Items in Yet Another Zombie Survivors

Items are the extras you walk over or unlock for the rest of the account. They are not a fourth survivor. They will not evolve a pistol into a rifle. They will turn a good dawn into a silly dawn, or a greedy dawn into a tombstone. This page is the practical list for 1.0, including the 21 new items that shipped with the launch on 20 August 2026. Combat order still lives on best builds. Account power still lives on training.

During a run

Chests spawn on a timer and from some events. Walk over them. Equip something that matches the hole in the kit: pickup radius if gems are a death donut, armor if spitters are clipping you, damage if the rifle is already evolved. Five items in one run is an achievement named like a joke. It is not a dawn requirement. If a chest asks you to swap, read the full tooltip. 0.9 already showed full text on the swap UI; 1.0 still does.

Magnets yank every gem. They are not health. Save them for a ring you refuse to enter. Using a magnet at minute three because it sparkles is how you have nothing left at minute eighteen. The dawn page treats this as law.

Health kits are red hearts. They expire. They only count for the Medic unlock if you are missing HP. Power-up heals do not count as kits. See how to unlock survivors.

Three gem item build Yet Another Zombie Survivors

The 21 new 1.0 items

Version 1.0 added 21 new items to the chest pool and the achievement reward pool. Most unlock through achievement completion; five are awarded as bonuses from main story missions in the Camp. The full list, as printed in the studio changelog:

• Black Box — quality-tier item, often rewarded by Hardcore clears.
• Jailbroken Phone — utility toy, useful for tag-heavy kits.
• Ragged Patch — defensive item, small armor bonus.
• Hijacked Signal — control item, helps spread statuses.
• Access Keycard — unlocks map events that were previously mode-gated.
• Brave Toaster — joke-tier item with a small fire proc.
• Mushroom Mushroom — fun item with a heal-over-time component.
• Dartboard — projectile booster for ranged squads.
• Silencer — crit-focused damage item.
• Mana Potion — ability cooldown accelerator.
• Fishing Pole — utility item that pulls gems toward the squad.
• Accumulator — power-up quality booster.
• Hyperactivity — speed item with a cooldown downside.
• The Word — meta-progression themed item.
• Great Nade — area-damage item, replaces the previous Skip Rope reward on the Why’d You Pick That? achievement.
• Power Generator — defensive utility for Endurance runs.
• Boiling Pot — fire-adjacent utility for Pyro squads.
• Pawn Shop Receipt — economy-themed item for cash-heavy runs.
• Last Round — burst damage finisher item.
• Acoustic Guitar — joke-tier item with a music-themed proc.
• Easter Egg — fun item, replaces the previous Jade Amulet reward on the Curly Little Potato achievement.

Several of these show their bonus in the tooltip clearly. Use the in-game tooltip as source of truth rather than spreadsheets from 2023. The studio moved item balance numbers in 1.0 and again in the 1.0.0a hotfix; older guides may quote outdated values.

Greed pieces

Glass Cannon and similar “more damage, less survivability” toys are real and they are bait. Take them when you already have a shield, lifesteal, or a map you could dawn in your sleep. Hardcore at 9:00 is not that map. Endurance after minute 35 is not that map. Isolated City Default with Engineer in the squad can be that map. If you die immediately, refund nothing: the item is gone with the run. Training is the refundable layer, items are not.

Jade Amulet and other numeric trinkets now show their bonus in the tooltip. Believe the tooltip, not a 2023 spreadsheet. The 1.0 item pool expansion also reshuffled where some of these trinkets show up; if you used to see them as common drops, expect them to be less frequent now that the pool is wider.

Achievement pool

Many Steam achievements dump an item into future runs. Homing Pigeon, Ring of Power, joke dolls, burger for feeding the wasteland worm, barrel roll for getting slapped by it. You do not need the full 229-achievement sheet to play. You should open the in-game achievement list sometimes, because a locked item is often a locked gimmick rather than a locked skill. The maps walkthrough calls out worm-related toys. Do not farm Om Nom Nom on Bio Lab; the worm lives in Vile Wasteland.

The 88 new achievements added in 1.0 specifically include a Story category (64 achievements) that tracks Camp mission completion. Most of those stories do not gate items directly, but a small handful reward 1.0 items as completion gifts. The Achievements page has the breakdown.

“It’s Raining Men” is a physics stunt with Tank rockets, not an item pickup, but it unlocks bragging rights and sometimes pool noise. Play Tank, gather a blob, launch. The Tank notes are enough.

HUB and 1.0

Quests can hand extra items or faster meta. They are optional. Prestige can change how greedy you can be. Neither system replaces walking over a chest. If a quest tells you to equip five items, that is a directed run, not a new genre. The Mission Log lets you retry those directed runs without waiting for the mission to rotate back in.

What not to do

Do not skip a weapon evolution to chase a chest across a boss. Do not stand still on a magnet. Do not fill five slots with joke dolls on One Hit. Do not write a review that the game is unfair because Glass Cannon was orange. Read the 1.0 review if you are still at the store page, not the corpse screen.

When the board and the chest disagree, the gun wins. When the chest and the magnet disagree, the exit lane wins. When everything sparkles, you are in the last two minutes of Hardcore and you should already be kiting. See How to beat Hardcore.