Video Game / State of Decay 2

State of Decay 2 is a Wide-Open Sandbox Zombie Apocalypse survival simulator and the sequel to the original State of Decay. Once again developed by Undead Labs and published by Microsoft, it was released on May 22nd, 2018 for Xbox One and Windows 10 (only on Windows 10 store and supports XBOX Play Anywhere which means that the same account logged in can be used to play the game on XBOX One, because of being a Microsoft first-party game).

Compared to the first game in the series, State of Decay 2 has much more emphasis on being an open-world sandbox. Unlike the first game, there isn't really an overarching plot or main single-player campaign, instead focusing on more free-form gameplay similar to the original game's Breakdown DLC game mode. The game also features up to 4-player co-op gameplay.

The game saw a free Updated Re-release for owners called the Juggernaut Edition in March 13, 2020 including a new area, remastered graphics for the Xbox One X and PC, as well as new gameplay modes and all of the DLC. The Juggernaut Edition also marks the first time the game is available on the PC outside of the Microsoft Windows 10 store (it's available on Steam and other digital distribution sites). The Heartland DLC and Homecoming DLC were released for free on July 19, 2019 and September 1, 2021 respectively. The former added the Trumbull Valley map as an extended story-based mission, while the latter made the map available as a regular region — and expanding the map to include all of the locations from the previous game — and with special scripted missions.

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State of Decay 2 contains examples of:

• Abnormal Ammo: The CLEO guns introduced in the Daybreak DLC all exclusively use CLEO Ammo Packs, which are "magazines" that are essentially a battery and some high-density iron fillings packed into the same container. What this means in gameplay is that every CLEO gun is basically a shotgun with varying amounts of spread, including the designated marksman rifles, making them exceptionally deadly in comparison to similar weapons. As a nod to this versatility, the ammo packs and CLEO guns that use them are squarely in the middle when sorting ranged weapons in the locker by ammo caliber.
• Aborted Arc: At the end of the original game, the original Trumbull Valley Survivors had to flee the valley and try to get to Danforth because they found out the local water reservoir was clogged with hundreds of Black Plague-infested zombie corpses, which would quickly make the valley uninhabitable. In Heartland and Homecoming this is never mentioned and the people in the valley are doing just fine.
• After the End: This game picks up roughly eighteen months after the first, during which society has collapsed and America, and probably the whole world, has been overrun by the undead. What few pockets of humanity that are left are just barely managing the hang on.
• The Alcoholic: One survivor group are drunkards, and want to build a still.
  Survivor: Hey, a beer in the morning is the best way to survive the apocalypse, don't you think?
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: CLEO is actually an experimental AI that became damaged, and the entire plotline of 2 is getting "her" head on straight.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Not only are there periodic sieges (see below), but zombies will constantly be getting in your base, no matter what you do. Expect at least one zombie hopping the wall every 30 seconds, and they will always zero in on the active character. This is incredibly irritating, as your base is thus no sanctuary and you'll very often be attacked while you are navigating menus. The HAVEN protocol from CLEO can make this a non-issue. This has been altered a fair bit as of the "Heart Attack" update, as infestations (and thus siege sites) don't form at all until you start pissing off the plague hearts, giving you a lot more breathing room unless you're being careless. Of course, the HAVEN Protocol has been nerfed a bit to compensate, so it won't be picking off ALL of your stragglers without exception anymore...
• Ambiguously Evil: Red Talon. Lieutenant Meredeth's broadcasts are uplifting, patriotic Rousing Speeches, but their leader Teresa West also briefly discusses "getting rid of" "troublemakers" from survivor communities, and there are claims from other survivors that Red Talon is running forced labor camps, notably Camp Erie. Meredeth denies it, as does Sasquatch, but Sasquatch also notes if they were, it would be necessary given the situation the country is in. Meanwhile, Chavez on the Trumbull Valley map will be cagey about why he left Red Talon, and hints they were doing things he did not approve of. There is even a chance to find a suicide note on a dead Red Talon solider, detailing how the screams of "Camp Eerie" have left them unable to sleep at night. Can be at least partially subverted if you recruit a Red Talon soldier to help you and your community survive.
• Anti-Frustration Feature: Quite a few things have been added to make the game simpler from the first.
  • Anything in a vehicle's storage can be instantly transported to the community locker so long as the vehicle is parked at a base parking lot. The original game also allowed for this, but only for rucksacks, forcing you to still tediously transfer items and weapons to the locker yourself. At launch, items needed to be manually transferred from backpack to the trunk before clicking the right trigger to transfer to base. A later patch now allows direct transfer from backpack to base as long as the character is looking in the trunk and the vehicle is parked in the base parking lot.
  • Influence is no longer required to remove items from the locker and items you don't want/need can be destroyed straight from the locker, rather than having to put them in the player's inventory first.
  • There is now a visible numerical score telling the player what exactly the base and individual survivor morale is and why. This way you know what specifically you need to work on to increase morale for everyone.
  • Suppressors no longer have limited uses, but instead increase the wear and tear on the firearm they are attached to, the level of which is dependent on their quality (Handmade suppressors will wear the gun out faster than a Professional or Advanced suppressor will).
  • Equipped melee weapons and guns have their own dedicated inventory slots and no longer take up room in your backpack.
  • Vehicles can not be permanently destroyed in this version. Even if one is rendered badly damaged and undriveable, it will never despawn, and anything in its trunk is safe.
  • Initially, dropping an outpost refunded your influence, but as of Patch 3.0 there is now a 40% penalty to returned influence. You still get 60% back, so there is a reduced penalty for posting and dropping.
  • Ferals and Juggernauts are still dangerous, but Ferals no longer have the instant-kill attack they had in the previous game - they'll have to beat you down to zero maximum HP just like the regular zombies in order to kill you. Juggernauts, however, can still instant-kill you if your health is gone and they grab you.
  • Is your map all but exhausted, and you're still not close to beating the game? No problem — you can simply move to a fresh map with a radio command. This does reset the Blood Plague and Leader quests, but you keep all of your resources, survivors and items.
  • Added via a patch: when you mark a Survivor for exile, they will teleport in front of you. This removed the very, very frustrating ritual of having to find out where they were at in the base to finish the job.
  • Using the radio command to "Locate Resources" actually generates the resource if it's no longer available naturally; normally, it'll just point the player to the appropriate storefront. In the previous game, it would only locate a remaining rucksack in an unlooted location — once they were all gone, they were gone forever. But for 35 (or more, depending on difficulty level) influence the game will stick a fresh rucksack in one of the indicated locations. Thus, resources will never run out.
