jonniemarbles

The endgame is boring and easy. While a big step in the right direction, I don't think the tweaks made to the IWBUMS branch fix this - it's still pretty easy (though often very grindy) to find an out-of-the-way house and start farming. If you're not squatting downtown and you don't ever actually leave your little compound, the game still turns into Farmville once you make it past the initial stages. I'm sure the spawning system will get further improvements making it harder to live like this, but it's still going to be the case that if you take up residence in a deserted farmhouse or cabin deep in the woods you're likely to live a quiet life. Here's my fix: 1.) Seriously nerf the boredom/unhappiness boost you get from cooked meals. If my character is eating carrot stirfry every meal, this should probably add to his boredom, not reduce it. Meals should only reduce boredom and unhappiness if they are unusual - if the player hasn't had meat in a long time but manages to trap and cook something, for example. The same goes for going outside - it shouldn't count if you're just visiting the same tiny patch of garden every day. 2.) Make boredom and unhappiness matter. A lot. Like they should be absolutely life threatening to your player at too high a level. This will make the end game Farmvillery a thing of the past - you will need varied food and or books (or other entertainment) to survive. That means leaving your compound and heading into town, which means danger, which means fun!

I agree that a map that just filled out (as in the minimum) would be too easy, but the current system seems too hard by contrast, at least for new players (and provided you don't "cheat" like I did). I'd like there to be a middle ground between the current system, which can be incredibly frustrating if you're totally new, and the alternative which is just to cheatload the online map.

So are we on 32.3 now? I don't think my IWBUMS has updated (not that I necessarily want fewer Zs right now, I'm enjoying the challenge, but I can always crank them up in sandbox )

No, sadly. Provided you pick a safehouse on the outskirts of town and have a good enough carpentry skill, lategame is still pretty safe. I don't mean in the middle of the woods either - just pick the very corner house of the suburbs and you're extremely unlikely to encounter a colossal horde (unless you head into town for supplies but the whole point of late game is that you've eliminated that need - you've got a farm/fishing hole and your rain collection/river water set up so why would you need to? It's frustrating cos I thought it was fixed too. Of course the way to "unfix" it is to not live in one of those places - set yourself the challenge of surviving in downtown or, heck, even the *middle* of the suburbs and the game is suddenly hella difficult. Sort of sucks that you have to pick an unsafe safehouse to ensure the game stays fun though.

This has not been my experience - I have instead found that zombies increasingly "cluster" as more meta-game events happen, to the point that entire areas are depopulated. One street will be deserted while the next will be filled with unimaginable hordes.

Currently when I play PZ I frequently use the online maps created by other users. While this is works perfectly well it does kind of break the game immersion for me - having my character know every detail of every street makes things much easier, but doesn't seem "real". Likewise, however, having my character know literally nothing about the layout of their town at game start also breaks reality for me - unless I just got parachuted in I'm going to have some idea of the layout of my own street, where the local stores are, where my (former) workplace is etc. So here's what I propose: Minimum: A "mental map" available from the start of the game. This would show a decent wedge of surrounding area (say, the survivor's home street) and places they visited regularly (local convenience store, workplace (so if you're a cop, you know where the policestation is, for example), perhaps a few other locales like the park they liked to visit). The rest is black and gets "filled in" as you visit it. The map shows where you are now on it. I would also like there to be a "true map" - an object, or series of objects, you can find in-game which show the true layout of the town. Ideal (these ideas would require more time and effort to implement but would augment the above minimums): The mental map is faulty. As an example, if your character was used to getting to the mall by car they may remember the road leading to the mall as being far shorter than it really is. Likewise streets beyond your "home" and places visited very regularly might have details missing - there's a house there when you thought there wasn't, or isn't one where you thought there was etc. If you walk down a previously unknown street once it fills in the map a little, and for a limited time - you will not accurately remember a street you walked down one time a month ago, perhaps in fact you will entirely forget it, with it being lost to the fog of war. These things could be affected by traits - "forgetful" making mental maps more unreliable whilst "photographic memory" makes them more so. Additionally you could have traits like "outgoing" which reveal more of the map at game start or "housebound" which reveals none (i realise this second one is kind of cheeseable, as people could just take the points bump then use the online map. It might instead be better to have this as a setting rather than a trait so people can roleplay it if they want). The "true map" should also be partial or unreliable in some way(s). For example, you might find maps dating from different years with different levels of reliability (read: wrongness). You might find maps that only cover part of the game map or offer different levels of granularity. Ideal ideal (I think this might be super hard so caveats apply etc.): You can draw on maps you find, and use other pieces of paper to make crude maps of your own. I realise this would essentially mean building an entire paint-style application into the game, however, so feel free to tell me to shut the fuck up.

