Modin

Hello devs, I am not sure if this error actually matters or not, but the logs are spammed by it so I am reporting it. When playing MP, the server will be spammed by the following message: "ReceiveThump: zombie (id) not found". This might (?) be linked with zombies being culled because of the 500 zombie limit. Interestingly, when the no-culling fix is used, it's not the server that is spammed with these messages anymore, but the clients. To reproduce, connect to a fresh server and start running around in any town with zombies present. If that fails, teleport to Louisville and run around the streets.

Hello devs, There would appear to be a specific error that causes a server to stop acknowledging zombies for a long enough time (more than 5 seconds) to cause the clients to stop simulating said zombies, and remove them. When that happens, the message "removing stale zombie 5000 id=(id)" appears clientside. Kiting groups of zombies over a certain distance seems to increase the likelihood of this happening. An odd thing is, these zombies remain inactive as long as players are nearby, but if all players leave the chunk and then come back, they will reactivate, as if they'd never left. This issue would seem to happen no matter what, but be compounded, and as such much more visible, when using the no-culling mod that stops zombies from being culled (no more 500 zombies limit), possibly because there are many more zombies for it to trigger, or maybe because the strain on the server is much greater. I am most curious about what could possibly cause the server to stop acknowledging zombies. To reproduce, play MP normally and watch the error log for "stale zombie 5000" messages. When this happens, you should have seen one or more zombies disappear. If you leave and come back, they will reappear. To increase the chances of this triggering, draw a greater amount of zombies and kite them over a distance of one chunk or more. To further increase the chances, remove the 500 zombie limit (not necessary). [EDIT: striked out sentence is false, the messages do not always result in noticeable disappearances in-game. In fact, they seldom do. They noticeably do when you drag zombies over a long distance. Otherwise, the disappearances happen out of sight. They still happen, however, and the zombies are put in a "paused" or "stalled" state where they wait for players to go away until reactivating. The underlined reason seems to be the correct one: no culling = more zombies = more such messages, it would appear to be a numbers game.]

Easy solution: by default, pause the game when clicking off-screen. Add an option for the risk-takers like @duh7

Sometimes you can see a zombie, you swing, but the swing does not hit. Example: https://streamable.com/h2xl25 This happens around cars and trees too. It's annoying, and doesn't feel normal.

Stealth kills with melee weapons. Silencers.

I know - if I do make an executable patcher program people will still have to download it and execute it manually which is why the ideal solution is one where people can just subscribe to a mod. Any hope of that?

Hey guys, I modded a java .class file to remove zombie culling, but the original file needs to be manually replaced by my own. The mod is getting traction and I'd like to be able to distribute it in an easy, accessible fashion like other regular mods, through the steam workshop, without having to tell the users how to install it. I'm unfamiliar with modding. I've looked around and this guide https://github.com/FWolfe/Zomboid-Modding-Guide mentions this: The ideal solution would be overwriting the java functions with my own in a separate file that loads with the game. If this isn't possible, any way to automate the replacing of the file (possibly without overwriting the original) would also work. Failing this, I suppose my only option is to make a patcher program so that people don't have to rummage into their game files, but I'd really prefer it to be fully automatic! Can anyone help?

Optional drivers for my 6900 XT AMD card caused instability and crashes in many games. From now on I'm only using recommended. Btw if you ever run into instability, first thing to check is that! @Jetrox Are there lots of items on the ground? That can cause lag. Try going into debug mode and create a new game where you fast forward. See if it lags when you reach about the same time survived. If not, then it's not just time. Try to move around fast to load lots of places. If it still doesn't lag, then it's something else. Have you tried making a copy of your save, unloading all the mods, and playing it?

No mods. Do you know of a way to capture footage when the game is in fullscreen? It gives a black screen for me. Edit: it would seem to not be a "once in a while" sound effect like a wolf howling, but a constant "atmospheric" background that has car engines roaring softly in the distance. It's hard to hear. And it's active here, in a deep forest far from any highway. Seems to only be active in the northern part of the forest, which is closer to a sort of vacation resort in the woods (south of the mall). It's active everywhere but I couldn't hear it during fog - maybe it was replaced by the fog's own atmospheric background (that anxiogenic hissing). Edit2: it basically feels as if there's a racetrack nearby with people in cars going "brrrr" 24/7, 6 months into a zombie apocalypse. At 1 AM in the forest "brrr". Edit3: ah. According to the PZ map project, there's a racetrack/abandoned airfield nearby. That must be it. Maybe this "racetrack" atmosphere should just be removed? Doesn't make sense to hear car engines go "brrr" 24/7 6 months into the apocalypse.