  • Survivors you're not using stay at home and any resource gathering they do is off screen. No more having to go rescue missing survivors or bogged down supply runners every ten minutes.
  • Added with Patch 10: You will be warned 10-15 minutes before an Enclave is giving up on waiting for your help on a quest (and turning hostile or leaving). Previously, you had no warning at all.
  • The simulation now only runs while you're actually playing the game and is based upon in-game time rather than real time. No more loading up your game to find your community in utter shambles because you haven't been able to play in awhile.
• Anyone Can Die: Similar to the first game, any of your characters can die and the game will just keep going. That is, unless you run out of survivors completely, in which case the game is over. Even in the more plot-focused Heartland campaign, any of your survivors including your two starting characters can die at any time.
  • Subverted to an extent with the 'Homecoming' update, as certain npcs (for example, Mickey Wilkerson, Doctor Hoffman, Ray Santos, etc.) cannot be killed, though they can still lose health and even enter fight for your life mode.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit:
  • The player's enclave is soft-capped at 9 survivors, with the hard limit being 12 if the player recruits an entire NPC enclave through certain missions (mainly through the Builder legacy).
  • Players can only ever have one NPC survivor permanently accompany them on their travels, whether they're from their own enclave or hired from another one. Missions can temporarly increase the player's follower count, but even then, in most cases there's only ever one additional follower.
• Artificial Stupidity: NPC survivors are.... not that great at dodging enemy attacks. They are prone to getting attacked from anything they can't see from their first-person perspective, making them vulnerable to getting attacked from behind. They're also fairly indecisive on whether to use their ranged or melee weapon if their target is hovering just outside of their melee range. On Lethal difficulty, bringing AI partners with you is tantamout to condemning them to death due to these shortcomings.
• Ascended Extra: Red Talon existed in Lifeline as a radio support option. By 2, they've become one of two surviving factions that have replaced the U.S. government in helping survivors. Red Talon Lieutenant Meredith makes periodic radio broadcasts, encouraging survivors and providing advice. Hell, you were once able to recruit an entire community of them via a glitch which is now patched! However it is still possible to recruit a few through legitimate means.
• Asshole Victim: As a random event, there's a chance that a random enclave will spawn in, asking for help and that they're being overrun with zombies. One of your community members will comment on not helping them since "they're nothing but trouble," and on the map they're marked as hostile. No matter how fast you are to the call however, they're scripted to die, either already being dead on arrival or turning into zombies once you get there.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Just like the last game, burst and automatic firing modes will typically just pointlessly waste your ammunition. Unless you are unloading on a plague heart or a Juggernaut, one bullet (of any kind) to the head kills anything else in the game, making even a short burst ridiculous overkill. On any difficulty higher than Standard, human enemies do resist headshots, so full auto weapons are somewhat useful against them, but you typically don't have to get into fights with them very often.
  • Revolver cartridges such as .357 Magnum and .44 Magnum fall into this category thanks to their placement among other ammo types. They do more damage than standard pistol cartridges, sure, but the fact that most zombies already die to a single headshot regardless of caliber means that doing more damage is just a waste. Revolvers also cannot be silenced (with a few rare event-limited exceptions from the Bounty Broker). Combine that with the relatively rare ammo and rare gun spawns means that most players are bound to leave their revolvers sitting in storage for the better part of the game. With the patch adding the ability for survivors to carry a sidearm and a long arm, revolvers do have some utility as a backup weapon to help with Juggernauts if they're using a lower caliber rifle like the Prepper's 10/22. The game has also introduced cowboy weapons (lever-action rifles of full-length and pistol size) which use magnum ammo and can be silenced, however they're also event-limited Bounty Broker weapons.
  • .50BMG weapons are among the most powerful weapons in the game, but the ammo for them is very rare (though you can find mods that let you make more, though they're rather uncommon themselves). They're also very resource-expensive to manufacture, with 8 .50 BMG rounds costing the same amount of resources it takes to make over 100 pistol rounds. They're pretty much overkill for anything that isn't a Juggernaut, or a last ditch weapon for a Plague Heart. They are very useful, however, when wielded by a Survivor not controlled by the player, who have infinite ammo.
  • The Lumber Mill in the Providence Ridge map is a shining example of this. Having 5 large slots to play with and the ability to create materials on demand sounds useful - but the lack of small outdoor slots means that, unless you can build a Sniper Tower, you have no way of lowering threat and will be facing large zombie invasions constantly.
  • Bloater Gas weapons do massive damage against humans, but have no effect against zombies. On regular difficulty, they're pretty pointless since fights against hostile humans are quite rare and easily resolved with headshots. However, on the difficulties past Standard, headshots no longer instantly kill enemy humans, making Bloater Gas weaponry somewhat more useful as enemy humans begin to take quite a lot more damage and can quickly recover if they're not executed quickly when knocked down.
• Big Good:
  • Lily Ritter is this for the Network and, to a lesser extent, Red Talon. She's seemingly able to defuse the conflict between the two basically just by asking them to stop competing and start working together.
  • CLEO is a more mysterious one. No one knows her true identity, origins, or motives, but everyone loves the periodic supply drops she provides. Heartland appears to subvert this, as it seems CLEO is somehow involved with the Blood Plague as an experiment. However, unlocking her HAVEN protocol in Homecoming gives your base the ultimate defense against zombies.
• Bland-Name Product: The board games in the lounge when installed include Humans Are Terrible and West To Oregon.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Firecrackers are cheap to make, a mere 10 parts for three (or more with special base bonuses), but they will save an overmatched player thanks to the Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! zombies who will instantly run to where the firecrackers are. They are also extremely handy in clearing infestations, luring zombies out into the open for some Car Fu or just plain gunfire — and they won't be distracted by gunfire because they're not as loud as the firecrackers. There's a tiny chance they'll be set aflame, too. The only downside is they don't distract special zombies. Unfortunately, they start losing some usefulness in Nightmare mode, as even regular zombies will ignore them for the tasty snack that is you once they know you're there.
  • Dodging behind a zombie, grabbing them, then insta-killing them. This is more fiddly than just straight up bashing them your main melee weapon as this does require you to maneuver into position first, but doing the insta-kill doesn't wear down the durability of your close combat weapon, is a guaranteed kill, and gives a moment of invulnerability while still giving fighting experience.
  • The Builder legacy bonus in New Game Plus. The Sheriff and Warlord bonuses (periodic weapon and item drops) are nice, but always having power and water at your base can save you some base, outpost and mod slots for other purposes.
  • Close Combat is not terribly effective for crowd control, but when you max it, you can take down zombies quickly with a flurry of attacks — and it you will ALWAYS have a working close combat weapon that never needs repairs. Plus you can save on a little carrying weight as you're not carrying a melee weapon, potentially making you a little faster on your feet as well.
