Badgzerz

Big no to my character out of the blue cutting or shooting themselves. Maybe that part could be a trait. Input delay is a good one. I think increased risk of injury is the best course of action. Depressed people tend to be careless and reckless with tools and machinery. They tend to be careless with actions that can hurt them in a pretty apathetic way. They may not be paying attention while swinging an axe, using a saw, doing maintenance on a vehicle, or while using hammers.

Plastic bottles can be filled with chemicals that make them burst after some time. They would be incredibly easy to make and carry and they would rupture attracting zombies, they would be louder than many guns. You can attach live ammunition by the bullet to anything that creates a lot of drag so that the primer of the cartridge always lands first. Effectively you could mortar these very easily manufactured decoys over buildings with an atlatl, sling, or slingshot to attract zombies. High skill with slings, atlatls, or wrist rockets would enable one to lob these decoys a great distance, far enough to reach over a gas station or bar. Stun grenades Smoke grenades - draws zombies from afar within line of sight. As far as you can pan your camera. Firecrackers - very commonly found and easily crafted from gunpowder. In 80-90s america you could get these at a gas station or supermarket at 16 years old pretty easily. Light and throw. Can throw further if a long primary melee is the primary as I can notch a sword or stick and use it as a lever for a farther throw. LRAD speaker - Imagine laser technology but with sound. You can beam any audio in a limited cone towards something from a great distance away. This would be a great way to split groups of zombies off a thinly spread horde from afar. High electrical skills can craft these, and they are handheld sirens that work in a customizable cone. Programmable burglar alarms ) Traps Falling log trap - easily setup in doorways, devastating against single targets, immobilizes targets and can be used to hunt medium game. ceiling claymore trap - Surefire way to hit a horde of zombies in the heads. Repeating gun trap - when mastered you can have zombies walk through a self resetting trap that uses one bullet to kill one zombie every time. I would do this with a .22LR gun mounted to a door jamb followed by a floating metal rod tripwire that is fixed to the gun, when the rod is tripped by a zombie head, it is guaranteed to score a headshot and reset itself. I hope you've been collecting those useless low condition autoloading pistols. Fragmentation grenade trap - largely useless as fragmentation won't kill a zombie because headshots only count. Would do a great job at attracting more, killing some, and permanently deafening & blinding live zombies. Has the side effect of creating many crawlers. Concussive grenade trap - Best trap as concussive blasts affect the ears, brain, and eyes worst. Put three stun grenades into one room slightly above head level hanging from the ceiling and the concussive blast is guaranteed to kill every single zombie in the room with minimal effort. Place a cone above the grenade cluster to direct all the concussive blast like a lens on a flashlight for more effect and range. Traps may draw more zombies than you kill, use carefully.

Cooking/foodprep should be the skill that is required to smoke/dehydrate meat. Carpentry would determine how sturdy and efficient your apparatus' are. I would like to make jerky out of all that spoling meat in my game in the first week passively. Cooking suffers from the inability to just let a meal cook all day while you do other things.

The spawn into an apocalypse with nothing, not even a backpack, and no skills shtick is old and it makes for a terrible beginning. Its like I'm some stand in actor that doesn't know what he's doing. I feel like a dumb shmuck when I spawn. Seriously, no skills, clothed, 27 years old, no items, in the middle of total chaos and death days, weeks, months after the balloon went up. Survival games have a lot to learn when it comes to their beginnings.

Cold storage just wouldn't be feasible year round in Kentucky.

People smoked their food or salted it to dehydrate it to preserve it. Smokers are very easy to make in the bush, they just require a couple sticks, some tree boughs, some twine, and some sort of metal rods, like the shelving in a stove or grill. I could make one very easily. Permanent ones could be made from planks, or bricks. Or even clay. Tribes also preserved meat and berries in its own fat and it could store for years at room temperature. This was called Pemmican, and in game it would be incredibly easy to make, and it could be made w/ or without foraged berries. People also preserved meats in salt to dehydrate it, then they would cook it into a soup to make it edible again. Then of course there is making jerky, which is laughably easy with some thought. This all needs to be in vanilla. Except maybe salt preservation, although salt shouldn't exactly be difficult to come buy. You can look at a lot of pre-industrial household methods for different things on the Townsends youtube channel.

