PC I need someone to reliably explain Horde Night, and how it works VS how it should work
- Thread starter Worrun
- Start date
Laz Man
Fun Pimps Staff
Bloodmoons in general are a measure if a player (or group of players) has used their time wisely to prepare for survival. On Dedicated MP PVE (Coop) servers not so much because those who play less end off on depending on those who play more (e.g. items, horde base, etc.)
To offset this, the devs changed the difficulty of a bloodmoon based on individual player gamestages and whether they are in a party or not. Some server owners end up modifying this calculation as they find the ramped up difficulty still too punishing.
Lastly, blood moon hordes doesnt really offer players any rewards different outside of normal gameplay aside from saying "They survived." This is especially the case for demolishers that only show up in blood moon hordes somewhere around game stage ~150 .
After that point, there isnt much more incentive for groups do do blood moons. Mods will need to fill in that gap until the devs further develop the game.
To offset this, the devs changed the difficulty of a bloodmoon based on individual player gamestages and whether they are in a party or not. Some server owners end up modifying this calculation as they find the ramped up difficulty still too punishing.
Lastly, blood moon hordes doesnt really offer players any rewards different outside of normal gameplay aside from saying "They survived." This is especially the case for demolishers that only show up in blood moon hordes somewhere around game stage ~150 .
After that point, there isnt much more incentive for groups do do blood moons. Mods will need to fill in that gap until the devs further develop the game.
Boidster
New member
64 is not a hard-coded max, it's only a default and only for dedicated servers. In SP the default is 60 (which explains my results above). In a single-player game you can use 'sg MaxSpawnedZombies 90', for example, to increase it to 90. For dedicated server, it's <property name="MaxSpawnedZombies" value="64" />. Change it to whatever the server and clients can handle.
I just re-did my GS232 test from above after upping MaxSpawnedZombies to 90 and as expected I got the maxAlive count of 72 for that GS (instead of the 60 spawns I got first time around, when it was still set at the default). One died, one replaced it - always exactly 72 horde zombies alive.
I think you have confused it with "num". The maxAlive setting in gamestages.xml defines the maximum alive at any one time during the wave, not how many will be in the wave. So the wave might contain 500 zombies (the "num=500" parameter), but only 100 will be alive at once (maxAlive=100). The "wave" will just keep coming, one dies, one to replace it, with 100 zombies alive until all 500 in the wave have been spawned. Or until the wave timer runs out and the next wave begins (after a delay).
This is true if you don't change the MaxSpawnedZombies setting. It is not hard-coded. The maximum number of zombies you will see at any one time on horde night is the lesser of these:
MaxSpawnedZombies [note this includes any existing natural spawned zombies - the horde will wait for space below this cap before spawning new zombies]
or
BloodMoonEnemyCount x #Players
or
maxAlive x #Players
All of these parameters are changeable. I tested several different permutations and the above rule held true as far as I could tell.
Last edited by a moderator:
Boidster
New member
No kidding, huh? The actual BM spawning mechanism isn't that complicated, but it gets complicated by game-wide limits (MaxSpawnedZombies) as well as per-player limits (BloodMoonEnemyCount) outside of the BM spawning system.Seeing all you game veterans discuss the matter has really made me feel a bit better about not understanding this clearly overcomplicated system
To just understand the mechanics, assume an infinitely-powerful computer, with MaxSpawnedZombies=9999 and BloodMoonEnemyCount=9999. Otherwise known as "Come At Me Bro" settings. With those assumptions, the explanation given above by Roland covers it.
- Based on your GS, you will get a certain number of 'waves' which each have a timer (in game hours)
- Each wave has a 'bucket' of zombies it wants to throw at you (the 'num' parameter)
- Each wave has its own per-player limit of how many it will throw at you at one time (the 'maxAlive' parameter)
- As you kill zombies, more are taken from the bucket to keep the total at the maxAlive number (x the # of players)
- If you kill the entire bucket, the next wave starts (after a short delay)
- If you don't kill the entire bucket before the wave's timer runs out, the next wave starts (after a short delay)
- After the 'normal' waves there may be a trickle of one zombie per player every minute to annoy you until 4AM
- As GS goes up, both the bucket size and the maxAlive will go up (also the difficulty of the zombies in each wave of course)
Last edited by a moderator:
Roland
Moderator
Asmolicious
New member
So after reading this, turns out bloodmoon hordes arent supposed to last the entire night... Am playing coop, with only one other person, Night 7 was easy, and wasnt 'endless' but night 14 and onwards we fought from sunset till sunrise. Pretty much all settings are vanilla, like the zombie count for the blood moon. I guess we are just killing em too slowly. We arent building those 'zombie killing bases' that are the meta like the pyramid towers with murder holes. We build a normal base, and fight on the walls/the field arround the base. Dunno if its the intended way but fighting the whole night *Is* Exhausting yeah. Its noticeable we are working through waves, as spawning in one direction stops and they come from another. But it does feel endless. since by daybreak there tend to be 10+ alive still.
Laz Man
Fun Pimps Staff
It certainly can feel overwhelming at first and honestly I think that's the point. Can the player make enough preparations and not be overwhelmed/exhausted? Mileage of course will vary from player to player on the feel.
