Zafehouse: Diaries – 10 Tips – To survive those 10 seconds longer

Zafehouse: Diaries is similar, in certain respects, to FTL: Faster Than Light. There are numerous ways of tackling a problem, and although you victory or loss depends on countless factors (one of the major ones being luck) it pays to know the game, its mechanics and often what is the best thing to do, and why. In this short Tip List I aim at providing such knowledge, so that whenever you give Zafehouse: Diaries a try you might feel slightly more confident. This will not always let you survive that much longer, but maybe bring you an inch closer to the Choppah.

How do you turn five angry survivors with barely any equipment into “winners”?

Zafehouse: Diaries – 10 Tips – To survive those 10 seconds longer

1. Search your house! – When you start any game you should first and foremost focus on exploring your house. You need every weapon, piece of food and medicine you can get your hands on. You might even be lucky and find a crucial piece of information needed to escape on the Chopper. If you fail to do this and, for example, decide to move onward you might had missed some much needed gear, especially weapons for Breaching new potential Safehouses.
2. The more the merrier? – Certain tasks can be greatly sped up by assigning more survivors to them. However this can have some incredible downsides at the same time. There are two cases when assigning more survivors to a task is a bad idea: 1) The Survivors do not like each other (they can dislike each other even more, or even get into crippling fights). 2) You mix highly qualified survivors with unqualified survivors (from what I could tell, survivors might critique each other if the other member is “unqualified”). If the survivors like each other then the above two points do not weigh as heavily down on the group. There is only one exception to this rule, Breaching locations.
3. Looking for a new Home – When faced with a location that must be looted or turned into a safehouse you have to take into account a number of things: 1) How important is the structure? If you aim at occupying a hospital, University, Church or Police Station prepare for one heck of a fight. Zombies tend to migrate to Special buildings, aside from Warehouses, Factories, Stores and Homes. Everything else should be considered “hot”. 2) How many zombie are there outside? Even though the building might have a handful of zombies more will come in to help their brethren. Always take the zombies outside into account. 3) How many Doors and Windows are there? The more the harder will it be to barricade the location. Certain Stores might be very easy to barricade (only 7 Entrances to be secured) while other times an entire church could take you a heck of a lot of time (23+ entrances). If you lack Power Tools and the firepower/manpower you might want to decide on checking less demanding locations first.
4. Breach! Breaaaaach! – So, you found an interesting location you want to occupy, or scavenge for supplies? There are a few ways of tackling the problem of “Breaching” into a location. When you send survivors to a location you can select between three different tasks. Investigate, Breach and Assault. Investigate simply allows the survivor to check what the location is like and he can grant you a very rough estimate of how many zombies are outside/inside. Breach means that survivors will try to enter the building and clear it out. The success of a Breach depends on the Traits of the characters, the weapons you gave them, and the number of zombies. Although in a perfect scenario your survivors could even take out thirty zombies without breaking a sweat it is just as likely that your group will die to five zombies. When Breaching a highly infested location it is better to send in the whole group, rather than individuals. The more firepower you bring over the better. This is very important to understand, because once a character begins a breach he/she cannot flee or turn back. It’s victory or defeat!
5. Clearing out high infestations – There are cases when you need to reach a destination, but you fear that there are simply too many undead for you to kill. Worry not, there are ways of handling this. First of all, Assault allows your survivors to “Attack” locations from the outside, using any weapons you gave them. It is a risky business, though not nearly as bad as “Breaching”, when you want to clear out a big building. The alternative is using distractions. If you have a Stereo or a Can of Gasoline you can place it a certain distance away from said location to force the horde out. Another alternative is sniping. If you have a Safehouse right next to the infected space hand your most experienced survivor a Rifle and order him to snipe at the undead. As long as he has enough ammo he will keep on firing. This will attract the undead, but if you have a few survivors patrolling outside you can continue to clear the building from afar indefinitely.
   

