A20 impressions - lots of good, lots of "it's still not improved since forever?"

[just.dont]

First of all, A20 gives off much better first impressions than A19. RWG is finally back into action (last time it was usable in... what, A12 or something?), the game looks much better than it did before, and everything graphics-related runs extremely smoothly on ultra on my rig (compared to A19, where I *had* to massively reduce graphic settings just to avoid extreme FPS drops).

I also really like the general loot rarity changes (and other ways to get stuff, like farming) in A20 as well, even though there are rough edges - still, it's way better than A19 and a few of A's before that. No sudden "I've got T6 shotty on day 1 by pure luck", food has a possibility of running out now (which could pretty much never happen for quite a few versions before), some items are appropriately rare to provide meaningful blockers on the way to better equipment. The POI update is also pretty great (but again, not without rough edges).

 

However, there's a lot of changes particular to A20 that do raise an eyebrow.

1) Biome loot modifiers. They are so incredibly gamey that after just one try my immediate knee-jerk reaction was to mod them out to nearly nothing (compared to vanilla values). As it stands, instead of giving the incentive to move to harder biomes, they are way too good - and instead they provide all the incentives to "cheese" yourself into obtaining better loot as soon as it's humanly possible. Plus, binding biome loot modifier to the player (instead of POIs, for example) is especially appalling, as it allows much more abuses - for example, killing the bloodmoon horde at the edge of the wasteland to get much better content in their loot bags.

 

2) Further reduction in spawns. Come on, guys, this is going long enough to turn the game squarely into a "28 days later" game (even though default settings do not reflect that) - as it stands right now, spawn rate looks like it was tailored specifically to make Insane/Nightmare/Feral Sense starts doable. Well, what the hell everyone else is supposed to do? "Enjoy" whacking one, rarely two zombies at once in a pretty long while when outside of POIs? Trying to play with "always run" (not "sprint") zombies and feral sense reminded me of A12 or A13 at the release - where we had a single zombie constantly spawning somewhat close and homing onto you constantly (so you had to whack exactly one enemy every X seconds, like a clockwork). "Walk" speed zombies might as well not exist with the current spawn rate.

 

3) It seems that current design ideas for the sleeper zombies is clashing really badly with other systems. I'm basing it on the fact that POIs gravitate heavily towards "trap rooms" and zombie activations that might as well be "let's just spawn zombies out of thin air". It looks like the concept of taking sleepers down one by one with stealth isn't getting any warm feelings from TFP, so sleepers now mainly activate in ways that make stealth pointless. I'm not the one for stealth builds in a zombie game - but I'm the one for keeping suspension of disbelief in check, and currently the amount of zombies coming from places where you generally wouldn't expect a humanoid being to be is getting ridiculous. Can we keep the amount of zombies in vents / suspended ceiling panes / closets / etc at least proportional to amount of zombies outside of such obviously handcrafted traps?

 

4) Zombie loot bags have rather great content right now - great, except that it seems their spawn rate was adjusted to be "fine" with Pine Forest default zombie spawn rates. Move into a more dangerous area, and bags suddenly become way too common for their amount of loot, do a bloodmoon - and the problem gets ridiculous, you're spending stimulants and grenades to actually *obtain* vast amounts of ammo from bloodmoon! Do that in a wasteland, as per #1 point, and you might actually get back more grenades than you spent as well.

 

And then, there are issues that's with us for a while now, but nothing was done about them in A20:

1) Bloodmoon. For quite a while, TFP seems to find time and spend some effort to make certain static defense setups completely useless. Yet, ever since we got our current buff system, nobody at TFP pays attention to the fact that now you can *outrun* nightmare-speed zombies very reliably with a few buffs, and thus all you need for bloodmoon defense is a bunch of stimulants and enough explosives (and a decent gun, but that's secondary). I'm not sure why static defenses get all the TFP attention (even though many of them require considerable effort to build) while the issue of being able to defend a bloodmoon with just a couple of items and a lot of running in an empty field gets *no* attention.

 

2) Biomes. Current iteration is going long enough to be alarmed by it. For the current (ridiculously simple and extremely unbelievable) biome map - a lot of stuff currently hangs on biome type you're currently standing, and I'm very much not liking this. No, stepping 1m into the desert for a few minutes shouldn't immediately spawn a bunch of vultures all around and shouldn't get me a heatstroke. No, deserts shouldn't be bordering snow areas. No, stepping into the wasteland shouldn't make it like it's raining zombie bears immediately. This is both ridiculously-looking and prone to lots of abuses, especially with the loot stage modifiers we have right now.

