The ten-hour prep window: where to go and what to buy

You get 10 hours, and travel eats most of them. The clock starts at 09:00 and the outbreak lands at 19:00; the nearest shop is a 40 min round trip and the furthest is 3 hours, so you get three or four trips, not all 6 shops. This page covers what each trip costs in time, what to buy on each one, and the two purchases that change how the rest of the run goes.

Times and prices below are for the Standard Survival difficulty preset, which is what a new run starts on. The Prep Time and Starting Funds settings both change these numbers. The last section lists by how much.

The clock

The two middle rows are the game’s own warning thresholds on how long a shopping trip will take. Above 4 hours remaining it says nothing; below that it flags the time cost, and below 2 hours it flags the trip as risky. Plan to be home with 2 hours left.

Where you can go, and what it costs

The game carries a travel time per character, and they do not agree. Pick yours.

Buy a vehicle first

Before anything else, price the travel itself.

A Car at $500 turns a 2 hours round trip into 1 hr 6 min. Across three trips that is 2 hr 42 min recovered, most of another full trip, plus 80 trunk cells that do not count against what you carry. The SUV costs $900 more for the same speed and 40 extra cells; take it only if you already know you will fill them.

Trip order

Work in this order. Each trip should have one purpose, because mixing them wastes whichever limit you are actually short of. Furniture has a limit of its own that the bag does not share: the shop delivers it to the entrance as a package that occupies a slot there, nothing is placed until you unpack it in Planning Mode, and once those slots are full the shop stops selling to you. So a furniture trip is bounded by the entrance rather than by what you can carry, which is the reason to keep it separate from a food trip.

1. Go to the Convenience Store first. At 40 min it is the cheapest trip on the board, which makes it the right place to learn how much you can actually carry before you commit a longer one.
2. Buy the vehicle on trip two, at the Used Car Lot. It costs 3 hours round trip, the longest single trip you will make, and every trip after it is faster.
3. Fill up on food. With the vehicle bought, the Discount Mart is a 1 hr 6 min round trip. Take Sausage Sausage Food · Meat Satiety +10 Morale +1 200 g 1×1 cells 50.0 Satiety/kg $5 90 d shelf life Waste at day 360 Meat Ready-to-Eat for bulk, at $5 for 10 Satiety it is 2.00 per dollar in one bag cell, and Canned Luncheon Meat Canned Luncheon Meat Food · Meat Satiety +20 Morale +1 1000 g 2×1 cells 20.0 Satiety/kg $30 360 d shelf life Waste at day 1800 Meat Requires cutting tool to open for anything you intend to still have in a month.
4. Spend the last trip on what you cannot scavenge later. Food is findable after the outbreak; the fittings for your house are not.

To build the list before you leave, sort the supplies list by Satiety per dollar and filter it to what the shops actually stock. It carries the price, weight, shelf life and bag footprint of everything you can buy in the window.

If a trip would return with under 2 hours left on the clock, do not start it.

What to carry it in

The smallest Backpack holds 9.6 kg across 56 cells, and weight is what runs out first on food. No table ties a bag to a character or to the start of a run, so which one you set out with is not something this site can tell you; the smallest is the floor. A Shopping Cart raises the allowance to 18 kg, 1.88×, which is worth more than any single food purchase on the same trip. Carry weight and bags has the full table.

The phone will lend you money

Everything above assumes the money you start with is the money you have. It is not. Quick Loan is on the phone from the start and offers 3 loans, the largest of them $500 against a starting balance of $1000.

The app advertises itself the way these things do. Its banner reads "Only $15 fee for every $100 borrowed", and its small print reads "Annual interest rate 468%, with additional charges for overdue payments". What the game actually stages is one caller, on the night of day 9 or 10, between 22:00 and midnight. His words are worth reading before you decide: "Hand it over tonight — or every night from now on, someone will be outside your door."

The visit is the same whichever loan you took. It comes once, and all 3 answers end it: Play dead and stay silent, Yell back through the door, Compromise and give away items. Only one of them changes anything: Yell back through the door pays +5 Morale.

The ceiling moves. Resourceful Management in the permanent tree raises the limit from $500 to $1,800 across its 3 levels, for 90 points in total. At the top that is more than the run starts with.

The same talent carries a warning the app does not: "the more you borrow, the more likely you are to attract unwanted attention." Take that as the game’s own view of the largest loan rather than the smallest, whatever a single reading of the tables shows.

Borrow before the first trip if you are going to: the prep window is the only time this money buys a vehicle. The same phone carries the contacts who send you supplies later.

Which materials are worth the money

The workbench takes materials rather than food, and 128 recipes draw on the same short list of them. What to buy is decided by how many recipes want each one.

Scrap Metal Scrap Metal Materials Stamina -10 100 g 1×1 cells $10 Keeps indefinitely Materials for crafting is in 69 of the 128, more than twice the next one, and those recipes want 158 of it between them. At $10 it is the cheapest thing on the list as well as the most wanted.

Buy the cheap end of that table and leave

Electronic Components Electronic Components Materials Stamina -10 1000 g 2×2 cells $80 Keeps indefinitely Cannot be used

until you know what you are building. The supplies list filters to what can be crafted and to what a material goes into, so you can check a recipe before you spend.

7 of the recipes can come out wrong, so keep a spare of anything you are making once. The supplies list marks those.

Two things people forget

Something to do. Playing Cards Playing Cards Household Morale +10 200 g 1×1 cells $20 Keeps indefinitely Fuel 1500 Have some fun, takes 10 minutes costs $20, never spoils, and survives being used. Morale is the stat that quietly ends runs, and this is the cheapest thing in the aisles that answers it.

Furniture answers it better. A generator, a reinforced window and a massage chair each carry a button that pays Morale every day for the whole run, and you were buying the first two anyway. Keeping Morale up lists all twenty of them with what pressing each one costs you.

Variety, not volume. Food types drive Morale, so eleven tins of the same thing feed you and still make you miserable. Spread the food budget across types rather than buying the single best value in bulk, Keeping Morale up explains the rule.

When the difficulty changes the answer

Two of the six difficulty settings move every figure on this page.

On the shortest setting the window drops to 7 hours, which removes a trip outright, buy the vehicle first or skip it entirely and stay close to home. On the tightest funds setting you have $400, which is less than the Car costs, so travel time has to be spent rather than bought.

The talent that changes this

5 permanent talents change the prep window itself: some give you more to spend it with, some make the spending go further.

Which talents to buy covers what the tree costs as a whole.

Quick reference

• Window: 10 hours on Standard Survival, from 09:00 to 19:00.
• Trips available: three or four, depending on distance and whether you buy a vehicle.
• Nearest shop: Convenience Store, 40 min round trip.
• Vehicle: Car at $500 cuts travel to 55% and adds 80 trunk cells.
• Be home with 2 hours left.
• Bulk food: Sausage Sausage Food · Meat Satiety +10 Morale +1 200 g 1×1 cells 50.0 Satiety/kg $5 90 d shelf life Waste at day 360 Meat Ready-to-Eat . Long-dated food: Canned Luncheon Meat Canned Luncheon Meat Food · Meat Satiety +20 Morale +1 1000 g 2×1 cells 20.0 Satiety/kg $30 360 d shelf life Waste at day 1800 Meat Requires cutting tool to open . Morale: Playing Cards Playing Cards Household Morale +10 200 g 1×1 cells $20 Keeps indefinitely Fuel 1500 Have some fun, takes 10 minutes .