Endzone 2 is not an upgraded Endzone 1, it is a new game in its own right and the reason why I need to both teach you how to play it in this video, and also explain just how different it is to the original. I was able to play it early and prepare this guide.

In Endonze 2, like in the original game you start with a bus full of supplies and a few survivors. But here your bus is still operational and you aren’t dismounted on a huge open map. In fact, you have a choice to explore the map or settle right away, but do note food and water on the bus are limited.

Meaning that you need to look at Endzone 2 in the light of an Anno game in fact, just one where islands or better said plateaus of flat and farmable land are surrounded by the post-apocalyptic wasteland of concrete and metal instead of water.

These are the new zones the developers decided to introduce in the sequel, and drastically change the flow of gameplay. So instead of building one massive sprawling settlement like in the original here you combine different resources found on individual plateaus and separate settlements which you have to interconnect with the other addition to Endzone’s gameplay. Vehicles.

Full video guide while this one is being written:

You can find many of the basics, and even a few of the more advanced resources and goods in these locations so the whole side gameplay element of taking vehicles around the map provides a nice counterbalance to settlement building and management.

When you mix a bit of both, you get to switch between them and keep things from becoming repetitive. As you clean out ruins along the road, you can pop back into your settlement and check how many kids grew up yesterday to put them to work in newly completed buildings.

Since your people don’t want to live the nomadic life of scavenging ruins anymore they need a safe harbour so that is the first building you construct on your new land.


The very next one is the town centre who’s white circle hits at its first use and gameplay mechanic which in this game is a boost to nearby building’s production as well as a collection centre for supplies.

When it comes to the basic needs of your survivors not much has changed on that front. A jetty is still the first building that you need to place on a lake to start collecting water, while wells will work even during droughts. But they are far less efficient at stockpiling water in cisterns than jetties which can have up to 5 survivors working on them at the same time.


After water, your second priority is food. Again, you have a choice, between a foraging hut and a fishery. One requires bushes in untouched nature and the other lakes which will disappear during droughts. This means that like with the choice of buildings for water, ultimately your settlement has many instances of both types because of their differences.


Research in Endzone 2 is based on knowledge points, which unlock sections on each tech branch, economy, ecology and society. The way to get these knowledge points is on expeditions. But we will get to those soon.

You should know that since settlements on the map are separate, you can customize each one with a name, symbol and color, making it easier to manage multiple settlements through the menus and also letting your personalise your playthrough.


The top UI section is again responsible for showing you the stats of your settlement, condition of your population and the amount of supplies you have in stock. If you switch settlements it also switches as each settlement has separate supplies, and all of its production goes into its own warehouse and town centres.

What you can still do just like in the first game is to set up individual, local orders for your survivors to cut down trees, collect food or scrap from the environment, but each flag is limited to just two workers and once the resource is exhausted you have to manually remove the flag or give two people a chance to slack off forever.


Much like in the original game, when you give your survivors food and water they will want shelter too. And you want to give them shelter as soon as possible, because they won’t be making babies under the stars, and you want your population to grow since there are many jobs to fill in loads of different workplaces in many production chains.


Tents are like level one buildings, they have few living spaces, but don’t cost much to construct and offer basic protection from the elements.


If you also add roads and connect your town centre with each of these buildings they will get constructed faster as your survivors do have to get to them to start the process.


What doesn’t have to get there on the other hand are the resources. Because, and this might come as a big shock to all you old Endzone players, in the sequel resources get teleported to where they are needed.


The developers have done away with the computationally intensive system of actually delivering resources across the settlement in favor of a more abstract system of supply and demand.

This is why I mentioned Anno in the opening of this guide and if you have played those games before you will feel right at home. While players of the original Endzone might feel like trespassers in another gamer’s franchise. On one hand you could say that the developers went too far, and changed the core design of the game, but on the other, you could say they were brave enough to dare to do it and chose to not iterate on their original design but change it completely.

Once your production of water or food starts to reach the maximum supply amount, you need to start building cisterns to increase this limit for water, as well as both storage for food and materials which are all in the logistics tab of the build menu, which you can turn on by using the B key on you keyboard.


The last option at the end of the build menu is for placing down blueprints, so that you can plan out where to build, without committing resources to the construction. It is a great tool for planning out future expansions when you already get the hang of the ebb and flow of production and consumption of resources.


Do note that when planning locations, you need to try to keep homes separate from production buildings because of adjacency bonuses which buildings give to each other.


So that later you can add a nice park right next to homes and give them the boost they require to be happier while at the same time leaving room for future, much larger manufacturing buildings next to those that produce resources for it.


These adjacency bonuses are just part of the overall system of bonuses which can also be gained from connecting everything with roads or having supply depots near production buildings. If the gameplay starts to feel more like a puzzle than a simulation you are on the right track to figure it out.

The recycler is the first such production building you need as the plastic it produces from scrap will let you construct more homes, and as I explained more homes mean more kids, more kids mean more future workers. Keeping the cycle going. In Early Access Endzone 2 has no education or specialization for workers, so you don’t have that element to manage.


This is another feature the developers might add again, or change into a different mechanic as new content is added during early access, so try not to look for what is missing, but enjoy what is there now, and what is new. The tools… They are not new, and there are still more than one kind, so for starters you need a workshop to start their production.


Do note it spends both scrap and wood meaning you need to keep the wood collection jobs on point and if possible close to the workshop for that extra bonus.

As I mentioned before, you can’t do research until you start doing expeditions, so with that in mind, let's take the bus out for a ride around the neighbourhood. Don’t worry, there is no one there, as in Endzone 2 the developers have yet to implement any sort of living enemies. Your main ones for now are hunger and thirst during droughts or sickness which breaks out and starts to spread fast through the settlement. I will get to that a bit later.


