Since the game got an update and lots of players are coming back to play it I though it was a good time to put up a list of tips for gameplay, but I would also like you all to add your own tips to the list!
I hope you don't mind I also made them into a video but also wrote them in this post:
0:00 Gate & Guard Posts - Tip 1
1:24 World map item production - Tip 2
2:18 Food distribution & management - Tip 3
2:44 Item stockpiles & production - Tip 4
3:33 Leaving empty room for later - Tip 5
3:51 Water production & location - Tip 6
4:43 How and what to trade - Tip 7
6:04 Tech tree research unlocking - Tip 8
6:24 Farming AND/OR Fishing - Tip 9
7:24 Fertile land overview - Tip 10
7:43 Living places & bonuses - Tip 11
8:15 Fertility of the population- Tip 12
8:31 House vs Two story house - Tip 13
9:16 Making or finding weapons- Tip 14
9:32 End game tech unlocking - Tip 15
10:02 Farm food or keep animals? - Tip 16
10:31 Attacking camps with multiple specialists - Tip 17
Your settlement’s Gate is the main element of your defenses against raiders, along with its guards. While you can upgrade it there are some raiding parties big enough that will manage to crash through it. Even after you research the required tech and upgraded it twice, into the reinforced and fortress gate, which give it more guard slots and damage resistance.
This is why having homes or community buildings right behind the gate is not a good idea, something I realized during my latest playthrough. But what is a good idea is to leave this area behind the gate empty until you research and unlock guards posts.
These structures are used to scout the settlement map and can employ up to three guards each. And that is why these are also a great way of concentrating your defenses at a single location if you build several of them close together right behind the game. I constructed four of them, after demolishing the previous buildings I had there and improved my defenses against raiders immensely.
The best part is that you don’t even have to employ guards there all the time. Since you do get a bit of warning when raiders come knocking, you can double and triple the guards on duty before you start the raid event. That way even if they break through, they will be met by a large number of guards and taken out.
When it comes to the world map, a great tip for passively accumulating lots of goods or useful items is to carefully look over the map in search of locations which have more than one building with a cog icon.
This means that once you send out a settler to that map segment and construct a scavenger outpost there, you will receive not one but two kinds of items from that location every 12 hours.
Sometimes you won’t be able to know that there are two such buildings on one map segment because one of them might be currently occupied by bandits. Once you use your specialists to fight off the bandits you will learn what that building holds.
And other times you might even get lucky enough that you find more than one building on the same map segment which can passively generate knowledge. That is the perfect location for a research outpost.
When it comes to food distribution you need to invest time and resources into constructing food storage buildings around the whole settlement with the aim to stockpile the best foods there in small quantities.
This stops settlers from wasting a lot of time trying to locate a good meal and also prevents them from becoming malnourished if they work far from the main part of the settlement and don’t have good food close by.
Similarly to this, stockpiling resources necessary for buildings which consume them for production of new items is also something you want to do by constructing warehouses or general storage buildings near them. And then setting up those items and resources as the requested ones in the bottom options. This shortens delivery times, improves production rates and prevents buildings from being idle.
To prevent the capacity of those warehouses or general storage buildings from being filled with items which aren’t necessary nearby use the allowed resources sub menu, and click to disallow the storage of all the other items inside that building except the ones you planned for.
To even be able to add in these buildings, both for food and storage of items, you have to leave room between all the different buildings as you are building up your settlement. Of course this isn’t something you will know beforehand if you are playing for the first time, but that is why I am giving you this advice now, so you can avoid having to demolish some buildings to have room for others.
Since water is one of the first resources you have to manage and keep producing in Surviving the Aftermath I think a very important tip is to know what is the most efficient way of producing it.
And that would be wells. Mostly because they don’t require a constant workforce to produce water and because they can be upgraded several times to give high amounts of water.
As for their placement the water overview is actually not the one that will give you the best idea where to put them, but the fertility overview. As the more fertile the ground under and around a well is, the more water it can produce.
But for the best efficiency you also want your well to be near a lake and then surrounded by ground which is at least normal, that is yellow, if not fertile, which is represented by the green color.
