The Last of Us Part 1 Human Enemies: All Six Factions

Bill has the line that sums this up, in Bill's Town: "It's the normal people that scare me." The Last of Us Part I backs him up. Human enemies fight Joel and Ellie in eight of the game's twelve chapters, and they are six different groups with six different kits. Robert's smugglers in the Boston quarantine zone swing 2x4s. The Fireflies in the Salt Lake City hospital wear helmets and carry assault rifles with flashlights on them. In between are soldiers in riot helmets, hunters with a machine-gun Humvee, bandits who throw smoke bombs, and a group of cannibals who wear no armor at all.

This guide covers those six groups in The Last of Us Part I, the 2022 remake for PS5 and PC, plus Left Behind: where each one appears, what The Last of Us Wiki lists them carrying, and the rules that decide how you kill them. The chapter list comes from the wiki's Part I act pages. GamingBolt's pre-launch comparison said not to expect significant changes to story or level design, so the same list should hold for the 2013 original and Remastered. The four infected stages are in our infected guide, and Part II's WLF, Seraphites and Rattlers are in the Part II enemies guide. Spoilers below for which groups you fight and where, including the Winter chapter.

Six groups, eight chapters

The other four chapters have no human enemies on the wiki's act pages: the outbreak-night prologue, Bill's Town, the Bus Depot and the Jackson epilogue. The wiki's armor page names four Part I human groups as armor users, FEDRA, hunters, bandits and Fireflies. Smugglers and cannibals are not on it, and the cannibals page says outright that they do not use armor.

Smugglers: the tutorial fight

The first humans Joel fights are other smugglers. Robert, a Boston weapons dealer, owes Joel and Tess a shipment of guns and has already sent two men to kill Tess, so the two of them go to his warehouse on the wharf in The Quarantine Zone and fight their way through his crew. Only when they corner him do they learn he gave the guns to the Fireflies.

The wiki says the smugglers there carry only 9mm pistols and 2x4s, if not their bare fists. It calls them arguably the weakest group in the game and reads them as a tutorial enemy, there to teach combat rather than test it. One detail worth knowing: the developers gave the smugglers in Robert's hideout the same combat dialogue as the hunters. If the callouts in Pittsburgh sound familiar, that is why.

FEDRA: the soldiers you mostly sneak past

FEDRA is the military government running the quarantine zones, and the wiki calls its soldiers the strongest faction you meet, rivalled only by the elite Fireflies at the end. It splits them into three types:

The wiki says a riot helmet can save its wearer from a headshot, so one clean shot to the face is not a guaranteed kill on a helmeted soldier.

In The Quarantine Zone the soldiers are patrols you walk past, not fights. Don't crowd them. The wiki's page for that chapter says a street guard shoves Joel away and warns him if you walk straight into him, and if you do it to the same guard again, the guard knocks Joel down and shoots him in the head.

The fighting is in The Outskirts: the patrol that catches the trio just outside the wall and scans Ellie, then the Capitol building and the subway under it. The wiki's advice is to avoid a firefight with soldiers in the outskirts, because Joel does not yet have the guns or ammunition for it, and to stealth-kill or sneak past instead. The squads in the Capitol and the subway are smaller and carry pistols rather than assault rifles, and those you can take head-on. The image above is one of them. One thing you will not get: the wiki's assault rifle page says Joel cannot pick up a soldier's rifle while escaping Boston.

Hunters: Pittsburgh's ambush economy

Hunters are what a quarantine zone turns into after FEDRA loses it. The wiki's history for Pittsburgh: residents fed up with food shortages rose up with Firefly help, fought the military for fourteen months, lynched the soldiers they caught, and then turned on the Fireflies too. What was left survives by killing "tourists", anyone who enters their territory, for clothes, supplies and food. The wiki lists Joel and Tommy as implied former hunters.

