Billionaire’s bunker island. Be the security guy with a gun that realizes that money doesn’t matter when civilization falls.
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Costco.
Small number of secure entrances. A lifetime supply of batteries and solar kits. Tons of shelf stable food and drink. Clothing. Tacky home decor to make the apocalypse feel more homey.
It would be great.
It would be great if there wasn't thousands of other people in your city who had the exact same idea.
Fully stocked pharmacy, comfy mattresses, tvs and video games, car batteries and inverters to run the entertainment, and sometimes even citrus trees to prevent scurvy.
Downside is that without power to the building you have a lot of work to do to dump all the fresh food before it stinks up the place. That dairy cooler alone would get disgusting real quick.
Assuming zombies are incapable of any higher reasoning, somewhere only accessible by climbing up a ladder or rope.
It works in PZ, it might work IRL.
Climbing or swimming. Steal a luxery yacht and some solar panels, soil, and seeds, and you have a floating homestead.
Read The Zombie Survival Guide for why water isn't much of a hinderance to zombies.
It's "hole up," by the way.
Maybe they're asking where you want to commit armed robbery first?
I think its fine.
Maybe yours is the true idiom but im not what you would call a literary legalist.
It entirely depends on what kind of zombies.
As long as they aren't evil magic zombies, I think the zombie threat is overrated.
As magic keeps those muscles moving, dehydration, infections, rigor mortis, and decaying flesh don't really matter. After all, the whole point of magic is to violate the laws of physics and chemistry. With the other types though, decaying flesh does matter, which means that the problem will solve itself within a few days. Just keep the doors locked and windows closed in the meanwhile.
If you happen to be outdoors camping when the outbreak occurs, you don't really have any doors and windows to keep you protected. If you have enough food to keep on camping for a few more days, you might be fine. After all, zombies are in the city, where there are lots of people. You're out in the woods, so you might miss the whole zombie apocalypse when you come back home a week later.
The larger threat is based on if they are virus zombies, and not living-dead zombies. To your point, living-dead zombies will just deteriorate are die off. But virus zomies have a chance of still being able to survive for long periods of time. There's also increased threat depending on how the virus is transmitted, it's lifespan outside the body, mutations, so forth.
The way viral zombies are depicted in movies and games, they seem to lack basic survival instincts. That’s going to make them vulnerable to dehydration, which will stop their conquest within a few days. Infected wounds are the next problem they’ll face if they somehow manage to drink enough water.
if the zombies are raised by a necromancers, we will have more problems. if its just the run of the mill pandemic virus.
Ok, fast zombies
There are a lot more considerations.
On a tropical island somewhere. It might take a while to clear the whole island, but after that, it's a pretty good way to ride out the apocalypse...
I was just thinking given the choice I'd kick Zuck out of his apocalypse shelter on Maui. It's gotta have everything you'd need and Maui's pretty sparsely populated so there shouldn't be too many zombies to start with.
I get the concept, but:
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Will you have the security benefits that I think are being assumed? If your threat is human, then, yeah, being on an island is a big deal. But...if zombies don't need to breathe, can they just walk under the sea to an island?
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Setting aside the direct issue of, say, being chomped by a zombie, one of the larger, immediate problems you face in a situation where you have infrastructure break down
which I imagine a zombie apocalypse might cause
is loss of potable water. Islands may not be the best place to go to get fresh water (though you could get salt water, and I imagine that one could use, oh, solar stills or whatever to desalinate).
There was a point in time where US military war planners did up a zombie apocalypse plan
to have a fun theme, but the problems that a zombie apocalypse would pose aren't terribly far off the same kind of problems that you have to solve when doing war planning. Drinking water access played a prominent role.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CONOP_8888
>CONPLAN 8888, also known as Counter-Zombie Dominance, is a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Strategic Command CONOP document that describes a plan for the United States and its military to defend against zombies in a fictional military training scenario.[1][2][3][4][5][6]
https://www.stratcom.mil/Portals/8/Documents/FOIA/CONPLAN_8888-11.pdf
> ii . (U) The following environmental factors apply to humans in this plan:
>
>I. (U) Rain will be vitally important to human survival. If civil water supplies are cut off, humans will have to rely on other means to obtain water. Ground water from streams and rivers will be unreliable since it will be difficult to determine if ground water is a vector for zombie infection.
>b. (U) Operational COG #2: Potable water sources (PWS)
>
>i. (U) Zombies do not drink water, but humans do. Humans typically cannot survive longer than 10 days without fresh water. Zombies will likely be drawn to potable water sources by the presence of human food sources that zombies prey on . Zombies can be expected to contaminate potable water sources with various contaminants during these attacks further limiting the supply of available potable water for humans.
