KendL

What is most interesting in this game is looting. Loot runs are core part of the game play (at least in my experience). But I don't have any reason to do any loot runs if I have plenty of food. So, I need to wait until something forces me to go out on another loot run. Obviously you can change the setting to make food spawn in fewer quantities... but it requires restarting the game. And if you don't want to lose your progress and want some dynamics in your world - you want to accelerate time between loot runs.

Well, I cleared out the nearby areas and the gameplay became boring to me. I felt like I literally had no reason to go anywhere and do anything. The game is a "survival" and I didn't need anything to survive actually. At the other hand I know that zombies respawn after some time and they can migrate. I also know there are seasons in the game and the game experience during winter can be different from that during summer. So I wanted to get this experience without restarting the game with different settings. Also it feels interesting from statistics point of view. Like "I can survive for 2 years without any longterm plan by just looting what I can" so that in another game if I can survive longer than 2 years I know it is a result of my longterm strategy. And it feels like a ... realistic apocalypse. If you are surrounded by hordes of hungry undead and you have a stockpile of food and drinks (especially alcohol) - you will sit there doing nothing hoping for a rescue. It is the most realistic apocalypse scenario I can imagine honestly. The point is - there are dynamic changes in the game and you may want to get these changes and see how the world changed over time without actually babysitting the character to let him not die from hunger while he sits on a stockpile of food. I realized that the map does change a lot btw. I made a base in a fully cemented lumber mill area but after 7 months it looked like a wilderness already - there were trees growing and bushes on the asphalt.

Oh nice, thanks for the link

Suggestion It would be nice to introduce a way to skip time automatically. Description I found myself in a situation where I stockpiled a lot of food/water in a pretty safe area and there was nothing to do for me there in order to survive. I decided to survive as long as I could and see different seasons in the game so the plan was to sit there until I run out of food. The problem It is relatively hard to skip a significant time period in the game. I mean it was summer and I had all the resources to live happily until winter. Even with the 3x time speed summer=>winter is too long to sit and wait for. It was not only long, but also not possible to automate. My character can auto-drink but he can't auto-eat for some reason. So... one day I realized that the best way to skip time is to sleep. While sleeping the time multiplier is faster than 3x time speed. And the best way to make your character sleep constantly is to drink alcohol every time he wakes up. Wake up, drink a beer, eat butter, drink another beer, get tired, sleep. Wake up .... repeat Possible solution It would be nice to have an option to make character eat any available food from nearby containers (also open canned food if the can opener is available). This way we could accelerate time and just leave the character there. Or introduce some options to accelerate time even further. For example if the character consumes huge amounts of alcohol in short time he can sleep 5 days without waking up.

Zombies spawn on the roads in illogically high numbers. I would suggest to reduce the amount of zombies that appear on the roads and especially on the roads at the countryside or in the forests. This makes the game feel like an artificially constructed labyrinth with artificially designed obstacles rather than a "world with its own commonsense" and it ruins the sense of immersion. I was driving from Rosewood to the Military base in the woods as highlighted on the screenshot below. And I killed 200+ zombies on this road. In the forest... that is going to the military base. We all love PZ for the very special set of rules that make commonsense applicable in the game world. However, the amount of zombies on the road is completely different - like what are all these CIVILIANS doing on the abandoned road in the woods which is going to the MILITARY base? I don't think that civilians hang around military bases in such huge quantities. Ok, it could be that they hang around military base, but why are they scattered all over the ROAD in such a huge numbers?

Looks kinda logical.