Add bullbars, undercarriage protection, and plows that are designed to prevent zombies from getting under wheels. Metal bars over windows are all that is realistically needed armor plates are far too heavy and unnecessary. My ideal zombie apocalypse vehicle wouldn't be a tank or armored vehicle, it would be some reliable 4x4 with something that prevents my vehicle from taking damage just driving down a crowded highway. A snowplow pickup with metal slats covering the windows is all that is needed against zombies for day to day use.

My vision is that eventually, zombies would gradually decrease in the world after they become massive shambling hordes a month in. They would rapidly die off and the ones left would be evolved versions that are far more capable of hunting you, because you are a potential host that needs to be secured to the parasite that they are infected with. If it takes hundreds and hundreds of zombies to infect one new host when those types of hosts are the only ones left, the zombies WILL die off and the apocalypse will end. The cities would be full of poisoned air that cannot be safely traveled without protective equipment like masks, or even hazmat if the air is that badly biologically contaminated. Survival late game would look like a farmer running out of gardening tools, axes, firewood, game, ammunition, and supplies so he must find new grounds or supplies to live. He would be forced out of desperation to deal with the festering cities, roadways, and evolved zombies scavenging for signs of humans along roads to get tools and supplies he NEEDS for survival. He would either die, or succeed and live to die from less violent causes without zombies. Maybe he will be bow hunting and he steps too close to a herd of wild boars that impale him and eat him. Maybe he has no antibiotics and hangs around corpses too much and dies of pneumonia. Maybe evolved zombies see me traveling in a direction, lose sight of me, and decided to endlessly walk in that direction they last saw me walking in hoping I walk in a straight line to my home and they wait outside doors and windows making little noise. Zombies that can't reproduce have one ultimate logical conclusion; death. They aren't smart enough to hunt, or survive in the wilderness, nor are they capable of hunting game. They will draw out that conclusion for as long as they possibly can given their intelligence to work with. The zombie apocalypse would be a matter of humans surviving until this logical conclusion to the undead apocalypse.

Hordes of dead zombies piling up will poison the air to the point where you will vomit, get sick, or pass out from nausea. Killing hordes with fire but not disposing of the charred corpses will also poison the air but to a lesser degree. You could dispose of bodies in sealed off buildings without burning them and it would keep the outside air clean. Medical items added - Charcoal tablets Used to prevent vomiting from queasiness/nausea Treats food/alcohol poisoning Can be crafted with very high cooking along with a read magazine with normal charcoal Common spawns in medical tables Respirator chargables added (like batteries or ammo charges electronics or guns, masks are charged with these) NATO filters Can be recharged with activated charcoal Can become queasy at worst lightweight (just over 1/2 a lb per filter) Oxygen tank Can be refilled with a large auto shop type air compressor (not the type you can throw in your truck) Immune to any poisoned air heavy Box filter Can be recharged with less activated charcoal Can become nauseous and faint in the worst air quality Extremely lightweight and easy to source Activated Charcoal Crafted from commonly looted Charcoal tablets looted from medical spawns with a mortar and pestle. The tablets it is crafted from are used to treat poisoning from things like alcohol or other toxin or stomach illness. Respirators added Military respirator Uses NATO filters, has a drinking tube, harsh perception radius reduction. heavy. Comes with an exertion penalty. Firefighter mask Uses oxygen tanks, has no drinking tube at all, has a panoramic mask, heavy. Medical mask Uses oxygen tanks, has no drinking tube, no perception hit, very light, reduces the protection provided by the oxygen tank, but it does increase healing rate. Contractor mask Uses box filters, has no drinking tube, no perception hit, and is very very light. Comes with an exertion penalty Premium panoramic respirator uses NATO filters, has a drinking tube, no perception radius hit. Medium weight. Very rare. Comes with an exertion penalty. Tile objects added Air compressor Can be used to refill oxygen tanks or air rifle reservoirs. Moodles Queasy can lead to vomiting which will just make you hungry and thirsty. Can be offset with tablets. If you vomit into a mask you will be panicked, hungry, thirsty, extremely anxious, and you will get reduced time from your filter/air supply. Plus your loot run will end up being cut short as you have to leave, clean your mask, and them come back better prepared. Pretty brutal isn't it? Advancing to nausea from queasiness combined with exertion will lead to passing out.

