State of Decay 2: Juggernaut Edition

In Dread and Nightmare modes, there will be more plague hearts than normal. It looks like 15 or so depending on the map. With enough prep, this can be pretty easy.

Scentblock was added in a recent update and allows you to walk right past zombies.

2 C4 can kill a heart on Nightmare mode, or 3 of the rocket pods or remote charges from the Daybreak DLC.

Take some plague cure to help with the scent block.

Before you go after the plague hearts, get a car and load up on fuel and repair kits. Do a lap around the map and look for where the hearts are. You can radio in a location, but that takes an hour to cool down. You shouldn't have any trouble while scouting as long as you don't run over many zombies. Take scentblock and plague cure with you just in case, but try not to use it. Look for the red glow coming out of buildings and wait a second for your mini map to mark the building. I had several plague hearts spawn close to each other.


With enough inventory, you can take 2-3 scentblock, 2 plague cure, and 12 c4 charges. Put fuel and repair kits in your left over slots. Going out during the day is best.

You can apply scent block and just walk into a building, plant 2 C4 charges, and walk out. Blow up the heart, and loot it if you have room, but keeping the stuff you started with is more important.

If you waited to apply scentblock right before going into the plague heart building, you should have enough to take out a few more hearts on the same dose. If you don't get hit by a plague zombie, you can safely take 2 doses before using a plague cure and moving on to the next hearts.

Don't get too greedy! If your characters are hurt or you are low on fuel, go back to base and rest up. Get some fresh survivors and go back out.

**Sadly, this game can be buggy in general. The updates that changed the way difficulties worked messed with it even more. You may need to run this achievement again if it does not unlock.**

Nightmare is much harder than the other difficulties and if you are not there for the challenge you want to do the achievement as quick as possible because in every playthrough the early days have much less zombies everywhere. Since the updates constantly breaking things in the game and I was the victim too of several huge bugs I wanted to make a guide which never fail. Because you know, you lose things in this game forever.

Map
You want to do this in Meagher Valley for several reasons. Easiest to loot, travel and has the best mid size base, the Brewing Company.

Preparations
Start or move a community in the Valley on NORMAL (can be done with a buffed up Dread community as well). Build them up and stockpile resources. Either use the Brewing Company or Whitney Field. Have the following:
- 1 survivor with the mechanic / automechanic skill for the toolkits
- 1 survivor with the gardener skill (gardening books can be made on the farm for 40 seeds)
- 1 survivor with the builder legacy
- at least 6 survivors before starting nightmare
- 2 fertilizer mods for the farm
- 2 (repair) vans
- 1 "Google" car (Survey Car)
- 20+ toolkits
- 20+ fuel cans
- a .50 caliber bolt action sniper rifle like Model 99-50
- 150+ AP bullets
- at least 8 C4 charges (the more the better, the worst luck needs 30 but that is borderline impossible)
- 20+ resources in every category
- the two vans filled with food/ammo/medicine/material in this order
- the Google car filled with fuel cans and one or two repair kits
- silenced 7.62 or 5.56 rifles for every survivor
- one or two silenced guns with cheap ammo (22 or 9mm) and 200-300 ammo for them, aunt prepper is perfect
- 500+ parts for quick repairs
- 20+ samples
- 20+ healing items
- 2000+ influence
- zombie scent if you have any

Survivor skills
Just a note: my survivors had all the best skills and weapons but it didn't matter much because the last update (10.1) broke all their best abilities and items just like many other updates before them. So don't rely on anything much. With the car/50cal/c4 tactic you can do it with any survivor but I will make a note of a few useful abilities (hope they work):
Powerhouse: LB+A instantly prepares a Feral for an execution (kneels and shakes it's head)
Stealth: sprint while sneaking, silent opening of stuck doors, can sneak by enemies very close
Swordplay: bladed weapons are the best in this game, max level gives you an instant execution on a zombie or screamer from any direction (when it isn't broken by the devs lol)
Close Combat: don't forget you have to remove your melee weapon for this, only good on max level for the instant and super safe skull crush execution and the relentless stabbing for stunlocking ferals
Gunslinging aka the "Snap": while aiming press A to snap your aim to the head of the nearest zombie. Makes even the worst weapons one shot one kill in this game. It doesn't work while in zoom.
Note: your survivors keep their hero status, so max them out if you can.
Note2: your survivors eat TWO food on nightmare, either have someone with high level gardening skills or / and bring extra! You have to plan to survive for 4 days at most.

