The Last Stand: Aftermath Knowledge Upgrades Guide

When it comes to The Last Stand: Aftermath, how you spend your knowledge points is key to survival. So, you should make sure you’re familiar with all of the available upgrades and what they actually do, not to mention figuring out which upgrades are most important for you to get first. That’s why we’ve created this The Last Stand: Aftermath Knowledge Upgrades Guide for you to make the most of your scavenged knowledge. 

The Knowledge Skill Tree

The knowledge skill tree is split into four different sections, each focusing on a different area for upgrades. You need to gain knowledge out in the world and can either use a radio you find outside or wait until your inevitable death and go back home to finish upgrading. 

Body Upgrades relate to your physicality. So run speed, stamina level, and even resistance to certain special conditions like infection damage can be found here. Most importantly, you’ll be able to reduce how quickly your infection meter fills even when you’re not using Antiviral. 

Combat Upgrades cover all upgrades related to fighting. Here you can do things like increasing your damage output, reducing your damage intake, and even improving your reloading speed. 

Survival Upgrades are for general survivability bonuses. Some of the most important upgrades can be found here, including those that increase the likelihood of finding resources when searching through containers. You’ll also find upgrades for how much knowledge you gain, so it can be worth maxing these options out as early as possible. 

Engineering upgrades take up the final skill tree. These upgrades are mostly additional items you can use to unlock special areas in the world or recipes that you can use to create makeshift items and tools. Some of these can be incredibly useful, especially once you’ve wrapped your head around how many items you can make out of scraps. (hint, check out crafting guide for help there) 

Where To Start with Knowledge Upgrades

Knowledge Upgrade Recommendations

The most important upgrades to start with are found in the Survival tree. By far the best skills to unlock in the early game are Ammunition Scavenging and Medical Scavenging which increased your ammo and healing item finds. You should also unlock Food Supply, which increases your chances of dinging food, but only once so you can unlock Fuel Scavenging. Food is already pretty plentiful, but you’ll want to find as much fuel as possible to skip locations once you’ve beaten an area. Once you’ve bought at least one of each of these upgrades, make sure you get the upgrade that increases how much knowledge you get from knowledge items, as this will make leveling up your skills a lot faster. 

Next up, head to the engineering tree and unlock Boltcutters and Modified Radio. These will allow you to unlock specific areas and find hidden caches in the world, which becomes insanely useful as you get further and further along in the game. I also highly recommend leaving Backpack for a while. Being over-encumbered isn’t actually that big of a handicap as long as you have a lot of stamina-restoring supplies to make up for it. 

The final recommended upgrades before you’re safe to start straying into other areas are the speed upgrades, specifically the speed at which you perform tasks. Being able to reload, repair, and heal as quickly as possible can save your life in a horde situation. You often have very brief windows where you’re not being attacked that you need to use to their fullest if you want to survive long. 

After that, you can pretty much start picking whatever feels most useful to your play style. Damage upgrades are probably a good point to hit next, as some of the zombies in the second area and beyond take quite a lot of punishment, and it can be helpful to take them out quicker. There are also other upgrades that improve the general chances that you’ll find items, like the scrounging upgrade, which can also help you to build up resources, but they’re not as useful as the specific upgrades are in most cases. 

Knowledge Upgrades to Avoid Early On

There are a few upgrades that are probably worth avoiding earlier on in the game. For one, it’s a waste of your knowledge to upgrade your chances of knocking down an enemy. While they do become easy to take down at that point, during more dangerous horde attacks it’s less useful to knock-down enemies when you could spend those points on abilities to make yourself more prepared for hordes like more resources or higher damage output. 

You probably shouldn’t bother with the HERC codes upgrade either at the start of the game. They’re useful when you hit the second area and onwards, but they’re not used very much, if at all, in the early game. Another early upgrade to avoid is door-kicking stamina and speed. They’re quite useful upgrades, but you don’t need to kick doors in quickly all that often so it’s a bad choice to allocate your points there when you’re just starting out.