Looting and Scavenging

Scavenging is the front end of every other system. Materials for Crafting and Modification, food and water for Survival Needs, and the blueprints that unlock better equipment all come out of the world rather than out of a shop. There is no trading system and none has been announced, despite repeated player requests, so what a survivor has is what a survivor found.

Refresh and Density

In the second tech test loot refreshed on a cycle of four to six hours, and that cycle stretched further when a server was under heavy load. The practical effect testers reported was that popular locations stayed empty: gas stations ran dry and city loot came back slowly. The studio's stated fix was not a faster timer but a bigger map, so that demand spreads out over more places. City areas also carry far more zombies than the countryside, which puts the dense loot and the dense danger in the same postcode.

Map size figures differ by build and should not be averaged into one number. The first test ran on a 576 square kilometre procedurally generated sandbox. The current store listing describes 5000 square kilometres of seamless wasteland, and at gamescom 2026 the studio described official servers at roughly 72 by 72 kilometres with private servers at 8 by 8 kilometres. World and Map keeps those figures apart and attributes each one.

Where to Search

Locks

Lockpicks and combination locks both exist. The second test carried one bug worth recording, because it shaped how testers played: a simple lockpick displaying a hundred percent success chance would still fail if the player was carrying only one, and the workaround was to craft spares before setting out rather than to trust the displayed number.

Blueprints

Blueprints are found, not bought, and their rarity is a balance lever the studio is still adjusting. The tactical sniper grip blueprint was singled out by testers as too rare to obtain reliably, and drop rate tuning was promised on 27 June 2026. No drop table and no blueprint list has ever been published, so any figure circulating for a specific blueprint is not sourced from the studio.

Carrying and Storing

Survivors have encumbrance limits, so a run is bounded by weight rather than by slot count alone. Back at a shelter, storage groups items of the same type and materials sort themselves, boxes placed on the ground can be stacked on each other, and recruited companions deposit materials automatically once their storage settings allow it. NPC Companions covers what else they will and will not do unprompted, including raiding the fridge for every copy of an item.

Vehicle trunks carry two interaction rules that testers filed as bugs and the studio confirmed as intended rather than broken. A trunk can refuse to open with a message saying there is not enough space above to lift it, and a trunk cannot be interacted with from outside it. The stated remedy in both cases is to adjust the position of the interactable in build mode rather than to wait for a fix, which makes where a container sits on a vehicle a practical decision as well as a cosmetic one.

Announced Improvements