Dawn of Zombies Guide: Tips, Cheats & Strategies to Build the Best Shelter and Survive the Zombie Apocalypse

Dawn of Zombies: Survival after the Last War on the Google Play Store, or Dawn of Zombies: The Survival on the Apple App Store, is an action survival game from Royal Ark set in a post-apocalyptic world. Developer Royal Ark has earned a reputation itself with all 5 of its action titles under its current game portfolio. Zombies: Shooting Adventure Survival, Shelter War – Survival Games in the Last City Bunker, and Zombie Arena: Fury Shooter Assault are some of Royal Ark’s other action games that continue to maintain largely positive user review ratings on mobile platforms.

Although there are plenty of action survival games on mobile that also employ a zombie apocalypse theme, Dawn of Zombies still manages to squeeze in a lot of unique features in addition to the usual ones present in similar games within the genre. The overall quality of the game’s graphics and design is further complemented by the scale of its content as well as the changing conditions within which every player must manage to survive through.

At the onset, Dawn of Zombies can appear to be intimidating for players, especially those who have yet to dive on any other game within the genre. The idea of having to constantly deal with hunger and thirst, radiation and energy depletion, as well as human and undead enemies at every turn can truly be an overwhelming predicament.

The plethora of materials to gather and items to create from scratch, however, is your constant key to solve the problems around you. Starting off with an almost bare shelter that serves as your home, Dawn of Zombies lets you customize and improve you shelter in more ways than you can possibly imagine.

The in-game tutorials for new features you unlock as well as the existence of missions that serve as your guide towards progression serves as the most basic help to look into for beginners to get around. Dawn of Zombies has simple enough controls and interface making it relatively easy for most players to pick it up and enjoy.

If you are having trouble getting through some of the missions or defeating certain enemies, then read on, as our Dawn of Zombies guide comes with numerous tips, cheats and strategies to help you build the best shelter and survive the zombie apocalypse.

1. Prioritize The Story Quest Line

Dawn of Zombies provides a ton of activities for you to engage in set in a huge world waiting to be discovered. Even as you dive in on your first hour, you are likely to be torn across a wide range of things you would want to do, which includes areas within your shelter you want to improve on, structures you want to repair, or places you want to explore. Although everything you do in the game positively contributes to your character’s overall growth and progression, the best way to go about progress is to prioritize the completion of story quests.

The initial tutorial session that introduces you to the world of Dawn of Zombies actually forms part of the game’s story. Progression through it is divided across quests, which you can see at the upper right side of your screen. Story quests not only introduce you to a variety of characters and locations, but it also serves as your key towards unlocking the rest of the game’s features and content. Beyond that, each story quest you complete also earns you experience points to strengthen you hero as well as tons of resource materials you need to further develop your shelter and boost your survivability within the apocalyptic world.

You will typically only see one story quest at a time and its objectives are often as basic as it comes. You can see more details about the quest at hand by clicking on it, and other quests can be seen as well on the other tabs. For starters, the early quests will be very easy to accomplish. Some, however, will take more time or resources to complete. These instances will be your sign to deviate a bit from the quest line and pursue other matters such as events or other dailies as well as the numerous chores you have for your developing shelter.

2. Always Tend To Your Shelter

Your shelter is more like a base camp that you will constantly need to develop and improve to make life easier for you and ultimately to sustain your survivability. Although you can quickly see the enormity of your shelter at a glance, you will also identify easily just how much work still needs to be done with it. Progressing through the story will also serve as a directing guide for you to slowly build and develop your shelter, so for starters, simply tend to it regularly on top of the quest objectives that align with fixing stuff up within the shelter grounds.

One of the basic tasks you constantly need to perform within the shelter is to eliminate zombies lurking within it. Each zombie you kill will earn you XP as well as some resources occasionally. Once all enemies within the shelter are cleared, you will begin to replenish energy. If you do not have a full energy bar and it is not regenerating, then it is an extra indicator that there are still enemies within your shelter.

Another important aspect of Dawn of Zombies that you need to be ready for is the limitation of storage space. You can initially carry 10 items in your pockets and crafting a sandbag gives you an extra 5 slots. Your shelter comes initially packed with a basic box where you can store items that you do not need to carry with you on missions. As you reach higher levels and collect more basic resources, you can craft extra boxes to increase the amount of items you can leave at your shelter.

