Red and Orange Skulls

Lax

Scavenger
Can someone explain how the skulls work regarding difficulty? 3 Red and 2 Orange Skulls means what?
 
Orange skulls show the gamestage multiplier of the biome, and red skulls show the gamestage bonus of the POI. Two orange skulls indicate that the POI is in the snow biome, and three red skulls indicate that it is a T3 quest POI.

This video that explains gamestage was made for A21 but should be still valid

 
Just to add to that, you can just look at the total and that's basically the difficulty tier of the POI/area. Generally speaking, a POI with 3 red and 1 yellow skull would be the same difficulty as a POI with 2 red skulls and 2 yellow skulls (both a difficulty of 4). Of course, that's just a general idea. Each POI is different, and you could have a tier 4 POI that isn't difficult and is just that high because of a lot of zombies, while having a tier 2 POI that is harder because even though there are fewer zombies, they are concentrated in a tight area. And just adding the biome difficulty to a POI really just impacts game stage and not necessarily the difficulty itself. Just having higher tier zombies doesn't necessarily make a lower tier POI as difficult as a higher tier POI that doesn't have that biome difficulty. Still, you can just look at it as an estimate of difficulty by just looking at the total skulls.
 
Generally speaking, a POI with 3 red and 1 yellow skull would be the same difficulty as a POI with 2 red skulls and 2 yellow skulls (both a difficulty of 4).
Not exactly. In the first level POI you will never meet 3 zombies at the same time, in most cases they will be met one by one and in the end two will come out. And it does not matter at all where this POI is. The fact that due to the binomial the zombies will be stronger is true, but in my opinion it is better to meet 1 glowing one than 3 ordinary ones.
 
In reality, the orange skulls that indicate biome difficulty have a bigger impact.
This is because the game stage bonuses that come with biome difficulty are quite large.
 
Not exactly. In the first level POI you will never meet 3 zombies at the same time, in most cases they will be met one by one and in the end two will come out. And it does not matter at all where this POI is. The fact that due to the binomial the zombies will be stronger is true, but in my opinion it is better to meet 1 glowing one than 3 ordinary ones.
Which was why I explained that. What you quoted was "generally speaking". The following explained how that isn't exactly accurate. I put the generalization there as a way to understand that you can get a general idea of difficulty by looking at the star total.

Also, I've seen more than one zombie at a time in a tier 1. You can usually get up to around 3 at a time in a tier 1 POI. It just depends on how the POI designer decided to do things.
 
The only reasonable rule of thumb for them is: the more skulls, the harder it'll be. The tier skulls aren't interchangeable with the biome skulls, a T3 in wasteland isn't a T5 in forest.

They're a relatively useless abstraction, Tier and biome knowledge get you somewhere; but knowing your quest type effects and the actual POI itself is basically more important, but entirely skipped by the skulls.
 
I rarely if ever do Trader quests. So I spend most of my time just randomly visiting interesting looking POIs. I know for sure that the more Skulls showing means more difficult. It's the Orange Skulls and Orange half Skulls that confuse me.
 
I rarely if ever do Trader quests. So I spend most of my time just randomly visiting interesting looking POIs. I know for sure that the more Skulls showing means more difficult. It's the Orange Skulls and Orange half Skulls that confuse me.
They just indicate increased difficulty. They basically just raise the game stage. You will see more radiated, blue, and orange zombies than if you did the same POI in the forest.
 
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Red = POI tier
Orange = biome modifier

Forest = 0
Burnt = half an orange skull
Desert = 1
Snow = 1.5
Wasteland = 2

3 reds + 2 oranges = T3 POI in the wasteland

POIs you enter without any red skulls are considered "remnant" POIs, generally because it's either tiny and/or destroyed to an extent
 
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I rarely if ever do Trader quests. So I spend most of my time just randomly visiting interesting looking POIs. I know for sure that the more Skulls showing means more difficult. It's the Orange Skulls and Orange half Skulls that confuse me.
I only look at the red ones. The orange ones depend on the binomial, but the binomial I'm in is already known to me.
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Also, I've seen more than one zombie at a time in a tier 1. You can usually get up to around 3 at a time in a tier 1 POI. It just depends on how the POI designer decided to do things.
Unless at the end near the loot. Or you run quickly along it. If you walk slowly, then more than 1 will not jump out at you.
 
Unless at the end near the loot. Or you run quickly along it. If you walk slowly, then more than 1 will not jump out at you.
That depends on the POI. You can walk into a living room that has 2-3 zombies in the same sleeper volume and they can all activate and attack even if you only barely stepped into the sleeper volume. Sometimes they don't wake up when you enter the sleeper volume, but when you attack one or do something like loot something, they all will wake up.

For that matter, there was a POI added in 1.0 that was tier 1 that killed me because there was a place where you dropped down off a broken ladder into a tiny room that had 3 zombies in it who all attacked at once and I couldn't manage to get back on the ladder because they were pressing me tightly against the wall. The room was probably only about 6x6 inside the walls. That one may have been changed because others reported it here back then as being too difficult in that one room to be a tier 1, but it is a good example of them having multiple zombies in one place in a tier 1. I'd have to read through all the POI names to try to remember the name of the POI. It might have been called something like Camp something, but that was a year ago, so I can't remember for sure. That was the first POI I went into in 1.0, so having a T1 Q1 weapon and only Q1 primitive armor didn't help.
 
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