For myself, it's all about having the horde last until 4am. If they stop coming before that it's usually because my killing efficiency is too good and/or my bloodmoon max alive setting is too high.
In my last SP playthrough, I stopped increasing my BM count at 16 as that was the sweet spot for me to have them come all night.
Asmolicious
New member
Its for sure fun and an adrenaline rush to go out in the middle of the horde, the other player tends to stay up on the wall and shoot from there, while im in the middle of the horde with my shotgun. Often narrowly dodging demo zombies and that endless amount of puke from the puking vultures. We had 5 rows thick spikes of mixed iron and wood, re-arming and repairing Feels kinda too expensive with how much damage the horde does. theyre blowing through reinforced concrete like a bowling ball through tissue paper. (again vanilla settings) Guess we have to change our strategy to cheese, cause the legit way is very very punishing, and thats on vanilla + adventurer difficulty, and we havent even reached the apex night of 49, after wich itll reset to the difficulty of 7 and ramp up again IF i understood the wiki right
To exhaust the hordes even in early nights you have to herd them together and kill them fast which expends a lot of ammo. Running around with a shogun in the field? Probably already too slow. In SP I often play agility builds where damage on horde night isn't my biggest suit. So I never try to exhaust the horde anyway but to slow them down.
You don't need cheese, but there are more than one way to beat the horde:
The longer they need to reach your walls the more time you have to kill the ones standing at your wall. And the less crowd-bonus they get. Barbed wire is VERY effective at this. Simple rows of (even cobblestone or wood) blocks in their way where they have to jump up and down again are very effective. Funnels with concentrated automatic firepower helps a lot to give you some breathing space. Unskilled INT turrets don't do much damage but their stagger effect also gives you time.
It also is often better to ignore single weak zombies and concentrate on the hard hitters, glowies and especially groups of zombies. You do know that zombies in a crowd do more damage, right? Giving them the opportunity to crowd together is what you have to prevent.
hiemfire
New member
"At 0400 the Blood Moon Horde will end and all Blood Moon-spawned zombies will die."
? Not from what I've seen happen. You still have to "clean up" the remnant unless you die, then the game takes care of it.
Asmolicious
New member
the horde mechanics page has a whole bit about the blood moon horde.
Oooh okay thank you. And no i had no clue that the more of them in a crowd the more damage they do, we didnt have anything with electricity sadly, i made stuff, but wiring it up opened the console and filled me with errors. so we left that by the roadside and just went on to try other stuff, Also noticed that shooting demos on their green button is a good idea when theyre in crowds, they cant run that far before blowing up, usualy taking a chunk of the horde with them. But its a nono when they get close. I was having the idea of just camping out the blood moon horde for a week or two somewhere else while gathering resources and build up the defences. Its good for identifying weakspots though, seeing where they all go. Always a lot to learn so again thanks :3
Boidster
New member
Yeah I saw that. It was talking about "carrying meat" and its effect on the horde. I will go clean up that page also. Thanks.
Let me double-check that then. It was not something I tested directly, but was a remembrance of past horde nights. Or...a hallucination.
Thanks for the feedback!
Edit - can any of you with a completely vanilla game open your console and type 'gg', then tell me what the MaxSpawnedZombies setting is? I don't believe I have ever set that value directly for single-player (it is not in the menus, must be set in console) and for me it was set to 60.
But that seems...weird, since the dedicated server default is 64. I'm thinking maybe I did something at some point in the distant past to set it to 60?
Last edited by a moderator:
Boidster
New member
hiemfire
New member
FileMachete
New member
Fwiw I checked and mine is set to 60 as well. But I'm running SimpleUI-BiggerBackpack and my own modlet that touches a few Items. Nothing that _should_ change MaxS... but who knows
Note the wiki is partly outdated and also has a lot of stuff about earlier alphas. Though there was some effort to update it lately, I think.
Usually electricity is not prone to errors. I fear for your save game. Make regular backups of it.
And maybe throw away any of the items you used when you got the error and replace them from the creative menue. Then go somewhere a few 100 meters away from your horde base and try a simple setup. It should work, there and in your horde base. If not, make a picture of your electric setup and post it and your logfile to the "general support" section. Someone might make some sense of the error message.
Last edited by a moderator:
hiemfire
New member
Liesel Weppen
New member
No, after reading that you should understand that the horde has a finite amount of enemies. However the (default) configuration of bloodmoon at higher gamestages throws that many Zs on you, that it becomes nearly impossible to kill all of them before the night ends.
So the numbers in the settings look like the bloodmoon is not supposed to be cleared before morning.
The above example throws 1500 Zs in total during one bloodmoon on you. Assuming default setting of 60min days and night from 22 to 04 the bloodmoon night lasts 15min, aka 900 seconds. Without taking any spawning delays into account you'll have to kill at least 1.6666 zombies per second, if you want to kill the whole horde until end of bloodmoon on point! If you want to complete the horde even earlier, you have to kill even more Zs per second. I guess those numbers are obviously not choosen to be fought off before morning...
As said many times before, the goal is not to beat the horde, but to survive the night. If you want to have the same Zs at the same difficulty according to your gamestage with the same amount of Zs in parallel but lower overall amount for being able to kill all of them early in the night, you have to change all the num-values in your gamestage.xml.