It has been roughly 4 years since Bohemia Interactive introduced Mini DAYZ: Zombie Survival to the mobile gaming world. With an explosive launch and largely positive reception across both Android and iOS platforms, the game stands as the company’s top offering to date, earning well over 5 million downloads from the Google Play Store alone and maintaining high net review ratings from users across both mobile platforms.
Mini DayZ 2 looks and feels very much like its predecessor. Some mechanics have been altered but the core gameplay features are well intact. Of course, the pixel art style and overall atmosphere of the game stays consistent with the original but the overall difficulty level seems to have been increased to give even experienced and veteran players of the original Mini DayZ game a challenge to test their wits and skills.
Mini DayZ 2 has a straightforward premise and provides simple controls and interface, ensuring that the totality of its challenges will lie within its gameplay. Set on yet another post-civilization collapse with zombies infesting the land and the remaining survivors scavenging for resources, your task, in a gist, is to survive it all.
Your fate does not entirely rest on the hands of a single survivor, as you will be able to recruit more survivors to join your cause. Food, medicine, gears, and materials are the resources to find but the items you can use are not limited by what you find as is, thanks to crafting.
The tutorial that greets you covers all of the basics and a brief description of each facility you can build within the camp will be provided as well. In truth, it will be easy to identify what you should do given the simplicity of the game’s mechanics. The actual performance on the field will most likely say otherwise, though, based on first-hand experience.
We feel that Mini DayZ 2 is more challenging than the usual action adventure game. So if you just started your dive into the world of Mini DayZ 2 and a little stumped as to how you can progress efficiently, look no further as our beginner’s guide has everything you need to become an elite survivor in the game!
1. Plan Your Projects Carefully
At first glance, your typical mindset of the cycle you will go through as you venture in Mini DayZ 2, will involve gathering resources, spending some of them, and saving the rest. While true to some extent, this mentality leads you to feel that progression is based on the number of items you have collected. Mini DayZ 2, however, provides various facilities for you to build and upgrade and, in our opinion, at least about half of your total progression can be attributed to the upgrade levels of each structure within your camp.
There are 10 different facilities available inside your camp and while some of them will be available for you at the start of your adventure, the rest will have to be built and each one will eventually require upgrades. As far as building and upgrading goes, there are hardly any prerequisites save for the generator that needs to provide sufficient energy to all other facilities. You have almost absolute liberty as to which structure you will build and upgrade first.
For us, the first structure to build is the Radio Station. Building the radio station and each upgrade performed on it will net you a new survivor. We would not consider it top priority if there are other means of acquiring more people but since this is the only way to have more characters, its importance cannot be neglected. You will have 2 survivors working together early on and building the radio station will recruit a third survivor for you.
Surviving exclusively with the items you pick up could work but if the layout of each location is randomly-generated per raid, then you cannot always expect luck to work in your favor on each run. To ensure that you have at least some of the basic needs, you will need to craft them in the camp, and that is what makes the crafting workshop an indispensable necessity for you to have.
The hospital is indubitably the most important facility in our book and while we appreciate having it available at the start of your journey, it is not the only facility you need to have to keep your survivors in tip-top shape. Survivors who are deployed on dangerous missions will often lose morale in every immersion. Providing them a living quarter will restore their lost morale and while it takes a long while to replenish morale in comparison with health, it is a definite must-have before other facilities.
With almost every resource you collect being important in Mini DayZ 2, weapons and gears you either find or craft are often even more valuable. Gears you pick up from raids will almost always be damaged and even a new one’s durability is heavily impacted by natural wear and tear. To ensure that your survivors will always have something to defend themselves with after they leave the camp, you need to put up a repair station. Repairing items cost materials based on how damaged they are but for the most part, each repair made is worth it.
At some point, having all different facilities built and upgraded will require more power than what the power supply can generate. In such cases, you will have no choice but to consider upgrading the power supply before proceeding with your next project. There seems to be no way to tell how much energy your power supply generates and how much energy your camp needs. As such, you will only know you need to upgrade it when you cannot proceed with another project due to lack of power.
The watch tower is your key to unlocking new locations to raid. Each tower upgrade unlocks a new set of area that holds multiple new locations. For the most part, you can tell that a location is more difficult to conquer based on the number of food you need to consume to raid it. Most basic needs can be obtained from the initial levels any way and you really need to practice your runs first before going to the next set of locations. Of course, better items are more likely to be obtained from the higher level locations and the map size will also grow in most cases.
In addition to almost always losing health and dropping morale levels for each of your characters, another thing to worry about are infections. Infection levels rise when survivors come in contact with infectious objects or enemies. For the initial levels, this something you hardly have to worry about, which is why you can save this structure as the last priority to build. So long as you stay away from suspicious looking barrels and ensure to not get too close to zombies in hazmat suits, you should be okay against infections.
