If you’re looking for a guide to improve your Zero City shelter and play a better game, you’re at the right place! You will find here all the Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival tips and tricks that you need to start on the right foot and play like a pro.
Similar to other great games like Fallout Shelter or Hustle Castle, Zero City puts you in charge of managing the survivors of a zombie apocalypse… and it’s extremely fun! And today we’ll learn everything from properly managing your base, to getting more survivors, winning all your battles and everything in between.
So let’s not waste a single second and instead let’s check out all our Zero City tips and cheat in the complete strategy guide below: perfect for beginners and advanced players!
Always merge rooms
This is probably one of the most important things to have in mind: you should always build up your base planning for the future, and merging rooms.
In order to merge a room, you will need to place 2 or 3 rooms of the same type next to each other. Remember that the level of the rooms must be the same and they will be merged automatically when they are.
If you haven’t planned your base design for room merging, you can always edit the layout of your base by either tapping and holding any room until you get into the editor, or by tapping the Command Center and selecting the “Shelter Editor” option.
Assign your survivors based on their base stats
Each survivor has a potential (number of stars), which influences the total number of skill points that can be assigned to classes. At 2 stars, you have a maximum of 40 points, at 3 stars – 60 and so on.
The classes a survivor can be trained in are:
– Fighter (only used in combat, affecting health and combat stats of the survivors)
– Researcher (mainly affects reagent production in the Chemical Lab, but also increases production speed overall)
– Cook (influences food production in the Dining Hall)
– Accountant (influences cash production in the Print Shop)
Specialization is key in Zero City Try to Survive aka Zero City Zombie Shelter Survival. This means that you should always train your survivors for them to fill one main role: either a fighter or a researcher or a cook or an accountant. It’s pretty easy!
The reason why you should always do that is because of how the game is built: you will very rarely end up needing to move a person from a position to another. The only exception here is with the fighters: when you are training some survivors, it would be wise to move other survivors into the barracks in order to offer a better defense of your shelter.
You will have to specialize your Fighters further more based on the role they’ll have in battle, but we’ll discuss more about this below.
Always equip the best items (and scrap the rest)
You will soon have a ton of items in your inventory and way too few survivors to use them all. Keep an eye on all new gear and make sure to equip the best options at all times because the differences between items are noticeable.
If you don’t really want to browse through tens of items and keep track of the bonuses offered, you can always tap a survivor in the game, then tap the class they’re using in their current role (so if they’re in the Dining Hall, tap Cook) and select the “Equip best gear” option from the menu:
There is no real need to hoard a ton of items either, especially the low level ones. You will have more survivors eventually who will need equipment, but you will always have items to scrap.
Do so, because you will eventually use the materials gained from scraping to craft better items. This also makes it a lot easier to keep track of all the items you have.
Keep your highest star survivors mating
Sending a male and female survivor to the Living Room will result in the lady getting pregnant (eventually). She will have a baby who will later on grow into an adult, which will become a permanent resident of the shelter.
The quality (star rating) of the new shelter member is influenced by the star quality of the parents: so two 2-star parents will probably never give birth to a 3-star kid. The higher the number of stars the parents have, the higher the chances for a similarly-starred survivor to be born.
I am not 100% sure about this, but I think that the skills that the parents have also influence the skills the child will inherit. So if the parents are highly skilled in Combat, so will be the child. I repeat – this might not be true.
Either way, it’s the star rating that matters, because the skills can be easily increased to fit your needs with training.
Remember that pregnant women can still work (although they can’t be assigned to fight). But even a fighter gives a bit of a boost if there’s an empty space, so don’t forget to send people to work as soon as the loving’s over to keep production optimized.
How to properly defend your base
You don’t have a lot of control when it comes to defending your base, so just a few common-sense rules apply.
First of all, make sure that you have the best fighters in the barracks when you leave the game. If some are training, send some other fighters instead in the barracks, otherwise only the one(s) in that room will fight to defend your shelter.
Second, use the proper weapons from the Arsenal. Upgrade the weapons constantly and stick to one type of unit because upgrades are really expensive.
For the Automatic Turret, I recommend getting the one that deals damage over time or the one that stuns opponents.
Finally, keep your base as unattractive to potential attackers as possible. This means keeping as few resources available for looting: nobody will waste food for a handful of coins and some Reagents.
How to win all your attacks
When it comes to winning a fight, the most important decision you will make is the Team Setup. We’ll talk about this in detail below, but until then, here are some additional tips and tricks to win all your battles in the game:
Apart from always having the best items equipped (based on the role of your fighter), make sure to have their Fighter level maxed out through training. This alone gives a massive boost and has your survivors fighting at maximum potential.
