Abandoned City Survival Beginner’s Guide: Tips, Tricks & Strategies to Survive And Leave the City

Abandoned City Survival is Casual Azur Games’ latest casual survival game currently available exclisively on Android. Like most of the company’s titles, Abandoned City Survival offers simple and straightforward gameplay mechanics that takes seconds to understand and at the same time guarantees hours of addictive gameplay.

Considering the overabundance of mobile games set in a post-apocalyptic era, images of widespread destruction and chaos almost always entails the need for survival. In order to continuously do so, constant gathering of resources, as well as tasks of rebuilding camps or communities will naturally be involved. Of course, having antagonists are also an expected part of the journey, which could be zombies, mutant monsters, or even other survivors as well.

Abandoned City Survival sets itself apart from most other action adventure survival games in that there are no pressures whatsoever relating to enemies that may pop up randomly on the abandoned city you are in. It is essentially a gathering, crafting, and rebuilding adventure with the goal of being able to survive and ultimately leave the abandoned city.

Abandoned City Survival lets you dive right in on the adventure as soon as run the app and the initial actions you take form part of its simple and very easy to follow tutorial session. Regardless of your choices of actions and amount of free time to spend on your adventure, progress can be felt every step of the way. If you are aiming to finish the adventure, then read our Abandoned City Survival Beginner’s Guide and discover all you need to know to clear the adventure.

1. Keep The Ad Boosts Active

If it is a free-to-play mobile game, chances are that there will be video ads contained. It is well understood that there are players who are distracted or even annoyed by the presence of ads in the games they play, but it is also important to understand that such ads exist to support the continued availability and development of the game.

Fortunately, there are no random ads that pop up as you play in Abandoned City Survival and you can actually enjoy it without having to play or watch a single ad. You can even continue playing Abandoned City Survival even without an internet connection as you are only required to have internet connectivity to enjoy numerous ad boosts offered in the game.

Contrary to the notion that in-game ads actually consume time that you should rather spend enjoying your adventure, ad boosts speed up gameplay progression in a variety of ways. While a video ad may take 15 to 30 seconds before the reward can be earned, rewards are always well worth the effort. Again, you do not need to patronize ad boosts to make progress or even enjoy your adventure but doing so will cut down the time it takes for you to finish quests and missions.

Although you will be itching to start rummaging through the area around you and craft some new items after the tutorial, we recommend extending your patience a bit more and activate 2 very important ad boosts. On the left side of your screen, there are 2 ad boosts available. One of them can double the movement speed of your characters and the other one recruits an additional person to help you with your quests.

Activating these ad boosts will tremendously help speed up the numerous tasks at hand and activating them once is not enough given that both will only last a few minutes. What you would want is to activate them at the soonest possible time and keep them active throughout your adventure.

The speed boost will activate for 2 minutes the first time but once the boost has expired the next activation will increase its duration for an extra minute. This means that the 15 to 30-second ad that you play for a double speed boost will even be more worth the effort the more times you use it. However, if you decide to leave the game while this boost is active, it will automatically deactivate even if the time has not yet expired.

Any extra set of hands should be appreciated in Abandoned City Survival as you will soon have plenty of different areas to loot from as well as a number of items to craft and upgrade. More people in your group means more hands on deck for the tasks at hand. Depending on your progression, the ad boost for the extra temporary recruit can increase as well, making each video ad you play for it worth more over time.

2. Prioritize Expanding Your Reach

Even at the early part of your adventure, you will already be given a glimpse of your end goal in mind. You will see a broken truck at the left side of the map, which is relatively close to your shelter. The truck requires a lot of parts for it to work again and once you have gathered all the required resources, you can finally use the truck and leave the abandoned city. To where? Nobody really knows as this stands as the end of journey in Abandoned City Survival’s current version.

The truck seems really close and the abandoned city map does not appear to be that massive as well. However, an important aspect that determines your overall progression in Abandoned City Survival relates to how far across the map you have reached and can loot from. As you are confined to just a small area at the beginning of your adventure, you will be able to obtain dynamite, which serves as keys towards unlocking the next area.

If you tap on a potential source of loot but it shows “view” instead of “open”, then it simply means that you cannot reach that area yet. If you click on the view button, you will be shown the debris or roadblock that prevents you from reaching that area. Typically, the impediment can be cleared with a certain number of dynamites so if you do not have enough, it only means that you need to screen the current area for loot locations you may have missed.

