State of Survival: Plague Zone – Event guide

Plague Zone is a good way to earn both Jane fragments and special Zone Crates with a chance to obtain a Legendary Hero Fragments. Since you’re not able to complete this event on your own, understanding and coordination with your Alliance is quite important. Let me explain in details how to do that!

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Overview

Plague Zones (PZ) appear randomly all over the map. You can quickly find one via the Events Billboard menu or by tapping the Search icon and scrolling all the way to the far end (for some weird reason, it is located after Gas farms).

Similar to the Influencer Trap, you can advance to the next level of the Zone after completing the previous one. So once they are introduced in your state, make sure you join your alliance members taking down the very first levels.

Each Zone has 2 timers:

• Before you launch an attack: it shows how long PZ will be located on that particular spot. Once the timer expires, it will disappear.
• Once you launched an attack: depending on the Zone level, you have between 30 minutes to kill all the mobs and Zone Matriarch. Otherwise, it will disappear and you won’t get most important rewards.

Before you start

• Make sure you have Travis available and his Hero Rank maxed out. PZ is the most stamina consuming event, saving 20% becomes quite important.
• I would not recommend switching your Chief Talents into the WAR mode. PZ monsters are quite weak and won’t cause any troubles up until PZ levels 25+.
• Your troops will get wounded during the attacks;
• The event is usually completed within 15-20 minutes, provided you have a full strike team and people know what to do.
• Zone rewards are sent in 3 steps: once Zone is eliminated, the next day and at the end of the week. See detailed description here;
• You do not need to complete more than 1 PZ per day. It will be just a waste of stamina and I will explain why in the event score calculation part.

Zone Composition

Each zone (I will intentionally skip low-level ones) consists of 3 Infected zombie’s categories, which you have to eliminate in the order described.

• Zone Mob: weakest target, can be solo attacked only. Consumes 10 stamina. On the higher PZ levels, you can find x2 or x3 Zone mobs tiles, which means you need to attack the same spot continuously until you eliminate all of them.
• Zone Menace: medium threat target, can be solo attacked or rallied. Consumes 20 stamina. Before rally is opened, you need to send your squad into the Explorer mode (like with the Explorer Trail missions) to remove Menace’s HP. 1 attempt will cost you 15 stamina. Number of HP is displayed under the tile (i.e. x348). Once all HP are removed, a boss x1 icon will appear meaning you good to go with a solo or rally attack.
• Zone Matriarch: most difficult target, must be rallied. Consumes 30 stamina. Similar to Zone Menace, you can only rally Matriarch after you have all its HP removed (usually, it has 1.5x-5x times HP more than Menace) by sending the squad into the Explorer mode. It will also cost you 15 stamina per 1 attempt.

For high-level PZ, there could be an additional challenge:

• Hidden Zone Mob: same as the Zone Mob, but you need to defeat surrounding tiles first to reveal and attack the Hidden one.

Assembling a Strike Team

For each Zone, you have 2 ways to run it through.

• Create your own Strike team

Strike Team creator can invite other members, kick out inactive ones and share event details into alliance chat. You can’t kick out or replace the Strike Team creator.

Once strike team invite is shared, you have a 3 minutes cooldown before sharing it for the next time. You can invite members of your alliance or contact list without any cooldowns.

• Join an existing Strike Team

You can join any team by either clicking the Alliance chat invite or visiting Events Billboard – Plague Zone page. Inactive players can be kicked out and replaced by others.

Heroes Choice

The first and the only hero that does matter while doing PZ is Travis. You want to use him in any solo attack or while launching/joining rallies for Zone Menaces and/or Matriarchs. Rest of heroes doesn’t matter, but if you want to have some guidance, I have copy-pasted it from the Influencer trap guide.

Since we are attacking Infected, our second priority hero will be Nikola due to his attack boosting skill.

In the Explorer Mode, Mike would be our preferred choice: since he deals a lot more damage on big bosses due to his skill that shoots an enemy, who is attacking a teammate, 3 times with huge damage per shot. Another huge stamina saver!

Attack Priority

Once you have your Strike Team assembled and ready for action, it’s time for attacking.

Since PZ takes a lot of stamina, the very first thing you need to know: do not attack all Zone Mobes! You have to remove only those surrounding either Menace or Matriarch tiles, everything else (diagonal tiles or mobs further away) can be safely ignored.

Check the screenshot below explaining attack priorities on a real example:

Here’s your strategy:

1. Start taking out all the surrounding Zone Mobs (marked with green squares). You can send multiple rallies from your settlement, but I strongly recommend using Travis in 1 rally and wait till he’s back. In a team of 5 people, it takes you 15 marches to take all the mobs for the Zone on my screenshot above, so approx. 3 times x 2 minutes per rally = 6 minutes. Repeat your attacks for x2/x3 tiles.
   
