What day length do you consistently play?

[Roland]

In another thread the question was asked about the settings people choose and I noticed a majority of responders posting 90 minute and 120 minute days. I can't stand playing with such long days myself and so it got me thinking about why people like playing such looooooooong days and by extension loooooong nights.

 

My favorite setting is probably 50 minute days but I also like 40 minute days quite a bit. My top reason is that the nights don't last quite so long. From A16 to A18 it didn't matter so much. Even when they added a random feral zombie to the night in A18, nights weren't all that scary so I just stuck with default 60 minutes and did whatever. But now that large predators are out at night in addition I have been staying closer to base and once again those nights tend to drag and 50 minute and 40 minute days are getting selected most of the time by me once again.

 

Also, I really feel that 40 minute days more closely represents what can be done in a single day. I love going to do a quest and having to spend the night there before coming home because night was falling. I like eating a meal and filling up in the morning and not being hungry again until the end of the day. 

 

So why do people like such long days? I'm interested. I don't think you're wrong. Just weird. Please vote but also explain your reasoning. Does anyone else like shorter days normally (not just when you feel like experimenting with crazy settings) or do you all secretly wish you could have 24 hour days and play minute to minute in a 1:1 ratio with real life?

[Outlaw_187]

I agree, the nights do tend to be a little long on 90 minute setting.

 

However using this time to organize loot, craft, forge, repair/build, mine, & leveling up does move it along for the most part. 

 

I just like getting a lot done during the day. I'm from console crowd so I'm loving the questing system from the traders right now since we didn't have that. I'm seeing the tier 4 & 5 quests eat up a TON of the day. 

 

So that's pretty much it, like all the things I can get done in a day. 

 

I played 60 minute days on console since 120 was the next option up & those days & nights would for sure drag. 

[katarynna]

I play on 90 or 120 minute days.

 

I am a creature of habit, and that applies to games. After the first 2 days, I have my daily routine, which rarely varies. I have breakfast and leave home at 4am to do the quest i picked up the night before. I'll quest until about noon, going back and forth to the trader(s) to turn in and pick up new quest. I sometimes, but rarely, loot a specific poi for a that is likely to have something specific i need even if i don't have a quest there. Otherwise, most of my poi looting is during quests.

 

From noon til about 10 pm, I gather whatever resources I need most or build/upgrade my base. Gathering resources includes ore and wood, but also things like eggs from nests, hunting meat, shoveling cobble/cement at pois when it can be seen from the street, gore piles, vulture hunting on a damaged bike in the desert while grabbing surface oil shale (if i need farm plots or sham chowder ingredients)... anything that can be gathered without going into pois.

 

At 10 pm i harvest and add on to my farm then have dinner at my base, then focus on crafting, workstation maintenance, organizing, decorating, painting, cooking, inside base upgrading, home base additions if i need extra room.... anything you generally do at your home base. Then I have breakfast and head out again at 4 am.

 

I know, I'm boring, old, and set in my ways. I do even sometimes yell out loud for roaming zombies to get off my lawn.

 

Shorter days don't feel like a whole day to me because they are so rushed. If i do one t3 quest and all of a sudden it's noon, my questing time seems unnaturally short. With the days set at 90 minutes, everything just feels right and I mostly don't even notice or pay attention to the time anymore. I'll turn in a quest and think to myself that it's probably time to go harvest and gather. I'll look at the time and it's always between 11:30 and 12:30.

 

Now multiplayer is different but always feels off. When I play with my son and friends, we do 60 minute days. I don't like it, but I suffer through it to play with him lol. I'm just happy I still share hobbies with him so that we hang out (even if mostly only online. 31 year old men have busy lives, so quality time with him is nice. BUT 60 minute days still suck.

[canadianbluebeer]

more time to get things done before the bloodmoon.

 

even at night there are things to do at the base. crafting, cooking, etc.

not to mention mining. I do most of that at night.

 

Bear hopped into my mining pit, got a munch on me, then ate hot lead.  meat delivery indeed. 