  • Blunt Weapons do not kill as quickly as Bladed... however, their knockdown capability is impressive and allows you to instantly execute downed zombies. Plus, they can stun-lock ferals, allowing you to execute the feral with one button press. On top of that, they are very durable. It may not be as flashy as Bladed, but it's more versatile.
  • An upgraded medical facility doesn't do anything particularly exciting, but it will automatically heal characters and remove Blood Plague progression (well, up to the point where you're full-blown infected with it). While you can't completely ignore the whole Blood Plague element with an upgraded infirmary in play, you can be much more frugal with your plague cure usage if you use a little caution.
  • .22LR ammunition. By far the most common ammo type in the game, .22LR will be a resource in which most survivors will have no trouble expending even in the most tight of resource famines. Finding .22LR weapons is also not a difficult task and will often spawn either with traders or in gun shops in which there is usually one per town. Since all common zombies and even most special zombies can be killed with a single shot of any bullet, equipping a survivor with a .22LR pistol and some ammo is never a bad idea for armament during regular resource runs or general scavenging.
  • Crossbows are very common drops with reusable, easily crafted ammunition. They're often completely silent which is something that .22LR weapons can't boast even with suppressors. That said, they're often limited to a single bolt capacity and long reload times in between shots so they're best used for non-aggressive situations or picking off special zombies from afar. Count yourself lucky if you find the crossbow that holds TEN bolts.
  • The Compact Cars aren't very cool-looking and aren't durable. But they do have an amazing eight cargo slots, great pickup and a small size (making it less likely to get stuck on terrain and harder for zombies to grab on).
  • The stealth upgrade for the Wits skill. All it does is make your actions, from searching and opening doors, quieter. On higher difficulties, this can be invaluable as sneaking is preferable to fighting, if not outright necessary.
  • The Gunslinger upgrade for the weapons skill, especially on higher levels. Being able to quickly headshot Ferals, Screamers and Bloaters is invaluable, especially if playing with a gamepad.
• Break the Cutie: When one of your survivors kills one of their first humans, they question what they’ve done with horror. They get used to it eventually.
• Broken Bridge: The updated Trumbull Valley map has these, making the town of Farfield and the camping area near Mount Tanner inaccessible. Lampshaded when one of the characters notes the Valley is smaller than she expected. They're repaired in the Homecoming DLC.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • Lily Ritter and Sasquatch are back, working for the Network and Red Talon respectively. The Network is itself what the Trumbull Valley survivor's group eventually grew into. Lily's statement that the other original founders of The Network (Pastor Will, Marcus, Ed, Maya, Jacob, and Alan) "aren't all around anymore" may imply that some or even all of the other Trumbull Valley survivors died in between games. This is likely to avoid Cutting Off the Branches given that Anyone Can Die in the original game; also Will and Alan were scripted to die no matter what.
  • CLEO returns in the Daybreak DLC, periodically dropping air strikes on hordes or providing resupplies.
  • The Heartland DLC sees the return of Ray Santos and Mickey Wilkerson.
  • The Homecoming DLC sees IzzBee joining Dr. Hoffman, with Mickey working for her.
  • Two of the Heroes from the original game's Breakdown DLC (the Mercenary and the Rebel) return as Red Talon operatives in the Daybreak DLC mode.
• Cannibal Clan: Later in the game, you come across a group of people doing rather suspicious things and keep giving you "free food." However, once you learn about a survivor who tells you this news of survivors trying to kill and eat her, you tell her of "friends" nearby who can help but you bring her back to said group's base! They then betray you to try kill you for food. These are apparently the same group Twain mentions on the radio in one random instance. And if you break open their food rucksacks, the random luxury items you find alongside the snacks provides another hint that they're not on the up-and-up.
• Car Fu: An effective way of dealing with zombies — though one you want to use sparingly in higher difficulties as your cars start taking less and less punishment before they're rendered inoperable, and car repair is less painless than it was in the previous game in general.
• Colossus Climb: When a Juggernaut's health is low enough, a Survivor can execute it by climbing on it and repeatedly stab it in the neck.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • To make up for the Artificial Stupidity of friendly AI-controlled survivors, their weapons never decrease in durability, and any consumables and ammo they appear to use aren't deducted from their inventory. A common base defense strategy that exploits these facts is to arm benched survivors with unloaded powerful firearms.
  • Hostile survivors have all the advantages of friendly survivors, plus a few extras to make them arbitrarily harder to fight, especially on Dread difficulty or higher. They're masters at dodging bullets and melee strikes the very frame they're supposed to land, take several headshots to down, and likely several more to actually kill. The only reliably quick way to kill hostile survivors is with incendiaries or bloater gas grenades.
• The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: Various parts of the game's UI stress the importance of having enough beds in your community in order to stave off and recover from fatigue faster, as well as preventing community morale debuffs. However, one dedicated player has proven that beds don't affect fatigue at all and the penalty for lacking beds is a measly -1 per survivor that has to go without one (out of a scale from -100 to 100), which is easily offset by every morale-boosting action in the game.
• Conspiracy Theorist:
  • Twain, the primary voice of The Network on the radio, is heavily anti-government and seems to be one of these. He believes in a number of conspiracy theories, some of which are proven to be true (i.e. Project Osiris), and some of which seem unlikely (he implies the Blood Plague and its cure were deliberately created by the government to control the populace through controlled distribution of said cure, which seems disproven by the tutorial of the game).
  • In Heartland, IzzBee speculates CLEO is being operated by the government and that the government has ulterior motives for not aiding survivors.
• Cosmic Deadline: While Heartland mostly re-creates Trumbull Valley map, there are several obvious development skimps. For instance, you cannot go to the second floor of any two-story residential house, and the northeast quadrant (with the fairgrounds) is blocked off completely.
• Cutting Off the Branches: In the updated Trumbull Valley map in Homecoming, the mostly intact skyline of Danforth is visible from the valley exit. This seems to indicate the city wasn't nuked back in Lifeline, which fits with Lily still being alive and Sasquatch having nothing to say about Greyhound One.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Juggernauts can take over three dozen headshots from a basic 9mm weapon before being stunned, allowing you to perform a finishing move on them. They can even survive several headshots from a .50 anti-materiel rifle.
  • Taken to the extreme in Heartland and in difficulties above Standard, as normal Juggernauts will be replaced with Blood Plague Juggernauts, which doubles their health pool.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • If you manage to keep any of the four starting survivors from the tutorial mission alive until the end of the game, they will have unique dialogue near the end after you defeat the Blood Plague.
