Unturned is a 2014 Survival Sandbox game by Nelson Sexton, founder of Smartly Dressed Games.
A combination of a Wide-Open Sandbox and Survival Horror game. You're dumped completely naked into a Zombie Apocalypse and have to find a way to survive. You can scavenge supplies from the abandoned towns and facilities or take to the wilderness to build a new settlement and grow your own food. Servers allow for play with your friends or engage in PvP with bandits and traps.
Unturned passed through Greenlight and Early Access on Steam and was officially launched in July 2017.
This game provides examples of:
- Abandoned Hospital: The Washington map has one, extremely well-lit and Spartan by the standards of other games.
- A.K.A.-47: A number of guns go by generic names, like Magnum or Double Barrel (now called the Ace and Masterkey as of 3.0), others have obvious references to the real world model like the Desert Falcon or the Uzi (now called the Bulldog). The game is playing this slightly straighter with a few weapons being renamed such as the 1911 (originally the Colt), PDW (was once the Honeybadger) and PocketKnifenote (formerly known as the Swiss Knife).
- The All-Seeing A.I.: Once you've been seen, the zombies are extremely hard to shake and will home in on your location regardless of line of sight or sound. Stand on top of a hangar with a horde of zombies chasing you at the northwest corner, crawl over the top to the southeast corner and watch the horde run around or through the building to your position. It's less pronounced with sound alone – the zombies will head to the exact location of the sound's origin, be it you shooting or an explosion happening. As of 3.0, it gets even worse during a full moon, because the zombies can sense you from a long ways off and even through walls.
- Always Check Behind the Chair: Supplies and items can be found behind or under furniture.
- Artificial Stupidity: In 2.0, zombies can't jump or swim. You can hop through a broken window and watch a train of zombies run within arm's reach heading for the door. You can stand on top of a car or tread water just inches from a horde of zombies and all they'll do is mill around. 3.0 fixes this, slightly: zombies can now path through windows, though they still can't swim or climb ladders. And they also now seem to refuse to travel past a border around the towns, preventing them from chasing the player through the countryside.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: Invoked with the quests at the Liberator. Finished repairing the radio towers? Defeated those super-powered mega zombies? Good job! Now talk to the captain and receive a unique uniform that looks cool but does nothing other than add as much inventory space as a regular military uniform.
- Awesome, but Impractical:
- The Shadowstalker Mk. 2. It has no recoil, cannot be damaged, no bullet drop, and can inflict massive amounts of damage. It also can only be aquired by completing an insanely difficult easter egg quest that requires travelling the whole of the Russia map. It also comes with only one 20-shot mag, which you'll use up rather quickly.
- The Hell's Fury is a good contender for this. One the one hand, it's a minigun that holds 250 rounds that tear through players, zombies and object alike and has seemingly no recoil. On the other hand, it can only be fired while aiming, it makes a loud revving noise when aiming, the ammo drums takes up a fair amount of space (four blocks) and the Hell's Fury itself takes a whopping fifteen inventory blocks! The large capacity also means that plenty of ammo boxes are needed to reload one fully, and unless you're on single player or not going PvP at allnote , those are more efficiently expended on more conventional Ranger weapons. It also has fairly low durability, forcing you to use up significant amounts of scrap to repair it after every reload.
- The Spec Ops clothing and armor set (excluding the beret) provide the best protection compared to the other sets of clothing you can wear. However, while the vest and backpack have serviceable space, the pants and top have little storage (think a tshirt and shorts, only slightly bigger), limiting what you can carry with you.
- Bayonet Ya: A tactical accessory that can be mounted on guns. While it's short-ranged and only moderately powerful, a bayonet can quickly protect you in an emergency without needing to switch weapons.
- Batter Up!: The baseball bat is fast and powerful, and if crafted with nails turns into the Makeshift Bat, a modified baseball bat with spikes sticking out; the makeshift bat almost matches the katana in damage and is easy to craft due to how common the baseball bat is in maps.
- BFG: Hell's Fury, a massive Gatling gun that takes up fifteen slots in your inventory, holds 250 rounds in the drum, has More Dakka than any other machine gun, and can demolish normally invulnerable structures.
- Big Good: Captain Sydney, leader of the Coalition.