Gathering resources seem like a never-ending task in Abandoned City Survival but the amount of resources you can gather from the abandoned city actually has its limits. In some instances, you will have to choose how to deal with your multiple tasks and if the choice is between continuously looting or expanding your grounds, then the latter should be the top choice.

Moving on to the next area may not always necessarily mean you instantly loot everything. As part of the progression mechanics in Abandoned City Survival, latter cars locks, and other sources of items require a higher level of equipment. In such cases, be ready to upgrade your gears anew for the next level of looting activities.

3. Strengthen Your People Whenever Possible

Although you will only be taking command of a person or two at the start of your survival adventure, progressing your camp and your journey will inevitably lead to recruiting more and more survivors to join you in your journey. While an increase in numbers certainly boosts your efficiency in completing projects and gathering resources, Abandoned City Survival provides a massive selection of upgrade options for your survivors.

You can access human upgrades through its icon at the bottom of the screen. There are 8 different upgrades that each speeds up specific activities. Each upgrade will naturally apply to every human in your employ and the effects are also permanent. Upgrades cost food, which is a basic enough resource you can gather almost anywhere on the map. In most cases, you can upgrade for free through an ad boost and playing a 15 to 30-second video ad will earn you a new upgrade.

Upgrade levels have a soft cap based on the upgrade level of your medical facility and each new level reached by the medical facility increases the upgrade cap by 5. While you may feel the monotony of playing video ads one after another just to fully upgrade your survivors, doing so is worth it considering how much it improves your team’s efficiency. Of course, upgrades become even more valuable the more survivors you have.

It is safe to say that each human upgrade is important. However, we consider some to be more valuable than others considering how often the activity is performed. In this regard, you can consider prioritization of upgrade choices in case you do not have enough food for all open upgrades or if you cannot spare as much time for the ad boosts.

Considering all 8 choices, what we consider to be the most important is Movement Speed. Survivors move all the time to and from camp out into the open city for continuous scavenging. An increase in movement speed may not be as noticeable with each new level but a closer observation of how people move about will certainly reveal that it has its positive effect. In tandem with the 2x speed buff provided by the ad boost we discussed earlier, banking on this upgrade will make your survivors move a lot faster than their default speed.

It may take a little time before you fully unlock the garage and be able to set out for expeditions but once you do, you should consider maxing it out next to Movement Speed. Expeditions are an excellent way of procuring additional resources over time and once you are able to utilize it, you should do so as often as you can.

The remaining 6 human upgrade options relate to looting speed or at least activities that lead to looting. Boosting Looting Speed will only affect gathering resources that do not require any equipment. As some resources require you to use a shovel, crowbar, lock pick, or a canister, there are specific upgrades to speed looting that relate to their use.

4. Learn To Prioritize Crafting Tasks

From the tutorial session down to the first minutes of your survival adventure, the amount and relative variety of the resources you gather makes it fairly easy to go into crafting. This is largely attributable to your resources being exclusively sufficient only for a particular crafting choice, making it seem like a linear quest to perform crafting tasks in the game.

However, as you continue to have different facilities at the bunker and have various tools to gather even more resources, it will soon happen that two or more crafting options will be open for building or upgrade.

There are 16 different tools and facilities that you can build and upgrade in Abandoned City Survival. Each of them are important in their own right and unlocking all of them will be your priority relative to materials consumption. It is essentially important to read through what each one actually does so you can tailor fit your choices based on your current needs.

What we consider to be of the utmost importance is the Bedroom. This is the part of the house that lets you invite more survivors with each upgrade and an additional helping hand goes a long way in Abandoned City Survival. In addition to materials shortage, what would prevent you from upgrading the bedroom as well as other crafting jobs is the item cap allotted for each resource.

As crafting upgrades are expected to cost more and more materials the higher the upgrade level goes, it can happen that the required number of resources is more than what your individual storages can hold. As such, it becomes the next important priority choice of upgrade to consider these different facilities. You have a Building Materials Storage, a Microchips Storage, a Food Storage, and a Fuel storage. Of the 4, the first one should be your top priority.

Within a few seconds following your dive into the abandoned city, you will be introduced to the crafting feature, which makes use of the Work Bench in the garage. You will occasionally have to perform upgrades on the crafting table as well since its upgrade level will determine the max upgrade level of every crafting task.

The crow bar, shovel, lock pick, and canister are crafting upgrades that are circumstantial. It is best to upgrade them as the need arises. For example, you do not need to upgrade the lock pick to level 4 if there are no locks in the current area you are in that requires it. Upgrading the backpack essentially shortens the time it takes for your survivors to gather resources as more item capacity basically means less travels.