Pittsburgh shows you how that works from the first minute, per the wiki's act page. A man stumbles into the street pretending to be hurt, Joel tries to speed past, and the hunters push a bus into the truck. From there it is the hotel, Ellie covering Joel with a hunting rifle from scaffolding, a Humvee with a .50-cal gun hunting you through the financial district, and a guarded bridge at night. At the bridge, Joel turns off the generator powering the hunters' searchlight. Part I's trophy list has a bronze for it, Lights Out: turn off the spotlight generator in Pittsburgh while in stealth.

For weapons, the wiki lists melee weapons, 9mm pistols, revolvers, shotguns, hunting rifles and Molotovs, with 2x4s, pipes and baseball bats making up for short ammunition. Some hunters wear body armor and gas masks taken from dead soldiers. They also left tripwired nail bombs around the city for anyone, or anything, wandering through.

The Suburbs is the last of them. A hunter with a military sniper rifle pins the group down until Joel reaches the house and takes the rifle himself, and then the Humvee comes back. It burns when Joel shoots a hunter about to throw a Molotov from it. The sniper sequence is covered in our weapons guide, and hunters versus Fireflies is also the split in the old multiplayer, covered in the Factions guide.

Bandits: the only group that smoke-bombs you

Bandits, which the wiki says are occasionally called marauders, are the rural version. Hunters lie in wait in a dead city; bandits live in the country around Jackson County, Wyoming, and leave their camps to raid other survivors. Tommy's Dam is theirs. They hit the hydroelectric plant while Joel and Tommy are arguing, and more of them arrive at the ranch house where the brothers catch up with Ellie.

The wiki lists scoped El Diablo handguns, hunting rifles, shotguns, Shorty sawn-offs, 9mm pistols and revolvers, melee weapons from 2x4s to machetes, and Molotovs, and some wear body armor, respirators and helmets. Two details set them apart:

• They are the only group in the game that throws smoke bombs at you, per the wiki, at the power plant and again at the ranch house. If the screen fills with smoke at Tommy's Dam, that is the bandits.
• They never speak in a cutscene. The wiki notes they are the only group with no spoken dialogue in cinematics; they only talk during gameplay.

Cannibals: no armor, and the only human boss

The game never calls David's group from Silver Lake, Colorado cannibals. Per the wiki, the first canonical use of the word was Part I's Model Viewer, on models named "Cannibal (Combat)" and "Cannibal (Chair)". The 2013 official strategy guide calls them survivors.

You fight them three times:

1. The University. After Joel and Ellie learn the Fireflies have moved to Salt Lake City, a group of David's men ambushes them. The wiki says one of them tackles Joel off a balcony, and Joel lands on the rebar that wounds him.
2. Left Behind's mall. A splinter group trails Ellie and the wounded Joel to the Colorado Mountain Plaza and runs into infected there. The chapter is The Enemy of My Enemy, covered in full in our Left Behind guide.
3. Lakeside Resort. Playing as Ellie in Winter, the cannibals kill her horse and David chokes her unconscious. The chapter ends with her fight against David in a burning restaurant, which the wiki calls the only non-infected boss battle in Part I.

The wiki lists pistols, revolvers, hunting rifles, shotguns and occasionally bows, plus hatchets, pipes and 2x4s. It says the better guns go to scavenging parties, while most of the Silver Lake town watch carry revolvers, and that the group at the mall mostly used pistols with some Molotovs. The useful line for a fight is the one already in the table: no armor, so there is no vest to soak up a body shot.

Winter is harder for a different reason. Ellie cannot strangle anyone; the wiki's strangling page says she uses her switchblade instead. The cannibals page adds that in melee they block her after two strikes and then choke her or punch her to the ground. Pick fights with the switchblade from behind, not from the front.

