Boidster

Possibly, yes. I'm not sure a zombie in the "ApproachDistraction" task (i.e. walking towards you where it heard a sound) will instantly change to a different "ApproachDistraction" (your rock), but it's worth testing. You can do it outside pretty easily by hiding behind something and firing a shot. Then throw a rock and watch the zombies who (presumably) are shambling towards you. I've used rocks to distract zombies, but never tried it that I can remember with already-distracted zombies. One obvious way to notice is to change the walk/run speed of agro'd zombies. When they start jogging/running at you, you know they've got a lock. Name-dropper.

Hmm...I'm going to go poke into the code to see about this. From what I saw/posted earlier I don't actually think it works that way, but maybe. Everything I saw implied that it was always about "can the zombie hear you". There is no automatic, random, "roll vs. player's stealth skill" in there that I saw, but there is a fair amount of noobiness in my code-poking so I'll look at it again. I'm pretty sure that it is only zombies who can make "skill checks" vs stealth. And it is never random. It is "was this sound above the threshold of hearing" or "is the player entity visible at X distance and with Y illumination". Maybe I'm arguing semantics, but when entering a volume the player doesn't "make a check" of any type. The zombies may get to make a check vs hearing or sight, but never the player.

Because it's not confusing enough, I'll point out that "stealth" has sound and vision components so "a stealth check" can mean a couple of different things. And the game models it all from the zombie's point of view, i.e. 1) Was that sound above the hearing threshold of Z 2) Can Z detect an entity within its cone of vision For D&D nerds, it's the DM rolling to see if the monsters hear you, not you rolling vs your Stealth skill. The perks and mods and books make you harder to hear and harder to see. Only if you are seen, though, will a zombie target you for attack. I guess it depends on how you define "stealth check". I think they are always (or often) checking for visible entities within their cone of vision. To the extent [zombie vision] vs. [player illumination & distance] = "stealth check" it's arguable they are making them all the time. I'm not sure there's a significant difference between sleeper behavior and biome spawn behavior in this regard, with the exception that sleepers begin 'sleeping' and only a noise (or possibly a volume trigger) can wake them up. I dunno, it could just be different definitions of "stealth check" in our heads.

Forgot about the timer and losing the stealth bonus. Good points.

Throw up some support beams and a walkway - free escape tunnels!

I think maybe it's used more than you think, but also it would be nice if zombies were spawned into a wandering/patrol state instead of just sleeping/hidden. I agree that shooting the closet door in front of a sleeper ought to wake it up, but currently the game doesn't model block break sounds so all the zombie hears is the quiet (?) *thunk* of your crossbow. Which is centered across the room where you made the shot. But once awakened, if you are a skilled, perked stealth player in a dark room, you have a very good chance to avoid any "hunting you down" zombies. Most of them will wake up into either "wander" mode or "investigate noise" mode. The latter will cause zombies to bust through walls perhaps, but they are not GPS-ing to you. I think that is one of the biggest misconceptions since they reworked stealth in A19. The "I heard something" zombies are confused for "targeting the player" zombies, when they are not. I highly recommend people read /config/stealth.txt. It lays it out pretty well (not in code - normal human speak). Edit: there is more nuance in this than I originally posted. See later in the thread (pg 5/6) where Faatal gives some info and we start tracking the behavior of 'attack volume' zombies. They do have a chance to lock onto you even if they couldn't really see you, but that can be defeated by stealth (From the Shadows perk). That describes a zombie running the "ApproachDistraction" AI task. The zombie heard something, but has no target on the player. Pretty easily avoided by a stealth player, since the zombie's direction of movement will not change as the player moves. They're just going towards a spot. A zombie running "ApproachAndAttackTarget" AI task looks like this: Falls out of closet Runs directly at player, even if player is moving If player runs away far enough or enters a dark enough stealth posture, revert to "ApproachDistraction" or "Wander" AI task Otherwise, keep chasing/attacking the player For a highly-skilled stealth player, step 3 there might be so easy that the difference between the two is trivial. Which is an excellent endorsement of the value of the stealth perks. It's really not different from any other stealth game - if the guard hears something, he comes to investigate. If he doesn't see anything he shrugs and goes back to wandering around/patrolling. If he sees you, he attacks. If he saw you at the very start, he chases you as far as he can still see you, after which maybe he goes to the last place he saw you and checks around, but then returns to wander/patrol. The zombies behave the same way. (It might be that you don't see any difference between "heard something" and "actively targeting you" behaviors in other games either. Which is completely fair and consistent!)

