State of Decay 2

• As of Update #21 (October 2020) you can use three difficulty sliders instead of set difficulties. The first two sliders (Action & Community) can be changed in-game whenever you want, but for the third one (Map) the game will need to refresh the entire map. Apparently you keep everyone and everything in your community, but you start back at your very first base and will have to rebuild it.

• The "Standard Zone" difficulty is fine at the start, but eventually becomes rather dull. The "Dread Zone" difficulty is more exciting, but might be a bit too much at the beginning. A better solution is thus to go with Action: Standard, Community: Standard and Map: Dread and move the difficulty sliders when you are comfortable to handle a bigger challenge (for example: some time after moving to a second, bigger base).

• Guns will draw every zed from a mile around if you use them without a silencer, so only use them in life-or-death situations. The major exception is human enemies, as they are very durable to melee but can go down with one headshot.

• Survivors you are not controlling don't need ammunition in their inventory to use ranged weapons. Make sure that any crossbow you give them has at least one bolt equipped, otherwise they might get stuck doing the same reload animation over and over again.

• Depending on your difficulty, cars can run over a hundred zeds OR the hood will already start smoking after a dozen. Smashing into rocks and other terrain doesn't help either. It is recommended to stick to the roads; driving close to scavenge points is tempting but it's very easy to get your car jammed on some errant ground debris, requiring you to use the "Stuck?" radio command to set it free.

• It is hard to end up with a base that is self sufficient, so use outposts to get a drip feed of whatever resources you are using the most of. Construction materials to start, ammo and medicine later. As your base gets more and more survivors, you may want a lot of food. You can free up outposts slots by going to them on the Base screen.

• Besides resources, each outpost will also give you access to your storage locker. If you set up an outpost in a remote area with lots of nearby buildings you can quickly go back and forth without having to constantly ride back to your base. Each outpost will also have a certain radius in which no new zombies will spawn.

• Eventually you will come to the point where you'll have way more rucksacks with resources than you can put into storage without wasting them. Those excess rucksacks are best stored in cars you park near your base. Vehicles that are great for this purpose are Vans or the Brogan Trekker, since they have trunk space for 8 items.

• Have a mission where you need to eliminate all zombies in an area and can't find the last ones? Be sure to check the roof of the building you are it, because sometimes they will bug out and spawn on the outside instead of the inside.

• The way you complete a campaign is to remove all the Plague Heart infestations on the map and then do the Legacy missions (those involve whoever you picked as leader of your community).

• Once you have finished a campaign, you can add your survivors to a pool of characters. When starting a new game you will have the option to skip the tutorial and pick 3 characters from that pool. They retain their stats and inventory. You may consider filling their inventory slots with items before you finish the campaign, because the game will explicitly tell you what the point of no return is.