   Zafehouse: Diaries – 10 Tips – To survive those 10 seconds longer

6. Keeping things clean and tidy – Let us assume you found a location that you managed to secure. What next? First of all, send one Survivor to Watch for Zombies. Even though you cleared all the zombies in the area it is possible more will come. The more survivors the better the warning system. Send some of the survivors to Clean out Corpses. Corpses left inside the house will result in you losing your meals, something you cannot afford. As an added bonus you can find plenty of ammo on corpses, so if you rely on firearms killing off hordes of undead inside your house is a good way to keep stock. Search the location for supplies. While the corpses are cleaned out you want to make sure this location is worth staying at. If you have enough food, medical supplies and weapons/tools to cope for now you can choose to fortify your location.
7. DIY Fortress – Each location has a number of furniture and entry points. When you want to Secure your Safehouse you will need to order your Survivors to construct barricades. There are two ways of doing this. Either Quick and Loud or Quiet and Slow. A lot depends on your available tools. If you have Power Tools, combined with experienced Survivors the Quick and Loud approach could give you your desired results in a matter of hours. On the other hand the Quiet and Slow method is only ever any good if you are short on weapons and will be unable to fight off zombies approaching the Safehouse. After all of the entrances have been secured your survivors can continue to Fortify your safehouse. Fortified entrances are in essence impenetrable. Although zombies could try bashing them down they will have a huge problem problem doing so. If the safehouse is silent, even while the zombies attack your fortified safehouse it is likely the zombies will simply give up and leave you alone. Take note: Not every location has enough furniture to Fortify it. Take this into account when deciding whether a location is suitable or not.
8. Scavenging Runs – If you plan on staying at a location you can organise Scavenging runs. They work on a similar principle like Breaches. Here is an example. You are in your Safehouse and decide to loot the local store. Your Safehouse is Secure/Fortified so you know zombies won’t come inside. You send out four of your five survivors to the Store for them to Breach inside, using a selection of silent yet deadly weapons. Once inside you clear out the corpses and then search the store. Once all the loot is visible to you the survivors have to “Breach” back to the safehouse. While breaching make sure you stuff all the things you need into their “Breach inventory”, remembering to take their weapons. The survivor who stayed behind will open the door for the Scavenging group. Without him the Scavengers would have to look for a way inside, and this could result in zombies mobbing around the safehouse. It’s that simple, but you have to calculate how much stuff can the Scavengers bring back. If you take too many weapons you might be unable to bring back any useful items. If you do not bring enough weapons then the Scavengers could die while Breaching or searching the location.
9. How to keep everybody happy? – Although 99% of the time there will always be some conflict brewing between your survivors you have the means to influence it. Your first and most easily accessible, if limited, tool are rumours. You can spread rumours about characters that could positively influence their relations with other survivors. For example, if you had a Middle-Class survivors surrounded by Lower-Class you could spread the rumour that he wrote an article for a local newspaper that was praised by the Lower-Class. This will improve the relations between the survivors, even if for a short while. You can only use Rumors once every day, so make them count! There is another good way of improving the relations between all the survivors, Feasts. In order to organise a Feast you need a Large Meal which costs a lot of Cooking Ingredients (25 to be exact). Once finished and you Organise a Feast (between 6PM – 6AM) and invite all of your survivors to take part their relations will be greatly increased, almost maxed. Although this could result in zombies coming over to join the party, in a safe location it is a feasible thing to do. The added bonus is that everybody will be filled with food, so for the time being nobody will need extra meals or snacks. Edit: Patches have introduced new ways of improving survivor happiness, such as cleaning and playing music. You will have to note the professions of your survivors in order to find the tools they need to increase local happiness. Take note that if people do not like each other than these attempts will fail (for example, somebody would smash the musician’s guitar, as he is playing).
10. How to win? – Despite what you might think you do not need every single scrap of paper in order to successfully survive and escape on the Chopper. There are two essential items, the Radio and the Radio Frequency. Once you have those two items you only need to know where the chopper will arrive. Sometimes you can find hints as to the building type (this can be easy, if it’s one of the special buildings like the church) or street (sometimes there will only be one house on a street). Other useful types of information is the date of the chopper’s arrival and the exact hour. However you do not need the exact hour or even date, as long as your Survivors remain in the general area of the extraction zone. You will be informed when your survivors hear a chopper. Once that happens you will have only a few hours to reach the evacuation zone. If you are there with the radio and frequency when the chopper arrives you win! Edit: There are more game modes now, and while the above does work for the “Chopper” game mode there is no quick or easy solution for the “Car” game mode. There you will just have to find all the tools and items you need to fully finish your escape car.