As the title says, are zombies attracted to meat chunks, like they are with the player? If not, can this be introduced as a game feature?
As far as I know, meat chunks do not have a smell/scent, which is why zombies hone in on you. I don’t think they would ether, because meat chunks would smell like dead meat, and the zombies don’t have a problem with attacking each other - it must be the blood and other living byproducts that attract them.
SCIENCE SLAM
Perhaps this can be a science recipe like zombie pheromones, “live meat” or something like that
Yea, a “zombie lure” item that puts out scent would be doable. All it has to do is set the scent of the tile it’s on every turn, and the scent diffusion code would do the rest.
No one tought of making zombies go for some items they see? Like, if you leave non-rotten meat, they would go after it. Like what they do with the pigs in The Walking Dead. It could lead to interesting game mechanics and better use of traps.
It could definetely be added with animals too.
Other items, such as alcohol, could hide your scent a bit. Or meat could make your scent more obvious.
I’ve had bears and wolves come and stand over dead rabbits and deer that I killed, was that some sort of smell that drew them or just a random coincidence?
Pretty sure they only use sight for that, but they are attracted to corpses, it’s intentional.
I think deciding whether zombies give a damn about dead meat versus living playermeats depends on why zombies are attacking you to begin with. The zombie lore for this establishes different needs than the traditional braaaaaaiiiins one.
I thought it was the goo kicking your ass for being too unlike itself to assimilate, but your body was still useful as a host? Meat chunks would be too small and I don’t know if the goo utilizes meat for sustenance…
I’d be for just trapping a wounded squirrel in a cage and getting out the landmines if ‘live things’ are the intended target of zombies, but I’m kind of a terrible person when my survival’s on the line.
[quote=“Pthalocy, post:8, topic:4682”]I think deciding whether zombies give a damn about dead meat versus living playermeats depends on why zombies are attacking you to begin with. The zombie lore for this establishes different needs than the traditional braaaaaaiiiins one.
I’d be for just trapping a wounded squirrel in a cage and getting out the landmines if ‘live things’ are the intended target of zombies, but I’m kind of a terrible person when my survival’s on the line.[/quote]
Ok but then, why are they attracted to scent? They cannot tell if you are human and have a acceptable size just by smelling you, this will make the scent attraction for the zeds pretty much senseless, I know it’s they last resort used only if they can’t both see and hear you, but as stated before they are not very clean and their strong smell would attract each other, so I think that the hypothesis, that, they are attracted to living meat (and should be attracted also to fresh meat chunks) is more plausible. Obviously, if the fellow zombie sees both you and a chunk of meat, it’s pretty obvious who will be targeted.
Maybe the goo cannot sustain itself, not with the resources contained in a single individual, I think that the skeleton is a pretty nice example of it, if the goo does not find enough proteins and in general food to keep the muscle moving, then it will start using the host resources, becoming a skeleton made of skin and bones, they could be represented by the first infected kept isolated, but yet the lore is pretty vague about this argument and digging into it would be pretty much a waste of time.
Where exactly did you dig up this lore about goo causing the zombies anyway?
…It’s in the library…
After posting in the suggestion thread some supernatural stuff I received many comments telling me it was not related to the lore so I decided to find out something more about what happened, there should be a link rotting around leading to a thread where both the lore of Cataclysm and Dark Days Ahead are well explained thanks to an accurate time line.
A human wouldn’t be able to smell annother human, no… but a given it’s lack of eyes and membranous surface chemoreception (ie: scent sense) would be a logical sense for the ooze itself to posses. Therefore we can assume that the zombies incredible sense of smell is a property of their symbiote, not the host itself (given the wide variety of mutations avalible it isn’t impossible all the zombies gain scent, but occam’s razor dictates it to be very much less likely.) Being able to differentiate between different types of prey by scent alone is a trival task for many predators, canines for example are well known for this, but various lower organisms are almost entirely reliant on chemoreception, thus have incredible senses of smell (to the point of being able to differentiate individuals.)
I would propose that the goo would have two reasons to be attracted to meat chunks, both tainted and untainted. On one hand it will use up both it’s own and it’s host’s resources quite rapidly, especially given the energetic requirements of regeneration and the massive growth of some of the mutants. These energetic resources would need replenishing and there is little reason for the zombies NOT to start ravaging any food supply they can, I could see skeletons and spitters in particular having a ravenous appetite for anything edible.
On the other hand, tainted meat is full of the goo, but is incapable of finding a new host, unless they somehow gain the ability to go full ‘The Thing’ and transform chunks into horrible gribbly infection vectors (or paste themselves back together even uglier and angrier) the neighboring zombies could try and mount a ‘rescue opperation’ for the trapped goo of the fallen zombies… namely by eating it and rejoining it to their own mass. Like the passengers of broken down vehicle flagging down the other members of the convoy they may even send out scent signals to the rest of the horde 'We broke down, come get us! Over here, we need help!"
You should get paid to write this stuff. tenouttaten
This could be interesting, may also lead to the creation of a new monster, that actually harvest the “Gooed” meat that cannot find a host, creating a shapeless mass of limbs that moves without coordinations crawling towards the next source of this “SOS”, eventually finding the player and ingesting him to enlarge this Jabberwock like creature.
Is that how the Jabberwock is made?
Edit: Ah, stayed on the page too long and missed a couple of post.
I think the jabberwock was the result of goo-tainted mass graves, but the process would be similar perhaps. All at once rather than piecemeal consumption.
I really like the argument for zombies to eat tainted meat - recycling is convenient!
I posted waaay back in one of the zombie evolution threads that I wanted brutes and hulks to be the result of one zombie absorbing a bunch of biomass and thereby getting larger.
Like many things, just haven’t had time to execute on it 
Do you intend to nerf pulping? I am all for it really. If you want a Z killed off properly, fire should be your first, last and best solution.