ApolloDiaspora

Pretty good idea. after all, nothing says 'survivor' more than ad hoc clothing, and tonnes of gear strapped to one's body in unlikely places. Fishing vest, fanny pack, backpack and bedsheet-cum-bandolier. So stylish. Very survival. Wow.

Seems pretty reasonable. Just think of stuff like the alarm-traps in Metro 2033. Hanging bells, broken glass on a concrete floor... Anything that would give off a noticeable noise when someone walked over/through/under it. If you want to go for the full on potato route, hanging grenades by their pin/pull-string on an elevated tripwire is pretty standard tactic as far as military booby traps go. Loud fekking noise with the chance of severely injuring the thing that hit the wire. Could pull the same sort of thing in Zomboid. Rig a firearm to your trip wire, aim at the path to serve as a trap, or aim up to serve as a non-lethal alarm system an/or annoy the birds.

An actual Campus would be pretty sweet. A bunch of multi level buildings, large open areas of pavement or grass, access to rare items not often available/looted by the general populace. Plus, if you're setting it up anything like the university I attended, no perimeter fence. At all. Coupled with the multiple buildings of different sizes, open areas and looting possibility, you'd have a pretty interesting place to fortify up.

...wait a minute. Does NPK stand for Nitrate, Phosphate Potassium?

Hehe. Thanks Croak. Didn't know I was making a name for myself here Out of all the things I slapped up here, I think reading glasses would be the easiest to implement, and a happy mid ground in terms of gameplay impact/difficulty. Taking longer to read a book wouldn't really make it difficult to play, but should prove enough of an irritation that finding reading glasses would end up being a player objective.

I think the only problem with using a flashlight-taped-to-a-gun in Zomboid as is, is the flashlights themselves. The sprite seems to indicate it's one of the big chunky 'lantern' torches that takes a big 6V battery to operate. Even though it uses generic-cylindrical-battery. Perhaps adding in another flashlight with a different sprite, that weighs less could be a way around that. Make it only the smaller torch-like flashlights can be taped to guns. Better yet, do horrible things to a helmet/hat you can find, and tape the torch to that. Or make the slim-torch-flashlight holdable in one hand when using a pistol. It's entirely possible to hold a pistol and flashlight at the same time, just look at any police pictures - One hand hold the torch, the hand holding the pistol goes on over the top, and you brace both wrists against each other.

Tapeworm idea? Seems interesting. Might need a new moodle though. Say, recolour the sickness moodles to shades of yellow, and change the prompt text. For example, 'Queasy: Feeling a little off. Perhaps it was something you ate?' Then 'tapeworm' becomes a catch-all for any sort of parasite/mild infection you could get after eating unprepared food, or food that wasn't cooked thoroughly enough. The nasty, crippling stuff you get from eating raw steak, for example, would keep the sick moodle we have now, as it wouldn't be a long, weeks long affair. Lucky clover/spiffo/lighter? Perhaps it gives an extremely low enhancement to luck, or only some weak happiness/calming buffs to the player. After all, they've got their grandad's lucky lighter! The one that got them through the war! So, more player-character attachment to a personal item than anything. As for the eyeglasses idea, I've often thought about that myself. I'm blind as a bat without my glasses, which would be a real liability in an apocalyptic situation. Provided your character knows what prescription they take, you could nick the glasses you find at the optometrist. The ones that they load with different grade lenses to see what works best. Failing that, you could pick and choose glasses you find lying around or on corpses. After wearing them for a while, if they're the wrong prescription, you could get a headache moodle or something. Actually, for a happy mid-ground with the glasses, perhaps implementing reading glasses would be a better idea. No fooling around with the players field of view or perception. You take a negative trait at character creation, and it would take longer for your character to read books. Equip reading glasses before going through the book and you'd read at the normal speed. The best part about this is that reading glasses are just magnifiers. You can pick them up all over the place, flea markets, petrol stations, etc. No need to bugger around with matching prescription glasses to your character's eyesight. As an added bonus, the magnifying lenses of the reading glasses could serve as a magnifying glass for starting a fire.

