PC A20 impressions - lots of good, lots of "it's still not improved since forever?"

[meganoth]

I got the 2.9 days from the respawn delay mistakingly thinking it was when the game did garbage cleanup.

Though I will say I strictly restart the game every hour. I close the game and reopen it at 04:00 each day and I've never once encountered spawns being reduced.

This game is one of the most unoptimized messes I've played (along with Ark and fragmented) so I go out of my way to make things run as perfectly as possible. 

I've made previous threads on this forum about animals not spawning and I've still never seen a deer in A19.6 aside from the first 5 minutes of a new world. Every other animal is plentiful though, and they've never had issues with my daily restarts.

Besides, it takes 15 seconds to load a world. It's not that time consuming or difficult to do.

Edit: One gripe for me is that I'll tell everyone to restart their game every in-game hour and start exploring, but I have yet for anyone to actually give it a go for 7 days and see if they have different results after they encounter issues. If it does actually fix things more than I know then it's more information we can relay to TFP.

Well, it takes multiple hours of constrained testing (i.e. do the same tasks of 2-4 real-time hours length in the same world at the same internal time twice) to test your theory without other factors weighing in. I wouldn't do that unpayed.

Even if that restart does anything it would be like the horde night restart on relog. Sure, it prevents the first horde nights stopping early, but that stopping is intentional. It would only be a bug if the stopping were even earlier than planned. And in this case it is expected as well, that less zombies spawn in explored areas (until respawn which happens after 7 days).

Sadly environmental zombie spawns seem not to get listed in the logfile. If they were we could have generated statistics simply by counting those lines in normal logfiles.

 

[Spatch]

My $0.02 regarding the running around during horde night - I find it a little disingenuous, by the defenders of this strategy, to state "why not?".  In two posts above, the defense was essentially "why shouldn't the player be able to, if they want to?".  So where was that defense when some of us liked to dig deep underground bases and crouch in fear during horde night?  Where was that defense when some of us liked to ride our mini-bikes around during horde night? 

TFP should be consistent - either make it where players can play how they like on horde night in every different way they want, or make it where they are forced to get battered by the horde.

So I agree with the OP on this point - it shouldn't be possible, if TFP makes it not possible for other play styles on horde night, to run around and survive a horde.  But my solution wouldn't be to nerf that ability, my solution would be to bring back other ways of surviving.  Heat-seeking vultures?  Nope - no more!  Digging zombies that can dig down to me at bedrock?  Nope - no more!

 

[meganoth]

My $0.02 regarding the running around during horde night - I find it a little disingenuous, by the defenders of this strategy, to state "why not?".  In two posts above, the defense was essentially "why shouldn't the player be able to, if they want to?".  So where was that defense when some of us liked to dig deep underground bases and crouch in fear during horde night?  Where was that defense when some of us liked to ride our mini-bikes around during horde night? 

TFP should be consistent - either make it where players can play how they like on horde night in every different way they want, or make it where they are forced to get battered by the horde.

So I agree with the OP on this point - it shouldn't be possible, if TFP makes it not possible for other play styles on horde night, to run around and survive a horde.  But my solution wouldn't be to nerf that ability, my solution would be to bring back other ways of surviving.  Heat-seeking vultures?  Nope - no more!  Digging zombies that can dig down to me at bedrock?  Nope - no more!

They are consistent, No defense without effort. As I said fighting the horde running takes skill, you are active, burning ammo and buff food. Sitting in an underground base or simply driving away is not.

Now just running straight without combat at all would be the same category as driving around and if at all possible should be countered by the game.

 

[Roland]

So where was that defense when some of us liked to dig deep underground bases and crouch in fear during horde night?  Where was that defense when some of us liked to ride our mini-bikes around during horde night? 

Who is stopping you from doing those things?  Why not try all three activities…

Spend horde night in a bedrock base,

Drive around during horde night,

Run around in a field during horde night, 

…and report back which required the least amount of skill to survive. 

 

[just.dont]

So you never have to fight more than 1 zombie at a time but they're popping in around you constantly? I think there is a bit of a contradiction there...haha.  I only notice zombies popping in when I am driving fast in a vehicle. On foot I haven't experienced it in a long time. Oh I know they are spawning in within about 30-40 blocks around me but I don't see them materializing right before my eyes when I am moving at foot speed. I don't remember the game ever having persistent hordes or wilderness spawns that just moved around the map and came from far away. Back when we had the minimap and radar you could see their blips popping into exisistence and then moving towards you.

