RedKrypton

In the recent Mondoid RJ talked about the nutrition system and it's effects on the player, but they haven't got a good way of showing it to the player yet. How about cravings? The human body always tries to get sufficient amounts of all the stuff it needs and does that by manipulating us through desires. There was once an interesting experiment in which a person tried to survive like a shipwrecked survivor on the ocean. He ate nothing but fish. After one week he suddenly craved the eyes and the liver of the fish as his body tried to get the stuff he was lacking, so why not here too? These craving of course only happen if there is a bigger lack of certain nutrients. A counter to craving would be being fed up with a certain food. If you ate cabbage everyday for weeks you would less and less enjoy the food and in the end maybe even despise it for some time.

I am not sure how it is handled in the US, but in Austria you can reuse lids for like eternity.

Also, remember, that with the inclusion of NPCs it will likely be much easier to find valuable tools, or at least people that own them. If it gets too easy to live on your own, I imagine it will be way too easy if you manage to get a functional group together once nonzombie NPCs are implemented in the game. This is , of course, speculation. NPCs won't make the game easier for you, but harder. Currently it's easy to have a safehouse or mulitple safehouses, because the only danger is zombies, but when there are others you have to rethink your defense and also food supply. You most likly have to team up to manage some kind of safety to be able to keep all the stuff you gather. Also why would I be able to find more stuff and tools? If I only was able to find one jar lid during two months, guess how many I will find if NPCs care about them.

What 30 jars? That's pathetic. Don't Americans store jam, pickles and all other kinds of preserved food in jars too? You can find pickles, which never go off, but they aren't in a jar, at least for the game they aren't. You should be able to find hundreds of jars of all kind on the whole map, not 30. I currently don't have any food shortage and would probably survive the first winter without problems. I don't like that farming is compressed and so easy to do. It makes all other methods of finding food largely obsolete, if it weren't for winter they would be pointless. I started my game with the park ranger profession and I wanted to play as a hunter gatherer. But after a while, while I searched for tarp and other necessities I became increasingly awae that foraging and trapping isn't worth it.You have to seriously level up both of these skills to be worth it with trapping being worth more as you can use your worms in your bird traps for some diversified nourishment. But what is foraging good for? I looked at the wiki page for it and I was very disappointed. Until level 4 you can't even find mushrooms and half the stuff I got from were tree branches, which I didn't really need. The time it took me from leveling up once was insane even after I read a skill book. Foraging takes way too long and yields too little of a result and it makes you instantly tired. I don't know how it is programmed in the game, but foraging makes you tired. If I wake up at 8 o'clock and instantly go foraging, by 12 o'clock I am exhausted for no reason. I know there is fishing in the game, but I am in Muldraugh and I have no interest of going to that imbalanced overrun town of West Point. And for the Mall, I generally don't liek to go there.

Currently it is impossible to stockpile any of your produce for extended periods of time. Potatoes are currently the best with 28 days before going rotten and cabbage worst with going sour within 4 days. Most other produce is gone within a week. How am I supposed to build up any kind of meaningful stockpile for winter, in which I reckon farming becomes impossible. I know there is a way to store produce in jars, but after currently two months and lots of scavenging I have found ONE jar lid after I scavenged half of Muldraugh. I really shouldn't have to. Why can't I just grab an empty sandbag and fill it with cabbages and put it in a dark storeroom for it to last months on end? It worked in the past and it often took half a year for potatoes or cabbages to go stale. Sidenote: During my last playthrough I grabbed a barbecue grill and dragged it back to my safehouse at the warehouse. I then tried to use it, filled it will charcoal and so on, but I just wasn't able to cook. Does anyone have an idea why?

