I thought I was doing pretty good at keeping quiet and had a privacy fence all around the house with all the curtains closed, and had just started preparations to turn it into a safehouse, but still for some reason after a couple hours a bunch of zombies attacked the fences to come after me. What attracted them? Is this because wander spawns can be kind of buggy, or is it because of scent? Just how many squares does scent work anyways? does any noise (like footsteps) attract hordes or do only a certain volume pull hordes?
Closing curtains, opening and closing doors makes a lot of noise as well, so probably one of the zombies was within “earshot” of anything you did, then they bashed against something and that noise attracted others - that or maybe a wild animal brought them to you.
Idk what triggers Wandering Spawns, I have that buggy mess turned off ever since I started having random zombies just dropping through Z-levels in Labs.
There’s an option to see your scent cloud, but if you have your windows and doors closed, “technically” the scent shouldn’t go outside.
Scent can “travel” multiple overmap squares (depending on wind) and draw in monsters and hordes.
Closed windows just “reduce” the amount of smell that pass through them, not eliminate it. You’ll have to tape them to make sure that no scent can go through them.
This also means that a horde that randomly comes by your house will smell you and try to brake into your house.
And since scent does hang around for a bit (unless it rains), Zombies and other monsters will smash down windows to get into a house even if you’re no longer in it…
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I never really considered that scent would linger in game. I understand why, just never thought about it. It makes me wonder if there could be a craft able item made to draw or bait zombies to a specific location. Say, instead of scent building up from staying in one spot, when your character is moderately fatigued or more (whatever level you’d be perspiring) you could use a rag or towel to mop up the sweat. That could be placed somewhere you -want- to draw the zombies toward such as a minefield or sets of traps/pits.
That would be great and was probably also one of the underlaying ideas of butchery refuse (given the description).
However, last I’ve checked (which is quite some time ago), butchery refuse did not give off any smell and did not attract Zombies in any provable way.
I’m not sure if this was not coded in because of time restrictions, or because the frame for it is missing (as in, only characters can give off smell).
I’m not sure if it changed with the introduction of activity levels, but I think it used to be constant (no matter what activity, you were giving off smell at a fixed rate).