Nightmare Zone
When everything is ready, put your two Vans in the parking spots on your base. If you have other cars take them all away from the parking spots or you may confuse the game. Sit in the Google Car and switch the difficulty to Nightmare.

You will start at the beginning of the Valley and the first beginner base is already yours. Your cars park in front of the base. Your normal base was automatically demolished and you got the resources back. You can't store these, especially materials so time is of the essence before they decay by 2-3 from time to time (I hope you didn't forget putting extra in the vans).

Run to your base, jump into the Google car and drive to the Brewing Company, clear it and capture. Now you have the "moving" bonus where all your buildings finish in a fraction of the time they would normally do for 10 or so minutes. Build a base, infirmary, workshop, watchtower, two farms, beds, enable free water to boost farms and morale. Even easier with the 4 prefabs from Daybreak. As soon as you finished, jump back into the Google car and drive around the map. Most of the plague hearts will be discovered. When you finished call in a Plague Heart discovery in the radio (and repeat it as soon as possible). Back in the base fill a Van and your inventory with some healing, fuel cans, 50cal, AP ammo and your preferred silenced rifle plus ammo for it.

Drive around a map and check every Plague heart. Most of the time you have a clear sight to them from outside the buildings. Park the car in front of these spots and climb on it. Take out the heart with the 50cal. 6 or 7 shots should do the trick. Early in game the following happens for most of the time: tons of plague zombies surround you but they will die with the heart. One Feral always comes but can be taken out with relative easy with your other gun. If some extra zombies wander there use your other gun to thin them then either jump into the car and drive to the next heart or kill the rest.

Warning: some people mentioned in the forums that they only got the achievement when they emptied all the hearts (taking out everything in it until it disappears). This makes the process harder because a horde usually appears on nightmare when you enter a house. If you want to skip this I suggest at least pausing the game and making a note of the location of the heart.

When you find a heart that is completely hidden skip it. We come back later for it. When you are out of resources or your survivor is weak capture an outpost and replenish. There are a maximum of 15 hearts on nightmare, a fraction of them are in the worst position where you can't reach them. It was 2 for me. Don't forget if you are in a tight situation you can quit and reload and the zombies disappear. Watch out for bloaters although the vans are high enough to save you from the cloud most of the time. Don't bother avoiding juggernauts just take them out with the sniper. 3-4 bullets should be enough. I had to kill two through my entire run.

Watch out for enemy survivors. Depending on their gun they can drop you with a single shot on nightmare. If confrontation is absolutely necessary try to sneak up to them and headshot the first. If they are not on alert that headshot will be an instakill. Otherwise they will crawl on the ground and you have to shoot them a lot.

After you are finished with the easy ones then go home drop the 50cal and the bullets. Take twice as many C4 as many hearts you have left. Here comes the tricky part: depending on how many items or abilities are broken currently in the game you may have to improvise. The easiest way would be applying zombie scent, walking to the hearts and blowing them up with 2 C4's each. Distraction items don't work on nightmare. Scent was glitched for me so I sneak in the buildings, put down the bombs, ran out and activated them. It is easier than it sounds in the early days of a game. I rarely ran into hordes.

If you are still missing hearts do another lap with Google car and call in discoveries. You can finish in two ingame days. Afterwards elect a builder leader and build / upgrade what you need, the Brewing Company has more than enough space. You still should have some leftover material. If all your survivors have silenced high caliber rifles they can easily defend the base against any horde. After all the building you have to send / take in survivors and then kill 3 who come at your base making them an easy prey. Peerless and Over the Rainbow unlocked.

Just make a bunch of fuel bombs - they are cheap and do lots of damage. Find the exact spot of a plague heart, drive close with your car and stand on it. Then just throw your fuel bombs at the plague heart. 5-7 will do the trick. You can stand on your car and throw them through windows too.

Use the lookout areas to find plague heart locations. You can also call for someone to search for one every 50 minutes.