 

3) Zombies still just pop into existence around you up until you kill enough to "drain" current chunk. I even remember the time (quite a long ago already) when it was first introduced, replacing zombies that clearly wander into you from somewhere much further away, and for all the outcry it was called "temporary". A couple of years later it's still there, there's still no concept of gradually clearing zombies, no wandering hordes (they're "popping in" hordes now), and no improvements over that very ground-level "let's spawn them around the player(s) constantly!" concept.

 

4) Loot abundance modifier. It never worked too well, but with the introduction of loot stage I think it works even worse. Setting anything below 100% causes you to encounter a ridiculous amount of empty containers early, especially those "piles of X" (food/medicine/ammo/etc) that are removed when looted; but a little bit later it "fixes itself" - does loot abundance modifier apply to loot stage and cause it to be set very low early?

[Kosmic Kerman]

4 hours ago, just.dont said:

 

1) Bloodmoon. For quite a while, TFP seems to find time and spend some effort to make certain static defense setups completely useless. Yet, ever since we got our current buff system, nobody at TFP pays attention to the fact that now you can *outrun* nightmare-speed zombies very reliably with a few buffs, and thus all you need for bloodmoon defense is a bunch of stimulants and enough explosives (and a decent gun, but that's secondary). I'm not sure why static defenses get all the TFP attention (even though many of them require considerable effort to build) while the issue of being able to defend a bloodmoon with just a couple of items and a lot of running in an empty field gets *no* attention.

 

 

I don't understand this complaint as it is framed.  It seems to entirely ignore player agency.  If you find fighting zombies on ground during horde night unsatisfying, stop doing that. If it's too easy, you have the ability to make it harder. For example, don't use stimulants. Or don't use explosives. Or use melee only. Etc.  What exactly is TFP supposed to do here? Make it impossible to fight on the ground?  

Edited December 13, 2021 by Kosmic Kerman (see edit history)

[just.dont]

5 hours ago, Kosmic Kerman said:

 

I don't understand this complaint as it is framed.  It seems to entirely ignore player agency.  If you find fighting zombies on ground during horde night unsatisfying, stop doing that. If it's too easy, you have the ability to make it harder. For example, don't use stimulants. Or don't use explosives. Or use melee only. Etc.  What exactly is TFP supposed to do here? Make it impossible to fight on the ground?  

Oh, but it's rather simple: if there's a way to circumvent the major game element using only maybe 1/6th of all the mechanics there are in the game - it shouldn't be.

 

If you have a game with building, with crafting, with tiered equipment, with block destruction, and all the rest - you shouldn't be able to skip the most special event in the entire game as of right now using exactly none of the above.

 

Yes, this essentially means that in an unmodded default settings (much less harder settings) game, bloodmoon shouldn't be doable solo in the open.

Edited December 13, 2021 by just.dont (see edit history)

[Boidster]

10 hours ago, just.dont said:

2) Further reduction in spawns.

 

Hmm. A19 daytime spawns were max=1 and respawn every 2.9 game days:

    <biome name="pine_forest">
        <spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="2.9" time="Day" entitygroup="ZombiesAll" />

 

A20 is exactly the same outside of commercial, industrial, or downtown zones. In those zones there are 3x the spawns and they respawn at almost 10x the rate.

<biome name="pine_forest">
        <spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="2.9" time="Day" entitygroup="ZombiesAll" notags="commercial,industrial,downtown" />
        <spawn maxcount="2" respawndelay="0.3" time="Day" entitygroup="ZombiesAll" tags="commercial,industrial" notags="downtown" />
        <spawn maxcount="3" respawndelay="0.3" time="Day" entitygroup="ZombiesForestDowntown" tags="downtown" />

 

[just.dont]

Yep, A19 was terrible. Yet A20 seems, I don't know, buggy? Theoretically, there should be big increase in spawns. Practically - not really, *and* that's even with feral sense on! Without any mods, I'm really not feeling any different than it was with A19 emptiness.