I figure any zombies found under/in a bed would have died and reanimated in place. Someone gets bit, starts getting very sick, and snuggles into bed for the night. They die, reanimate, but there's no stimulus in the room to move the zombie around. It just lays there. Sure, it might flail around a bit, but I doubt they'd have the motor skills to get out of a snuggly made bed. On the flip side, the smell would likely give them away. But, yeah. I'm all for surprise zomzoms As for shower zombies, it's not that that gets me. It's the eight zombies hidden by the inwards opening bathroom door, only to pop out and bite me rump as I rummage in the cabinet for towels.

Personally, I'd take a sod house as being more 'shelter' than 'fortress'. Make a smallish wooden frame, heap sod over it, cover the gaps with dirt, etc... Could work well as camouflage or a hunting blind. It'd be a given that sod earth walls would crumble very fast under even one agressive zombie, but, again, shelter. Not fortress. Anything is better then being caught in the rain.

Funny that space sims have been brought up in-forum. Just started a new game of X3: Albion Prelude myself

Perhaps collecting river water in a pan and letting it dry out? It works wonders near the ocean. If any body of water in the playable area is mildly salty, you could be able to collect some over time. Whether you can collect enough this way for it to be worth doing is a different matter entirely.

This topic has been brought up, time and again, and run into the ground every time. Use the search function The TL;DR version is the average Joe won't be able to handload their own ammo without something nasty happening, the player can build a house because of gameplay reasons, and Zomboid really isn't about running around hosing down zombies with bullets. That said, I (my opinion remember) think that being able to reload shotgun/grenade rounds might be worthwhile, seeing as the large shell casing and simplistic weapon design (so, double barrel shotguns, NOT pump) would be more forgiving if the player screws up.

Could be useful to include larger capacity ammo boxes. Say for the pistol ammo. You can put ten bullets in a box and it weighs X. Being able to put thirty bullets in a box and have it weigh 3X would be fine by me. Be more for organising ammo in cabinets in a safehouse so the list of items isn't filled with smaller boxes. Of course, this means carrying a larger ammo box out on a loot run would be silly. Cracking open a larger box would likely encumber you immediately

This idea means we could have louder thunderstorms! We don't need another hero We don't need to know the way home All we want is life beyond... the thunderdome...

I've always thought the crowbar could weigh a little less, or have a buff for knocking down doors. It IS a crowbar after all. Otherwise, Freeman 4 Life

Considering how rare(ish) garbage bags are in game, and the fact that you find most of them in cabinets/drawers instead of bins, I'd always figured that the garbage bags you find in game are clean ones without holes in them. It also comes down to the volume of the bag you're using. The average supermarket bag is smaller than a garbage bag, and made of much thinner plastic, especially if you luck out and grab one of the heavy duty bags designed for storing garden trimmings (i.e: clipped tree branches). Might be interesting to make the small rain collector (the square one) craftable using a bunch of shopping bags and duct tape instead of garbage bags. An alternate recipe, mind you, not a replacement of the existing one.

You'd be surprised. I had a bright orange plastic metal detector when I was younger. Ran off a 9V battery, clearly made for kids, but it worked pretty well. Plus, if you know what you're doing, it's reasonably easy to make a metal detector from electronic components and some wire. As for a use in Zomboid? Stripping for electronics, or rewiring as a sensor in some electronics project. Most sets of traffic lights have a magnetic loop running across the traffic lanes (much like a metal detector) for sensing if cars are stopped and waiting to pass through the intersection. That's also why gluing strong magnets to a bicycle frame is a good idea; The strong magnetic field is detected by the loop, allowing regular bikes to be counted in the traffic light's logic. With a bit of jiggering, I could see a metal detector (or the guts of one) serving as a vehicle sensor, opening gates for passing vehicles, detonating mines, or something. Be better than using pressure plates, seeing as hordes would probably weigh enough to set one off. Mine detection? Probably not going to work. Modern landmines are mostly plastic, specifically to avoid setting off military metal detectors. Could work well for detecting unexploded ordnance though. With all the battlefields (post zombies of course) and abandoned target ranges in the Kentucky area, there's bound to be a few hot potatoes waiting around for some poor bugger to step/kick them. Using a metal detector as a stud finder could work, if extracting nails from walls ever becomes a thing. Finally, buried treasure! Perhaps a survivor buried a cache of ammo, perhaps a survivalist scattered cheap guns over the landscape long before Z day and forgot about them (it's been know to happen). But, the best, and most common, kind of buried treasure would be finding nails, screws, fish hooks and the like buried in soft sand/mud around garages, river banks, and so on. Imagine if someone lost a multitool when fishing and it got buried in the sand. If it's a decent non-cheapie one, it's going to be mostly rust proof, so you'd be able to use it to some extant after digging it up. Loose railway spikes, lying hidden in the ballast around/under railway tracks could be useful too. Remember, not all scrap you find would be useless in a survival situation

