◼ Knox Event/ Server Briefing/ Read Before Day One/ 19 Items

This is howyou died

Not if. Not maybe. The only questions left open are how long you last, how much you drag out of the ruins first, and whether the others get to bury you or just watch you go. Everything below is already decided. Read all nineteen. Nobody gets to say later that they didn't know.

No extraction · No rescue · A new character only over the body of the old one
Attrition schedule

The world does not wait for you to be ready. Here is the timetable of everything you are about to lose.

Day 0
Lights still on

Taps run. Freezers hum. This is the richest you will ever be. Fill the bathtubs. Fill every can, bottle and barrel you can carry.

Days 2–7
Grid failure

Nobody is at the plant. Power dies within days, and the pumps die with it — so water goes the same week. If you didn't store it, you don't have it.

Day 14
The bite comes due

Infection is a fortnight long. If something got its teeth into you on the first day, this is the week you find out — and you will feel perfectly fine right up until you don't.

Day 60
The map is stripped

Other survivors are working the same houses you are. Around half of everything left in the world is gone by the two-month mark. Some buildings will be bare boards.

After
No refills

Loot never comes back. The dead you put down never come back. Every single thing in this world is a finite quantity, and all of it only ever moves one direction.

Chapter I

The ground you'll walk

Knox County is not evenly haunted. Learn where the dead pooled, and stay out of those places for as long as you possibly can.

Item 01 — Small towns

The villages got out in time

Hamlets, small towns and outlying settlements are thin on the dead — those people heard the sirens and left while leaving was still possible.

They also took everything with them. Quiet streets, empty cupboards. Safety and starvation, at the same address.

Low density · Low loot
Item 02 — The roads

The highways belong to them

Everything between the settlements is walked. Not packed — but a steady, constant drift of dead across every stretch of asphalt and every field beside it.

Travelling town to town is the most dangerous thing you will do all week. Plan the trip like an operation, not an errand.

Medium density on all routes
Item 03 — The cities

The cities never emptied

Large population centres are stacked with hordes. Whole districts moving as one mass.

Louisville is insane. Not "hard". Not "a challenge". It is a city-shaped organism made of the people who didn't leave, and it will eat any plan you bring to it.

Extreme density · Louisville maximum
Item 07 — Migration

Nowhere stays cleared

They migrate, and they migrate often. The street you emptied last week refills from somewhere else while you sleep.

Clearing an area buys you time, never permanence. Re-scout everything, every time.

Migration frequency increased
Chapter II

The horde

They do not arrive as individuals. They arrive as weather.

Item 04 — Grouping

Up to five hundred in one mass

Zombies clump into groups of up to 500. That is not a fight. That is not even a retreat — that is a relocation of your entire life.

The correct answer to a horde is almost never a weapon. It is noise somewhere else: lure them, walk them off, and take the ground back once they've drifted.

Max group size 500
Item 05 — No respawn

Dead stays dead

Respawn is off. Every one you put down is one fewer in the world, permanently. The county has a finite number of them, and the number only falls.

It means the work you do actually counts. It means a place can, with enough blood and enough months, genuinely be made yours. Unless —

Respawn disabled
Item 06 — Bad kills

Never trust a corpse

Some of the bodies on the ground are lying to you. Including the ones you are certain about. Including the ones you personally put down and stepped over on your way to the kitchen.

A sloppy kill is not a kill, it is a delay. Dispose of every body — burn it, bury it, do something final with it — or one evening it will stand up in a room you'd already decided was safe.

Corpses may reanimate
Chapter III

What they can do to you

Individually they are stupid, half-blind, half-deaf and weak. This will kill more of us than anything else on this page.

Item 11 — Senses & memory

Blind, deaf, and patient

Eyesight and hearing are randomised between poor and normal, rolled per corpse. Most of them will not notice you. You can break line of sight and genuinely be gone — that's deliberate, so that losing a chase is possible at all.

What they do have is memory that does not fade. Whatever they last saw or heard, they will walk toward it, and keep walking toward it long after you've left the county. A gunshot is not a moment, it's an appointment.

Navigation stays idiot-grade: they will not route around a fence and they cannot open a door. They are stupid meat bags. Use it. It's most of what we've got.

Sight & hearing: random poor–normal · Memory: long · Navigation: basic
Item 12 — Sprinters

Two in a hundred run

2% of them sprint. You will not outrun one, and there is no clever answer — the only thing that works is hitting it first and hitting it hard.

If two of them are coming at you, you're cooked. Say goodbye properly.