In addition to the inventory button at the bottom of the screen that takes you to see the items you have, the craft button beside it will be among the buttons you will spend a lot of time visiting. Naturally, there are limited items you can craft at the start of your adventure but you can easily unlock more as you make progress.

Once the box is available for crafting, do not hesitate to create new ones and place them on your shelter. Crafted items wind up within your inventory and you can highlight them and click the build button to deploy them on a spot of your choice.

Opening a box gives you instant access to all your storage devices. To some extent, this will make it easier to organize items if you choose to group them according to a category of your choice. There is an auto sort button within the inventory menu that you can use to pile similar items within a box together as well. Make sure to use it regularly as you can free up more empty slots by maximizing item stacks in your storage.

Once you have sufficient storage space, the next activity you would want to do within your shelter is to scour the surroundings for random resources. There is an auto mode button at the lower left side of your screen that you can use to have your character collect resources automatically. Auto mode will not only search and pick up items scattered across the shelter’s grounds but will also chop up trees if you have an axe. If some enemies happen to roam within your home as well, auto mode enables your character to instantly attack all of them.

Take note, however, that auto mode will not let your character heal automatically or consume food and water to handle hunger and thirst automatically. As such, make sure to keep watch of each of those levels and make sure to keep the levels up enough within the auto mode duration.

3. Ensure That All Essentials Are Covered

There are many important tasks you need to accomplish in Dawn of Zombies as well as constant necessities to deal with to ensure your survival. While it is important to prioritize main story quests as far as progression is concerned, it should not in any way blind you to the most basic objective in the game, which is survival.

The idea behind pushing forward with quests and gathering various resources to develop your shelter revolves around the goal of consistently making life in the post-apocalyptic world easier for you as time passes by. Every minute spent within this world has its toll on your character’s health in the sense that survivors consistently build up hunger and thirst, and the irradiated lands necessitate washing as well.

Necessities such as food, water, health kits, and baths or alternatives should be kept in good stock, or better yet, finding ways to ensure that you can provide these basic necessities for yourself should become your top priority. Relative to this, having ample storage space as well as weapons and tools to defend yourself are necessary as well.

Fortunately enough, Dawn of Zombies provides a lot of ways for you to become less and less dependent on scouting for most of the basic resources as you will eventually be able to process materials for your basic needs. As an example, there are plenty of ready to eat food items that you can obtain from various supply runs but you can gather basic food items and process them yourself.

The well and the garden patch outside your shed are among the basic structures that can give you a steady supply of food and water. You can place seeds on the garden patch and leave empty flasks in the well for them to supply you with food and water, respectively.

Building the fireplace enables you to cook food as well and end up creating different food items that recover hunger and thirst better as you upgrade it later. As far as health is concerned, rags, which are a common resource can easily be crafted into bandages that can restore lost health.

4. Focus On One Project At A Time

As far as crafting items are concerned, the ones you should always prioritize fall within the basic survival items listed on the first group of products you can craft in the crafting menu. Beyond that, you will see a lot of broken structures within your shelter that require numerous materials to be fixed as well as other equipment that you can upgrade.

After securing the key to the basement underneath your home, you will discover even more stuff that require materials and repairing before they can be utilized. The thing is, you can actually start assigning raw materials to the stagnant structures to make it easier for you to keep tabs on the remaining items needed. Doing so will also free up more empty slots in your limited storage.

One simple feature in Dawn of Zombies that you can surely appreciate is the option to check the materials you need and where to specifically farm for them. Although much of your time outside of pursuing quest completions revolve around explorations and scavenging, having an end in mind as far as targeting specific materials you need will tremendously boost your progression.

Additionally, you should consider to focus on one project at a time and streamline your efforts towards completing all needed resources to repair one equipment. It is best to check all the items for repair first before deciding on which one to try and complete first.

The crossbow turret may sound more appealing for you if you want to bolster your shelter’s defenses but the repair workshop in your basement which can bring valuable weapons and gears back to full durability is also an enticing first project.