After I turned the music off I started noticing a distant car sound playing way too much in an area that makes no sense for it to play. The area is deep forest (specifically around the lone cabin south of LV). Among the sounds that play (animal sounds, howling, wind etc...) is a distant car engine sound that plays every 1 or 2 in-game hours. It feels very out of place to have that sound play 6 months into the apocalypse, inside a deep forest far from roads, every in-game hour, and is quite immersion-breaking.

Ah, could be possible! That would be... well... *sigh* just zomboid things.

Didn't investigate or try to reproduce but this is how it happened: - Hypothermic for a while without it going back up, -6 degrees celsius - Caught a cold (full strength) - Drowsy - Hungry (far from starvation) - 1 hp (hypothermic leaves you there, whether intended or not) - Outside with tent, campfire - Campfire lit, fuel for ~4 hours Stayed 2 minutes around the campfire, got back to 5-10% health and cold/chilly. Went to sleep in the tent, instantly died. Couldn't be starvation, I know I was far from it. Couldn't be hypothermia, it doesn't kill, and the campfire was lit. Wasn't burning, the campfire was away. No zombie scratch or bite or anything like that. Not dying of thirst. Didn't eat anything bad. I think the time skip from sleeping somehow messes with the health calculations. Something to do with hypothermia and/or being low health. I also thought you're kicked out of sleep whenever your health is too low? Didn't happen for me - I was low when I went to sleep, health was slowly going back up, bam instant death.

Could be 10, 20, 30 encumbrance, but it would be really nice for wilderness survivalists to be allowed to place some items in their tent! Placing fishing gear on the ground next to a river makes no sense when you could place it in the perfectly good tent that's sitting right next to it.

Any info on this? Still bugged, pretty immersion-breaking during winter.

You guys implemented a fix for the "right click a bed while not panicked, sleep option is available, click it and go to sleep even if you've gained panic since then" exploit that made claustrophobic less dangerous. Now, when a toon goes to sleep, a second check is made for panic when they reach the bed and if it's too high, "too panicked to sleep". That check is broken. It will fire even under the effect of a sleeping tablet, which nonetheless should allow you to sleep through panic. The result is that in the absence of beta blockers, a claustrophobic toon will never be able to sleep indoors no matter their tiredness.

+1 good idea to make first aid relevant and the game a bit more realistic/challenging

No, on the contrary. If I had 3% chance to survive, if the character I just poured hundreds of hours into to survive to month 3, with which I've grinded all the skills to 10 and had so much fun and memories with, if that character got bitten and had 3% chance of surviving? I'd stick around till the very end and do everything in my power to maximize the chances of survival. I'd want that guy to stay around and hell, if they did, I'd grow even more attached to them. Unless you could be 100% sure the toon would die before the very end of course. I'd quit the moment I knew there was nothing to do. If I died (and I already do that), I wouldn't just go "oh well" and boot another game. I'd just give it several minutes of silence, quietly sob, rant about how this game's bullshit, give it a few days and then maybe start a new game. It's not because I completely disregard what the usual zombie apocalypse ambience would have me do (which is completely contradicted by the game and was my whole point: a zombie apocalypse is about X, the game pushes you to do Y - some form of dissonance there, hence me saying the game needs more ways to deal with zombies without just backpedal swipe swipe swipe stab stab stab, yadda yadda), that I don't grow attached to my toons. After all, I make them in my image and play them in my image. It's the same with any game that leaves me free to decide what my character does and thinks and why they do it and think it. Zomboid is more an RPG in that sense than say Skyrim. My toons are an extension of me and so of course I develop a sort of relationship with them. So does everyone in every game. Anyway either OP's idea, or yes, a ridiculously low chance of actually surviving a bite that kicks in at the very last second that you'd die. Something that makes me stick to the very end. Imo that improves the game. Edit: I make my own character's background on the go because it's fun and there's nothing else to do. And we humans like stories and coming up with reasons for everything. Every character I play, I attribute some vague idea of a personality based on their appearance/traits/how I feel like this particular day, and the more I play them, the more I almost subconsciously come up with reasons for that personality - who they were before the apocalypse, who they knew, what happened to them, how they feel about all of it, what're their goals etc... Of course almost all of them invariably are badasses capable of killing 500 zombies a day with spears and knives but that's just how the game is for now... And there are still ways to think up many different reasons for that.

