[41.78.16] [single player] Disappearing Zombies

[Bred4WarZ]

Hello

 

I've come across an issue with hordes of zombies disappearing. It happens when I've quit a game then come back to it a while later. The size of the hordes is 100+ and have grouped together due to a car alarm being triggered. I am on the latest build, only play single player and as far as I can remember the issue has only happened when on a user created map.

 

Now, for some, it wouldn't be a problem. Having a large group of zombie just vanish and not have to deal with them would make life in the world of Zomboid a little bit easier. For me though it doesn't sit right, I don't like to gain an advantage due to a glitch in a game even if had no control over it.

[hilvon]

I have a similar problem, though I suspect this might be a side effect of another issue.

 

More dtails on my situation. Set up a game with high zombie population, no respawn and recurring helicopter event.

After about 2.5 month and 4000 zombies killed a helicopter would still bring a ton of zombies to my base vicinity which got me a bit frustrated because it is kind of sus that after that many kills there would still be that many undad out and about. So I hop into debug mode and pull up zombie population stats. Of the 4 map tiles I see immediately around my base most are basically at cap population circa 650/650. The tile my base is actually on the populations counts are through the roof like 1500/620.

 

Use Ghost mode to jump around the map tiles furter away and some of them are under population and the missing counts in them add up to about 2000. Which is significant but don't account for all the zombies I killed and all the overfolow zombies I have around my base. So it looks like there is something off going on.

 

I TP back to base, turn off ghost mode and keep playing till the nect chopper hits. Then when I hear it coming I hide un the ubstairs of my base and watch the zombie population charts. Sure enough a large number of zombies from outside my marked vicinity move in close to my base. Then become yellow dots and shuffle about. All seems pretty normal. Then the chopper starts leaving I assume, because I see another blob of white dots plotted to move to somewhere away from my base. but even though this blob should have covered the zombies immediately around my base they didn't seem to respond to that chopper pulling them away.

 

And after that (and trying to fight my way outside of my base killing quite a lot of zombies, the game starts to lag. I assume that it was due to my laptop overheating, but turned out it just got umplugged and thus in power saving mode. So I start the game again and... there are no zombies around.

 

So... my theory on what happens is - in some instances - especiallu when large migration occur, some zombies in the immediate vicinity don't get properly reassigned if they should be handled by the meta zombies system, or full gameplay instanced zombies system. So we get some zombies that are spawned into gameplay, but are not accounted for by some systems. So they fail to react to meta events and are not serialized into save file while existing in runtime data. This explains why they vanish on game reload.