I wanted to post about this for a while now, so here it is. Farming currently is very easy, but at the same time tedious. What do I mean? First of all setting up the garden or the fields is very easy and has no real threshold. Just take your trowel and you basically got a field in 2 hours maximum ready to be sown. You take your seeds and sow them and then hope for rain. If you get rain you are set and most likely don't have to do much else. Plant growth is ridiculus for a game that writes "Realism" on its flag and you most likely don't have to water at all as it regularily rains, but even if it didn't it would be too much of a hassle to because of the UI taking you ages to issue order to water each and every plant. Then when harvest happens you have too much produce to eat and you can't really store it if you haven't got a generator and a fridge and finding glass jars to store a lot of it is uncommon. That's how I currently see it. Here are my improvement ideas. Keep in mind that a lot of them are for the time after NPCs arrive. First of all it should be an undertaking to farm at a scale to be able to live of it. Working on making a piece of land into a field should be a time consuming effort, but also not be click spammy so I have an idea, zones. You know how in most city building games you use your mouse to make farms, stockpiles and such? This concept could also be realised in a load of other ways, but to that later. This would immensly ease the problem of click spam. Depending on the place you are trying to set up the farm it should be more or less difficult to set up. Digging up the former garden of a nice house a few months after the end? Easy, as there are barely any roots and stones in your way. Trying to cultivise the land you and your groups just grubed? Be prepared to go full pioneer. You have to clear out roots and stones, burn stumps to make it easier for you to clear them and generally spend a lot of manpower and tools to make it ready for use. Hoes will be your friend. Then the actual farming starts. Sowing is again made much easier by just using zones your character should sow in. The earth then also should have some saved water in it to help the crops to grow. Then the real enemy starts to appear, weeds. Weeds are a pain in the ass especially if you don't have any weedkillers. Guess what you'll often will do? Rip out these weeds every so often as they would otherwise destroy your crop. This also a time consuming work, which means at least one person is gonna care about them all the time. Fertilising can be done by using commercial fertiliser or better compost from the weeds you gathered, the food waste and so on. So when harvest comes and you don't have the luxery of electricity or that of canning everything there is a solution, the root cellar. You dig it outside and then are able to safely store your food there, just make sure the rats to get to it. Another issue for me is the growth period the plants need. You should have realistic growth periods, which would make an infestation for more interesting and could lead to people actually trying to counter the pests instead of just destroying every infected crop. But I know not everyone likes pure realism so here is an idea: Difficulty of Farming. Likely with reloading there should be an options for you to choose how realistic your farming expirience should be. Going from an arcady feel (current) to full blown realism with you needing a lot of land to sustain your group.

So I noticed that while scavenging the warhouses for all sorts goodies that charcoal weighs the exact same amount and it doesn't matter at all how much use is left. For smaller items that may not be as noticable, but for the 8 weight sack of charcoal or a gas can it is a lot.

The current building and barricading system heavily relies on you finding an axe and a saw. Without both of these items you are screwed in terms of barricading your house in any meaningful way, as you can't find planks in any meaningful amount and carrying them over from the warehouses and industrial buildings is risky, because of their bulk. The idea of IBMs is that these are construction materials, which don't fit in the "plank" category. You can either find them, or better and more useful, craft them by dismanteling with a hammer and saw. Smaller furniture (like chairs) through pulling the legs out and larger by sawing parts off tables as such. Instead of planks they should drop when a door is destroyed. I's like to improve barricading by also using furniture like bookshelves to block windows and doors and then nailing them down in place.

I already posted this suggestion a few weeks ago.

But currently it feels like you are the point of interest for everything. I play PZ, because I like the game's feeling of unimportance. You aren't anyone special and you are trying to survive this terrible cataclysm. Yes, this world is harsh and tries to kill you, but it goes out of its way to kill you. Stuffing more and more zombies in the towns and sending hordes after your base does make it difficult to survive, but it doesn't make sense with the world you are trying to create here. If I wanted a perpetual horde mode, I'd play 7 days to die, not PZ. Some of my suggestions would be to make qualitativly harder and not quantitativly harder. One of big big gripes currently is zombies grabbing you from behind. It takes way too long for them to grab you and bite you. I just hope that with the addition of vehicles, survivors and the big city, the importance of both Muldrough and West Point will become smaller and the real motherloads will be in the city with it's hordes moving out and all. I also hope you will someday change the zombie desnity to be more migration and not just spawning.

Why do I even argue with you? This is pointless.

The difference between Metro Ranger mode and survival mode is huge. For one the Ranger mode in Metro was balanced for the game, survival doesn't feel like that. The thing is, survival mode isn't even supposed to be the hardest mode, it should most balanced mode, the way the game is supposed to be played. It currently doesn't feel like that. Survival mode currently suffers from repetition. There are a handful of ideal buildings in each town, which can serve as your base. All others are either too dangerous or too far away. You can say, that's the fun of the challenge, but I say it's unbalanced having no room to breath and being in this very tight corset. Zomboid prides itself in being a realistic game (as much as a game with zombies can be), but in the current version the game ignores its own logic. Zombies only care about one thing, food, but currently this logic is defied because zombies just more and more mass in the towns. Yes, zombies also spawn outside of towns, but the emphasise is on "spawn". The zombies should move out as giant hordes mindlessly roaming along highways and roads and fucking up your day, when they spot you and your base. A game, like any work of fiction should stay internally consistant. Please enlighten me, why are zombies only massing up inside the towns and don't move out as hordes?

While I haven't died, it's apparent that survival mode feels unfairly difficult, at least with the current means of survival. Without cars you are pretty much forced into a small amount of locations, because zombie density starts of thick and then increases more and more around former populated areas. Adding to this is that the stealth system isn't implemented. Yes I can walk slower looking around myself, but that doesn't constitute a stealth system for me. Looting anything but the outskirts is suicidal, because of the density and the lack of a good stealth system in which you can really sneak and take down zombies quietly. Another problem I found was, that the random noise events just played Ping Pong with the zombies around me. If there is an event in the west the next day there is an event to the east and so on. It wouldn't be so bad if the zombies didn't play vandal at every occasion. Noise behind the house?-Fuck it, let's visit the neighbours and let's use the window for entering. I know you want us to feel challenged, but shouldn't that come with time, like running out of the canned and other non perishables and giant zombie hordes from the city moving along the Highways?

