ReverendNow

You know, although zeds becoming slower/weaker/inanimate during the winter definitely seems more intuitive... it occurs to me that making them *faster* during the winter would have some serious horror value. At the least, that would be a pretty cool custom setting. A general zombie behavior/seasonality setting would be neat to have.

As a proof of concept, I think I'm going to try making a mod for this system. "Legacy" has a nice ring to it... Looking at the API now. For any experienced modders out there... are there any aspects of the mechanics described in the OP that seem like they would be infeasible (or would require a hacky implementation) in a mod based on the standard functions/events exposed to modders? Edit: The journal handling mechanics will take some care. If possible, I might implement the journal as a zero weight item that can be looted but not dropped - capable of being "updated" if personal, and "read" (consumed) for its xp bonus if belonging to someone else.

You could definitely set a player zombie's unique attributes to deteriorate over time... Interestingly, that could be self balancing along with the other suggestion about the xp bonus. You probably wouldn't want to try to game the system by waiting until your corpse had gotten really weak to try and hunt it down: 1) you might lose track of it, and 2) the xp pool would be relatively less valuable to you after you had already leveled up a bunch, because it's based on a flat amount, not a percentage - so it's most useful for bootstrapping (as it should be).

So, for... closure... I like to hunt down the zombified form of my previous character when I reload a map after my old character's untimely demise. This ritual made me think of a few complementary mechanics that I think could be pretty neat and satisfying: 1) Zombified player corpses could have attributes that reflected the player's physical attributes while living, presumably with some degree of deterioration. Most prominently, I'm thinking of sprinting, fitness and strength: If the player had trained, say, fitness and strength up to 9+, his character's zombie form would have relatively high strength and durability. Similarly, if the character had been like greased lightning in life, his corpse would be a fast shambler or even runner after death. Perception traits could also be incorporated (e.g., eagle eyes = zombie with better than average sensitivity to its environment). This could also work in reverse: a character with obesity or weakness could give rise (ha!) to an appropriately-hobbled zombie. Just to be clear: I'm not thinking of "special infected" here - player zombies wouldn't be superpowered mutants or anything, just relatively strong or weak in standard zombie capabilities depending on the player that gave rise to them. Arguably, this is also more believable than having a player zombie's attributes be entirely generic or random. 2) Zombified player corpses could be likely to become the center of gravity for hordes. This would increase the drama and peril of hunting down your previous character, which you would want to do (for more than just my eccentric reasons), because... 3) The payoff: Hunting down and killing your corpse would earn a modest xp bonus. Mathematically, the way I imagine this working is that the bonus would be a pool of xp set to a fraction of the total xp gained by the previous character. Points from this pool would be dolled out bit by bit as your new character earned its own experience. To make the process lore-friendly, you could have the bonus tied to a special "journal" item carried by zombified form of your previous character. Thus, the story conceit would be that your new character is benefitting from the accumulated survival wisdom of your old character by reading his or her journal. To go a step further, you could even have the journal be an item that needs to be "updated" while a player is living to be truly valuable to its recipient: Each time a player writes in his or her journal, it sets the pool of bonus xp associated with the journal to a fraction of the player's accumulated xp at that moment. The length of time it takes to update the journal would also be proportional to the delta of the old xp pool value and the new one. This would also provide a way to make slow reader a more interesting trait: You're not going to be reading skill books every day, but you would be advised to update your journal. Slow reader would, of course, significantly increase the time this process took. Illiterate would preempt the mechanic entirely - and become an even more serious disadvantage. Just a suggestion to add a little extra color and interest to the inevitable embrace of death!

I think a compost mechanic deserves to be incorporated into the base game, for a few reasons: 1) Composting is an idea that really would occur to almost everyone trying to farm. Just about anyone with a grade school education will have heard of compost and have at least a vague idea of what it is and how it can improve farming. 2) It's an idea that can work at multiple levels of sophistication with readily-available materials. You can toss some organic matter and dirt into a pile, maybe cover it with a tarp, and you'll get some results. Not great results, but something - and something you can learn from. From this, all the way up to custom built barrel frames used to facilitate rotated, humidity-controlled composting. Special additives, etc. 3) There are some interesting opportunities to introduce penalties for ignorance - and not only for characters in-game. E.g., not everyone would know that uncooked meat is dangerous to use in composting. Presumably, an experienced farmer would: Maybe players with high farming levels would get a helpful warning label on organic matter that's risky to compost, but low farming level players wouldn't. Similarly, composting materials with useful positive attributes could have an analogous labeling system. It would be trial and error until you got your farming level up!