Hey, I remember seeing pics of that homemade flamer back in highschool.If I recall, the PVC pipe assembly is supposed to be pressurised. Dangerous stuff if you don't make it perfectly... Anyway. Flamethrower appears a -bit- OP at a first glance, but think carefully about it. With that sort of get up, you're looking at only a few bursts of flame. It's heavy, awkward to carry, and liable to explode in a nasty fashion if you've not been scrupulous with your manufacturing of it. Plus, there's the whole flamethrower-versus-zombies issue raised by Max Brooks: A human body is a cow to set alight, and it doesn't burn all that quickly. Which means that horde you just doused with burning petrol is going to happily set fire to anything in the area before they're rendered immobile. On the other hand, flamethrowers are really the only option for a player craftable heavy weapon. Perhaps for a scratch built armoured tank?

Could have a 'mild trait' you select during character creation. Does your character like their hot cuppas with or without sugar? Though, I agree a recipe rebalance might be needed. Make a hot cup (or pot?) of tea/coffee, then you can add milk, sugar, cinnamon, etc to it, as you would spices for extra benefits. Perhaps make the extra 'spices' reduce boredom more than a regular cup? Come to think of it, being able to brew up a large pot/urn of tea, and have characters fill mugs/thermos bottles/water bottles (if it's cool tea/coffee ) with it could be a nifty thing for multiplayer. Come back to base and there's Frank, looking after the coffee urn, making sure it stays hot and doesn't boil dry.

I wonder how easy it is to remove those chain-linked-bar security barriers (that are pulled down over glass storfronts) with the right tools? It'd be a building project and a half, but I wonder if you could transplant a barrier like that to another building? Though in that case the supports you'd build up would give out long before the barrier itself. Hell, when vehicles are put in, riveting/bolting one of those security barriers over the windows on a car/bus could serve quite well as armour. Ah, possibilities!

Have yet to play the release (derp!) but noticed something in the OP: "Firearm need to be held with 2 hands (except pistol)."Does this apply for the sawn off shotgun too?

Well, I'm just throwing ideas around Suomi I figured that having a 'water barrel' be a little cheaper, in terms of resources/skills required, than a full size 'rain barrel' would be a good way to offset its inability to collect rainwater, poor rain collection capability, or something like that. If you think about it, having to frequently empty a small rain collector into a 'water barrel' to build up a nice reserve of water would be slower and more inefficient than simply making a large rain collector and letting it do its thing. Anyway. The 'water barrel' idea is me just trying to have a craftable water storage container that doesn't collect rainwater (or does so poorly), independent of the existing rain collector box/barrel, and any future methods such as filling up a bathtub. It'd be nice to make, but not really essential. In other words, being able to pour water back into the existing rain collectors is the main point of this suggestion. The 'water barrel' idea is something nice that could be slapped in if the devs, or a mod maker, are so inclined.

Hmm.... The concept of 'zombie-guts-camo' has been brought up time and time again. Covering yourself in zombie gore, when a single bite or scratch can get you infected? Covering yourself in gore when it won't fool the zombies? Yeah. No. However. Let's take the topic title literally: 'Undead Disguise'. The player crafts a disguise from torn clothing, meat, congealed blood, and all the various forms of nastiness you'd expect a zombie to be wearing. Except all the gore, meat and blood isn't sourced from zombies. It comes from dead animals you've hunted, rotting meat found in the fridge, even players you've murdered (ick!). It certainly won't fool a zombie, but it might fool a survivor. Lurch a bit, groan, even lie still in the grass like a crawler. Wait for them to see you at range, and determine that you're not a threat. They run off for a fun, mirth filled day of cracking skulls and collecting loot. Meanwhile, you get into their safehouse, steal the loot, smear blood (and the odd bit of rotting meat) on the furniture, punch out a pair of windows, then get the hell out of dodge. The come back and assume a zombie knocked out a window, staggered through the house, and kept going. Until they find the missing gear. If they find it's gone missing. Not sure how this sort of 'zombie camouflage' could be implemented in Zomboid, but I think it's an interesting concept. You're balancing making yourself sick (you ARE covering yourself in rotting crap after all), being coated with gore you can't wash off easily, and potentially getting attacked by a zombie against being able to sneak around other players and NPCs. Oh, and potentially taking a blunt instrument/bullet to the brain. Hell. If you play your cards right, and have gigantic cojones, you could gore up, play dead, and attack a survivor when they dismiss you as just another corpse. Just hope there's no zombies nearby that would appreciate a well presented meal.

