Safehouses

As per the 16 August, 2010 Update:

• Survivors and zombies alike are finding it easier to navigate the familiar wreckage of the city streets. Survivors can get directions to a nominated safehouse; zombies automatically focus on the most recent groan or scent trail.

Glossary Article

Safehouses are buildings fortified by survivor players and used as safe resting points to regenerate AP, areas where one can search for ammo in safety, or as meeting points for groups.

These buildings usually have barricades and are often inconspicuous locations such as warehouses 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 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!

Large safehouses are often popular targets for zombies, since a higher concentration of humans in one spot makes killing them easier. Even if a large safehouse is 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.

One theory is that the safest residence is with several capably levelled survivors in a nondescript building without barricading and the doors wide open - the reasoning being that few zombies will bother to look inside (and if they do, they will be swiftly taken care of). This is only reasonable if at least one player in your group is online at all times to warn everyone else if zombies attack. 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, rendering the safehouse unusable in the short term, making this strategy foolhardy in these new times.

When a new character is created in any survivor character class, they will automatically spawn in a 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.