Zombears

Hello, my character is a naturalistic type, and uses a short bow in combination with a knife.
I find that disposing of zombears is a quite risky business, often leading to crippling my character for a day or two after the fight, not even my base defense longbow with my best arrows has enough power to take those suckers down before they get to me, I have no firearms, nor any want of them.
Is there any way to kill them more quickly with a bow and arrow? Also, they appear to spawn even though I have static spawns on, yes I do butcher the corpses, leading me to think that they are treated as natural animals, even though (perhaps unsuprisingly) animal empathy doesn’t seem to do anything on them. They spawn as fast as my character can kill them, is there a way to slow down their spawn rate?

On killing them, My knife seems effective but the z-bear always gets in enough hits to seriously hurt my poor character before I kill it. I am quite afraid of losing this character because I’ve spent a lot of time on it and am midway through building a house, though z-bears make the process slow.

Any help on this subject is welcome, as I don’t know what other options there are.

Get bow

Kite to a bush while firing at it (Unnecessary, but it’ll help)

Wait until bear/mob is in bush

Set the bush on fire

Hit monster/bear until it dies.

Simple!

Didn’t think of setting a bush on fire, will try it.

Longbows are an ok weapon for archers, but as you’ve experienced, they really don’t get the job done against larger targets, especially bears. Given your self-imposed limitations, your best bet is to supplement your archery with traps, such as snares and the aforementioned fires.

I personally find zombified wildlife in general to be really annoying. Especially since they spawn dynamicly on static mode.
While I wouldn’t mind them occasionly spawning, the spawnrate seems to be out of control at times.

Which today led to both the most lucky and unluckiest character so far. Who found a baseball bat and a military jacket right outside the evac shelter in a crate.
Only to be instantly overrun by 7 zolves a few minutes after. Even though a formidable fighter, capable of defeating these zolves. he was too weakened to defeat the second wave of another 4 zolves, and perished on his first day.

[code]In memory of: Vidya
"No way"

He was a male Novice Martial Artist when the apocalypse began.
He died on Autumn of year 1, day 1, at 10:51:06AM.
He was killed in a field in the wilderness.

Kills:
w - 7 zolves
Z - 1 tough zombie
Total kills: 8[/code]

Anyway, in your case. I’d recommend that you make a few traps (spiked pit) around your base as extra defence.
In addition, you could perhaps make a knife spear to improve your ability to fight melee.

With a line of pits (spiked or no), you should be able to kite-kill any number of Zombears.

Get a good melee weapon (check pawn shops), practice on zombies a bit, then just murder the zombears in close combat.

Schools are a particularly good place for grinding your melee skills. Sure, you might feel bad about the first hundred zombie children, but after that it stops being a problem.