5. Prepare Well Before Engaging On Adventures

Story quests as well as events often involve venturing out into the unknown or, rather, specific locations on the map that are home to a variety of opportunities and threats of all sorts. Every adventure outside of your shelter is an exciting one and as much as you would be raring to travel at the first opportunity, you should take time to properly prepare before venturing out.

As to be expected, there are enemies lurking within each location on the map. Naturally, ensuring the weapon you equip has a high enough durability remaining is important as well as keeping a secondary weapon in hand. Even if your thirst and hunger levels are at maximum or close to it, packing enough water and food for the trip is a necessity as well.

Regardless of how great your fighting skills are and how superb your gears are, you should not forget to pack some bandages or healing items as well. Lastly, an axe and a hammer serves as basic tools you need as some resources within different maps can only be obtained after using them.

Remember to set healing items on the quickslot provided. Under the inventory menu, you can tap on an item and click the quickslot button to assign them there and you can instantly use these items through icons above the attack/interact button at the lower right side of the screen.

Once you are ready to leave the shelter, simply approach any foggy area on the map to leave the current location and be transferred to the map. You can scan the map to see a wide array of locations you can visit but while there are numerous choices, you should consider where the quest needs you to proceed.

You can choose to walk, which takes a lot of time to finish; or run, and consume some energy. Between the two modes, though, running is the preferred means of movement as energy will be replenished quickly anyway.

6. Be Selective When Looting

With all these necessities you need to be ready with in relation to the limited inventory slots you can carry with you, you are sure to completely fill up your bag and pockets with various materials early on in your adventure. Various items can be found within each location you visit and it is only natural for anyone to want to grab every bit of resource in front of them.

While each of the items you can pick up have their own useful purpose, your prioritization in relation to basic needs and pending projects make it so that some items become more valuable than others. You will certainly have to be very selective when picking up items and refrain from looting everything in sight.

As an alternative, you can always revisit the location at a later time to pick up the rest of the items that you chose to leave behind. On your initial run, limit your looting only in accordance to the materials you need the most.

If you happen to pick up an item that you did not intentionally want to take, you can check your inventory, highlight the item, and click on the trash bin. This will permanently delete the item and free up some space, but the discarded item will no longer be retrieved. With this, being selective and leaving some items as is grants you the ability to loot them at a later time.

7. Allocate Skill Points Carefully

In addition to being able to equip a wide variety of weapons and gears, Dawn of Zombies: provides players with ways to further customize their characters with the skill points earned relative to the skill tree to allocate them on. Levelling up can earn you skill points and these can be sued to unlock and upgrade different passive skills.

You can allocate skill points by clicking on the inventory icon, and then tapping on the skill icon at the upper right side of your character’s model. An indicator will be present whenever you have unallocated skill points so be sure to invest the skill points you earn as soon as you can but following planning and prioritization.

Skill points work in such a way that you need to invest some to unlock skills in each column. You will initially only have the basic skill tree unlocked but reaching the last column through investing skill points, and satisfying underlying conditions will unlock the more specialized skill tabs. These relate to the fighter, survivalist, and provider skills that can develop your character and boost his or her efficiency even further.

In the event that you feel you have made a mistake with the initial investment of skill points, you can reset it and have all your skill points returned to you. This can be done by clicking on the reset button at the upper left side of the page. Your first reset is free but the succeeding ones will be costly so be sure to try and allocate the skill points you have earned as best as you can so that you can hold on to your free skill reset until you really need to rely on it.

8. Engage Enemies Defensively

Every area you visit in Dawn of Zombies guarantees to have zombies in them, human enemies, or even a combination of both. Even if you brought tons of weapons and healing items with you, your first venture into a new location, especially on a quest, will leave you completely unfamiliar with what to expect in terms of how challenging battles can be as well as how many enemies you will have to go through.

Some earlier missions take a long while to complete as well and even though you can always move back and forth between your shelter and the mission location to recuperate, playing defensively is the better alternative.

It may be hard to notice at first but you can actually sneak up on enemies in Dawn of Zombies. There is a sneak button just below the attack/interact button at the lower right corner of the screen and using it leaves your character in a crouching position. Movement will be slowed down but it also makes movement a lot quieter. Once you attack, the sneak mode will be turned off.