 

Furthermore, now I'm using a mod that increases maxcount on those entries to 1,4,8 - and with that, things are barely starting to look lively, but still even on zombies speed set to "run" and feral sense on, it's highly unlikely you'd ever deal with more than 4 zombies moving on you at once. And you'd have to stay in the area for some moments for that to happen.

(also increasing spawns via mods is painful as it breaks XP gain rate and zpacks drops, so for every increase you'd have to dial that down too, or else you'll keep getting overleveled and overfed by extra loot; but I digress)

Edited December 14, 2021 by just.dont (see edit history)

[Ramethzer0]

On 12/13/2021 at 6:58 PM, just.dont said:

Furthermore, now I'm using a mod that increases maxcount on those entries to 1,4,8 - and with that, things are barely starting to look lively, but still even on zombies speed set to "run" and feral sense on, it's highly unlikely you'd ever deal with more than 4 zombies moving on you at once. And you'd have to stay in the area for some moments for that to happen.

(also increasing spawns via mods is painful as it breaks XP gain rate and zpacks drops, so for every increase you'd have to dial that down too, or else you'll keep getting overleveled and overfed by extra loot; but I digress)

 

I'm playing on Warrior in my MP server, moderate zombie counts, and no mods.  There are times when things are really quiet, particularly at night.. but there are definitely some clutch moments during the day in open world and im surrounded by 6 without it being a micro horde.  And it just gets worse in the wasteland and snow biomes.

 

Are you sure those numbers aren't just bad luck?

[pApA^LeGBa]

In the forest the towns are as empty as in A19. Feral sense doesn´t change that at all. I constantly can travel a few hundred meters without seeing a single zombie. Wether it has changed or not, this is just a huge flaw.

 

More zombies should be everywhere, not just in harder biomes.

[meganoth]

2 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

In the forest the towns are as empty as in A19. Feral sense doesn´t change that at all. I constantly can travel a few hundred meters without seeing a single zombie. Wether it has changed or not, this is just a huge flaw.

 

More zombies should be everywhere, not just in harder biomes.

 

Feral sense doesn't remove the respawn timer, so if you have cleared an area it will take time for the zombies to "grow" back. And if you just drive through an area you will not see them group up and gather. In my game at least I had run-ins with a group of zombies while doing a quest POI. Not every time, not in areas visited shortly before, but I died already to such a group that i'm sure would not have happened in A19. Only I can't swear it wasn't a wandering horde.

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

@meganoth I don´t have them at all. It´s a new day, i spent the night building my hordebase just now and went ~600m in a completly different direction from my homebase on foot (just to see if i get zombies), shooting a chicken with the pistol. Wasn´t in that direction the day before either. Not a single zombie. It´s all the time. Doesn´t matter when or where it still feels like A19.

 

Only downtown i get more. The amount of zombies there is like it should be everywhere and in downtown there should be even more.

Edited December 16, 2021 by pApA^LeGBa (see edit history)

[Darklegend222]

3 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

@meganoth I don´t have them at all. It´s a new day, i spent the night building my hordebase just now and went ~600m in a completly different direction from my homebase on foot (just to see if i get zombies), shooting a chicken with the pistol. Wasn´t in that direction the day before either. Not a single zombie. It´s all the time. Doesn´t matter when or where it still feels like A19.

 

Only downtown i get more. The amount of zombies there is like it should be everywhere and in downtown there should be even more.

If you're not seeing a zombie for 600m then your spawns are getting backed up somewhere. It takes 2.9 days for them to die and respawn if they're wilderness zombies. 0.3 days if they're naturally spawning zombies.

 

Have you restarted the game, killed everything as you saw it, or had many zombies inside a POI that you just left? Since you said it's a new day and your not seeing anything, I can only assume you hardly exit the save and reopen which means your exploring so much with no "code refreshes" that everything backs up over time.

[pApA^LeGBa]

I should get respawns and zombies without workarounds, like restarting tbh. And it also happens when i come to a new town i haven´t discovered yet. Went to a new trader, parked the bike and explored a bit. Empty town. Seen 2 zombies outside.

 

Either i have bad luck and they all get stuck somewhere, or it doesn´t work as intended.

 

But even if it works as intended, 8 zombies per chunk is a joke. It´s not enough even if they all come for me.

