The Walking Trade Achievement Guide — How to Heal Customers

The Walking Trade has 45 achievements in total, with 30 of them in the base game group worth 5,615 points. This The Walking Trade achievement guide lists the base set, separates the achievements that fall out of normal play from the ones that need deliberate grinding, and covers the two Hardcore mode clears that decide whether a completion run is realistic.

How the achievement list is structured

SteamHunters groups the game's achievements by DLC and update, and the base game block is the largest single group. At the time the page was captured, the listing showed 348 players qualified, 553 players and owners tracked, 51 players who had completed the base game set, and zero players who had perfected the full 45-achievement list.

That last number is the useful one. Nobody on record had finished everything, and the reason is visible in the tags: several entries carry a Grind tag, and two carry a difficulty-specific tag for Hardcore Mode. The base game achievements are also mostly cumulative counters rather than one-off story beats, so progress is measured in repetitions.

The full base game achievement list

The table below reproduces the base game group as listed, in order. One entry in the snapshot was cut off by the page length, so the final base game achievement is not reproduced here.

#	Achievement	Requirement
1	Welcome to Retail Hell	Serve 5 customers
2	Rookie Numbers	Kill 5 zombies
3	Customer Comes First	Save a customer from an aggressive zombie
4	Backroom Privileges	Gain access to the warehouse
5	Arts & Crafts	Craft an item
6	Loot Goblin (Part-Time)	Scavenge 10 times
7	Sketchy Deal, Solid Loot	Purchase an item from the Exotic Merchant
8	Luxury, Sort Of	Upgrade the bed to a Bedroll
9	Lets Talk Promotions	Defeat a Zombie Horde in the city
10	Regaining Control	Kill 100 zombies
11	Graveyard Shift	Serve 100 customers
12	DIY or Die	Craft 10 total items
13	Live Another Day!	Defeat a zombie raid
14	Impulse Buyers	Build a Basket Stand for your shop
15	Local Legend	Reach 75% reputation
16	Put Those Cars Down!	Defeat the Brute Army raid
17	Loot Goblin (Full-Time)	Scavenge 100 times
18	Open Floor Plan	Hire the demolition crew to expand your store
19	That's What That Noise Was!	Gain access to the Hospital
20	Totally Normal Employee	'Hire' the Hulk Helper
21	Backdoor Access	Fix the Generator in the warehouse
22	I Didn't Like That…	Defeat the Broody Birthers raid
23	Post-Apocalyptic Factory	Craft 100 total items
24	Twin Terrors Fell	Defeat the Twin Terrors raid
25	Certified Questionable Prize	Win a Limited item on the Meat Doctor's game
26	If Smells Could Kill	Defeat the Sweaty Rotter raid
27	Take This 'Medicine'	Kill 1,000 zombies
28	Ten Days, Zero Chill	Reach Day 10 on Hardcore Mode
29	No Refunds, No Respawns	Defeat a zombie raid without dying on Hardcore Mode

Achievements that unlock without trying

Six of the early entries are effectively free. Welcome to Retail Hell, Rookie Numbers, Arts & Crafts and Loot Goblin (Part-Time) all fire during a normal first session, and Customer Comes First fires the first time you rescue a shopper. Impulse Buyers only asks you to build a Basket Stand for your shop.

A short list keeps the no-effort unlocks straight:

• Serve 5 customers for Welcome to Retail Hell.
• Kill 5 zombies for Rookie Numbers.
• Craft any single item for Arts & Crafts.
• Scavenge 10 times for Loot Goblin (Part-Time).
• Build a Basket Stand for Impulse Buyers.
• Save a customer from an aggressive zombie for Customer Comes First.

The grind achievements and how to shorten them

Three achievements are pure counters and they are the ones that decide your completion time. DIY or Die wants 10 crafted items, Post-Apocalyptic Factory wants 100, and Take This 'Medicine' wants 1,000 zombie kills. Loot Goblin (Full-Time) adds 100 scavenges, and Graveyard Shift adds 100 customers served.

The review coverage explains why the crafting counters are slow. Upgrades and research consume enormous quantities of parts, with the reviewer citing 96 sawblades for the recycler, and the same review notes that scavengers "more often than not" fail to bring back anything useful. Stack your crafting sessions with multi-crafting, which hotfix 1.2.7 restored when materials sit on pallets, and keep a pallet of base materials ready so a crafting run is never blocked by inventory layout.

For the kill counters, the Steam guide Easily Win Raids describes the community's standard approach: take a ranged weapon and plenty of ammunition, climb the ladder outside the shop onto the cargo containers, and shoot from the top so the zombies cannot reach you. Kills during raids and hordes count toward Regaining Control and Take This 'Medicine', so a defended raid is both an achievement and a kill-farming session.

Raids, Hardcore mode and the customer achievements

Five achievements are tied to named attacks, and each one is a distinct fight: the Zombie Horde in the city, the Brute Army raid, the Broody Birthers raid, the Twin Terrors raid and the Sweaty Rotter raid. Defeating any raid unlocks Live Another Day!, so the raid achievements effectively gate each other in sequence.

The two Hardcore entries are the real difficulty wall. Ten Days, Zero Chill asks for Day 10 on Hardcore Mode, and No Refunds, No Respawns asks you to defeat a zombie raid on Hardcore without dying. The community has published guides on saving your game in Hardcore mode, which is a fair signal that the mode is unforgiving by design. Prepare your stock, guards and weapons on a normal save before you commit to a Hardcore run.

One last note on the customer achievements, because it is the question most players arrive with. Customer Comes First is about rescue, not treatment. There is no achievement for healing a customer and no documented healing mechanic in the game; the medical ward appears only in a player suggestion thread asking the developers to turn it into a real healing service (to confirm). If a completion run stalls, it will not be on a heal-customer objective, because none exists.