In the last few game i started the shelter was always surrounded with pack of dogs and coyotes. While they are not always aggressive, they are much dangerous than zombies because you can’t run away and you can’t kite them.
I think this makes the first moves in the game based on pure luck, you have to take unnecessary risk to go past them.
That’s not always the case. Just luck that you happened to be there with them. They can’t open doors and won’t bash windows so you’re safe in the shelter. If you know where a large group of zombies are you can kite the dogs into them so they fight it out while you sneak away.
Alternatively you can just go out at night and avoid where you know they are. Just come back a slightly different way because they might be tracking your scent. I only recommend night raiding if you have night vision though.
I know all the tricks how i can handle them, but my problem is there should not be so many enemies around the shelter. For dangerous start there is the surrounded starting.
In the past there was no problem to leave the shelter at least in one direction, but my few last starting was like dogs at north, east an south and for the change there was coyotes to the west. Nice. Now i have to wait for the night and hope to not bump into a dog, wait for a miracle like something would distract them or i can bravely go outside an hope they don’t attack me or they are some weak dog pack. Really the surrounded starting would be beneficial with a start like that.
But maybe the problem is there are so many more dogs in the game now, “they are everywhere”.
You could just kill them with a crowbar as well. It’s not exactly hard. Even 2v1 a starting character will win out almost every time. Hell if you clear them out you have more meat than you’ll need for a while and as a bonus it will all stay frozen if you dump it outside while it’s still early spring. So you won’t have to worry about food at all.
I tried to fight with few dogs with my current toon and just butchered them. But other times my other toon was badly wounded when tried to fight with them so i started to evade the dogs. But maybe i was just unlucky that time, maybe they was some stronger type of dogs. Well i think you are right.
If you get injured you can use rags to create makeshift bandages to speed up your healing. Just cut up some curtains and if you’re worried about hostiles seeing in then just disassemble/smash furniture and use it to board up the window you don’t have to worry about light since you can just use the terminal for that.
Also you can always peek through curtains by examining them. Thereby staying hidden while seeing if the way is clear.