[Darklegend222]

8 minutes ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

I should get respawns and zombies without workarounds, like restarting tbh. And it also happens when i come to a new town i haven´t discovered yet. Went to a new trader, parked the bike and explored a bit. Empty town. Seen 2 zombies outside.

 

Either i have bad luck and they all get stuck somewhere, or it doesn´t work as intended.

 

But even if it works as intended, 8 zombies per chunk is a joke. It´s not enough even if they all come for me.

Well your not going to zombie spawns 24/7 without a workaround whether you believe it should happen or not. Never have I said I agreed with it. It's just something you do otherwise you have issues that can be avoided.

 

I'm on day 15 and I've got over 7 stacks of meat (i make 10 boiled meat everyday) and I have 953 zombie kills. Cleaning spawns every hour makes the world lively and as clean as this game will get until The Fun Pimps decide to further optimize the cleanup and spawning system.

 

 

[meganoth]

7 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

I should get respawns and zombies without workarounds, like restarting tbh. And it also happens when i come to a new town i haven´t discovered yet. Went to a new trader, parked the bike and explored a bit. Empty town. Seen 2 zombies outside.

 

Ok, there seems to be something not working correctly in your game. I get a bear almost every second night attacking my base, I see zombies all the time, especially when going to new places. And I don't need to do any "cleaning" that Darklegends222 is describing (I never heard of zombies staying for 2.9 days if you don't kill them !??)

 

I'll start my SP game right now and drive into a new town and count zombies. Lets see what I'll get.

 

 

7 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

 

Either i have bad luck and they all get stuck somewhere, or it doesn´t work as intended.

 

But even if it works as intended, 8 zombies per chunk is a joke. It´s not enough even if they all come for me.

 

[meganoth]

Ok. here's what I saw in my SP game with feral sense. I had a night time quest in a part of a town I think I wasn't in yet. Drove there in empty streets. But when I stopped before the POI, a few seconds later 3 zombies had detected me.

 

After killing them I started the quest and entered the building which had a relatively open sales room. After killing two POI zombies with some ruckus (silenced shots in quick succesion, maybe some running) I heard voices from outside and in the next minute about 8-10 zombies came in from outside and I had a pretty intensive fight that nearly killed me. After that I could continue my quest altough later another 2 zombies came in from the street and one was hitting a window outside.

At the end of the quest another zombie came in from outside and one was banging on some door somewhere that I ignored.

 

Then I drove to a new town where I had a trade route quests. Relatively far away and I got there in early evening. After some trader bussiness I went to the next POI which was a gardening center or something like that. Empty streets, but as soon as I was standing around I could hear the first zombies making noises. I went in but seconds later went out again to take care of 4 zombies who were hitting the fences. Since it was late I made a fast round in the building to kill the POI zombies. Then a lot more zombies came from a backside door and presumably the front entrance. Since it was still day I didn't have much problems with them, but there were around 8-10 again. No idea how many of them were POI zombies though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 17, 2021 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Roland]

On 12/13/2021 at 5:21 AM, just.dont said:

1) Biome loot modifiers. They are so incredibly gamey that after just one try my immediate knee-jerk reaction was to mod them out to nearly nothing (compared to vanilla values). As it stands, instead of giving the incentive to move to harder biomes, they are way too good - and instead they provide all the incentives to "cheese" yourself into obtaining better loot as soon as it's humanly possible. Plus, binding biome loot modifier to the player (instead of POIs, for example) is especially appalling, as it allows much more abuses - for example, killing the bloodmoon horde at the edge of the wasteland to get much better content in their loot bags.

 

TFP always introduce new features in a big noticeable way and then they make adjustments. I agree that the lootstage bonuses need to be balanced more. I've also mentioned to them that weather survival doesn't begin until Day 2 6am so people have a full free day of running around in snow and desert and wasteland avoiding enemies and opening containers naked as a jaybird with zero consequences. Hopefully they will fix that as well. Extreme weather in general needs to be a lot more punishing if you don't have the proper clothing. But yeah, the bonuses for loot are way too good like TFP was afraid people wouldn't notice them so they made them huge.