  • In a New Game Plus, if a character who did their Aunt's .22 Prepper mission still has the .22 Prepper, they will instead practice shooting 25 zombies with it and commenting how awesome the gun their Aunt left them is. If you lost the rifle, the mission will have them buying the gun for almost no Reputation before doing the aforementioned quest.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • The Prepper's 10/22 rifle can be obtained via a random personal sidequest for one of your survivors, who wants to locate their prepper aunt. It has an astonishing 50-round drum magazine, an impressive semi-auto rate of fire, comes fitted with a homemade silencer and can be fitted with an advanced silencer to get rid of the weapon decay penalty, uses the incredibly cheap and easy to make .22 LR ammo, and can still kill anything in the game except Juggernauts, armored zombies, and higher-difficulty human opponents with a single headshot. The sidequest to get the rifle can pop up as early as immediately after the end of the tutorial. It can also rarely be acquired from Network agents or plague hearts.
  • Completing Mickey's questline in Homecoming will get you the 7.62 equivalent of the Prepper, with an advanced suppressor as well. Mickey's questline is one of the easier missions of Trumbull Valley, too.
  • If you know where to look for them, the special weapons caches can drop some very nice equipment, like a grenade launcher or AK-47 with a 150 round magazine. With these, you can then easily clear out plague hearts, which drop even more upgraded equipment.
  • One of the first missions is to get a Plague Sample. The quest giver warns you that getting them by destroying a Plague Heart is dangerous, but Hearts usually have an advanced weapon inside them for your troubles.
  • The trench tool bladed weapon. Relatively easy to find, and boasts both a whopping amount of durability and relatively high ease of use making the stamina usage for it rather negligible, plus being a rather light weapon on top of that. On the blunt weapon side of things is the metal bat, for which where it lacks in cutting ability, makes up for with a rather high chance to knock down zombies.
• Foreshadowing: In the Homecoming DLC, The Ray Santos Legacy story arc begins "All Good Things". It's a not so subtle hint Ray won't be much around much longer, as the Complete-the-Quote Title is "... Must Come to An End."
• Fragile Speedster:
  • Hostile humans are this. They're just as fast and capable of dodging as your survivors, but a single headshot will bring them down. That said, if you try to melee them you'll find they're able to take an astonishing number of crowbar hits to the face. They upgrade to Lightning Bruiser status on higher difficulties, especially Nightmare or Lethal, as they have massive health pools and can no longer be killed with one headshot — and being in a vehicle just makes you an easier target. Thankfully, fighting them is very rare and you can generally tell in advance when you're about to be doing so.
  • Ferals are fast and strike with rapid, very damaging attacks, but can be taken out with a single headshot. Plague Ferals have an armored dome over their head that needs to be shot off before you can headshot them, however.
• Gainax Ending: The ending to Heartland. You've destroyed the last Plague Wall! What do you find inside but a mysterious CLEO module? When Dr. Hoffman hacks into it, it ominously activates the "HAVEN" protocols and thanks you for your participation in this "experiment". The Homecoming DLC continues the story with the now-inert Plague Walls on the map, the CLEO module gone, and one special survivor, Tressie, investigating just what happened.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Outside of the tutorial missions, the game has no real overarching plot, focusing more on being an open-world sandbox experience with occasional random side-quests, with your only primary goals being destroying every plague heart on the map (the number of which varies with difficulty) and establishing your endgame leader legacy. What passes for a story in the game is told via periodic radio broadcasts, mostly from The Network and Red Talon detailing the state of the country and a growing conflict between the two groups.
  • Subverted in later content updates, as the Heartland DLC is a story-focused game based on revisiting Trumbull Valley, and the Trumbull Valley map introduced in the Homecoming update has a good few major quest lines the player may follow.
• Glass-Shattering Sound: Following the Homecoming update, screamers will now shatter the windows of any nearby houses or vehicles when they emit their ear-piercing howl.
• Grief-Induced Split: Among the recruitable player characters in the Heartland DLC are Mutually Exclusive Party Members Vic and Isaac, bereaved husbands who recently lost their daughter. Isaac left because he felt Vic would never stop blaming him for the girl's death.
• Hand Cannon: Pistols that use .44 magnum rounds (i.e. the Desert Eagle or S&W M29 revolver) deal high damage and have the same ability to penetrate multiple enemies that rifle-caliber longarms have. The downside is that .44 magnum weaponry cannot be silenced.
• Happy Ending Override: Returning to Jurassic Junction with IzzBee in Homecoming shows the location is completely trashed and overrun with zombies, and IzzBee can't get over whatever happened after the events of Heartland.
• Heel Realization: Mickey admits in the Homecoming DLC his family is kinda terrible, and he's done some awful things, and wants no part of that legacy anymore.
• Hollywood Darkness: Averted. Night in this game is just as dark as you'd expect in rural areas with no electrical lighting, and it's easy to accidentally get yourself lost or cornered - which only gets worse whenever you realize too late that you've also completely missed that you walked past about five zombies and their glowing eyes just turned toward your back. One of the benefits of having electric power to your base is it will be lit up at night.
  • Played Straight more in later updates, as while the environments are still shrouded in darkness at night, the player is able to see a decent area around them so they are not completely lost in the dark.
• Hollywood Silencer: Zig-Zagged. Suppressors in this game will not completely silence your gun gameplay-wise, and zombies within a certain radius of you depending on the gun will still hear the noise of your shots. Additionally, shotguns and revolvers cannot be silenced whatsoever, unless they are suppressed beforehand like certain Bounty Broker weapons and Echo weapons. However on an audio standpoint, attaching a suppressor to a gun, whether it be a .22 caliber pistol or a 7.62 rifle, will greatly muffle the sound it makes, outright letting out nothing but a small pop on the smaller guns.
• I Lied: In one optional Sheriff side mission, you must retrieve a rucksack of stolen meds for a group. You have the choice of either killing the thieves outright or negotiate peace. Should you choose option B, they seemingly let you and the other group member from the friendly group go scot-free with meds. Then, the moment you step out of the building... They betray you and kill the friendly enclave member following you and (possible if you have terrible gear at hand) you.
• In Medias Res: A non-tutorial game in which the player picks three survivors will have them banter about dealing with the Blood Plague and specials, showing they've had their adventures and are deciding to settle down and hole up in the selected town rather than Walk the Earth.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • At max level, the Powerhouse skill lets you execute zombies without needing to stun them first; this allows you to pretty much insta-kill anything short of a Feral or Juggernaut with a single button press. The Juggernaut Edition changes this so it only works with Heavy weapons, however, the Bladed and Close Combat weapon specializations are also given insta-kills at max level (Blunt weapon specialization does not have an insta-kill, but does give a special move that knocks down multiple zombies at once).