This feedback is based on my 100 hours gameplay, no mods, single player and "HoboHaven PVPVE vanilla server (50.20.248.138:27060)" with no weapon mods. Benchmarked with a character with 6 aiming stat. Handguns Magnum Damage 1.2-1.9 => 1.6-2.3 Maximum range 11 => 12 Knockback 0.3 => 0.4 Knockdown 2 => 4 D-E Pistol Damage 1.0-1.9 => 1.2-2.2 Noise radius 100 => 90 Maximum range 10 => 11 Knockback 0.3 => 0.4 Knockdown 2 => 3 M9 Pistol Damage 0.6-1.0 => 0.5-0.85 M36 Revolver Damage 0.7-1.2 => 0.6-1.0 M625 Revolver Noise radius 70 => 60 .44 Ammo box Amount of ammo 12 => 20 User experience .44 handguns are one of the most disappointing things in the game in my opinion. The ammo is insanely scarce, the guns are loud and attract a lot of zombies, the skill requirement is high. In most cases, when you find ammo in the game, it will come in the form of ammo boxes. And .44 ammo boxes provide 12 ammo VS 30 ammo for all other pistol types. So when you grab a .44 pistol with the rarest ammo in the game, high skill requirement and loud yet cool sound - you expect that it will be POWERFUL. And the disappointing thing is that it is not. In fact it is slightly more powerful than other pistols... but not even significantly. M9 pistol has 2.5x the ammo capacity of Magnum, 3x more ammo from boxes, 3x higher "accuracy". A commonsense suggests that with these stats M9 must spend 3 bullets to put down something that Magnum can oneshot. This is just to have EQUAL total damage output on M9 and Magnum... not to mention that Magnum has higher skill requirement so you might expect it to have HIGHER damage output in total. In reality M9 does 0.8dmg on average VS 1.55 Magnum. And the most important thing here is that DAMAGE DOES NOT DIRECTLY DETERMINE THE CHANCES TO KILL THE TARGET i.e. a weapon with 3x higher damage will not necessarily kill targets 3x more often because of hit RNG. You can still oneshot a zed with M9 in 50% cases at 6-level aim so there is no point in picking other weapons with higher damage as this "higher damage" is sometimes an overkill and sometimes still not enough to ALWAYS kill a target with one shot. So, it looks like I spend an average of 1.7 bullets per kill with M9 and an average of 1.3 bullet per kill with Magnum while aggroing more zeds and total availability of .44 bullets is 3x less. At the other hand, starter pistols M9 and M36 seem to perform too well when compared with their "advanced" counterparts. I found that M9 is the best weapon in the game outperforming even shotguns / auto rifles in some cases thanks to its high firing rate and very high magazine capacity. And M36 is just a silent killer - not that powerful but reliable enough. I have developed a google spreadsheet where I wrote the stats of all handguns taken from https://pzwiki.net/ (hope it is relevant). I did some "score calculations" by multiplying the average_damage * ammo capacity(magazine size) * ammo_per_box and divided it by noise_radius as these are the most essential stats for a handgun. The results correlated with my in-game experience to a significant degree so I'd like to share it here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N4AwBXB9YV59WhYFXo9oxM3Y-MEsCLl6lJCKxfWkFj0/edit?usp=sharing Rifles MSR700 This rifle is the most disappointing thing in the entire game. One of the worst damage outputs in the game. It almost never kills stuff. It's hard to aim and unusable at close range while it occupies the "back" slot of a large weapon. Feels more like an air-pumped rifle rather than a gun. I did some research on Remington 700 that fires .223 rounds and its energy is ~1700 Joules. This is at least 2x higher than 600-800 Joules of .45 ACP. The point of having a rifle is that you should carefully aim... and if you do - it should deliver a powerful punch. Damage 0.6-1.3 =>1.2 => 2.0 Aiming time 30 => 90 Default max range without scope 10 => 15 Noise radius 70 => 90 (why the hell a .44 pistol is more loud than a long-range rifle? from balancing point of view) MSR788 Well, this one is better. But still barely usable if you are dealing with high number of zombies or if you have running zombies on your server and how fast you can kill them determines whether you will survive or not. And it's still too quiet for a RIFLE that fires .308 cartridges. It would be reasonable for such a rifle to have the highest damage per shot outputs in the game. Even if it will almost always one-shot its target - it will be still quite hard to use efficiently. With 2.0-2.8 damage double-barrel shotgun does not always one-shot its target. Damage 1.2-2.0 =>1.7-2.7 Aiming time 40 => 100 Default max range without scope 10 => 15 Noise radius 70 => 100 Scopes The point of a scope is that you can see EXACTLY what you are looking at and you don't see anything around. So, it would be reasonable to make "scope" narrow down the vision cone of the rifle owner dramatically while he is "aiming" (he can still look normally while not aiming through the scope of a rifle). The scope should also increase the aiming time as it takes time to aim carefully if you want to deliver a perfect shot. At the other hand, the well-aimed shot with a scope must be almost a guaranteed kill. Damage multiplier 1.5x with a scope Aiming time multiplier 1.5 for 2x scope / 2.0 for 4x scope / 2.5 for 8x scope The higher the magnitude of a scope - the narrower the vision cone while aiming through it It would be nice to allow players to shoot further than 35 tiles. 50 still looks reasonable. 35 tiles is not that far for zombies to travel especially runners can cover this distance faster than you will kill 3 of them.

