How do you even play with hordes on?

[Lesseps]

I have no idea how you guys play with that stuff. How do you exit your start location if you decide to start in the city and every house is surrounded by brutes, hulks, shockers, spitters, acids, smokers…

Okay, you might suggest starting outside the town. But anyways?

[StopSignal]

Avoid everything.

[Lesseps]

On the contrary - if I use Static Spawns - False and turn Wandering Spawns off - how big of a challenge the game is?

[CK_Kirbi]

Well static spawns creates a limited pool of creatures for any given location you can go to. The number of creatures tends to be much larger than with dynamic spawns because everything gets dumped at once. Wandering spawns on the other hand has a pool of creatures it will draw from until a given area has a large enough population to satisfy the system. Those spawn points will move around as well, so you can find a horde of zombies chasing sound through the countryside.

I am not overly familiar with what happens if you turn static spawns off while having wandering spawns off as well. Someone here will hopefully have more information.

[pisskop]

I use both. 1.5x spawns. They recently hella-nerfed horde hearing. Because why would we want challenge?

[Shopkeeper]

They made horde hearing sane, mostly so that you can drive a car or shoot a gun in the woods without having every zombie from nearby surburbia on your ass.

Though to answer OP’s question. Get a car or run into the woods for a while, horde numbers in the city swell at the beginning of the game when first gen’d. But tend to disperse into more manageable numbers given a couple days. They’re also much easier to deal with once you get out of the early game, a proper weapon, bit of melee and dodge skill, along with kiting goes a long way.

[pisskop]

Driving hasnt been an issue since 0.C and sur-bloody-prise, shooting a gun that can be heard a mile away is going to attract zombies A. Mile. Away.

[CK_Kirbi]

That is why we kill everything with fire and arrows, in that order.

[Shopkeeper]

I dunno, it’s kinda refreshing not having to worry about noise when your deep innawoods now.

Besides isn’t the horde gunshot hearing radius something like 16 map tiles? That’s the size of your average small town in game basically, easily equitable to a mile or more. Especially once you factor in the potential for back round noise and other distractions throwing a horde off on the way.

[Wally-kun]

Short answer: very carefully.

Long answer: same rules as always apply, except now you’re dealing with enemies that can appear more or less anywhere on the map and can make places inaccessible for extensive periods of time that you can’t control, and there tends to be a lot of them. If somewhere is too hot to even consider messing with, leave for a while, or intentionally create a large distraction elsewhere.

Zombies tend to linger in huge numbers when they start messing up a car and won’t leave for a while if you’re nearby. Leave, let the horde mechanics spread the numbers around, check back later. Give it a few weeks more and a majority of undead will be milling out in random numbers or alone across the countryside, making it much easier to get into cities and get ahold of what they were previously guarding.

Basically just hold out somewhere remote and manage. If you can stay alive and scrounge up material until then, opportunities will reveal themselves.

Just uh…don’t settle near any minefields. That tends to go poorly in the long run.

[Zanos]

Driving hasnt been an issue since 0.C and sur-bloody-prise, shooting a gun that can be heard a mile away is going to attract zombies A. Mile. Away.

It does make guns kind of useless, since ranged alternatives that are similarly powerful, have more accessible ammunition, and are silent or near-silent are readily available before firearms are.

[evilexecutive]

I play on 50x hordes. It’s mostly a matter of getting a good base up and running, and not making any noise. But the most important aspects of it is checking your map frequently, and constantly keeping aware of the locations of nearby hordes. The best base in my experience is a Mansion, since it has lots of ammenities… Internal sturdy rooms for crafting/storage, stocked libraries, rare firearms, and rare weapons. In Latest Experimental, it’s also the most likely place to obtain a combat-ready melee weapon like an arming sword, without having to worry about inferior weapons.

Basically, if you take the perk “Scout”, you can detect hordes on your map in the form of a Flashing Z, from up to around 30 map tiles away. These flashing Z’s can be moved to other locations by producing a very loud noise at a location you want all of the Z’s to converge on. Say I want to raid a grocery store for some sweet cereal boxes, but there’s a trio of hordes nearby it. I don’t want to get kerblammed by 100 hulks, so I take anything that can make noise, and set it off about 10 map tiles away from the grocery store, preferably on the opposite side of the town.

My preference is typically for a shotgun, but if you have a talking doll that can be used to a much shorter distance. Just walk 10 tiles away from the town, and shoot your shotgun into the air… Then take a circular path around the town to your starting point, and loot said grocery store with impunity. Talking Dolls can also be used to lure hordes, but only from a single map tile, so using them to kite hordes requires practice and precision.

You can also deliberately trigger a car alarm to lure hordes… Slam metal doors shut, set off landmines, bombs, and such… Basically making noise in a location you want zombies to be in, in order to get zombies AWAY from places you don’t want them to be.

[Michi]

But doesn’t making loud noises actually cause more zombies/hordes to spawn when Wander=true?

[pisskop]

gonna be completely honest here:. i think you guys are exaggerating the threat of hordes.

i dont have issues with zeds outside of cities unless they spawn at wrecks/roadstops.

theres a buffer around the city wherein you can get wanderers to spawn but outside of that radius(6-8overmap tiles, dep) you could hold arock concert.

walking i use hordes as a signal im near a town. hordes move around, and if they dont materialize theres zero threat to them so you can sneak around them with experience.

hordes are an issue aftrr you attract them but you can run out five tiles, light a fire, kill zeds, snd run 5 more and repeat until you excede city range.

am i the only one who finds the nerfs to their range repulsive, i wonder?

for me, my issue with them is how they feed into each other and how they spawn onto the real map

[Michi]

Hmmm… I have found that zeds come from far and wide to the refugee Center once one of the guards fire their weapon at something, and then you can basically kiss the refugee center goodbye, since more zeds come, more gunshots … zombie apocalypse…

Ideally, all the guards in the refugee center would be smart enough to be armed with repeating crossbows, pneumatic rifles and at least silencers.

[Wally-kun]

I suspect map size and city size/disribution has a lot to do with the difficulty of living with hordes. I always increase the distances between cities for a little more realistic sense of scale, and hordes tend to thin themselves out and make it pretty easy to secure a relatively large area for a long time.

[evilexecutive]

But doesn’t making loud noises actually cause more zombies/hordes to spawn when Wander=true?

When hordes are enabled, zombies are instead loaded into distinct “hordes”, which act as entities on the world map. Rather than spawn normally, they instead move around the map directly, while responding to noise generated in nearby map tiles. Again, if you have the Scout perk you can track the positions of hordes rather easily, while having binoculars in your inventory also helps out with this to some more extent.

When a flashing ‘Z’ enters the same map tile as you, all zombies stored within the horde entity are then loaded into your reality bubble. As far as I know, hordes don’t replenish their numbers, so with wandering zombies on, it’s actually entirely possible to kill all of the zombies in a city. I have done this myself on multiple occasions, by very careful and surgical precision in removing chunks of the horde at a time.

Again, having scout helps, because you can SEE the location of hordes on your map, as well as their general numbers. Now if you intend on taking on hordes early in your adventuring days, I recommend putting points into Fabrication, so you can make something called Blade Traps. Getting resources for them is hard, but Blade Traps are supremely effective at shredding hordes to pieces. Just lure zombies into the spinning blades and watch them get gibbed.