I played Project Zomboid few days ago and i was suprised how dangerous are the zombies with acute hearing. This feature not just missing from the CDDA, but our zombies are so ignorant to sounds, this severly hampering their dangerousness in the game.
Every time i make a loud noise they ignore it or - seemingly - aware of it just for few turns only. In an older release i shot zombies with gun in a FEMA camp and the soldiers in the nearly tent made some noises but never came out.
Now i hit dozens of zombies with a loud truck in the Research Facility, there are zombie cries, sound of crashes and shreading car parts, but the other zombies not far away just don’t give a damn. They act perfectly fine when they see me, some zombies even follows other zombies to me (i see the exclamation mark on the leading ones), but they are almost totally oblivious to non-continuous(?) loud noises.
I think it is a big problem. Hearing range should be larger also zombies should be much more persistent to investigate noises.
Now, i think about it, i was never discovered by zombies by hearing when i looted a house, not even when i made noises like climbing on furnitures or put away items. The only exceptions when i purposely smashed fridges or walls. This alone makes the looting much more easier.
Also, i think they are too passive, i can sleep in a house while zombies outside. They come in if they can smell me, but they never wandering in accidently. At least this was my experience with them in the past, i didn’t do it in the recent past.
Edit: zombie security guards thump to lure other zombies to the player, also useless.
I think folks are generally aware of this. Fixes to horde behaviour are planned but take a backseat to other stuff for this version at least. I’m hoping evolution and zombie behaviour might be the big thing after 0.E releases
the zombies appearing out of thin air after you cleaned out a place are related to noise i think so at least they can do that haha my god that is so annoying i recently made a base inside a research facility in the middle of nowhere and every once in a while new zombies spawn in the courtyard after yet another round of clearing the ground floor. like where are they even coming from lol
I think you’ll find you’re massively underestimating them. From what i’ve seen the zeds can hear you before you even know they’re there and I’ve had numerous occasions where I round a corner only to find a door smash open and 3 fast zombies jump out.
Plus its coded into the game that zombies will ignore noises from other zombies with the exception of screamers. otherwise it’d make a feedback loop of zombies following eachothers footsteps.
And even if they were pretty oblivious its to balance out some of the more deadly mobs. Can you imagine how lethal grabbers or ferals to unkitted survivors would be if they were more attentive?
Plus dead people aren’t exactly known for being the brightest bulb in the shed, so you could forgive their short term memory.
I’d say zomboid probably spoiled you into expecting every corpse to be able to hear a fart in the next town over
That’s never happened to me and i don’t think this should happen anyway. Hordes are enabled? Z-levels? Maybe they wandering into your base from other levels?
They ambush you if they was close anyway (like in a next room) and you made noises or they smell you. Also they moving into your direction for a while if they saw you before. But they react to a noise only for a short time.
I don’t want PZ type zombies, but when other zombies don’t react as i violently hit dozen of zombies with a noisy truck, that is bad. Really, if i shout or honk a car horn zombies barely react.
Zombies are dangerous in mass group. If their reaction to the noises would be just as good as when they see us - if they would be more persistent -, they would be fine. Now the only noise which really get their attention is a car bashing zombie, because it makes a loud continuous noise, so they slowly attracted to it.
Zomboid didn’t spoiled me, i just played few hours and realized the CDDA zombies terribly indifferent to the noises .
I found that the hearing system is not very helpful to the zombies.
Specifically, when I made the brainless series of zombies, I gave them very bad sight but good hearing. As such, even if you were only a few tiles away, they basically never tracked you. Eventually, their sight was bumped up to compensate for this.
There are also examples from my own gameplay. Oh, there’s a shocker? Let’s move up the road and fire our shotgun. What? That didn’t draw its attention AT ALL? Oh, there’s an apartment full of zombies. Let’s go a few tiles away, outside, and shout a few times. What? They’re not reacting to that in any way? Ah . . .
A (regulated)feedback loop would make a great focal point for insane horde groupings though.
Someone crashes a car or shoots a gun and that leads to a days or weeks long buildup of zeds thrashing around eachother in a nightmarish mosh-pit that reduces every vehicle and buiilding to rubble that eventual dispurses when the only sounds left are flesh smacking against flesh.
Would need some checks to make sure you couldn’t just cheese things by ramming a truck into a house to draw the whole city to that one point and then loot unopposed forever
Just play with wander spawns. If that’s not enough, bump up the spawn rate.
Also, it sort of does make sense that zombies have a short attention span. It could also just be the blob’s behavior to ignore sounds unless it is close.
I’ve used noise to draw zombies out of a valuable building before via horde mechanics. (This was like a year ago.) Park about three tiles away and make a lot of noise, and they move up onto the overmap, shuffle on over towards you, and pop into the reality bubble nearby.
My experience was that duration is better than volume, but ideally you want both, and you have to wait a while. It took most of the day to lure and kill and smash, and to be mostly certain no more were coming , but when I went up to the building (hospital IIRC) it had only three or four Zs inside, and nothing was smashed since they all left while it was unloaded.
