How To Get Started In SCUM & Learn The Basics

SCUM released earlier this week and it looks like it truly will be the next big thing. For a while, it completely knocked Fortnite, PUBG, League of Legends and the other big names off the top Twitch spot and it’s sold over 250,000 copies in its first few days. If you’re just getting involved and haven’t a clue what you’re doing though, then this SCUM guide is for you. There’s a lot to digest and it may seem overwhelming at first but fear not as we’ve got everything you need to know to stop yourself from being eaten by zombies or dying of hunger.

Creating a character

As soon as you join a server, or play in single player, you’ll be prompted to create a character. There’s a very good chance you’ll die as you learn the mechanics and explore so don’t fret about this too much, but the general gist of things is as follows.

Adjusting the age slider will change the four attributes appropriately, as will making yourself muscly, fat or thin. As the game is still in early access, a lot of features aren’t quite there yet, one of which is the dexterity skill. Right now, only stealth can be upgraded and to get your stealth stat to the maximum, you only need 3.0 points in dexterity. We’d recommend that as stealth can be crucial, which we’ll get onto later.

For the rest, it’s really your call. It’s incredibly easy to obtain a melee weapon as you’ll find out shortly so boxing isn’t a skill you need to upgrade very high and for your first character, you can probably forgo the sniping stat. We’d recommend upgrading melee weapons & handguns, running & endurance, along with camouflage & survival. They’re the key components to a good base character right now.

Crafting your first weapon

As soon as you spawn on a brand new server, your main goal needs to be obtaining a weapon and a backpack. Neither are too difficult but you’ll want to start with the weapon as it’s the simplest.

Look at the ground and you’ll see rocky patches that when looked at, present you with the option to “Search for rocks”. Do that and place two stones in your inventory, or stand by them so they’re in the vicinity. Navigate over to the crafting tab and in the top section, you’ll be able to craft a stone knife. Everything else will either have yellow lines over it which means you have some of the items required or red lines which means you don’t have any of the ingredients.

From there, find a bush. There’s plenty of them around no matter where you spawn and having a stone knife means you can cut it down. That’ll leave a few sticks lying on the floor which you can then use to create an improvised wooden spear. Congratulations, you’ve got your first weapon! Just make sure you don’t leave it on the ground near you as it will automatically be dropped in the vicinity rather than going into your hands or your holster.

Bonus: crafting a backpack

If you want to spend a bit more time in the wilderness, it’s a fairly simple but slightly lengthier process to craft an improvised courier backpack. Chop down a few more bushes until you’ve got five long sticks lying on the floor, then take off your pants and chop them up into rag stripes. Craft some tree bark rope then you’ll be able to make the improvised courier backpack, which offers slightly more capacity than your inmate clothes.

Finding loot

There’s two main types of location in SCUM: Towns and military compounds. Just by looking at the map, it’s hard to discern which cluster of red dots are one or the other, but there’s a general rule of thumb to apply. If the place of interest is at the end of a single white road that branches off from a longer path, there’s a good chance it’s a military compound. These places are guarded by robots that will kill you almost instantly, so avoid them.

Towns on the other hand are slightly bigger than the military bunkers. They’re not completely safe - puppets roam around but they’re slow, easy to spot and as long as you put all three dexterity points into your stealth skill, they’re easy to avoid. They’re loud too, so if you can’t hear one, you’re safe.

If a door to a building is open, it means someone has already been there and most likely looted it. The devs have said loot respawns every two hours but whether that includes doors closing again isn’t confirmed. Either way, head inside as many buildings as you can and loot everything from garbage sacks to washing machines.

Understanding metabolism

When you press tab, along from your inventory and the crafting screen, you’ll see the metabolism window. Don’t worry - it seems like a lot of information at first and it is, but hardly any of it matters for the most part. The most important thing to stress at first is that your energy levels don’t matter yet. Nothing immediate happens when your energy drops to 0% and that’s because it’s more of a long term issue. You’ll eventually start to slowly lose health, have a lower maximum stamina and other negative effects but it takes time for those to take place.

At first, as long as you’re eating the food you find and regularly drinking liquids, whether it’s water from a well or a big ol’ two litre bottle of caramel soda, you’ll be fine. If you’re finding a lot of food though, be careful you don’t overeat. Gradually eating larger consumables rather than hurriedly selecting “Eat All” works better, as you may end up vomiting. Keep an eye on your bladder volume though since your character will need to urinate eventually, along with taking a number two when the time is right.

Fighting puppets

Noticed the drones that will occasionally fly at you and film you for a while? That’s because this enormous prison cell is actually a TV programme. They don’t do anything right now and will fly off after a while, but the zombies on the other hand are hostile. Despite looking and behaving exactly like you’d expect a zombie to, they’re not technically zombies. They’re actually called “puppets” and they’re being controlled by the producers of this sadistic reality TV show.

Semantics aside, they’re fairly easy to take down. If one is running toward you, it’s simply a case of timing your swings. Equip the improvised wooden spear or other melee weapon if you’ve found something better, then left-click to swing at its head. If it doesn’t get knocked down, take a step back because it’s going to have a go. Once you’ve dodged it, swing again. Rinse and repeat this process until it collapses and you can search the bugger and steal its clothes. Try not to get too many on you at once though as in numbers they’re a real pain.

That pretty much sums it up for your first couple of hours in SCUM. Once you’ve had free reign of a town, you’ll want to look for a military compound but by that point, you’ll be familiar with the mechanics and ready to take on the world. Well, not quite… those enormous robots are bastards. Good luck!