 

Once I get to steel knuckles, well, the goal then is treating the nasty critters like rock'em sock'em robots.  

 

 

[Ezed]

I just play default settings.  I think that's 60 minutes/18 hour days...I haven't looked at it in forever but that's how I voted.

Contributing Factor = Other...because default

 

Years ago I played 120 min days but while the extra time before horde night was nice, it became too long between horde nights eventually.

[pApA^LeGBa]

50 min days with 16 hours of daylight. In SP. In MP we play 90mins with 18 hours of daylight.

 

And seeing the poll, can we finally get 70 and 80 minutes instead of 10 and 20 please.

[Kalen]

90 minutes, 18 hours daylight. 

 

Mostly play that out of habit from when I played with a group of friends.... it took us that long just to organize what we were going to to do for the day.

 

The nights are long, but night isn't nearly as dangerous as it used to be so I spend that time mining or farming.   Many nights go by where I don't even see a zombie.

[AtomicUs5000]

I usually prefer one extreme or the other.

For 120 minute days, max daylight, it's about immersive passage of time for me. The nights are indeed long, but I try to get my base started on day 1. When night hits, at the center of my base, I start my tunnel down to bedrock. That eats the entire first night. The second night the tunnel down gets cobble walls and a ladder. The third night, the walls get concrete and I start making my main underground storage chamber. The fourth and fifth nights, I dig out a ring around my storage chamber 8 blocks wide, to be used as an underground garage. The sixth night, I start 4x4 tunnels off of the "garage ring" going N, E, S, W which I work on from that point forward every non-BM night. Eventually each of those tunnels branch off and surface at cities and traders. It's a lot of work, but it makes travel really, really fast... even preferable over gyro. More importantly, there is always some work that needs to get done, day or night.

On 10 minute, max nighttime, BM daily games, the concept is that you only have breaks for a short moment in between hordes that seem to grow in size rather quickly. So, I suppose the choice in time revolves around the daily bloodmoon. This type of game is just to see how long you can last. There isn't time to build or loot much, so you depend on zombie loot and making fast trades. Agility and/or strength seem to be the easiest to work with. It's a completely different game and the way you play it is as well.

[Reckis]

SP I usually start out with 120 minute days (there is just so much to do!) and 18 hours of daylight, sometimes (okay, most of the time) after the first week I switch it to 90 minutes. I guess I don't go out at night much mostly out of habit, the nights used to be scary, I am slowly getting braver about that.

 

When my wife and I play co-op we always do 90 minutes, 18 hours. It just seems to work the best for us and it is what she prefers.

[Kyonshi]

If 60 minutes (the default setting) is weird to you, i can tell you that i find it weird that someone plays with a faster time frame.

 

The default setting is already so quick that it hinders immersion to me. I usually set my games to 90 minutes because i wanna have an acceptable amount of time to do stuff in preparation for the dreadful night (what a horrible night to have a curse 😄). Preciselly, i set my game to have very dangerous nights, so i can have a thrill to go out for a quest or a loot run during that period. I like the buzz of the fear of the oncoming night that pushes me to prepare my stuff for best chances of survival. In that regard, i enjoy a longer night on a 90 minutes setting.

 

So its a matter of game stage pacing and immersive passage of time. And yeah, id like to undertake the challenge of having real-time 24 hours game, for the fun of it. I did that once when i was playing Fallout 3. Lastly, i always keep the 18 hours of sunlight. 

[IrishRed]

I play with 120 cycle and 18hr days mainly to maximize questing, looting, building. On my currant playthrough, I think I might switch to 90min or even 60 min. I just completed day 14 BM and feel that my hoard base is pretty well set up asides from some fine tuning. 

 

The only downside with the 120 is that I do get really bored at night. Just not giving myself enough to do i guess. 

[Roland]

What about difficulty?  Does anyone who sets the days to 90 or 120 minutes ever feel like they are giving themselves too much time to prepare for horde night and making the game too easy?  With so much time to act and days alive moving so slow and yet being an important part of the difficulty curve isn’t it just boring so easily staying ahead of the difficulty curve and to feel so much less pressure to prepare for blood moon?
 

