Dead Rising 4 has a new “safehouse” location in each area, now called Emergency Shelters.
These Emergency Shelters are quite a bit more useful than in the previous versions, and come with various different vendors for combo weapon blueprints, vehicle blueprints, and training manuals. You’ll be able to access these vendors once you unlock the Emergency Shelter.
Unlocking an Emergency Shelter is fairly simple. Like in previous versions, you just need to clear out all of the zombies in the shelter. Once you do that, some survivors will come out of hiding to populate the vendor spots in the shelter.
The items you can buy from the vendors in these Emergency Shelters depend on the current level that the shelter is at however, so you’ll need to level them up if you want access to all of the items they sell.
How to Level Up Emergency Shelters
To upgrade an Emergency Shelter, you simply need to rescue survivors in the area that the shelter is located. As you’re traversing the map, you’ll come upon survivors in various different places. You’ll find them in shops, or being ganged up on by a bunch of zombies, locked up in Obscuri crates, etc.
When you find a survivor and help them out, Â they’ll reward you and run off to the Emergency Shelter nearby and add to your total survivors for that location and a completion bar will show at the top for your level progress for that Emergency Shelter.
Thankfully unlike previous versions, you don’t need to escort the survivor to the Emergency Shelter to make sure they get there alive, they’ll automatically make it there in one piece. You also can’t harm survivors on accident, so no more accidental survivor murder (and inherent saved game reload) like in previous versions.
The number of survivors you need in order to upgrade an Emergency Shelter can vary a bit, and typically to reach level five you might need to rescue somewhere between ten and fifteen survivors. Basically, you need to rescue all of the survivors in an area to completely upgrade the local Emergency Shelter to level 5 and unlock all of the possible items for purchase.
