Days Gone · Progression Route
Two years after the outbreak, on a bike that’s always one tank from empty. A wife nobody can prove is dead, freakers around every corner, and a road that refuses to end. The journey, tracked.
Nothing in Days Gone is level-gated. What decides how hard it feels is two economies that are easy to misread. First, credits and trust are per camp with no transfer between them, so spending badly strands you. Second, melee weapons are destroyed at zero durability, not merely unusable. Take Focused Shot with your first skill point and Field Repairs with your second, buy Saddlebags before anything else on the bike, clear ambush camps first because they reveal the rest of the map, and clear infestations because they are what unlock fast travel. Build toward the final act early: the story forces a 500-freaker horde on you and will not let you skip it. Survival is what improves your ability to operate out there; Skills & Gear is what improves Deacon, down to the secret ending that needs all 30 NERO sites. The case does not close the way you expect, and what Deacon is really chasing out there is hope. Every tick saves on this device as you go.
Focused Shot with your first point, Field Repairs with your second. Saddlebags is the first bike part you buy. Credits and trust are per camp, so never bank them at a camp that does not sell what you want. Clear ambush camps to reveal map icons and infestation nests to unlock fast travel. Fight hordes in daylight, and run in straight lines.
Nothing in the campaign is level-gated. There is no rank check on any mission. What actually limits you is supply: fuel in the tank, scrap for the bike, a melee weapon with durability left, and enough throwables to survive a crowd. Every recommendation in this guide is really about protecting that supply line.
Light. Systems and the opening region only. The full four-act route is on Storylines; the bike, camps and NERO on Survival; skills, crafting and collectibles on Skills & Gear.
Items marked ↔ shared also live on another tab — tick them anywhere and they stay in sync.
Because each camp has its own wallet, saving up "for a good gun" at Copeland's or Diamond Lake is throwing money away: neither sells weapons at all. Copeland credits can only ever buy bike parts, fuel, repairs and paint, which is also why you should spend them freely rather than hoard them.
Trust is not a generic reward ladder. It is purely a gate on that camp's shelf. Once you have bought everything Copeland's tier I stock offers, further Copeland trust buys you nothing. The exception worth knowing: Copeland's and Hot Springs join the final battle if both are at Trust 3, which is a genuine reason to finish those two.
| Skill | Tree | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Focused Shot | Ranged L1 | ★ Gates the entire Focus slow-motion system for firearms. Without it your ammo economy collapses. First point, no debate. |
| Field Repairs | Melee L1 | ★ Melee weapons are destroyed at zero durability. This is the only thing that stops it. |
| Hawkeyed | Survival L1 | Plants on the minimap. Plants are credits, trust, cocktails and bolts. |
| Green Thumb | Survival L2 | Doubles plant yield. With Hawkeyed this is the fastest trust farm in the game. |
| Thief in the Night | Survival L2 | Near-silent movement. Stealth is how you clear camps without spending bullets. |
| Ear to the Ground | Survival L3 | Enemies outlined through walls. Turns every ambush camp into a solved puzzle. |
| Monkey Wrench | Survival L4 | Halves the scrap cost of bike repair, which is your tightest resource. |
Not because it fights better — because plants and meat convert into credits and trust at any camp you choose, which is the only part of the trust economy you fully control. Region activities like hordes and nests credit whichever camp owns that territory whether you like it or not.
Reaching a level 3 skill requires buying two level 2 skills in that same tree. Players chase one shiny melee skill, pay the filler tax in the wrong tree, then cannot afford Survival L3/L4 for another ten levels. Pick the tree you want depth in and pay its tax deliberately. Also: Juice Up, Hyperfocus and The Alchemist all buff cocktails, and cocktail recipes unlock later from specific bunkers — buying the buff first is dead value.
| Type | Answer |
|---|---|
| Swarmers | The horde rank and file. Fire, funnels and straight-line running. Never a fair fight. |
| Newts | Scrawny, perch on roofs, pounce. They only attack if your health is low. Shoot them off allies — this is a hard-fail condition in two missions. |
| Screamers | Call everything nearby. Kill them first, at range, before they open their mouth. |
| Breakers | Huge, armoured, slow. Explosives and distance, or leave. |
| Reachers | Late-game mutation. Fast and durable. Focus and headshots. |
| Ragers | Infected bears. Never melee. Keep terrain between you and it. |
Start at Horse Lake or O'Leary Mountain in Cascade — 25 freakers, the smallest in the game. Go in daylight, when the horde is holed up in one known place with a usable choke point. At night they are dispersed and hunting. Do not touch anything above roughly 100 until you have saddlebags, a drum-magazine automatic, Napalm Molotovs, attractor bombs and a planned escape line on the ground.
