So, the big problem with hordes seems to be that they can’t despawn and go back to roaming after they hit your reality bubble. Unless everyone else has a totally different playstyle that I’ve never considered, as a newbie character you’re likely to draw the horde to your shelter with noises and have no way of fighting them off. So, you make a break for it in the dead of the night and maybe get away. Then you fort up some new place and never get bothered by hordes, ever again, because they’re all sitting around twiddling their thumbs at your abandoned, original home.
This means, unless I’m just doing it wrong, you’ll never get to test a decently fortified shelter against the horde because they’ll either come too early, when all you’ve managed to do is board up some windows, or they’ll already be spawned out someplace and never come to bother you in your superfortified turret-guarded bunker.
What if there was an optional mode where the game tracks how long you’ve stayed in one place to try and figure out if you have a “main home”, and once it reaches a certain threshold (30 days maybe, or 15, or 60, or configurable in the options, or maybe with some RNG thrown in to keep people on their toes), a horde gets genned a few dozen overmap tiles away and told to march straight there and test out your walls and turrets?