 

On 12/13/2021 at 5:21 AM, just.dont said:

2) Further reduction in spawns. Come on, guys, this is going long enough to turn the game squarely into a "28 days later" game (even though default settings do not reflect that) - as it stands right now, spawn rate looks like it was tailored specifically to make Insane/Nightmare/Feral Sense starts doable. Well, what the hell everyone else is supposed to do? "Enjoy" whacking one, rarely two zombies at once in a pretty long while when outside of POIs? Trying to play with "always run" (not "sprint") zombies and feral sense reminded me of A12 or A13 at the release - where we had a single zombie constantly spawning somewhat close and homing onto you constantly (so you had to whack exactly one enemy every X seconds, like a clockwork). "Walk" speed zombies might as well not exist with the current spawn rate.

 

There were no reductions. There were in fact targeted increases. They aren't going to touch these settings until they have all the entities that they are going to have populating the world. It would just cause a lot of anger for them to up the zombie counts and then have to pull them back once NPCs and bandits are added. Better for them to wait until everything is in and then they can adjust densities having the whole picture in front of them. I have the amounts increased in my game and am happy with the population of zombies around.

 

On 12/13/2021 at 5:21 AM, just.dont said:

3) It seems that current design ideas for the sleeper zombies is clashing really badly with other systems. I'm basing it on the fact that POIs gravitate heavily towards "trap rooms" and zombie activations that might as well be "let's just spawn zombies out of thin air". It looks like the concept of taking sleepers down one by one with stealth isn't getting any warm feelings from TFP, so sleepers now mainly activate in ways that make stealth pointless. I'm not the one for stealth builds in a zombie game - but I'm the one for keeping suspension of disbelief in check, and currently the amount of zombies coming from places where you generally wouldn't expect a humanoid being to be is getting ridiculous. Can we keep the amount of zombies in vents / suspended ceiling panes / closets / etc at least proportional to amount of zombies outside of such obviously handcrafted traps?

 

There were some bugs with stealth--a couple of which were just fixed in today's patch

and they will be working on it more for sure as time goes on. Trap rooms and attack volumes and zombies popping out of hiding places are not going to go away though. I brought up the stealth concerns and the lead level design guy said, "attack volumes are not going away. We plan to keep using them--especially in and around loot rooms and in areas we feel that it will challenge the players." Probably best to resign yourself to the idea that in this universe people turned while up in the rafters. The current POI/Dungeon level design is something they are very keen on and unlikely to change.

 

On 12/13/2021 at 5:21 AM, just.dont said:

4) Zombie loot bags have rather great content right now - great, except that it seems their spawn rate was adjusted to be "fine" with Pine Forest default zombie spawn rates. Move into a more dangerous area, and bags suddenly become way too common for their amount of loot, do a bloodmoon - and the problem gets ridiculous, you're spending stimulants and grenades to actually *obtain* vast amounts of ammo from bloodmoon! Do that in a wasteland, as per #1 point, and you might actually get back more grenades than you spent as well.

 

I'm almost certain they will dial these back at some point.

 

On 12/13/2021 at 5:21 AM, just.dont said:

1) Bloodmoon. For quite a while, TFP seems to find time and spend some effort to make certain static defense setups completely useless. Yet, ever since we got our current buff system, nobody at TFP pays attention to the fact that now you can *outrun* nightmare-speed zombies very reliably with a few buffs, and thus all you need for bloodmoon defense is a bunch of stimulants and enough explosives (and a decent gun, but that's secondary). I'm not sure why static defenses get all the TFP attention (even though many of them require considerable effort to build) while the issue of being able to defend a bloodmoon with just a couple of items and a lot of running in an empty field gets *no* attention.

 

If it takes a few buffs to outrun them then its probably where they intend it to be. As long as you can't outrun them unbuffed I don't see the problem. All the four legged animals should be faster than the player and should only not catch them if they have a territorial behavior that turns them back if the player gets away from their territory. Zombies on nightmare speed should be faster than the player unbuffed. However, the purpose of buffs is to overcome a disadvantage. Why have those buffs if they don't temporarily boost the player's speed faster than the enemies? People should be able to choose to play in an open field buffing themselves for speed or to build a base with defenses and do it that way.

 

On 12/13/2021 at 5:21 AM, just.dont said:

2) Biomes. Current iteration is going long enough to be alarmed by it. For the current (ridiculously simple and extremely unbelievable) biome map - a lot of stuff currently hangs on biome type you're currently standing, and I'm very much not liking this. No, stepping 1m into the desert for a few minutes shouldn't immediately spawn a bunch of vultures all around and shouldn't get me a heatstroke. No, deserts shouldn't be bordering snow areas. No, stepping into the wasteland shouldn't make it like it's raining zombie bears immediately. This is both ridiculously-looking and prone to lots of abuses, especially with the loot stage modifiers we have right now.

