HOWTO hordes

Game Talk The Bunker
101

I just had a horde storm out of an already-looted mansion in 0.C. I know mansions are regarded slightly differently in the code, so that could be it.

[ETA] Actually, while I’m on the subject, what’s a good makeshift defence to throw up for a temporary camp? My latest character’s robustly unstable genetics are pushing him towards Elf-a, so he’s taken to the forest to train his archery instead of my usual melee god route, but zeds will not leave me alone long enough to disassemble a single rag, even in the deepest woods. Do I just need to run away until the horde is no longer even near the reality bubble, or is there some kind of simple preparation I can do to my campsite to reduce the number of zombies stumbling across me?

102

pits are cheap way of defending your postion if you do not plan to move anywhere a teleport pads are nice
just place it like that

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this will give you good postion to practice your bow skills on zombies and if something managed to step on a teleporter without triggering it just use mele

103

[quote=“Arek_PL, post:102, topic:8282”]pits are cheap way of defending your postion if you do not plan to move anywhere a teleport pads are nice
just place it like that

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this will give you good postion to practice your bow skills on zombies and if something managed to step on a teleporter without triggering it just use mele[/quote]
Yeah, I was afraid it would be something like that: “just” surround yourself with teleport pads and you won’t need to melee most of the zombies away.

Thanks, but hordes are still a no-go for me at the moment. I don’t know what needs to change, but something ought to because right now it’s melee or nothing. For reference, by the time my character managed to get to archery 2, he was already melee/bashing 7 and I was literally doing more damage hitting zombies over the head with my bow than using it to fire arrows.

Actually, what would you think about the following:

Zombies are reanimated by the Blob for mobility, right? So a horde would be akin to the Blob’s fingers, exploring the countryside for… whatever. So even though individual zombies are overtly hostile, why should hordes follow noise, and explicitly home in on the player? The player won’t live forever; the Blob will have you sooner or later, so there’s no reason to kill you now.

Why not have hordes migrate around according to some specific but unclear scheme? In addition to horde wandering, have a set of randomly-walking attractant points to which the hordes’ movements are weighted, instead of to noise. If the horde’s zombies see you, smell you or hear you, they’ll attack as normal, but otherwise they’ll follow the group.

So keep your head down, don’t attract too much attention, and hordes will generally pass you by. That is, until the attractant point moves over your camp, in which case you’d better be prepared to fight or run.

104

Maybe the blob is like better safe then sorry? Humans are intelligent and violent enough to warrant preemptive measures.

105

darn blob. ITS LEARNING!

106

Hordes seem to make a beeline for my starting shelter no matter what now. What level of sound attracts them?

107

I think the horde now is okay. It doesn’t make sense that one survivor can handle a whole horde of zombie easily without strategy.

In early game I always run away from horde and try not to encounter one. Never staying too long near a city can definitely help you to avoid horde of large size. Just run whenever you see a horde coming. Nomad style is a must in early game.

After acquiring some means of transportation (like bicycle or roller-blades) I can try to go near city and attract some zombies away from the horde and take them down using fire or kill them one by one using terrain.

108

If you have the fungus nearby. Make the horde follow you into its terretory. The shrooms will get rid of the horde for you.

109

Can zeds destroy the fungal towers?

110

yes.

111

And so it begins…plants v zombies. Well technically fungus, but I believe Triffids wreck zombie face as well.

And the easiest way to deal with a horde is to lure them to a Thriller. Just uh…just don’t stick around the party in case something happens to the DJ.

112

I turn off joke monsters every game. Thriller’s cute and all but if something happens to him, just…gg. Literally gg. There’s no way around it.

I like hordes as they work now, but I’m with the general concensus that they appear too often, too quickly, too much. There’s just no way NOT to get a horde started. I had a flash-horde lock me out of my own LMOE shelter multiple times, and they have this weird tendency to trickle into being as I walk through a field traveling from city to city. Just like…really? The sound of my walking will attract them? From where? Where the fuck are these things even coming from at this point?

Hordes are nice. But their senses need to be dulled. Maybe more than a little bit.

This could be what special hordes comprised of specifically designed hunter-killer zombies are for. Feral hunters, those new predator things, acidic doohickeys…THOSE are the pre-emptive measures. The others are just natural movement, or part of some sort of world coverage maneuver. Some kind of agenda that we couldn’t hope to observe from the scale we currently operate on.

(I think it’d be the Old Guard to notice if anyone but even then there’s not much to do about it.)

113

Their senses aren’t that strong, really. It’s just that the can only spawn, never despawn. This makes them accumulate around the player even when they only stumble around randomly.

I think they totally ignore sounds below 20 and are only weakly influenced above that.

114

Ya, it’s their inability to despawn that seems to be the last real problem with hordes. It makes it impossible to hunker down in a closet and stay quiet and hope not to be noticed as the horde passes by, since you’ll end up eternally besieged. It also allows the cheesiest tactic of dealing with incoming hordes ; cruising around the fields in a vehicle until they’ve all spawned someplace unimportant, then driving off.

115

In my horde games I always get mega horde (hundreds) on my start location. Once I move out of it spawns tend to drop down to zombie here and there to 20 zombie groups.

116

It would be nice to have a feature to decrease the hordes spawn rate or how many max zombies it can spawn like there is to zombies and items

117

That isn’t my findings. Massive horde descended on my refugee shelter. The amount of gunfire coming from it made it very understandable, working as intended, all that.

Fled for my life, fought only in melee (~12 sound?), lockpicked a door, and looted some stuff. Disassembled a bench. By the time the bench was disassembled, the horde was marching towards me. There was one car that was idling (~8 sound), but that was it. I was being VERY careful to remain silent, but it looks like the hordes are following me.

This is an experimental version exactly 7 days old.

118

Then they stumbled randomly and weren’t attracted by sound.
Random horde stumbling can look like it is following sounds, but below 20 volume, overmap hordes are deaf. They can spend few “cycles” walking towards a sound source that was loud.
Once spawned, they have only the regular zombie senses, so sound of volume 12 won’t attract most zombies from afar.

They stumble around quite a lot and that could be it.

119

That would make a lot of sense.

I had another run in with a massive horde when running silent, so I turned on the debug menu.

Turns out the second run in was caused by an antimaterial turrent drawing every horde within the nearest two cities. And it makes sense, everyone draws into the tiny little spot where all the noise was being made, and then they explode outwards (in a random walk pattern), when there is no sound anywhere.

I guess I will continue to walk the earth…

120

Using the debug you can spot hordes right? Is the ‘nr of Z’s in this horde’ counter broken? iirc it always lists just one.