2% sprinters
Item 16 — Your back

They bite backs for free

A zombie behind you gets its teeth in almost without contest. No struggle, no window, no shove.

Check corners. Check behind. Never give one your back — that single habit is worth more than any weapon you'll find.

Rear attacks heavily favoured
Item 17 — Being swarmed

Two hands hold, three hands kill

Several of them at once will grab you down, and once you're down it's over. Numbers, not strength, are what finish people here.

Fight in doorways, corridors, over fences — anywhere that forces them into single file. Better still: don't fight at all.

Multi-grab enabled
Item 19 — The real killer

Weak hands, fatal mouth

They will not take you down in one blow. They're weak. Almost anyone can win a straight fight against one.

The fight isn't what kills you — the virus is. It is deadly, it takes about two weeks, and you will feel completely healthy for nearly all of them. No test, no cure, no reprieve. Every unnecessary swing is a coin flip you keep making until it lands wrong.

Avoid combat wherever combat can be avoided.

Infection lethal · ~14 day mortality
Chapter IV

The body you're stuck in

There is no hospital. There is no one coming. Your body is a resource like fuel and food, and it does not refill either.

Item 13 — Injury

Everything hurts more here

Bites, scratches, cuts, falls, burns — injury severity is turned right up. A wound that would be an inconvenience elsewhere is a month of your life here.

Pray you never break a leg. A broken leg on this server is not a setback; it's a death with a long, boring middle section.

Injury severity: very high
Item 14 — Rot

Proximity poisons you

Standing near the dead damages your health — and standing near the bodies of the dead does it too. Sickness comes off them like heat.

Corpses, blood and maggots never clean themselves up. Not in a week, not in a year. Wherever you choose to live, keeping it clean is a permanent chore and a survival requirement, not housekeeping.

Corpse sickness on · Decay never clears
Chapter V

The world runs out

Everything you will ever own is already lying somewhere in Knox County. It is being taken by other people right now.

Item 08 — Power & water

Days, not weeks

Nobody is maintaining the grid, so the grid goes fast — and when the electricity dies, the pumps stop and the water dies with it.

Everything you want from the modern world you must take in the first few days: fill the bathtubs, fill every container, freeze nothing you can't eat soon, and set aside the tinned and dry food for the winter version of yourself.

Grid shutdown: within days
Item 09 — Scarcity

There's almost nothing left

Loot is very rare across the map, especially anywhere people evacuated from — they emptied the shelves on their way out.

The exception is Louisville, which still holds real supplies, because the people there never left. They're still there too. That is precisely the problem.

World loot: very rare
Item 10 — The long strip

It only gets emptier

Nothing respawns. Ever. And you are not the only one searching: unseen survivors work the map continuously. By roughly two months in, about half of everything left in the world is gone, and some houses will be picked completely clean.

Remote villages, forest cabins and back-country huts hold out longer — fewer hands reach them. Early is the only good time to be greedy.

No respawn · ~50% stripped by 2 months
Item 15 — Vehicles

Cars are rare, wrecked and dry

Finding a working vehicle is luck. Keeping one alive is a project in parts, tools and skill you probably don't have yet.

Fuel is scarce or simply absent. Treat any car as a one-way ticket until proven otherwise, and never plan a route that only works if the engine does.

Rare · Poor condition · Low fuel
Chapter VI

The one mercy

Exactly one thing on this entire page is on your side.

Item 18 — Experience

Double experience, everything

All XP gain is doubled. Every skill, every discipline, every hour of practice counts twice.

Not generosity — arithmetic. Vanilla progression is glacial, and none of us are going to live long enough for glacial. Learn fast, because you are not going to be here long.

XP multiplier ×2
Chapter VII

The rule that outranks all the others

You are not playing a save file. You are playing a person — someone with a name, a history, a reason they were in Knox County when the roads closed, and a set of things they're too proud or too frightened to admit to the rest of the group.

Stay in that person. Talk like them on the radio. Make their bad decisions instead of your good ones. The mechanics above are only frightening because there's someone inside them to lose.

And when one of us goes — and someone will — they are gone. No shrugging it off, no "well, I'll respawn at the safehouse". The group grieves. Properly, in character, in whatever way that character deserved: a burial, a mark on the wall, a bottle opened, a name said out loud. Take the time. That's the whole point of doing it this way.

Then the player behind them writes someone new. A different name, a different face, a stranger walking in from a different direction with their own reasons and their own future mistakes. Not the old character with a haircut.

Full manifest · 19 items

Every setting, in the order you were given them. Nothing here is negotiable, and nothing here is a surprise later.