>iv. (U) CR #4-Safe food, water, and fuel distribution network: Ultimately, healthy human populations and the forces protecting them will require the means to acquire, purify, and distribute foodstuffs , water and fuels for heat and machine operations. Failure to maintain security supporting the distribution networks and nodes for food, water and fuel will compromise the longevity of healthy humans; decrease the amount of time that humans can remain sheltered in place or barricaded from zombie threats and could cause competition for resources that will
undermine law and order. If compromised, the capabilities in this CR could undermine all the CCs in this plan.
But…if zombies don’t need to breathe, can they just walk under the sea to an island?
Sure. Some will absolutely end up there, but it would be far less than on the mainland.
one of the larger, immediate problems you face in a situation where you have infrastructure break down
I was thinking of the islands off of the coast where I live. Most of which are large enough to have small fresh water streams.
if zombies don't need to breathe, can they just walk under the sea to an island?
I wonder what happens if a shark takes a bite out of a zombie? Does the shark become a zombie? Or does the zombie become a shark?
hold up
And a bone apple tea to you!

a 1950s school building. they were built like castles. have wide open lawns and high towers. windows were at least a story above grade, and the glass had that mesh embedded inside.
any windows or doors that are at grade can easily be barricaded or already are with high grade steel cages.
bonus if there's an internal courtyard that can be used as a field for growing crops, water retention area, and just an outdoor exercise area.
schools already have a cafeteria and kitchen, showers, fitness and entertainment, first-aid and medical, an entire library, science/biological labs. many schools have also been retrofitted with solar panels as well.
a school is really the best place to hold up for any kind of natural disaster.
In any country with hot wet air. All insects would do a party in any Zombi near there.
Either that or someplace with bears, wolves or any other fauna that could "clean the place".
Flies and other insects would eat the flesh pretty quickly. No muscles, no movement, right? I think the zombies would stop walking within two days.
If they're evil magic zombies, you would still have a walking skeleton problem though. I suggest you bring a cleric with spells that inflict radiant damage. Bludgeoning damage (maces, hammers etc.) work pretty well too. Paladins and clerics and also use the turn undead ability, which will come in handy.
"Secure" as in "fortify it against zombies and potentially other threats"
Or as in "I can get to it and lay some sort of claim to it"
Because if it's the former, we probably need to put some restrictions on the scenario. That's really the hard part of this and we're just assuming we can do it, and your best bet is probably to secure as big of an area as possible. A city, a country, a whole hemisphere, or hell, the entire world or the solar system if we're being really silly.
If we're going with the latter, where we find a building or property of some kind and call "dibs" and the rest of it is up to us
I think a tech school is a pretty good bet, at least thinking of my local tech schools.
They have some fully stocked workshops with pretty much any tools and materials you could need- carpentry, plumbing, automotive, electrical, etc.
Maybe some kind of medical program, so probably a decent amount of meds and first aid equipment, in addition to whatever is in the nurse's office.
A culinary program, so you have a well equipped kitchen and probably a decent amount of food on-hand.
Maybe it even has some sort of agricultural program with some farming equipment, maybe even some ready-to-go planted crops and possibly livestock.
Most schools are fairly secure with limited entrances and locking doors often they have backup generators and maybe even solar these days (odds are any school with a decent electrical program at least has a few solar panels kicking around somewhere) and you have the tools and maybe the materials there to further fortify it as needed.
And it probably has some pretty beefy fire suppression systems since you have teenagers playing with welders and industrial stoves/ovens.
Some college campuses might be as good or better for the same reasons, with the added benefits of there probably being some purpose-made living quarters, but they're usually less compact, which has its plusses and minuses, more land to grow crops and such but harder to secure.
And if the apocalypse hits while school is in session, you have a bunch of young, hopefully reasonably-healthy people already on-hand to do some of the hard work if like me you're not quite as spry as you used to be.
Walmart or similar has food, tools, guns, ammo, chemicals, and the building can be secured via steel shutters.
Yeah but the materials you have to work with are a little limited. At least around me, Walmart doesn't carry much in the way of stuff like lumber, pipe, or other building materials, and there's gonna be some gaps in the tools available, I don't think most Walmarts carry welders around me, and even if they do you certainly wouldn't be able to get the gases you need for MIG/TIG welding there, and you might want that if you, for example, need to repair those steel shutters.
And most Walmarts around me actually don't carry guns.
