How do hordes currently work? Last time i checked they seemed to be bugged and not worth the effort but is that still the case or are they still a feature so buggy that they functionally don’t exist?
I did my last run with them, but they didn’t seem to behave in any coherent manner. Just blobs that kind of shuffled around without much rhyme or reason. If that’s what they are supposed to do, then they are working great - but I remember in playthrough a couple years ago they seemed to cluster and move in a much more coherent manner.
Wander spawns do indeed wander, just not a whole lot typically. It’s most evident when you clear our a decent chunk of a city and then a horde of zombies decide to roll up on you.
I wouldn’t mind having a setting that changes just how much they wander.
hordes normally spawn based on noise, but that option is toggle-able now. They operate on the overmap as a ‘number of zombies’ that the game tracks, and spawns as they hit the ‘bubble’ that is the loaded world around the player (slightly larger than max vision range)
Damage and I think type-of-zombie is not tracked, so if you ‘unload’ and ‘reload’ the horde multiple times it will be different and recreated based on current zombie evolution numbers. note: this might have changed since I last heard
zombie hordes track noise (with some RNG thrown in) and will navigate towards noise on the overmap
Unless I am mistaken local zeds can get caught in the horde as well. Eventually if you get enough overmap tiles away from them the horde will de-spawn entirely.
To the best of my knowledge hordes are fully functional, and as a main focus of the devs “finished” though likely to continue to be tweaked from time to time in the future. I don’t think any major updates to hordes will be coming anytime soon, while the devs focus on other areas of the game.