Now that loot is tied to gamestage does anyone feel like 90 minute and 120 minute days keep you primitive longer than you can stand?  I wonder if that is a contributing factor to some of the distaste for the new progression. At 50 minute days I am moving through the primitive stage more quickly in real time than those who choose longer days. 

[Axonius]

I play whatever the max daylight hours are. I don't recall seeing a setting for nighttime though. Sure does feel like the nights are shorter than the days to me. The setting implies that the nights are not affected by the day setting. Maybe I've interpreted the setting incorrectly. 

 

I go with the max setting because I don't like to rush. Also, I like to run the POIs as intended and I never take the cheese approach and cut directly to the main loot room. I like to loot everything so that when I get to the 30s, I'm never having to hunt down things.

 

[Teacyn]

I used to run 90 minute days on Warrior but the new looting system totally killed that for me. You sit there looting nothing but primitive stuff for so long (because your EXP massively outpaces your day count) that you start having a lot of incentives to metagame (not opening main loots, nerdpoling and then just leaving the main loot, intentionally only looting tiny POIs, etc.) and you spend a lot of time not really doing anything because you're literally just waiting for time to pass. I'm not surprised a lot of people want a Sleeping setup to skip nights these days, especially if they use longer days.

 

I personally use 60 minute days on Warrior with varying night lengths. If I build agility I start off with 16 and then move all the way down to 12 after the second BM. Otherwise I stick with 18 because non-agility builds can't really do anything at night unless you're fine with wasting a lot of ammo.

[Kyonshi]

1 hour ago, Roland said:

What about difficulty?  Does anyone who sets the days to 90 or 120 minutes ever feel like they are giving themselves too much time to prepare for horde night and making the game too easy?  With so much time to act and days alive moving so slow and yet being an important part of the difficulty curve isn’t it just boring so easily staying ahead of the difficulty curve and to feel so much less pressure to prepare for blood moon?
 

Now that loot is tied to gamestage does anyone feel like 90 minute and 120 minute days keep you primitive longer than you can stand?  I wonder if that is a contributing factor to some of the distaste for the new progression. At 50 minute days I am moving through the primitive stage more quickly in real time than those who choose longer days. 

I always play at Warrior difficulty and i put 3x more zombies during day and night (0.5 respawn rate for both). I can tell you that its quite a freaking challenge at beginning, with the current loot progression. Until level 20, i rock a stone Sledge and bow & arrows, unless i find a Pistol or the usual Blunderbuss. And even with the later... Its easier for me to swing the Zs with the Sledgehammer. I also currently play on a Wasteland-only biome map. Its pretty rock n roll pal 😆

 

I dont feel it makes the game easier at 90 minutes days. I just did my first BM and i had no more than 300 9mm and 7.62 bullets, a bit less than 100 shotgun ammo. I almost burned through all of them (64 zombies BM). I have been lucky to have couple of Molotovs as quest rewards. But for the most part, i used an iron Sledge (that i made).

 

It would have been too easy with default game settings and xml, that's for sure.

[Hellsmoke]

 I always play on 120 minute days, I have to have the feeling that the day is worth something. Anything less is much too short for me and I've been doing this since I started playing way back when.

[RipClaw]

I used to play to 120 minutes because I don't usually want to rush things. But in A19 I went to 60 minutes days because I wanted to see if I could keep up with the horde on the default settings.

 

Having the days at 120 minutes is a double-edged sword. On the one hand you have a lot more time to get things done but on the other hand there are much bigger differences in gamestage between two bloodmoon hordes because you gain more levels between two bloodmoon days.

Another difference is that the hordes last longer. While a horde on 60 minute days lasts only 15 minutes in real time, the same horde on 120 minute days last twice as long. This doesn't make much difference at the beginning but later it's like having two hordes in a row in one night.

