Zombie Skills/Ransack
Ransack is a zombie skill which allows the player to cause internal damage to buildings, reducing search odds and making barricading impossible until the damage is repaired. It is a child skill of Memories of Life. Like all zombie skills, Ransack costs players of all character classes 100 Experience Points (XP) to purchase.
Overview
Whilst inside a building devoid of survivors, a zombie with Ransack has the option to Ransack building. Ransacking once costs 1 Action Point (AP) and gives the zombie 1 XP, along with the message You ransack the building (this message may differ inside some building types). Further ransacks by that zombie will cost 1 AP each but will return no XP after the first. They also return the slightly altered message You ransack further rooms of the building. Ransacked buildings have their search odds lowered, and cannot be barricaded until the damage is repaired by a survivor, which is only possible after all zombies have been removed from the building.
After a building has been ransacked five times in a row (without being repaired), zombies with the skill will be given the option to Ruin building. This again costs 1 AP, which brings the total cost of ransacking and then ruining a building to 6 AP, but once again returns no further XP. It gives the message You ransack further rooms of the building. The building is now ruined. Ruined buildings suffer the same penalties as ransacked buildings, but also incur further ones; survivors cannot free run into a ruined building, instead landing outside of the building with a chance of suffering 5 damage (though this damage cannot be fatal), preventing the scouting of a safehouse and removing the bonus granted to anyone who has already done so, and preventing survivors from changing clothes. Ruins also are more difficult to repair than mere ransacking, as even a freshly-ruined building will require the Construction skill and a toolbox to repair; whilst every day that a ruined building is left unrepaired, the cost to repair it rises by an additional AP.
The inability to free run into a ruined building can be combined with the fact that a building can be ransacked and ruined whilst it is still barricaded (say, by a zombie rising after dying of an infection alone in a barricaded building) to create what is known as a Piñata; since a building barricaded beyond Very Strongly cannot be entered from the street, and a ruined building cannot be entered by free running, this creates a bastion which needs to be breached by survivors wishing to recover it, and is a vital death cult tactic, adding to the value of Ransack as a skill.
See Also
- Ruin- more detailed information on ruined buildings
- Decay- in-depth breakdown of the decay process in ruins
