Dying Light 2 is here and it's glorious.

If you're jumping into the game, the following tips and tricks will help you avoid getting eaten by zombies and make your life a little bit more enjoyable. 

Like any open-world game, Dying Light 2's map can seem a bit overwhelming in terms of all the things to do, places to explore and adventures you can have. It's worth focussing on a few things first, to get the upper hand before you start. 

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Parkour is everything

As you've probably gathered, parkour is a big part of Dying Light 2. It's not just a fun aside to the game, it's also an important part of the way you should play. 

Running, jumping and dashing is a good way to get out of trouble. Sprinting across the rooftops is also a good way to get safely across the city, especially at night. There are usually less zombies up there (unless you're being chased because you upset a howler) meaning far less danger. 

Dying Light 2 is also incredibly well polished, so it's easy to jump from place to place and you'll be surprised at how far you can jump, even in the early stages of the game. 

Keep an eye out for useful objects you can jump on, from and to. You'll see the classic yellow markers with ledges you can jump to and climb up. But there are also conveniently placed lampposts, power cables, bus stops, ramps and even the occasional rope hanging conveniently from a crane that you can use to fly about the place. 

You'll find it's much easier to use obstacles to get up high than it is to simply scale the side of a building. If you jump from a car to a bus, to a small shelter to a roof top, you'll have much more success than trying to climb a wall and then run out of stamina halfway up. 

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Soft landing spots

One thing to watch out for is landing spots. When you're up high, it can be tough to work out how to get down to ground level safely and quickly. Keep your eyes open and you'll see mattresses on the ground with X markers on them. You can land on those for a safe and soft landing. What isn't obvious though, is you can also use the roof of a car or the top of a bus to absorb some of the impact of your landing. 

Generally though, a lack of stamina is a real pain and it drains in two main ways - climbing and fighting. You'll see the blue stamina bar fall as you try to scale things and if it drops then so will you. Straight into the arms of awaiting undead. The good news is running doesn't impact stamina, so if you get into a tough spot, RUN!

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Find inhibitors for more stamina

In our mind, stamina is your most important asset and if you increase it you'll survive longer and kill more zombies too. Stamina doesn't just mean you can climb further, but also swing your melee weapon for longer too. 

Luckily there's one way to increase your stamina with relative ease and that's by finding inhibitors. You'll have encountered inhibitors early on in the game so you should already know what they are. Essentially these are treatments to keep the virus at bay and they're located in spots around the map. 

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The first thing to look out for is the clues. When you're running around the city you'll sometimes hear an audible cue "inhibitor detected nearby". When you hear that sound you'll see an indicator in the bottom left of the screen with a distance marker to show how far away you are from the inhibitor. 

Use this like a hot or cold marker to so you can suss out the direction by moving one way or another in the world until the distance drops. 

You'll find inhibitors in several places:

  • Scattered around the map - often they're located in nondescript buildings with holes in the wall or a single open window. Sometimes they're easy to get to in there, other times they're full of napping zombies. You'll find there's often a warning when you step into one of those buildings that you should go back at night. The zombies are then mostly out on the streets and you can sneak about the building without fighting them all. Use your survivor sense (press Q on PC or right thumbstick on PlayStation) and scan your surroundings and you should see the inhibitor container.
  • GRE Quarantined buildings - There are several large buildings on the map that are covered in greenish tents. They're marked as quarantine zones. These buildings sometimes contain several inhibitors. There's one with four in it for instance, which makes it ripe pickings. You need to go in at night, then sneak through using takedowns on zombies and avoid danger until you can loot the good stuff.
  • GRE Anomalies -  you will find there are some areas that look like small military compounds. They are marked as GRE Anomaly zones. In there you'll have to fight an unusual zombie and kill it to unlock a nearby container that has an inhibitor inside. You can only do these at night, but early on in the game they're relatively easy to do. 

Do these things as soon as you can. Prioritise finding inhibitors over and above any of the main missions or sidequests. Doing this will then quickly help you upgrade either health or stamina. Stamina is much more worthy of upgrading. 

Health is worth upgrading because you'll obviously be able to take more punishment or survive more falls. It also helps by increasing your immunity timer. Stamina though is more valuable as you'll find you'll stay alive longer by just running away and parkouring until your heart is content. 

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Upgrading your skills

As well as health and stamina, you have other things you can upgrade too - your clothing (more on that later), your weapons and your skills. 

Skills come in two forms, combat and parkour. You earn these by chaining together moves. Naturally fighting zombies and bandits will help you build up your combat skill points that you can then spend on more skills and abilities. 

Once again though, parkour is more interesting as the skills there allow you to jump further, land more effectively and get across the map more easily. In order to build parkour skill points, you just need to parkour. Chain the jumps together and don't stop. Don't fall. Keep going.

At night, skill points increase more quickly, especially if you're being chased. The danger makes points climb faster, so it actually pays to run about (and fight) at night. But it's essential that you don't die. If you die you'll lose any of the points you've racked up along the way. 

If you're doing well and have a nice chain going, we'd recommend finding a safe zone and sleeping. This will mean you've survived the night (or day) and those points will count towards your next skill point. If you fall and die you'll lose it all and that sucks. 