   Note: for the Hidden Mobs (1*) take the surrounding ones first to reveal the tile. Not need in the case above.
   
2. Once done, proceed to take out HP of Zone Menaces (marked with blue stars). You always have at least 1 Zone Menace, on the higher difficulty you can have multiple. You will be able to rally one after all its HP is down. Time-wise you will need around 5 minutes per each.
   
3. To get to the final boss, Zone Matriarch (marked with an orange star) you will need to kill all Zone Menaces first. The scenario is the same – take down all its HP, then rally together to destroy it. It shouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes to challenge and rally the Matriarch.
   

Points Calculation

Every Zone has a certain level that you can see next to Menace or Matriarch bosses. I.e. on my screenshot above, it was level 25.

The amount of points you will contribute to the weekly Alliance score is calculated via the formula:

Zone Matriarch Level + Number of Zone Menaces + 1

i.e. Zone above gave me 25 + 2×1 + 1 = 28 ★ points

Currently, maximum ★ you can obtain is 36 per single Zone (with Lvl. 30 Matriarch and 5 Menaces) and maximum weekly Alliance score is 3600 (in case each of 100 people of your alliance did a 36-star PZ at least once during the week).

There are few important notes here:

1. It doesn’t make sense to do more than one Zone per day because the amount of the points you contribute is measured by the highest Zone rank you’ve done. So if you eliminate 3 Zones during the day/week – i.e. Lvl. 24, 25 and 25 again – your contribution will be only 26-28 ★ points (depending on the number of Zone Menaces). But not 50 ★ or 74 ★ or something like that;
   
2. It is sufficient to do at least 1 PZ for each alliance member per week. Doing 1 PZ is recommended for the daily reward crate;
   
3. The higher level PZ (26+) have more than 5 strike team limit. When fighting such Zones make sure as many Alliance members participate as possible. Even if they don’t do much damage (or just not powerful enough), they can still send their squads into the Explorer mode (when fighting Zone Menace or Matriarch) or join stronger players’ rallies and score points for the whole alliance.
   
4. Strike team members who haven’t hit a single Zone Mob, Menace or Matriarch will not get rewarded, thus won’t contribute to the weekly Alliance score.

Rewards

There are several types of rewards while doing PZ run. Some of them are sent immediately, while others are sent on the next day and at the end of the week.

• Zone Mobs, Menaces and Matriarch: for each one taken down, you receive an email reward with Food, Wood, Metal & Gas (FWM&G), Chief Exp and (for Lvl. 20+ Mobs) a small amount of the Advanced Alloys. For the Explorer mode runs, you can also get Hero Badges and Hero Skill Books. All these rewards appear immediately in your game inbox.

• PZ Neutralized: besides FWM&G you also get Jane Hero Fragments, Combat Manuals and Hero Gear Parts. All these rewards are sent to your game inbox as soon as PZ is eliminated.

• Daily PZ Reward: depending on the star rating, you will receive a relevant reward chest, Jane Hero Fragments, Legendary Skills Books and some other stuff as on the screenshot below.

• Weekly PZ reward: depending on your Alliance score, a leaderboard is calculated and rewards will be depending on your Alliance rating in there.

Some (PRO) tips

• People are often wondering what is the purpose of the Strike Team chat in the game? Well, now you know the answer – to coordinate your PZ activities 🙂 You’re automatically added into this chat once PZ event is activated and kicked out – once it’s done.
  
• If you skipped early PZ levels for any reason and your Alliance is now doing 10-15 levels above, you don’t need to start from scratch. Even when you haven’t completed a single PZ above Lvl. 1, just ask your Alliance member to launch Lvl. 10 (or 12 – I don’t remember precisely). Once done, you can repeat the same way by joining Lvl. 15 (needs verification) and eventually – Lvl. 20.
  
• Getting to the top PZ Level is important due to a significantly higher chance of getting Legendary Hero Fragments from the daily chests. I.e. your chance to get 5x fragments from 1 crate is doubled at 26-★ and onwards!

• While doing hard PZs (with more than 5 Strike Team Members limit), invite as many people as possible due to the boost applied per each member. Check out Team Benefits section on the Strike Team screen as shown below.

• From PZ Lvl. 26 and onwards daily reward crate remains the same. So doing higher difficulty PZs makes sense to obtain more points for the weekly Alliance score. However, weekly rewards are quite meh at the time of writing – Jane Hero Fragments don’t provide much of a value.

Newer states might benefit from the increased silver coins reward for the Alliance shop.

Special thanks to

• My Dead’n’Alive Alliance for countless PZ runs allowing me to acquire all the wisdom shared here (state #135, R5 Abase)
• /u/basigboy and /u/taxe117 for Heroes Choice suggestion for the Explorer Mode.