My little play session in Zomboid's sandbox ended up with awesome scenery.

[LeoIvanov]

Okay, so I've been giving a small run to the zomboid in sandbox, tweaking around with settings that fit my playstyle well when I stumbled on this masterpiece of a scenery.

 

It happened with me testing out zombie settings along these lines :

 

Zombie count: Insane

Strength: normal

Toughness: Tough

Sight: Eagle Vision

Hearing: Maximum hearing (forgot how it's named in settings themselves)

Speed: Slow shamblers (meaning no lunging.)

 

Some of the settings didn't seem to affect too much (reanimation time, despite being set to 1 minute, didn't really reanimate me, etc.)

 

Upon starting the game, I brought basic items from the inventory of my home and just wanted to check how good zombie's hearing is. I knocked on a window (if you do it once, it doesn't break fully) and waited for a minute, noticing a small pack forming just outside. Confident with my results, I move out of the front door as zombies that reached the window behind me manage to break it, attracting what seems like a whole neightboring block (about 100-150 zombies) to my area. Pretty amazed at how quickly they were swarming the place, I decided to screw with the sneaking and just set on jogging across the muldraugh.

 

It felt awesome, as any corner i'd take I'd run into zombie hordes upon zombie hordes. Since I was sprinting, their vision coupled with amazing hearing made EVERYONE I could possibly render on screen to shamble towards me as I helplessly run around the place looking for a way to escape. Eventually, after a few in game hours of sprinting about, I decided to go up the highway and, being slightly bored of cautious play I wanted to have a little fun and tried to do some tip-toeing and zig-zagging among the small clusters of zombies. It took just one of them to take hold of me and slow me down for a split second, as the rest caught up and swarmed me within a matter of a minute. At that point trying to push away wasn't really helping, so I just accepted my fate.

 

 

 

 

BUT!

 

That wasn't my original point when making this thread. I was just about to exit the game when I've noticed a cool fix to the game's camera where you were able to scroll and roll around the place freely with your camera view, so I've decided to wait until I turn into a zombie (which I didn't, spoilers duh), while observing how horde behaves.

 

At first, it slowly began dispersing from the original big cluster that formed around my body, slowly occupying the whole highway. If any car would dare to pass through I don't think they'd end up well. (On a side note - it would take exactly 1 of these zombies to make Lori crash her car, so no big deal.)

 

 

As those little pesky buggers continued to stumble around the area cutely, one of them decided that it was a good idea to smash his head on a nearby building's window... Breaking it in the process, which attracted a small cluster of about 5-10 zombies from the whole herd to investigate. They, without a doubt being a bunch of smart individuals, started banging their heads on nearby windows aswell.

 

 

It didn't seem like a big deal at first, until the constant noise of window crashing attracted more and more zombies from the herd to that building.

 

 

 

It didn't take long for the WHOLE HORDE to swarm a place just because of 1 zombie wandering off the original course.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In summary, that was a very great sight to observe AFTER your character's death... I didn't even know the game was capable of reproducing this kind of swarming mechanic by a simple tweak of hearing and visibility in sandbox.

[Dragonbahn]

Yea. it's preatty cool... When you're already dead...

[Suomiboi]

Yea, I noticed this behavior too when I tried playing mp for the first time. I just tried it by myself (insert forever alone meme) and as an admin, I was invisible and spawned a few hordes next to me. Then I fired a few gunshots to get them moving a bit and when a few of them got to the windows it was awesome. All of the horde swarming into the building and after the shattered glass.

 

I too wish these kinds of scenarios were more pronounced while actually playing the game and not just when spectating...

[Ohbal]

Amazing. The mechanics are there! That means TIS are much closer to fix the end game than it would have seem like.

 

 

Yea. it's preatty cool... When you're already dead...

 

 

I too wish these kinds of scenarios were more pronounced while actually playing the game and not just when spectating...

 

I'm confused about this part. 

 

I understand that what is causing the horde behaviour are the settings Leolvanov used in his sandbox game, and not the fact that he was spectating / dead.

 

Has anybody managed to reproduce those behaviours while playing? Probably easier to see in MP, as you can enjoy the view of another player getting chased

[Suomiboi]

The problem comes to the fact that there are not enough zombies in your vicinity to cause this reaction and the zombies hearing/reaction isn't strong enough and last, there aren't enough things triggering zombie movement. If there'd be a window breaking around my neighborhood, it could be heard from at least a 100 meters, even from inside a building.

 

This has been in the game for quite a while if I'm not wrong, it's because it needs such masses, and loud volume/easy reaction that we're not noticing it in game.

[Ohbal]

All good news then. Its just a matter of tweaking values so the survival mode gets closer to the original intention. 

 

Even without an insane number of zombies (but for sure higher than the current amount), if they tend to swarm like in those screenshots things should get interesting

[HauntedQuiche]

See, I've found these scenario's to be fairly noticeable in-game. (Maybe caused by me being crap at stealthing).

 

Fairly often, I've managed to pull fairly reasonable-sized hordes down on top of myself, often through misguided attempts to escape the small horde I attracted earlier. Even in standard settings, zombies will swarm around any sounds that they hear, and it can easily get quite dangerous.

 

I guess the main difference is that when you are good at stealthing around the zombies, you don''t really do anything to trigger the swarm, and as a single survivor it isn't too difficult to sneak by.

 

I do think that'll change when NPCs are implemented, though. The extra sounds and activities of numerous survivor groups are going to pull zombies around the map a lot more, and it'll also be a lot harder to stay so sneaky when the zombies are much more likely to be riled up.

 

(Instead of now, where they are essentially just hanging around a happy, peaceful zombie village, looking for the lone nutter who keeps stealing their things.)

[Lerxst]

If I remember, this has been around for a long while now. It's just not a scenario you get to see often, but the zombs do move around the map in response to different noises; gun shot, helicopter, etc. I think that fact that it's persistent and occurs regardless of players around is what makes this game stand out from some others. 

[Wolfen]

problem is that anything far from you doesn't really exist.

 

So no hordes atm

[Suomiboi]

If a tree falls in the forest...

[EnigmaGrey]

If a tree falls in the forest...

Do the zombies mistake it for a fallen human and proceed to devour it?

[Narnobie111]

I also managed to get a big horde up as well.