The world

Pollution is played in three kinds of places. You live in one, roam the second and raid the third.

Place	What stays	What you do there
Home region	Everything: it is yours	Build your base, keep your stash, craft, grow food, sleep and heal. It is fairly safe, but hordes and raiders come at night (see base building).
Open world	Everything you change: felled trees, dropped items, bodies, boats	A sea of islands to explore and scavenge. Gather wood and ore, meet traders and factions, hunt, and find the raid sites.
Raid sites	Only what you left there; the rest is new each visit	Towns, industrial parks, police stations, hospitals, bunkers, labs, launch sites, airports and nuclear power plants with the best loot and the most enemies. You must reach an extraction point to keep what you carry.

Home region ──helicopter──► Open world ──gate──► Raid site
     ▲                          │                    │
     └────helicopter────────────┴─────extract────────┘

You leave home by helicopter and come back the same way: call it with a Smoke Grenade or from a landing pad. Out in the world you walk, or row a boat between islands. A raid site stands in the open world as a group of buildings; walk through its gate to go in. See travel and raids.

Day and night

The clock runs 90 times faster than real time: a game day lasts 16 real minutes, and an in-game hour 40 real seconds. A new game starts at 06:00 on the first day of spring.

• Night is from 18:00 to 06:00. You see much less, zombies are stronger and faster, and more of them roam (see seeing in the dark).
• Temperature drops at night and is lowest around 03:00.
• Seasons turn every 7 in-game days, a 28-day year (see seasons).
• Time skips when you sleep in a bed at home, and when you die in the open world (you wake at home the next morning).

In this section

Islands and climatesEight climates over a sea of islands SeasonsFour seasons of 7 days, snow and ice WeatherRain, storms, fog, snow, dust and ash Raids and deathSites, extraction, the helicopter, your body LootWhat every container can hold The mapGPS, minimap, pins, cards and the radio TravelWalking, boats and the helicopter ThresholdsThe anomalies the lab once held The InstituteWho held them, and what went wrong