The rate at which required materials increase from building any facility compared to taking it to the next level is huge. Save for the power supply, we recommend building all facilities first before taking any of them to the next level. The farm, which generates food over time will have increased output per hour with each upgrade and raises the cap it can hold as well. The storage also raises the limit of basic resources you can hold so these 2 facilities should be among the top candidates for upgrades once you have built all the structures.
2. Play Defensively
Zombie-themed video games have been around longer than what most people can remember and what is usually attributed to games with zombies on them is an objective that rests on exterminating zombies. Seeing zombies while you venture in any location, most especially aggressive ones that chase you around, certainly fuels your excitement. Considering everything, it is important to always keep in mind that the main objective in Mini DayZ 2 is survival so kill counts do not actually matter.
Your survivors in Mini DayZ 2 take time to recover and if they completely pass out during a mission, that would be an even worse scenario. Beyond the long waiting time to recover, fainting any time during the raid means losing everything. That is certainly a logical penalty but something you do not necessarily need to experience before considering to play safe from the get-go.
Zombies are just 1 of 3 types of creatures you will encounter on the field as there are wild animals and bandits that will try to kill you for no reason. Wild animals can be carved for their meat and are abundant in forest locations. Bandits are often more dangerous than both zeds and animals as they may be armed and can shoot you from a distance. Bandits, however, leave loot behind after you eliminate them, making them worth the effort in some cases.
As for zombies, there is basically zero value if you eliminate them. There are no extra rewards and no loots so it’s all a waste of effort and possibly ammo; a bigger waste even if they manage to damage you, make you bleed, or infect you. The stealth mode is among the basics you learn from the tutorial and it is there for good reason. Avoiding encounters with anyone is always the best recourse in your raids.
Being stealthy does not always work the way you intend it to. You can be very careful and yet any of the NPCs can still see or hear you. You can always run away and a good deal of these NPCs will not be able to catch up to you. Likewise, there are numerous obstacles scattered around the map and you can make use of them to outwit just about anyone.
Guns certainly give you confidence to engage but we recommend that you keep them only as a last resort. Ammunition is not as easy to come by and guns make a lot of noise, and noise attracts baddies just like in the movies. A silent bow and arrow is our preferred ranged weapon and you will always need to carry a bladed melee weapon as you will not be able to carve up animal meat without one.
Band aids are always good to have as bleeding can kill your survivor faster than you can anticipate. There are blood bags that can restore health but given their scarcity early on, it is best to use them only on desperate times.
3. Inspect Every New Item You Pick Up
Playing as a scavenger in a zombie apocalypse certainly has its share of excitement and while some players enjoy more hunting and action, some revel more in the looting aspect of the adventure especially if there is a wide variety of items to collect. Although most items you pick up in your adventures within the world of Mini DayZ 2 have values based on how many food or materials they can be converted into, gears have intrinsic values for the survivors and some items can be used as crafting materials.
Some players might be expecting an overabundance of items to see on each raid they engage in. Mini DayZ 2, however, sides more on the idea of having scarce resources on every location as a result of bandits and other survivors. You will be used to experiencing finding nothing after opening half a dozen car trunks or exploring a huge building. After some time, you should be used to not finding anything with the buildings, buses, and cargos you go into and the trunks you open. This does not mean in any way that you are likely to end the raid with some space in your inventory.
Each item you can obtain has a corresponding weight and each survivor start off having a weight capacity of 20. The variety of items you can carry does not even matter so long as the total weight is less than or equal to the survivor’s limit. Survivors can equip 2 weapons, clothing, hat or helmet, a backpack, and a quick-use item and all these equipped items contribute to the aggregate weight of what you can carry.
Most clothing enables the survivor to carry more weight and, of course, no survivor game exists without backpacks. It is important to check details of items you can equip as some may be better than others on one occasion but not as suitable on others.
Despite the seemingly scarcer than normal availability of resources, you will often find yourself not being able to pick up more items as a result of the limited weight capacity. This leads back to the importance of inspecting each item you pick up as you would naturally want to bring home only the best of resources you can find.
You can simply tap on the item in your bag and then the inspect option to see its detailed information. Weapons, gears, and ammunition are always a treat to find especially early on but the rest of the items are either considered for crafting or valued based on conversion rate.
All items except for ammo can be either converted to food or materials. You will notice that once you exit a raid, items that can neither be equipped nor used as crafting materials will automatically be converted into basic resources. You can access your inventory at camp and convert the materials yourself at any time.
You will have a bigger space to hold all sorts of items inside your inventory than the material resources and food resulting from conversion so be sure to check each one’s levels and only manually convert items if you are in dire need of specific resources.
Items you will discover in raids come in different shapes and sizes but, more importantly, have different weight to value conversion rates. Junk, scraps, and timber are the most common items you will find on any location. You will initially be happy to find these items early on but may want to avoid them later on and there is nothing wrong with that.
Junk, scraps, and timber are better than nothing but once your survivor has reached his or her weight limit, these are the items you should start throwing out. These items weigh a lot for the materials you can convert them to. There are some items as heavy but would be of higher value because of what you can get from them.
