Invader Jim

The Super Survivors! mod is quite good imo. The NPCs can add a lot, whether it's a bunch of survivors that you're trying to keep alive, or hostile bandits shooting at you. Now and again a survivor might have a fire bomb - most of them have guns. So, you might be happily coming back from a looting trip to your base and there'll be a raging gun battle against a horde of zeds w/ buildings on fire. Good times.

It has been a couple of years but I had the same experience. I think we even had a thread about it back then and there were others that survived a bite. Frankly, I think there should be a 5-10% chance of surviving a bite.  If you know a bite is 100% fatal there is little point in continuing. However, if you know there is a chance you might survive you may go all out in your healing/recovery efforts. This sort of struggle adds to the game in my opinion.

You do, for maybe the first day. It becomes rarer quickly as everyone starts dying. Just like how it would go down! You can try to help people out and get them to join you or, do what I've taken to doing: Lock your partner in a bathroom, tell them to stay put (use the right-click context menu for orders), run around to spawn as many survivors as you can, watch them die (maybe help a couple), loot their bodies, then go back home- You'll have a sweet starting loadout, your partner is usually still alive, and the survivors will have lured the zeds away from your base with their gunfire! Good times ensue. 

if you leave the settings at default your gonna almost always hear gunshots at the start, hordes swarming back and forth after the people who are shooting. You can just wait out that initial chaos in an upstairs room.  if you don't like that chaotic start you could go to the settings.lua file (see workshop desc to see how to do it) and set the chance for npc to spawn with guns way lower or set spawn rate of npcs much lower.

My survivors keep committing suicide by drinking bleach. This makes me very sad. They just can't keep their hands off of it, so I have to hide the bleach where they can't find it. =P Any way to fix this or do I have to keep them on suicide watch all the time?

Let's go Alice! WE're going to drive to grandma's house! Lol

Lots of people are tired of waiting.  I feel your frustration.  However, we bought a game that was in development.  There are no guarantees.  If the situation with PZ is really disappointing to you, go play something else. It is just a game and there are plenty of other ones out there. 

Please, please . . . don't ever buy games based on "promises" again. Even if it saddens me that PZ is the reason you learn this lesson, I can't stress this enough: buying something based on what it will be always ends terribly.
 
To those hundreds upset, there are thousands that aren't, and hundreds of thousands we'll never even hear from. Perspective goes both ways and, of course, there are reasons for it. Being upset the game is still in development and that a few of the remaining features aren't in after all this time is totally reasonable.

Gotta remember the number one rule around here.
 
 
Be Lovely. Or Kirrus has something to say 
 
Sarcasm is one thing.
 
Telling a person repeatedly to go fuck themselves is on a whole different level. Kind of tells me a bit about you.....if ya know what i mean.
 
Ask about NPC development all you want. But be aware of the official TIS No ETA policy. And as i said before, they have been told off by so many people for the same stuff you wrote, they won't discuss NPC development in any public forums.
 
Doing so has shown to have a steam roller effect, as it quickly gets misinterpreted to mean NPCs are imminent if they give us anything to show how its going. Suddenly people who have been waiting play the game again, get pissed off when there are no NPCs, and create gripe threads in which they attack the Dev ream, publicly ream them as taking WAY TOO FUCKING LONG to do this.......you get the idea
 
Its a vicious cycle. And we the community are along for the ride. No one said this would be a quick fix thing to add NPC or Vehicles. A lot of that has also been heavily dependant on Animations getting polished off. Probably other little issues that arose as a result of the animations that we dont hear aboutas well....the weird glitches the IWBUMS is intended to help with...
 
Once it hits that development stage internally and they are ready for IWBUMS.
 
Again, have faith. Shit, as bad as WE want it.....imagine how nice it will be for the Devs once V1.0 is out and they can breathe.
 
But keep in mind, its a game. Nothing more. Whether you have 12 steam hours or 2100 steam hours, its only a game. 
 
 

Lots of people are tired of waiting.  I feel your frustration.  However, we bought a game that was in development.  There are no guarantees.  If the situation with PZ is really disappointing to you, go play something else. It is just a game and there are plenty of other ones out there. 

Lots of people are tired of waiting.  I feel your frustration.  However, we bought a game that was in development.  There are no guarantees.  If the situation with PZ is really disappointing to you, go play something else. It is just a game and there are plenty of other ones out there. 

my favorite sandbox setting is:
start population 0,5
max population 3.0
peak at 30 days
respawn time 100 hrs
respawn% - 0.1
migration time 72 hrs
 
with those settings i have nice start to set up base get some loot enjoy the ratio and tv and after a 2 weeks its getting hard. with migration set up at 3 days i dont have to clean my base every day but they still come from time to time. long respawn time is not that bad, they just respawn far away and then migrate to my cells.

Survival is meant to be hard, every time someone survives for too long in survival the devs make it harder.

By the time PZ is 1.0 when you start survival you'll just spawn dead.

