Dying Light

When Techland's Tymon Smektała explained the first Dying Light's success to the Official Xbox Magazine, in the interview our news page reports, he named three pillars: natural parkour, brutal first-person melee, and the day and night cycle. Our older pages on the game were written years apart and for different reasons, but they sort onto those pillars without much force, and the three newest fill in what they left out. The melee pillar is the weapons and equipment guide, the blueprints page and the crafting components page. Parkour is the poster challenges and a couple of rooftops on the easter eggs page. The night ran thinly through all of them until it got a page to itself. This guide takes the pillars in turn, then the expansion that retires one of them, then who you can play it with, then the things Techland hid, then the numbers Techland gave, and says where to begin. The three items pages are read together, by the element each blueprint adds, in our blueprints, components and posters guide.

Melee: what you swing and what you bolt onto it

The weapons guide is the place to start, and its first rule is that you carry four weapons at once and should mix them, its own suggestion being a rifle, a two-hander, a one-hander and a free choice. Quality comes in five colours, White through Green, Blue and Violet to Orange, and a higher colour means better damage, durability and handling and more upgrade slots. The guide then walks twenty weapon types from the axes to the Wrench, with opinions: the Khopesh arrives around the midpoint and the Machete near the end and both are worth keeping, the Cleaver breaks too fast to deserve a mod, the Military Shovel is not worth carrying, Knives shine at close range once you have the Dodge skill, and the Baseball Bat is the one weapon the quartermaster gives away. Guns are the strongest things in the game and the scarcest to feed; the guide's advice is headshots and short bursts.

Improvement runs on two rails. Upgrade Mods, 21 of them named from Assassin to Titan, go into a weapon's slots and raise damage, durability or handling by a level or two. Blueprints need no slot, just parts, and add an element: Burning, Toxicity, Bleeding, Electricity or Impact. Our blueprints page lists 86 recipes, 59 of them for weapons, 24 lying in the Slums and 14 in Old Town, with the rest bought, earned from side quests and escorts, or bundled with DLC. Read together, the recipes give up a pattern the pages never state outright: every Electricity recipe contains Batteries, every Burning recipe Aerosol, every Bleeding recipe a Blade and every Impact recipe Chemicals, which is the spine of our items guide. The components page supplies the last link, the container each part comes out of, with toolkits named for six of the twenty and a reminder that a spent weapon can be dismantled for Metal Parts, the one part in 66 of the 86 recipes.

Parkour: nine posters and two rooftops

The posters are Old Town's parkour exam. Nine of them appear once you reach the district, each a timed task, and the page sorts them into three climbs (a tower north of the centre, a tower in the far east taken from the back through a window, and a van-to-rooftop route by the blue structure under the bridge), two races (one across the first gap on the cables, one through Toads that you keep off you with Firecrackers rather than fight), three fights and a dive for six boxes. Each pays 10,000 Survivor XP and the page's one piece of general advice for the races is to put points into Agility. Finish all nine and Bozak appears on the map holding the Exploding Throwing Stars blueprint. Two easter eggs are parkour puzzles in disguise: the Korek Machete is a blue toolbox on the roof of a C-shaped building at the north end of the Slums, kicked around 75 times, and World 1-1 is a pipe on the last rooftop in Old Town's southwest corner that opens into a level where you kill by jumping on things.

The night: Volatiles, UV and Night Sense

The night has a page of its own now. Our Volatiles page takes the enemy that owns it, the way a pursuit escalates from the moment you are spotted, and the six things that break one, from a safe zone perimeter to sunrise. The older pages supply the kit that goes around it. The weapons guide explains that the day and night cycle is not optional, that the UV Flashlight and Flares both light the dark and disrupt some infected, and that Volatiles, which only come out after dark, cannot bear either. The blueprints page puts a Flares recipe behind the Firebug side quest and a Night Vision Booster, one Common Plant and three Underwater Algae, behind the Boosters skill. The components page tells you to lean on Night Sense to pick parts out of containers. And the first poster challenge is a night fight: a balcony, a double-barrelled shotgun with infinite shells and Volatiles climbing toward you until the timer runs out.