And you can't grow too much food on a parking lot, you can try to work with containers and potting soil of course, but odds are a school is gonna have more land you can easily convert to a food plot or maybe even the plumbing parts to get some kind of hydroponics system going.
Lots of food is gonna rot.
An island? Seems like a great way to isolate yourself from the masses
Where's safe? Where's familiar? Where can I smoke?
The Winchester!
Look, I need to spend my efforts on the toxicity and climate collapse apocalypse. I would WELCOME zombies at this point.
There was a movie/TV show where the character was hunkered down in a wind turbine. Always thought it was a clever idea.
If I can automatically secure the location, then I pick the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Ok. But why?
A highly secure remote location that I'm sure has some kind of bunker, no shortage of guns. A good place to start looking for what caused the zombies and how to cure them.
Having access to all the other secrets they keep is icing on the cake. I don't know how much I can get into without passwords but if I can tap into satellites or send messages to spies, that's also useful.
The hill country, of course. Long sightlines, rough terrain, low population, high ratio of guns to people.
The Bar in North Muldraugh, Kentucky...oh sorry, you meant IRL and not in Project Zomboid..... Let's see...IRL...zombie apocalypse...got it...The Bar in North Muldraugh, Kentucky.
Some island in the pacific
a bunker, completely underground and zombies cant get to you like in resident evil.
I got an old abandoned insane asylum on the top of a hill next to a naturally occurring spring kinda near me. You really couldn't ask for a better location. Farm on the roof.
My current location in rural Tasmania has some advantages. There would likely be a delay in the zombies getting here, so that gives us prep time. Low population density means fewer zombies to deal with when they do. Plenty of natural resources, food, and water.
My main issue is a lack of defensible buildings, but there are lots of wood mills so maybe something could be constructed.
The wildcard is Tassie devils, being a powerful scavenger species. Would they go for the walking corpses? If so, would they end up turning themselves, because I don't fancy dealing with zombie nocturnal marsupials with a bite that crushes bone.
I live next to the regional hospital, I'll probably be one of the first to turn into a zombie.
You want someplace with the infrastructure to support lots of people (or a few people for a long time), but little local population to compete for those resources. National parks are generally well stocked, with water and lodging to support peak tourist season, but at least in the western US, most are pretty far from major metropolitan areas.
Grand Canyon and Yellowstone have a lot to offer in a zombie apocalypse.
An island in the Stockholm archipellago.
Since we assume that you can secure any location picked, any location would be safe, you just need ground to grow crops and freshwater to drink.
I speculate that in a real world zombie apocalypse scenario the zombies will probably be just one war crime out of many, Half Life 2 style, so it must be assumed that if you manage to fortify a location against zombies, that fortification is probably getting noticed by a drone and bombed or similar after not too long. Therefore instead of holing up, it would be a better strategy to focus on offense instead of defense in some way.
Probably a Walmart. Lots of guns, food and medicine.
Yeah if there is power, no contest. Especially in the southern USA where they sell guns and ammo. You could honestly last years there alone.
Definitely a mega grocery store. Just have to secure all those entry points and loading docks, but it would last you at the minimum a couple of months. Most stocked canned food are 2-3 years out from expiring, so if you have enough of them in the store, you can last that long assuming the building is secure the entire time.
A shopping mall, so I can pick up a flashlight, duct tape some jewelry on it and use it as a lightsaber
A bridge. Destroy the entrance on both sides, build a draw bridge in its place. This is assuming youre not worried about human enemies, which are always the real threat.
Nuclear powered carrier ship in the middle of the ocean.
You know how to run those?
I bet there's a manual somewhere on the ship.
You're gonna run out of supplies eventually.
probably a farm with solar power
I live in Jackson Hole. According to The Last of Us, this is the place to be.
My house is pretty good for a zombie apocalypse, i'll probably just hang out here.
From a security standpoint, if we're just talking zombies and assuming that the zombies can't climb, maybe a pre-cannon-era castle or similar fortification. I think that most of the things that obsoleted historic fortifications wouldn't really apply to zombies.
I don't mean one of the castle-themed buildings, like a folly. But something where you don't have any ground-level windows aside from slits, and probably has walls around it.
You may have defense-in-depth (multiple layers of walls or building structure, with the building and walls designed to permit a retreat to an inner area if an outer area is compromised).
Cisterns for freshwater storage are likely already present (though I've no idea what condition they might be in) so you don't need to get ahold of more storage.
Ample room for storage.
I guess the major issue might be the degree to which any fortifications might have been converted for public-access use. I don't know how many gates and porticullises might have been removed or disabled over the years because they aren't really necessary if the fortification is essentially a museum.


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