I would much rather have recipe books tell us how to actually make stuff (thus making finding one feel like an achievement) than have to "guess" endlessly. Or at least give us clues... clues might be fun actually.

I agree this needs fixing. I get it's an RPG survival sim so maybe some grinding is to be expected but it hurts when the biggest long-term factor in whether I live or die depends on me sawing 500 pieces of wood so I can make a rain collector (or only ever playing carpenter, or only ever living right by the river). These things aren't fun. "So why do them?" you might well ask - well, because the whole point of any survival game is to survive, and the best path to survival currently involves me doing large amounts of grind or living in extremely specific locations. A CAREFULLY BALANCED system wherein you can use any/most containers to collect rainwater would really fix things for me, and could reward people who are good at scavenging (rather than just good at grinding out several thousand useless sturdy sticks).

Damn, shame that the Zombie danger didn't seem to carry on later in the game - can you confirm where your safehouse was? Yes I can: http://imgur.com/BKsDLDt As you can see, not exactly a cabin in the woods, but being on the very edge of town may have helped. Sadly about 5 minutes after writing my mammoth post last night I went out looking for garbage bags and got myself bit. With anxious and nauseous Moodles jangling away I decided to grab my pistol, run into the populated area and start blasting, with the hope of actually brining some of the dead over to my place to test out my defences. I wasn't able to keep a horde following me for long enough to make this work and Jim Adams died doing what he loved - drinking bleach in his barricaded bathroom while three zombies gently bashed their heads on defences at least 2 layers of fuck you away from my actual self. I died of stupid too - fighting one zombie when another just showed up right behind my and took a nice big bite. And he was just one garbage bag away from retirement *sniffs back tear*.