You don’t really need to load up any supplies on the bus when you have no survivors on it, as the driver will… well let's roleplay and say he will scavenge along the way for food, water and fuel, to avoid repeatedly saying the developers haven’t implemented that yet. That’s the downside of Early Access for you, while you could say lower price and chance for your feedback to matter is the upside.


What you can bring along the way is… corpses of your dead survivors. As you can basically leave them around the world like some gruesome Santa. Unless of course you want to spend resources on building a cemetery and employing some survivors on grave digging duty.

The first settlements are spread all across these paths between possible settlement locations as well as all over the edges of the map. The icons above will tell you, as will the UI menu on the right, are you coming up onto a settlement that you can just loot or is there an opportunity for an interactive expedition.


You can find many of the basics, and even a few of the more advanced resources and goods in these locations so the whole side gameplay element of taking vehicles around the map provides a nice counterbalance to settlement building and management.


As you clean out ruins along the road, you can pop back into your settlement and check how many kids grew up yesterday to put them to work in newly completed buildings.

Now we come to a building at which we can actually experience the new system of expeditions first hand.


When you click on the radio icon you are going into a sort of mini game where the driver leaves their vehicles and explores the location on foot. There are even voice lines which give a bit of lore and sort of tips and ques on what you can do with the stuff you find in the ruins.


You can use the Space key to turn on names for items you can interact with on the screen, or role play and explore on your own, but it will become much harder on bigger locations with several buildings to explore both horizontally and vertically. I actually found these expeditions to be almost the best part of the game and enjoyed every single one a lot. Not sure how long this effect can last, but there is a good sized pool of different building types to explore by what I have seen.


As you scavenge around each place you will gain knowledge points which you need for research but also items which have their uses.


An axe can break a lot of stuff, ladders or boards let you climb, generators start stuff up, lockpicks open safes and books on nature let you identify seeds you can later plant at your farms. No, you can’t get them any other way, as there is no trade or traders in the game right now.

The campfire is especially nice to watch at night, and it also has a great bonus effect on all the homes in its area of influence.


This isn’t the only such building but you have to research to unlock the rest. Do note that besides the survivors' health, you also have to worry about their happiness and of course the radiation level.


Small tip here, don’t let your survivors use up gear like protective clothes or gloves in the start of the game as there is no radiation for you to worry about until nasty weather events start happening.


In fact there is no starting radiation to worry about at all, another feature of the first game that didn’t make it into this one.

One element of gameplay that has been changed greatly in Endzone 2 is the way plantations and farms work. As not only do you have to construct them on fertile sections of the map, but they also have a limited number of plots they can manage in a circle around the building.


Plantations also grow resources used in production chains, while farms grow food, but for those you need iron tools, the second type of tools, which are much harder to produce.


As your plantation gets into production of fibers you can plan on production of cloth from a waver. Again for adjacency bonuses you can put these buildings next to each other, but make sure to add roads close to them and depots.


One very important thing about Endzone’s gameplay has remained unchanged and that is the balance of adding more homes to have more population while making sure you can stockpile food and water to support them all in a time of crysis. So every time you add more tents or homes make sure you are also increasing your food production and water collection from all available sources.

To start a new settlement on one, you might end up needing to fix a bridge to get to it.


This is a sort of expedition on its own, but one which requires several trips as you can’t know all the required resources at once.


With a fixed bridge you can cross over and explore more of the map as well as start a new settlement on a plateau which has the resources you require to move up the tech tree.

To do this you have to recreate the conditions you had when you first started. A bus full of supplies and some survivors next to one of the plateau’s earth ramps.


There you can build an access point and start with a brand new settlement. You might end up having to bring over more resources from the first one to jump start everything but that is what your extra vehicles are for.


Since the gameplay revolves around separate settlements and sort of plateaus with different resources on them, you have to be careful to properly research tech that you can use on the plateau you are on.


Now that you have several vehicles even a drought on one plateau won't be as dangerous as before as you can bring extra water and food from the unaffected one to the one where you lack those if you didn't manage to stockpile enough. You do the same in a situation where one settlement has an outbreak of a disease but doesn’t have the meds to keep the survivors healthy. That is a production chain of its own, with an extra building which takes care of the people who live around it.

There are many other tidbits of info like how to hold shift and click to lock something on the UI to be able to track it or how to see the overlays that are next to the mini map to help you track down problems.

But I will go into such elements in another guide.

Now let's jump ahead a bit to how you gain more vehicles. You can only make them or salvage them. And it is much easier to find them on expeditions.


So just keep traveling around your map and keep looking until you locate one such place. It will probably require a lot of items to be able to free the vehicle for use, so do make sure to bring them along. Once you do all the required actions and use the right tools you will have use of two vehicles making exploration much easier.


Do note vehicles have different speeds, item and goods capacity. The bus is slow but it can carry much more than the other kinds. Having more vehicles is in fact key to having more settlements as you need them to set up trade routes.


Since no one plateau has all the resources, having trade going between them is a requirement for high level play. You can also automate this process by using the transport routes interface.


You need one vehicle with several free slots, then you click on the map to choose the starting location and decide what resources or goods it will pick up at that settlement along with the amounts.


Then you click on the settlement you want to deliver those and make sure to click on the unload option.


Lastly you look at what the settlement has that the first could use and set the pickup of that at the second location and drop off at the fist. The amounts will probably need some fine tuning over time.


Now that you have several vehicles even a drought on one plateau won't be as dangerous as before as you can bring extra water and food from the unaffected one to the one where you lack those if you didn't manage to stockpile enough.