Dealing with wanderspawns

I’ve pitted a few doomed characters against them, with mixed success, and I’m not sure whether those successes were sheer dumb luck or not. But here’s what I’ve found.

  • Always be checking vehicles and grab the first one you can find in working order. Mobility is vital.

  • Take refuge in evac shelters, gas stations, cabins, farms, anywhere out of the way ; but always have a back door and always have your essential goods ready to grab on your way out. If a horde arrives, just grab what you can and leave. If you’re not abandoning loads of supplies and equipment, pile up some firewood and gasoline by the back door to light on your way out.

  • Scout during the day for places to hole up if a horde decides to take over your current camp. Leave caches of supplies wherever you can and mark them on your map. I’ve always planned to return to abandoned campsites once the zombies move on, but they never seem to move on.

  • Unless it’s raining, chainsmoke cigarettes and/or start forest-fires behind you on your way home from raids or scouting missions where you might have been spotted. One of my characters managed to keep his cabin free from invasion for two weeks doing this, although I don’t know if it was just luck or if it actually works. He died of moose, so I’ll never know if a horde would have eventually arrived anyway.

Anyone have any tips to add? I’m curious about what exactly brings the spawns, as whenever I decide to stop running and start fighting, they just don’t seem to stop. Is it the noise? Is it scenttracking? Is it just random? Once I decide to make my stand, will they ever stop coming, or will the noise of fighting just spawn infinitely more?

The zombies that are already there won’t move on, the infinite spawner will. So you’ll need to clear the area out again, but at least at that point it’ll be possible.

Probably the noise, I don’t see many tbh but I use a longbow, and throw tear gas around after a loot run (super cheap to make, bleach and ammonia are everywhere).

Granted holed up in a 4 tile apartment tower ATM, all boarded up and slowly being converted into a murder hut. The food tends to come to me though, it’s always like jumanji out the front door, not really sure why this is but it’s a thing.

I also turned off the zombear spawns because it’s dumb when you have more zombears than zombie dogs, especialy in a largeish field in the middle of a city…

TL/DR; Spawning is indeed a little wacky; even on static

last time on my world i used lab as my safehouse when horde surounded my base i just used my tricycle and penetrated throught horde (sometimes i used colt with holo sight, laser and supressor) few times it worked but 1 time i died because that zombie dog…

Do you know how the spawners decide where to travel? Are there ways of predicting or preventing them from catching you at home? I’ve noticed they often seem to approach from the direction of the nearest town, and usually a day or two after I visit, but I can’t be sure this isn’t just coincidence.

They generally start in towns IIRC. After that they wander more or less at random, moving towards you if you are making exceptionally loud noises.

They can hear shrubs being run over by a vehicle from a LOOOOOONG distance away, so if you look on the Debug Menu>Show Hordes map and it shows a horde that that isn’t at least 3/4ths of a maps screen away then don’t move your vehicle.

You know, someone should really change the “Wander spawn” option to “Spawn hordes”.

I mean what kind of name wander spawn? Sounds like it could be easy to confuse it with something Npc or player spawn related.

The way I deal with them it to turn the option off. They are not much fun right now since they spawn infinitely. If they are changed to actually be moving hordes I can kill off I would enjoy the feature.

[quote=“gcaliber, post:9, topic:6071”]The way I deal with them it to turn the option off. They are not much fun right now since they spawn infinitely. If they are changed to actually be moving hordes I can kill off I would enjoy the feature.[/quote]Currently(as of a few days ago) each horde has a set number of monsters it will spawn. Seriously, activate the Debug Menu, scroll down to “show hordes”, then scroll over to where you see a horde.

It’ll show, in the upper right hand corner:
The number of monsters in the horde
The horde’s current level of “interest”(aggro)
The horde’s current target tile’s coordinates. The target tile itself will be marked with a “x”

The number of monsters in a horde will decrease as they are spawned and you kill them, and if you kill all of them the horde will disappear. You may have to hunt down the last dozen or so, but by that time the horde will be pretty much harmless, and I haven’t noticed them regenerating so you can take your time with the mop up.

[quote=“HunterAlpha1, post:10, topic:6071”][quote=“gcaliber, post:9, topic:6071”]The way I deal with them it to turn the option off. They are not much fun right now since they spawn infinitely. If they are changed to actually be moving hordes I can kill off I would enjoy the feature.[/quote]Currently(as of a few days ago) each horde has a set number of monsters it will spawn. Seriously, activate the Debug Menu, scroll down to “show hordes”, then scroll over to where you see a horde.

It’ll show, in the upper right hand corner:
The number of monsters in the horde
The horde’s current level of “interest”(aggro)
The horde’s current target tile’s coordinates. The target tile itself will be marked with a “x”

The number of monsters in a horde will decrease as they are spawned and you kill them, and if you kill all of them the horde will disappear. You may have to hunt down the last dozen or so, but by that time the horde will be pretty much harmless, and I haven’t noticed them regenerating so you can take your time with the mop up.[/quote]

last time i was atacked by horde of 6 zombies :smiley: