Guides:Corpse

This is the survival guide for Corpse characters.

Corpses

The Corpse class is for people who want to start out the game as a zombie. While the generic zombie guide talks about the pros and cons of starting as a zombie or a survivor, this guide assumes you're starting out as a zombie.

Starting Out

Lucky for you, the Corpse class starts with the most important zombie skill, Vigour Mortis. This gives you a semi-decent chance to hit, for now.

Forget about your claws for the moment because with Vigour Mortis, your bite is more effective. Find someone and start gnawing on them.

Don't believe me? See the numbers: You can bite for 20% chance to hit, 4 damage, or claw at 30% chance to hit, 2 damage. So for bite, every 10 attempts, you hit 2 times, doing 8 damage. The average damage per bite is 0.8. For claw, every 10 attempts, you hit 3 times, for 6 damage. The average damage is 0.6.

See the zombie skills table for full analysis of all skills at the end.

The Rules

General

Here is the key to being a lone zombie: forget about hordes, forget about metagaming, and forget about breaking into buildings. Stay away from the areas that are heavy in zombies. Look for areas with a lot of humans but not too many.

Find lone humans out in the open. Move quickly; don't stay in the same place for long. When you see a human, move toward them and bite the heck out of them until you're down to 5 AP or so, then look for someplace to hide.

Always leave yourself some AP to hide, unless you're very close to killing someone and thus getting the XP boost from a survivor death. The ideal hiding place is a junkyard or a building with an open door. The former is much more common and less likely to be barricaded. Don't bother with anything that's barricaded; it isn't worth the effort to tear down.

If you can't find anywhere good to hide, try near an unimportant building like a library or a bank, or even out in the open so long as you're not near survivors. Sometimes a big flock of zombies is good to hide out in as well, tho be careful of the fact that established hordes can also have established enemies.

Don't Give Up

Being a low level zombie is a little harder than being a survivor, but only a little. If you're clever you can level up quite easily, and the more you level, the more fun it gets.

Yes, it's very rough at the start. The key here is: don't give up. Chances are someone will kill you before you log in the next time. So what? You're a zombie, just get up again. Sure, it costs 10 AP, but if you log in once a day you should have plenty of AP left over. Get up, find victim, bite, and then hide. It's as easy as that.

Yes, you will occasionally get Headshot, and you'll lose 5 more AP when getting up. Again: don't give up. Get up again, find a victim, and keep moving. You might want to hide for a while to regenerate the AP lost for the Headshot, though. If you're getting Headshot "all the time", as some people complain, you may just be in a neighbourhood that's home to a well-organized survivor group. Move somewhere else.

If you get revived (which is likely to happen if you stay near a NecroTech building, so watch out) then head to a police station and search for a flak jacket; you'll still be able to wear it as a zombie. Then find a tall building and hurl yourself off it, so that you can be a zombie again. After a while you'll find it's only slightly less inconvenient than being killed, and you can get back to prowling for lone survivors and biting them. Alternately you can remain a survivor for a short period of time since its typically easier to find zombies that aren't in hiding then survivors. This would be a great opportunity to pick up the Body Building skill and 200-300 XP before killing yourself. The XP will carry over and you can quickly grab a few zombie skills to help you on your way.

If you don't find anyone after using all your AP wandering around, don't give up. You'll never go for two days without seeing someone to munch on.

When in doubt, munch rather than hide. If you only have a few AP and you haven't seen a survivor until now, head toward them and bite until you have no AP. You'll have been killed by the time you log in again, but chances are you won't have been Headshot and you can just get up and go about the business of earning more XP.

Feeding Groans

When starting out as a beginner zombie, you generally don't have many or any of the skills that allow you to track down or locate fresh meat easily (Rather, you'll likely be spending most of your XP on strengthening your bite and claws at first). So it is imperative that when you log back in, you take the time read up on what's been going on since you last logged out. Primarily, search for any feeding groans within your vicinity that weren't made too long ago. If you have heard a groaning from 10 blocks away that was about 8 hours ago, you might want to skip it figuring as by the time you've spent a number of your AP getting there (especially if you don't have lurching gait yet) most of the meat will most likely already be devoured by the time you arrive.

Rather, search for groans that were made at an hour or two ago at most, and within your area so that you have plenty of AP to snack on some Bra!nz when you make your arrival.

Optional: Rotten Meat

Generally it is better to eat survivors than to eat zombies, as you get much more XP that way.