  • If you're lucky enough to roll a character with both the Scouting specialization in their Wits slot and the Weapon Handling specialization in their Firearms slot, the 25% bonus to firearm durability from both skills will stack, letting your character blaze away with firearms with significantly reduced degradation.
  • In Heartland, The Plague Buster grenade is a major game changer. It instantly annihilates any Screamer or Plague Zombie in the area of effect. Two of them will kill a feral, and even the mighty Juggernaut will be at deaths door for two hits. Once you have a good supply, the heavy freaks are little more than an annoyance. Furthermore, it's harmless to humans. So any time you're swarmed, throwing one at your feet will instantly slaughter the normal zeds and set the freaks reeling.
  • Hidden weapon cases occasionally contain a gun called the Eternal Guard's Infinite Rage, an otherwise normal AK-47 with one key difference — a modified helical magazine holding a staggering 150 7.62mm rounds, basically making it a light machine gun. The amount of sustained fire it can put out can down single Juggernauts, Plague Hearts, or massive hordes with ease long before ever even considering reloading.
  • Red Talon base equipment are the best bang-for-your buck upgrades available. The Red Talon watchtower has the most danger reduction of all watchtowers you can construct, the officer's quarters provides two beds, a latrine, and skill boosters, and the Red Talon workshop is equal to a level 3 workshop, but comes with its own power supply and provides +1 material per day. Best of all, they cost nothing to construct. The downside is they can only be acquired with prestige grinded in Daybreak, AND you have to have unlocked the equipment by repeatedly doing well in it.
  • A combination of skills can give a Survivor the ability to run indefinitely without ever getting tired unless carrying a rucksack or other heavy equipment — and infinite Sneaking, too.
• It Can Think:
  • As of the Heart Attack update, the Plague Hearts are more than just meat pinatas that need to all be destroyed as part of your game objectives - now, the entirety of the infestation and siege mechanics revolve around them, as once awakened, they're what send out hordes of zombies to infest locations around the map with the explicit intention of getting ever closer to your base to set up staging grounds for sieges with specialized infestation sites. Luckily, they don't START awakened, but non-stealthily killing too many zombies and allowing Screamers to call out your position while in plague territory will wake them up angry in a hurry, so pick your battles carefully lest they start a war in response.
  • Even before the update, regular Zeds already display a predatory level of intelligence. Should they manage to spot you from behind, they will prowl and approach silently to catch you off-guard. Zeds also display excellent pack mentality, running off to summon reinforcement of they think they're outmatched.
• Killed Off for Real: In the Homecoming Update, numerous characters from Heartland unfortunately fall into this category. Those that are confirmed dead (or die later as the DLC progresses) are Malik, Nat, and Ray Santos. Excluding Reba, Diane, Mickey, IzzBee, Chavez, and Doctor Hoffman, the rest of the Heartland characters' fates remain shrouded in mystery.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Before Update 28, players could ransack a group's enclave (then sell them back their property).
• Left Hanging: Word of God says the Blood Plague and black fever from the first game are two separate diseases and the story won't be following up on the black fever angle.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: The flavor text for the Kind of an Idiot trait is: "We should all split up. We'll cover more ground that way."
• The Load:
  • One random sidequest involves a group of 3 unprepared and poorly equipped survivors who, like many survivor groups, ask you repeatedly for supplies. They're armed only with knives and your fellow group members will comment that they seem useless and that giving them resources is a waste. They'll eventually ask to join your group; if you accept, you'll learn they have terrible traits that cripple their combat abilities (often unable to advance beyond the first couple of levels for assorted combat skills). If you're lucky they at least might have some non-combat abilities that you're looking for (such as mechanical skill or gardening). They are, however, perfect for Cannon Fodder and Suicide Missions.
  • Any survivor with a trait that stops them from reaching the full seven levels possible on a given stat track is locked out of the ability to specialize in that stat, and even without considering how this stops them from learning some potential new skills, it has the passive effect of lowering their stats' max potential since they're unable to get the stat gains that leveling their specialization would've given them. Unless their fifth skill, if they have one, is something you REALLY need, such characters are flat-out worse than a survivor without a stat-crippling trait.
• Lured into a Trap: Occasionally, a survivor group offering trade are actually setting up an ambush, and will attempt to kill you as soon as you arrive.
• Made of Iron: Human opponents beyond Standard difficulty can take a shocking amount of damage before so much as being downed, and can no longer be autokilled by headshots, rendering them some of the few enemies in the game where emptying a full-auto clip into their torso and head may not be a bad idea.
• Mad Scientist:
  • In Homecoming, Dr. Hoffman's faction are the Mad Scientists.
  • The Flavor Text for Echo Labs-related weapons and consumables are written from Sasquatch's perspective, who heavily implies that they are this. Completely justified, as Echo Labs' weapons are all engineered to be as quiet as possible, including integrally-suppressed shotguns, revolvers, and two bladed weapons that somehow make no noise when they cut things, all of which impress Sasquatch. When it comes to their consumables, Sasquatch outright describes doses of Zedeye (pills that enable people to see in darkness) as "some mad scientist shit".
• Magikarp Power:
  • The Close Combat specialization. It's a lot harder to fight with your emergency weapon than a bladed weapon, blunt weapon, or heavy weapon, but if you max out the Close Combat specialization you get the ability to instantly kill zombies with the press of a button. Unlike the similar ability granted by the maxed out Powerhouse or Swordplay specializations, the Close Combat specialization has considerably more I-frames, so zombies can't attack you during the animation.
  • Of all the vehicles, the Miragra gets the biggest upgrade, going from a four seater with only 4 trunk space, with average stats across the board to the Witchita ES, increasing its track space to an impressive 7, with armor that gives its durability a major boost, while improving acceleration, making it the best versatile upgraded vehicle.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: A particularly annoying example, as other outposts will always look to you to help them. There can be ten other survivor groups and they never think of asking the others, and blame you for not helping them, regardless of circumstance.
• Master of All: Red Talon operatives have special unique specializations that give them the best benefits of ALL FOUR specialization choices. I.E., their fighting specialization, Heroism, gives them the best elements of the Close Combat, Swordplay, Striking, and Endurance specializations. This makes Red Talon operatives by far the best survivors you can recruit into your community. However, doing so requires a lot of grinding in the Daybreak DLC to earn enough Red Talon currency to afford them. To keep them from being too overpowered, all Red Talon operatives also have a "Red Talon" trait that makes them increase in Standing more slowly so they can't jump straight to Hero or Leadership status, and they'll also come with one of a pool of traits unique to Red Talon operatives that has a blatant downside to counterbalance its benefit.
