Plague vector is ruining my game

How to get rid of plague vectors in a town? They are super annoying. I am playing the latest experimental build.

My character is a bow hunter without any other skill/trait. The starting equipments included a modern recurve bow and 8 carbon fiber hunting arrows. My game started at an evacuation shelter next to a forest. After going through the forest, I found a huge town. The first house that I saw was a two floor house without any zombie. I dug 4 pits near the door of this house with a shovel over several days. The shovel was from the backyard of another house near the edge of the town. I went back to the shelter from time to time to eat and sleep. After setting up the traps, I went into the basement of the house and find no zombies. Then I killed every zombie near the two floor house, including one zombie soldier. My bow didn’t work on the zombie soldier but the pits kill it.

After making the house relatively safe, I made some short cordage pieces from wither plants gathered from the forest. I deconstructed two lamps in the house to get pipes and chunks of steel. Afterwards, I used one pipe to hammer another pipe into a makeshift crowbar. I also made a makeshift hammer with a stick from the forest, cordage, and the chunk of steels. Next, I smashed a display rack to get scrap metal and use the scrap metal to make a screw driver. With the screwdriver and makeshift crowbar, I deconstructed some furniture to get more planks and nail. I made three nail board traps. I place the nail board traps near the front door, back door, and the door of the bedroom in the 2nd floor.

At night, I eat something in the fridge, drink clean water in the water heater in the basement of the house, and sleep at the bedroom.

In the next few days, I killed and pulped more zombies. Life is good, until I visit a house with skittering plagues. They ran super fast. I tried to kill them with my arrows but my arrows always miss them. Since I only had 6 carbon fiber hunting arrows and I couldn’t make any more arrows in the next few days, I ignored the skittering plagues and just killed and pulped the zombies. There were a lot of disgusting rogue dirt. I burn them.

After a few days, I saw lots of plague vectors. My arrows didn’t work on those. The basement of the house next to the two story house is full of plague vectors. I went into that basement to lure a few of the roaches out. And I killed them with spike pits. Each plague vectors have to fall into spike pits for three times. Otherwise it lives. When a spike pit is occupied, another plague vector won’t fall into the pit. I setup 6 pits near the window of the house. I also setup 8 more pits in a checker board pattern as the plan B. Building a spike pit needs 4 pointy sticks and the pointy sticks can break from time to time. I think I made about 120 pointy sticks. After killing the plague vectors and the zombies in the basement, I pickup and burn all the roach eggs. I pickup and burn all roach dirts. I mop all the disgusting green goo from the plague vectors. Finally, the house is clean and relatively safe…

But digging the pits, making the pointy sticks, and setting up spike pits take lots of time. Several houses have basement with plague vectors. Quite a few plague vectors wander the streets. A few escapes into the forest. There are a lot of roach dirt. They are disgusting, super annoying, and sometimes deadly. :sob:

How to get rid of the plague vectors?

  • Does burning the roach dirt help?
  • Does getting rid the zombie corpses help? Burning the corpses don’t work. I have to butcher and then burn the corpses to actually get rid of the corpses.

Plague vectors will start spawning in after the first week or so, replacing skittering plagues at that point - If your actively city raiding, you should probably have a half decent melee weapon (crowbar, etc) by that point, same with some armor (motorcycle, scavenged police and sports gear, etc). Fast creatures like roaches are difficult to deal with using ranged weapons, especially at the lower skill levels or with longer fire times - Some things are better being killed the old fashion way.

Your best bet is to rely on chokepoints to deal with them. Roach dirt is just their shit, not how they spawn (I believe refuse to carrion creatures was disabled a while back) and while their description says they’re from roaches eating zombies, its not an active “roach has to eat a zombie to upgrade” behavior, its assumed to have been happening off-screen for a given population.

Killing the roach eggs is good tho, Those can spawn into more roaches afaik.

I don’t knkow for sure, but from my expectations, plague vectors don’t have super-abilities to multiply. They go through cycles
roach → (pregnant roach?) → roach egg → roach nymph → roach
or
roach → pregnant roach → roach nymphs (on killing pregnant one)
and it takes longer than 1 week. Basement with roaches have many of them on start, and roaches/plague vectors can run out of a basement if they hear noise. So you probably just unlucky to have few “infested” basements around.
In current run I have a strong character, with good weapon and armor, so I can fight whole basement of plague vectors (or giant roaches). But I think even “medium” character can fight them - just don’t fight with all of them at once, heal and rest after fights etc. Plague vectors are not infinite, keep fighting and you will clear the area eventually.
By the way, have you tried to burn houses down, including basements? I think it should help if plague vectors are still inside the house.
Also, you can try to find some other ways to efficiently clear houses from plague vectors, “spoilers”:

A makeshift gas canister and a gas mask work fine for me, throw some in a basement and wait for 15 minutes outside, then you can deal with few plague vectors-survivors, if any. Insecticide gas canisters are even better, but require applied science levels and less available components for crafting.
Stun guns are good since don’t need aiming, and also good for zombie soldiers and skeletons.
Noise emitters plus blade traps should also work in the night

As for burning the zombie corpses - I think it will not help with plague vectors, but you can still burn them if you like. You just need a place which prevents fire from fading out - like stone fire ring, stone fireplace or oven furniture, etc.

Roaches, including plague vectors, are lightly armored and are “hard to hit” as well. That means most bow/sling attacks miss, and the ones hitting typically glance off. Critical hits may do 1-2 points of damage (I’ve used the best arrows a player can craft, as I haven’t been lucky enough to find carbon fiber ones).

Roaches of either kind are a pain to kill, because melee combat is very tiring and they’re hard to hit (again), they come in hordes, and even if you’ve got something like MC armor they’ll eventually tear it and then start to chew you up.
If possible, melee them in batches (as small as possible), and use choke points to fight one at a time if you can (I’ve used doorways in basements and moved corpses out of the way to close the door to catch my breath at times).

As mentioned, roaches are present early on, later progress to pregnant ones, and then start laying eggs. The eggs eventually hatch (unless you destroy them, which you can’t do by smashing, but a fire destroys them instantly (I typically grab a nymph corpse as “tinder”), and you can run them over with a vehicle. This cycle means that the area will eventually be overrun if even a single nymph escapes, although I haven’t seen that happen. The roaches have a breeding cycle of something like a year, so they don’t replicate explosively like their normal sized originals.

It can also be noted that unlike zombies, roaches can’t smash doors, so if the stair down to the basement is behind a door, you can contain the menace by simply closing the door and then avoid returning (at least without being equipped for it), and if there isn’t a door there, make sure all windows and doors are closed, and they’ll be contained until a zombie breaks the seal (and you’ll probably clear the neighborhood of them eventually, unless you play with hordes). I mark such houses with notes on the overland map.

2 Likes

i usually use crit character, but u said u killed zombie soldier, if it has combat knife, take that, and melee, if i rmbr correctly one of combat knife ability is knockback, so u can knock back and then wait until they come to u, do this next to stairs so u can retreat up stairs if needed