The main reason it it requires a base design that needs to withstand a full nights onslaught every session.
Not true. Nothing about the game forces you to build a base. You can use a POI, or you can fight out in the open.
I'd much rather know I can exhaust a horde quickly with a bare bones base and still survive.
Then turn down night length so you can survive more easily, or turn of blood moons if you're struggling too much.
That to me feel like a lot more freedom and creativity in base design.
Now we get stuck with multi layered sideways catwalk doorway metas. It feel like base design is pretty much bottlenecked into something like that.
Not true. Nothing about this game forces you to make horde bases like that. It's just an option if you enjoy that kind of base.
It would be cool if I COULD just build a 100 meter long hallway lined with cobble stone and line it with wood spikes killing the entire horde as they tried to get to me that way. Sure it's not exciting, but it's the freedom to build a base without resulting to the meta tropes we all know now.
If you think it's cool, then do it. Nobody is stopping you.
How do you keep hordes/bloodmoon's interesting?
Do you move your base to each new biome?
Do you stick to one horde base and build upon it for each Bloodmoon?
I just do whatever feels fun at the time, and a lot of the time that is just picking a POI at the last minute to fight in. Other times I build a dedicated horde base in the biome I want to fight in (usually either forest or wasteland, depending on how I'm feeling). Sometimes I just fight out in the open on foot.
The part that is really dragging down the fun is the time investment in a horde base. I don't want to keep recreating it because of the time/resource investment once I move to a new biome,
Then don't rebuild a horde base if it's not enjoyable. Do what is enjoyable for you. Only you know what that is. Other people can give suggestions, such as "turn off blood moon", or "use a POI", or "fight on foot", or "go back to your original horde base", or "just build a new horde base", or whatever, but ultimately it's up to you to decide what's enjoyable for you.
If you build something with enough layers, and your max horde is set to 8 for single player, 60min days, you can easily just sit inside a cube of cobble stone and wait until morning and then go out and kill the only 8 that spawned. My last horde night on day 14 my base was about to be destroyed at 2:30am and I bailed and hopped onto my bike and realized I can out run them without sprinting and cheesed it all the way until morning (default game settings)
If you're going to not engage with blood moon, why even enable it? You could just as easily turn it off.
The potential damage to your base goes up drastically if you are dealing with exploding enemies or enemies that can vomit/destroy blocks at range. This is a totally different type of horde experience that is dictated by speed to kill. Killing enemies quickly is actually increasing the total difficulty when it should diminish your potential damage/difficulty.
If you find the game too difficult, and you're not enjoying it, turn the difficulty down, or disable blood moons. You have permission. It's literally a game for enjoying. Do what you enjoy.
You can't cheese that if your horde is set for x total.
You can't sit in a shell of cobble stone until morning. You can't ride your bike until dawn and kill a single wave because that total is coming until exhausted.
You've got it totally backwards. By "sitting out" horde night and not engaging with it, you're essentially playing as if you've got blood moons disabled, but you're still wasting 15 minutes of sitting afk in your base. That isn't what I'd call "cheesing", that's you choosing to waste 15 minutes of your life for no reason. Literally the opposite of cheesing, if I'm honest. Cheesing is abusing a mechanic to advantage yourself, but in your example you're not giving yourself any advantage.
I like to play on 2hr days when I play solo to give me enough time for base building, but the 30min of straight enemies is just like you said tedious and feel like such a grind.
60min is just not enough time to really make a proper horde base unless you dedicate a full day to gather resources and close to a full day of building. It cuts your questing down drastically.
If that's how you feel, simply set your day length to 60 mins and blood moon every 14 days, or set day length to 120 mins and night to 21 hours. Simple math.
Ya, the Bloodmoon is great. I love the concept. The way that you make it harder for yourself by killing zombies quickly is a bad implementation of difficulty based on your gamestage. That is what frustrates me the most as a solo player.
I think maybe you misunderstand how the game works. You don't just "progress blood moon difficulty" by killing enemies during blood moon. You progress difficulty by leveling up. What you're describing is that, you purposefully want to level up as slowly as you can, so your blood moons are as easy as possible... That means less looting, less building, less crafting, less killing, less quests, less trading... Because these things give you exp... And exp leads to levels... So to min-max your strategy of staying low-level, just... Afk and don't play the game... That's essentially what you're leaning towards.
When you look at those two examples, the difficulty increases the better you are doing. You are better off building slow to destroy bases than fast kill bases early on. It's a better implementation of resources until you have a ton of traps.
Not true. The "difficulty" doesn't increase the "better you are doing", it's just that killing zombies allows more to spawn. Your reward for killing zombies faster, is that you have more zombies to kill. Blood moon is like a bonus level, and you get a limited amount of time to kill as many enemies as you can.