Damn.... I think I Farmvilled it. I've done a few runs on the IWBUMS build (and, overall, had way more fun than I did on the previous build) and generally never survived more than a week. So today I thought I'd make a week my target. The first 48 hours were, as with every other game I've played so far, pure horde hell. I'd spawned in the relatively isolated house with unclimbable fences all around it. Knowing that there is a nice 2-story nearby I decide to make my way there. The only problem was the closest thing I could find to a weapon was a damn fork. So a lot of sneaking, running, desperately trying to open locked windows - the usual hullaballo of fun. I get lucky and find myself a hammer and some nails (nails seem to spawn a lot in the trailer parks. Is there some stereotype about trailer park boys being nail aficionados I'm unaware of?) which allows me to implement a tactic I've used very successfully in previous builds - lots of houses with sheet ropes on either side, a great way to escape the ravening horde. I don't get too far into my ingenious plan before I'm being overwhelmed and decide to high-tail it back to the only place I have successfully sheet roped, my intended safehouse, resulting in every damned window in the place getting broken making it considerably less, well, safe. I clear the place out with my trusty frying pan, put sheets on ALL the windows and make a point of only ever sleeping upstairs. I decide, realistically my only hope of survival is to get hold of a fireaxe so I can barricade those broken windows, so off to the warehouse I go. Again, horde hell. I find if I largely stick to the park I see very few zombies and make it to the warehouse without too much fuss, at which point I immediately trip an alarm. Fuck, I think to myself and begin to run for it before logic kicks in and I decide I'm better off staying inside the three story building and looting what I can until they arrive then hiding upstairs - after all, running away is just as likely to have me crashing straight into the huddled, brain-hungry masses as anything else I do. No one comes. Like not a single Zombie. It's weird. I find the fireaxe and decide to fuck the fuck off. On the way out I see what I assume was the horde responding to the alarm, a huge clump of Zs just standing around. I guess they were on their way to eat me when it stopped and they got bored? Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing... the idea of them just stopping like that is jarring to me somehow but at the same time, how long would a zombie follow a noise that isn't audible any more? I make it back to base with a lot of damn fine loot, including my beloved fireaxe, a saw, a trowel and basically everything you need for end game. This is where it begins to suck, and not in a good way. I start a little routine of planting my farm in the morning and chopping wood the rest of the day, hoping to level up enough to make some rain collector barrels (hey, do you know what would make an excellent rain collection barrel? Literally anything you left outside in the rain.I'm chopping down hundreds of trees just so I can make... what exactly? What is it that makes my rain collector barrel infinitely superior to, say, the garbage can outside my front door? Or, for that matter, a damn cooking pot left on the lawn? But I digress). This... is... dull. What makes it worse is that, despite cutting down literally a couple of hundred trees (and sawing them all up to boot) I encounter maybe 5 zombies responding to all the noise I made. OK, the new spawn system meant that, on one day, there was a horde a little too close to one side of my house... so I walked a screen or so down the street and did my chopping there. The devs, in defence of the new build, that they want you to feel grateful every day when you went to bed that you had survived. This was not that experience for me - it was tedious fucking grind, totally necessary to my long term survival because carpenters are the only people in this world with the wherewithal to collect rainwater for some reason (IMHO, even a cup left outside in the rain should collect *some* water if we want this to be a realistic zombie survival sim.) Along with my tedious, pointless chop-tree-saw-tree-saw-plank-into-sticks routine I decide to wall off my garden. The noise of all this building also does not attract the hordes. In doing this I discover two more annoying little nuggets about the new spawn system. I've build a large walled off area and I literally only have to put the door on. I go out into the wild to get some more hinges and some nails. I return to the trailer park I had visited in the first week when it was an absolute mess of zombies and it's totally deserted. I guess the meta events etc. work so well now that the zombies clump together to the point of totally depopulating some areas. I honestly can't decide whether I think this is a good thing or a bad one but the experience of going from "Holy shit! They're everywhere"! To "where is everybody?" was certainly jarring and I don't feel like the world should be getting safer a few weeks into the game than it is on day 1-3. Irritating thing number 2 came when I got back to my safehouse. As I said it was all walled off apart from the doorway, so what do I find when I return? 5 Zs inside. I assume what happened was that there was a respawn while I was a way and as the spawner could find a route to those points, it spawned the zombies there. Now, on the one hand, this was the most interesting thing to happen for at least an in-game week and actually led to me running away etc. but it felt a little wrong. I'd been gardening and chopping wood in this area pretty solidly for 10 days or so and had barely a sniff of zeek, but I disappear for a day and come back to find him crawling all over my vegetable patch. If it had been a meta-game event, helicopter or whatevs, I could understand, but that would have left the place crawling with the suckers. It's a minor point really but I hope the final build is able to differentiate not just between "possible" and "impossible" places for zombies to spawn but "unlikely" ones too. This would greatly improve the barricading experience as, at present, there's little point in barricading an area unless you can totally enclose it - it's 100% protection or nothing, which again doesn't make the best experience (from my point of view. Still, I cleared them out, built my door and a rain barrel (OK I might need 2 of these and I'm 1 garbage bag away from achieving it, so it's not totally end-game yet) and, well, it's Farmville all over again. It's only day 26 and I suppose a lot can happen... but the last 3 weeks haven't seen any hordes come knocking so I don't see why they would now. Two additional points: I've yet to find a recipe book (except one for a smoke bomb, which didn't actually tell me how to make a smoke bomb). Are there meant to be food recipe books in this build? I can't make bread for some reason. Admittedly, I never made bread before but I have all the ingredients I need, just none of them offer me the option to make dough, even when I have them all in my main inventory. Bug or me being stupid? I expect I'll jump back on tomorrow. I'll probably die doing something stupid (or trying to get those final garbage bags + box of nails I need to get to the true end game) but right now it feels like if I just sat in my little fort farming I'd live forever. TL;DR - The first week is hell then things get surprisingly easy again, provided you don't try and live right in the middle of town.

As one of the people who was, a month ago, whinging about the game turning into Farmville after the first week or so and also one of the people who is now whinging about there being too many zombies I just want to say this: Thank you devs. I know this is tough. Assholes like me will never be satisfied, but we do appreciate the huge amount of work you are putting into this and your sincere desire to get it right, no matter what it takes and to do something genuinely impossible - make people like me happy I'm gonna jump back in and see if I've got what it takes to survive for ooh, say, a week. Right now, I'd be damn satisfied with a week

I'm not sure about the new numbers. Perhaps I just suck but in my 8-or-so IWBUMS playthroughs so far I've barely been able to leave home without MAJOR horde drama. I know a lot of people are saying that means I ought to change my tactics but... to what exactly? I can't sneak by ALL of them. If I kill even a couple of stragglers then there's every chance I'll trigger a huge chain reaction. Most of the time I end up trying to be all sneaky and shit but ultimately having to run like fuck, at which point I end up with a colossal horde chasing me and die. I agree with a lot of people that the new numbers are fun, for a while, but when even raiding the house down the street is virtually impossible, regardless of strategy, the game gets a bit static.

