Zombiologist

On top of this I'd add lightning strikes. Having had lightning strike near me a few times in life I can imagine the extremely loud boom would probably draw every zombie for miles towards you in zomboid. I think lightning strike fires should be relatively rare though, given they usually happen during rain the fires they start are rarely very big and usually go out fairly quickly in my experiences. Speaking of weather sometimes wind and rain makes noise by causing different things to move or fall. A gurgling rain gutter, a slamming shutter, the howl of the wind, or heavy rainfall could all stir up zombies. Plus with infrastructure not being maintained strong whether might cause some things to break. Transformers blowing, manhole covers launching off geysers from water pressure buildup, gas leaks, etc.

Also having a door slam shut from a draft in the building you are looting could give players a scare. I slept in a house once that the doors would randomly open and slam shut in the middle of the night, sometimes repeatedly. It's definitely a very unpleasant way to wake up. That and it had creaky boards that could wake up the dead they made so much noise. Also perhaps the ability in game to fix shutters, doors, and creaky boards so they don't slam or make noise anymore might be a good addition now that I think of it.

To a certain degree there will be at least similarities. Additionally a lot of real life disasters face similar levels of isolation as a global collapse would. It would be closer to a more extreme version of real disasters than it would be anything like what movies and games portray. I think it would be better to use real life as a template than it would be to use media cliches or guesses. We can also look at historical accounts of real life past situations that were perceived by the people experiencing it as global, such as the black death which many at the time believed would be the end of the human race and is probably the closest thing to a zombie apocalypse we have in real life to compare to. Additionally many large scale regional disasters have no definitive end in sight. Some places remain destabilized for years with seemingly no way to bring things back, like in failed states.

The idea is pretty straight forward. Sounds attract zombies, setting up some ways to make noise to guide zombies to desired locations could be interesting, especially for things that might already be in people's yards. It could also be an interesting way to make cache houses more difficult if they have a large wind chime on the porch drawing zombies any time the wind picks up. Other things like doors and shutters banging in the wind or other natural sound makers could also add a reason for why a cache house has so many zombies in/around it.

Whenever I've burned food, my house, or zombies I've noticed that no fire alarm goes off. They typically still work long after the power goes out and also start making chirping noises when they're batteries get low (good for knowing when to change batteries, bad if the zombies hear it though). I think this could make fires more interesting if the fire alarms drew zombies, especially large buildings and certain factors can have exceptionally loud fire alarms that would draw a lot of attention. Additionally fire alarms can be used to your advantage as you can press the "test" button to set them off at will, perhaps rigging them to a mechanism to press the button on a long string to set off away from yourself would be advantageous. Likewise smoke from gun fire could set them off depending on the rounds used, how good the airflow is in the room, and the proximity to the alarm itself.

TWD is actually a good example of one of the many shows that gets human behavior completely wrong in disasters. The kind of human behavior portrayed in the show can technically happen in real life but is not nearly as common as portrayed in the show and doesn't work the way the show would have you think, the fact that there always seems to be somebody raiding them or trying to eat them or etc just isn't how real disasters work. No show or movie will show you what a real disaster looks like. Unless you've either been in a real disaster or talked in depth with people who lived through them then you really don't know what it's like, because all the people making shows about them are just making stories about experiences they've never had, and all the news outlets are trying to sell clicks with the most extreme stuff they can find not capture the whole human experience. The books I mentioned in OP are better examples of how it really works as they are real accounts of actual events rather than just stories. The stuff that happens in the books is not like what happens in TWD or any movie or show or story book I've seen. Raiding to survive is about the worst strategy there is. Sure there will be people who raid, but not nearly as often as movies lead you to believe. Quite simply most raiders just die. Also people won't be violent towards each other without what they at least perceive as a good reason, and the most violent will be the ones dying early. Factions don't form easily because everybody is in the same shoes: desperate to survive scraping by with what they can. There isn't that much to really fight about and fighting is scary and dangerous when there is no hospital and no antibiotics for your open wounds. The people who are in real danger of being attacked are those that have much more than everybody else, haven't hidden the fact well, and refuse to share. Your stereotypical doomsday prepper for example usually is among some of the first to die as there aggressive posture towards everybody else, combined with their huge stockpile of supplies, makes them a very hard to ignore target for hungry mobs. There are some things that change this calculation though: if a group in the area has a monopoly on violence or some sort of leverage as well as enough ideological, cultural, or other type of difference to view themselves as separate from others then they might start trouble. Gangs, cartels, rogue military groups/war lords, cultists, etc. These things don't stop being a threat just because society collapses. They still exist, but they aren't everywhere all the time and in most real life disasters even of large scale you're unlikely to personally encounter them much if at all unless they are already in your area per-disaster or actively caused the disaster. Games do tell a story though, and stories need conflict. There could be reasons these groups might be included in a game, but I think if they are included they should be included in ways that mirror more realistic life scenarios rather than just being a ubiquitous threat that exists one dimensionally to harrass players.

