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State of Decay 2 Beginner’s Guide to Black Plaguehearts
In this guide I’ll give a rough step by step guide on how to handle the Black Plagueheart curveball as a newer player or player returning to the game in update 34 after a long hiatus. This is a tough challenge to tackle as a newer player, but hopefully this guide can be some help.
Step 0: Intro to Black Plaguehearts
When you first encounter a black plagueheart, you’ll see this page in your curveballs tab in the map menu screen. This will tell you a bit of information about what the plagueheart will do, but not everything.
When this curveball becomes active, plague zombies in the area have a very high chance to become black plague zombies, and all future plague zombies will be black plague zombies. These zombies move much faster, deal higher damage, and accrue blood plague much faster on your characters than a standard plague zombie. These black plague zombies can be identified by the glowing purple eyes rather than the usual red.
Additionally, the area of effect for this plagueheart will cause vehicles you drive to tank their fuel efficiency, meaning that you can’t move more than 100 meters even on a full tank. You’ll have to go into the heart’s territory on foot if you want to take it down, which can be a pain to deal with.
The heart itself will have double the health of a normal plagueheart for your difficulty, and take 7.5x less damage from all sources except for one, which can be discovered through the optional objective. This will either be damage from ranged weapons, melee weapons, or explosives.
Step 1: Outpost Positioning
Ideally you want an outpost that has at least one of the following:
- In or near the radius of the plagueheart
- Close to a high-traffic route for both you and zombies
- Near enough to the edge of the Plague Heart’s new expanded territory that you can drive up to the edge.
Ideally you want an outpost similar to the radio outpost or ammo outpost in this image, as they’re close enough to allow you to resupply easily.
Once you’ve set up your outpost in this way, ensure that the outpost is heavily protected by activating the Incendiary mines defense on the outpost you wish to enter and exit this territory through. That way you can run back to a safe area if you get aggressively overwhelmed by the enhanced plague zombies and have a way to deal with infesting hordes as they come from the plagueheart.
Step 2: Learning the weakness
While in the safe zone of your outpost with incendiary mines active, you can easily farm for black plague samples. These special quest items are what you’ll use to discover the plagueheart’s weakness. Collect 5 samples and deliver them to the science enclave spawned by the curveball and in 24 hours in game you’ll discover the heart’s weakness. This enclave will leave as soon as you deliver the samples, and as far as I know none of them are recruitable.
Now that you know the weakness of the heart, get a follower that’s pretty powerful and give them enough supplies to stay alive and carry supplies for you. If the heart is weak to melee, carry plenty of smoke and distractions to keep the plague zombies off of you as you swing at it. If the heart is weak to ranged, carry extra ammo. If the heart is weak to explosives, carry in bloater grenades and flares if you can, or your best explosive otherwise.
Regardless of the heart’s weakness, you want your best survivors to take this heart out, and you want to take them in and out mostly alive. Pack in plenty of stimulants, painkillers, energy drinks, and a few plague cures if you feel like you need it. There’s gonna be a lot of running from the plague zombies, and a lot of walking to the heart.
It also couldn’t hurt to get a scentblock on your follower and main survivor when you’re entering plague territory, and regardless of weakness smoke grenades can be really helpful for the first few volleys of shots in a ranged weakness heart takedown. If the heart is weak to melee weapons, be sure to drop the smoke grenade far enough away from the heart that you can back up and still be safe from zombies when the heart starts spewing gunk on you.
(Optional) Step 2.5: Give it the Lockheed Martin Treatment
If you have an outpost that offers artillery or have a command center at level 3 with computer knowledge, getting an artillery or drone strike off to begin this fight wouldn’t be the worst idea, especially if it’s a heart weak to explosives.
Step 3: Lay Into It
Now that you’ve appropriately set up to take out the heart, give it all of your damage. Take your melee weapon of choice and slam into it while managing stamina with energy drinks and stimulants. Take your best gun and unload as many mags as you can into it. Throw a road flare and bloater grenade through a window at it, or otherwise set up explosives to take it out. Regardless, you want to get as much damage into the plague heart as possible according to it’s weakness. The plagueheart never enters a dormant state, and will constantly remain awakened as long as its alive, so just taking it out as fast as possible is the best option you have. Dealing damage to the heart will only increase the frequency of infestations and aggressiveness of plague zombies.
Step 4: Keep Yourself Alive
Keep those smokes up, keep the damage flowing, and most importantly, keep you and your follower alive as long as possible. If you’re running out of supplies to keep your health high and plague infection low, return to the outpost and heal up.
Step 5: Rinse and Repeat
Repeat steps 2-4 over and over again as needed, using scent block and smokes to create an opportunity to escape to your outpost if you absolutely need it. Repeat this until the black plagueheart is no more!
