Completing Goals
It’s easy to get wrapped up in your immediate survival needs, like scavenging for food. However, your community has additional goals that your survivors would like to pursue. The Map Screen shows your community’s current goals broken down into different categories. Use this list to guide your activities whenever your community doesn’t have a more pressing need. You can review current goals from your map screen.
Story Goals
These goals advance the overall story of the town and your community. At the start of the game, these include some critical tasks required to build up your community. Later on, this section focuses on selecting a Leader, defeating the blood plague in your town, and completing your Leader’s final legacy — your lasting contribution to this region of the world.
Community Goals
Goals that appear in this section tend to be of smaller scope and importance, though completing them can still earn significant rewards and other benefits. These tasks may be highly personal to individual members of your community, representing specific goals that they believe are important to survival. They often give you a bit of insight into that character’s personality or values.
Sometimes, completing a goal requires that you play a specific survivor in your community. You must continue playing as that character until the goal is entirely complete. Otherwise, this goal will be put on a back burner for a while. It might be a while until you see it again.
External Goals
This category includes the vast majority of tasks that are initiated by someone outside your community. Some involve individual survivors who need your help, while others represent longer storylines centering on a neighboring community of NPCs. Completing these goals can earn you nice rewards, including opportunities to recruit new survivors to your community or to build lasting alliances that grant special benefits.
One special kind of external goal is the traders who come to town looking to buy or sell items. These traders often focus on a subset of items or resources. Each trader only remains in the area for a limited time (except the Bounty Broker who is there to stay), so be sure to prioritize a visit if you’re looking to earn more influence (by trading away items) or to stock up on whatever they’re selling. For more information, see the section on Special Traders.
Ambient Goals
These tend to be small missions that can appear as the player travels throughout the map. These points of interest could be missions on investigating a mysterious broadcast, helping a survivor in need and more.
Curveballs
The very nature of a post-apocalyptic world is one which is unpredictable and often chaotic. Curveballs represent an emerging incident, phenomenon or happenstance that will either be to the benefit of your survivors or their detriment. Sometimes luck will be on your side and a scenario will arise that creates a timed opportunity for your community to take full advantage of, such as finding a lost supply crate, a mutational defect in a group of zombies, or simply the boost of having a well-maintained base. Other times more sinister challenges will emerge like a mutational advantage in a group of zombies, hostile raiders appearing on the map, or even the Plague Hearts themselves becoming more deadly
Curveballs are not always one-shot events, they have a chance to reappear, and when they do you may receive a different combination of effects for a different experience, a previously seen minor effect may now be elevated to a major, and vice versa.
- Location – Some Curveballs will be events that only occur at a specific location, this will be highlighted on the map. Whether you want to skirt around the area or drive straight in is up to you!
- Global – Global Curveballs are inescapable, they will be in effect no matter where you are and you’ll just need to take this into account as you traverse the world.
Resolving a Curveball
- Timed Curveballs – Some Curveballs are just destined to fade out over time. These will eventually expire and the effects will come and go.
- Objective Curveballs – Some of the worst Curveballs will require you to take action to rid the world of its influence. These actions are small objectives, that when completed, may include a reward and will clear up the effects so you can get back to the “normal life” of surviving the apocalypse.
For more information about Curveballs, see Update 34: Curveball’s patch notes.
Curveball Control Panel
Want less chaos and more predictability in your apocalyptic world? Or maybe more of a challenge? Check out the Curveball control panel located on the Curveball screen that lets you customize events – balance, frequency, impact – it’s all up to you!
- Balance – Choose to receive more beneficial Curveballs to help you out or negative ones to create more of a challenge.
- Frequency – Choose how often new Curveballs will appear in the world. The Frequency setting can also be used to disable the Curveballs feature.
- Impact – Decide how strong the Curveballs will be on your play session, this includes the duration they are active, the strength of the effects and the size of their influence on the map.
For more in-depth information about Curveball control panel, see Update 37: A Light In The Dark patch notes.
Plague Territory
Whatever map you move to will be peppered with valuable outposts, but to claim them, you must first defeat the Plague Hearts whose influence now spreads across the map, filling the area with a nasty red mist and making it unfit for human habitation.
Plague territories are marked by a deep red splotch on the map. Any site within plague territory has a red icon, indicating that you cannot secure or claim it. To free a site, you must destroy any Plague Heart that includes that site within its territory. In densely-clustered maps, that could mean destroying multiple hearts.
Plague Hearts tend to congregate where humans do, so expect valuable bases and outposts, as well as denser neighborhoods, to be covered by plague territory.
This means that defeating Plague Hearts is a day-to-day concern as you plan your community’s expansion.
For more on Plague Territories, see Update 25: Plague Territory’s patch notes.
