10 MISERY Tips So You Don't Immediately Die Like a Chump
Alright, so you bought MISERY. Maybe you saw the Stalker-meets-Lethal Company vibes and thought, "How hard can it be?" Pretty damn hard, it turns out. This game throws you in naked and expects you to figure it out while anomalies melt your face off.
This isn't a comprehensive walkthrough. This is the stuff I wish I knew before I spent my first few hours getting vaporized by planes, eaten by invisible spikes, or just forgetting to save my goddamn game.
Surviving the Zone's Bullshit 101
Before you even think about thriving, you need to master the basics of not dying immediately. The Zone doesn't care about your feelings, so pay attention.
1. Master the 60-Second Panic Loot
The game starts by kicking you out of your bunker into your old house with a 60-second timer. Your priority list is simple: Healing (bandages, medkits are rare gold) > Melee Weapon (machete > axe/bat) > Clothes/Backpack. Forget everything else. Food and water are easier to find later. Grab the essentials and get back before the boom.
2. Combat is for Suckers (Especially Early On)
Seriously, don't fight if you can avoid it. Everything hits like a truck, and your starting gear is garbage. Be a coward; it's the smart play. If you must fight bandits (melee only idiots), hit and run. Plague Doctors shoot on sight and have infinite ammo; trying to melee them is suicide unless you're Neo. Get a bandit/tourist jacket and a steel helmet ASAP for a tiny bit of protection.
3. Learn Your Anomalies or Become Abstract Art
The Zone is littered with physics-defying deathtraps. Black holes are instant death but visible. Spike anomalies turn invisible and hurt like hell. Scrapyards have invisible anomalies that launch you sky-high, usually killing you on landing. Approach weird-looking air slowly, mark anything suspicious, and tell your buddies. Don't be the guy who face-checks a gravity well.
4. That Plane Isn't Dropping Care Packages
Hear an airplane engine? Don't stand there gawking. Look up, spot the plane, and run the opposite direction of where it's heading. If you don't, you will get bombed into next week. There's no complex strategy here, just "don't be where the bombs fall."
5. Bunker 101: Power, Metal, and Not Losing Your Shit
Your bunker is your safe space. To get metal bars for crafting, you need fuel in the generator, a cable connecting the generator's OUT to the incinerator's IN, and then you melt scrap metal in the powered incinerator. Use sledgehammers to expand your concrete hellhole. Crucially: Items left in the bunker yard are safe. Items left out in the Zone get deleted when the map resets daily.
6. SAVE. yOUR. GAME.
I cannot stress this enough. MISERY does not autosave. If you play for hours and disconnect or crash, that progress is gone. Poof. You MUST be inside your bunker, hit Escape, and manually click the save button every single time you return. Don't learn this the hard way.
7. Keep Your Head Straight (Sanity Matters)
Don't ignore your stats. Health and Stamina are obvious. Radiation will kill you silently; carry anti-rads or embrace the vodka-induced sanity drain. And Sanity? It's not a joke. Let it drop too low from radiation, hunger, fear, or seeing buddies die, and you'll start hallucinating, messing up your aim and awareness. Eat cooked food, drink clean water, don't stay alone too long.
8. Where to Find Your First Real Gun
Tired of the peashooter pistol or whacking things with a stick? There's a guaranteed PPSH spawn. Find a warehouse surrounded by concrete walls with a hunting tower attached. Climb up into the tower from below (through wooden cracks), and the gun + a stash are waiting for you. Alternatively, look for a POI with levitating helicopters and three hangars (two open) – guns can spawn there, but it's radioactive.
9. Co-op Can Literally Break Your Save (For Now)
Be warned: co-op is buggy as hell right now. There's a known, game-breaking desync issue where if a friend reconnects, they might load into a different version of the map than the host, making the session unplayable and potentially corrupting the save. Hopefully, it gets fixed soon, but be aware.
10. Know the Loop, Know When to Run
The core loop is simple: Prep, Scavenge, Survive, Return before the emission, Upgrade/Trade, Repeat. The hardest part is knowing when to cut your losses and head back to the bunker. Don't get greedy. That "one last crate" is how you end up dead or caught in an emission. Learn the warning signs (sky changing, weird humming) and run. Living with less loot is better than dying with a backpack full of junk you can't use.
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