That said, if you are desperate for XP, you might want to gnaw on a fellow zombie or two. Be careful about this; some zombies take this very seriously, and even keep "zombie killer" lists like "player killer" lists.

That said, most zombies won't care. If you kill a fellow zombie, they'll just get back up again, with full HP, and it's better than being Headshot. Most of the time it's not worth the trouble for them to track you down, even if they did care. This is especially true if you keep moving, like you're supposed to.

In fact, aside from the lower XP return, this is the other problem with gnawing on zombies. There's usually enough around that the temptation is to stay in one place. Resist the urge to settle down; staying too long in one place is just asking for a survivor group to organize in that neighborhood and start shooting you in the head.

This is why eating other zombies is optional. A lot of the time it's better to invest the AP in moving and finding lone survivors. But if you only need a couple XP to level, sometimes it's worth it.

Rumor is that some zombies want to be eaten at the end of the day. Check their profile. Some say if a profile has "Brnhr" in it, or you hear a zombie say that, chances are very high they want to be eaten.

Skills

The moment that you get 100 XP, spend it on a skill, even if you're in the middle of a fight. It's always good to have an edge.

Being a zombie doesn't get easy until you have Neck Lurch and a decent chance to hit with a bite. That first level as a Corpse is a difficult hump to get over; this is where the simple advice of "don't give up" is the most important. (This is why it's tough to play a "new" zombie after your survivor is killed, rather than starting as a Corpse; getting both Vigour Mortis and Neck Lurch is a tough hump to get over.)

It doesn't get seriously fun until you get Lurching Gait, which makes it so you don't waste any extra AP closing with your prey. However, once you have those three skills you're golden: everything else is gravy. This is why not giving up is so important; it's harder to level at first as a zombie, but then it suddenly gets much, much easier after you have the first three zombie skills or so. (It's easier to level at first as a survivor, but the skills don't do as much for you as those three zombie skills do for a zombie.)

Here's the order you should buy skills in:

1. Vigour Mortis — you should already have this
2. Neck Lurch — once you have a 30% chance to hit with a bite, you shouldn't want to do anything else but bite
3. Lurching Gait — this way you can move through the different suburbs with ease
4. Ankle Grab — this lets you get up quickly after you're killed, which will happen a lot
5. Digestion — this way you can heal by biting if you're wounded
6. Infectious Bite — this way a survivor won't come after you later if you leave him alive; he'll be looking for healing
7. Scent Fear — weak survivors can be killed for an XP boost while leaving you plenty of AP to hide with
8. Scent Trail — it's very, very useful to know where survivors you've had contact with are
9. Death Grip — your claws are almost, but not quite, useful at this point
10. Rend Flesh — at this point, your claws are actually better than your teeth statistically, despite the lower damage, but remember your bite can heal you and infect survivors, so bite then claw
11. Tangling Grasp — this makes your claws even MORE awesome
12. Scent Blood — knowing exactly how wounded someone is lets you decide who to eat next
13. Scent Death — being able to find a horde to hide in can be a good thing
14. Memories of Life — to heck with getting into buildings, just pick off lone survivors outdoors, which is why this skill and those that derive from it are close to last
15. Feeding Drag — as long as you can get into buildings, drag the juicy morsels out
16. Feeding Groan — this is only useful for attracting other zombies, and since you're a loner and not part of a horde, it's hardly necessary
17. Ransack — you shouldn't be in a building, but if you are, it's nice to smash stuff up
18. Death Rattle — be sure to check out the Zombie Speech Translators
19. Flailing Gesture — this is cute, but only so useful for a loner
20. Brain Rot — this is optional; temporarily becoming a survivor is a good way to get a flak jacket

Summary: The Wandering Monster

1. Move diagonally in the same direction until you hit an edge or see a survivor - moving diagonally lets you see 2 more new blocks with each move than moving orthogonally. Moving orthogonally reveals 3 new blocks and moving diagonally produces 5.
2. Bite any survivor you see. (Optionally, bite a zombie if you're low on XP.)
3. When low on AP, hide. Avoid big piles of zombies, or any position visible to a survivor.
4. Upon logging in the next day, don't give up if you were killed. Just get up, and start the cycle again.
5. Level the moment you get a chance.

This guide was originally written by Xiombarg, with some excellent edits by Dayfat, Spiro, and Kschang.

Please comment in the talk section if you found this guide useful.