The Countryside, where one of the pillars stops working

The Following, in February 2016, added ground that roughly doubles the combined area of Harran's two districts, and the first thing it does with that space is retire parkour as the way you get around. Our page on Dying Light: The Following covers what takes over: a buggy you fuel, repair and upgrade across five component types rather than simply drive, a cult that releases its story in six ranks of trust rather than on a quest marker, and a tougher blue Volatile in a dark that you can now thin out by clearing nests. It also carries the two additions that followed you back into Harran, the Legend levels that give a maxed character somewhere left to go and the Nightmare difficulty that stretches the dark out and drains stamina on every action. One thing the expansion is not responsible for: the six DLC recipes on our blueprints page come from separate weapon packs rather than from this.

Playing it with somebody else

Harran holds four players and the campaign itself is the co-op mode, but the invitation only travels inside one platform family. Our cross-platform page answers the question pairing by pairing, including the part that surprises people, which is that Steam, GOG and Epic count as one platform between them while every other wall holds. It also covers Be the Zombie, the invasion mode that began as a pre-order bonus and ended up free, and what happens to a character when somebody buys the game a second time on another machine.

What Techland hid

The easter eggs page lists twelve secrets, and half of them pay out in developer blueprints, which is why anyone searching for secret or legendary weapons ends up there. Expcalibur is a sword in a corpse on an island southeast of the Slums, held for around two minutes until the body burns away. The Korek Machete and World 1-1 are the rooftops above. The Sick Bomb is a checkers board by the crane on the Tower roof, played one move per visit until you win. The Stasis Field Projector is a pink teddy bear in the kindergarten above Rupert's rooms in the Magic Fortress, prodded a few dozen times until it explodes. The Left Ball of Glova is two stones, one on a ledge behind the tilted tower in northwest Old Town and one on the beach southwest of the museum, set into the eye sockets of the skull in Ishaq's apartment. The other six are jokes: zombies that dance when you flip a switch in the second hangar during Werewolf Escort, a wall of missing-person photos outside the Tower, a cave in the Slums' northeast built to look like Destiny's loot cave, a guitar in your room that only sounds good after you read the book in the school, a Ray McCall figure from the pawn shop in the Gunslinger quest, and a Clicker from The Last of Us behind an elevator door in the Town Hall during the Bunker mission.

The numbers Techland gave, ahead of the fifth anniversary

Our one news page on the game was written as the fifth anniversary approached and the sequel was still in development. Its figure is 17 million players, up from the 13 million copies Techland had reported in 2018, so at least four million more in the interval. The rest of the piece is about what the sequel would keep and change: the same three pillars, twice as many parkour moves, more tactical melee, and a story shaped by player choice in place of what the writer calls the original's weak one. It places Dying Light 2 fifteen years after the first game with a new lead, Aiden Caldwell, on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC and the then-unreleased PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, and expected it in the first half of 2020.

Where to start

Read the weapons and equipment guide first, because the rarity colours, the four slots and the two upgrade rails frame everything else. Open the blueprints page when you have a weapon worth improving and the components page when a recipe names a part you have not seen. The posters wait until Old Town. Save the easter eggs for a second run, when you know the Slums and Old Town well enough to find a toolbox on a particular roof. Read the Volatiles page before your first night outdoors rather than after it, and open The Following once Harran is behind you and the question is whether the expansion is a new game or a victory lap.

FAQ

How many blueprints does Dying Light have?

Our page lists 86: 59 weapon recipes, 14 throwables and 13 pieces of equipment.

Are there secret weapons in Dying Light?

Six of the twelve easter eggs on our page hand over a developer blueprint, among them Expcalibur, the Korek Machete and the Stasis Field Projector.

What are the weapon rarities?

Five, from White through Green, Blue and Violet to Orange, with each step adding better stats and more upgrade slots.

How many poster challenges are there?

Nine, all in Old Town, each worth 10,000 Survivor XP, with the Exploding Throwing Stars blueprint from Bozak after the last.

Is Dying Light cross-platform?

No. Techland rules out cross-platform play and save transfer, though Steam, GOG and Epic players share one pool. Our cross-platform page has the full grid.

How do you get away from Volatiles?

Get inside a safe zone, stay out of sight long enough for them to lose interest, or hold out until sunrise. A UV flashlight beam buys the seconds in between.