As for gaining other resources you might lack or items you don’t produce yet, it’s best to trade from them in large quantities. This requires the relevant tech researched and the trade center built, with more than one for multiple simultaneous trade routes. Also, you have to first come into contact with other settlements on the main map by clearing the enemies on those map sections.
Then you can use the trade window and start offering up items in exchange for those you need. My special tip here is that because of how the production is balanced in Surviving the Aftermath it is easiest to stockpile huge quantities of raw foods like venison, fish, different grains or prime meat and then trade those for everything else you might need.
Having farms, two hunting cabins working at 100% efficiency with good tree coverage, along with one or two aqua farms or just plain old fishing huts and several ranches with different animals will let you overproduce so much fresh food that you won’t know what to do with it all.
Trading it away for items such as fun boxes or fuel or even raw materials like metal or concrete will be so easy that you might slow down and even stop your own production of those items.
Another very important tip is that you don’t have to research every technology on the tech tree as there are some branches in it where you can make a choice and keep moving along the tree without unlocking every tech in that line. That is why it’s called a tree in the first place, as some branches you don’t have to follow.
These are usually choices between two types of a building, like when in the food technology tree you can choose to go with Basic Farming to unlock the small field or with Ice Fishing to unlock the Fishing hut. Researching either one will let you progress towards the Communal eating tech, so it is up to you to choose which one is the best fit for your current playthrough.
And that will depend on the map you are playing on. If your starting position on the map has more lakes you are better off with Ice Fishing so you can upgrade a Fishing pier to a Fishing hut and keep fishing even in the dead of winter.
On the other hand if your starting position has a wealth of fertile green land, which you can best see using the soil fertility overlay then you are much better off researching the Basic Farming tech and building many small fields to grow crops on.
In my own latest settlement I hadn’t researched Ice Fishing for almost half of the playthrough and I was totally fine with other types of food production.
One note here is that you can spot the most fertile land without the overlay, just by looking for the places which have the thickest and greenest grass. Once you start comparing it to the yellow fertile land which has much more sparse grass and it’s more yellow you will easily distinguish the two in the future.
The other places on the tech tree where you can choose to ignore, skip or leave the tech unresearched for a long time is with the choice of housing in the community tech tree. First of all, once you research Communal Living and have both the Shanty and Tenement unlocked you can pick which one to invest more research into to unlock its upgrade and increase its durability.
I usually go with the Shanty and its upgrades because I prefer not to have the reduced fertility rate in the basic Tenement. The upgraded shanty also increases the comfort and happiness of the survivors with their accommodations and reduces the impact of catastrophic events on their happiness level. That is a very important stat in this game as it drives the reproduction rate of your population.
Similar but less noticeable difference is with the choice between the house and the two story house. These are the unlocks from the Comfortable housing and High-density housing techs. Both of them provide a major happiness bonus and both can be later upgraded with heaters and reinforced durability through further research.
But since one has double the capacity for survivors, compared to the other one, you can easily go with the Two-story House as it will take up less space to house the same number of survivors. You will also need fewer buildings which affect these in their own area of influence, like the burner or radiator for heat, the transformer for power or lighting tower for protection against lightning strikes.
When it comes to the safety tech tree, you can choose to skip all the upgrades for weapon crafting and the Gunsmith building if you have scavenged a lot of weapons from the world map or created scavenging outposts on main map sections where guns can be continuously found.
As for the end game techs you can put off for a long time Biofuel is one of them as you can not only find a lot of fuel on the main map but also trade for it with other settlements. Something that I have already covered in detail in the section about trading.
Rare metals is another tech which might not be necessary for a very long time depending on your trade and scavenge plans and success as the rare metals item can be gained in those ways in large quantities.
When you get to the choice between advanced farming and Animal husbandry that is another one which will depend partly on your map configuration and partly on available funds as procuring animals for the first time is quite expensive, especially if you don’t have anything valuable to trade or anything cheap in high quantities. So leaving one tech branch unexplored here isn’t a big issue as you can always come back later to expand your food production ability.
Another tip on the main world map for you is to always attack enemies with several of your specialists at once. Regular buildings can be cleared with a maximum of three specialists but camps can be attacked with more than that. Bringing in many of your specialists and if possible those with high weapon damage onto the same enemy camp will not only reduce the time it takes to clear that camp but also the damage your own specialists take while doing that.