When it comes to materials you can extract from items that you have looted, there are common ones indicated by a wood icon and then there are rare ones symbolized by a gear icon. Regardless of the weight of items that you can convert to the latter, they should be considered as among the top priorities, only coming second after valuable equipment. These materials are so rare in that you can finish several raid runs without nabbing anything that earns you these rare materials.
4. Stay On The Road And Use The Map Often
Despite each location having a completely unique layout with every new visit, you will never be completely lost in it and familiarity certainly is no issue. The random generation of each map actually adds to the excitement aspect of Mini DayZ 2 and despite each new visit appearing to be a totally new experience, there are certain aspects of each raid that hold true.
For starters, even the availability of resources to uncover is almost consistent with animal meat, traps, and bows being more commonly found in farms and forests while junk, scraps, and other tech are attributable more to industrial and residential parts. Every journey is comparable to a blind exploration but the roads and the map more than enough help to lead you towards where potential loots can be obtained from.
Vehicles are almost always on the road and most structures you will see can be found close to the road. The zoom in and out function you can perform with a pinching gesture or through the magnifying glass icon at the upper right of the screen gives a better view of the map as well.
You do not even need to see an actual establishment to know you are close to one as being near one will have their icons appear on the map. For more advanced adventuring, you should make it a habit to follow the road, or path in case of agricultural areas, and use the map often.
Some structures can be designed to be confusing as you will have to look for an entrance to verify their accessibility. The same goes for cargo containers that are lumped together with only one or a couple being actually open. This is where utilizing the map almost feels like cheating as a quick look on the map will reveal which of these structures are actually accessible.
There will be rare instances of seeing structures far from the road or path. There are also torn or demolished buildings to find that are usually away from the roads. The random elements surrounding the presence of resources makes it possible for some of them to be scattered around desolate areas away from the paths. If you have followed the road and still have some space in your bag, then that would be the time to venture further to uncover the rest of the map.
5. Strive To Have A Better Perspective
Despite being presented with a top down perspective, Mini DayZ 2 does not let you see the entirety of the area visible on your screen. The survivor’s vision is limited by the light around him can reveal and, realistically enough, this light will not pass through solid objects. You will notice even during the tutorial how the survivor’s light and vision is impacted by his distance to an object and even getting close to the trunk of a car will render everything in front invisible.
Light is obscured even further when inside buildings and houses. There are garages with wide open spaces but some structures have a lot of walls that restrict your vision. As a beginner, you might be convinced that a building is empty as items will not be visible until the light has touched them.
It is always important to strive for a better perspective in these instances as valuable items can be found just about any spot within structures. Making a quick run across its halls and past all walls is a necessary feat if you want to ensure that you nab the best loots from each raid.
Similarly, Mini DayZ 2 is designed in such a way that when 2 or more items are on relatively the same spot, you will only see one of them on the map. Drops from bandits are a common example of these instances as well as contents of the secret chest.
Instead of relying on what you can see on the map, you can click on your bag and it will reveal all items within your reach. This method also makes it easier to sort your items out. You can easily tap and move items between your bag and the ground, easily leaving behind items you no longer want.
6. Manual Raid Is Always Better
One of the unique features everyone can easily appreciate in Mini DayZ 2 is the auto raid feature. This feature is available right from the start and lets you send out a survivor to any location to bring back, after a given period of time, random items and resources. It is convenient and has the potential to earn you more items within the same period of time especially since any number of survivors can be sent out for raids on their own consecutively, and works much like an idle game does.
With its convenience, you certainly should understand its disadvantages over doing a raid yourself. With numerous random elements involved, there is no sure way of telling just how the survivor will perform. For one, you should understand that any survivor on auto mode will never outperform you. This holds true even if you are a complete beginner and still learning the basics of Mini DayZ 2.
Survivors sent on auto raids are more likely to sustain more damage and come back with lower morale. You can expect them to be a lot more susceptible to infections as well. With these common results, one preparation you need to do is to only send survivors with full health and moral on auto raid missions. This consequently means less auto raids but very well in line with playing defensively.
There is hardly any possibility as well for a survivor on auto raid to reel in more items and resources than you. What they can collect for a 30-minute auto raid will most likely pale in comparison to what you can collect in a fraction of the time.
One thing worth mentioning with regard to manual explorations is the secret chest, which is a guaranteed treasure trove you can find on any location. Secret chests contain random items and while it is possible to get a lot of common loot from them, there is a good chance to obtain some rare ones, too.
Mini DayZ 2 certainly holds a lot more secrets waiting to be uncovered but for now, this is where we will wrap up our beginner’s guide. Hopefully, the tips and strategies we shared in this article will go a long way to boost your performance and efficiency and lead you to become a top grade survivor. If, by chance, you have stumbled upon some nifty trick or strategy other than what we discussed, don’t hesitate to tell us about them!