Metal Gear Survive guide: Managing base camp, your crew and deployment

In Metal Gear Survive, you’ll come across other survivors that you can recruit onto your base. While you’ll be taking on the burden of keeping them alive, you’ll also be gaining another worker to help you out. The more workers you have, the better benefits you reap. But getting there can be a real pain.

In this guide, we’ll teach you how to manage your crew like a real Big Boss.

Collecting crew members

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Before you can really manage a crew, you need to collect a bunch of survivors. By the time you finish the story, you should have a small group of named characters. To get more disposable soldiers, you’ll need to go after the distress signals.

Distress signal side missions are denoted with a green circle on your map. When you move into the mission space, you’ll find a soldier with “????” as their name. Clear the enemies around them, throw them on your back and run toward the nearest teleportation location. If you stay out in the Dust too long, the survivors will suffocate and die, so keep an eye on their health bar.

Once you get back to base camp, the survivor will take up residence. Time to put them to work.

Where to employ your troops

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You can now start to funnel your crew members into the six jobs at base:

• Development team
• Food supply team
• Medical team
• Base development team
• Base defense team
• Exploration team

This is where things start to get tedious. Aside from your story crew members, it’s impossible to tell where you should place your new recruits without trial and error. Collect your non-story crew members and begin placing them in each of the six jobs. Look just above their life bar and stats to see what the note says. This will tell you how that crew member will perform in that role. Move them around until you find the most positive sounding note you can.

For example, a team member in the wrong job would have text like:

Low ambition. Would not perform very well.

Text for a team member in a good position would read:

While not gung-ho, would yield modest results.

Your story crew members will do well if placed in the following locations:

• Dan - development team
• Nicholas - food supply team
• Miranda - medical team
• Reeve - base defense or exploration

Keeping your crew fed, hydrated and healthy

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To keep your crew members ticking, you need to provide them with food, water and medical supplies. As you progress through Metal Gear Survive, you’ll gain access to farms and water tanks for your base. These will collect shared resources, meaning that they nourish your troops. The more crew members you have, the more resource nodes you need.

Building farms can be expensive and difficult. If you have some excess food that you want to give your troops, you can build a mutualization facility for food, drink and medical supplies. Here, you can dump what you don’t need into shared resources pool.

Periodically, the game will alert you regarding the status of your base in the base information report. Watch these numbers and keep an eye on your base camp status by looking into Virgil AT-9’s menus. While base management is somewhat optional in Metal Gear Survive, you need to pay enough attention to it to keep your small crew alive.

Deploy on resource hunt mission

The exploration team is one of the most unique jobs on base. When you assign crew members to this gig, they go into a pool that you can assign at the exploration team ready room tent.

Once in this menu, you’ll be asked to assign your soldiers to a team. If you aren’t interested in buying extra teams via SV coins, pick the Alpha unit and move on. Place four soldiers in here. Each soldier comes with a combat score, so you may need to move soldiers in and out of the exploration tab until you get the highest combat numbers.

Once your crew is put together, they should have a combined combat rating. Now it’s time to up their survival. You can go into the options of your squad and give them food or medical supplies in order to up their survival stat. You will not get these back but they will last for a few missions. You can also raise their combat stat by giving away weapons and armor.

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Each mission comes with specific requirements in terms required survival and combat effectiveness. Once you’re crew is all geared up, you can start looking for a mission. Tougher missions appear in red. Look for a supply you need, make sure your odds of success are satisfactory and send your team out.

After real time passes, the unit will come back with some resources. However, they may need medical attention, so be sure to care for them in the crew management menu before sending them back out into the wilds.