Metal Gear Survive: 8 Tactical Tips To Help You Survive

Stealth espionage action becomes zombie horde survival in Metal Gear Survive — the latest and strangest spin-off from the Metal Gear series. Without Hideo Kojima at the helm, the series has taken a weird detour into the sandbox genre, where you must craft weapons, build a base, and defend yourself against nightly raids of undead abominations in an alternate reality world. It’s bizarre, and the mechanics are hardly user-friendly for first-time players. When you’re dropping into Metal Gear Survive, it helps to have a few tips and tricks at your disposal.

That’s where we come in. As your humble Metal Gear aficionado, this game throws (some) of the stealth stuff out the window. Instead, you’ll need to scrounge for items, construct defenses, and work with your team to make it home. There’s a story mode and a singleplayer campaign, all set in an alternate version of the areas we visited previously in Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. Most of the weapons return, but you won’t face off against human opponents. It’s all about an army of undead that come in a variety of versions — not all zombies are created equal, and you’ll need to learn when it’s safe to explore, and when it’s time to start getting headshots.

More Metal Gear Survive guides on Gameranx:

8 Tactical Tips To Help You Survive | Beginner’s Guide

Metal Gear Survive is set in an alternate timeline where soldiers from the destroyed Mother Base (see Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes) are transported to a mysterious wasteland that’s populated by the undead. To escape, you’ll have to defend your home base, collecting materials and crafting items as waves of zombies attack.

This isn’t your standard Metal Gear game. It’s closer to something like Fortnite — a mixture of shooting, crafting, and creating. To help make sense of it, we’re going to provide 8 helpful tips as provided by the community.

#1: Defending Your Base

The first step to survival is defending your base. You’ll need to create fences, turrets, and traps to slow down the zombie hordes. Make sure you build and place traps / fences outside the base area or outside the red protection circle when enemies are closing in on you. Look for the red arrows that show zombie paths, they’ll always stick to those routes.

Place your walls on the zombie routes. They stick to the arrows and won’t deviate, so you don’t need to encircle everything. They won’t go around the fences.
- You can attack through high / low barricades with bullet or melee weapons.
- Propeller traps are useful for placing in front of or right behind fences to chop up swarms.
Machine gun turrets are extremely useful when placed in chokepoints and behind walls.
- Set Balloon Traps ahead of machine gun turrets. You’ll stop multiple enemies and have time to easily shoot them all down.
Grenade Launcher turrets are one of the most powerful weapons in the game. Place them in you’re struggling through a round.

One of the biggest dangers to your fences are Bomber zombies. Those guys are annoying, so we’re going to skip ahead and detail some simple tips for dealing with Bombers.

#2: Dealing With Bomber Zombies

Bomber zombies are a huge pain in the butt. Shooting causes them to detonate, damaging or destroying your carefully placed traps and fences. There are a few good ways to deal with Bomber Zombies that can save an entire round.

Shoot Bombers in the legs to trip them up at long range.
If you can, sneak up behind a bomber zombie for a stealth kill. At higher levels, this won’t kill them instantly — but if you can kill them instantly, they will not explode.
Use distraction items to get a Bomber’s attention. It will turn around — aim for the glowing spot on a Bomber’s back. If you shoot it, you’ll kill them without causing them to explode.

A bad Bomber zombie can smash your barricades and ruin an entire round if you’re not careful. Dealing with them using backstabs or shooting them in their weakpoints will help a lot.

#3: Go On Salvage Side-Quests Early

At the start, you won’t have much scrap or materials to craft. To change that, you’ll need to go on salvage side-quests early. To do that, select a Salvage Mission from the prep room. You can start a new lobby or summon your friends to help you — Salvage Missions send you somewhere on the map where you’ll have to defend.

When playing with a team, you can send one player to complete side-quests while the rest of your team stays at the base defending.

You only have a few minutes to prepare, so you’ll want to build walls, ammo, and extra traps in the prep room before starting the mission. It doesn’t even matter if you fail — failed missions will still give you all the items you collected, giving you a pretty good stockpile. It’s not a bad idea to completely ignore your main base at the start and just play through salvage missions so you’ll have a good supply of basic materials for crafting.