The loot probabilities are, let's say, out of sync with the other updates made for A20. Out of balance, and TFP is aware. They mentioned in a thread a couple of weeks ago that they have a rebalance on the to-do list. Looks like they're starting to roll out some of that rebalancing. This is a significant change from A20.0, and probably explains the increase. What does "groupMailbox" look like? Does it reference both Mailbox01 and Mailbox02 and still have count="all"?

I poked into the code a bit more and...well, there's a lot, but I think it jibes with the idea of "sleepers do not auto-attack players". Even for sleeper volumes marked "attack" in the POI design. What seems to happen with "attack" volumes is that the zombie gets a sort of freebie check to see if it can see the player. If it can see the player, then it will attack. If it can't, it may still investigate a noise and head your way. Passive and Active volumes don't get that 'freebie' check to see you. They would have to turn your way and see you normally I guess. For the code-inclined, here's what I found:

It was only two examples and apologies if you're referring to some specific POI which does this, but the tests above show that they often don't break out at predetermined times and are in fact quite happy to stay 'sleeping' in their hidey holes until the stealthy player chooses to break/open the concealment. And they often stay sleeping even after that. The only time they will walk towards where you are is if they detect a noise <where you were standing>; they don't necessarily detect *you* right away. Stealth.txt has the deets. In my tests, only twice (out of 10 or so sleepers) did the zombie lock onto me. Once I stepped on trash and didn't back away fast enough and the other...I dunno exactly what happened. Maybe too much light from the kitchen? In two cases, zombies walked right past me after stumbling out of their hiding spots. Clearly they heard something in my vicinity and came to investigate, but never did see me just 2m away. I think it's easy to interpret the 'investigating' phase as a GPS lock, but keeping calm and scooting back into shadows can save the encounter. Basically, I think there are no auto-aggro rooms like we had in A19. Instead, it works as described in stealth.txt, and a skilled stealthy player can defeat the jump-scare hiding zombies. I'm not arguing against a more organic wandering/patrolling zombie idea. I think that would be great.

The colored doors are not powered objects so they can't be automated with motion sensors and the like. Wouldn't surprise me if powered versions appear in the game, though. The settings are just for locking the door and/or setting a passcode.

I changed to padded (as suggested above) and removed both of the books from my skills, and only took 3 levels of the agility stealth perks. Then I bravely headed into house_modern_13. The pool-house zombies woke up because I stupidly stepped on trash. One of them targeted me, the other headed my way, but wasn't targeting so it lost interest when I backed away and sat still. Entering the house, no zombies woke up so I shot the closet right by the entry window. Z was sleeping in there so she got murdered. Then I walked around the living room area and shot the bathroom door. There was a dude and he did start walking towards me. Unsure if he was targeting me or just investigating the noise, but I shot him anyhow. Then I walked to the kitchen area and shot another closet. Zombie sleeping in there did not wake up, but one did drop from the ceiling back where I had successfully snuck around before (didn't even drop when I shot the bathroom guy above). Must have made her d20 hearing check this time. She was not targeting me. I didn't do the whole POI, but generally it seems to play like the others. Even with only 3 levels in the perks and no books, it is at least moderately stealthable. But stealth doesn't scale with gamestage so definitely higher-level, higher-perked players will do better.

I think they definitely made a stylistic choice about the hidden zombies. Part of the issue they are trying to overcome is the problem of zombies popping into view when you cross a threshold. They have limits to how many zombie entities can be active at once and they try to keep it under control by only spawning zombies as needed while you proceed down the One True Path in a POI. When you enter the living room and trigger the sleeper volume, they don't want Zs to suddenly appear so they hide them behind boxes, in closets, in the ceiling, etc. Ideally, a POI would be fully populated (with a mix of roaming, sleeping, and a few hidden) zombies before you enter it, but I dunno if that is technically feasible. It does look like some of the POI rework has tried to address it. In an earlier thread where we looked at an Army Camp POI, it sure looked to me like there was one big sleeper volume covering the entire camp, so that as soon as you entered the POI all of the Zs would spawn (inside tents or otherwise hidden) so that you could approach any area from any direction and not see pop-ins. Probably that sort of technique is required for an open-landscape POI like the army camp. In building-based POIs, TFP seems to have decided (maybe due to those technical limitations) to spawn zombies in as-you-go, and rely a lot on closet and ceiling zombies to obscure the moment they are spawned. Laz Man said that they are trying to find POIs where zombies pop in and fix them, which implies that the "populate the entire POI as soon as I step foot on it" is not an option. They're trying to fix room-by-room issues, meaning our almost-always-hidden zombie occupants are the norm going forward. It could be that TFP really would prefer the more organically-populated POIs like we've described, but it's not technically feasible. Or if feasible, too costly to recode everything and rebuild the POIs so...closet zombies it is.