I've been running into some frustrations: - Looting piles of corpses to find where that knife was is annoying. Foraging and search mode seem like they were made exactly for that, but they won't show items in zombie corpses, only those on the ground. - On the other hand, foraging shows stuff on the ground that nobody cares about. Those dirty rags you threw on the ground. The tin can you threw away after eating. The glasses and hats the zombies dropped when they died. It'd be nice if we could filter that out. - Looting warehouses (and other places with lots of containers) can be a pain. If foraging somehow worked with containers, it could both remove some frustration from the game, and make it a bit more realistic. And to solve these, I came up with a couple ideas... What if we had a new skill called scavenging, which would borrow foraging's search mode but act on containers and items already lying on the ground. It would be foraging's sister-skill. Taking the idea further, what if instead of magically instantly knowing what's in any container around themselves, your toon had to search them. Stand around a container for a very short time in search mode and it will be automatically searched. After all, it takes time to search a corpse's pockets, or a desk's drawers. Every container searched levels the scavenging skill. This would also act on dead zombies. Any container that's searched would from there on always be shown, to avoid running into problems with player-owned containers (like your car's trunk or glovebox... would be silly searching it every time). A higher skill could mean searching faster, and finding more items. After all, scrounging for food and valuables from drawers and cupboards is an art, and an unskilled scavenger could fail to find everything there is. Additionally, like foraging, one could focus on certain types of items. I'm not sure if it'd be wise to limit item types to certain levels like foraging, though. Focus on, say, food items, and now, in search mode, any food item on the ground will show and any container with food will be highlighted (and sorted first in the list of containers). Focus on weapons, and any weapon on a dead zombie around you will show as if it was on the ground, allowing you to pick it up quickly. Focus on nothing and you get nothing, only what foraging will find - no tin cans or glasses or dirty rags. Not sure what else the skill could be used for, but there's more potential. For example, some special "hidey holes" could only show after a certain level, or roll a dice and the higher your level, the more chance you find them. Some of you might have run into houses with money hidden under a floor tile. What if there were many more hidey holes everywhere and they could contain valuables, but only if your toon is skilled enough to find them? After all, a zombie apocalypse team is not complete without an expert scavenger. And the longer into the apocalypse, the more stashes. Not many people hide anything apocalypse-relevant in their homes, but apocalypse survivors have lots of incentive to stash resources around. Anymore ideas? Other frustrations about looting and containers? Please share

Hmm well in my games, I run around clearing 500+ zombies every day with rows and rows of spears that I somehow craft from tree branches that I get from bushes, and all the knives that the zombies drop. I yell and honk so that I can bring as many zombies as possible to my position, and endlessly stab and stab with my 20 hunting knives while strafing backwards. I am the hero. As FauxPass said, apocalypse lets you do that. But really, I do that in 6 months later and CDDA too. If anything, it gives me more incentive for it: zombies are everywhere so might as well kill them all. Not very apocalyptic. My idea of an actual zombie apocalypse isn't rambo swinging spears in the streets, it's constant despair, setbacks, terror, exhaustion but also hope, careful preparation and planning, stealth, inventiveness, a simpler life, rediscovering nature, etc... but most importantly, surviving together. As is yours, I'm sure. Right now surviving in nature is too easy. Zombies are the only challenge. The only way to deal with them is to simply kill them with the best weapons. And surviving in cities once the zombies are dealt with is also trivial. I'd like to see more: yes NPCs but also, actual stealth mechanics, misdirection, traps, a harsher world with fewer resources, constant danger, overwhelming odds. So I say again: right now bites are the only way I die. Apple bite sound? Open health. Bitten? Quit. Where's the despair, where's the terror, where's the hopelessness, where's the drama? Where's the realistic apocalypse you guys claim I should be thrilled about? Let me struggle for my life as I hold onto a faint glimmer of hope, let me thrash and claw and maybe eventually bleed out, sure, but not just quit, or rush headfirst into the first available zombono to die faster. So yep OP's idea seems pretty good to me, so we can get closer to that actual apocalypse feeling. Not just "oh bitten game over quit".