Several months is a lot different than years. I meant to refer to long term survival. If you look at these people that have survived months alone almost all of them lost significant weight and had vitamin deficiencies, if not serious illness. They managed to buy themselves time but they couldn't have survived indefinitely alone. Lone survival for the long term is near impossible for a human. Isolation is deadly. Even homesteaders living alone in older times usually went to the market every year before winter if not every few weeks or so or at least had distant neighbors they occasionally saw. It's just too hard to survive any other way. The majority of cases surviving for a very long time alone they lived in ideal survival environments like tropical islands with plentiful natural resources. Surviving a winter alone would be difficult for even a hardened survivalist. There definitely will be increases in violence and such. On average more prosocial people will survive longer, but there will still be people who will mug or kill you and the number of them will be higher than pre disaster, it just won't be like the movies where every other person wants you dead. More people are likely to try and take stuff behind your back than try to attack you premeditated. Most people will really want your company. Many of the things you hear about in sensational news headlines do happen, just not nearly as often as the media would have you believe. For example mobs stealing from homes do happen and in a long term disaster you may even encounter them at some point, but more often than not they go after doomsday preppers or hoarders who refuse to share with the community. Unless it's getting desperate and people have kids to feed, they are less likely to loot house to house in mobs. You also have a good point about misunderstandings, especially at the beginning when social order is breaking down they could be a lot of confusion and misunderstandings that can create conflict. Lonely people are also more prone to becoming less trusting and more likely to interpret neutral social cues as negative ones, which can create problems. Not to mention the rates of psychological trauma are likely to be much higher in the unique situation of a zombie doomsday at least I'd imagine. The fact that anybody could be infected may also make people less prosocial, at least on first encounters if not in general. Somebody that has been hiding in the house alone for several weeks might be a little grouchy when you find them, but they will likely also be desperate for company so they might be a little unpredictable at first.