We already mentioned the importance of expeditions early on and the further you progress in your adventure, the more important it becomes for you to be able to obtain extra resources. The pickup in the garage will actually be used for the expedition.

Once unlocked, you will be able to send out 1 person to an expedition but upgrading the garage adds one more person for each upgrade level. You will still be able to choose to deploy less than the maximum capacity of people to head out but we recommend maximizing this feature for its relative perks.

The expedition basically consumes fuel but nets you a set amount of construction materials needed for crafting. Fuel, just like food, falls among the resources that are relatively more abundant than the construction materials so expeditions basically equate to a trade of abundant resources for scarcer ones. The Market might be easy to miss being just outside your house but it also works as an exchange facility where you can earn construction materials and microchips by paying food or fuel.

If you have already fully upgraded your survivors and want them to be even more proficient, you should consider upgrading the Medical Center. As awkward as it may sound, the purpose of the medical facility is to actually increase the upgrade cap of the survivors. If you choose to upgrade this, then you must be ready to play a lot of ad boosts to maximize your team’s performance towards the next cap as well.

5. Pay Attention To Your Resources

There are basically 5 different resources you can gather in Abandoned City Survival with dynamite being the fifth one. You have construction materials, microchips, food, and fuel. Both construction materials and microchips are required for every crafting upgrade so you will always be needing more of them.

Food is used to upgrade your survivors but, for the most part, you can just take advantage of the ad boosts to perform any of those upgrades. Fuel is necessary for expeditions but given that expeditions can only take place once in a while even at max upgrade, you will have more fuel than what you will regularly need. Finally, dynamite is like a special resource that you can obtain specifically for the needs relative to expanding your covered areas in the abandoned city.

Considering the 4 main resources, you will quickly notice that you will always need more of the construction materials and the microchips almost all the time while food and fuel may always be capped. As such, make it a habit to expend both food and fuel especially for activities that earn you more of the former. This means that you need to always entertain the idea of expeditions each time its icon lights up at the bottom of the screen. Likewise, make it a habit to visit the Market on a regular basis. After going for an exchange, there will be a cool down period within which you must again wait to go for another exchange.

Keep a keen eye on every potential source of loots around the city as it can happen that you will miss some of them. There are glowing outlines around each object or location where resources can be gathered. White lines symbolize open access for these areas while red lines mean you are missing a requirement such as path towards it or a needed upgrade level for an equipment. Even if you have reached several areas in your survival adventure, make it a habit to revisit earlier areas for items you may have missed.

When your expedition ends and the survivors you deployed have returned back home, be sure to consider taking advantage of the ad boost that may pop up. This ad boost can increase the rewards of the expedition by an extra 50%, which is a huge help especially if you are low on construction materials and microchips.

Likewise, keep an eye out for the chopper that randomly flies across the abandoned city. Clicking on it will prompt yet another ad boost opportunity to earn you a resource drop. The resource crate contains construction materials, microchips, and even some fuel. You do not necessarily have to claim it each time it shows up but when you are low on these resources, the airdrop will almost always fill up your supply of them.

6. Check On Your Survivors As Well

There are hardly any idle moments in Abandoned City Survival especially if you are the type who exercises patience in playing ad boosts one after another or in-between performing crafting tasks in your adventure. There will be instances, however, when you can just enjoy your survivors at work, whether they are crafting something or rummaging through the different areas you sent them to.

With an abundance of survivors under your command in combination with a plethora of locations they are deployed to for resources as well as the occasional crafting sessions, it becomes possible for some of them to lose their way and be stuck in an area. This will result in a reduction on the group’s overall efficiency and if you see some survivors idle, it may mean that they will stay that way for the rest of your session.

Although logging out of your session automatically means the speed boost and the extra recruit will be gone, there really are no other choices to make when a survivor or a couple gets stuck in a loop. Perhaps future updates to Abandoned City Survival will have these instances fixed but for now, you will have to close the app and restart it again to get them unstuck.

And that very much covers all you need to know to survive and leave the city in Abandoned City Survival. We hope that you learned a good deal from the simple tips and strategies we shared and that you enjoyed reading our beginner’s guide.

As simple and straightforward the gameplay may seem, you will surely find yourself getting hooked into it for hours at a time. If you have some extra tricks or strategies to share or simply want to share your experiences with the adventure, do not hesitate to share them with us in the comments below!