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[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   What black roads does is make every shelter a zombie infested place. I mentioned it because it sounded like Tjoh was being assaulted right outside his shelter which unless he was in a city shouldn't be happening. I was posting from a phone so I wasn't able to really expound upon my reasoning.
   As for starting survival I find that breaking one of the lockers and getting a pipe is about the best course of action. After you have a pipe just grab a rock and craft it into a makeshift crowbar which does decent damage and can be used to force open doors without breaking them. It makes about the best starting utility weapon. As for survival when fighting zombies make note of terrain. A bush slows a zombie enough that as long as your not really slow you get a free hit in on them at the least. With faster and more powerful attacks you can actually manage to kill them without getting attacked once. Same goes for windows though I have found I prefer retreating outside the town so as to avoid additional zombies being attracted. Also if your using a melee weapon don't encumber your torso. The way torso encumbrance affects your chance to hit is that without any your basically rolling a number of d10s depending stuff like skills and such. Each point of encumbrance reduces the dice size by 1 down to a minimum of 2 sides.
   When it comes to food meat is generally the best option. There are a number of natural animals that will let you get close to them like dogs and you can easily even with no survival skill butcher them for some meat. To cook them you do start with a match book and it just needs something flammable. If your in town zombies generally drop an item of clothing so you can simply light a pile up that is in the middle of the road and cook it there. The starting match book isn't really the best of fire sources though noting low use count so I advise you pick up a lighter in its place which has 100 uses. That should last you long enough and generally are the more plentiful of the two anyway. I do advise cooking the meat if you can because cooked meat has 50 nutrition as compared to the uncooked having only 20. Just to note you do need something to cook the food on but a pointed stick works though I tend to try for a pot as it has further uses.
   Water depending on where you start and what you find can be a real tough one. All you really need to get water is a container, a heat source, and a pot or something similar to "cook" it in. Always clean your water mind you as unclean can make you sick though if your dehydrated it might be your only choice. Anyway about the best setup is just being near a river as that is infinite water to clean but if you are not setup near one basically every where has a bathroom of some sort and toilets have water in them. To clean the water you don't actually need it in a container just near you so you only need one container for it if you have something like a gallon jug or what have you. A really nice early find is a coffee maker which works as both the heat source and cooking container though early games you might not have the batteries to keep it up but at least you find them full of batteries so you can use one for a bit. One final tip for thirst in general is drink any juices you find first. They go bad quickly and you will note that regular milk is already rotten when the game starts which is on purpose.
   When it is time to sleep and your character is tired make sure you are in a good place to sleep. This might sound inane but its not. A bed is nice but you should definitely aim for certain things over even a soft place to lay. If in a town then finding a room with no windows is one of the better place to take a snooze, more so if it has a bed. Of course a basement is even better but that tends to be harder to find and if taken unaware by night you generally just want inside at that point. Also to note is that you can close the window curtains by 'c'losing and already closed window if its a house or some other similar place. Store generally don't have windows, then again they generally don't have beds either so not typically the first place you go to sleep. Once you head off into the wilds you face another problem. In towns there where secure place to sleep which as long as there wasn't any zombies around you could just sleep. In the woods your generally open to the wilds and dogs, bears, and their zombie equivalent not to mention the wolves and supernatural nastiness is just waiting to gnaw your face off. About the best you can do is travel along a road and hope for a car. They won't keep you safe from the zombie animals but wild animals won't bother you. Also you can general travel said roads safely if you took the night vision trait which gives you an extra bit of range in the dark. Do note that if you plan to travel in the dark without a light at any time whether at night or underground then safe mode is your friend. It can be annoying in the light when you spot a giant spider five counties away and it stops you but with such a restricted view distance anything that interrupts you in the dark is about to eat your face.
   If anyone wants to know more about a specific early game survival topic I can expound on it some though to note I am rubbish with later game content as I tend to do something stupid in a fit of "should have been to bed a few hours ago". Also I have a YouTube channel where I do a lot of CataclysmDDA videos so if anyone wants a specific survival thing shown I can try that as well. Also this is all my opinion and others may thing differently so try it all yourself and see what works better for you. Not all people play the same.

[Greiger]

An alternate strategy is to start with a point or two in melee or dodge, and smash up some stuff in the starting shelter for a good weapon.  You can make a makeshift crowbar by smashing a locker for a pipe and using a nearby rock which makes a weak melee weapon and opening tool.  Or you can smash up a bench or two and make yourself a nailboard which is a better weapon but can't open doors.

Another less common option is to smash some windows for string and make some nail knuckles, they're a bit weaker damagewise but they attack much faster, and you can often let a zombie walk up to you, punch them once and still have time to take a step away to repeat the process before they can attack, even on open ground.

