Maps

Eleven Zombies maps ship with Black Ops 3, and the thing that actually separates them is not the theme or the boss. It is how long the map keeps you unarmed. On one of them you buy four doors and pull a lever. On another you have to find five objects, perform four rituals with them, and then perform a fifth ritual on top of the four you already did, all before the upgrade machine will even show itself.

That gap is the useful way to sort them. Call it the setup cost: everything that has to happen between the moment you spawn and the moment you are holding an upgraded weapon with a full perk bar. This guide walks the eleven maps in order of that cost, cheapest first, and points at the detailed guide for every step along the way.

The setup ladder

Two things gate every map: turning the power on, and reaching the Pack-a-Punch machine. The table below is the whole roster measured against those two jobs. Read it top to bottom and the difficulty curve of the Zombies mode across three years of DLC is visible in a single column.

Maps that only want your points

The four remastered classics at the top of the ladder ask for nothing you cannot buy. There is no crafting bench, no ritual, no part hunt. You farm early rounds, you spend, and the map opens. What varies is the size of the bill.

Nacht der Untoten

The oldest map in the series has no setup at all, which is exactly why it survives as a corner of Revelations rather than a standalone survival run. Our one guide for it covers the exploit that still works there: the under-the-map glitch, which needs at least two players, the Near Death Experience GobbleGum, and the couch blocking the upstairs debris left exactly where you found it.

Shi No Numa

Shi No Numa's only real expense is its traps, and they are the reason for its hardest trophy. The Flogger in the central hub runs 750 points, and each of the four huts around it holds an Electric trap costing 1,000. Killing with three different traps inside one round is the whole ask, so budget somewhere near 2,750 to 3,000 before you start. Our It's a Trap trophy guide lays out a route that opens only the paths you need.

Kino der Toten

Kino is the map most people picture when they picture Zombies, and its setup is a straight line: four doors at 750, 1,000, 1,250 and 1,250, which comes to 4,250 points, and then a red lever behind the stage curtain. Our power guide gives the route door by door. From there the Pack-a-Punch is a two-stop errand: prime the teleporter, run to the pad in the spawn room, come back and ride it. Upgrading costs 5,000 and a re-pack costs 2,500.

Because Kino is cheap to set up, it is the map where people actually plan a loadout, so we have a best weapons ranking for it. It is also the only place the Thundergun turns up. Everything else on the map is optional flavour: upgraded Monkey Bombs through a Mystery Box trick, the three meteorites that unlock the 115 song without any power at all, the film reels and radios, and the knock-code Easter egg that ends in a hide and seek game with five dolls.

Call of the Dead

Roughly 2,750 points of debris stands between the spawn and the control room at the top of the wrecked ship, and the switch is beside the door once you are in. After that, Call of the Dead is one long quest rather than a survival map, which is why our single guide for it is the full eight-step Easter egg. Half of it is optional: steps one, two, three and eight are the solo path, and steps four through seven only matter if you want the co-op version. The reward at the end is the Wunderwaffe DG-2.

Maps that make you stand somewhere

The middle of the ladder adds a second kind of cost. Points still open the doors, but the machine will not appear until players physically occupy the right spots, or until a linked circuit is completed by running between two ends of the map. Nothing here needs crafting, but everything here needs a route.

Shangri-La

The stairs to Shangri-La's Pack-a-Punch are missing until the pressure plates are held down, and how many you need depends on how many of you there are: one plate solo, all four in a full lobby. The catch is on the far side of that. Once the last plate settles and the stairs rise, water starts filling the area and you have about a minute to get up there before the route seals.

The map's wonder weapon does not care about any of this. The Shrink Ray, properly the 31-79 JGb215, only comes out of the Mystery Box at 950 points a spin, and packing it turns it into the Fractalizer, which stretches the shrink effect from five seconds to fifteen. The long quest here is the Focusing Stone, fourteen steps of gongs, geysers and time travel, and the map's nine radios unlock in step with it rather than sitting on shelves waiting.

The Giant

The Giant is the cleanest teleporter map in the game and a good first pick for anyone learning the mode. Two doors at 700 apiece and 1,000 points of debris put you on the second floor, from which you drop into the courtyard and switch on the generators. Then you link the three teleporters to the mainframe, each one a thirty-second sprint back to the spawn area, and the door behind the mainframe opens onto the machine. Our Pack-a-Punch guide has the location of all three and the table of five alternate ammo types a 2,500-point re-pack can roll.

