Zombies run towards sound. If you nailed/surgeried headphones on/into a zombie and made them play sound as if its in front it would run forward. With some fiddling you should be able to make zombie run wherever you want it to.
Requirements: headphones, cable, smartphone for the zombie, another smartphone or laptop for you to control it. Skill requirements similar to zombie slave ones + computer skill.
Usage example: kill a zombie, rig the RC headphone kit on it, wait till it revives, make it run into hostiles repeatedly and fight for you, sneak in to swap battery on the smartphone when its dead. Since dying and reviving makes zombies evolve you’ll eventually have an armored hulk at your beck and call. Just make sure to keep away from it while its alive.
Other usage examples:
-zombie treadmill power generation
-blindfolded zombies pulled chariot
-zombie herding if you make them play loud sounds while running around
Yea I remember zlaves, very powerful early game storage that follows you around. However due to the argument about zombies healing over time the zlave concept falls apart, you can’t reallistically keep zlave indefinitely as something sharp will eventually grow on it and allow it to kill you.
In my current example nothing particularly gets damaged, zombie doesnt get completely controlled by you as its other senses still work and it will kill you if you get within its eyesight. It is also established that zombies are dumb enough to get easily baited into talking dolls and working motors of the cars, headset is just a way of granting you a more precise control over it. Having an expensive scout that doesnt get attacked by zombies on sight has some pretty great, if niche, applications.
This is still pretty dependent on very specific cartoon logic, and also pretty much undermines every single non-blob faction, especially the Exodii, if zombies could so easily be turned into net-useful tools. It paints everyone as fools who just couldn’t think of this idea.
Considering that zombies are well established as “adaptively stupid” all this would likely lead to is zombies that ignore sounds entirely, not remote controlled allies of any fashion.
Well mycus does subvert zombies, triffids dont really need to, Exodii might have reasons to not use zombies like fear of attracting blob attention or their high end stuff being more cost effective. Maybe blob evolves some EM wave sensitive stuff to sense where headphone signal originates and tracks you down.
I cant see why some bandit faction cant set up zombie treadmill power generators though, zombies siphon free energy from blob and it should be a cheaper and more scalable solution to power generation than solar panels, even if with some detriments like attracting zombie hordes or zombies evolving into super fast runners and breaking out.
My point is that short term, its reasonable. It should work. Its safe. It should be reasonably easy to implement, even. Long term repercussions of remote controlled zombie are well, debatable.
Well, if you can’t see why a zombie wouldn’t just stand there and start trying to smash up the wheel rather than walking constantly in the right direction, I’m probably not going to get through with descriptions of existing zombie behavior.
Well your more than welcome to propose it as an idea/issue on the github, although I doubt this reasoning will convince any of the other floating contributors that this is worth putting down their pet projects for and making instead. You’re more likely to see success and engagement by building it and putting a pull request through, and then iterating on any feedback for it to be merged.
Well, if you can’t see why a zombie wouldn’t just stand there and start trying to smash up the wheel rather than walking constantly in the right direction, I’m probably not going to get through with descriptions of existing zombie behavior.
I’m not talking about the wheel/treadmill literally, I’m talking figuratively as a device that turns biological motion into energy. Something like a big empty liquid tank turned into a hamster wheel. They cant smash it (unless evolved), liquid tanks are several cm thick. All they gotta do is walk and make it turn around.
They don’t have to successfully smash it - Zombies are braindead stupid, they will just keep bashing. Thats sorta the problem with it, they’re more likely to be wailing on shit ceaselessly than trying to move around without seeing anything to move to. We already see how easily they take offense to the car they stumble into and proceed to beat into scrap metal.