Safehouses (Glossary)
This is the glossary article for safehouses. For the article on the in-game safehouse function see Safehouses.
Safehouses are buildings fortified by survivors and used as safe resting points to regenerate Action Points (AP), areas where one can search for supplies in safety, or as meeting points for groups.
These buildings usually have barricades and are often inconspicuous locations such as pubs or libraries. However, Police Departments are commonly used as safehouses by gun-wielding survivors, and Hospitals are often home to a wide variety of classes hoping for First Aid Kits either to heal themselves, or to gain Experience Points (XP) by healing others. By turning these buildings into safehouses, the resident survivors can search for items without having to spend AP travelling between safehouse and destination. However, many in the Urban Dead survivor community think this is an undue risk due to the natural attractiveness of these locations to zombies and instead choose to rest up in a warehouse or another less obvious building.
Remember that no place is safe, only safer!
Populous safehouses are often popular targets for zombies, since a higher concentration of humans in one spot makes killing them easier. Even if a populous safehouse is diligently barricaded, zombies might still break down the barricade to attack the survivors resting inside. For this reason, safehouses are never perfectly safe. Survivors are often cautioned that revealing locations of major safehouses might lead to attacks on those safehouses.
When a new character is created in any survivor character class, they will automatically spawn in a Tactical Resource Point (TRP), bar Firefighters, who spawn in Fire Stations. As detailed above, TRPs are generally regarded as safehouses, as they need to be secured so that the suburb can work at full efficiency. In response to this, some safehouses are barricaded to VSB, so that characters can enter the building without the need to Free Run into them.
One theory is that the safest residence is one that zombies are unlikely to check inside. In the early years of Urban Dead, this might be a nondescript building without barricading and the doors wide open. With the advent of the Uniform Barricading Policy and the implementation of Feeding Groan, however, a barricaded building is no longer something that attracts much attention, and one zombie can now call for allies within moments of being faced with a survivor. Nowadays, it can make more sense to hide in a ruined building, at least in areas where most buildings are ruined.