• Mêlée à Trois: Unlike the first game, State of Decay 2 features combat against hostile survivors (although such fights are relatively rare), resulting in 3-way battles between you and your teammates, enemy survivors, and the zombies. Sometimes players will use Zombait to sic zombies on enemies, and toss in a firebomb after both sides are in full battle.
• Mercy Kill:
  • In the tutorial, the player is introduced to the shooting mechanics by putting down a blood plague zombie who the doctor was unable to save. In the main game, a player can choose to kill someone who has been infected by the blood plague if they don't have the ingredients for the cure.
  • In Homecoming, after completing the Mickey Wilkerson storyline, Ray Santos will eventually succumb to his cancer several days later. Ray asked Mickey to make sure he wouldn’t turn and Mickey mercifully killed him.
• New Game Plus: Once you've completed a legacy story, the game starts over while allowing you to bring three leveled-up survivors from a previous game and up to two legacy bonuses, provided you've unlocked those legacy bonuses on a difficulty either equal to or higher than the one you're about to start playing on. Unlike Breakdown, you do NOT keep your supply locker items when you start a new game. You only bring over the items carried by the three survivors. Of course, they don't stop you from loading them up to the rafters with the best weapons, tools, and consumables you've got...
  • Alleviated in recent updates, as now you can choose to move your entire community to a new map once you complete your leader's legacy goal. On top of this, you can immediately move into a higher end base so long as you have the influence, that way you don't have to fit 9 people and a warehouse of resources into a tiny starting base.
• No Fair Cheating:
  • Turning off the game when your character is dead will not save them: when you log back on, they will be dead. However, if you turn off the game and reload BEFORE they take the hit that'd kill them, all zombies surrounding your character will be gone — but all quests will be reset as well. However, the level of Blood Plague the character(s) have remains, meaning if they were gang-tackled by plague zombies before you quit, they may turn anyway if they're not near a cure. Also, cloud saves take priority over local saves, which prevents you from reloading from a backup save file if you lose a character or get in a poor situation.
  • Blocking base entrances with vehicles (to keep zombies out) won't work, either. The vehicles will be bumped back (damaging them in the process) when an NPC opens the door.
• No FEMA Response: Zig-zagged. There were Army camps to help refugees, but they've been abandoned by the time the tutorial survivors reach one. The government appears to have straight up fled, leaving Red Talon and the Network to pick up the pieces and help remaining survivors.
• No Periods, Period: Feminine hygiene products are a very high-value trade item, but your survivors have no domestic consumption.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: Zig-zagged. Survivors frequently refer to the hordes of the undead as zombies, but also have different nicknames for them, like "creepers" or "brainless" or "deadheads."
• Offscreen Villainy: Red Talon is supposed to be the evil paramilitary group that runs labor camps, but you never get to see any of its villainy onscreen. By contrast, the organization is immeasurably helpful to your group, providing not only its own agents to permanently aid your community, but also giving you powerful military-grade ordnance to destroy plague hearts.
• Our Zombies Are Different: This zombie apocalypse is of the "hell is full" type where everyone revives as a zombie regardless of how they died, barring a headshot - which you can witness when killing human opponents with non-headshot final blows. The "blood plague" is just another disease on top of the zombies everyone has to deal with; normal zombie bites are not infectious and do not hurt you more than a regular human biting you (which can take out a chunk of flesh, but still).
• Our Weapons Will Be Boxy in the Future: Almost all of the CLEO melee and ranged weapons introduced in Daybreak are extremely angular in design. The only exception is the two CLEO sniper rifles, and even then, the only curve present on either of them is in their stocks. This even applies to muzzle mods, with the CLEO Accelerator and CLEO Tumbler looking decidedly more square than other muzzle mods in the game.
• Plot Armor: Almost none in a game where Anyone Can Die, but there are some rare exceptions, especially in Homecoming. Characters like Ray, IzzBee, Dr. Hoffman, and other plot relevant characters can be completely wrecked by Blood Juggernauts, but they'll at worst be limping from Blood Plague (which won't kill them.)
• Private Military Contractors: Red Talon. Notably, if you recruit a Red Talon soldier, they're called a "contractor".
• Queer Romance: Completing Mickey's questline reveals his brother Eli and Lily's brother Jacob were romantically involved; they were killed during the opening of the zombie apocalypse. Mickey says that if there was anyone who could have resolved the tensions between the Wilkersons and Ritters, it was Eli, who was the White Sheep of the family.
• Rage Quit: Thanks to the Rogue Like nature of the game that saves the game constantly, quitting the game just before your community member suffers a final blow is a useful last-ditch tactic.
• Random Event: Update 34 added Curveballs, which can effect either the zeds, your community, or the map's loot in a positive or negative manner. The beneficial Curveballs are often temporary, while the more detrimental ones involve completing at least one objective to get rid of their effects.
• Random Number God: The game tries to avoid having illogical scenarios, but sometimes it'll have the farmhouse where Ray Santos in Homecoming DLC was staying have a Plague Heart. "Something happened" indeed.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Plague zombies' eyes glow red. It's especially noticeable at night. Just to mess with you, the area near Plague Hearts has glowing bits in the air to make some lights wander around that look like zombie eyes in the dark. Regular zombies' eyes will glow yellow to a similar eerie effect.
• The Remnant:
  • Some survivor enclaves are made up of U.S. Army soldiers who got left behind when the government fled. A group of 3 ex-soldiers can join your survivor group as part of one of the game's potential random sidequests.
  • "Osiris Command" is apparently what's left of the U.S. Military; their primary concern at the moment seems to be making sure the President and other VIPs are able to ride out the apocalypse safely, rather than doing anything to help the scattered survivor communities. They also seem to consider Red Talon to be a Renegade Splinter Faction and ignore communications from them.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: Zombies and humans can only be killed by destroying their brains. If you down a human without doing so, they'll reanimate a few seconds later as a zombie. Also, hostile human NPCs use the same "second-wind" mechanic as your player characters, so unless you kill them with a headshot you need to execute them quickly while they're knocked down on the group, or else they'll just recover with most of their health restored.
• The Reveal: Homecoming reveals finally what the acronym CLEO stands for (long a source of speculation among fans). It stands for Computerized Logistics for Executive Operations and is an experimental advanced artificial intelligence (AI) developed by the US military and housed in a network of orbital satellites. When society began to collapse, the CLEO AI was tasked with automated logistics and resupplies for the military while it tried to contain the outbreak. However when the military was overwhelmed and splintered, CLEO went dormant until certain people were able to access and utilize it's resupply functions. 18 months into the apocalypse the satellite network that housed CLEO began to decay, putting it's mission in jeopardy and leading to survivors in Trumbull Valley doing whatever possible to salvage the AI and it's logistics functions.
