by no means the best.

More Inventory Space (and no more streaking)

A major goal of your first time looting is to find clothing. This is so you'll have more inventory room to be able to hold more items, and bigger ones, and at the same time receive an armor benefit, which negates a portion of damage received. Hats are mostly decorative, however some such as the military helmet add a good amount of armor. Neckpieces (buds/bandanas etc.) are purely decorative. Shirts and pants add decent armor and inventory. Backpacks add a significant amount of inventory space, yet have no armor bonus. Vests add armor and inventory in good amounts. To start just about any clothing is helpful, but ones with more inventory are a better choice.

Getting Hungry?

After you grab a weapon and some clothes you should try to find some food. Food spawns pretty frequently, and in a variety of places. Almost every house has a kitchen area, which can spawn basic foods and vegetables. When picking foods there are several things you need to keep in mind. The first, is the food's quality. As mentioned before, low quality food has the potential to lower your immunity. Avoid taking food with quality below 50% if at all possible. Only if your fullness is below 25% and there is no healthy food should you take low quality food. The second thing to consider when taking food is space. Most food items take up only one inventory space, however some such as chips, corn, and venison take up more. The third thing to consider when selecting food is obviously the amount of fullness/hydration restored. The most common types of food are Chocolate and candy bars, neither of which restores much fullness (chocolate restores 20% and Candy 15%). Generally anything besides those two items and granola bars is a good choice for food. The most common drinks are apple and grape juice boxes (both restore 20% hydration). For these basic items it is better to find higher tier foods/drinks, however in large quantities they can be better than smaller quantities of better items.

Tools

Before heading out you'll want to make sure you have some tools to start your own base. An axe or chainsaw is almost necessary for gathering wood (you can chop a tree down with anything, it just takes forever without an axe/chainsaw). The Fire Axe may be a good choice because it is both a tool and a weapon.It's also a good idea to find a handsaw, which can cut logs into boards (used for fortifications and crates). If you can, pick up a blowtorch, as this can repair vehicles and many weapons. If you plan on taking a vehicle, it is a good idea that you try to find a gas can as well, seeing as it is the only way to refuel. I also strongly suggest trying to find a flashlight, so you can keep moving after dark. A flashlight is also considered a melee weapon, so if you can't find a better weapon it can be dual-purposed.

Building A Base

Home Sweet Home

There are three ways to build a base in Unturned. The first is to commandeer an existing building; put up fortifications, sandbags, barricades, barbed wire, whatever... Make it zombie proof. This is ideal because it allows easy access to essential item spawns such as food. The second way to make a base is to build onto a car, a sort of mobile home. This is helpful because you easily access all parts of the map (well... on the main island). The third type of base, and the most homely is the base you build yourself.

Essentials of a Base

There are three key things to keep in mind when building your base, defense, survivability, and storage. By this I mean that you want to have a base safe from zombie attacks. You also want to have a good source of food nearby. And most importantly (in my opinion) you want to have lots of room to store your spoils of war. It is helpful to build your base somewhere near a town, for easy access to items and supplies. It's also helpful to build near trees. If you have a choice of trees to build near, go for pine trees, as pine is by far the best wood in the game (Pine crates have more inventory slots than others, and pine rifles have more range than others). Another good tip is to build near water. Water provides easy access to one of the most valuable renewable food sources in the game... fish. Fishing rods can be found in the camps, or crafted with sticks and some rope. Also, try to build your base near an area with grass, so you can plant seeds (from vegetables). Early in the game this isn't very effective, but when you get the Agriculture skill you can double your food every harvest.

Simple Base Layout

The Tower :
1st floor : 2x2 floors with walls and 1 door. Have a few crates/lockers with resources you use a lot (foods and medical supplies)
2nd floor : all walls with crates/lockers filled with everything else.
3rd floor : all windows for scouting/sniping.
Outside put up a wall of sandbags or barriers, then surround it with wooden spikes or barbed wire.

Lighting

If you're inside when night comes it will get very dark. The simplest fix for this is a flashlight, but this must be in your hand to provide light. The next solution is to pull a car up and leave the lights on when you leave it. Not very effective or convenient, but it works. The next (and in my opinion most efficient) method of lighting is the campfire. The campfire can be crafted with 5 logs of any one type. It can be placed on any ground or floor, and provides light in a large radius. This is useful for lighting up whole floors (depending on size), or lighting up around your base. Not only that, but it's cheap. It only takes one or two trees to get the wood, and no skill level to craft. Another form of light is the torch. This can be made using sticks and scrap metal, and comes in the three different wood types. The final lighting method is the spotlight. This light is bright, but needs a generator to run (which uses fuel).Place lights strategically around your base so you can see incoming attacks, and see where you're going.

Basic Crafting Guide

In Unturned 3.0, crafting has its own HUD screen (default key Y, or accessible through the Crafting tab in inventory). In the crafting menu there are six tabs: Tools, Apparel, Supplies, Gear, Ammunition, Barricades, Structures, and Repair. A recipe will not appear unless you have the proper level of the Crating skill and at least on of the required items (not a tool). When you meet these requirements the recipe will appear in its designated tab and will show the necessary materials and the outcome. When you have the appropriate materials to craft something, fins it in its tab and click on it.

Tools

This section includes the recipes for scrapping guns; crafting wooden bows, rifles, and fishing rods; and crafting the ammunition for those weapons. This section is very important, as it allows you to create scrap metal, which is useful for: building lockers, repairing weapons and tools, and building/reinforcing your base. The craftable weapons are decent mid game items, however looted weapons can be much better.