- Boring, but Practical:
- Cargo Pants. It offers the most inventory slots (6x3), tying with the less common Thief Bottom, but are much easier to find. While the extremely rare Spec Ops Bottom offers slightly more leg protection, it has much less inventory slots (4x2), and the increased leg protection is not a significant advantage as most zombies do not target the legs and many players in Pv P aim for the chest or head for better damage.
- Semi-automatic weapons in PvE. Many guns in the game do 99 damage to zombies and generally kill with one hit to the head. This means that players will usually spend the time to accurately aim headshots in order to conserve ammo. Additionally, many semi-automatic weapons can be reloaded with the common civilian ammunition.
- Salvaging clothes for cloth. Cloth can not only be used to craft bandages to heal yourself, but can also be crafted into rope, which can then be crafted into fertilizer for farming crops. They can also be used to craft bedrolls, which can save a new spawn point and is particularly useful if you are about to die in order to easily respawn and reclaim your stuff.
- Camera Perspective Switch: You can switch between first person and Always Over the Shoulder with the H key.
- Car Fu: You can run over players and zombies to deal an instant kill when you go fast enough. You get no Experience Points for doing so, however.
- Chainsaw Good: What self-respecting zombie game doesn't have a chainsaw? It's noisy and individual hits are weak but it automatically attacks very quickly, and never needs to be refueled, only repaired. Combined with the mechanic that melee stuns zombies on headshots, it's one of, if not the most powerful melee weapons in the game Unturned also gives it a special power rarely seen in video games: its intended purpose of cutting wood. And far faster than axes.
- Crate Expectations: While not as common as other games, there are a still a few unbreakable crates in military checkpoints. However, the wooden crate is the first and simplest container a player can craft.
- Department of Redundancy Department: The meat cleaver is described as a "meat knife for cutting meat". You don't say?
- Elite Zombie:
- Crawlers are slower than average but surprisingly fast zombies that crawl on the ground, and have boosted health and damage to boot. They can be hard to see and are inconvenient to fight in melee.
- Sprinters are zombies that run hunched over on all fours, fast enough to catch you with ease. They are weaker than average to compensate, and can be dispatched with one good headshot on Normal even if they're wearing helmets.
- 3.0 adds Mega Zombies. They stand over a full head taller than regular zombies and players, are as fast as sprinters, can kill in just a few hits, and can take a full magazine of assault rifle ammo to kill. They can also throw enormous rocks if you're too far from them or in a place where they can't reach.
- Flankers can cloak, making them invisible, and as the name indicates, they tend to go for the player's sides or back. You can spot them barely if you pay attention to their purple outline when they cloak, and when they attack, they flicker back into visibility for a split second. Hilariously, their cloaking is rendered useless in a full moon since their Glowing Eyes of Doom remain visible.
- Flamers are zombies constantly spewing embers from their bodies, that explode upon death. This explosion deals massive damage to players and animals, and turn regular zombies caught in the blast into more Flamers. In the dark, they have an aura of light to them.
- Spitters are zombies that spit blue acid and can leave acidic pools that deal damage if the player stands on them.
- Update 3.17.2.0 added zombie bosses in the Russia map, which include the Groundpounder, Flamethrower, and Lightningstrike, that can only be spawned after accepting certain quests. A later update gave players the option to make them spawn randomly in any map at a user-set frequency.
- There is a sort of variation of the Flanker, known as the Spirit. They are constantly transparent and white, making them easy to see, and are soft against melee weapons like most zombies, but they are also almost Immune to Bullets, making them a pain to kill for gun-oriented players.
- Emergency Weapon: Fists are easily accessible by holstering whatever weapon's active and swing very fast, but they're an absolute last resort, as they don't stun zombies unless the Overkill skill is maxed out; on Hard, melee is a bad choice, period, the fists even more so. Early on, it's better to just have a flashlight in a weapon slot, as while far from a powerful weapon, it can stun zombies and provides light.
- Emote Animation: You can shoose between pointing, waving, saluting, holding your arms up in surrender, facepalming, sitting down, amongst others. You can also change facial expressions in real time with the same prompt.
- Every Car Is a Pinto: Cars explode when severely damaged. This includes when zombies tear it apart trying to get at you. Bicycles also exploded when they were first added.
- Exposed to the Elements: In earlier versions there was no reason why you couldn't remain naked save for inventory constraints. Averted on the Yukon map, which dumps you naked into the snowy territory of Northern Canada, where freezing may be a bigger threat than the zombies if you get caught in a blizzard while away from an enclosed building. Better bundle up for protection against the cold.