 

Biome transitioning will be polish work. Its no wonder they haven't worked lately on the trasnsitions in biomes when they are still finalizing the biomes themselves. Weather still needs fixing and finalizing. I know for a fact that they don't want the transitions between biomes to be jarring but there are also limitations. They've experimented a lot with blending the borders and in every case it hurt performance beyond acceptable limits. I'm pretty sure you will have to come to terms with and cope with desert next to snow as I doubt they are even planning to keep those biomes apart from each other on purpose. (Snow next to desert actually does exist in Arizona, btw)

 

On 12/13/2021 at 5:21 AM, just.dont said:

3) Zombies still just pop into existence around you up until you kill enough to "drain" current chunk. I even remember the time (quite a long ago already) when it was first introduced, replacing zombies that clearly wander into you from somewhere much further away, and for all the outcry it was called "temporary". A couple of years later it's still there, there's still no concept of gradually clearing zombies, no wandering hordes (they're "popping in" hordes now), and no improvements over that very ground-level "let's spawn them around the player(s) constantly!" concept.

 

So you never have to fight more than 1 zombie at a time but they're popping in around you constantly? I think there is a bit of a contradiction there...haha.  I only notice zombies popping in when I am driving fast in a vehicle. On foot I haven't experienced it in a long time. Oh I know they are spawning in within about 30-40 blocks around me but I don't see them materializing right before my eyes when I am moving at foot speed. I don't remember the game ever having persistent hordes or wilderness spawns that just moved around the map and came from far away. Back when we had the minimap and radar you could see their blips popping into exisistence and then moving towards you. I remember some discussion about persistently wandering zombies and hordes and ideas about how the game could track them cheaply but that was never implemented. So I think your memory of having that in the game but then losing it for popping in zombies with a dev claim that it was just temporary is not quite right.  The game has always had wilderness spawners for zombies and most likely always will. Maybe in their next game they'll implement roaming persistent enemies that are tracked and actually move around and come for us from far far away. I doubt that will ever be this game.  In fact, the big feature they are looking at is a random event manager that-- you guessed it--- will spawn in encounter scenarios randomly in our projected path. 

 

On 12/13/2021 at 5:21 AM, just.dont said:

4) Loot abundance modifier. It never worked too well, but with the introduction of loot stage I think it works even worse. Setting anything below 100% causes you to encounter a ridiculous amount of empty containers early, especially those "piles of X" (food/medicine/ammo/etc) that are removed when looted; but a little bit later it "fixes itself" - does loot abundance modifier apply to loot stage and cause it to be set very low early?

 

I think their fix was the addition of the 33% modifier. Isn't that one the best one to pick? I remember a discussion in the dev chat about how 25% loot was pretty garbage because of how the game rounded it down so many containers ended up with nothing and so they added the 33%. But maybe that is no good either? I don't play with those settings, myself, but I agree that if they keep those settings on the options menu they better make sure they work okay when they polish this up for release.

[Darklegend222]

3 hours ago, meganoth said:

 

Ok, there seems to be something not working correctly in your game. I get a bear almost every second night attacking my base, I see zombies all the time, especially when going to new places. And I don't need to do any "cleaning" that Darklegends222 is describing (I never heard of zombies staying for 2.9 days if you don't kill them !??)I

I got the 2.9 days from the respawn delay mistakingly thinking it was when the game did garbage cleanup.

 

Though I will say I strictly restart the game every hour. I close the game and reopen it at 04:00 each day and I've never once encountered spawns being reduced.

 

This game is one of the most unoptimized messes I've played (along with Ark and fragmented) so I go out of my way to make things run as perfectly as possible. 

 

I've made previous threads on this forum about animals not spawning and I've still never seen a deer in A19.6 aside from the first 5 minutes of a new world. Every other animal is plentiful though, and they've never had issues with my daily restarts.

 

Besides, it takes 15 seconds to load a world. It's not that time consuming or difficult to do.

 

Edit: One gripe for me is that I'll tell everyone to restart their game every in-game hour and start exploring, but I have yet for anyone to actually give it a go for 7 days and see if they have different results after they encounter issues. If it does actually fix things more than I know then it's more information we can relay to TFP.

