Anymaker Career Mode Beginner Guide
Starting out in Anymaker’s Career mode means three jobs: fit the four wheels to the starter car now and add a battery once you find one, loot the four houses around your spawn, and arm yourself. With the tricks below, a knife or axe is enough for zombies. A gun makes infantry and animals far easier.
In short: drive sparingly, because batteries are rare and cannot be recharged. Search the four nearby houses for food, water, weapons, ammo and bigger clothing. Clear houses one room at a time and keep noise down. Without a gun, keep away from animals. Standing on your car works against cats and wolves, but not bears. At night, carry a lit flare.
Controls worth knowing first
| Action | Key |
|---|---|
| Open your inventory | Tab (or your inventory key) |
| Pick up or fit a car part, such as a wheel or battery | Hold F |
| Drive forward | W (Z on an AZERTY keyboard) |
| Reload a gun you are holding | R |
| Put a weapon on the toolbar, so you can switch to it without opening the inventory | Hold left click on it, drag to a toolbar slot, release |
Inventory
The inventory screen looks crowded the first few times. To loot a wardrobe, closet or anything else, look straight at it and open your inventory. You get one screen split into columns.
| Where on screen | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Left column | Containers you are wearing, such as your backpack and your shorts |
| Middle column | Tools you carry, and what they hold or need |
| Right column | The object you are looking at. If it holds a container of its own, like a pair of shorts, that opens underneath |
| Top row | The clothes you have on. Swap or remove them freely |
The starter car
The car is parked to the right of the house you start in. It will not move until it has four wheels and a battery. The four wheels are lying around the starting area: one on the road, one by the neighbouring house, one in the field near the car and one in a fenced garden.
Pick up a wheel, carry it to the car and look for the blue squares that mark where it goes. Look at a square and fit the wheel there. The battery goes in the same way.
You have to find the battery yourself. The starter car can hold up to two batteries at a time. Batteries are rare and turn up mostly in warehouses. The car runs its battery down as you drive, and there is no way to recharge one at the time of writing. So only drive when walking would be worse, and do not hold the forward key the whole way. Build up speed, let go, and coast until you have nearly stopped.
Looting the four starting houses
With the wheels on, loot the four houses near you at the start. At the time of writing these houses should have no zombies inside, which makes them the safest loot on the map. Walk every room and open everything.
Skip the boxes in the garage. They are not what you need yet. What you want right now is food, water, weapons and ammo. Take any clothing that carries more than what you have on. When your pockets are full, pick one of these houses as a stash.
When the four houses are empty, sort through the pile. A gun is a big win, but the best melee weapon you own is fine for now. Before heading anywhere new, carry that weapon and a first aid kit. A torch is handy but optional.
Food and water
You need to eat and drink to stay alive. Your food and water bars sit in the top right corner of the inventory screen, next to a knife and fork and a cup. You do not need to keep checking: a warning appears near the top of the screen, under your health bar, when you are getting hungry or thirsty. Once either bar runs empty you start losing health and hear a sound.
Most food comes in cans and most water in bottles. Both turn up in houses and warehouses, entirely at random. One house can be empty and the next packed. There is no shortcut here, just keep exploring.
Air tank, illness and temperature
The inventory shows a few more stats next to food and water. Here is what they do at the time of writing.
| Stat | What it does |
|---|---|
| Air tank | Your air supply underwater |
| Illness | Nothing yet, and there is no medicine in the game |
| Temperature | Very little |
Zombies
Zombies vary a lot. Some are very fast, some crawl along, and some take far more hits than others. There is no way to tell which is which just by looking.
| Situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| Zombie inside a house, visible through a ground floor window | With a knife or axe, hit the bottom of the window until it breaks. The zombie comes to the window but usually cannot reach you, while you can reach it. Works on several at once |
| Slow zombie in the open | Walk backwards and stab it as it follows |
| A fast one knocks you down | Stay down and stab it (see below) |
| A crowd, like the one in a warehouse’s big main room | Lure them outside, then climb onto higher ground (see below) |
Being knocked down by a fast zombie is survivable if you have a knife. Stay on the ground and stab the zombie. Each stab stuns it for a moment, so time them. Do not get up until it is dead, and it will not hurt you much. This works against two zombies, but three is much harder.