And if you're only on day five... Yeah things do tend to go from bad to worse

It seems to me that for non-zombie related injuries, infection should be a prerequisite for fever.  If you gash yourself and it gets infected that could lead to fever if the infection gets worse but you should not go from wounded to fever without infection. 
 
That seems like a bug or a game flaw in my opinion.
 
My advice - remove the broken glass from every broken window you encounter.  I do it obsessively. 

Last run with build 31 lasted for over 3 months before I got bored.
 
Tried built 32 for the first time. Was ded in 4 hours. 
 
The old ways don't work anymore apparently.

First im going to answer the op:  " i dont survive ( max 5 days if im lucky )"
i play the game since when the zombies looks like egg head aliens hahaha 
and always survived 5+ months, i agree that was too easy, but now.. i feel its too hard, mostly at the beginning.
ive always followed my rules: go "ninja" and  try to not fight more thant 2 zombies at the time (but now that is almost imposible because the quantity of them everywhere)..

Hey guys, I love the game but one thing that's pretty annoying for me is when there's a profession you want but it costs more than 8 points and it means you have to then take negative traits, It's not really realistic that a police officer has to also be blind, deaf and dumb etc while a burger flipper can easily be in perfect health, I was kind of bummed when I seen that the new electrician and engineer jobs cost 12 pts which means we have to take negative traits to use them, Would it be possible to change it so no profession costs more than 8 pts. I wouldn't mind if some of the stronger jobs are toned down a little or the weaker ones being buffed for balance. But being forced to take negative traits when you want to use a certain job is not fun and unrealistic in my opinion.
 
 
EDIT: I meant 8 pts not 10

Great discussion here!
 
Just a few quick comments from my side
 
 
Perfect balance for everyone will never be obtained. That is universal. 
 
However, in my experience, the more professions / skills you have in the pool, the harder is to balance a game. I think it was a necessary boost (and a common request on these forums) to add more as the basic set was lacking. I don't know if it went a bit too high tough, only time will tell. Devs have access to the metadata we users generate. If some of the current professions are not being used / picked by the vast majority of players, there are three simple choices: you can either boost the unnused ones (most popular choice), nerf the most used (way unpopular) or delete / merge some professions so you have a less varied source of balance issues (and then go back to square one). 
 
Those of you familiarized with MMORPG will know that rarely a game with a high number of professions + customization reaches true balance. The ones that get close tend to sacrifice variety. Ultimately, its a design choice the makers have to bet on
 
 
I'm still feeling a bit lost when creating a new char and the system is making me feel a bit sad right from the start (maybe this is intended?, the PZ scenario is not pretending to be pleasant). So many things to pick up and so very few points. 
 
Call me soft, I think your positive traits should be higher than the negative ones, not right away balanced. I like the handicap idea, but I think PZ takes this to a painful level (which I'm not labelling as bad "per-se"). Giving me a a max of points I can spend on possitive things and a min of points I must spend in negative traits is something I definitely enjoy. But the feeling you have when creating any kind of "jack of all trades" char is that you are severely handicapped in so many ways that you'll be dead before putting any of your skills in use. 

thank you for the replies guys
 
training and education = blind, deaf and dumb = this is not realistic imo
 
But the distinction between each job should be what specific role that job has and not how many free points you have left over to spend, A farmer is very good at farming and a doctor very good at healing people this is where the distinction should be, Jobs should be specializations and we should be allowed to pick the job we want without having to handicap ourselves.
 
I think negative traits should only be for when players want to take extra positive traits.

But why does a police officer need a negative trait to be a police officer?

I think some randomness would be good.  Instead of a once per day respawn of 10% I would rather see a 33% chance each day of a respawn but it would be a 30% instead of 10%. (Credit goes to Rathlord for the daily % chance of respawn idea.)  Slow, steady and predictable is less fun than a more random  and intermittent influx.
 
You could even randomize the number that respawn. 
 
I am currently in a sandbox game with weekly respawn at 30%.  I am on the north side of West Point.  There is nothing between me at the river last time I checked and I killed maybe 3-4 zombies in that area previously.  I have not noticed the two respawns that occured.  The area around my house has remained fairly clear since I cleared it.  A block to the south and there are two or 3 large (15-20 zombies) groups.  There is much more clumping.  I also see the zombies move in response to meta-events. 
 
Overall I like the clumping zombies. Respawn is a good thing but I wish it were more random. 

I'm actually more excited about the next week now that Q2 ends. It might (possibly) mean that we could, at the very least, get a video or two about the current state of what NPC's are in, or a few paragraphs about what new additions NPCs have gathered for the past several months since we've had the update on them.
 
I could seriously just sit down and watch a little NPC buddy run around and do stuff for 2 hours straight.. I mean, after all I did end up wasting half an hour of my time watching my zombified self wander around along with the horde that ate me... I don't know, maybe I'm just weird.

Alright, so I've spent a while fiddling with zombie settings (until I realized that I have to delete zpop.bin files after each edit, oh well!), And currently I'm on a great run. Finally stopped using knives and dying constantly, because they're currently bugged and don't do the jaw stab kills on specific zombies.
 