Everything on this tab improves your ability to operate in the world: how far the bike goes, which shelf each camp opens, where the 30 injectors are, and which of the 37 hordes you are actually ready for.
Fuel drains constantly and the stock tank is small. Refuel free and forever at O'Leary Mountain in Act I, at any gas pump icon, or from red cans in the world — cans and pumps both regenerate. Coast downhill with the engine off. Repair with scrap.
| Camp | Sells — and nowhere else does |
|---|---|
| Copeland's | All tier I parts, plus Gas Tank II. The only tier I source in the game. |
| Lost Lake | Exhaust II (highest in game) and Fork I (the only fork upgrade). Engine II, Frame II, Gas Tank III, Saddlebags II/III, Nitrous II, Suspension I. |
| Diamond Lake | Engine III, Gas Tank V, Saddlebags IV, Nitrous III, Frame III, Tyre III, Suspension II, Radiator. Best in game. |
| Hot Springs, Wizard Island | No mechanic at all. |
Exhaust. A quieter bike lets you ride close to camps, nests and hordes without waking them. Everybody buys engine and nitrous first and then wonders why every approach turns into a fight.
Trust caps at Level 3 per camp and gates that camp's shelf, nothing else. Thresholds are reported as roughly 5,000 / 12,500 / 25,000, though only one source publishes numbers, so treat them as indicative.
Hordes, nests and ambush camps credit whichever camp owns that territory — you cannot redirect them. But freaker ears, meat, plants and rescued survivors go wherever you choose. Bank those and spend them at the camp you are trying to push over a threshold. Sending a survivor to one camp never penalises the others.
Diamond Lake and Wizard Island share the Crater Lake region and compete for it. No source documents how region activities split trust between them. Assume nothing, and use ears and turn-ins to steer whichever one you actually want.
Everything on this tab improves Deacon himself: the three skill trees, the 30 injectors that raise his caps, what he can craft, and the collectibles worth his time.
Three trees — Melee, Ranged, Survival — and you cannot max all of them in one run. NERO injectors are the only permanent stat increase: 30 injectors, ten per stat, taking each from 100 to a cap of 350.
| Set | Count | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| NERO Intel 🔗 | 52 | Yes. The only set worth completing. Carries the outbreak plot and the secret ending's context, and you pick most of it up while doing NERO sites anyway. |
| Historical Markers 🔗 | 43 | No mechanical reward. Pure percentage. |
| Tourism 🔗 | 28 | No mechanical reward. |
| Radio Free Oregon 🔗 | 20 | No reward, decent worldbuilding. |
| Anarchist Cairns | 12 | No reward, but knocking down 12 is an achievement. They look like scenery. |
| Lab Notes | 6 | No reward, plot-relevant. |
| Markers, sermons, speeches, guitarists, plants | — | No mechanical reward at all. |
541 items looted from human corpses. Human enemies become rare after the credits, so this is the single achievement that genuinely punishes leaving it late. Loot every marauder, Ripper and militiaman as you go and keep inventory space free. The 989 freaker ears grind is the same idea with a longer runway.
Both story lockouts — after Lost Lake and after Crater Lake — are temporary and lift once the story advances. The credits close nothing: all six regions reopen, every horde gets auto-marked, and New Game Plus carries skills, weapons, bike parts, injectors, credits, trust and collectible progress forward.
All three ship with the Steam version at no extra cost.
A comfortable run finishes the story around 50 to 60 hours with two camps at Trust 3, a tier III bike, most of the 30 injectors, and a large chunk of the 37 hordes still standing. Then the map opens fully and the hordes get marked, which is when most people discover the game they actually wanted.
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