Getting started

Pollution is a top-down shooter about surviving in a polluted world. You build up a home, head out into a persistent open world to explore and scavenge, and push into raid sites for the best loot. You have to get out alive to keep what you carry.

Three places

Place	What it is	What you do there
Home region	Your own map, fully saved	Build, store loot in the stash, craft, grow food, sleep and heal. Mostly safe, but hordes and raiders can come at night.
Open world	A persistent world of islands, saved as you change it	Explore, loot, chop trees and mine ore, meet factions and traders, hunt. Weather and pollution move across it.
Raid sites	Generated anew each visit: towns, factories, police stations, hospitals, bunkers, labs, launch sites, airports and nuclear power plants, on the planet abandoned colonies and the source, and in the rift the lost expedition’s camps	The best loot and the most danger. Reach an extraction point before the timer runs out.

A run

• Gear up at home from the stash. Bring food, water, bandages and ammunition.
• Travel out into the open world. Watch your needs, the weather and the air.
• Enter a raid site, loot what you can carry, and get to an extraction point (or call the helicopter with a smoke grenade).
• Bring the loot home, stash it, craft and build, sleep, and go again.

Dying

If you die out there you lose what you carried, but not your home, your stash or what you have learned. Your body stays where you fell, so you may get your gear back; see raids and death.

Everything is simulated

• Damage hits body parts. Blood is your health, and wounds bleed until treated; see wounds.
• Enemies see and hear you: gunshots carry far, walls muffle sound, darkness hides you.
• Weather and seasons change the temperature; cold and wet drain you. See seasons.
• Pollution spreads across the map, poisons water and kills plants and people. See pollution.

Next: starting a new game and the controls.