• Revolvers Are Just Better:
  • Revolvers have been somewhat improved from the first game. While they still cannot be suppressed, they won't jam or break, unlike automatics which wear out and have to be repaired after a few magazines worth of gunfire.
  • An experimental silenced revolver is available as part of the "Trumbull Valley Pack" from the Bounty Hunter quest giver. It holds 8 rounds of .22 ammo and like all revolvers has infinite durability; the only drawback is that the cylinder does not swing out (which is part of what allows it to be silenced) so you have to reload it one chamber at a time.
• Serial Killer: A crossbow-wielding maniac will sometimes show up and murder neutral or hostile survivor enclaves. When confronting them, you can either drive them out of town, fight them, or even have a small chance of recruiting them to your community.
• The Sheriff: One of the possible leaders for your community is this. Their legacy is built upon bringing law and order back to society, which culminates in a fight with a band of renegade survivors preying on neighboring enclaves.
• Shop Fodder: Anything that's categorized as a Luxury Item falls under this trope. As their name implies, these are often items that were taken for granted before the zombie apocalypse and now command a high trade price due to their rarity, such as jewelry, snacks, hygeine supplies, books and board games, etc. The only exception is the case of Bulk Plague Cure, a player-created item containing four doses of Plague Cure that can be sold for the price of five, worth a whopping 500 Influence by default.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Humans and ferals will go down quickly with one blast from a shotgun. Update 19 gave them numerous buffs, such as guaranteed dismemberment or headshots within 20 meters, reliable kills within 5, and much less noise so you don't attract another horde while you wipe out the first one. It gets even better with the Sharpshooter perk: the cloud of buckshot goes through anything it hits. With good timing, you can decimate 5-8 incoming zombies with one shot.
• Shout-Out:
  • Building a trade depot nets you the Achievement "Who Run Bartertown?"
  • Promoting a Warlord to Leader earns you the "Mediocre!" Achievement
  • Upon entering a structure with a plague heart, some characters will say, "What an incredible smell I've discovered."
  • The Action Hero survivor is rife with film references.
    • The Action Hero may brag "I have the death penalty on twelve systems!". If the Action Hero is a female survivor with the Deadpan Snarker voice set, they'll instead say "It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum... and I'm all outta gum." Whatever the quote actually is, another survivor inevitably asks: "Are you... quoting a movie?"
    • When a survivor complains about the Action Hero, s/he'll retort, "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!"
    • When the Action Hero declares he's going to take out an Infestation, he says, "If I'm not back by dawn, call the President!"
    • "When dealing with an infestation, I say you take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure!"
    • If with another survivor:
      Survivor: What, no cheesy quotes?
      Action Hero: (chuckles) It's not the years, honey. It's the mileage.
  • The GSG-W rifle's description text mentions that it is manufactured by Veridian Dynamics.
  • During sieges, your character can sometimes shout "Everyone fights, no one quits!"
  • One restaurant in Cascade Hills is named "Mama Fratelli's".
  • In the Providence Hills map, a survivor may come across a drainage pipe with a red balloon tied to it and a paper boat lying nearby.
  • If your Survivor has the "Strong" trait, the flavour text reads, "It's not my fault being the biggest and the strongest. I don't even exercise."
  • On a rare occurrence, there will be a zombie wearing a traffic cone.
  • One note will have some guy's briefcase combination lock: 12345. That's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage!
  • One device is "an odd little CLEO machine" — the flavor text says "all that's certain is that this little machine definitely goes 'ping'."
  • A survivor may be named "Grignr".
  • Twain on Network radio does a Take That! on a scene from Shaun of the Dead, saying he knew one fool who came upon a horde and pretended to be a zombie to avoid getting killed. It didn't work.
    Twain: Zombies don't care about your improv skills.
  • The achievement/trophy for killing 100 zombies is called "Puppies and Kittens".
  • Several Luxury Items are various volumes of an encyclopedia. The volume that covers entries starting with N and O has Flavor Text claiming that "Wise readers will explore the entry on ophiocordyceps unilateralis".
• The Siege:
  • Like in Lifeline, your base will be periodically attacked by zombies. The frequency and intensity of the attacks is based on how much noise your base makes, with higher tier base facilities and larger populations creating more noise. As of the Heart Attack update, this can still happen, but you'll have to have first awakened the Plague Hearts and allowed them to set up a chain of infestations that lead them to sites near your base.
  • The Daybreak DLC is one long, intense siege mission.
• Speaks in Shout-Outs: The Action Movie survivor thinks he's in one, so he spouts lines from action films (as seen in Shout Outs).
• Stepford Smiler: The Achievement "Throw Your Love Around" (getting a 100 morale on Dread difficulty or harder) features a Survivor smiling◊ as if Happiness Is Mandatory.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Averted. As all characters (other than the tutorial's starting characters) are randomly generated, it's quite common for a parent and child or siblings to look nothing like each other, and often be from entirely different ethnic groups. One random sidequest in which a pair of brothers joins your community at least lampshades this by noting that they're step-brothers.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: All three new maps are quite similar to Trumbull Valley from the first game, being rural areas in the shadow of a large mountain. The layout of the foothills map (the first choice when asked which map you want) in particular is extremely similar to Trumbull Valley.
• Thrill Seeker: The Action Movie survivor acts like the entire game is one big Army of Darkness scenario, wanting fast cars, weapons, and taking on special zombies.
• Time Management Game: A key element. You cannot take every mission that comes in due to sheer volume, so you need to choose which is more important. You must constantly be on the move:
  • If you don't seek out the traders, you'll likely never get the higher end weapons and base improvements.
  • If you ignore other Enclaves, they may leave the valley, or even turn hostile.
  • If you ignore personal missions for your own survivors, they will get angry and make the base morale drop.
  • If you ignore the Scattered Survivor missions, you will miss out on recruits and easy resources.
  • If you don't periodically clear out Infestations, they spread and your base morale will suffer tremendously.
• Title Drop: In Homecoming, during one of Tressie's quests, she tasks the player to defend her while she examines the remains of the plaque wall and acquiring samples from walls that are near maximum state of decay.
• Token Evil Teammate: Team members with the Warlord aspiration are this, being ruthless and having few qualms about killing other humans to survive. Builders to a lesser extent, as they will still voice complaints when a Sheriff or Trader sets out on a quest to help someone.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • The special zombies are significantly more dangerous this time around. The Feral is better at dodging and attacking, the Bloater is sneakier and its gas does more damage to both health and stamina, the Juggernaut is... well, The Juggernaut, and even the Screamer is better at drawing in zombies. And all of this is before you find the Plague Freak variants.
