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Highway Hordes?


TedHead

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I'm based in Riverside, playing on the middle difficulty (Not Apocalypse or Builder) which DOES have respawns.  My understanding is they'll respawn up to what the sort of "under the hood" zombie count is in the region, if the area goes unseen for a short while, bit by bit.

However I am NOT noticing respawns pretty much anywhere but the city proper (very few) and POSSIBLY the highways directly out of town.  My base is in the southern part of town, near the gated community, with my thought to be to move into those nice houses once I can find a sledgehammer - and I've cleared the whole town without finding one so far, but building my own house on top of the roofs of the single-stories seems to work out.  Anyway, that's beside the point.

I was jogging to work up my stats one day and thought: I've never seen a zombie out here where my traps are, so I'll just run around here.. when I was sprinting down the road, I noticed a zombie.  Think it was a car crash story.  One more wandered out of the woods, then another.. dealt with about 5.  Yelled.  That was a big mistake.  LOTS of them poured out of the woods at that point.  Dozens.

This is true for each of the highways I've checked.  Just a big horde waiting outside of town.  But it's sparse outside of the region directly outside of towns, as I secured some wheels to check Muldraugh for a sledgehammer.

I can't find anything on the wiki in regards to spawning or AI to indicate that zombies build up on the outskirts of towns en masse without really entering the town itself.  I've holed up for a whole year in my safehouse and haven't had a big group wandering in, but right outside of town, maybe 4 screens away from my safehouse in fact, it feels like there's just a massive respawn point and they seem content to just chill out there.

Has anyone had an experience similar to this? 

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Ahh yeah, that heat map pretty much tracks.  I'd read that over time they're supposed to drift around though, did that get changed at some point?  (playing the IWBMS build)

21 hours ago, HetCigarr said:

I also lived in that gated community for a couple of months, I encountered the same thing.
Was it around here by any chance? https://map.projectzomboid.com/#0.5289605647722662,0.10450674822894482,61.75591130505147
I stumbled upon a MASSIVE horde there, I pondered for a long time how they got there

Yes, that's exactly one of the places.

https://map.projectzomboid.com/#0.5494205202073055,0.12137822420238223,32.450607771945556

This is the first one I found, anyway.  I was able to run around the first two sections of the road over and over, never found anything, so I decided I'd go further into the wilderness which is where I found the car crash story and the zombies in the woods came out and I yelled.  That part doesn't line up with the heat map.

I built my base on top of those two one-stories right on the edge of town, by the gated community.  Easy access to traps by the highway, not too far from the city center.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I thought about it some more, it defintely has something to do with Cells. The map is divided by cells which are 300x300 tiles large, each cell has predetermined amount of zombies. Like you mentioned, zombies do migrate. But they are limited to stay within their current cell, UNLESS provoked by hearing/sight.


The red line is a cell border
Screenshot_1.thumb.png.e6f3d75a17c5dabf3a883b0eabc865f8.png

So if dead citizen of Riverside gets lured over that red line by the player, helicopter or other meta sounds, they never return. Because of the heatmap they don't migrate towards deep woods. So if you live where we do, eventually alot of metasounds will have been played, resulting in that area having much more zombies than intended

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zomboid.thumb.jpg.7b1e30b0357b8fb7682ff110051d0622.jpg

 

These four options are your problem. 

 

If this is what your "Respawn unseen hours" is set to then the area has to be unseen for 16 hours for it to start being able to respawn Zombies. If this is where you base is, unless you are traveling to another area and staying overnight then the area will never be unseen for 16 hours, hence why nothing spawns.

 

Additionally "Respawn Multiplier" dictates what percentage of the intended population should respawn AFTER 16 hours has passed. So with these settings only 0.1% of the intended population can respawn after 16 hours has passed.

 

I THINK "Respawn hours" then dictates that after an area has been unseen for 16 hours and 0.1% of the population has respawned  an additional 72 hours must pass for more to respawn. Could be wrong on that last one though.

 

The devs really need to add some detailed explanation to each of these options in sandbox cause it's kind of a hot mess trying to figure out what all this means,.

 

I would strongly recommend that you play with respawn off as it ruins the game in my opinion. In Zelda games I rarely kill the enemies because they just respawn when you come back into the room, so it's pointless and I just run past them. Respawn has a similar effect.

 

When the Zombies can't respawn every Zombie that you kill is one less to cause you problems down the road, it gives you a sense of cleansing the world, another one bites the dust.

 

The devs implemented respawn to address the fact that the zombie simulation effectively turns off when the player is not in a given cell, as such once you clear an area it's mostly impossible for new zombies to wander in.

 

A way to sort of address this is to set the world pop to high and turn "Follow sound distance" to 1000. now if you set a loud enough noise off zombies can come from as far as 1000 tiles away. Because a cell is 300 tiles by 300 tiles that means zombies could wander into the sound lets say of a siren from the next cell. Zombies can move from non loaded cells to loaded cells if they hear a sound, however if you were to clear the cell next to you and then go back into the original cell then this would no longer work. 

 

Only a partial fix until the dev enhance the zombie simulation and make it more dynamic and able to happen map wide even when the player isn't in the cell. (I so hope they do as it's my most anticipated feature, far more so than NPC's) 

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