Cities and Encounters

Cities and Encounters

Lost Cities are rich in supplies, but they are not passive ruins. A Radio Transmitter maps local progress, infested buildings lock their own containers, and every clear makes the city more dangerous.

Map the city

Place a transmitter in or near a Lost Cities zone and leave it in place while it calibrates and surveys the connected city chunks. Once it connects, open the Survivor Network and use < CITY to review the local report. The panel is intentionally collapsed by default so it does not obstruct contacts and quests.

Progress belongs to the city zone, not to one radio or one player. Multiple mapped radios report the same clears. A radio outside a mapped zone still provides ordinary network access, but cannot take a city-operation contract.

Infested buildings

Treat intact city buildings as uncertain. When an encounter activates, its containers remain locked until the site is clear.

• Regular sites have a persistent target of infected kills. By default, the whole population is placed as you approach rather than endlessly replacing enemies.
• Boss sites can summon a Rotwire Brute after the regular target is reached. A short warning gives you time to reload and reposition.
• A building counts as cleared only when the encounter reaches CLEARED. A site marked safe does not count, and repeating a cleared site does not add progress.

Clear methodically. Hitting the objective count does not remove infected already loaded on other floors.

The Rotwire Brute

The Brute has a deep health pool, tracks targets over long distances, hits hard, and can tear through blocks. At range it throws rocks; watch for the windup, break line of sight, and move away from the impact point. Do not bunch up or fight with a wall, cliff, or dead-end behind you.

Use the warning before a boss arrival to reload, establish solid cover, and make a lateral escape route. Killing the marked Brute clears its encounter immediately, even if stray regular infected remain.

City danger

Every five unique encounter clears raise the default city danger by one level, up to level 12. Each level adds 10% of base maximum health to tagged infected (with a matching, separately tunable Brute setting). The bonus applies throughout the city and its surrounding influence area. An infected that has received a higher bonus keeps it after leaving.

Unique clears	Default danger	Maximum-health bonus
0–4	0	+0%
5–9	1	+10%
10–14	2	+20%
15–19	3	+30%

The City Status panel tells you the current clear count, danger level, infected health bonus, and the number of clears until the next level. Use it to decide whether a supply run should become a deliberate clearing operation.

Street and wilderness infected

Outdoor zombie pressure continues by day and night. City streets have the greater chance of scattered infected, while the wilderness has uncommon wanderers. Both outdoor populations are more likely after nightfall; underground vanilla zombie spawning remains unchanged. Skeletons and creepers are pushed into deeper caves, concentrating surface danger around the infected.

Next: move through the city quietly or turn recovered evidence into supplies.