Apparel

This section is basically just for uncrafting looted clothing items, however in here you can also craft the leather jacket/pants. The only way to get cloth (besides loot spawns) is through this process, so it is helpful. With the recent addition of clothing quality it is necessary to repair clothes occasionally, which requires cloth.

Supplies

This section is dedicated to medical and food supplies. Using this tab you can craft cloth into rags, then rags into bandages, and finally bandages into dressings. This makes dressings easily farmable if you pick up any clothes you find and craft them into cloth. It is a wise idea to do this frequently, in case you mistime an attack and take unnecessary damage. You can also craft splints in the supply tab, which take maple boards and scrap metal. These are used to heal broken legs (and a small portion of health). Also in the supplies tab, you can cook or combine certain foods. Fish and venison can be combined into their cooked forms (in the presence of a camp fire), and wheat can be made into bread. You can also create ham and tuna sandwiches, BLTs, grilled cheeses, and cakes.

Gear

This section is mainly devoted to the crafting and uncrafting of basic materials. This included cutting logs into planks and planks into boards, combining scrap metal into metal sheets, and making scrap metal into items such as cans and nails. Most recipes in this section require a tool (a handsaw or blowtorch). The recipe will not show up if you have the tool but none of the required items.

Ammunition

This section is just refilling magazines with either ammo boxes or other magazines.

Baricades

This section is very large, due to the game's definition of barricade. A barricade isn't just a defensive fortification, its any structure that isn't part of the structure of a house. Because of this many things are considered barricades, including campfires, torches, crates, planters, seeds, etc.. So this section has tons of different recipes in it. The most important ones are the campfire, crates/lockers, seeds, and barricades/fortifications. The campfire is the most effective craft able source of light. It is made from 5 wood logs of the same type, and can also be used to cook certain foods. Crates/lockers (using wood and metal respectively) are used for storage, with progressively better inventory space. A birch crate has 24 inventory slots, a maple crate has 28 slots, and a pine crate has 32. A locker has 32 inventory spaces, making it the best storage unit (without mods) in the game. To craft crates you need planks and sticks of the same wood type, and to craft a lockers you need metal bars, metal sheets, and a blowtorch (this will not be consumed in the crafting process). In the is section you can craft vegetable items (corn, carrots, potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes, and wheat) into seeds. This can be done on a 1:1 conversion rate (with the agriculture skill fully upgraded you can harvest 2 from one plant, effectively doubling your food supply). This can also be a way of converting moldy (<50% quality) food into healthy food.

Structures

This section is where you will find the essentials for building your own base. Floors, pillars, walls, windows, and roofs; all of the three different wood types.

Repair

This section contains every recipe that involves improving the quality of an item. This includes weapons, tools, clothing, and food. Most weapons and tools need scrap metal or wood to be repaired, however some require a blowtorch as well (again, not consumed). Currently food quality cannot be increased, however drink quality can be, with the use of tablets (a medical item). Clothing is repairable with cloth, or in some cases (vest/helmets) scrap metal.

Full Moon

What is the Full Moon?

The full moon is an event in Unturned, in which zombies gain better vision, faster respawn, and higher chances of bleeding. You can tell when a full moon is approaching by looking at the current moon phase, the fuller the moon is on the right side, the closer it is to a full moon. You can tell when there is a full moon, because an icon with two red dots will appear above the status bars in the lower right hand corner... Or you can just look at the moon.

What does a Full Moon Actually do?

The full moon changes zombie behavior, making them more aggressive and dangerous. The full moon changes the appearance of zombies, by making their eyes glow red in the dark. Along with this, zombies gain immensely increased vision range, and can spot you from extremely large distances. This can make already difficult places seemingly impossible with poor equipment (i.e. Summerside Military Base). Also, the full moon causes zombies to give the "bleeding" status effect to the player much more frequently. This can be deadly if you are fighting large amounts of zombies, or have no medical supplies.

Tactics for a Full Moon

There are several ways to fight out a full moon. The easiest way is always to find a safe spot and stay until night is over, but that's also the least exciting. The next way is to armor up, grab about 10-20 rags/bandages/dressings and a good melee weapon and hold off the hordes. Another way to deal with the full moon is to avoid big cities and towns, and go for smaller locations (i.e. Kennington Campground) and pick of any zombies that notice you. Yet another tactic for surviving the full moon (courtesy of moodkipz) is to get out to sea and stay there... Zombies can't swim, so they can't follow you.

[Kybosa]

Okay, did a cache validation and now it's showing up.

[Samot]

That's odd... You have any screen shots or videos?

[Kybosa]

But my support tree has been maxed out, and with sticks, logs, and planks in my inventory I still don't get any floors or foundations showing up.

[Samot]

yes, you should be able to... It should come up under the Structures tab of crafting... you may need a level of the crafting skill, but I don't think so

[Kybosa]

is it possible to build floors with Maple or Birch? I have various versions of both in my inventory but no "floor"s show up in my crafting menu anywhere.

[Evil Warlock]

heres a huuge tip. zombies cant swim at all. if tehre is a full moon run to the water, they will follow to the shore then stop

[Samot]

To all the comments... In order to cook fish you need to have a camp fire near by. AS of right now quick moving to crates does not appear to work. The two reds dots signify a full moon. and @Fabix you need to craft a locker, which is a metal chest. (Recipe is 3 metal sheets, 3 metal bars, and a blowtorch)

[Revalopod]

this game is boring

[willdo2000]

@ExtremeNinja
You don't have to find BluePrints to craft things you have to upgrade your crafting skill or mechanic skill to repair things. If what you want to craft still doesnt show up in the menu even after you have upgraded those skills then get one of the components to make that and it should show you what you need to make said item.

[DieRegteAdrian]

Do you have to find BluePrints if you want to craft something???