Plague Inc. Dead End Achievement Guide & Walkthrough

The Dead End achievement is one of the many achievements that can be unlocked by playing the Necroa Virus plague in any difficulty. It requires the completion of very specific tasks by evolving symptoms after the pop-up of an event. In order to trigger the events that lead to this achievement, we'll need to start the Virus at the USA, DarkWater only appears there. As the description suggests, we'll have to prevent the private military contractors from discovering our "zombie" plague's weakness.

It is highly recommended to attempt to unlock this achievement in casual difficulty. Completing it in higher difficulties isn't impossible but you'll have to be mindful of the expansion of Z-Com. After getting the final pop-up of this achievement, it isn't necessary to finish the game. That about covers the basics you need to know, I'll explain the rest along with the guide.

First off, the recommended genes:

• Cytochrome Surge
• Aerocyte
• Spliced Activation
• Based Oxidasation
• Hydrophile

1.) Start in the USA. DarkWater achievements will only appear if you start in this country.

2.) Evolve Saliva 1 and Drug Resistance as soon as you can, within 60 days to be exact. They're going to cost 6 and 9 DNA, respectively.

3.) After a short while, this pop-up will appear:

DarkWater 'concerned' for missing geneticist

4.) After seeing the pop-up above, wait and accumulate some much needed DNA. To proceed to the next step, you will need to wait until you see both of these news banners appear:

DarkWater denis containment breach in weapons facility

DarkWater weapons facility shut down over security fears

 Tip: There are times when these news banners fail to appear on the news headline at the world screen, so be sure to manually check the news as well.

5.) After seeing both news banners above, you can move on and evolve the following symptoms(you can also choose to wait a while and gather up DNA if you want to):

• Insomnia
• Fever
• Photophobia
• Delirium
• Cytopathic Reanimation

Tip: At this point, there's a few things that you need to know to ensure the success of unlocking the achievement. First, If the zombie population of the USA exceeds 5 million, evolve Horde Pheromones and use the Zombie Horde ability to move zombies to a nearby country. Second, if a pop-up saying "Authorities can't protect from the USA" appears, you've automatically failed. That's about it.

6.) Wait for these two pop-ups to appear:

DarkWater created [plague name]

 This first one, above, should appear after some time after the apperance of zombies.

DarkWater successfully analyses [plague name]

The one above appears some time after the first one.

7.) After seeing that DarkWater successfully analyzed your plague, immediately evolve Genetic Hardening. Doing so will trigger the final pop-up, and the mark of successfully unlocking the achievement, to appear:

DarkWater fail to find [plague name] weakness

Congratulations! You've successfully unlocked the Dead End achievement after seeing the pop-up above. You can choose to either finish the game or quit, either way the achievement should already be unlocked.

Thanks for reading this guide and HSG!