- Frying Pan of Doom: The frying pan is considered a rare weapon on PEI in version 2, and it's described as "Standard Military Weaponry". It's absent in version 3 unless modded in – the More Farming mod, for example, has it as a middling melee weapon and also as a vital part of cooking the mod's recipes.
- Gatling Good: The Hell's Fury is an extremely rare minigun with an insanely high rate of fire, capable of easily shredding zombies or players alike.
- Glowing Eyelights of Undeath/Glowing Eyes of Doom: During v3's full moon nights, zombies' eyes glow red. This indicates that their sensory range and damage output are significantly higher than normal.
- Goggles Do Something Unusual: The Snorkel's goggles make it easier to see underwater, both civilian and military Night-Vision Goggles are fully functional, and the Headlamp (an item that, like the previous ones, goes in the Glasses character slot) provides the same light as a flashlight, hands-free. Played traight if you enable cosmetics that include goggles, of course.
- Golf Clubbing: Golf clubs are fairly common and make a decent weapon with good damage and reach, but low swing speed.
- Grid Inventory: Implemented in version 3, wearing clothing adds additional separate grids.
- Guide Dang It!: Prior to version 3, it was often necessary to consult a guide when attempting to figure out the in-game crafting system. Made all the more difficult due to a limited inventory. After version 3, and similar to Terraria or the console versions of Minecraft, the crafting system tells you what you can build with what you have on hand or if you have a portion of the required materials.
- Gun Accessories: There are four possible slots for gun accessories: the barrel, sights, a tactical grip, and a tactical mounting. The barrel accessories affect bullet speed, drop and damage. Sights obviously are for aiming and range from iron sights to x20 zoom scopes. The tactical grip slot is unavailable to pistols but has various grips to reduce recoil. The tactical mounting slot allows you equip a variety of items including a targeting laser, a flashlight, a rangefinder, and a bayonet.
- Hand Cannon: The Ace and the Desert Falcon do nearly twice the damage of the other two pistols. The game's Hand Cannons are modeled after two popular Real Life guns, respectively the famous Smith & Wesson .44 magnum revolver and the Desert Eagle.
- Heal Thyself: You heal with medical supplies found around the map. The supplies vary from makeshift rag bandages that recover a tiny amount of health to full medkits that restore three quarters of your health, reduce sickness, and cure all debuffs. Unlike most games, there is a quick animation when your heal yourself, like applying bandages to your arm, giving a morphine shot or opening the medical kit.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: While the game makes nods to realism with clothing being required to expand your inventory, it's a pretty generous restriction. Even when naked and limited to your bare hands, you can carry a surprising amount of supplies and equipment and still punch enemies or operate doors and objects unhindered. Then you can stuff a rifle and logs into your new jeans, or perhaps fit a couple of axes, tools, and ammo into your sweater vest. The Carpat map pack severely nerfs this, with clothing offering at most six inventory slots and backpacks hardly getting more than nine.
- The Illuminati: An Illuminati symbol can be found in the underground subways on the Russia map.
- Immune to Flinching: Zombies in Hard difficulty can't be stunned at all.
- Improvised Weapon: Virtually all of the melee weapons, only the katana, police baton, and bayonet are weapons by design. A few of the more unintentional weapons include the tree branch, blowtorch, flashlight and frying pan.
- Infinite Flashlight: All of the flashlights in the game will operate forever. Prior to 3.0, batteries existed, but their only function was to craft the Handlamp with.
- Interface Screw: Your color vision fades when you're low on health. Also incorporated as a game mechanic, upgrading the right skill reduces the Interface Screw on taking damage.
- In-Universe Game Clock: The game has a day/night cycle. A full day is forty-eight minutes long, twenty of which are night. The in-game clock is set to the master server, so time uniformly passes for all players even while not in-game.
- Inventory Management Puzzle:
- In version 2, you start the game butt naked with four inventory slots. A can of soda weighs less than a Timberwolf sniper rifle but takes the same amount of inventory space. Finding a backpack is critical, and even then you'll quickly run out of space with the sheer amount of supplies in the game. Especially when trying to craft, as a handful of screws takes the same inventory space as a assembled wooden door.