  • Your own survivors to an extent. when you first meet and recruit them, they are potentially not the best fighters. Once you max them out however, they become badass undead killing machines after singlehandedly disposing of hundreds of zombies. Not to mention, that’s on their own! It bears mentioning that NPC Survivors in your community almost never are killed while controlled by the AI... which is quite a change from the original, where they'd get killed all the time while under AI control.
  • In Heartland, all of the zombies are far more dangerous, including plague Freaks:
    • The regular zombies can now climb. You are no longer safe jumping on top of a platform.
    • The Ferals now take four shots to the head to take down, not one.
    • Screamers don't just attract zombies like before, they now spawn them in the immediate area, including specials.
    • Bloaters' area of affect is increased and the health penalties for breathing Bloater Gas has increased quite a bit.
    • Juggernauts were tough before but now they are nigh invulnerable: double the hitpoints, a plague cloud area of affect attack, and they no longer run into walls.
    • And if you're playing the main game on Dread or higher, the plague freak variants start showing up there, too!
• The Topic of Cancer: Ray Santos reveals in the Homecoming DLC he's dying of cancer, and doesn't want Lily to know about it.
• The Virus: The Blood Plague, carried by the plague zombies and presumably created by the plague hearts that infest the map. Getting hit or bit by a plague zombie causes a survivor's infection meter to increase and if it fills up completely they will be infected. After an amount of time that, depending on your difficulty levels, can be as much as three real time hours or at little as five real-time MINUTES - a timer which drops further if they sustain further damage from plague sources - that survivor will then die and turn into a zombie. With samples gathered from dead zombies and hearts, the player can craft the cure. Or, as mentioned above, simply Mercy Kill the infected survivor.
• Unexplained Recovery: More to Unexplained Reconstruction. The bridges to Fairfield was destroyed prior to Heartland but in Homecoming, which takes place after the the former, the western bridge has been restored with a military portable bridge to allow access along with a makeshift wooden bridge set up as an alternate crossing further down the river. The bridge to Mount Tanner has been repaired as well, allowing for easier vehicle access than before.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Late into the game, an enclave threatens you for supplies because you’re “hogging” them. Even if you’re generous, they still continue to threaten you. Which leads to the final offer, the leader asks you to GIVE UP YOUR HOME BASE! Talk about being a major douche. You can either A, give up your base and move or B, kill those ungrateful bastards. What do you think you’d choose? If you've supplied your group well, it becomes a case of Mugging the Monster, as it turns into a Curb-Stomp Battle.
• Villains Do The Dirty Work: If you manage to turn a survivor enclave hostile (such as by repeatedly refusing to help them), and opt not to fight them immediately, they won't stay on the map for too long. Eventually they'll get wiped out either by zombies or the Crossbow Serial Killer.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Not every survivor in your community has the same agenda. People who qualify for the "Builder" leadership are often at loggerheads for you pursuing Sherriff missions that prioritize helping other people, for example (Traders less so since they like having allies). Sherriff missions in particular also often have you helping out one enclave over another which may make one like you less. And Warlords are just generally opposed to helping out anyone who isn't part of your tribe, putting them at odds with both Sheriffs and Traders. Some members of your community may get frustrated and leave if you don't address their concerns at least some of the time.
• Wham Shot: In Heartland, what lies behind the last Plague Wall is a CLEO module, the biomass that forms them growing out of it.
• Where It All Began: Heartland returns to Trumbull Valley from the first game. Homecoming opens Trumbull Valley as a regular region.
• World Half Full: The world's continued taking hits since the first game. The U.S. government is gone, having straight up abandoned the survivors or succumbed to the hordes. The special zombies are more dangerous, working cars (a survival tool) are now something of a rarity, and the fuel to run them is now a resource when previously it was too plentiful to track. The blood plague replacing the the black fever is a sidegrade: from a rare lurking killer that can take your best, to a constant bother that can be treated reliably by communities that can afford it, and even comes with a handy timer to stop you from guessing when to shoot your comrade in the head in case he turns, but if you can't eat the cost you need to stick your neck out for the materials and risk contracting the blood plague.
  
  Yet you can now make a difference: the campaign mode is about carving out a place to stay, whereas the best you could do in 1 was to keep running. Increased trading, making base maintenance less demanding, and the fact that radio recon now spawns resources instead of locating them means humans are no longer stuck running on fumes of the old world, doomed to decline once the scavenging runs out (and takes some of the fun out of things). Almost no humans now have the joke skills that represented not being specced for this life, and while that carries implications, they're much better at staying on top of the outbreak. Best of all, the player's group is no longer alone: it hears from distant factions surviving and helping others to survive (though one's implied to run forced labor camps), and once it puts down roots it helps establish more settlements in the form of bonuses such as always having electricity and running water. You're as likely as ever to be messily dismembered, but humanity's going to make it.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • It's unclear what happened to the rest of Greyhound One or Vienna Cho from Lifeline. Though, given Sasquatch now runs with Red Talon rather than the Army, we may be able to guess.
  • When you exile a survivor from your community, unless you follow them and cause them to get killed or they have uncured blood plague and are going to turn, they are never seen or heard of again.
• What the Hell, Hero?: A Sheriff or Warlord who chooses Murder Is the Best Solution will get an earful from the more peaceful Survivors.
  • Can be enacted in general, as warlords and builders will generally oppose sheriffs and traders, questioning them whenever they start or complete a legacy goal quest.
• Wrench Wench: Your female survivor can be one of these with the ability to repair weapons, vehicles as well as crafting in general. You can even wear a mechanic outfit with gloves, boots and a boiler suit.
• Your Head Asplode:
  • How practically everything dies in this game. Using a small firearm with .22 caliber ammo? Head explodes. Bladed weapons? Head explodes (although, one could argue the survivor is merely chopping off the top part of an enemy's head). Nothing short of firing a few .50 caliber rounds into a zombie's stomach will result in a zombie or enemy survivor's head popping like a balloon.
  • In the first Sheriff questline, the NPC that tags along with you is scripted to die, no matter how fast you manage to kill the raiders. This can result in the character's head quite literally exploding for no reason, which can admittedly make for a morbidly hilarious sight, if nothing else.
  • When CLEO is installed and the HAVEN protocols are activated, it makes zombie heads explode when they're too close to your base.
• Zerg Rush: As usual for zombies, one or two are no problem for even a newbie. However, once they start attacking in groups, things can get out of hand in a hurry.
• Zombie Apocalypse: It is a zombie apocalypse survival simulator.

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