Second, make sure to always head into battle using some supplies. Use the said supplies as soon as you can in order to be allowed to use another one ASAP in the battle. These provide massive advantages and they’re something the defenders don’t have.
Best Team Setup
As your Barracks goes up the levels, the number of survivors you will have in your team will increase. The maximum number of fighters you can have right now is 6. Here are my recommended team setups, based on the number of survivors you have:
3 members: one melee, one chemist and one ranged. This way, you will always have the best equipment possible equipped to your survivors, since the game equally offers you these three categories early on.
4 members: I recommend going with 2 melee units (as they are OP and can deal a ton of damage), one chemist and one ranged.
I don’t have enough experience with 5-member teams and haven’t unlocked the 6th member yet, but I will update this when I do.
I also want to make some recommendations regarding the items to equip, especially for the melee units: always choose the ones that give your character the chance to regain some health as these are literally vital.
Having a melee unit (a tank) that regenerates health, soaking up damage, is ideal because the troops at the back have time to deal a ton of damage and easily take out all enemies.
The opposite goes for the ranged units: only equip the items that increase attack or damage dealt and nothing else, as you want them as lethal as possible, even though feeble.
Join an active alliance
Being part of an active alliance is vital in Zero City, as you get a lot of benefits if you team up with strong, active players.
Early on, you can request resources from your fellow members – and getting some is extremely useful when it comes to building upgrades in your Shelter.
But even more important are the Alliance Wars, with top rewards for those who play a good game. So for these reasons, make sure that you are in a solid alliance – it makes progress a lot easier!
Constantly train your survivors (specialization’s the key!)
We briefly talked about this earlier: specialization is key in the game if you want everything running smoothly.
You can specialize your survivors by training them constantly to develop the skills required for the jobs you want them to do in the Shelter.
Things are easy and straightforward here, and you should always have maxed out survivors for the following roles:
– A number of fighters equal to the maximum number you can have in the barracks (so if the barracks can hold 4, then max out 4 fighters in their combat skill).
– At least 3 cooks, 3 money makers and 3 chemists
Next, you could go with a mixed specialization with 3 more survivors, so that you have backup for the barracks when your main ones are training or if they are in the Living Room, making magic possible. And keep the ratios above as your Shelter increases.
Increase the Star ratings of your Survivors
It’s really difficult to get 4-star and 5-star survivors in Zero City: Zombie Shelter Survival, but it’s extremely important to have at least a few of these because you can’t have top stats otherwise.
In order to increase the star rating of your survivors, tap the one you want to improve and then tap the plus button next to the star rating. Getting an upgrade from 3 to 4 stars costs 750 Cryptcoins, so it’s definitely not cheap!
Also, since star upgrades are so expensive, I recommend to only use them for your Soldiers, as they are the most important survivors in the game and you need them to have the potential of maxed out Fighting skill to make winning battles easier.
Get Premium, if possible
If you have some money available to spend in the game, choosing to pay for the Premium Account is really worth it, as it makes progress a lot easier in the game. It’s almost like cheating!
I wrote in detail about Premium here, so make sure to check out the article as well for all the Pros and if you’re interested in even more help, check out my thoughts about hiring the Zombie Assistant.
Grab all the freebies that you are offered!
Freebies don’t come often in Zombie City: Try to Survive, so you definitely must take all offers that you have: the daily crate, the ads that you can watch for the Ad Crate and also the random “watch an ad” feature that pops up every now and then, offering you money or other resources.
You could also consider a “freebie” the option to watch an add to speed up training of your soldiers or other survivors. Do that if you really need to get the upgrade before logging out for a longer period of time.
You should also focus on the Zombie Hordes whenever they pop up since you get a ton of crates from these events. Similarly, make sure to complete all the daily missions for even more free goodies in the game!
How to use the Premium currency
Since Cryptcoins (the Premium currency in Zombie City) are difficult to get and hoard, spending them on the right things is essential.
I recommend you to only spend them on two things: starring up your survivors and getting that second builder if you really must.
Everything else, from speeding up production or training to getting extra resources… that’s just a waste of Premium currency since it can be obtained for free from simply playing the game!
Keep the happiness bonus as high as possible
If you tap the population happiness icon in the top right corner, you can see how happy your survivors are. Try to always keep that at maximum (5% normally or 20% with Premium), in order to get a boost in resource production.
You can increase the happiness of your survivors by tapping the various icons that appear randomly above their head while in the Shelter.
This would be our Zombie City guide! Hopefully, you will find it useful and it will help you get a better understanding of the game’s mechanics and how everything works.
If you have additional tips and tricks to share – or extra questions – don’t hesitate to let us know by commenting below.
Published: Jul 16, 2019 10:06 am