Scanner

General#

The Scanner is the social weapon. It does no damage and heals nothing: it tells you whether the person standing next to you is going to turn, and it tells everyone else at the same time.

Stats#

You have to be looking at a living human for it to work.

Getting One#

Not craftable. Sold in the Item Shop for 100 gold.

Chance within the weapon category of each chest tier:

At 0.3 percent it is the single rarest item in an ordinary chest's weapon category.

What a Scan Tells You#

• The target's radiation band: Low, Moderate, Severe or Critical.
• VIRUS INACTIVE if they are clean.
• VIRUS ACTIVE if they are carrying the infection, whether they were bitten during the round or started as one of the round's zombies.

The result is public. A loud alarm plays that everyone nearby hears, and the scanned player is told directly that their group now knows.

Execution#

Humans normally cannot damage each other at all. A public VIRUS ACTIVE result lifts that protection for the scanned player, and the group can kill them.

Killing them does not remove them from the round. They leave a corpse, their gear drops, and after a few seconds they respawn as a zombie exactly as they would have anyway. What execution buys you is:

• Their gear, which is often better than what you are carrying
• Control of the timing, so they turn in a doorway you are watching rather than behind you in a firefight

Melee is the reliable way to do it.

A scan is cleared if the target is cured with a Syringe or if their radiation reaches zero. Otherwise it lasts until they die.

Playing Around It#

Being scanned is not the disaster it looks like if you are quick. A cure clears the flag, and a survivor who gets scanned at 20 radiation and immediately uses a Syringe walks away clean and still trusted.

The bigger tell is usually not the Scanner at all. Infected players go into visible spasms every twenty seconds, so a group paying attention often knows before anybody spends 100 gold to prove it.