Just wanted to clarify something, if possible: MY understanding is that, in previous builds, the zombie numbers were very large but essentially finite. Am I right in thinking that this is no longer the case - they will always respawn back up towards their starting numbers? I would personally favour zombies spawning but remaining finite - i.e. a depopulated area respawns but at the expense of zombie numbers in the rest of the map. Not 100% sure how this would work though, or if it would actually make much difference (except for in very long games) but I do feel a little like clearing an area is sort of pointless now, particularly with a respawn rate of 10% a day (the numbers I've seen suggest that this means you could have 90 new zombies respawning a day in some areas!). Whinge aside I love the new spawning mechanic, it's made the game way more fun and challenging (and/or borderline impossible!).

What do people think of the new spawning mechanics in build 32? Will this fix the problems we've seen (i.e. PZ becoming Farmville)? I'm personally not convinced unless the area you can attract zombies from with noises etc is larger than the "loaded" part of the map. Otherwise it will remain pretty easy to stay home, farm, and never have any new Zs spawn close enough to your base to be a threat. That said it does look like the way the new spawn mechanics work (with zombies unable to spawn inside walled off areas) will cause lots of zombies to spawn at edges of bases, particularly larger bases, which could be fun

Hey all, Like many people I'm having trouble with the late game turning a bit Farmville-ish. I understand that at present zombies only "exist" in the cell which is being streamed (i.e. the one the player is in). Would it affect performance too greatly to extend this area to adjacent cells as well (I respect that the answer may be 'yes' as it would mean streaming either 5 or 9 cells instead of 1 at present, depending on whether you included diagonals)? I was thinking a combination of: 1.) More cells streamed (so there's always likely to be at least a handful of zeds being streamed thanks to respawn etc.) 2.) Greater effect of sounds (so, say, meta-noises or player produced gunshots outside are audible throughout the streamed area) and 3.) Longer zombie memory (so they keep moving towards the source of a noise/anything else interesting till they reach it rather than getting bored and forgetting like they often do now) Would nicely ramp up the difficulty/challenge/realism in the later game. At present I chop wood and saw things right outside my own house, for weeks on end, without a single zombie being attracted by the noise. Even when I did encounter a big group of them (whilst trying to raid the mini-mart) I just ran away for a minute and when I turned round the mob had gotten bored and forgotten about me. I hadn't even really moved out of line of sight (though I was a reasonable distance away) and I would have expected them to keep shambling towards the last location they saw me at rather than giving up like they did. Any thoughts on the desirability of this and whether it's implementable, or would it be too CPU intensive?

I've only had the game a few days and already this issue is bugging me. I've come to realise I don't even need to close the doors and windows on my safehouse - let alone build an impenetrable fortress - as there simply aren't any zeds nearby. I've been thinking about how to implement "realistic" migration a lot and I can see it would be supremely difficult to do perfectly without keeping track of every zombie location which is not feasible for those of us not running on a supercomputer. I am going to try modding in something that creates and migrates hordes (rather than individual zombies) around the map - I've made a thread over on the modding forum asking for help/enquiring about feasibility. I really want to see this game work and I admire the devs commitment to a "realistic" zombie experience, but the lack of danger in the mid-late game kind of breaks it for me right now.

Hello all, Very new to PZ and modding. I've enjoyed the game so far but my major disappointment is a severe lack of 'wandering' Zs once you've cleared the area around your safe house, so I wanted to try modding in a bit more migration and horde formation to make things more challenging in the late game. I'm sure the devs are working on this but I wanted to create a placeholder mechanic in the meantime. Broadly what I would like to achieve is this: 1. ) As well as storing the total number of zombies in unstreamed cells, give those zombies a chance of 'clumping' represented by a simple fluctuating value (possibly recalculated only when the player sleeps, to minimize performance issues). 2.) When this clumping value reaches a certain threshold the zombies have a chance to form a horde. 3.) If a horde is formed, the horde semi-randomly picks a location and moves towards it, preferably navigating along roads and other natural paths rather than in a straight line (I recognise that this may be extremely difficult, so difficult it may be necessary to hardcode in the various paths a horde might shamble along, but it's desirable both from a realism standpoint and to avoid zombies walking through impassible non player-generated objects). 4.) The game would keep track of either an exact location or a cell location for wandering hordes, updated pretty constantly. I'm assuming that, provided there were never too many hordes (there could perhaps be an upper limit) that this wouldn't be too demanding. 5.) What happens when a horde reaches its destination? I'm not sure - it may simply disperse, or it may attack the building it was heading towards, or it may choose a new location. What I want to know is: A.) how much, if any, of this is feasible using the available modding resources? B.) What public functions should I start looking at in order to implement this? I'm willing to put the time in (both for my own enjoyment and because this seems to be something a large subsection of the community is really eager for) but I don't want to start down this path only to find it's a dead end. Any help advice greatly appreciated P.S. Much kudos and gratz to the devs and community for making such a great game!