So far I'm playing with these zombies.ini settings :
 
A few explanations as to why the numbers are like these :
 
- PopulationMultiplier=1.0 because the survival should start with normal zombie numbers.
- PopulationStartMultiplier=1.0 instead of 0.8 because of the reason above. The game should start with the already "normal" numbers in mind.
- PopulationPeakMultiplier=3.0 Because when the population reaches the peak day, I want the zombie numbers to be somewhere between "Insane" and "High". Zombies reach the peak of their population at day 28.
Why? Because usually at day 28 experienced players have played enough of the game to gather all the essentials they need for base building and securing of perimeter. If, by that time, the random meta events (<3) don't eradicate their safehouses already, going outside would essentially mean running into a lot of zombies and potentially bringing them back. Also, at around day 28 it is fair for the game to have a spike in difficulty, which either comes -before- the electricity/water shutoff, -after- or -along- with it. Also, high zombie numbers constantly moved around by meta-events and near-constant onslaught of zombie hordes on their base will eventually force players to relocate out in the wilderness (which, honestly, they should have already done by now).
- RespawnHours=72.0, RespawnUnseenHours=16.0 and RespawnMultiplier=0.1 . Now these settings I'm really confident with, they are good enough for zombies to never "visibly" spawn in a cleared out area EVEN if you are using the zombie spawn map to track the zombie migration. What those three settings in unison do, basically, is they make 10% of an overall cell population respawn each 3 days, and you have to not see the specific area for 16 in game hours for them to spawn in that chunk. These settings make sure that zombies never "respawn" in your cell if all you do is sit inside your safehouse, eating away at your reserves and occasionally clean the perimeter of zombies. The only zombies that will show up are those that migrated from other cells by meta-events or when they are occupying an empty area. However, if you leave the area (let's say for a long loot run), and don't return in about 16 in game hours, the zombies will start spawning (10% per 3 days) around your safehouse. The system in place, as I'll repeat again, ensures that zombies don't "visibly" spawn in a cleared area, but still fill it up if you don't visit it for a while.
- RedistributeHours=12.0 Twice a day, overly huge, clumped hordes in an unloaded area will start moving around and occupy empty spaces. Sometimes they will cross cells, sometimes they will flood the area where your safehouse is (which has happened to me). It's quite fair for it to happen like this.
- RallyDistance=50, RallyGroupSize=500 and RallyDurationMinutes=10 I wasn't quite sure how it worked. I specifically put the rally group size at half the maximum amount, rally distance at max and rally duration at near minimum to see how big the hordes would form, but all it did, essentially, was make them clump around a single spot and travel from 1 edge of loaded spot to the other just to join another group (Which looked pretty good for me, simulated hordes moving on it's own!)
 
 
Now, to my experiences.
 
My usual favorite safehouse (here) did not work out as a safehouse anymore. The sheer number of zombies accompanied with very little neighboring houses to loot essentially made it near impossible to secure properly, before first meta-game noises started flooding the area. Of course, since I was testing the game, I used the dynamic zombie map to see which area had the least amount of zombies assigned for a single cell (For the sake of fun, I won't include which house I took place in). The cell, on normal zombie population, only had 15 zombies assigned to it's total population, and had about 4-5 neighboring houses to loot in. Granted, it was very open, and the houses were 1 floor high, but the meta-noises only were dangerous if there was a high influx of zombies on the north/west, and the gunshot sounded from the south/east. ONLY due to having dynamic zombie map on me, I was certain that I had no reason to worry about zombies flooding in from either east or north.
 
I've killed those little zombies that left of the total of 15 (remaining were already long pulled away by metagame noises) and barricaded the house, using planks from broken doors and as much as mere 5 nails that I've found in a cupboard.
 
Days went by, overly-mega-overpopulated neighboring cells (I'm talking about 900-600 kind of overpopulated) to the north constantly exchanged zombies with each other with never stopping gunshots. I took my time to gather some sticks and sharp stones from the nearby forest line to the east, cutting down nearby trees and setting up log walls around the windows.
 
The first attack happened when the gunshot brought the high influx of zombies from the north. Zombies started pouring in all over the place, some hordes passing by, and some "sticking" to my house and bashing on my defenses. In a mere night the 0/15 cell became 230/15. Due to high range of rally point, almost every zombie within loaded cell clumped together into 1, big mega-zombie-clump, consisting of maybe 50-90 zombies. And they all were standing outside my safehouse, a single "Hey you!" away from fucking up my entire place. I loaded all the canned food and a few essentials into a big hiking bag and just kept waiting for another meta-event to drive them away, ready in case they decide to all bash down into my house at once. I was thrilled about the idea that the horde may just randomly walk into my direction, eradicating my hideout.
 
But it took too long, and the clump ever so slowly moved into the direction of my safehouse. I decided to make a move and lure them away.
 
I stopped playing after luring the horde around the cell and leaving it behind quite a distance away. meta-game noise drove them away, but a few days later another, HUGE horde arrived at my cell because of another meta-noise.
 
tl;dr - I LOVE IT.