Increase amount of zombies

[KromaZone]

Is there a way of increasing the amount of zombies? especially zombie cops to spawn in through XML? any tutorials on this please. I have got the blood moon count to 64 and difficulty on Insane so cant increase it anymore this way.

 

thanks

[dreamdancer]

Generally what you want to search for are discussions about modding the gamestage.xml file. This is the primary file that determines the numbers and types of zombies that spawn at various stages of the game as you progress. The file though is a huge tangle of generated zombie lists, and as such the act of modifying it can end up a somewhat daunting project. I would recommend first taking a quick peek at it, and then coming back and doing a forum search for 'gamestages.xml' to find others discussing it. Going into depth about that here is out of the scope of a single response. I can go into more if you like, but take a look around first.

 

The file entitygroups.xml does interact with this somewhat, but the generated lists of zombies that can be spawned at each gamestage ended up largely decoupled from this at some point. The reason being that having fewer -types- of zombies spawn at any one time tends to be easier on cpu resources. It is easier for the cpu to handle a batch of 30-40 zombies if there are only 3-4 different kinds of zombies in the mob than if they are all different, so drawing from the entire pool of possible zombies randomly is not a good idea.

 

There is a specific mod I like for the bloodmoon that is particularly intended to make early bloodmoons more challenging, and does so in a clever way.... it only increases the final of 3 waves, so that the 'ending trickle' effect you might run into(after the horde, you get a trickle of 1-2 zombies at a time for the rest of the night) is replaced by a bigger, badder horde than ever. This gives you tough bloodmoons, but only if you are good enough to handle the initial waves to begin with. If you want just a simple patch to make the blood moons more exciting, it is an easy fix. You can find it here: https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?68457-Quick-fix-to-quot-boring-blood-moons-quot

 

Another thing you can look at is editing the zombies themselves. The way that difficulty levels work is that it increases your gamestage -a little-(making more/harder zombies show up a little bit sooner), and also changes the damage calculations, so that you do less damage to zombies and they do more damage to you at higher difficulty levels. This is all that higher difficulty currently does, and this does not end up meaning they have more hit points or stronger attacks. As such, increasing difficulty does not change how easily your traps kill them, or how quickly they chew through your walls. To change this, you can modify those statistics of the zombies themselves. The file entityclasses contains the HP statistics of the various zombies, with a baseclass of zombieTemplateMale that other zombies then inherit, and modify. Going through and looking for the property "MaxHealth" and increasing it wherever you find it will make your zombies more tanky, and make them hold out against both your attacks -and- environmental damage like traps. Many of the zombies simply inherit the base HP from the main zombie class, but others have their own statement that overrides it and gives them a different amount of HP, so if you want all zombies to be tougher you have to do a search through the whole file.

 

For zombie -damage-, you want to look in items.xml, and do a search for zombie hand. All of the melee attacks of zombies take the form of them 'wielding' an item, that is defined as a 'hand'. Their ranged attacks(really just cop zombies in vanilla) have their own attack-items defined, so you can look for zombie spit too. Each item has 2 damage values: entity and block damage. Entity damage is the damage the attack does to living things(generally)(specifically you) and block damage what it does to objects. Remember that increasing difficulty effectively increases their entity damage for all intents and purposes(their damage to you), but not block damage. So if you want a harder game where they chew through your walls faster, looking at block damage is the way to go.

 

Anyway, welcome to the fun world of xml modding. There are a lot of possibilities to explore. Hope I've been helpful.