I hope you don't mind I also made them into a video but also wrote them in this post:
0:00 Gate & Guard Posts - Tip 1
1:24 World map item production - Tip 2
2:18 Food distribution & management - Tip 3
2:44 Item stockpiles & production - Tip 4
3:33 Leaving empty room for later - Tip 5
3:51 Water production & location - Tip 6
4:43 How and what to trade - Tip 7
6:04 Tech tree research unlocking - Tip 8
6:24 Farming AND/OR Fishing - Tip 9
7:24 Fertile land overview - Tip 10
7:43 Living places & bonuses - Tip 11
8:15 Fertility of the population- Tip 12
8:31 House vs Two story house - Tip 13
9:16 Making or finding weapons- Tip 14
9:32 End game tech unlocking - Tip 15
10:02 Farm food or keep animals? - Tip 16
10:31 Attacking camps with multiple specialists - Tip 17
Your settlement’s Gate is the main element of your defenses against raiders, along with its guards. While you can upgrade it there are some raiding parties big enough that will manage to crash through it. Even after you research the required tech and upgraded it twice, into the reinforced and fortress gate, which give it more guard slots and damage resistance.
This is why having homes or community buildings right behind the gate is not a good idea, something I realized during my latest playthrough. But what is a good idea is to leave this area behind the gate empty until you research and unlock guards posts.
These structures are used to scout the settlement map and can employ up to three guards each. And that is why these are also a great way of concentrating your defenses at a single location if you build several of them close together right behind the game. I constructed four of them, after demolishing the previous buildings I had there and improved my defenses against raiders immensely.
The best part is that you don’t even have to employ guards there all the time. Since you do get a bit of warning when raiders come knocking, you can double and triple the guards on duty before you start the raid event. That way even if they break through, they will be met by a large number of guards and taken out.
When it comes to the world map, a great tip for passively accumulating lots of goods or useful items is to carefully look over the map in search of locations which have more than one building with a cog icon.
This means that once you send out a settler to that map segment and construct a scavenger outpost there, you will receive not one but two kinds of items from that location every 12 hours.
Sometimes you won’t be able to know that there are two such buildings on one map segment because one of them might be currently occupied by bandits. Once you use your specialists to fight off the bandits you will learn what that building holds.
And other times you might even get lucky enough that you find more than one building on the same map segment which can passively generate knowledge. That is the perfect location for a research outpost.
When it comes to food distribution you need to invest time and resources into constructing food storage buildings around the whole settlement with the aim to stockpile the best foods there in small quantities.
This stops settlers from wasting a lot of time trying to locate a good meal and also prevents them from becoming malnourished if they work far from the main part of the settlement and don’t have good food close by.
Similarly to this, stockpiling resources necessary for buildings which consume them for production of new items is also something you want to do by constructing warehouses or general storage buildings near them. And then setting up those items and resources as the requested ones in the bottom options. This shortens delivery times, improves production rates and prevents buildings from being idle.
To prevent the capacity of those warehouses or general storage buildings from being filled with items which aren’t necessary nearby use the allowed resources sub menu, and click to disallow the storage of all the other items inside that building except the ones you planned for.
To even be able to add in these buildings, both for food and storage of items, you have to leave room between all the different buildings as you are building up your settlement. Of course this isn’t something you will know beforehand if you are playing for the first time, but that is why I am giving you this advice now, so you can avoid having to demolish some buildings to have room for others.
Since water is one of the first resources you have to manage and keep producing in Surviving the Aftermath I think a very important tip is to know what is the most efficient way of producing it.
And that would be wells. Mostly because they don’t require a constant workforce to produce water and because they can be upgraded several times to give high amounts of water.
As for their placement the water overview is actually not the one that will give you the best idea where to put them, but the fertility overview. As the more fertile the ground under and around a well is, the more water it can produce.
But for the best efficiency you also want your well to be near a lake and then surrounded by ground which is at least normal, that is yellow, if not fertile, which is represented by the green color.
As for gaining other resources you might lack or items you don’t produce yet, it’s best to trade from them in large quantities. This requires the relevant tech researched and the trade center built, with more than one for multiple simultaneous trade routes. Also, you have to first come into contact with other settlements on the main map by clearing the enemies on those map sections.