Edited December 17, 2021 by Darklegend222 (see edit history)

[Roland]

Don't deer spawn mostly at night as of A19? I thought that was one of the changes in the last alpha. Small game for day and large game for night. I could be wrong about that.

 

I think garbage cleanup happens whenever you open your UI.

 

I'll have to try logging out and logging back in at 4am after a few days go by and see if I notice anything different.

[Darklegend222]

11 minutes ago, Roland said:

Don't deer spawn mostly at night as of A19? I thought that was one of the changes in the last alpha. Small game for day and large game for night. I could be wrong about that.

 

I think garbage cleanup happens whenever you open your UI.

 

I'll have to try logging out and logging back in at 4am after a few days go by and see if I notice anything different.

I went back through the known issues for A20 to see if it's still there. It says:

PC
317	Game doesn’t shut down properly on PC and Linux after long play session

[Roland]

2 hours ago, Darklegend222 said:

I went back through the known issues for A20 to see if it's still there. It says:

PC
317	Game doesn’t shut down properly on PC and Linux after long play session

 

I meant after a few game days not real life days...

[meganoth]

7 hours ago, Roland said:

 

If it takes a few buffs to outrun them then its probably where they intend it to be. As long as you can't outrun them unbuffed I don't see the problem. All the four legged animals should be faster than the player and should only not catch them if they have a territorial behavior that turns them back if the player gets away from their territory. Zombies on nightmare speed should be faster than the player unbuffed. However, the purpose of buffs is to overcome a disadvantage. Why have those buffs if they don't temporarily boost the player's speed faster than the enemies? People should be able to choose to play in an open field buffing themselves for speed or to build a base with defenses and do it that way.

 

I'd like to add that stealth game play depends on the player being "mostly" faster than the zombies. For restealthing and because his armor is not what will keep him alive against multiple zombies. Slow down the player and you remove both ways of playing

 

I have nothing against an alternative play style that uses no base and running around for horde night. It takes skill, so not everyone will  be able to do it. It usually costs plenty of ammo. Sure, material cost is low, but material is also not that difficult to aquire, in my SP game I have practically not mined at day 31 and still had enough material for a horde base (using a POI as base)

 

[meganoth]

7 hours ago, Darklegend222 said:

I got the 2.9 days from the respawn delay mistakingly thinking it was when the game did garbage cleanup.

 

Though I will say I strictly restart the game every hour. I close the game and reopen it at 04:00 each day and I've never once encountered spawns being reduced.

 

This game is one of the most unoptimized messes I've played (along with Ark and fragmented) so I go out of my way to make things run as perfectly as possible. 

 

I've made previous threads on this forum about animals not spawning and I've still never seen a deer in A19.6 aside from the first 5 minutes of a new world. Every other animal is plentiful though, and they've never had issues with my daily restarts.

 

Besides, it takes 15 seconds to load a world. It's not that time consuming or difficult to do.

 

Edit: One gripe for me is that I'll tell everyone to restart their game every in-game hour and start exploring, but I have yet for anyone to actually give it a go for 7 days and see if they have different results after they encounter issues. If it does actually fix things more than I know then it's more information we can relay to TFP.

 

Well, it takes multiple hours of constrained testing (i.e. do the same tasks of 2-4 real-time hours length in the same world at the same internal time twice) to test your theory without other factors weighing in. I wouldn't do that unpayed.

 

Even if that restart does anything it would be like the horde night restart on relog. Sure, it prevents the first horde nights stopping early, but that stopping is intentional. It would only be a bug if the stopping were even earlier than planned. And in this case it is expected as well, that less zombies spawn in explored areas (until respawn which happens after 7 days).

 

Sadly environmental zombie spawns seem not to get listed in the logfile. If they were we could have generated statistics simply by counting those lines in normal logfiles.

 

 

Edited December 17, 2021 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Spatch]

My $0.02 regarding the running around during horde night - I find it a little disingenuous, by the defenders of this strategy, to state "why not?".  In two posts above, the defense was essentially "why shouldn't the player be able to, if they want to?".  So where was that defense when some of us liked to dig deep underground bases and crouch in fear during horde night?  Where was that defense when some of us liked to ride our mini-bikes around during horde night? 