- Version 3 switches the game to a Grid Inventory system, giving you much more carrying capacity for at least the small items like duct tape and nails. Add in juggling large boxes of ammunition and weapons and the puzzle returns. Clothing gives you additional grids rather than just expanding the inventory, so you'll have more space overall but need to wrangle bulkier items more.
- Katanas Are Just Better: Light-weight, fast, and powerful, but rare.
- La Résistance: 3.0 added in the new Russia map, and with it came the Coalition; a group of survivors based on an aircraft carrier.
- Level Editor: Added in version 3. A robust system for creating your own levels with a built-way option to submit them online.
- Level-Map Display:
- In version 2, the PEI Map was a rare item that showed your location on the island with a red cross, you also needed light to read the map and reading it obscured your vision.
- In version 3 the map is now part of the interface, showing all locations with name labels and players marked with an icon and name.
- Post version 3, the map interface now requires either a chart
◊ or a GPS◊ to access.
- Lunacy: As of 3.0, there is now a very basic moon phase cycle. And when the full moon emerges, so do the zombies... with their eyes glowing, their senses boosted, and their damage doubled. The XP gained from killing them is also doubled.
- MacGyvering: Some weapon attachments can be improvised using some rather unorthodox materials. For instance, two tin cans, duct tape, and a blowtorch can make an improvised silencer called the 'Muffler'. Another example is an improvised scope made out of a pair of binoculars and some duct tape which has a fairly high zoom level and a reticule but is large enough to hinder the user's peripheral vision.
- Made of Explodium:
- Flamer zombies explode in a fireball when killed. Any regular zombie caught in the blast also becomes a Flamer. Melee weapons are definitely not recommended.
- Amusingly, a short while after bicycles were added, they used to catch fire and explode when destroyed just like gas-powered vehicles.
- Magnetic Weapons: The rare Shadowstalker and the unique Shadowstalker Mk. II (which requires completing a very intricate puzzle to acquire) are railguns with insane amounts of damage per shot. The Shadowstalker Mk. II is even stronger with zero recoil and no durability loss. Too bad the Mk. II has only one non-replenishable magazine.
- Nice Day, Deadly Night: Played straight with the full moon, subverted otherwise. You can't see as far at night, but neither can the zombies, so it's easier to sneak around. Just be careful waving that flashlight's beam around, as zombies can notice the light even if their backs are turned.
- Night-Vision Goggles: Two kinds can be found and worn. Civilian Nightvision turns the screen black and white and enhances light sources, so it's worthless in dark underground locations like caves, sewers or metro tunnels. Military Nightvision turns the screen various shades of green, without the civilian version's drawbacks. Both kinds, when activated, get a glow effect on the lenses, so players wearing them can be spotted by others, which can be a problem in PvP; zombies can't see the glow.
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Nintendo Hard: You start a game with nothing, inventory is limited, supplies are scarce, and zombies are legion. You'll become hungry, thirsty, can succumb to sickness, and that's assuming the zombies don't eat you first. There are also no doors to be found so buildings are no shelter until you fortify them yourself. - No Bikes in the Apocalypse: Played straight prior to update 3.20.9.0, that implemented the bicycle as a low-tier vehicle that doesn't need gas. The bicycle's "fuel" is the player's Sprint Meter, and the Exercise skill affects the drain rate on it (but not the speed of riding).
- One Bullet Clips: Averted. All magazines are separate items with a stock of ammunition. You might carry a total of twenty shots for your Colt pistol divided between three or more magazines, from full mags of seven rounds to empty mags that need to be reloaded. Prior to 3.0, you could also lose ammo by reloading a partially-full magazine: a box of Universal Ammunition civilian bullets was consumed to give you seven rounds in an empty Swift mag, reloading a partially-loaded Swift mag still consumed one box of bullets even if it only gained four more rounds. As of 3.0, however, ammunition boxes have their own bullet count.
- Player Versus Player: Similar to DayZ, you can work together with other players or fight against them. The Washington map is designed to be more PvP-minded than PEI, with Germany .
- Powerful Pick: A decent weapon and the only non-power tool that lets you break up boulders for metal scrap (stone prior to 3.0). The only alternative to it is the considerably rarer jackhammer.
- Ragdoll Physics: Added in version 3, zombies now recoil when hit and flop down when killed. The "Flight" skill kicks it up to eleven: ragdolls will outright rocket off into the distance instead of simply flopping on the floor.
