Dead Island

Dead Island

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School of hard knocks

School of hard knocks

Reach level 50.

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How to unlock the School of hard knocks achievement in Dead Island - Definitive Guide

You will likely be at about level 36-38 after completing the game once, doing pretty much everything possible. From this point, if you can find someone who is already level 50, join them and grind out the remainder to make it go a little faster. Find a highly populated area of zombies (the more special ones the better) and grind there. Using your Fury skill to kill enemies awards bonus experience, especially if you kill enough to get your multiplier up a few ranks.

The best way to get to level 50 is probably abusing the repeatable quest "Dreamtime" as shown below. To duplicate a weapon, hold  to ready it for throwing, then hold  at same time, and press . If you're using Logan and your "Boomerang" skills pops, it won't dupe. Otherwise you'll now have two of the same weapon on the floor. So in essence:

  1. Dupe a ton of your best, high-selling weapon.
  2. Sell them all and buy as much Oleander as possible.
  3. Turn in x5 Oleander for 1000xp in the repeatable "Dreamtime" quest in the Jungle.

Another excellent method is abusing the passive Thug inside Harlan's Hut during the "Make yourself at home" quest in Act 1. Once you beat the game, start a New Game+ and complete the quests Passport to Life, Lazarus Rising and Ashes to Ashes, then drive to the location in the video. Save Harlan and begin the quest mentioned previously. Make sure you DO NOT end the quest, and try not to kill the thug. When its health is low, reload your last checkpoint to reset the Thug. Follow the steps below:

  1. Accept the quest from Harland and break into the house.
  2. Break the Thug's arms (may need to use a stronger weapon).
  3. Use a pair of BROKEN brass knuckles to punch at the broken arms.

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You will likely be at about level 36-38 after completing the game once, doing pretty much everything possible. From this point, if you can find someone who is already level 50, join them and grind out the remainder to make it go a little faster. Find a highly populated area of zombies (the more special ones the better) and grind there. Using your Fury skill to kill enemies awards bonus experience, especially if you kill enough to get your multiplier up a few ranks.

The best way to get to level 50 is probably abusing the repeatable quest "Dreamtime" as shown below. To duplicate a weapon, hold to ready it for throwing, then hold at same time, and press . If you're using Logan and your "Boomerang" skills pops, it won't dupe. Otherwise you'll now have two of the same weapon on the floor.

So in essence:

1. Dupe a ton of your best, high-selling weapon.
2. Sell them all and buy as much Oleander as possible.
3. Turn in x5 Oleander for 1000xp in the repeatable "Dreamtime" quest in the Jungle.

Another excellent method is abusing the passive Thug inside Harlan's Hut during the "Make yourself at home" quest in Act 1. Once you beat the game, start a New Game+ and complete the quests Passport to Life, Lazarus Rising and Ashes to Ashes, then drive to the location in the video. Save Harlan and begin the quest mentioned previously. Make sure you DO NOT end the quest, and try not to kill the thug. When its health is low, reload your last checkpoint to reset the Thug.

Follow the steps below:

1. Accept the quest from Harland and break into the house.
2. Break the Thug's arms (may need to use a stronger weapon).
3. Use a pair of BROKEN brass knuckles to punch at the broken arms.

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0

You need a total of 3,008,316 xp to reach level 50. To reach level 50 the normal way you will need to play almost two full playthroughs and have completed every side quest. Luckily there are quite a few farming methods/exploits to get to level 50 fairly easily. We have detailed the best ones below:

  • Method #1 - Champagne Glitch *Not patched, possible on the GOTY Edition*

    You need to get yourself at least two bottles of champagne. You can find loads of them in the hotel, just look around the areas with bars and you will more than likely find some of them on shelf's etc. The second place you can get them is in the Lab, located in the Jungle. In the labs are coolers, you can loot these coolers and most of the time you will find a bottle of champagne. Once you have two bottles, you want to head to the Diamond Bungalows area in the Resort. Once here you need to find Svetlana and start her quest "Time for Booze" which will task you to find her a champagne bottle. Now give her one bottle of champagne, this will create a checkpoint. Walk a bit behind you onto the little bridge walkway, just in front of her. You now want to open your inventory and drop all the champagne bottles you have in your inventory (do not drop more than 40, the game will either make them disappear or cause frame-rate issues).

    Once you have dropped all the ones you have, find a quick way to kill yourself. As soon as you go down it'll say "Time To Recover 7secs", the moment you see this screen you want to press then "Load Last Checkpoint". If done right, you'll spawn right by Svetlana and near the Champagne bottles you dropped on the floor. You will notice that all the bottles you dropped are still in your inventory, as well as all the ones that you dropped on the floor. All you need to do now is pick all those bottles up from the floor. You can now either go to Svetlana and give her most of the bottles you have (keep around 10-20). You will get 1,000 xp per bottle you give her. To get from level 1 to 50 you will need to give her 3008 bottles of champagne but you will be around level 40-45 when you feel the need to do this glitch so it'll only take you a few hundred bottles or so. For more info on this method, please refer to this thread: https://www.playstationtrophies.org/forum/dead-island/191467-xp-glitch-works-goty.html
  • Method #2 - Breaking a Thug's Arms Exploit *Patched, impossible on the GOTY Edition*

    The only way to do is delete the patch and play the game offline, on the GOTY version it is pre-installed and cannot be deleted. Start the quest "Make yourself at Home", which is found on the way to the gas station on the other side of the hotel. From here you want to climb up and walk along the fence, then jump in the backyard of the house. Go in the house by breaking the door down and you'll see a glitched out thug that just stands there. What you want to do now is break both its arms using a blunt weapon. Once you have done that, you will need to find a pair of knuckle dusters (bought from merchants or found about the island). Once you have a pair, wear them down on normal zombies until they have run out of durability. Now all you need to do is punch the thugs broken arm with the very weak pair of knuckle dusters. It'll do hardly any damage and you'll get 400 xp per punch. When the thug is on low health, reload the last checkpoint to respawn the thug with full health. Here is a video walkthrough for this method, credit to Nvoy123:

  • Method #3 - Bloodbath Arena DLC

    We found this the best method to grind levels. What you want to do is keep playing the Easy Arena over and over and over. If you can get to wave 30-40 each time then you will get a ton of XP. The later rounds, the zombies pretty much only consist of the special ones (Thugs, Bloaters, Butchers etc.) which you'll get a ton of XP for killing. You will also rack up a lot of XP towards the challenges. Each game we were getting to about wave 40 or so and getting a few hundred thousand XP each time. You need to have good weapons however. We used the Zed's Demise with Shock Mod and pretty much every different type of gun with lots of ammo. The main thing you need to be careful of is falling off the cliff and Suiciders. Suiciders will one hit kill you if you are in the blast radius of their explosion so be careful. We were able to go from level 45 to 50 in a few hours of doing this.
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