The answer to this question is "no", hence theFlu's recommendation to keep a copy of 20.0 executables and run from that when you join your MP games. Play 20.1 exp from your Steam location.

Don't just chop up stumps. Though they have the best % chance per individual block, you can increase your odds of finding honey in X minutes by searching for medical supplies. Honey is part of "Common Medical Supplies" with the same drop chance as splints. Raid a Pop-N-Pills or two and it's likely you'll come away with honey, if not antibiotics. You can search 20 shelves/cabinets much faster than running around to find 10 or 20 stumps. The loot for these are not scaled by lootstage - a level 1 player has same chance as level 100.

*pushes glasses up nose* Ackshually, if you are a coder or are code-curious, you can see all of it, with TFP's blessings, using a tool like dotPeek or dnSpy. It's how all the expert modders are able to do their thing. Here's a bit relevant to the stealth discussion: There is a LOT of code to wade through. This is just the "EntityAlive" class, in 4pt font. There are hundreds of classes.

I will try that, however I actually think that setup might be more stealthy. The military armor has a 10% noise increase per piece and I had no muffled connectors in it. I don't think padded adds any noise at all. Losing the military boots and the nightstalker book would net +15% noise, but I think the total noise level would be -15% (-30% from switching to padded, +15% due to loss of boots & book). But I'll test it out. I originally was just testing the proposition that the volumes are auto-attack, auto-GPS, and un-stealthable. That is clearly not true.

I've always thought it was kind of dumb, and prone to accidents as you saw. Plenty of ways to kill yourself without it. I'm sure others have done this already, but FWIW I made a one-liner modlet, "Boid's Inedible Glass", which will prevent this type of accident. https://www.nexusmods.com/7daystodie/mods/1819?tab=files

For what it's worth (again), I played the first few rooms of restaurant_02 and it plays like other POIs as far as I can tell. I went in at night with military stealth boots, full military light armor, and max stealth perks (+Night Stalker 2 & Urban Combat 3) and I was able to sneak around pretty well. These first few woke up when I tried to shoot a light, but they only walked to where I had been when I took the shot. I backed out into the trailer (the entry point for the POI) and they lost interest. I easily sneak-shot two of them, then the 3rd one came right at me. Ambush! But nope, he walked right past me and stood in the corner. He didn't "see" me at all, he just heard a noise. Then he heard one more and that was that for him. So I walk up the stairs to find this guy, snoozing away in spite of all the murder going on down below. I murdered him. Doing that triggered a zombie to fall from the ceiling below me where I had just snuck past. If her orders were "ambush any human who comes into this room, and BE SURE YOUR GPS IS ON!", then she failed miserably. After she fell I was able to sneak past her (this is not a large room, mind) back into the trailer and wait for her to lose interest. Then got the 6x damage shot. Later on the roof, after taking out a vulture and a dog which were visible from the ladder, I had this dude pop out behind me. Did not have GPS on me, he fell to the ground (stumbled out of his hidey hole) and then just stood there looking my way. Got murdered.

That is a much neater way to handle it - take it out of loot RNG and put it up on a billboard. And it seems like you can craft a billboard wherever you want, which is neat. A mobile quest-giver. I'll finish my hack, just for my own amusement and education.

Yep, that will have to be something I look into. Definitely the "Blitz Defense" challenge (football players) isn't going to work. Easy enough to replace missing zombies with other ones I guess. Or just remove the affected quests. Maybe I'll rename it to "Biker Brawl" and substitute a few bikers.

For what it's worth, we did a pretty good evaluation of A20 stealth changes in the thread linked below. The specific post I linked to is to my test of an "attack" sleeper volume (what you call "ambush with GPS") where I was able to sneak into the volume right up to a sleeping zombie. I did not test a "falling through the ceiling" type of trigger, though, and they may behave differently. My guess would be that if my stealth value (@ night time, in a darkened area, max skills, and so on) was low enough, even the ceiling zombies would not detect me. But I will go check out restaurant_02 to see how it goes. It definitely seems much harder to stay undetected in A20, given all the complaints from stealth players. Needs a balance check for sure.

I just tested "Ladykiller" and it still seems to work. I can hack together a modlet which puts them back into the game. And it will be a hack - putting it back how it was in A19 (more or less) but not testing every single challenge.

Sjustus548, have a seat here on the couch for a minute. We're all friends and we care about you. We've been reading a couple of your recent posts and we think it's time for you to face up to your zombie abandonment issues. The zombies don't like everybody, and that's okay! You are still special just like Rob Gronkowski. Don't worry that the zombies don't pay any attention to you, we'll always be here for y....oops sorry gotta go pizza's here.