Expert tips to earn a gold rank in Days Gone’s new Horde challenge

Another week has passed, so it’s time for the next Days Gone gameplay challenge, Keep Them Safer. Your goal: Clear the 300 Horde as fast as possible. Of course no challenge is ever that simple – if you want to unlock all the rewards and reign atop the global leaderboards you’ll have to do well at the following sub-objectives:

1. Bolted: Get X kills with crossbow

You start this challenge with 15 bolts, but you can search the environment for Cedar Sapling to craft additional bolts. The crossbow is an extremely effective weapon, but its slow firing rate/reload times mean you’ll always need extra space between you and the oncoming horde.

2. Untouchable: Get X Kills without taking damage

This will force players to create a larger cushion between them and the horde, so don’t stand your ground and press your luck. Since the horde spreads out, you need to pay attention to your flanks – as soon as you see the mini-map’s center circle turn red, you should start moving. And definitely always make sure there’s extra room before throwing Molotov Cocktails.

3. In scope: Get X headshots

Combat Focus is available in this challenge, so use it to secure gold in this sub-objective. Make sure you capitalise on the five Focus Cocktails available as part of your starting load out. You’ll also rack up a good deal of headshots whenever you have the high ground and can fire down into the rushing horde from a steep angle, or when you can corral the horde into narrow chokepoints.

4. Needless Risk: Get X Kills without dodge rolling

This sub-objective forces players to break their reliance on the Dodge Roll, which is a critical tactic for escaping danger in the world of Days Gone. This should leave you additional stamina that helps create distance, which should help you make simultaneous progress in the Untouchable sub-objective.

It is possible to achieve gold rank for all sub-objectives in a single run – if you’re really good. Since each sub-objective has multiple reward tiers that are increasingly difficult to achieve, incorporate some of the following rings to improve your score:

• Bullets: Rolling will reload your equipped weapon with a portion of its ammo.
  • A great perk when you just don’t have time to reload, but using this means you’re giving up on achieving Needless Risk.
• Ram: Vaulting regenerates a portion of your stamina.
• Lionheart: Kills while a Focus Cocktail is active restores Focus.
• 1%er: Headshots decrease reticle size and increase accuracy when stationary.
  • Combine this with Lionheart to really extend your Combat Focus windows to get as many headshots as possible.

Earning a ranked score in this challenge awards the Endure patch which reduces stamina cost.

Not only will this help you in the main game, but this perk is beneficial for the current challenge, as well as previous releases like Surrounded, and Ambush Camp Rush.

And finally, the Condemned patch from Ambush Camp Rush improves gun penetration, so we suggest earning that to drive up your top score for Keep Them Safer.