 

[doughphunghus]

All vanillla settings (including days) except:

- bump up day/night zed run speeds a little. I change it around a bit so no standard. No zed walking in the day or night. 

- only 0-2 hours of daylight .  I had to mod it to do it, but it does a few things:

Almost always nighttime increases the doom and gloom.  
It seems that on vanilla settings, you’re much less likely to be prepared for day 7, which is fun for me to have a blood moon I’m not ready for. 
And the more extreme night settings makes it harder to live longer, so game stage doesn’t ramp up as fast. It drags out the beginning game more, which I like.  Getting game stage up to get better loot/bloodmoons is a challenge in itself.

 

i don’t like (generally) to start a game on any settings that make the zeds bullet sponges.  I like having a few hits generally kill the basic ones, but making it hard to get those bullets and reinforcements is my goal. 
 

after the game has gone on for a bit and I have more resources. I tweak zed settings to make them harder, especially when “I’m done” and just want to shoot everything . 

[Roland]

1 hour ago, Kyonshi said:

I always play at Warrior difficulty and i put 3x more zombies during day and night (0.5 respawn rate for both). I can tell you that its quite a freaking challenge at beginning, with the current loot progression. Until level 20, i rock a stone Sledge and bow & arrows, unless i find a Pistol or the usual Blunderbuss. And even with the later... Its easier for me to swing the Zs with the Sledgehammer. I also currently play on a Wasteland-only biome map. Its pretty rock n roll pal 😆

 

I dont feel it makes the game easier at 90 minutes days. I just did my first BM and i had no more than 300 9mm and 7.62 bullets, a bit less than 100 shotgun ammo. I almost burned through all of them (64 zombies BM). I have been lucky to have couple of Molotovs as quest rewards. But for the most part, i used an iron Sledge (that i made).

 

It would have been too easy with default game settings and xml, that's for sure.

I get that you like it difficult. I didn't mean to imply that anyone choosing 90 minute days was trying to make things easy, I just wonder about the difference in difficulty between them. Ripclaw made a good point about how it is a double-edged sword.

 

See, for you I would like you to try all your modded settings to make things tough and then try those on 50 minute days and see if you notice any difference in urgency in difficulty or anything. Your settings + 90 minute days are tougher than default. But what about your settings at 50 minute days? What would that be like....?

[Boidster]

120 minutes due to two main reasons:

 

1) we like a slower pace and don't want to be facing a horde every 2-3 play sessions

2) we often play out of sync, so one of us will be in the game alone, puttering about; 120-minute days means we can do that and not run up against a horde as often IRL time

 

Of course I have no qualms about using settime to fix any problems with #2 if we encounter them. 10 game days before the "day 7" horde? Sure, it's been known to happen. Even with all the extra build time our bases sometimes fail. Because we are Not Good At This. 😄

[beHypE]

3 hours ago, Roland said:

What about difficulty?  Does anyone who sets the days to 90 or 120 minutes ever feel like they are giving themselves too much time to prepare for horde night and making the game too easy?  With so much time to act and days alive moving so slow and yet being an important part of the difficulty curve isn’t it just boring so easily staying ahead of the difficulty curve and to feel so much less pressure to prepare for blood moon?
 

Now that loot is tied to gamestage does anyone feel like 90 minute and 120 minute days keep you primitive longer than you can stand?  I wonder if that is a contributing factor to some of the distaste for the new progression. At 50 minute days I am moving through the primitive stage more quickly in real time than those who choose longer days. 

You make a very good point regarding the linear progression. My group has played 90 minutes days for as long as I can remember, because it gives us more time to just enjoy the game instead of always being in a rush to be ready for horde night. But with the new progression, indeed, 90 min days are boring. The primitive age lasts way too long for our taste, even with a 150% experience multiplier, and the time you have to loot is just huge with 90 min days, so loot redundancy early game is really a big bummer.

