Anyone play Unturned?

The Game Room
1

Lately, a friend and I have been trying to get into the zombie survival game Unturned. But it’s rough going so far, because neither one of us has any idea what to do. It’s fairly easy to avoid the zombies… but it also only takes an hour or so before you die of hunger/thirst, so just avoiding them isn’t any good. The in-game tutorial is useless: It basically just tells you that if you have food, you can eat it, and if you have a gun, you can shoot with it, but that doesn’t do much good if you don’t have either. Any place where it looks like there might be either is crawling with undead, and it takes about two human lives to kill even a single zombie with your bare hands. Nor do there appear to be any useful online tutorials, beyond the blindingly obvious “teaming up is good, because then you’re on a team!” and the like.

And yet, the game has overwhelmingly positive reviews, and they can’t all be bots (even if most of the reviews do badly fail the Turing test). There must be some way to start off and work your way up to good equipment/skills, that we just haven’t found yet.

2

Can’t play it at the moment, but videos I’ve seen suggest that going where the zombies are is necessary for early-game survival. There’s no other way to get the stuff you need quickly enough. One comment even recommended dying and respawning until you spawn within sight of a town for this reason.

Consequently, killing zombies–barehanded, at first–is necessary. It looks like the key to doing that is backing up constantly while punching. Backing up while using the strafe keys (like S+A) makes you back up diagonally, which is somewhat faster than backing straight up. Use it to back in large circles, so that you don’t back yourself into a corner (or more zombies). It seems to take quite a few punches, but as long as you’re backing away, regular town zombies don’t seem to get many hits in. Don’t forget to aim down and punch the crawlers; they seem to cause problems.

First goals should be food (look in restaurants), a canteen, and a sleeping bag. Food is obvious, a canteen lets you refill your water from open water sources, and a sleeping bag lets you respawn where you place and claim it. You can make a sleeping bag with fabric and duct tape, I think, so watch for those. Your starting space makes projectile weapons and ammo an inventory management problem, so a melee weapon might be a better find.

You can’t stealth worth a damn at the start, but you can use buildings to block line of sight as you approach the town, and try not to aggro too many zombies at once.

You can plant seeds, which you can get by breaking down vegetables, including moldy vegetables, in your crafting pane. You won’t have much room to carry seeds at first, so planting them right around where you find them is an option–it gets you a small supply of emergency food at the town or farm, or you can harvest the vegetable for seeds when you’ve got a better backpack and want to get a farm running at your base.

Again, I haven’t actually tried to put this into practice. Maybe it won’t help, in which case, I will just wish you luck. :smiley:

3

I try to be stealthy when I start a new game. Press z to slither around carefully. Avoid zombies until you can find something, anything, that can be used as a weapon. The important things to grab at first are a melee weapon, an axe and/or saw, and clothes. Guns are less useful at first as they attract a lot of attention. They become more useful later in the game. Axes can be used as weapons and to chop down trees to build a shelter. They can usually be found in fire stations and campsites. If you want to build storage, you will need a saw (which can also be used to cut down trees). Saws can be crafted from metal. Many things in the game can be scrapped for metal or cloth, so some stuff that doesn’t seem to be immediately useful can actually be helpful if you scrap it. Clothes increase your inventory and can be turned into cloth. Cloth is good for making bandages and for creating a bedroll. If you place a bedroll and claim it (don’t forget to claim it!), you will respawn at the bedroll, making it easier to progress.

That’s it for starters, anyway. Once you’re settled in, try visiting gas stations for blow torches and gas cans. You will need these if you use a car to get around the map. You can also find food and drinks at the gas station. Start collecting guns and/or bows. The advantages of guns are that they are quicker to reload and you can carry more ammo, but bows are quieter (you can also put silencers on guns).

Those are my strategies, anyway. Good luck!

4

I haven’t been spurning items I find that don’t seem immediately useful. I’ve been finding so few items, period, that there’s no sense in not picking up everything. Like, last game, I was super-excited that I found a bottle of glue, because that was one item more than I had found in the entire previous game. And then I apparently accidentally huffed it or something, because when you only have one item it equips it to your hands, and clicking anything makes you use it. Or something… All I actually know is that the screen went psychadelic for a little while for no discernible reason, I got an achievement, and when I recovered I didn’t have the glue any more.

I’ve also tried the punching while running away thing, and it didn’t really work. I can run, and I can punch, but if I try to both at once, my punches come about one every 15 seconds.

And I’ve died, I think, three times of thirst and four from zombies, without ever finding anything that I could use as a weapon of any sort.

5

Are you exploring towns? It seems strange that there would be so few items around. From what I’ve seen, items mostly spawn in basically logical places: food in restaurants, medical supplies in pharmacies, and so forth. (Again, this is from watching videos, but the people I’ve watched had more trouble deciding what to keep than in finding things.)

6

We’ve been exploring towns as closely as we can… but given that any given point in a town seems to be within close line of sight of at least three Zs, that’s not very closely. I did, at one point, find a place labeled “Fast Food” with only a single Z guarding it, lured it away, and then circled back around, only to find absolutely nothing in it. You’d think I could at least drink out of the sink faucets, but no.

7

Wait, a thought: Is it possible that the servers we’re finding are ones that a bunch of other people have been though, and they’ve already cleaned out all of the easy pickings? If that’s it, then how does one find/create a fresh new server?

8

It’s possible, I suppose. Items are supposed to respawn, but the server you’re on could have a long timer set for it (or even just a screwy map with sparse or missing spawns).

It seems easy enough to create your own server, though, if you want to try it. Unfortunately, most of the tutorials on doing so seem to be poorly made YouTube videos, but I found some info on an Unturned wiki. You’ll have to do some port forwarding or set up a VPN with something like Hamachi if you want to play with someone online.

9

Yeah, if you’re not finding items at all, something is wrong. Either other people have cleaned the places out before you get there or the spawn rate is set really low. I second the idea of setting up your own server. I’ve set one up before using the instructions that Balance linked to and found it pretty simple. Having your own server will also let you customize the settings to make it easier or harder as you like.

10

Is the police car in the Tutorial just broken? I’ve put the gas can in my hands, right-clicked the fuel tank (Fuel:100%), then left-clicked the car (Fuel:0%), but getting in the car (F) nothing happens. Can’t drive, headlights, sirens, anything. I tried a dozen or so times, then gave up.

The car seems to be half embedded in the ground, if it matters (I can’t see the wheels).

11

I eventually got the tutorial car to work, but it was some unintuitive combination of left and right clicks and I think some other key, none of which the tutorial explained.