Missing - Presumed Zed

I feel this would be a good addition if/when movable furniture is re-added. Caster wheels are extremely common (shopping carts, beds, office chairs, etc), and adding them to a board wouldn't be a huge project. Put it under a crate and you could have a user-crafted equivalent to the old wheelie bins.

That's just trading difficulty for boredom, and also entirely against the "players shouldn't be surviving for several months" concept this whole thread is about. Upon further reflection, I think the real problem in the current version is that there are entire basic game mechanics that reward not doing anything. Right now we have four main sustenance routes: Farming: safe, somewhat reliable once you know the system, and produces a truly ridiculous amount of food if you focus on it. The downsides are the arcane rules, that it's mind-numbingly boring and requires constant tedious busywork, and finally that it rewards players for sedentary behavior instead of actually taking risks and having fun. So yeah, not a fan of farming in its current form. Trapping: not as safe as farming as the traps must be placed in unoccupied areas, but as a consequence it's not as boring either. The randomness and lack of feedback as to why a trap isn't working are probably my biggest gripes with it right now. Fishing: I haven't played around with this one much, but it's fairly easy to comprehend without a wiki (unlike the prior two) and even an unskilled character can survive on a few good catches. It also puts you in a bit of danger as you'll have to relocate occasionally and you are vulnerable while fishing, but since the area around the river is free of obstacles and thus easy to keep clear, you'd almost have to be trying to get caught by a zombie. Looting: the most dangerous and unpredictable route (and honestly the most fun), this is the only gameplay mechanic that forces you to leave your comfortable base for extended periods of time. It leads to interesting encounters (dealing with the weather, zombie hordes, other players, and eventually NPCs; all in unfriendly and uncharted territory) and allows you to obtain loot other than food. I consider looting the heart and soul of Project Zomboid's gameplay, but a lot of players stop doing it once they have the tools to reach self-sufficiency. More game mechanics that kept it relevant in the end-game would be very welcome. (-ish) Foraging: Not really a valid food gathering method since AFAIK you can't find enough early on to sustain yourself, but it's a good supplement to the others in a pinch. It's also moderately dangerous (zombies in the woods, man!). All in all a good addition to the game.

This is a very good point. I remember how tense the game was when I first started playing. Entering a house filled me with a creeping sense of dread, of not knowing what might be behind every corner, or whether that door hides a zombie waiting to lunge at me. That quickly faded as I discovered just how toothless zombies are in this game. I think that realization marked the death of treating my character like the desperate survivor the lore intends as opposed to the battle-hardened badass the game mechanics make him into. My last several playthroughs have been knife-only runs because it's at least slightly dangerous (although safely getting the jaw stab 100% of the time is child's play if you've ever played a parry/riposte build in Dark Souls). I would love for looting to feel as tense as it did as a newbie again. A simple tweak that would help immensely here is to make 'e' actions reset your weapon timer and temporarily slow you. Right now you can charge your melee weapon and open a door while backing away, making hidden zombies a non-threat. If opening that door slowed you and made you lower your weapon (you did have to grasp the doorknob after all), suddenly things have become much more dangerous. And as Akiruu said, more indoor zombies with better hiding please. Zombies can't open doors by default and hiding at home should have been common in such an apocalypse, so why are most houses completely empty with their curtains open?

These are my thoughts exactly, especially if an established player safehouse attracts NPCs looking to raid or team up (with all the drama that entails). I'm not complaining about OFLGBKYBYGT - the difficulty increase is welcome and a lot of the mentioned plans are long-requested additions - but NPCs should disrupt the status quo more than any other tweak you could make. Although the reintroduction of hordes is a close second.

Excellent, that should solve the "zombie turned into 2D sprite, it's definitely dead" exploit nicely. Does the number of corpses drawn three-dimensionally come from the same pool as zombies, or is there a separate setting for them now?

A rural Kentuckian pushing a mindless beast through a fence causes it to react with aggression? The jokes practically write themselves! I'm sorry.

Will Aiming and Reload be made subsidiary to Ranged now that such a system exists?

I like it. I feel it could be made balanced as sod would be much heavier and take longer to build than plank walls. They could also use up an entire tile (meaning you'd need to increase the size of your base by 2 each dimension to fit the same amount of stuff inside you could with walls - so a 10x10 base would go from 36 to 44 wall tiles required). And if that's still not enough, it could take two constructions to make a complete wall (the first would act as a fence so zombies could still climb over).

Yes! UnReal World is one of my all time favorite games and the pinnacle of realistic survival gameplay. If PZ's wilderness survival mechanics end up even 1/10th as deep they are in this game... To anyone who's turned off by the roguelike tag: this is part of a rare breed of roguelike where player skill, not the random number god, determines survival. Most stuff is explained in-game, but there's also an external wiki (slightly out of date, but most info is still good) that will help new players. I'd recommend these three pages for beginners: http://unrealworld.wikia.com/wiki/New_Player_Guide http://unrealworld.wikia.com/wiki/Acquiring_Food http://unrealworld.wikia.com/wiki/Surviving_your_first_winter

Do sheet curtains count as player buildings? Tents? Campfires? Lanterns? What about the new signs and paint? I tend to make many minor (curtained but unbarricaded) safe-houses as I travel through the city so that I always have a place to escape to if necessary. I can foresee that behavior causing arguments in MP if I'm permanently reducing the future available loot for everyone else. Is this a permanent flag, or will destroying structures cause loot to respawn again? Will NPC barricades block respawn as well when they arrive?

Have you ever played UnReal World? It's a hardcore realistic survival roguelike set in Iron Age Finland. The survival mechanics were top-notch and included cellars just as you described to slow food spoilage. Making one was utterly back-breaking and time-consuming work, and the cellar didn't even double food shelf life in most cases (being most useful in conjunction with other preservation techniques such as smoking meat). I think that'd be great for Project Zomboid; a massive step down from fridges but still of enough use to be worth building at some point. Actually, a lot of stuff in that game would fit in PZ rather well. I'd love it if the devs would play the game, or even just browse the wiki to get some ideas (examples: http://unrealworld.wikia.com/wiki/Surviving_your_first_winter, http://unrealworld.wikia.com/wiki/Acquiring_Food).

After looting many, many corpses in my current game I've run across several axes and a half-dozen pistols, but I've yet to see a single knife on a zombie corpse. Checking the spawn distribution, it seems they only drop from male zombies, and at the same drop rate as an axe or pistol. Doesn't this seem off? If an average Kentucky household has, say, four people, one hammer, a third of a pistol and a quarter of an axe (statistics may not reflect reality), I'd assume knives would be the de-facto self defense weapon. And someone using a knife would also be far more likely to get bitten, hence finding them on zombies. Not really a big deal, but I'm a bit frustrated as I just started a knives-only run, haven't found a hunting knife yet and kitchen knives seem to drop at a rate of one every 2-4 houses.

So what kind of noise level can we expect with the hunting rifle? It'd be kind of self-defeating if a long-range weapon just drew all zombies to you anyway. As for loot respawn, does it only add a few items at a time? And if existing loot is kept I'm guessing this will only fill containers up to a certain point? Although it would be awesome to suddenly have entire houses of 50/50 containers... Which is very funny It works. Either way, your CPU is fucked.