- Rainbow Pimp Gear: While the game doesn't feature equipment with stats, it is a Survival Sandbox where you start off completely naked and your inventory is limited to what you can hold in your hands. While that restriction is still pretty generous, you're going to need clothing to carry more equipment and supplies, and that clothing is going to be pretty damn random, especially since virtually all of it is in a shoddy state of repair. Combine that with multiple layers and you can easily wind up wearing red lumberjack flannel, white scrubs pants, a purple poncho, green backpack, and a black fedora.
- Respawning Enemies: Enemies will respawn whenever you load into the game, perhaps even right beside you. In version 3, this is taken up to 11, since zombies will respawn periodically, and they can also spawn right next to you. Thankfully, items respawn as well.
- Robinsonade: The goal of the game is to survive by scavenging supplies, finding shelter, and battling the undead. You can try to fortify the empty towns and live off packaged food and water in stores or take to the forests and hills, build your own shelter, and hunt or cultivate your food. In maps with factions of survivors, you can also complete quests to gain access to unique gear and reputation and trade for items using experience points as currency.
- RPG Elements: You gain experience from killing zombies and said experience is spent buying skills like doing more damage, being better at stealth, or requiring less food and water.
- Satiating Sandwich: Sandwiches are some of the best cookable food items in the game, restoring 80 food at the very least (the BLT also restores quite a bit of thirst) and taking up only one inventory slot. Bread is also very easy to make, and there's a huge variety of fillings to make sandwiches with. They're gated behind the cooking skill, though, so they're not viable early on to a player without the Chef skillset.
- Save Scumming: Items respawn when you reload the game in singleplayer. You can feasibly load in and out of the game to try and find something you need. Just be careful, the zombies respawn too.
- Sentry Gun: A crafted item that can be equipped with different weapons and, in another nod to realism, will need to be manually reloaded. Sentry guns also don't fire as quickly as a player can.
- Shout-Out:
- Preston Garvey can be found in the med bay of the Liberator on the Russia map.
- There is a detached head of a Ruin Guard located on the curated map of A6 Polaris. It is even mentioned to be an "old farming equipment" a reference to the Ruin Guard's real name; the Field Tiller.
- Sprint Meter: The stamina bar controls running, jumping, and your ability to make power attacks. There are three food items that can restore your stamina instantly: energy drinks, granola bars, and potato chips. Adrenaline syringes can rapidly regenerate stamina and regain health slightly at the cost of increased sickness. However, even before upgrading sprint regeneration speed, it regenerates fairly quickly, making these items rarely useful.
- Starter Equipment: You get a chocolate bar, a box of apple juice and a flashlight on easy mode. Otherwise averted and you start with absolutely nothing, not even clothes.
- Trick Bomb: Smoke grenades create distracting clouds of smoke that attract nearby zombies. Road flares also draw zombies, and create a good amount of light for a short while.
- Universal Ammo: Played with. Some guns have chambered for specific magazines that have to be pre-loaded, most of them named after itself. Other guns, such at the Maplestrike, Heartbreaker and Eaglefire all share a general military magazine. However, the magazines are reloaded with boxes of a broader type of generic ammunition divided into three categories: Civilian, Ranger, and Military. The Military and Ranger categories are further divided into low caliber and high caliber rounds.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: If you max out the Sneakybeaky skill, zombies have their detection range so reduced they will appear to willfully ignore sight of you if you're not standing, provided you don't get within a meter or so of them. That makes it surprisingly easy to loot a deadzone clean, provided you have more filters to compensate for the reduced movement speed.
- Verbed Title
- Virtual Paper Doll: You start the game completely naked but save for a cripplingly small inventory, there are no drawbacks or penalties for being remaining so. Shirts, pants, vests and backpacks are the only articles of clothing with a function beyond cosmetic customization and a reserve of cloth/leather/metal that doesn't take up inventory space. There are many different outfits to choose from, like Canadian Mountie, business suits, or lab coats.
- Wizard Needs Food Badly: And water too. You'll need to eat and drink to stay alive, as starvation or dehydration will cause you to rapidly lose health. There's the option of consuming pre-packaged food and drinks, but the best results tend to come from cultivating or hunting your own food and cooking it, both because these items tend to restore more thirst and hunger and because the pre-packaged stuff isn't necessarily apocalypse-proof, so consuming anything with a low condition will increase the sickness meter.