#4: Warp Points & You

At the start of the game, you’ll always have a Warp Point in your inventory. This is an item you can place that allows you to warp between two locations on the map. Place your first warp point somewhere safe in your base, like on a second floor, then another while outside the base completing side-missions. You can warp between these locations at will.

Even better, warp points are shared. So any of your teammates can also use your placed warp points to quickly swap locations, or escape to safety and heal up if you’re in a bad situation.

Each player gets a warp point, so place them at the base and out on the fringes of the map while completing side-missions.

#5: The Drill — Everything You Need To Know

Generally, your objective is to defend a big drill from the undead. There are lots of wrinkles to the drill’s design you probably need to know, so let’s go over everything.

You can interact with the drill for a variety of effects — speeding up the drill timer, summon support (like Metal Gear Ray), or withdraw.
- To get S-Rank, you’ll have to speed up the drill with one player.
Don’t let the drill get destroyed! If it’s destroyed, you’ll lose half your Iris rewards. If the drill is about to be destroyed, it’s better to withdraw.
The drill has “chunks” of HP in sections on its health bar. After losing a section of health, the drill will explode with a pulse attack, destroying any nearby zombies.

After collecting the amount of Iris energy you need (100k Easy / 200k Normal / 400k Hard), you can withdraw before the end of round 3. Side-quest salvage missions have three rounds, and you can simply withdraw before the timer ends if you’ve got all the Iris you need. No need to stick around.

#6: Useful Melee Tips

Before hitting the field, you’ll want to equip a melee weapon for close-encounters with zombies. You still have your CQC abilities from MGS5, but you can also equip a spear, machete, or other melee weapon. These are pretty useful when you’re low on ammo. Here are a few tips centered on melee weapons.

Check the fence stats before placing — it will tell you which melee attacks are compatible with the fence type.
Use CQC on armored zombies to knock their helmets off, allowing you to get an easier head shot kill.
When falling, use the dive attack. You’ll lunge forward and won’t take fall damage.
If your weapon has a sprinting attack, initiate the run-attack early so it isn’t interrupted by a zombie attack.
If you’ve unlocked the Extra Attack Skill, you can follow-up a heavy melee attack with a powerful, fast strike.

Melee weapons are a great choice when exploring or moving through the environment, and they can help save ammo when you’re dealing with just one or two zombies (or special zombies) in one place. They’re especially great when used behind barricades.

#7: Keeping Up With Crafting

You have to craft everything in Metal Gear Survive. Every bullet you use and every trap you place requires crafting. That means you needs lots of materials, and most of those materials are going to come from salvage side-missions.

You can craft items in the prep room before starting a side-quest or entering the map.
Strengthening weapons and spending points to upgrade your character are important for surviving.
- After a round or a mission is complete, return to the prep room to collect your rewards.
When crafting items, it’s important to craft a stockpile of extras for weapons you plan on using — craft more ammo than you need, then place it in the repository so you can quickly stock up without having to craft more.
- When crafting, you craft 2 bullets / 10 arrows each time.

There are two items you don’t need to craft — warp points which we discussed earlier, and walkers. Walkers are special vehicles that spawn late in rounds, and they essentially make completing a round easier.

#8: Getting S-Rank

You’ll be ranked on your performance, and the better you do, the more rewards you’ll get for higher and higher difficulties. One problem is — getting S-Rank on Hard seems impossible. Oh, it is possible, but you’ll need a four-person team that’s working perfectly.

To Get S-Rank on Hard:
- 1 player must be interacting with the digger and speeding it up the entire time.
- 2 players defending the digger.
- 1 player completing side-quests early, then returning to defend the digger.

That’s the only way. Not exactly required to survive, but if you’re looking to do your best and have a well-coordinated team, it’s fun to strive for. The worst part is leaving one player to speed up the digger extraction — you’ll be short-handed, so use everything at your disposal to fight off the incoming hordes.

And that’s all the beginner and expert tips we’ve got so far. Have your own tips? Let us know in the comments!