They would be worse to deal with than zombies. They are a massive problem in the southern rural US because they ravage crops, they impale hunters, and they travel in herds potentially numbering above 50. In zomboid they would end up depleting your forests, crops, and traps, all while luring zombies to their activity. They would also eat zombie corpses which means their meat cannot be used for food or bait, maybe compost. You could hunt herds that are exclusively rural populations for renewable bacon. A high enough cooking skill gives you the ability to tell if meat is tainted. They can and will charge you impaling you with tusks covered in icky gunk that is sure to give you a nasty infection at the very least. If they've been fighting zombies, this is a guaranteed way to get zombified. They won't make constant noises, be attracted to sound, and they will stick together in herds like wet boogers. Blunt weapons would be almost useless against them. They will try to get into water collectors which means you may wake up to broken water collectors. They may use buildings as shelters long term or rummage through cabinets for bags of chips (Wildlife is incredibly resourceful, they will do these things!!) This wouldn't be so bad considering they are bacon if they couldn't be tainted. How would they be dealt with in zomboid? Dreadfully. Lots of traps combined with a lot of bullets/arrows.

If you survive long enough zombies won't be the threat because they've all died off.

In the long dark the world runs out of manufactured resources which means you end up having to use bows, hand forged knives/axes, you have to hunt your own food and survive wildlife encounters with wolves, bears, and moose without access to flare guns, rifles, or revolvers. You have to render fish oil in order to use a storm lantern after you exhaust all the jerry cans. You would have to handload your own ammunition, or start using black powder guns which you can very easily cast your own lead for and use gunpowder for. As for zombies; They would starve and die off over time, the fit ones would cannibalize other zombies and they would become more fit for survival. The parasite in their heads would make their hosts more fit for survival rather. I would expect zombies to start using tactics used by animals like foraging for food, stealing from traps, depleting your reserves of food. I would expect them to be able to run, or make vocalizations to draw many more zombies to them. They would not increase in population however in prolonged periods. The ones that starve and die en masse would end up poisoning the air and you would need a respirator to live in those areas. Corpse disposal is not important enough in game. You would need to get a full face respirator along with in date filters for it to not die of severe infection entering areas littered with corpses. 40mm nato filters CAN be improvised if you have charcoal and fine enough cotton to put together a filter. Activated charcoal is commonly used in the medical industry, and it is used in gas mask filters. Wearing a gasmask increases exertion, decreases your perception radius, and most masks don't allow you to drink, only the military masks really have standardized drinking tubes. Due to the zombies becoming more adaptive, melee would be absolute suicide, melee shouldn't be as effective as it is with weapons that don't allow you to reach a human skull outside an arms reach. Late game when zombies are faster and smarter, and potentially capable grabbing your weapon, ranged weapons need to be learned. Clearing them by having them walk into a campfire won't work as they've learned that hot stuff burns. Wildlife; Wild boars would make you miserable. They would destroy your crops, steal from your traps, forage from your forests, and draw zombies to themselves and thus, to your supplies. They would fight with zombies and I would guess be immune, or they could eat/bite/impale zombies and become carriers so if they impale/bite you, you risk zombification. They could also try to drink from your water collectors and damage them. Wild boars would make the apocalypse worse than zombies ever could once you are living off the land. If you can hunt them effectively, you've a renewable supply of BACON! People hunt wild hogs in the south with 50 round drums and thermal scopes from trucks because they are such a massive problem ravaging farms with herds in the dozens. They could eat zombies which means tainted boars could not be safely eaten or used as bait for traps, plus they would infect you. Urban boar populations would be magnitudes worse than zombies given they can charge and you won't be killing them by bashing their skulls. You'd have to hunt boars out in the sticks to get usable carcasses. These boars would move in to feast on the rotting zombies. Rotting food in containers would attract them and they would begin using buildings as shelters. Sasquatch easter egg Resources; You'd need to make your own pine pitch glue You would need to pick up a bow/crossbow, along with learn how to make arrows (the walking dead doesn't portray them well, you WON'T be getting those arrows back intact very often, especially crafted ones) You will end up using lower end renewable weapons that are able to shoot ball bearings like wrist brace slingshots, atlatls, hardwood longbows. Some items would simply never run out, like plastic, or ball bearings, or sheet metal, or possibly ammunition. There are trillions of rounds in existence in the US. There are many plants and handloading tools. There are many places to source powder, and one person could never possibly use it all. You could expect to have to travel a long way to a very densely zombified area to get access to it though. TL;DR, a zombie apocalypse would never be a never ending horde of World War Z zombies long term. It would also be a zombie aftermath apocalypse where you have to deal with thousands and thousands of rotting corpses poisoning air. You would have to deal with animals that you would otherwise eat stealing your supplies and feasting on zombies and become inedible/unusable for bait. Zombies that don't die would be too scary to want to take on with melee weapons because they learn to grab, block, or they grow tumorous scar tissue that works like armor.