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Avoiding death by lack of immunity 

When it's dark or when you're exploring inside a building, you'll see an indicator at the top of your screen with a skull and timer to let you know how much immunity you have left. If that timer reaches zero, you'll die. So it's important to keep that timer full or at least not let it get too low. There are several ways to do this:

  • Boosters and mushrooms - it's possible to find UV (glowing) mushrooms around the map. They're on rooftops, inside buildings, in the underground locations. You can chomp on these to give you a small boost and stave off the inevitable death. You need a lot of them though as their effect is minimal. The alternative is a booster. These look like asthma inhalers that you can squirt to keep you going. You can buy these or craft them and they're well worth having. 
  • Daylight and UV lights - if it's daytime, get into the sunlight. That'll stop the count down. If it's nighttime, then you can stop the counter by getting to a safe zone with UV lights. These are highlighted with bright purple sunshine markers on the map or with an indicator when you use your survivor sense. Go and stand in the light and your timer will reset. When you step back out again it will start counting down once more. Using these safe zones is a good way to end a chase sequence if it's happening too. 
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Blue diamonds and markers

There are many, many sidequests in Dying Light 2. It's easy to get distracted when playing an open-world game like this, but some of them are low risk, easy reward.

When you're charging about the roof tops you'll often see two sorts of indicators - blue diamonds and blue markers. These are mini-quests that are really easy (usually). Some, for example, are just other survivors who need help because they've been bitten and need an immunity booster. Go over to them and give them one and they'll give you a reward. 

Other times it's a group of bandits that are looting a box or holding someone prisoner. Defeat them and then claim your prize. Easy. 

Another sort is zombies who are worth slaying. Some will run from you, some are massive and need a bit more work to slay. These are worth doing because you'll get bonus points for doing so, but also because you can get trophies for looting them.

Loot zombies for goodies

Killing zombies is fun, but looting zombies is also beneficial because you'll not only get random resources but also Infected Trophies. Infected Trophies can be used with traders in exchange for upgrades for your various consumables. The abnormal, mutated and special zombies are likely to have better quality trophies and therefore are even more worthy of slaying and looting. 

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Start the windmills

Check out the map and you'll find various windmills around the map. These can be activated for various rewards, including unlocking a safe zone in that area. This is worth doing as it gives you somewhere safe to go at night, but some of them also unlock structures with people selling gear and more. 

These are easy to do as well, as you just need to climb the windmill (jumping up various moving parts), reach the top and click on the marked part to fix the windmill. Do a few of these and you'll improve life around the city. 

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Stealth and distraction

One thing you'll find early on is it's not a good idea to try and fight the horde. Sure, you can take out a handful pretty easily, but when they swamp you you'll quickly run out of stamina. Your weapon will also break if it's used and abused too much. Then you'll have to find or buy a new one. 

It's best to employ stealth whenever you can. If you're sneaking through a building you can use your survivor sense to see where the zombies are and creep up behind them to use a takedown move. These still count towards combat points and do no damage to your weapon. Do this often and you'll find life easier. 

Distraction also helps. You can grab gas canisters off the floor and ignite them then chuck them. These can be used to blow up a bunch of zombies or simply create a distraction with a noise in one direction while you run the other way. 

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How to repair your weapons

In most survival games of this sort, your weapons will degrade and break over time. Dying Light 2 is no different. On your travels, you may find a weapon you're particularly fond of because it has good stats or is just effective or satisfying for one reason or another. 

Sadly there's no obvious way to simply repair your weapons when they become damaged. So you might end up using them until they break or selling them at a shop when they're worn out. 

There is, however, one way you can upgrade some weapons. Some weapons have a mod slot or two. You can see whether a weapon can be modified by looking in your inventory. You'll see small circles over a weapon icon which indicates it has upgrade slots. If you apply upgrades to the tip or shaft, then those weapons will be "repaired". Sadly it's not fully repaired, but it will be usable for a fair while longer. 

Of course, this sort of repairing requires you to have two things - weapons that can accept mods and mods to use on them. You can purchase both from most vendors though. 

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Clothing 

You'll find there are different pieces of clothing in the game, each which have different stats and will suit a different playstyle. These include hats, gloves, tops, trousers, shoes, etc, for different classes:

  • Medic - has a focus on parkour movement and healing
  • Ranger - adds traits for ranged weapon combat
  • Tank - gets a reduction on incoming damage and boosts two-handed melee combat
  • Brawler - Focus on frantic one-handed combat

Have a look at the stats on each piece of clothing and type and combine them to suit your style. We like the medic gear, for instance, because we enjoy the parkour so much and find it the most useful thing in the game. 

Clothing is ranked according to your player level, but you'll also see it's rated by rarity too. So you'll have common clothing, uncommon, rare, unique and more. Naturally the higher the level, the better the stats. 

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Lockpicking

Picking locks in Dying Light 2 is relatively easy. If you're familiar with the mechanics of Skyrim and Fallout then you'll know how to do this. On PC you use your mouse to move one of the pins, then press A to try to turn the lock. If the lockpick wiggles too much, it will snap and break. What you want is a stable pin, so if it wiggles too much let go and stop turning, reposition and move it again. 

Oddly we find the sweet spot is often on the left side. 

Lock picks are easy to craft from parts you find in the world, so do that whenever you get a chance. The harder a lock is, the trickier it can be and you might find you break a few lockpicks on attempting it. However, if it's not going well you can exit the process and restart it before the lockpick breaks and that way you won't lose it. 

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Find more things with your binoculars

You've got binoculars for scoping things out. Press B on PC to equip them. They can be used to spot enemies, but they're also great for finding things on the map. Get up somewhere high - like a windmill - and take your binoculars out and scan the surroundings. 

When doing so, you'll see a box appear in the middle of the screen. Move that around until it starts to shrink. When you get it at the right spot, the box will shrink and you'll hear a noise. Then you'll ping a location, for example, a military airdrop or a safe zone. Keep doing that and you'll find plenty more spots to loot and pillage. Just think of the upgrades!