Getting started

You wake in a sealed hospital ward in Los Santos with five years missing and nothing in your pockets. The city belongs to the dead now. The people who are still alive are about 3.4 miles 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.