Meleeing hordelets is always genuinely dangerous. It's easy to convince yourself that it isn't because you can get good at it, but that feeling of safety is a fool's confidence: One goof up with placement, or misidentification of a crawler as a corpse, and you've got a nice scratch to show for it. And you're never more than one scratch away from death in this game. Play like Rambo and eventually you will die (well, die sooner than you otherwise would've...). It's just statistics. The odds are ever in the zombies' favor. One way this is bound to happen eventually if you insist on playing aggressively: when attempting to kite a group of zombies, it's easy to miss a fast shambler coming up from behind through the slower bulk of the horde and then get caught while you're frozen in recovery from a swing. If you make a habit of trying to smack more than one zombie at a time this is an even bigger risk.

Okay, looks like this is still affecting all furniture (at least, in the parts of the map I've already traveled through), so I'm guessing it's a result of this specific game having been created prior to the relevant patch. Will be interesting to see if this also affects furniture in the parts of the map I haven't been to yet.

Actually, because I want to tweak this guy's build anyway, I'm going to have him, uh... donate his body for science, to to speak: I'll report back on what happens when I reload the same map with a new character.

My current game was created prior to this patch, at least. Not sure off hand if it predated the first patch whose notes mentioned this bug being fixed, however. (edit: oh and just to confirm: my game does state that it's running version 34.23 (Steam))

Looks like the bug causing furniture to get a lower capacity after being moved is still in game, at least for vending machines: A couple of vending machines I transported to my safe house each ended up with a capacity of 20 after being moved.

Does anyone know how taking Restless Sleeper and Wakeful compares to taking Sleepyhead alone? These alternatives have the same cost, but I think there may be a balance issue here, depending on how the traits involved work. Sleepyhead and Wakeful are opposite traits, but Wakeful only costs 2 points, whereas Sleepyhead grants 4 points. Restless Sleeper, which grants 6 points, is another fatigue-influencing negative trait like Sleepyhead. However, since it isn't considered an "opposite" trait to Wakeful, it can be combined with that trait. If the fatigue increase caused by Sleepyhead is really worth 4 points, then insofar as Wakeful takes a "Sleepyhead"-sized bite out of the impact of Restless Sleeper, Wakeful + Restless Sleeper should effectively have a 2 point value advantage over taking Sleepyhead alone. If true, that could be considered a balance issue.

Just jumped back into the game after playing around with the earliest builds a few years ago. Very glad to see development is still proceeding on this awesome game! A few thoughts on the late game: I feel like the decision of rural vs urban living should be a bit more of a "pick-your-poison" choice than it is at present. The tedium of supply runs aside, the large farm outside of town is a just total slam dunk for maximizing your survival odds right now. Once you've cleared the farm and its environs of zombies, you might be safer at night on at the farm than in Camden, New Jersey. Let me be clear–it's not that you want to defeat the completely rational, common sense deduction that the player would probably be safer *most of the time* on a farm outside of town during the zombie apocalypse. Or that remote houses might have their own water supplies, etc. However, there should be mechanics in place to keep tension alive. Here are a few thoughts: - Remote farms, cabins, etc. would logically have lower horde population density in the area, fair enough–however, it also stands to reason that every so often, a gigantic horde from the city would roam through farm country. Moreover, with little to draw its attention elsewhere, that horde might just decide to stick around for a while. You better hope you've fattened your larder... and you better really hope the horde doesn't pass through right when you're coming back from a supply run, effectively barricading you out of your own home. To really enhance the paranoia, perhaps supply runs to town could *increase* the risk of a horde passing through... - Surely you can't be the only one who had the brilliant idea of heading to that "big farm just outside of town," right? Occasional survivors knocking at your door for sanctuary would be natural, but the least of your worries. What happens when you wake up to find 3 survivors harvesting your crops? Worse still, what happens when you get a knock at your door from five well armed survivors who threaten to *burn your place down* unless you bribe them with supplies–or perhaps even clear out and turn over the key to your safe house? - As others have mentioned, hostile wildlife should be an occasional issue in rural areas. Packs of feral dogs, mountain lions and bears are obvious possibilities. This could be a great mechanic to jack up tension, because predatory animals, if less far numerous than zombies, should also be far more dangerous. You can't outrun them or sneak up on them easily, and they can follow scents, suggesting that they would have superior path-finding abilities. Meleeing a bear, it should go without saying, is also going to leave you a bloody wreck if you survive at all. This suggests that guns would become far more important in rural areas–but of course ammo is limited and tends to be found in those remote, zombie infested urban areas, necessitating risky supply runs. What's more, constantly shooting guns would logically have a way of attracting those zombies you moved out of town precisely to to avoid... Broadly, the strategy here is to force the player to trade the visceral fear that comes from ever-present, but more predictable, threat of the undead hordes in urban areas for a creeping sense of paranoia that comes from unpredictable threats of more varied nature in rural areas.