Linking teleporters is also how the map pays you. It hands out a random power-up each time, it deploys a free perk bottle at the mainframe, and doing it three times with a Cymbal Monkey thrown in melts the snow over the sixth perk machine. Unlocking the machine door is also the first move toward the Annihilator, a special-slot revolver that needs an upgraded gun, a shot control panel and three hidden toys. Beyond that the map is collectibles: ten blueprint fragments, eight radio sets carrying eleven messages, and a short hide and seek Easter egg.

Der Eisendrache

Der Eisendrache charges 4,500 points in doors on the way to its switch, at 750, 1,000, 1,250 and 1,500, and our power guide walks that line and finishes at the Juggernog machine underground. What makes the map sit higher on the ladder is that the Pack-a-Punch arrives in pieces: you visit three teleport pads and send a part on from each, and the third trip drops you at a rocket pad in orbit with the finished machine waiting by the western rail.

The rest of Der Eisendrache is the deepest weapon layer in the game. Feeding eight kills to each of the three stone dragons puts the Wrath of the Ancients bow in the Knight's Tomb inside the first handful of rounds, and each of its four elemental upgrades is a separate multi-step quest. A second wonder weapon, the Ragnarok DG-4, needs a Panzersoldat kill around round twelve, a 1,000-point Death Ray activation, and a rocket-launch window. Both feed the fourteen-step main quest, whose tightest moment is the wisp step: four sparks shot inside one round, drawn from eight possible spawns.

Maps that hide the machine inside something

Two of the later maps do not put the Pack-a-Punch in a room at all. It lives inside a creature, and the setup is the fight that opens it. There is nothing to build on either map, which makes them feel lighter than they read, but neither will let you upgrade a weapon in the first few rounds.

Revelations

There is no crafting on Revelations and no lever either. Instead you override four Corruption Engines at the ritual table for 500 points each, holding off zombies for about half a minute at every one, and each override opens a portal into another map's fragment. With all four green, the Apothicon circling the map can be knocked out of the sky from the terminal above Nacht der Untoten, and the machine is inside its abdomen, behind a handful of yellow orbs.

Revelations is stitched from pieces of older maps, so its perk layout is scattered across all of them and is the fullest perk list we have for the game. The Dragon Shield here needs three parts from three different fragments and arrives already upgraded, so the Pack-a-Punch has nothing to add to it. Its four secret melee weapons come from timed round challenges rather than the map itself, and the main quest is the longest in the game at seventeen steps.

Gorod Krovi

Gorod Krovi starts easily and then makes you earn it. One lever in the Dragon Command Center powers the map, after which zombies begin dropping Code Cylinders in three districts. Each cylinder feeds the Groph Module in its own district, each module calls down a pod that has to be charged with kills, and each pod yields a Dragon Network Circuit. Slot all three into the Dragon Network machine and you can summon a dragon and climb onto its neck, and the machine is waiting where it puts you down.

That whole sequence is also the opening of everything else here. The Gauntlet of Siegfried begins in the Pack-a-Punch area with a Dragon Egg tucked above a metal chute and runs seven steps to a grave in the spawn. The Dragon Strike upgrade is the one quest here you can measure in kills: roughly forty with the controller, then a burnt flag for every player in the lobby, then lockdown rounds until the controller's four lights fill. The three vodka bottles behind the Dead Ended song give no on-screen confirmation, and the main quest runs ten steps to a fight with Nikolai.

Maps that make you fetch

The bottom two rungs are the expensive ones. On both maps the power switch itself is a fetch quest, and on both the Pack-a-Punch is a second fetch quest layered on top. If you have half an hour and a full lobby, these are the maps worth the evening. If you have twenty minutes, they are the wrong pick.

Zetsubou No Shima

Zetsubou's power is spread across three generators, in Lab A, in Lab B, and underwater in the main bunker, and none of them take a switch. Each one has to be filled from a glowing bucket carried from a pool of irradiated 115 water, and a generator you light on its own runs for five minutes and then dies. Only lighting all three makes it stick, and the bunker is locked until the two labs are already burning. Our power guide covers the order that works.

