Just had a rather awesome start. 2.5 Z-Spawn (no wander spawn), 0.3 Item Spawn, NPCs, and Experimental Z-Levels. My scientist character started with an Infected start in her own home, starting the game in the garage. Usually, when doing an infected start, I try to find a First Aid Kit or Antibiotic in the starting house, then book it for the wilderness and try to find some edge places to loot. With high spawn, I try to avoid the cities, both because of the swarm of zombies, and because of the increased number of special zombies. But when I heard a turret ripping off rounds right outside the west side of the garage, I knew this one was going to be a bit different.
On the bright side, I had spawned near the city’s edge. On the flip side, I also had the luck of spawning right next to a police roadblock, with a child-zombie-infested house nearby. Every zombie within a block radius was instantly homing in on my house, and some quick curtain checks confirmed what I had suspected; I was surrounded on all but my southwest side. I was only able to arm myself with a makeshift crowbar, drop off my chemistry set, and start a chat with my starting NPC, Clay Land.
Mercifully, the RNG did cut me a couple breaks. First, assuming we both somehow managed to survive, I agreed to kill his zombified mother; in return, he gave me a set of First Aid Kits. That’s the infection down. And second, Clay Land had a gun. Admittedly, it was a .22 Rifle, but hey, it beats harsh language. Unfortunately, getting out wasn’t going to be easy. I attempted to make my break for freedom, but it got cut short; after stepping out, I found out there was a shocker zombie and a couple of zombie dogs to the north. In good condition, I could beat 'em in a sprint (Quick), but the pain from the infection (plus some rather ridiculous windchill, enough to plummet several bodyparts down to Very Cold-levels) meant they’d catch me. Either the zombie dogs would catch me and force me to fight those off, or the shocker zombie would paralyze me. Either way, it’d give time for the other zombies to move in for the kill.
I couldn’t think of a way to get past them, and it was pretty much looking like this character wasn’t making it past brunch. So I figure, if I’m going down, let’s go down in style. I step into their line of sight, then retreat back into the house. The NW exit was actually almost perfect in this regard; it was a single door that served as a beautiful chokepoint; the only problem was the glass wall nearby, but most of the zombies were coming from the roadblock to the west, and thus straight at the door (the entire west side of the house was a wall, other than that door). I readied my crowbar; let’s do this.
My role in the battle was initially just backing Clay up; my character had zero combat skills (including zero dodge), so Clay initially took the brunt of it. He used his rifle to shoot down the zombies coming through the door, while I alternated between whacking anything that closed with him and engaging the ones that went through the glass wall (or which flanked us from behind, coming through the windows). But it wasn’t going to be that easy; the aforementioned Shocker showed up pretty quick, with an entourage of spitter and acidic zombies. Clay gunned down the Shocker with it only getting a single shot off, but the spitters quickly started wearing us down; poor Clay flat out had his legs melted off from all the acid getting flung around, but that didn’t stop him, as he ventilated zombie after zombie. But while we were taking heavy damage (my pain was redlining at about 45; and thanks to the earlier-mentioned Zombie Children, morale was plummeting), there was some more luck as well; one firefighter zombie was carrying a Halligan Bar, which I promptly grabbed, and another had a nail gun; with all the furniture damage, nails weren’t in horribly short supply. My character quickly made use of both, popping off a couple nails at approaching zombies before finishing them with a Halligan beatdown. Meanwhile, despite running out of bullets, Clay continued to dominate by switching to the best weapon he had: a bottle of non-drowsy cough syrup. I’m not entirely sure how one wields cough syrup in battle, but Clay was apparently very well-practiced in the art, bashing undead heads in faster than I could with my super-sized crowbar.
Just let that mental picture sit for a minute: A man in tattered clothing, covered in HUNDREDS of scratch and bite wounds, with his legs MELTED OFF, leaping into battle against a horde of ravenous undead and bringing down his holy instrument of smiting, a plastic bottle of non-drowsy cough syrup, onto the unsuspecting skull of whatever zombie was unfortunate enough to be his first victim. Forget bionic and mutant super-soldiers; THIS guy is the definition of a cataclysm survivor.
Meanwhile, while Clay acted out the world’s most badass Dayquil commercial, I decided to slip around. The horde was ebbing, and I wanted to see how many stragglers we had left to deal with; I would’ve thought that the turrets outside would’ve cut a good deal of them down before succumbing, so I was actually surprised at just how many we had to deal with. I step around the corner… just in time to see a Zombie Necromancer meandering toward our battle. Crap. That’s why.
Falling back, I polished off the last ones directly engaging Clay, then started smashing corpses. Luckily, the acid the spitters had been flinging around had a fortunate side-effect: a lot of the corpses had been melted. But I wasn’t quite fast enough; zombie children started to get revived. Letting Clay take them on, I charged the necromancer. Firing a few rounds from my nailgun, I then closed and started smashing the damned thing while it kept trying to revive everything around it. Thankfully, it went down quick, and the revived zombies were damaged enough to join it in short order.
All total, the fight lasted from Late Morning until about Noon. I had torso and right leg in the red, pain hovering at 40, and my zombie infanticide left my morale at -238 (thank God Clay had some Prozac on him). Meanwhile, Clay… well, look for yourself. And this is after he applied some medical gear on himself.
Here’s the aftermath, from inside and outside the hourse. This was taken near the end of the day, since I didn’t think to grab screenshots while it was happening.