This is something that bugs me about basically all post apocalyptic media I see. Humans that don't act like real humans do in real disasters. There are so many myths about how people act in disasters that are so pervasive that it's often accepted as fact. Given the devs dedication to making a realistic game that is fun to play, I would be quite delighted if Project Zomboid became the exception to the rule. I provide a bit of further reading materials that explain how real humans behave in real disasters as compared to how we think they do at bottom of the post. First, people don't abandon all of their morals as soon as there is no government around to tell them not to. Crime rates do go up quite a bit, desperate people are more likely to steal or get involved in conflicts, and panicking people are more likely to make foolish decisions in the heat of the moment (for example if they see people looting, they are more likely to loot without considering the implications out of panic), but in general people are far more focused on working together and problem solving. Most of the people causing trouble are people who already were causing trouble before the disaster or who always wanted to and now think they can get away with it. Gang ridden areas might be really unsafe, but grandpa probably isn't going to beat you to death for a can of soup. People's moral beliefs may change over time but it's not something that just happens like a finger snap. The kinds of people that simply abandon all morals when disaster strikes are the ones the typically die pretty early on. Humans are a dangerous super predator, regularly creating conflicts with them does not give you good odds. Avoiding conflict is a far better survival strategy and comes more naturally. The news often focuses on the looting, shooting, and such, but that isn't what the majority of people are doing in most disasters. Another thing. There are no "alpha males" or anything like that in real naturally formed human social structures. The scientist who coined the term only ever intended to to describe wolf behavior and later disproved the entire theory when he realized wolves only have "alphas" when you trap them all in a cage at the zoo together with no options for escape and not enough proper stimulation, not in the wild. During disasters the social structure that forms with humans is much less organized and more complex, at least for the first few years unless an organized structure already existed before the disaster (such as the military or a prepper group, etc) or some challenge causes people to come together to build a social structure (usually years down the road from the start of the disaster). People tend to congregate in the safest places they can, there are no clear leaders but certain personalities tend to command more respect. In the very beginning this tends to be the tough types that get stuff done, but this quickly turns over to people who have good people skills, can resolve conflicts, and can keep people's spirits up. However this doesn't mean any one of them is the leader or even makes the rules and nobody picks these de-facto leaders, they sort of rise up organically. In fact even the rules in these types of groups typically evolve spontaneously. That is nobody ever starts a discussion to make a list of rules, it just happens organically based on human instinct, culture, and a few other things. The enforcement is also typically fair and universal. Whatever your status was before the disaster nobody cares anymore, if you step on toes you might get kicked out. Exile is functionally the same as a death sentence in a long term disaster unless a different group will accept you (your reputation will follow you like it or not. People talk). This is one of the reasons there are no "alpha males" if you try to dominate everybody and make them agree with your rules they're going to all gang up on you and kick you out, or the group will devolve into conflict and dissolve into smaller groups, or if the conflict can't be resolved possibly everybody dies. Cannibalism... It just doesn't happen. Yeah if you comb every survival situation over the past 100 years you find a handful of cases, but the vast majority of people literally rather starve. The rare times it does happen it's usually only if the people being eaten where already dead from other causes. Humans hunting other humans to eat for survival is so rare you can write it off as an urban legend. It's also a really terrible survival strategy. First there are few foods more dangerous to your health than human flesh for many reasons that would be a bit off topic to get into, short version is prions, diseases, biocumaltive waste, other mystery symptoms, etc. Second your reputation will follow you. If word gets out you're eating people a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands will be very upset with you, and remember conflict with a super predator is a bad survival strategy. No matter how tough you are you won't be able to take on angry mobs alone, and very few if any people are ever going to trust you enough to make a lasting group with you. Trust is worth more than gold in survival situations, and trust can only be gained long term by being a trustworthy person, people don't trust somebody who might eat them when their stomach gets the grumblies that only hands can sooth. Since this is a zombie game though I would add that who knows what the psychological impact of being surrounded by flesh eating humanoids all the time would be and how that might change behavior. Maybe cannibalism would be more likely in such an apocalypse at least over time. The lone survivor in the wild: they don't exist. I mean yes if you comb through the records you will find rare instances of it, but few forms of survival are harder than lone survival. Few can survive long this way without support from others, or at least plenty of resources to scavenge from long dead others. It's really hard to do and a single mistake or injury and you're as good as dead. We are a social species evolved for millions of years to survive in groups, not alone. Being alone = death. You aren't likely to wander out into the woods and find somebody living out there alone, and if you do it's because they prepared very well ahead of time and almost certainly brought modern tech to help them. The psychology of survival. Surviving cooperatively in a group actually feels really good emotionally. We evolved specifically for this very function and it gives a person a sense of satisfaction and purpose that is very hard to get in the modern age. It's an extremely hard and dangerous life but also one that many people find highly rewarding overall. In fact some people who have escaped such situations made efforts to go back. It's typically those that are close enough to the disaster to be affected emotionally but unable to actually do much to help anybody that typically have the worst psychological side affects. Not that one should underestimate trauma and other factors that will affect those directly involved. In most survival situations more humans (as long as everybody has a cooperative goal) serves to improve your survival odds, hence our instinct to help people even if we don't know them that well. Some of these ideas may not be well accepted in modern thoughts about disasters or might not translate perfectly into video game logic where the goal is to make a game that's fun to play but I suggest you consider where your beliefs about disasters comes from before you write it off, and maybe do some reading on the topic of real situations other than the sensationalized internet news headlines. How much of what you know comes from real life experience or even at least people who were actually living it that you've had full conversations with? Further reading on real life human behavior in disasters: Tribe by Sebastian Junger, A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit, https://www.commentary.org/articles/james-meigs/elite-panic-vs-the-resilient-populace/

I don't think this would violate the spirit of the game in this way, at least not any more than reclaiming your old character's base and items does already. You'd still lose all your hard work, you'd just be given a small reward/incentive to try again, to give the world you survived in another chance. It also gives the feeling of more continuity, as if your new survivor may have spent time living in this world while you old one was surviving. Otherwise why not simply go full rogue like and force the world to be deleted or reset each time you die?