 

Honestly, I hope some day in the future the "loot progression checkpoints" (GS 11, GS 51, GS 91) will have their own option in the menu. We'd probably enjoy the game much more with something like GS 11 / GS 36 / GS 61. Then again the whole zombie spawning depending on GS would be out of balance aswell so I don't know if it is that simple, it would probably have to be "Speed multiplier" option that modifies a bunch of parameters at once to keep it balanced regardless of speed.

[Ti2xGr]

120 minutes - So many players equals time going by too fast. It gives people time to explore the map, go on quests, build/rebuild on their base. We have plenty of zombies in-world to keep people who are "bored" of long days. They can always wander to the burnt or wasteland areas and rack up kills as we have an endless stream of zombies in those biomes.

[AtomicUs5000]

In a way, the first few bloodmoons suffer the same issues as the loot. I think what it might be was the removal of the trickle of zombies at the end.

Let's say you have 2 games, default settings, but one has 2 hour days and the other has 30 minute days.

A long time ago, this would mean the 30 minute day player had to rush to get things done before day 7, which was awesome. The 2hr day player had it easier. Even though gamestage affects the BM in both cases, those trickled in zombies was a constant.
These days, if you play 30 minute days, you are likely to have a lessened BM and once it's over, it's over. On 2 hour days, you can benefit yourself by avoiding zombies and reducing your xp intake on purpose, so that you have even more time to prepare yourself before harder hordes come.
 
In other words, what you choose these days for day length does not matter as much as it used to.

[katarynna]

3 hours ago, Roland said:

What about difficulty?  Does anyone who sets the days to 90 or 120 minutes ever feel like they are giving themselves too much time to prepare for horde night and making the game too easy?  With so much time to act and days alive moving so slow and yet being an important part of the difficulty curve isn’t it just boring so easily staying ahead of the difficulty curve and to feel so much less pressure to prepare for blood moon?
 

Now that loot is tied to gamestage does anyone feel like 90 minute and 120 minute days keep you primitive longer than you can stand?  I wonder if that is a contributing factor to some of the distaste for the new progression. At 50 minute days I am moving through the primitive stage more quickly in real time than those who choose longer days. 

Playing on 90 or 120 minute days means the day 7 horde is like equivalent to a day 10 1/2 or day 14 horde regarding gamestage if you had been playing 60 minute days. It also lasts quite a bit longer due to the increased duration of the horde night. So I feel like hordes are quite a bit harder than with shorter days and the extra prep time just keeps you even. My day 7 horde night had me cleaning up the last of it after 4 am and I burned through a lot of ammo even with spending a lot of time using melee. 

 

I like the primitive loot stage, and generally don't worry as much about weapons and tools during early game. The things I want and need to loot during the first week I am able to loot. I want seeds, books, schematics, workstation recipes and things like that. I prize rotten flesh and eggs. Better stone tools are awesome.

 

By day 7, I had a 50 plot farm so done making farm plots now and rotten flesh is now hobo stew ingredients. I had one of each workstation except 3 forges and campfires. My tools and melee weapon have ergomatic grip mods and burning shaft mods, as well as various other random mods to fill all their slots (q6 stone ax and shovel, q3 impact driver from trader, crafted q4 baseball bat). I prefer burning shaft mod on mining tools instead of a helmet light. The ergomatic grip and burning shaft schematics were amazing finds, and of course even though i have no crucible harvesting/buying enough steel for mods is easy. I have a bicycle for travel, but will upgrade to motorized during week 2. My base is a mix of reinforced concrete, stage 1 concrete, and upgraded cobblestone, almost all of the concrete and cobblestone harvested from pois.

 

My settings work well for me, as does a19 in general.

 

 

[theFlu]

Usually on warrior difficulty and 60 min days; mostly because it's the default and after the first few days, day or night makes little difference. Sure, runners are mildly more annoying to deal with, but... just mildly. Other spawns of the night, well, I'm perfectly willing to cheese Dire Wolves and the like and the ferals aren't really a challenge usually.

 

I'll usually up the horde frequency to every 3rd or 4th day now, keeps one entertained as there's only so much looting chores one can endure ...

 

10 min horde every night sounds fun though, might have to try that.