Getting started

You wake in a sealed hospital ward in Los Santos with a year missing and nothing in your pockets. The city belongs to the dead now. The people who are still alive are about five and a half kilometers north-east, at Haven, the old Sandy Shores airfield.

The field kit

Press M to open your field kit. It's the map, your status, your squad and a rail of sections for everything else: inventory, crafting, medical, skills, your story and the logs. Right-click anywhere on the map to set a waypoint, and right-click it again to clear it. Every section has a Back button, and ESC or BACKSPACE steps back one level.

The road north

Orientation walks you out of the hospital and up to Haven one step at a time: searching, eating, keeping quiet, riding the bike, reading the wind, washing off your scent, the heat, the cold, and your first fight. If you skipped it, or want a refresher on one part, every lesson can be replayed from the Field Manual. Hold BACKSPACE to skip a step you already know.

At Haven

Haven is a safe zone: nobody can hurt you inside the wire, and the infected are kept out. You'll find a trader and the clinic, the workshop and a workbench, the Motor Pool, a wash bay for anything you drag out of a Blackzone, and the board where people post work that needs doing. Your tracked story objective is always on the HUD; tap O to show or hide it.

What to do first

• Follow your tracked objective. The early story teaches the county as you go.
• Search everything you pass: cupboards, cars, trash cans and bodies. Look at a thing with ALT to see what you can do with it.
• Keep food and water on you, and a dressing or two. See Survival needs and Medical.
• Move quietly. Noise brings the dead, and a fight you didn't need costs you ammunition and blood. See The infected.

There are no chat commands in A.P.O.C. Everything you can do is in a menu, on the field kit, or on the thing you're looking at.