Fireflies: the elite guard at the end

The Fireflies you pass dead in Boston are lightly armed militia. The ones guarding St. Mary's Hospital in The Firefly Lab are not, and the wiki reads them as elite soldiers guarding the base and the surgical team. Most wear body armor and helmets and carry flashlight-equipped assault rifles that, per the wiki, can drain Joel's health in a single burst. Others carry El Diablo pistols, Shorty sawn-offs and shotguns, so they cover short and long range, and a few wear gas masks.

The upside is the gun. The wiki's assault rifle page says most Fireflies drop it, and it is the only fully automatic weapon you can obtain in single player. It holds 30 rounds and Joel can carry 90 in total, but on difficulties above Hard each pickup gives 9 to 15 rounds rather than 30. Why Joel is fighting his way through this building at all is the subject of our ending explained piece.

Rules that apply to every group

These come from the wiki's armor and strangling pages, and they are the same whichever group you are fighting:

Humans and infected rarely meet on your terms. The hunters at the Pittsburgh bridge pick off a clicker while you watch, but the wiki notes that in the first game the cannibals at the Left Behind mall are the only enemies whose fights with infected you can steer. Part I's trophy list rewards it: Live Bait asks you to use bricks or bottles to lure an infected into attacking a human.

On Grounded the damage math changes, and our Grounded mode guide covers which of Joel's guns hit harder there.

What the Part I remake changed

GamingBolt's comparison said not to expect significant changes to story or level design. What Naughty Dog talked up instead was how enemies behave. In its July 2022 gameplay video, as reported by TheGamer, game director Matthew Gallant described "the fundamental knowledge model" behind how enemies perceive where the player is, and TheGamer sums up Neil Druckmann's comments as aiming for more intense encounters, with enemies that interact with each other and use their surroundings more realistically. GamingBolt's pre-launch write-up of Naughty Dog's statements says enemies try to flank you in combat and talk to each other during stealth.

Your side changed too. The PlayStation Blog's July 2022 feature says buddy characters now use cover to stay out of enemy sightlines, and TheGamer reports Gallant calling the way allies reposition based on where they expect enemies to go next "future exposure".

The clearest list of what makes Part I's enemies harder is in the game's own menu. The Combat Accessibility section, published in full on the PlayStation Blog in August 2022, has switches for flanking, grabs, perception and accuracy:

My read: if you learned these fights on PS3, the chapter map above should still hold and the behaviour is what moved. That table is Naughty Dog's own list of the enemy behaviours a player might need help with: flanking, grab escapes, perception and accuracy. Part II's version of the same menu is broken down option by option in our Part II accessibility guide.

Quick Action Checklist

• Expect humans in eight chapters: The Quarantine Zone, The Outskirts, Pittsburgh, The Suburbs, Tommy's Dam, The University, Lakeside Resort and The Firefly Lab, plus Left Behind's mall.
• In The Quarantine Zone, don't walk into the same street guard twice. The second time, the guard shoots Joel.
• In The Outskirts, sneak past or stealth-kill the soldiers outside the wall, and fight the smaller pistol squads in the Capitol and the subway head-on.
• Don't trust a single headshot on a FEDRA soldier in a riot helmet.
• In Pittsburgh, watch for tripwired nail bombs, and turn off the bridge spotlight generator in stealth for Lights Out.
• Against armored FEDRA soldiers, hunters, bandits and Fireflies, use melee, shivs, chokes, limb shots or the armor-piercing hunting rifle.
• At Tommy's Dam, smoke means bandits.
• Cannibals wear no armor. As Ellie, attack them from behind, because they block her after two strikes in melee.
• Pick up the assault rifle from the Fireflies in the hospital, and expect 9 to 15 rounds per pickup above Hard.
• In Left Behind's mall, lure infected into the cannibals with a brick or bottle for Live Bait.
• If flanking or grab escapes are what keep killing you, the switches are under Combat Accessibility.

More Part I breakdowns are in the chapter walkthrough, the rest of our coverage is on the The Last of Us coverage hub, and everything else is on the Mythras blog.