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As anyone who has ever seen a flashlight from far away pointed at them in a rural area will tell you, when everything around you is pure darkness, those things can be very visible from VERY far away. It surprises me how, even in pure darkness areas, zombies seem to ignore flashlights and car headlights pointed directly at them or how they won't feel too attracted to a house with every single light inside turned on when electricity has long been cut off. My suggestion would be: If you point your flashlight or car headlights towards zombies in the dark or at night for too long, they will notice you even from farther away and come to you. The time needed for that "notice you due to the light" to happen should be a lot longer the farther from you they are (but the cone of light will also be bigger there, so a lot more may notice you) AND they need to be looking towards your direction in order to see that light (zombies that are looking back won't notice). This means that for example: -Stopping your car at night with the headlights on and going into a building could be a bad idea, since when you return, a group of zombies that was down the streets could have surrounded your car. -You could use your flashlight to slowly bait some zombies in your direction from far away to slowly trim down a horde. -A carpentry post with a flashlight used as light source needs to be placed taking its light into consideration in order not to constantly attract zombies towards your base. Lights on inside a house or fireplaces at night should attract zombies nearby that look towards it for a while (even lights in higher floors). Similarly with #1, it should take longer for the zombie to be attracted to the house depending on the distance and they need to be looking towards it. Curtains and sheets should mitigate but not fully nullify this. Boarding up the windows or barricading it with bookcases should fully nullify this. This means that for example: -Early in the game, zombies would gather around buildings that have lights on inside and those buildings would naturally have a higher amount of zombies in or around even later in the game. -If your house windows are higher than the fence line, it could attract several zombies from down the street towards your "safe" spot, turning it into a death trap. -You could purposefully light a few houses early in the game as a way to attract zombies towards them and away from your base. -For taller buildings (in case there even is the possibility of starting the game already on Louisville), the higher the floor, the farther away it should attract zombies from, but nullify the effect from zombies nearer (so if a light is on a very high floor, zombies that are up to a certain distance won't see it since they would have to be looking up and not forward). 3- Three words for you: Visible Light Spectrum. As an added to both suggestions above, it could be very interesting if, due to deterioration with zombification and decay, if the zombies eye cone cells degraded and they lost the ability to perceive a few colors of light, more specifically, red and violet, which are the lowest and the highest wavelengths of light. As such, changing your lamps for the flashlight, car headlights or inside lighting for either a red or a violet color would render both effects from #1 and #2 nullified. You could carry 2 flashlights with you, one with red or violet lightbulb to not attract zombies attention, even though the color makes it slightly harder to see and another with a common white lightbulb, that doesn't bother you to see, but can attract zombies attention. If we add both sides with a few craftable battery powered spotlights(with an effect that makes zombies notice it twice as fast) and other "light decoys" and trap mix it with fire or bomb traps and have interesting strategies to deal with hordes that can be used even way after electricity has been cut off. This would bring a whole new dimension of strategy and danger to the game. Light sources doesn't just help you see in the dark, but also makes others see you...

Generators similar to the one currently present in the game can be significantly loud, ranging from 70 to almost 90 decibels, which would be close to a "someone shouting" or an average "car engine". This should be reflected in the game by having zombies be attracted towards the sound of a working generator from a range similar to somewhere between the shout sound radius and the car engine sound radius. It should also make it hard to sleep if your bed is too close to the working generator. Not even close to the sound radius of gunfire even from a pistol or a revolver, but still, if you make a base inside a city, you'd need to clear zombies from a certain distance around your base and zombies migrating that pass by your base would constantly come towards it, so you'd have to turn it off from time to time, specially if you are going somewhere far from your base or risk getting back to a base overtaken by zombies that were attracted to your generator, or make sure the generator is placed in a spot that can't be heard from outside your base. This means that if you can't feel safe enough to be constantly shouting "Hey! Hey you! Hey! HEEEY!" inside your base, you shouldn't feel safe enough to turn on a generator there. Here is a video that show just how loud an open frame generator can be.

I think there should be an actual helicopter that's visible to the player during the helicopter event. You know, it's all modeled and textured and you could see the crew in it including the pilot recklessly following you around! It'd be more immersive than just a sound plus it'd be more realistic to have something that's there that would be visible.

So... Umbrellas, not rare but not super-common as loot in houses and the stores. It would require both hands to use and would open in three seconds but take ten seconds to shake dry and close. Both of those timers would require you to be standing still. The noise from the water hitting the umbrella would make more noise than the rain around it making you a little more noticeable when walking around in the rain if zombies are about. It would be usable as a very limited bat like weapon and would break pretty fast, maybe one to three uses. It would have the close combat jaw kill move like knives, maybe four to five uses. If in multi-player, two or three people can stand under it and not get wet. It would wear out over time from the wear and tear and from the water damaging it (long-term). And if hot and sunny, you stay cool when using it.