Base building & utilities

Most recommended starts in Build 42: the Rosewood fire station, the Riverside or West Point police station, the Echo Creek diner and the Ekron fire station. See loot locations.

Planks need a claw, ball-peen, stone or smithing hammer; a sledgehammer will not do. No Carpentry level is needed, it only makes you faster. Metal barricades are listed at Welding 3.

Barricade the ground floor first, starting with the windows nearest the road. Curtains cost nothing and stop zombies seeing your light.

Hit points are the base value; every skill level adds more. Stone walls start at nothing but finish strongest of all.

On Apocalypse the water goes off at a random time in the first 30 days, with no warning. Fill every bathtub, sink, pot and bottle before it happens.

On Apocalypse the electricity goes off between day 14 and day 30. Unlike water, the emergency radio broadcast warns you up to two days ahead.

Build 42 moved carpentry into the crafting menu and tied far more recipes to it, but the building unlocks still arrive in a fixed order. The XP ladder is steep: 75 for level 1, 225 total for level 2, 525 for 3, 1,275 for 4, 2,775 for 5, 5,775 for 6 and 32,775 for level 10. Read the skill book for your range before you build anything, and remember that dismantling furniture gives no Carpentry XP in Build 42 unless the sandbox option is turned on. See skills and crafting.

The practical targets are 2 for a first wall, 3 for a door, a gate and water, 4 for the tall gate a vehicle can pass, and 6 for stairs. Everything above that is strength, not new shapes.

Zombies attack your walls for one reason: they want to reach you and the wall is in the way. On default settings a zombie only thumps a door, window or player-built wall when it has seen or heard you behind it, which is why most bases fall after a loud night, not during a quiet one. Four sandbox settings govern it.

• Damage Construction (on by default) lets zombies destroy player-built walls, doors and defences at all. Turn it off and your carpentry is permanent; many players call this cheating, but it is the single biggest change you can make.
• Environmental Attacks (off by default) lets zombies that have never noticed you bang on doors and constructions as they roam. Leave it off unless you want hordes testing your gate every night for no reason.
• Zombies To Damage Fences defaults to 25: a tall fence takes no damage until that many zombies press on it together. Lower it and a small group can topple a fence; set it to -1 and fences are safe.
• Fence Damage Multiplier is 1 on Apocalypse and 1.5 on Extinction, and sets how fast that crowd pushes it down.

What this means for a build: a single zombie that sees you through a window will eventually get through a plank barricade, but it will never get through a wall it cannot see you behind. So the order of work is to block sight first with curtains, sheets and solid walls, keep lights and noise off the perimeter, and fight any zombie that starts thumping rather than letting it call the others. Metal sheet barricades at 5,000 hit points buy time, and stone walls at Masonry 10 are nearly unbreakable, but the quiet base is the one that survives. Tall fences with the default 25 threshold are a sound outer ring because small groups cannot touch them.

Thumping is loud and spreads. If you hear it, deal with the thumper now, from the inside if there is a window, before the sound pulls the street.

Our view is that a base is a set of decisions about where zombies will stand, not a pile of walls. These are the ones that matter, in the order we build them.

1. Two exits. A front door you use and a back route you never use: a sheet rope from an upstairs window, or a gate on the far side from the road. If the front is thumping, you leave by the back and loop round. One exit is a trap.
2. Double doors. Put a fence gate a few tiles outside the real door, so there is a small yard between them. Zombies that follow you in are held in the yard, where you kill them through the gap one at a time, and a horde at the gate is not a horde at the house.
3. A kill zone you control. One deliberate opening in the outer fence, facing away from the road, with nothing to hide behind on their side. Zombies funnel through it in a line and you meet them with a long weapon from inside. Sleep with it closed by a gate; open it to fight.
4. Sight lines closed. Curtains or sheets on every ground-floor window, solid walls rather than fences where the base faces a road, and no lights on the outside at night. A zombie that cannot see you has no reason to thump.
5. Noise outside the ring. The generator goes outside the house and inside the outer fence, as far from the bedroom as its 20-tile range allows. Cars park inside the gate but never under a bedroom window; a car alarm there is a siege.
6. Work inside the walls. Crops need open sky, so leave a fenced plot without a roof, and keep the rain collectors on the house roof where nothing can reach them. See farming and animals for what each needs.

Build the perimeter from the back forwards, because the road side is where zombies come from and where you want the strongest wall last. Upstairs is where you sleep, and the stairs are the last thing you would remove, not the first; a sheet rope makes that decision reversible.