Spear nerf seems extraordinarily harsh as its around about an 80% nerf.

The game is in a late 1980/1990s setting judging by cars, at that time tank type water heaters were almost exclusively used, some electric, most natural gas. So, how would you get water from non existent residential 40 gallon tank heaters? Good question. If you are tapping water heaters, that means the water was cut off in your game, which likely means there is no power either, and so the water won't be hot and capable of severely burning you. However if you do tap a water heater in any way that is full of hot water, there will be hell to pay. You can tap a water heater with several methods: Power the pump that moves water out of the heater, this will enable you to use faucets, toilets etc. This water is clean. If your house is powered with a generator this pump is already powered. Open the drain valve, you need a hose to collect this water as you do not have the clearance to fit any kind of container under it. This water is dirty and needs to be filtered, not boiled, its just full of mineral deposits because it came from the bottom. A brita filter or sawyer/lifestraw is all that is needed to drink/cook with it. If you hook up the hose after you open the valve, say hi to a horrible burn for a week. You can tap the heater this way with hot water in it and not burn yourself provided you attach the hose before opening the valve, again the water will be too dirty to drink and you will need to filter it, not boil it. Saw open either the inlet or outlet pipe at the top, and use a pipe wrench to remove the connector bringing water into the heater from outside the house. If you saw open the hot water outlet and the water is hot, you will likely scald the skin off your entire forearm and be left with a painful pus leaking mess for a week. Shoot a hole into it and put a cooking pot under it You can't stop the heater from losing water without wasting valuable duct tape. If the water is cold when you tap it, it will likely all need to be filtered because the minerals only separate and fall to the bottom of the tank when the water is hot. This isn't 100% realistic but it provides gameplay value such as, tap the heater safely w/o a hose and container to put it in for cold water, but it needs to be filtered. Risk burning yourself tapping it for hot water and it doesn't need filtration. If you set up those tarps you find to collect rain, you could theoretically run it to a water heater instead of making a barrel. Now, not every water heater would be full, most would be drained. But one with water would be enough to keep you hydrated for just a little while after water gets shut off. A 40 gallon water heater if the games weight is in kgs would have 2000 units of water. If it is in pounds Also, if gas lines ever get added, those I would expect to outlast the electricity(Unsubstantiated belief), so yes water heaters will be hot after power goes out as most of them back then used gas. Its more fun than tapping water heaters safely for cold water in any default mode.

If you have a 1.5 gp/f toilet (gallon per flush) that is how much water the tank holds. While you guys are fighting for toilet water, I'll open up a standard residential 40 gallon water heater that nobody is clever enough to think about. Having been an apprentice plumber I can make a genius suggestion thread on the matter.

What firearms have rotational motion that needs to be translated to linear motion? When I first picked up a gun racking confused me a bit as I'm so used to technical terms like cycle.

