28 days later

[enkephalin07]

I managed to clear a Blood Moon at 1:33 on my 4th week. First time I survived at all, much less found nothing to do but collect lootbags and make repairs until 4.

 

I found this little house between towns with a tight, spiral layout, with lots of chokepoints (I'm playing a 10k generated world, but I assume the prefab is in Navezgane.) I had made a stand there on week 3, mostly relying on wooden spikes around the foundation and a baseball bat in the chokepoints, but got overrun ~2pm after the horde bust holes directly through the loops of the spiral to make it essentially a straighter line for them. I patched the breaches with reinforced double doors to hopefully make them less attractive than following the open entry. I think what won the game on day 28 was wrapping the house twice in electrical fence, then crisscrossing all the hallways and stairways with more. I also replaced the rooftop windows with double doors, and during the attack I could redirect their path by opening and closing different sets. A few times I had to open these to deal with the crawlers and canines who got under the fences.

 

I did make some mistakes; my dart trap and shotgun turret never fired, and I had a sledge set up to punch zeds into a blade trap which also didn't power on. I tried to fix these, but didn't have the same success on day 35, probably because I got cocky and didn't use the door switching strategy like before. Now the place is so damaged that it would take a dedicated weeklong effort to shape it up. But I don't feel like doing this; I'm playing a generated and unexplored world, I'd much rather nomad around than establish a settlement. Are there viable strategies for surviving on the run? I tried that on week 2 and it ended pretty miserably.

[Lenny Lettuce Lips]

On the run I usually know I've gone full panic and it's all gone bad. If you mean doing it a little more "raw" like in the wild, it's totally doable. I find a POI with a fair to middlin' elevation and cut the access points, find where they swarm and proceed. If it gets real bad, I make my way to the top and stay super close to an edge if it feels like it's gonna come down. 

 

As far as being on the ground and mobile during a horde, I've had some fun with it, but I've always been very well prepared. It's just a hair out of control, even in earlier hordes to try and go full Rambo. I've had some fun doing it like that, especially with friends, but solo I always play safe and game the pathing. It's really the only way, if you want to both survive and not demolish a building. I wish it were different for the AI, but we work with the zombies we have. 

[Laz Man]

There are certainly tons of ways to make your own base and cheese the AI to the max but I find the most enjoyable playthroughs are the ones I have reinforced POIs.

 

With that said, there are tons of POIs out there that you can reinforce into multiple fall back positions.  Hatches at key choke points to buy time.  Segmented areas that you can jump back and forth from.  Sprinkle of traps here and make each defenceable spot last longer.  Junk turrets and sledges at each fall back spot to give you cover and save time to get into position.

 

Note: if you have a vehicle, make sure to pack up your workstations so you can craft / build what you need once you find your new horde base.

 

 

[Ripflex]

One trick I use to do horde night without a base at all is que up a Tier 5 quest that would normally be a Skyscraper or large building, pre-clear it out and have Horde night in it.  Once Horde night ends you can activate the Tier 5 quest and instantly fix the building. 

 

You can do low tier quests but the buildings are usually too small and not defendable but not impossible.

 

 

[enkephalin07]

I'm going to attempt guerilla style for the next one, since I haven't actually prepared much except for hoarding exp and garbage. I have robotic turrets now, and a 4x4 with fuel extension, so I'll hit and run, set up ambushes then bail out when it gets too hot. The last time I tried this I only had a bicycle, which made vultures that hadn't otherwise appeared begin to spawn to peck at my nape. I think in principle I could've sustained a run if I just timed my bursts of speed right, but I'm playing double-duration hours, so I have twice the opportunity for error.

 

EDIT: It worked, though I'm not too satisfied with it. I patched up the safehouse enough to get some more mileage out of those electrical fences. They didn't quite make it to midnight, though my auto turrets finally worked -- locking the ammo was a non-obvious necessity, I thought that was just to prevent other players from fiddling with the ammo supply.

 

After my control room got overrun, I made a break for the roof, jumped to the garage, dropped to my 4x4, and promptly ran into a hole I dug for lead earlier. Somehow one of the zombies yanked me out of my ride, but fortunately it was also pushed the 4x4 out of the hole, so I jumped back in and drove. For the next 2 hours, vultures got a little faster, meaner, and spittier. They kept playing hopscotch over each other in front of me, slowing down my vehicle, but it damaged them enough to splatter them on my hood eventually. Unfortunately I got 0 xp for those kills, so I got out to bat them off with my stun baton, and set up robo-turrets in opposite facing directions to deal with approaching horde. That worked fantastically! So I collected them and kept doing this: driving until the vulture swarms got too thick, set up turrets and beat anything that came in reach.

 

At 2PM, I exited the game to set the cycle time back to default duration, and that made the rest of the night less nerve-wracking. The vultures coincidentally got less frequent and less aggressive, so I just drove around a loop on the highway until 4. So I survived, but didn't get the loot or exp that previous Blood Moons gave me.