Since I started playing 0.D I’ve noticed that the towns in general seem to become a lot less valuable than they used to be in the mid game, and begin to feel very grindy.
There’s actually much more variety of buildings now, which is really nice, but you can now go through multiple fairly large towns without ever seeing specific building types, like a garage, a bank, a library, or a dojo. The towns seem to have a lot more common houses in them, even in towards what were previously the commercial centers dominated by special buildings. Now its mostly parks, construction projects, and a LOT of houses. I haven’t even seen a gas station in the course of a 50 hour game so far. (not lacking for gas, but you’d think those would be popular…)
Combine this with what seem like substantially faster respawn rates than we had previously, and working your way through towns into the mid game where houses are no longer interesting gets very slow and laborious.
Now that I’m solidly in the mid-game with full survivor gear, crafted weapons, and a nicely built out APC, I still find myself having to spend several days just to clear a couple blocks to safely get in towards town centers - and then there often just aren’t very many buildings of value there any more.
Nothing stays clear for long - I constantly have to deal with back-spawns within just a couple days in cleared areas, some of which can get pretty aggressive now that I’m regularly seeing hulks, dreadnoughts, and the like.
On one hand, it keeps things from feeling ‘safe’ - but on the other it makes towns very unattractive to explore because the risk/reward seems to be getting steadily worse as time proceeds and the evolution rate increases, and most of the stuff there is useless garbage, with a tiny chance of finding something useful or vital.
That’s why I LOVE a wilderness survival. I try to build a log cabin, simple stone tools like a hammer, axe, adze, shovel, pot etc. Then, I don’t care about cities, cars, unique buildings. I try to be as peaceful as possible in order to avoid infections, ripping clothes and death. Now, my goal is to survive till the next stable build of Cataclysm
Big towns now often contain entrances to Science Labs in the basements of regular houses, so don’t necessarily write those off as uninteresting. Gas stations being rare does seem odd. Probably a result of all the new variety just not having enough room in standard size towns.
If you have all the tools you need to live on the road, you can just streak from town to town, ignoring most of the zombies, and bypassing whole towns if they don’t contain high value buildings. Just watch out for turrets, as the old bug where projectiles shoot through vehicles is back.
in regular evac shelter starts, i always raid the nearest town to exhaustion, pretty much looting every house, store or building for pretty much anything that might proof useful. houses have lots of diversified loot, from glass jars to atomic night lamps. having a big town with no bookstores or banks really is a spoof though… maybe i should disable the more locations mod? thoughts?
It is a bit annoying that towns have less useful buildings now that there are more mundane fluff buildings and stuff to take their place. you would think most places would at least have a few hardware or utility stores.
Yeah, I think some of the problem is just that there’s much more variety of buildings, so even large towns often don’t contain a lot of the basic ones. Do seem to be a larger proportion of houses now though - I think that could be reduced somewhat to make more room for the more interesting stuff.
Been through a LOT of basements. Seems like there the variety is a little skewed as well, with about 70% of them being weed farms.
The spawn rates though - that’s an issue. I have no problem with areas respawning - I approve in fact. But they don’t have to do it so damn fast. You run into the ‘backspawn’ problem you see in MMO’s with fast spawn rates, where the monsters respawn behind you faster than you can make progress and it turns into this Sisyphean task to move around.
It really feels like the fun part of the game doesn’t start until I find or craft the equipment I need to get going and towns are so diluted these days. Kinda starting to feel like a slog
I think I’ll do what @draghi is doing and disable any location mods I have in my worlds.
Are you guys not smashing the corpses? Most of my characters have an NPC buddy set to help smash 'em, and it’s not a problem. Just have to deal with the acid zombies they won’t smash for you.
BTW, the fastest way to safely deal with acid zombies is to (B)utcher, then dis(m)ember them. This usually takes less than a game minute and doesn’t generate acid puddles.
No the problem I’m talking about is actual new spawns in already cleared territory. Now I do of course have wandering hordes on as well because those are fun - but these appear to actually be new static spawns, and they can pop up pretty damn quickly.
I think the spontaneous spawns are a wander spawn thing. I never had that trouble when I had it off but no area can ever be called clear with wander spawns on. It’s just infinite zombie nightmare annoyance.
Must be something more recent then. It’s been a few characters since I had wander off. Once upon a time you cleared a town and the surrounding area and you weren’t woken up by spontaneous solder zombies in your bed.
Looks like realistic to me. But respawning seems to work (didn’t read the code) only before town is completely cleared. After clearing a town approximately 10x10 nearby my base in one playthrough I don’t remember seeing any respawns for many weeks with wander spawns enabled.
Yeah, wander spawns is not supposed to generate new zombies out of thin air, they have to be picked up off the map and moved from somewhere else. I’m not sure what’s happening that people are having hordes pop up behind them.
Yeah, static re-spawns are totally fine in concept. The issue is more one of frequency and density.
I can clear a series of intersections in a city center of all (un)life, go to work on a vehicle nearby for a day or two and re-scout the same area and find multiple packs of 20-50 zombies re-inhabiting the same area already. It’s kind of obnoxious.
It’d be fine if it was just a handful of new zeds popping up, or if I was coming back a week or two later to find major spawns - but no, give it a couple days and there will often be full heavy spawns with high level crap in it like hulks, incandescents, and predators, so having to re-clear every couple days is a major PITA.
They don’t appear to be wandering hordes, as they don’t get horde markers on the map, and they don’t move much other than to chase stuff around.
Wandering hordes sweeping through I’m totally fine with, as you can see them approaching on the overmap and either decide to confront them or skirt around and let them pass by - because they are a mobile phenomena that you can see at distance, they’re much more dynamic and interesting to interact with.
I don’t know much about zombies’ spawn in terms of cities but I’m sure that tiny hordes sometimes aren’t ‘marked’ on the map and they’re really wander around. I live in my log cabin and sometimes I have to deal with unwanted visitors (2-3 zombies). In most cases, I go to my hidden improvised shelter that is located in the thick forest and wait there 2-3 days. After that, those 2-3 zombies are gone. I know that it is strange to run away from 2-3 zombies but I don’t want to die due to an infection
