Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival is a new base building and management simulation game that plays much like Fallout Shelter or the short-lived Westworld. Unlike both of those games, though, there is a story campaign in Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival that puts a little more action into the game as well as open up a more strategic aspect to team-building and combat. Beyond story chapters, the PvP aspect of the game also elicits competitiveness among players who enjoy customizing their top fighting dwellers and duking it out with others. There are plenty of unique events as well and in-game rewards as abundant. If you enjoy base-building sims that offer a variety of challenges, then you will definitely enjoy spending a lot of time in Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival.
There are numerous seemingly complex game mechanics in Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival and as you dive into it, you may initially be overwhelmed by the screen as it seems littered with plenty of stuff you are inclined to tap on. Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival provides a nice and easy tutorial to follow. As you take on the initial stages of the introductory chapter, the easy mobs of zombies you need to defeat will just be a glimpse of what’s to come. In-between battles, you will have to tend to your shelter and initiate some upgrades to make it more efficient.
As survivors begin to pour in, it becomes part of your many tasks to put them in their right place. There are definitely a great number of ways to play Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival and you will make progress however you choose to play it. If you want to run ahead of the pack, level up faster, and manage your shelter better, then follow our Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival beginner’s guide for tips, cheats and strategies!
1. Let The Storyline Missions Guide You
Once you are free to do as you choose, which signifies the end of the tutorial, you should first click on the monitor icon at the left side of your screen to access your missions. Three will be available at one time and you are free to choose which one to prioritize based on what you feel you can accomplish faster. Each mission accomplished earns you rewards and completing all the missions on each chapter rewards you with a chest that offers much better rewards than the usual one you receive.
Storyline missions in Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival typically revolve around finishing stages in the campaign, upgrading certain rooms in your shelter, or training dwellers. As these are what you would be usually doing anyway, following these missions is the most practical way to go. Don’t worry if you strayed a bit from it and decided to accomplish something a little ahead of time. Once the mission relative to that pops up, it will instantly be marked as accomplished and you can immediately claim your rewards.
Make it a habit as well to click on the storage icon just below the missions icon and proceed to the warehouse to open the chest you earn every time you beat a stage in the campaign. There is no benefit in keeping it idle and receiving equipment and resources from the chest at the soonest can help you progress faster in the game.
2. Keep Everyone And Everything In The Right Place
On top of all the action and adventure you will be immersing yourself into as you battle through mobs after mobs of undead in the story campaign, a huge chunk of your time and effort will go into managing the dwellers that live in your shelter and likewise managing the shelter itself. For the most part, first time players who haven’t played similar games before may take some time to the multitasking aspect of Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival. Despite that, playing the game immensely will soon give you a clockwork procedure of how to go about everything that needs tending.
For starters, your dwellers ought to be your top priority. Each dweller has unique stats and are initially better suited for one thing over another. Although you can train each one to eventually improve their stats, it is naturally more efficient to work with what you already have considering as well that you will only be able to train dwellers for strength improvement in the early stages of the game.
Dwellers have unique stat values for combat ability, cooking skills, and financial acumen. These are all that is necessary for your dwellers and shelter to survive and progress. Naturally, combat skills are important for battles you engage in and it would be best to have each of your warriors be trained to the fullest before you traverse the map and battle with zombies. Dwellers with higher than average cooking skills belong to the dining hall and those that are good with numbers, as indicated by the higher than usual number beside the calculator icon on their stats, should be assigned at the print shop. As you begin to reach new levels later on, more stats will become available but by then you will know where to put dwellers that excel on those stats.
On their own, these dwellers won’t be able to make that much big of an impact on their assigned jobs and you will need to put the right set of equipment as well on each one of them. Fighters have a variety of sets to choose from in Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival. From melee and ranged, there is another option that becomes available pretty early in the game, the chemist. Having the right equipment that augment specific damage types and streamline buffs is key to having strong fighters and a more dependable field team.
For support roles such as the cooks and moneymakers, equipment practically works the same way as it does on your combatants. Be sure to read through each equipment description and equip the right gear on the right dweller. Although stats may not tremendously impact production, the gears that do so require a minimum level of specific stats for dwellers to be able to use them. There won’t be any shortages of gears, though, so do spend some time browsing through your inventory for the best set of gears for each dweller you have.
It may happen that some dwellers you take into the shelter have equal proficiency across all their stats. In such cases, decide to put them where you need people the most. As you will be playing a while with only the gym available, make the most of it by training dwellers to boost their combat ability. If you can, switch people to spend time on the gym as training will take a long time later in the game and you would want to have back up field warriors to be able to play through campaign stages at any given time.
Cash and food are capped by the vault and refrigerator that you have in your shelter. Although both resources are constantly used for upgrades and battle respectively, you should avoid either depleting them or having them reach the maximum amount that you can hold. These can be dealt with easily by allocating the right number of people across roles. This means that relative to unique stat attributes, you will constantly have to consider what your shelter needs to allocate your dwellers.
3. A Good Shelter Layout Can Boost Productivity
Like in the loosely similar games that came before it, rooms in Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival can often be merged to form a bigger and more productive room. Although this feature was costly in the other game, you can freely do this in the game at absolutely no cost. For starters, you don’t need to worry about which room goes where as you can always shuffle them later on for a more productive shelter.