The Pack-a-Punch is then three machine tools: one behind the webbing you cleared for the generator, one from the cocoons in the western room, and one in the water past Mule Kick. With all three in the pumps, the water drains and the machine surfaces. The same buckets that powered the map run its strangest system, the plant beds, where one seed watered for three straight rounds gives a different reward depending on which colour of water you used.

Weapon work here is a chain rather than a hunt. The riot shield comes first because it improves your odds on everything after it, and it can be electrified once the map's challenges are done. The KT-4 needs a random green drop, a spider trapped in a cage, and a plant from the deepest underwater dead end, and the Shima Masamune upgrade needs three more items that each depend on something you built earlier. The buildables guide collects every part list on the map, including the gas mask and the Skull of Nan Sapwe, and the main quest ties all of it into ten steps and a lift ride.

Shadows of Evil

The launch map is still the most demanding thing in the game, and it is demanding before you have fired a shot. Everything on Shadows of Evil runs through Beast Mode, entered at the purple fountains and lasting twenty-five seconds a go, and in a full lobby you only get one transformation per round. The power alone is three fuses hidden on three district catwalks, carried to a box in the rift, and the reward for that is a Civil Protector you can call for 2,000 points rather than a straightforward power-up.

The Pack-a-Punch is the reason the map sits at the bottom of this list. You need the Summoning Key from a crate in the spawn alley, then four ritual items, one per district, each behind a crate only the beast can break. Every item has to be carried to its own ritual room and defended through a wave, and each ritual returns one Gateworm. You can only hold one at a time. Four Gateworms go into four goblets in the rift, and a fifth interaction at the altar finally reveals the machine.

The rest of the map is layered on that same beast economy. Three of the perk machines rotate between districts every match, and the broken bottle outside each district gate tells you which one is inside, with red pointing at Juggernog. The buildables list is the longest on any map, covering the rocket shield, the wonder weapon parts and the Elemental Sword's symbol puzzle. If none of that appeals, the round skip lets you shoot the Shadowman on the fire escape and jump straight to round ten with 16,000 points in hand, and the main quest runs eight steps, the last two of which need a full four-player team.

What the setup actually buys

The payoff for all that work is the wonder weapon, and the same ordering holds: the maps that ask least give you the least reliable weapon. Kino hands its best gun to whoever gets lucky at the Mystery Box, while Der Eisendrache and Zetsubou give you weapons you can plan around because you built them yourself.

Perk prices do not move

One thing stays fixed no matter which map you load. Perk prices are identical everywhere, so a points target you learn on one map carries over to all eleven. What changes is where the machines are and whether they sit still, and only Shadows of Evil shuffles three of them between matches.

The layer you are allowed to skip

Every map carries a collectible set that changes nothing about your run. They unlock songs, audio logs and lore images, and most of them can be done in the first few rounds while you are still farming points. If you only want one, the meteorites on Kino are the cheapest, because they need no power and no doors.

Main quests, shortest to longest

If you want the storyline rather than the survival, the length of the main quest is worth checking before you commit an evening. The Giant's is a short scavenger hunt. Revelations is a seventeen-step marathon that expects you to have finished several of the others first. Shadows of Evil sits in between on step count but is the only one that hard-stops a solo player partway through, since its last two steps need four people at four train stations.

Every map guide in one place

Shadows of Evil: power, Pack-a-Punch, ritual items, buildables, perks, Juggernog, round skip, Easter egg.

The Giant: Pack-a-Punch, perks, Annihilator, blueprints, radios, Easter egg.

Der Eisendrache: power, Pack-a-Punch, stone dragons, bow upgrades, Ragnarok DG-4, wisps, Easter egg.

Zetsubou No Shima: power, Pack-a-Punch, buildables, shield, KT-4, Masamune, plants, Easter egg.

Gorod Krovi: Pack-a-Punch, Gauntlet of Siegfried, Dragon Strike, secret song, Easter egg.

Revelations: Pack-a-Punch, perks, Dragon Shield, melee weapons, Easter egg.

Zombies Chronicles: Kino der Toten's power, Pack-a-Punch, best weapons, Monkey Bombs, meteorites, reels and radios and Easter egg; Shangri-La's Pack-a-Punch, Shrink Ray, Focusing Stone and radios; plus Call of the Dead, Shi No Numa and Nacht der Untoten.

Whichever map you land on, the systems underneath are shared. The mechanics guide covers the three currencies Zombies runs on, and the Black Ops 3 hub ties the mode back to the multiplayer half of the game.