My only existing discovered complaints with guns is that they are far too heavy and I haven't used them because early aim skill makes them coupled with very scarce ammo useless. My second complaint is that gun weights need to be realistic. Please. I can't use the gun well because of accuracy, and I can't carry it when using it early on because it weighs too much. The double barreled shotgun is FAR too heavy. It weighs 2.5kg irl but in game its 4kg. This is unusably heavy. The JS2000 is also too heavy, but its not 1.5kg too heavy. Unloaded a 6 round tube fed shotgun weighs under 3.5kg. In game it weighs 4kg which is 1/2kg too heavy, and 1/2 more kg on your back is dead weight that could go to medical supplies, tools, a radio, or clothing. I don't think ammo should be common enough to be shot haphazardly, but .22LR needs to be added, this ammo wouldn't be effective for killing zeds unless you had a high aim skill. It would be light, very common, have very low recoil and thus somewhat high accuracy, and it would be utterly incapable of hunting game larger than beaver. .22 would be the caliber you shoot as much as you can early on to level up aim to graduate to using an M9, an MSR788, M16, or other revolver/rifle below .308/.44. Leveling firearm skills should be a graduation process from .22 to 9mm/5.56 to .45/20 gauge to .44/.308. I really don't like the use of the word rack opposed to rechamber, its improper and confusing terminology. It also conveys that the developers (bless them this is a good game) don't understand firearms on a tangible level. I wish I could rebind 'racking' to Alt+R as it is much more intuitive and I've learned to instinctively use it playing escape from tarkov. Using alt/ctrl + R to perform secondary actions to main actions like reloading is such an intuitive format tbh. I reload the magazine in the gun with R. I reload the chamber in the gun with Alt+R. Its intuitive to me, maybe not for you. I think there should be a comprehensive look over of guns when the developers get around to rethinking their implementation, and that this look over comes from a perspective of realism and practicality. As for gun attachments, here are my thoughts: Sling, required to carry the gun on your back, stabilizes your aim when you press the sling key and makes you more accurate, but it prevents you from swapping to melee or a pistol until you unwrap the sling from your arm. You need to read a magazine or have the right profession to know how to use the sling technique, or the necessary skill level. Fiberglass stock, reduces weight. Suppressor, decreases weapon reliability, increases rate of fire if automatic, increases weight. Reduces volume somewhat but greatly reduces sound distance. Can be threaded onto a barrel or attached onto a muzzle brake. Muzzle brake, increases recoil recovery, doubles gun volume and distance perpendicular to the direction you fired. Requires the barrel to be threaded. Scope, increases weight and accuracy. Decreases perception angle when used but massively increases accuracy when standing still if not done already/ Bayonet, allows the gun to be used as a spear. Only bolt actions, M16's, and M14's can take bayonets. Choke, increases accuracy, decreases crowd control ability. With a choke you could expect a shotgun to one hit kill every zombie with no aim skill. As for gun crafting, it is very easy to make a slamfire pipe shotgun. You just need two pipes, a nail, and a piece of wood. As for automated gun systems, recoil recovery and accuracy should be directly tied to weight automatically and intuitively. Here is how I'll frame it: Heavy gun; Exhausts your character greatly to aim and hold aimed, good recoil recovery, average aim. Light gun; Exhausts your character lightly to aim and hold aimed, bad recoil recovery, average aim. Average gun(not heavy, not light, perfectly balanced between the two); Average exhaustion, average recoil recovery, good aim. The aim part seems confusing as you think you could hold a 1 pound gun steady better than a 12 pound gun, but there is a sweet spot because a really light gun has no inertia. The weight of a gun would also impact how different strength characters use guns. A high strength character would aim a light gun less accurately than a heavy gun. This is because the mass of your blood pulsing is enough to overcome the inertia of a light gun to move it. These mechanics should be clearly defined on the wiki so players can automatically know how their gun will handle just by looking at the weight of it, and its type too. Maybe I'll spend an hour and cohesively organize and format a suggestion thread when I gain more experience with guns in game.

The window key formats aren't great and I lost a character I spent a lot of time on because I closed a window rather than climbing through it. Holding E should open the window. Pressing E should be the way to climb through windows. Diving through windows while jogging or sprinting would be cool although dubious as to if it is worthwhile. The game needs more hotkeys, it would be nice if I could break windows and remove glass with singular keypresses instead of clicking menus. Escape From Tarkov has a lot of keybinds you can use to interact with items without using any UI and its honestly a great system. I'll explore a format of keybinds for window interaction: X Press - Break Hold continuously - Break and remove glass, hold further to pick up glass E Press - Traverse Hold - Open/close Alt + E Press - Open/close Curtains Hold - Remove/Add curtains