As you wait to earn more money to initiate a room upgrade or training to finish and at the same time still won’t be able to engage in campaign battles, you should spend some time clearing debris at the right side of your screen. These may appear as random things but you need to spend a small amount of cash to destroy them and leave a clear space for your future rooms or room extensions. As most rooms can be merged up to 3 rooms wide, expect this for the most basic ones and start rearranging rooms on your idle time.
4. Click Regularly If You Are At Home
As you begin to take in more dwellers and the various production rooms in your shelter becomes populated, you will soon have to regularly click on these rooms to obtain the cash, food, or other items that each one produces. Unless you rented the zombie assistant to tend to all sorts of collections for you regardless if you are online or off the game, manually clicking on each room is an integral part of production and should be done every so often to ensure steady growth and development of your shelter.
On top of the production items, each dweller within the vicinity will have a feeling bubble above him or her and clicking on it will add points to the general happiness of the people within the shelter. Winning battles and staying productive helps maintain a good level of it, while random accidents and attacks on the shelter will cause for it to decrease.
In addition to the typical idea of wanting to have a happy little community of your own, keeping your dwellers happy carries with it a certain buff that increases production of cash, food, and reagents. The increase you get outside of premium can go as much as five percent, which is actually a big help if you really want to stay ahead of the game in terms of growth and development. As such, make it a habit to click on any floating icon whenever you are at the shelter and likewise visit it in-between each battle.
5. Have A Balanced Field Team
Having dwellers built for battle can mean more than being superior as far as offensive abilities go. In fact, you will have a hard time completing stages in campaign mode if your rely mostly, if not entirely, on damage-dealing fighters. As there are various was you can build each combatant, be sure to consider having a melee one with tough armor and a ranged one that has high DPS. The third and subsequent members should be arbitrary.
Having a well-rounded and balanced team is practically a basic necessity to survive combat in Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival Whether its PvE or PvP. Without a melee tank, your enemies will make quick work of your team especially if you have a full squad of gunners all lumped together and an enemy unit or two does AoE and splash damage. Likewise, having more than the needed frontline warriors and tanks may result in low DPS and will similarly be prone to AoE attacks. For starters, consider each new type of specialization you come across with like the chemist who is not that far back and does AoE and crowd control abilities.
6. Complete The Crowd Of Zombies Mission
The Crowd of zombies is a special time-limited event that you can encounter once daily in Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival. The target is to beat all 10 stages infested with zombies within 2 hours and receive a grand reward at the end of it. Each stage you complete also gets you a chest with cash or an equipment within it. Although the stages are laid out very much like story missions, you take on each battles in any order you choose.
As such, you should look into the details and check the difference between your power and the enemy team’s power. Settle for the easier ones first, unlock chests to secure more gears and prepare well for the tougher battles. For the most part, the battles here should be well within your strength and it’s a matter of being able to play through all stages within the time limit.
7. Attempt To Create Better Dwellers Early On
There is a quality system that applies to the dwellers you acquire in Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival as indicated by the number of stars each dweller has. For the most part, what you can get are between 1 to 3-star rarity ones and with it comes a limitation as to how far these dwellers can train. For these guys, you just have to accept their limit and as you progress further in the game, you should plan on how far you will invest on each dweller based on such limitations.
Getting a 4-star dweller is possible in the game although you can’t expect them to just wind up outside your shelter’s door. To have one, you must place a male and female dweller who both have 3-star quality at the living room with the hopes of acquiring a 4-star offspring. As it is based on probability, it’s never a guarantee. Just the same, though, you can attempt to do it as many times as you wish. It takes a while for the would-be parents to mingle in the living room and it may happen as well that the meeting won’t end up with pregnancy or a baby. As it is a long process from getting these two people together down to waiting for their offspring to mature, you should invest some time to start pairing dwellers early on.
8. Watch Some Ads For Rewards And Other Perks
On top of the free chest you can claim once every 24 hours from the market, you can also receive an Ad Watcher’s chest after watching 5 short video ads. The video ads only take about 5 to 15 seconds and you can only play one once every 6 hours. It will take a while to reap the rewards, but it will certainly be worth it.
Although training only takes a few seconds on the initial levels, the waiting time will soon grow into minutes once you have upgraded the gym and the other training areas later on. Simply click on the room and check for the availability of free speed boosts that can cut down training completion time by as much as 20 minutes. This is all for the simple act of watching one ad which will definitely take a lot less of your time.
Last but not the least, whenever you fail to win a battle and your filed combat team gets injured, you can watch an ad to instantly recover their health. This is especially important if you still have a lot of battles you need to go through and you lack the manpower resources to have substitutes for your recovering warriors. Even if you chance upon a full length ad that spans 30 seconds, it will still be a lot faster than actually waiting for your team to fully recover.
This ends our Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival beginner’s guide. There are still plenty of stuff to dig into and we may come back to provide another guide for this game. For now, we hope that we have sufficiently provided you with everything you need to know to more efficiently develop your shelter and earn more cash for all those building and upgrading needs. If there are tips or strategies you discovered and you are inclined to share them with us, then be sure to drop us a line in the comments!