Then you can use the trade window and start offering up items in exchange for those you need. My special tip here is that because of how the production is balanced in Surviving the Aftermath it is easiest to stockpile huge quantities of raw foods like venison, fish, different grains or prime meat and then trade those for everything else you might need.
Having farms, two hunting cabins working at 100% efficiency with good tree coverage, along with one or two aqua farms or just plain old fishing huts and several ranches with different animals will let you overproduce so much fresh food that you won’t know what to do with it all.
Trading it away for items such as fun boxes or fuel or even raw materials like metal or concrete will be so easy that you might slow down and even stop your own production of those items.
Another very important tip is that you don’t have to research every technology on the tech tree as there are some branches in it where you can make a choice and keep moving along the tree without unlocking every tech in that line. That is why it’s called a tree in the first place, as some branches you don’t have to follow.
These are usually choices between two types of a building, like when in the food technology tree you can choose to go with Basic Farming to unlock the small field or with Ice Fishing to unlock the Fishing hut. Researching either one will let you progress towards the Communal eating tech, so it is up to you to choose which one is the best fit for your current playthrough.
And that will depend on the map you are playing on. If your starting position on the map has more lakes you are better off with Ice Fishing so you can upgrade a Fishing pier to a Fishing hut and keep fishing even in the dead of winter.
On the other hand if your starting position has a wealth of fertile green land, which you can best see using the soil fertility overlay then you are much better off researching the Basic Farming tech and building many small fields to grow crops on.
In my own latest settlement I hadn’t researched Ice Fishing for almost half of the playthrough and I was totally fine with other types of food production.
One note here is that you can spot the most fertile land without the overlay, just by looking for the places which have the thickest and greenest grass. Once you start comparing it to the yellow fertile land which has much more sparse grass and it’s more yellow you will easily distinguish the two in the future.
The other places on the tech tree where you can choose to ignore, skip or leave the tech unresearched for a long time is with the choice of housing in the community tech tree. First of all, once you research Communal Living and have both the Shanty and Tenement unlocked you can pick which one to invest more research into to unlock its upgrade and increase its durability.
I usually go with the Shanty and its upgrades because I prefer not to have the reduced fertility rate in the basic Tenement. The upgraded shanty also increases the comfort and happiness of the survivors with their accommodations and reduces the impact of catastrophic events on their happiness level. That is a very important stat in this game as it drives the reproduction rate of your population.
Similar but less noticeable difference is with the choice between the house and the two story house. These are the unlocks from the Comfortable housing and High-density housing techs. Both of them provide a major happiness bonus and both can be later upgraded with heaters and reinforced durability through further research.
But since one has double the capacity for survivors, compared to the other one, you can easily go with the Two-story House as it will take up less space to house the same number of survivors. You will also need fewer buildings which affect these in their own area of influence, like the burner or radiator for heat, the transformer for power or lighting tower for protection against lightning strikes.
When it comes to the safety tech tree, you can choose to skip all the upgrades for weapon crafting and the Gunsmith building if you have scavenged a lot of weapons from the world map or created scavenging outposts on main map sections where guns can be continuously found.
As for the end game techs you can put off for a long time Biofuel is one of them as you can not only find a lot of fuel on the main map but also trade for it with other settlements. Something that I have already covered in detail in the section about trading.
Rare metals is another tech which might not be necessary for a very long time depending on your trade and scavenge plans and success as the rare metals item can be gained in those ways in large quantities.
When you get to the choice between advanced farming and Animal husbandry that is another one which will depend partly on your map configuration and partly on available funds as procuring animals for the first time is quite expensive, especially if you don’t have anything valuable to trade or anything cheap in high quantities. So leaving one tech branch unexplored here isn’t a big issue as you can always come back later to expand your food production ability.
Another tip on the main world map for you is to always attack enemies with several of your specialists at once. Regular buildings can be cleared with a maximum of three specialists but camps can be attacked with more than that. Bringing in many of your specialists and if possible those with high weapon damage onto the same enemy camp will not only reduce the time it takes to clear that camp but also the damage your own specialists take while doing that.