Are you the one who knocks?

Had a bit of a brain wave today. Often, when playing PZ, I don't bother levelling up my carpenting skill that quickly. Even when the water supply konks out, I know there's enough charges left in nearby taps, showers and toilets to keep me going for a while. Often, I'll start filling buckets and cooking pots full of water, then haul them back to the safehouse for a nice little reserve to keep me going until I finally get around to learning to saw a log in half properly. This normally results in a container full of containers of water in the safehouse. So, I got to thinking about water management. I suggest that we be given the ability to empty containers of water into a rain barrel, and that some form of indicator be implemented to inform us how full a water barrel is (in addition to the visual feedback we get now). Say, when you're standing near a rain barrel, you right click on a bucket of water. You see a prompt 'Pour into container: Rain barrel, 75% full'. Click, and there the water goes, just like pouring water into the various empty bottles we have now. Why would this be useful? You might not be getting that much rain, but the full water barrel is a damned useful asset. So, you haul water. The water gets placed in a single, centralised location that you can use to fill up your watering cans, bottles, etc. without the ponderousness of having to fill them by pouring: Instead of having a full cooking pot and a bottle in your inventory, pouring water into the bottle, and storing the pot back in the cabinet, you can simply right-click on the rainbarrel and fill the bottle direct. Suddenly, a rainbarrel doesn't need to be crafted outside to be useful. You could store a large amount of water in a rainbarrel indoors, while your collection point is outside, or hidden elsewhere. Convenience. Maybe the external source of water (be it another barrel, a well, houses with water still in the pipes) has been cut of by zombies, or perhaps you don't want to erect a structure outside that screams 'safehouse' to avoid attracting other players on a PVP server. Or perhaps you're doing some gardening indoors, and walking back outside to fill the watering can is too much of a pain. Again, the convenience of having a large amount of water right there, where you need it. To further extend the concept, perhaps the player could craft a 'water barrel' or 'water tank'. Similar in capacity to the end-tier rain collecting barrel, but craftable at a much lower skill level. This water container would be inferior to even the first teir rain collector, or be incapable of collecting rainwater altogether, but would serve as a convenient place to stockpile water in and around the safehouse. A 'water barrel' could be cheaper in terms of resource expenditure too. You could argue that the large amount of garbage bags used in the construction of the existing rain collecting barrels are used to not only waterproof the container, but serve as a water catchment framework (i.e: Plastic funnel) to help collect water better. The 'water barrel' could then require less garbage bags to construct, as you're only making the barrel water tight. Or perhaps the amount of bags needed to make the high-end rain barrel (or both) could be raised to make storing hauled water more attractive. As a final alternative to consider, perhaps the 'water barrel' concept could be pushed towards the other extreme and become an expensive and very high capacity water storage vessel, ideal for storing all the usable water for a fortress. TL;DR The ability to pour water from containers back into a rain barrel would enable us to stockpile water inside rain barrels situated indoors, or during a dry spellBeing able to pour water from containers into rain barrels would make hauling water from nearby houses a much more attractive proposition, as you no longer need to collect a large amount of pots/buckets to store this hauled waterA new rain barrel ('water barrel') that is very bad/incapable of collecting water, has the same overall capacity, and is easier to craft than an end tier rain barrel would be highly useful. Stockpiling rain or hauled water indoors, or close to where it is needed (i.e: kitchen, indoor garden) would be most convenientEven when the ability to stockpile water in a bathtub (or similar pre-made container) is implemented, being able to build a water storage container (rain barrel or water barrel) wherever you want would give players more flexibility in how they set up their safehouses/supply caches.