I like the idea of small bands of survivors getting together and I think it would be interesting for it to be possible, but very difficult to build larger NPC colonies over time when NPCs are added to the game. I think it should be on par with say Dwarf Fortress where the learning curve for such colonies is steep and very unforgiving of your mistakes, and you'll learn by losing whole colonies at times. In fact sometimes you do so well your colony grows too fast, and starvation sets in while other times it's a war of attrition where dwarves drop one by one or succumb to growing hoards of enemies, and other times still it's something you never expected or planned for coming out of the left field catching you off gaurd. I also think to really catch that Romero zombie feel there will need to be some way to have larger hordes, both for balancing larger colonies and in general. In the Zombie Survival Guide book it expressly warns of how attracting even one zombies can potentially cause a chain reaction attracting more and more zombies from farther and farther away, hundred, thousands, hundreds of thousands, or unlikely but possibly a million zombies, is what the book stated and that this risk increases the fewer other survivors are left to distract zombies from bunching up. I've managed to attract screen filling hordes that blot out the ground with their mass on rare instances and there is something very satisfying about facing such a daunting horde but I find they glitch into SCP style shadow monsters after a while. The only ways I can think think to fix this would either limiting the zombies that can be on screen, but have a cache of off screen virtual zombies that continue to show up as you kill the on screen zombies, or to have zombies that once bunched up and in a large enough group are treated programming wise as a single entity that only breaks up into individual zombies when close enough to a player or otherwise dispersed somehow. I also think the idea of having a thriving colony facing a massive hoard that goes on for as far as the eye can see would make for a very entertaining zomboid experience. This would also be especially terrifying if you in fact did not have a colony but simply had survived on your own all this time to suddenly find yourself the target of countless walking corpses.

I've been thinking about how losing long standing characters can make it seem really pointless restarting sometimes, and can be a reason to stop playing for a while for some when it's a big loss. I think a way to balance this without breaking the core game play might be being able to save all of your traits for redistribution into your new character. Like for example if you start out with an out of shape character and during the course of you game play you grind them into shape then die, on you next character you will have all those traits by default on character customization and can choose to sell your in shape character trait to buy additional traits. This way you still lose all your XP and skills meaning death is still quite punishing, but there is a good reason to try again with a slightly better starting character than last time so it feels less discouraging. You'll still need to play to earn these points, since grinding new traits takes time and not all traits can be changed on active characters, but you get a small reward for continuing on so it doesn't all feel for naught.

Key FOBs were widely available in the US as early ias 1989 so it is likely that there would be a number of them available in the exclusion zone to allow remote lock (and thus that slight beep) as well as remote car alarm. Some way in general to intentionally set off car alarms and house alarms should the house have one would be a nice feature. Sometimes you need a little extra chaos to smoke out a stubborn opponent, or just because chaos is fun sometimes.

I think a lot of people would scream when for example, a zombie is taking a literal bite out of their flesh, likewise when severely startled many do. Perhaps cowardly trait could increase the risk and brave decrease it, perhaps also as "stoic" trait to remove it. It may also be useful to have a very brief moment where the player can press a key to stifle the scream. An unstifled scream attracts attention.

Some people run up and down stairs for fitness as it is, though I think further realism could be added if there is a chance to trip if the character has high exertion, panic, fatigue or low nimble level. Pehraps stairs that have railings would have much reduced fall risk, though perhaps slightly increased for "all thumbs" trait.

I was thinking about how there are plans on adding a lot more specialization in the skills, and I thought about how this might affect single player. I think it would be interesting to be able to have more than one character on single player worlds. When you "log out" of you single player world your character disappears just like in multiplayer, and you can "log in" with other characters who's locations, stats, etc are saved as part of the world, but don't exist in the world when you aren't using them. This would allow for specialization without sacrificing much for single player worlds or forcing the simplification of single player skill sets or OP single player characters. I think it's at least a decent alternative until NPCs are available.