Along with sneaking, some areas in Dawn of Zombies also provides bushes or other items you can use for cover. For the most part, one on one battles will be simple enough especially if you have a ranged weapon as well as a plethora of health kits in stock. The more challenging aspect of each adventure lies with the number of enemies found within each area and rather than taking on enemies consecutively, the smarter approach is to take them down one at a time.

Most enemies in Dawn of Zombies move very slowly, making it relatively easy for you to perform the proverbial hit and run tactic. It is naturally a lot easier to pull this strategy of with a ranged weapon. Note that you can also switch across weapons so be sure to utilize it in combat. In addition to regular attacks, some enemies have special attacks indicated by a red AoE indicator prior to the attack. While you should naturally dodge normal attacks, you should be wary of special attacks and move away from the affected area as soon as you see them.

9. Accomplish Daily Missions, Challenges, And Events

In addition to the story quests that you need to progress and various routine activities you need to regularly perform to ensure your survival, Dawn of Zombies provides even more means for you to obtain more items and resources to ensure your survival and speed up your shelter’s development. For the most part, daily missions, challenges, and events are tied up to your usual activities, so you are likely to receive extra rewards from them without even knowing the specific objectives.

Daily missions provide you with an unlimited supply of feats to accomplish. These missions revolve around the usual activities you do like crafting, production, or traveling to specific locations. Three different missions will be available for you to complete and a new one will replace the one you accomplished. Missions earn you medals that serve as points to unlock rewards at the bottom of the page. Naturally, you should aim to obtain all the rewards at the bottom of the page within the cut-off period for the day.

Challenges in Dawn of Zombies are much easier to complete on a daily basis, as the challenges depend on how much time you have spent logged in on the game. Playing for a mere hour is sufficient enough to earn you all the rewards and, to be honest, you will certainly be spending a lot more time than that each day you spend in the game.

While pursuing story quests and scavenging across different locations, you will obtain different documents that will unlock various events. These events will often be available for a limited period of time and serves as an added quest that you can pursue to obtain even more rewards.

In addition to the usual ones, Dawn of Zombies also provides various special events to add to the long list of activities you engage in on a regular basis. Make sure to check the event tab just beside the quest list at the upper right side of your screen as you will want to take advantage of them whenever they are available.

10. Manage Your Storage And Inventory Regularly

One of the most important tasks you have in Dawn of Zombies is ensuring that you have ample storage space for the growing number of materials and resources you gather in your adventure. You can always create more space by crafting boxes and these can also be upgraded to hold even more items.

The underlying concern that follows having a continuously growing inventory of items is the need to organize them and ensure that you are keeping what you need instead of hoarding everything that might prove to be useless in the long run.

In this sense, it becomes equally important for you to constantly manage your inventory of materials and resources. One thing to keep in mind is that some rewards you earn do not go directly to your inventory or personal pockets. At the upper right corner of your screen, there is a storage icon that takes you to a storage separate and distinct from what is stored in your shelter.

While these items can be held in that storage, though, they will not be kept there indefinitely. Unclaimed items in the storage will be lost forever when the time expires, which is why you should claim them whenever you can.

Some of the items you claim from storage are boxes or chests that uncover the real rewards when you open them. It is likely that these boxes contain several items that can completely fill up your pockets as soon as you open them. Just the same, it is best to open them instead of keeping the boxes within your bag or shelter.

When it comes to the different boxes you have amassed in your attempt to house as many items as possible, it is best to group them in such a way that you can easily find what you need and also be able to stack similar items more efficiently. Keep in mind that the auto stack function in the inventory only applies to items within the same storage box, which is why it becomes important to group similar items as much as possible.

Notes or such other items that you need to read, instead of using or opening, should likewise be read as soon as possible. These documents will disappear once read and the information they contain will be recorded in your PDA.

Dawn of Zombies continues to grow with each update so we can expect a lot of new features and content to be added to its world from time to time. For now, though, this is where we will end our beginner’s guide and we hope that you picked up a lot of useful information from the tips and strategies we shared. If you have played Dawn of Zombies extensively enough and have something you feel should be added to the tips and strategies we discussed, feel free to drop us a note!