Guides
Welcome to Elunah’s Virtual Zombocalypse Survival Manual! If you’re reading this, surely an undead reckoning of curious proportions has been unleashed upon your monitor for your morbid enjoyment. But don’t worry! With this manual, you’ll be out of the safe room and serving up lead salads before you can say “brains!”
How To Use This Guide
This guide is designed as a reference, a primer for beginner players, and as an abridged walkthrough of all campaigns. It’s also designed to rock your fucking socks off.
The Crash Course provides you with the most important information about Left 4 Dead that should keep you on your feet and help prevent nooby embarassments. If you’ve just started playing, we highly recommend reading it.
We outline Basic Strategies for surviving out there once you know which way the gun should point. Within this, the Common Dangers section instructs you on how to mitigate and manage the environmental dangers you’re sure to encounter throughout each campaign. Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of lead!
Preparing for the Worst
So you want to kill some zombies. Well, there are a few things I might recommend before you grab that cricket paddle.
Bring Friends
If you don’t have any friends, then find people who don’t want to eat your brains and make them your new friends. The most obvious—and most important—tip any player can give you is that Left 4 Dead is all about teamwork. If you can find a stable group of Survivors to work with, you will start to learn what your optimal role is within the group and learn more about each person’s tendencies so you can avoid friendly fire and watch out for each other.
Hear All Evil
I highly recommend investing in a 5.1+ sound system of some sort—not just for L4D, but for games in general. Most motherboards come with at least 5.1 surround built-in, and even if you don’t want to buy speakers, many good 5.1+ surround sound headphones are available. If you’re using stereo sound, you will be shocked at the difference.
Be Vocal
Microphones are cheap, and the time it takes to type or read can mean the difference between life and being curb-stomped by a tank. If you know your mic works but it fails whenever you play a Steam game, it’s probably because Steam changes your input settings. More on this in a moment. When talking to teammates, call out their characters’ names. “Louis!” is much shorter than “Hey, you…SukItTrebek420…” This means that you should be aware of who you are at all times, so you can respond to your character’s name.
Steam(ing Pile of Crap)
Don’t expect to get all your achievements when you earn them. Steam is a buggy little wart sometimes, and you need to account for that. If it disconnects from itself and reconnects, you may not be eligible for achievements. To account for this, I highly recommend restarting Steam if you’ve left it on for a while. It only takes 20 seconds, and it can save you hours of wasted time. Also, in terms of achievements, it’s always safer to go back to the Lobby if you’ve joined during the session.
As for microphone issues, most problems come from Steam changing your input settings “for your convenience”. Download Muvixer, select the correct input line, and set the update frequency to around 5 seconds. And no, Muvixer won’t get you in trouble with VAC, as it doesn’t directly affect Steam in any way.