 

TFP should be consistent - either make it where players can play how they like on horde night in every different way they want, or make it where they are forced to get battered by the horde.

 

So I agree with the OP on this point - it shouldn't be possible, if TFP makes it not possible for other play styles on horde night, to run around and survive a horde.  But my solution wouldn't be to nerf that ability, my solution would be to bring back other ways of surviving.  Heat-seeking vultures?  Nope - no more!  Digging zombies that can dig down to me at bedrock?  Nope - no more!

[meganoth]

18 minutes ago, Spatch said:

My $0.02 regarding the running around during horde night - I find it a little disingenuous, by the defenders of this strategy, to state "why not?".  In two posts above, the defense was essentially "why shouldn't the player be able to, if they want to?".  So where was that defense when some of us liked to dig deep underground bases and crouch in fear during horde night?  Where was that defense when some of us liked to ride our mini-bikes around during horde night? 

 

TFP should be consistent - either make it where players can play how they like on horde night in every different way they want, or make it where they are forced to get battered by the horde.

 

So I agree with the OP on this point - it shouldn't be possible, if TFP makes it not possible for other play styles on horde night, to run around and survive a horde.  But my solution wouldn't be to nerf that ability, my solution would be to bring back other ways of surviving.  Heat-seeking vultures?  Nope - no more!  Digging zombies that can dig down to me at bedrock?  Nope - no more!

 

They are consistent, No defense without effort. As I said fighting the horde running takes skill, you are active, burning ammo and buff food. Sitting in an underground base or simply driving away is not.

 

Now just running straight without combat at all would be the same category as driving around and if at all possible should be countered by the game.

 

[Roland]

2 hours ago, Spatch said:

So where was that defense when some of us liked to dig deep underground bases and crouch in fear during horde night?  Where was that defense when some of us liked to ride our mini-bikes around during horde night? 

Who is stopping you from doing those things?  Why not try all three activities…

 

Spend horde night in a bedrock base,

Drive around during horde night,

Run around in a field during horde night, 

 

…and report back which required the least amount of skill to survive. 

[just.dont]

10 hours ago, Roland said:

So you never have to fight more than 1 zombie at a time but they're popping in around you constantly? I think there is a bit of a contradiction there...haha.  I only notice zombies popping in when I am driving fast in a vehicle. On foot I haven't experienced it in a long time. Oh I know they are spawning in within about 30-40 blocks around me but I don't see them materializing right before my eyes when I am moving at foot speed. I don't remember the game ever having persistent hordes or wilderness spawns that just moved around the map and came from far away. Back when we had the minimap and radar you could see their blips popping into exisistence and then moving towards you.

First of all - no, there isn't any contradiction here. The amounts of zombies that can be spawned at once are very limited (for quite a while), so given the time required for zombies to aggro and come towards you - it's exactly that. You're not fighting more than only a few at a time. And then again, when new ones will spawn after you killed the previous. And again, etc. You can gather a notable amount of them if e.g. you go into a downtown and gather spawns from several areas together in a clump - but that's very much all intentional work rather than events unfolding as is.

Second, "back when we had the minimap" isn't enough - you'd need to back a bit more. In that era (around A6/A7, I think) we had zombies spawning rather far away and then homing onto you/your base. The homing part wasn't particularly great, of course, but the whole experience looked nicer than what we have right now.

It's not about "noticing" zombies popping in, by the way. It's the inability to have anything else than a full-circle defense when fighting: new spawns are just as likely appear behind you as in front of you, and so you can never have any engagement more interesting than "enemies come from all sides up until spawn limit and then nothing else would come". It never ever changes, it gets pretty stale after a while, and it's thoroughly abusable via the spawn limit: as long as you keep a pile of zombies busy with something, nothing else in the area will spawn.

 

10 hours ago, Roland said:

I think their fix was the addition of the 33% modifier. Isn't that one the best one to pick?

I stopped experimenting with that setting - it doesn't seem to work correctly. Any <100% value results in a very large amount of completely empty boxes and loot piles, much more than the modifier would suggest. When I played with 75%, subjectively it was like having every other container have no loot.

I have a suspicion that the modifier might be applied twice at various stages of loot generation (so instead of 0.75 you're actually getting 0.75 * 0.75), but of course it's pretty hard to prove.

Edited December 17, 2021 by just.dont (see edit history)