I meant walking very slowly like how your character does at the start of CDDA. Normally in CDDA I would kill every zombie at the start, idle in the house next to the starting one, lose my cold this way after about 4 hours, then move on to looting the trailer park and clearing hordes north into the town. I would usually by the end of week 1 be clearing the northern road with all the shops. This groin thing, however?! Goddamn. Now I have to resort to crawling east towards the farm house to lose the cold, and... I don't really know what to do from there. I'm not sure how long the deep wound takes to heal by itself if you don't stitch it. If it takes more than a week, then clearly the best move is to go loot more farm houses and forage on the way and hope for a needle. You can survive pretty trivially by just eating the berries you find everywhere (only the holly berry is poisonous) and drinking water from the houses. Now I was able to pretty much do what I usually do in CDDA by my 10th try or so, maybe a day or two behind schedule, but only because I was lucky enough to find a needle in the farm house. And I was abusing the jog glitch, mind you. When you do find a needle you can finally jog like normal. You could always just jog glitch up to the medical center in town and hope for a suture needle, but you can't really fight, so it'd be really risky. Or you can just forage for branches and stones, get some spears, start killing some zombies, get more gear, a bag, some hunting knives etc... and work from there, and just jog glitch all the time so you stand a chance. If you don't jog glitch though... yeah there's just no fighting. Or maybe very carefully? Btw the machete fix... thought that was intended. I would keep a machete on me all the time for infinite spears. Kinda sucks!

"Fixed characters not limping when they had their groin bitten." Melted ice-cream doesn't matter for CDDA. This, however, makes the start an absolute pain. You have to slow-crawl everywhere or abuse the jog glitch until your groin is healed. CDDA start just got about 20x harder for me. Went from "don't care, just kill everything and hope for no flaming zombies, no cold after first 4 hours, start killing 500 zombies a day after day 1" to... can't even get started atm. Basically, crawl east to forests to los everything and then good old farm tactic, but 20 times slower. Or risk crawling west to walls and good luck fighting 50 zombies while crawling. More challenging = more fun but crawling everywhere = the start takes about 20 minutes of your time just crawling = less fun.

This is an amazing idea and I think it should be implemented! You're very right that death is unfun in this game. "Apple bite sound" *checks health* "Bitten" welp... escape, quit. Since it's so punitive it also forces you to play very safe. Congo lines, outside, clear day. No fences, no windows, no fighting in cramped spaces. For the love of god, no stairs. +1 from me

I don't think items take damage in an open trunk but yes it would be a cool mechanic. Also visual cues for cars having their trunk, hood, or doors open.

I don't think we necessarily need an end-game, like escaping or rebuilding society or anything like that. But I do think it needs more things to do. It's clear the devs don't want Zomboid to be arcade. I don't think we're going to get big character progression that turns you into a pro fighter or lots of different weapons with wildly varying stats and uses. But there has to be something more than just "stay alive" because that gets boring quick, no matter the amount of zombies. Even with lots of zombies, all runners or something, you either have to live somewhere without any zeds (farms) or cheese their AI (windows, fences, congo lines & left click spam). And they both get boring quick. We either need something else or staying alive needs to be more diverse and challenging than: 1 keep fed 2 keep away from zombies.

Any food item that gives less than 1 hunger disappears instantly. No matter how much hunger it started with (gum with 1 or lollipop with 5), if you eat it partially and the hunger that it gives drops below 1, the item will disappear from your inventory and the rest of the hunger will not be gained. Example, have a worm in your inventory. Eat half of it. It's gone. But you only gained half a worm worth of hunger: 1. Have a gum in your inventory, start eating it but instantly cancel with ESC. The gum disappears and you barely gained anything.