That would do the trick for now. The reason why I ask for a seperate UI element is, that you then could implement an armor system easily. You know the zombies proof armor, which you equip at your arms to prevent a bite from coming through. Or helmets and other chest armor.

Time and time again, when I want to clear out my inventory I strip myself naked and also unequip my rucksack. Could you please make it so, that worn items don't show up in the inventory, because currently, if I for example have more than one pair of pants I have to open the stack and only select those I do not wear. Same with sweaters and backpacks. Couldn't you make a screen just for the armor and clothes you are wearing? All other zombie survival games manage that too.

Well being hard of hearing is very dangerous in the zombie apocalypse. This Film Theory episode made me aware of this: Currently being hard of hearing ingame isn't such a big deal as zombies take a ridiculus time to grab you. I hope they will change that you have to fear zombies coming from behind. Hunters in Austria are notorious for often being hard of hearing, soldiers have special earplugs, which let you hear normal talking without a problem and block most of the loud gunfire (most still have problems afterwards, so it's not 100% effective), normal police doesn't fire their guns as much as on TV and SWAT or any other commando does have hearing protection (fire a shotgun in an enclosed room and you will be deaf). Maybe you won't use it, but using ear plugs for clearing out large hordes with a shotgun helps in not becoming deaf.

Guns are loud and using them regularily without any hearing protection should damage your hearing and make the ingame sounds quieter. There should be utensils to avoid this, like earplugs or all around hearing protection. Using them would make you very hard of hearing while using them, but you should keep your hearing permanently.

Can't zombies already move if cells aren't loaded? Can't just hordes be moved as one entity, which loses and gains zombies on it's way.

That would just be the end result. In the meanwhile there could still be herds moving around.

They would return for supplies like you do. Think about it like the supply run Rick an the rest did in TWD season 1.

Cities wouldn't be instantly safe. They would just empty and then there are still the loads of zombies in the city which are trapped inside buildings and then there will be the other scavengers competing with you. If they would lenghten the time crops need to be ripe for harvest and prohibit farming in winter there would be a much bigger incentive to also scavenge.

Currently the zombie density is not one bit dynamic. Zombies just stay in the starting density zones and never move outside of them. Just look at Eckyman in this video: Ecky is over four months into his playthrough and the only thing changed is the zombie density, which is a lot higher. The distribution is about the same as the distribution of zombies during the first days of the game. Which should not be the case. Because after at most a month zombie hordes or zombies in general should move out into the countryside, because food (people) is getting scarce in towns and cities. In short the zombie density should go from urban focused to a more and more uniform density over several years. Cities should even become safer than the countryside at some point (a few years) as almost all zombies moved out of it on their search for all living. The real challenge after a few months should be other humans and gigantic hordes of thousands if not tens of thousands of zeds roaming around. General zombie density should become lower, but the horde size should become bigger and bigger.

My issue is that there is no dynamic. Zombies never leave their zone. Why for example would there be thousands of zombies in West Point after 3-5 months? They are looking for prey, aren't they? With time cities should become less crowded and the surroundings should become less safe. If you have your base outside the main spawn area you will never get attacked. You would have to lead a horde to your base yourselve. Currently The zombies just get more and more in the city but stay largly the same outside of it.

Survival was always my favourite to play, but currently the game seems to care for the zombie density map too much and seems to always try to spread them out everywhere equally. I kill a zombie group and the next day or sooner another herd has taken it's place. That's not at all realistic or fun. All the groups also are about equally apart, which makes the landscape boring and looting impossible. It's like the zombies are all standing watch, trying to spot you. They also love to just pick a random house, fuck it up and then leave. There are no sound events which triggered this and I wasn't involved. The new system also severly limits, what safe houses you can have. Because the zombie density seemingly never is allowed change you are forced into very few locations to be able to have a relativly safe base which isn't constantly attacked by zombies because they randomly walked into a boarded up window and currently never lose interest and not having to walk the better part of the day to loot something. Currently you are basically forced to always reside in the most upper house in West Point because all the others are impossible to defend, even if you never make any noise or give any clue to your existance. In most of my playthroughs in which I didn't use this safe house I have to use half a day everyday to reduce zombie numbers. In my ideal world there should be a realistic amount of zombies in both Muldraugh and West Point, not a mass we have now. After day 20 or so zombies would spread out into the countryside on their search for flesh. Huge hordes would slowly waltz along the highways out of the cities picking up or dropping off smaller hordes. They would slowly go along the withering roads and if they see something or hear something, they should come down with all of their force.

Yeah, I hope they make it possible to thin out the herds of zombies, which currently isn't really possible.