After that it's all patience, try to kite the zombies into a tile that slows them down, see how much movement it takes to move into that tile, and attack while using the number in the bottommost right to see how much time yer taking on attacks.  Once you've attacked enough that the time it takes you to attack adds up to close to what it takes to move through the tile the zombie is on, back up and kite to another slow tile.  Try not to get the attention of more than a few at a time, and don't be afraid to run like a little girl if things get hairy.

Also the basic zombies have a vision range of 40 tiles, which is less than you have, so just because you see them, if they are far enough away they might not see you.

Ninja'd

[IronTomato]

Any tips for not dying instantly with static spawn on?

Wait before you go to stay in town. Start as a class with a backpack. Dive into a house, get water, then take a hike over into the woods. It's a lot less dangerous there, if you know how to survive. Animals and fruit provide a good source of food, and water shouldn't be a problem if you got plenty in the beginning. You can make pointy sticks to throw in order to hunt. If you're good you can make a lot of stuff out of animals, too.

"No wattah in house? What do!" You might say? There'll still be plenty of bottles, which you can 'U'nload, and get water from the Toilet.

Sorry people already do this stuff, I didn't at first, and I have no clue how other people play the game.

[LordSlowpoke]

SNOP SNAP SNIP

for the love of zombie necromancer, why are you not writing the wiki yet?

[Bouchart]

About sleep- you really don't need to worry to much about this because there isn't a penalty associated with tiredness like there is hunger or thirst.

Also, it's a bit of a waste to choose a profession because it starts with an item, because you'll be finding items all over the place eventually.  I think it's best to start as a hobo and use those extra skill points for your statistics.  If the alcohol withdrawal is too much, go for a shower victim.

The early game can be very easy or very difficult depending on where your shelter is located.  A department of public works is a good place to raid early because they have so many tools to use.

[Kaitol]

Man. The amount of walls of text people have put out concerning early survival. Someone should just make a wiki page and be done with it.

[pisskop]

They do have a wiki text on it.

[Tomcost]

I've been looking in the Json files, and I can't find the rechargeable battery mod, or the part that goes into the car. I suspect that I am usign the wrong version. I'm usign the latest stable version for Windows.

Also, if I have to change versions, how do I do so without losing all my stuff?

[i2amroy]

There's lots of new content in the experimentals, which is probably where said stuff is located. Save files should be compatible between the stable and the experimental, so you should be able to just copy over to the new version without any problems (there are a few oddities that crop up in older saves, but no one of them are serious and shouldn't occur in any new areas that are generated within the world).

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

About sleep- you really don't need to worry to much about this because there isn't a penalty associated with tiredness like there is hunger or thirst.

   While being 'tired' doesn't affect you that I know of 'dead tired' penalizes you so sleeping at night not only passes a time period which is hard to operate during at the start but makes sure you don't fall to far. Also if you reach exhausted it appears you can just randomly fall asleep which is never a good thing. I don't really know the affects too well though as I always try to sleep.

[Bouchart]

What is the penalty for being Dead Tired?

Also, I think it's best to hold off on sleeping until you are wounded or in pain, since you heal wounds when you sleep and pain doesn't matter when you are sleeping.

[Ivefan]

The experimentals are quote stable right now as it seems they have mostly been working on remaining bugs before a full release, some balance perhaps. But you might as well just get the experimental version for more stuff. Add autosave to be on the safe side.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

What is the penalty for being Dead Tired?

Also, I think it's best to hold off on sleeping until you are wounded or in pain, since you heal wounds when you sleep and pain doesn't matter when you are sleeping.

   It looks to lower your stats by one and give you a speed penalty of 5. I haven't looked into the code but it might get worse the more tired you are but the speed penalty would mean that if you don't have a speed trait you stop being able to outrun normal zombies easily. If it doesn't it needs to because while a bad penalty it takes a while to get beyond that level. As for healing and pain you do have a point but I find those to be not really time constrained. You tend to either be dieing or fine. If you are dieing you can't really sleep but after your through the danger you can retreat and then sleep later. Pain is a more tricky subject, low level and aspirin is the solution, high levels of pain means your probably really hurt as well or have some other debilitating problem.

[Bouchart]

Ok, I've installed a large electric motor, a solar panel, storage battery, and vehicle controls onto a shopping cart.  It has a safe speed of over 215 mph.

With a driving skill of 1 I'm having a surprising amount of trouble controlling this thing.  Think I'll drag it over to a large flat area and work on my skill.

[Funk]

Safe speeds are nowhere near safe, anything over about 100mph need dead straight roads that are trap free.

With a skill of 1 i'd keep it to under 50mph, just so you don't hit a tree to hard.
My trike had a safe speed of 312mph and an over drive speed of 815mph!