Zombies cannot jump, so a raised spot is safe from a crowd you have pulled out of a building. Now and then one still manages to climb up, and then you stab it or shoot it.
Houses hold fewer zombies than warehouses, usually one or two per room, although a single house can hold six or more. In a house, clear room by room and take your time.
Noise and zombie hordes
Every zombie reacts to sound. Zombies inside a house or warehouse start out dormant and do not look around. You can move past a dormant one carefully. Noise wakes them: your car, running, gunfire. An awake zombie wanders and looks around, and chases you once it spots you. Some wake more easily than others, and it is not clear why.
Sound also builds hordes. Make noise at a building and the zombies outside head for it. Once they arrive they stay together as a horde, and the next noise you make at another building sends the whole group there. That can mean a lot of zombies arriving very quickly. Fast zombies get to the noise first, so the horde itself is mostly slow ones. Scout ahead for hordes, and be ready to run or fight when one is close.
Enemy infantry
Infantry are armed bots. They roam the map in groups of anywhere from two to about seven, and some walk alone. They move in and out of buildings at random, keep going at night, and fight any zombies they come across. Their weapons range from a tactical knife up to a shotgun, and at the time of writing they never run out of ammo. A horde can wipe out a group.
Gunfire in the distance usually means a group is fighting zombies over there. Follow the sound if you want their gear. With a gun they go down easily. Melee is possible, but pick a small group, and reach them before they see you or while they are reloading.
When one dies, open its inventory. Infantry carry a first aid kit, a tactical knife and, if armed with a gun, an ammo box, and some carry more. Check the backpack too, since some are bigger than yours. Larger weapons can fall to the ground on death, so look around the body.
Guns and ammo
Getting a gun is the hardest part of the early game. The starting houses sometimes have one. With a lot of luck it is a rifle, but usually you find a knife, a tactical knife or an axe. After that it is either luck in houses and warehouses or taking a revolver or shotgun from infantry.
| Gun | Ammo | Needs a magazine? |
|---|---|---|
| Revolver | .357 Magnum | No, load the rounds directly |
| Rifle | .308 | No, load the rounds directly |
| Shotgun | Shotgun shells | No, load the shells directly |
| Pistol | 9mm | Yes. Carrying several magazines makes reloads quick |
Ammo spawns randomly in houses and warehouses, and no spot reliably has it.
Animals
Animals are a real nuisance at the moment. You will mostly meet bears, cats and wolves, plus a few creatures that are hard to identify. They are fast and attack constantly.
Shooting them, or hurting them until they run off, is the only real way to stop them. Without a gun, keep your distance. If one knocks you down you are in serious trouble. You cannot outrun them, and the ground stabbing trick that works on zombies does not work here.
Against cats and wolves, climb onto your car and stab down at them. Bears run straight over the car, so it is no refuge from them.
Light and night
Nights are almost pitch black, and the torch only helps a little. There is no easy way to make light and no way to sleep at the time of writing, so you either use flares or wait for morning.
Put a flare in your toolbar, light it and walk around holding it. When you need your hands for something else, drop the flare on the floor, do the job, then pick the flare up again and return it to its toolbar slot. A flare you put away stays lit but gives no light.
Some backpacks have a dedicated flare slot. A flare lit in that slot keeps lighting the area without taking a hand or a normal inventory space.
Remove tool
The remove tool looks like a circular saw and turns up in all kinds of buildings. It takes apart walls and other building parts, and you keep whatever you remove. If your inventory is full, the pieces drop into a box instead. Use it to cut an exit out of a building or to gather materials for a base.
It works on the starter car too. Do not take off too much, or you can break the car.