The problem 1. I've played 8 hours in Sandbox mode with modified options as it is shown on the screenshot (Melee weapons - Common / Ranged Weapons - Abundant / Ammo - Abundant) but I have noticed that Firearms and Ammo are NOT spawning more often than on default "Rare" settings. Melee weapons do spawn more often. 2. It is unclear what "Abundant" means. Is it 2x more often? Or 20x? Or this option affects the map generation rules and defines whether CONTAINERS that *may* contain weapons (wardrobe with two halves / nightstands) spawn in houses? Or this option is not supposed to affect the "chance" of weapon to spawn but only increases the quantity? 3. Firearms still spawn where they originally can be found. No extra "sources" of weapons. Proposed solution 1. It would be nice to introduce separate numeric multiplier options similar to how zombie multipliers work. "Ranged weapon quantity multiplier" / "Ranged weapon chance multiplier" / "Ammo quantity multiplier" / "Ammo chance multiplier". 2. Clarify the descriptions so that a user would know what to expect from this options. 3. Introduce a very small chance for "extraordinary" items (like weapons, nails, seeds, special magazines or skill books) to be found in common places - on civilian zombies and normal book shelves for example. 0.1% chance by default could work - in fact there is a slight chance that a civilian could have a holster with a gun in it or a box of ammo. The multiplier however could increase this chance (say, a 30x multiplier will turn 0.1% into 3% chance) which means that what is supposed to be "abundant" will be "abundant" not only in special looting locations but overall on the whole map. Description Initially I wanted to benchmark all weapons in the game on runner zombies. I increased zombie stats and make them always run. I set spawn rates of weapons/ammo to "abundant" and expected that I will find a lot in the houses all over the map because I knew that there is a decent chance to find a gun case with weapons in a normal house in a double wardrobe. I picked a "lucky" trait on my character to increase the chances of finding weapons even further. However, after playing and looting a couple of houses I realized that not only I can't find "all types of weapon in the game" - but I can't find ANY firearms at all... I was killed numerous times because even a small group of 2-3 runner zombies with increased stats is almost unbeatable in melee. I tried with "lucky" trait and without it. In 8 hours I managed to find 1 rifle, 2 pistols and numerous shotguns however it's not super rare to find pistols and shotguns in just normal houses with two floors and wardrobes even on "rare" setting so I didn't notice the difference... and weapons are by far not "abundant". Because Abundant is supposed to mean that there are a lot, right? Or at least this is what a user expects. This just doesn't feel right. It may be that "lucky" trait overrides the modifiers of the loot spawn that I chose in the sandbox menu. It may be that weapon rarity modifiers do not affect GUN CASES containing weapons, but only affect the spawn chances of weapons themselves... which are not the main source of weapons because in civilian houses GUN CASES are seen more often. It may be that the difference is just not significant enough to be recognized. Like, if the default chances are 1% per wardrobe and "abundant" increases it to 4% per wardrobe it still means you will spend weeks trying to find what you look for.

Yeah, I realized that this option is already in the game. I noticed that the camera is twitchy however. Like when you move in a "diagonal" direction (SouthEast / SouthWest / NorthEast / NorthWest) the camera tends to move in a zig-zag while shifted towards your path. Anyways I would recommend to make this option enabled by default so that users would have less problems.

Proposal 1. Make it possible to shoot empty tin cans, empty bottles. 2. Make shooting cans and bottles provide an XP bonus (3x). 3. Destroy cans / bottles on successful hit. Rationale Imagine you are in a zombie apocalypse, you found a gun and you have no idea how to use it. What will you do? Go gather the largest hungry horde of undead possible and start pumping hot lead in their direction? Well, this is what we are doing PZ right now to level our shooting skill but this is definitely not what any sane person would do. Personally I would first practice my shooting skills to understand how this gun works. It can be done by shooting anything around you. In most cases bottles and other junk works. Alarm clocks could work just fine.

+1, we need trucks

Suggestions 1. Change Vehicle camera positioning. The center of the screen should be shifted forward in the direction of the vehicle. 2. Allow camera movement with RMB like in a normal person view. Currently it is only possible to "aim" the camera when the front window is open... which is illogical. 3. It would be better to introduce "Vehicle camera offset" option to let players configure how far the camera is moved when they enter a vehicle. Rationale 1. In most cases a player does not really need to observe half of the screen behind the car. At the other hand the player needs to look forward and the further he can see the road - the better. It is not possible to "aim" the camera with RMB in a car when the front window is closed but it is possible to do so when you open that window. As the result I found myself in an illogical situation where I open a window to look further by aiming the camera and positioning it so that the car would be at the border of my screen. Because I don't need to know what is BEHIND my car when I move at 100mph speed. The only exception is a situation where I intentionally aim my camera backwards. 2. It is useful to be able to use "aim" camera. I don't really get why we can't use it with closed windows. It would be better to allow players to use this camera and look through the windows of the car exactly the same as they can do with open windows now. 3. In case someone does not like the offset - they can tune it.