0.C-6876 - Overall Impressions

[Vastin]

Back after several months off to see how things are going. For context, I play with wander spawns on, and otherwise pretty much vanilla.

I’m really enjoying the direction the game has been going. Love most of the changes over the last few months. Love the general increase in challenge, the way the filthy mechanic makes clothing a real issue again, the rebalanced combat with weaker armor and smaller skill mods, the better accessibility to damaged-but-operable vehicles, and so on.

I’m just feeling the heat in terms of sheer mob density - with wandering spawns on, town interiors seems almost uncrackable now due to huge spawn numbers with the harder combat - and they don’t actually ever seem to wander away, even if you try to lure them out of town with loud noises or tooling around on a motorcycle? Not sure what’s up with that.

Also feeling the pressure of a kind of lame mechanic (corpse disposal) that was once easy to overlook, but has now become dangerously aggravating in the more challenging environment. Most of my deaths sadly come when a dangerous mob pops around a corner and interrupts me butchering when I’m at low stamina. It just takes too long and is such a massive stamina hit, which makes it deadly (and smashing is little better), and for whatever reason the interruption system often allows mobs to get within a few steps of you before you can interrupt butchering, even if you can see them from way off. I mean, I guess I could drag them all into brazier pyres, but that’s a huge amount of boring logistical dragging that certainly doesn’t add any fun.

[Coolthulhu]

Don’t butcher corpses if you don’t need to. Smash them - it is intentionally much faster and less taxing on stamina.
Butchering is for when you want to recover things from the corpses, not dispose of them.

[Vastin]

Well, smashing is certainly faster, though still fairly endurance intensive - but my impression was that that only delayed them getting up again, albeit for a long period of time. Is that not the case?

[Vastin]

Ah, Coolthulhu while I’ve got your attention, a few question about zombie horde mechanics and sound.

1. Can a horde actually be moved by sound? I’ve tried tooling around on the outskirts of a mob with a motorcycle and hitting the horn (99 volume) to get their attention and drag them out - but it doesn’t really seem to work. The individual zombies may follow me for as long as I let them, but the Zs on the map tend to stay pinned firmly in place, and when I circle back around later, the place I’m trying to clear usually seems just as packed as ever (if not more so).

2. I’ve tried burning buildings down adjacent to a horde to lure them in and get them all killed in the ensuing blaze and collapse. This actually seems to kinda work ok, but I’m not clear if zombies really respond much to sounds that you don’t personally originate - and the amount of noise coming off a burning building is massive, so I’m guessing that it probably ends up generating more zombies out of the void than it kills…? Not sure, have to experiment more, but I’d be interested in your thoughts on how this would play out given what you know of the spawn system.

3. Does sound outright CREATE zombies, or does it just draw in existing ones from a distance, or both?

[Coolthulhu]

Nope. Smashed corpses are supposed to be completely deanimated. Necromancers can’t rez them either.

[quote=“Vastin, post:4, topic:14422”]1) Can a horde actually be moved by sound?
2) I’ve tried burning buildings down adjacent to a horde to lure them in and get them all killed in the ensuing blaze and collapse.
3) Does sound outright CREATE zombies, or does it just draw in existing ones from a distance, or both?[/quote]

1. Yes, although the magnitude of that movement may be low. It may have gotten broken. Either way, hordes move rather slowly.
2. This works, but the horde needs a good path to the building. Zombies are dumber than most bricks and the only way to keep their attention is to stay in their sight.
3. Draws in.

[Vastin]

Great, thank you. The horde numbers and combat difficulty in the current build are pretty brutal, but a better grasp of these mechanics should help a lot - I’ll just have to work on refining the tactics I’m using a bit.

[deoxy]

Nope. Smashed corpses are supposed to be completely deanimated. Necromancers can’t rez them either.

I’m a little behind, so maybe they fixed this, but basically the rules on “can they get back up or be rezzed by necro” are as follows:

If the name is in yellow, even if it SAYS pulped, they can get back up.
If it doesn’t say “pulped”, even if the name is no longer in yellow, they can get back up.

Basically, sometimes, when you’ve been away a while and come back, some of the corpses may not be pulped, but they lose the yellow label. Also, sometimes when you kill stuff (especially low HP stuff, like child zombies or skeletal dogs), you do enough damage to get the corpse to “pulped”, but it stays yellow. This last one is fixed if you smash another corpse on the same square, but they aren’t eligible for smashing alone.

As I said, I’m a bit out of date, so those may be fixed - Coolthulhu?

[jacob.exe]

I have never encountered a corpse that gets back up if it is not yellow. I actually filter the list items menu using the word “corpse” and I can easily see if I missed a zombie or not just by looking for a yellow name in the list.

[Coolthulhu]

[quote=“deoxy, post:7, topic:14422”]If it doesn’t say “pulped”, even if the name is no longer in yellow, they can get back up.

Basically, sometimes, when you’ve been away a while and come back, some of the corpses may not be pulped, but they lose the yellow label. Also, sometimes when you kill stuff (especially low HP stuff, like child zombies or skeletal dogs), you do enough damage to get the corpse to “pulped”, but it stays yellow. This last one is fixed if you smash another corpse on the same square, but they aren’t eligible for smashing alone.[/quote]

Pretty sure that the yellow color means it is active. If it’s not yellow then the only way it could get up would be necros. If it is pulped, it shouldn’t be able to rise, even if it stays active.

[Mantar]

1) Can a horde actually be moved by sound?

Yes, I can confirm this. In recent experimentals, I’ve laid on the horn of my deathmobile to attract hordes four or five tiles off, and then went crafting, only to have them shamble up to me an hour or two later. (And get flattened by my turrets) It’s been a handy way to get materials for mutagen.

[Eisen]

It really is way more difficult. Only played stable from time to time and tried out the newest experimental last weekend.
I spawned near a really really small town (4 houses and a garage) but it was filled with tons of Zs (static spawn). And I couldn’t even kill a single one.

[Vastin]

Switching back to just smashing corpses does make quite a difference. The huge time sink for butchering was really costing me before - didn’t realize just how much.

Now I’ve got a ninja crawling more comfortably into the early-mid game, cleared out most of a mid-sized town which finally gives me a relatively safe/stable area to work in, even if occasional mobs come wandering through that I have to deal with.

First set of light survivor gear mostly in place, and working on refurbishing a security van so that I can load up crafting supplies and move out to another town sometime in the summer most likely.

I really like how leather and kevlar retain their value as semi-rare crafting components for a much longer span of time. Overall the crafting system now seems to present a much more gradual progression from scrounged ill-fitting clothing/trying not to freeze to death, to decent layered clothing, to actually using piecemeal armor and then on to simple survival/nomad pieces over the course of around two seasons, depending on how you prioritize development.

Previously clothing would just rain from the sky, and the basic armor values of regular gear you’d find would easily carry you straight into the first survivor sets - all you really had to do was hole up in a building and read/practice for a couple weeks without really doing much else because the components were so easy to get. Much more interesting now.