First of all - no, there isn't any contradiction here. The amounts of zombies that can be spawned at once are very limited (for quite a while), so given the time required for zombies to aggro and come towards you - it's exactly that. You're not fighting more than only a few at a time. And then again, when new ones will spawn after you killed the previous. And again, etc. You can gather a notable amount of them if e.g. you go into a downtown and gather spawns from several areas together in a clump - but that's very much all intentional work rather than events unfolding as is.

Second, "back when we had the minimap" isn't enough - you'd need to back a bit more. In that era (around A6/A7, I think) we had zombies spawning rather far away and then homing onto you/your base. The homing part wasn't particularly great, of course, but the whole experience looked nicer than what we have right now.

It's not about "noticing" zombies popping in, by the way. It's the inability to have anything else than a full-circle defense when fighting: new spawns are just as likely appear behind you as in front of you, and so you can never have any engagement more interesting than "enemies come from all sides up until spawn limit and then nothing else would come". It never ever changes, it gets pretty stale after a while, and it's thoroughly abusable via the spawn limit: as long as you keep a pile of zombies busy with something, nothing else in the area will spawn.

I think their fix was the addition of the 33% modifier. Isn't that one the best one to pick?

I stopped experimenting with that setting - it doesn't seem to work correctly. Any <100% value results in a very large amount of completely empty boxes and loot piles, much more than the modifier would suggest. When I played with 75%, subjectively it was like having every other container have no loot.

I have a suspicion that the modifier might be applied twice at various stages of loot generation (so instead of 0.75 you're actually getting 0.75 * 0.75), but of course it's pretty hard to prove.

 

[Spatch]

The point to my post wasn't which is easiest, the point was that it was disingenuous to me to support one way but not all ways.  My idea of letting people run and hide in fear, should not be something that is discouraged by TFP and it clearly was - there was no other reason to add heat-seeking vultures! 

I know the way the wind blows though, so I'll continue to cheese the horde using their stupid AI   Still love the game, just miss some of the old ways of doing things.

 

[Maxley]

And then, there are issues that's with us for a while now, but nothing was done about them in A20:

1) Bloodmoon. For quite a while, TFP seems to find time and spend some effort to make certain static defense setups completely useless. Yet, ever since we got our current buff system, nobody at TFP pays attention to the fact that now you can *outrun* nightmare-speed zombies very reliably with a few buffs, and thus all you need for bloodmoon defense is a bunch of stimulants and enough explosives (and a decent gun, but that's secondary). I'm not sure why static defenses get all the TFP attention (even though many of them require considerable effort to build) while the issue of being able to defend a bloodmoon with just a couple of items and a lot of running in an empty field gets *no* attention.

I agree that the player should not be able to outrun nightmare speed zombies, at least not for very long. I definitely think some of the perks like Cardio and Sexual Tyrannosaurus are overpowered as well as getting 10 stamina back for every kill with a bat. But people wouldn't be happy if those were nerfed.

I know this would never be implemented but what i feel would solve this problem is if there were an exhaustion meter which fills based on the players level of exertion. The more sprinting and power attacks a player does in a short time, the faster it fills. It might take a couple of minutes to fill fully. Once full, the players stamina regeneration is reduced significantly for a duration, maybe a couple of minutes until it goes back down to zero.

EDIT:

Actually there is another solution. They could add a zombie that spits slime at the player which slows the players movement speed for a duration. You would just have to be careful to dodge these projectiles but if u get hit it could allow the other zombies to catch you.

 

[Darklegend222]

Well, it takes multiple hours of constrained testing (i.e. do the same tasks of 2-4 real-time hours length in the same world at the same internal time twice) to test your theory without other factors weighing in. I wouldn't do that unpayed.

Even if that restart does anything it would be like the horde night restart on relog. Sure, it prevents the first horde nights stopping early, but that stopping is intentional. It would only be a bug if the stopping were even earlier than planned. And in this case it is expected as well, that less zombies spawn in explored areas (until respawn which happens after 7 days).

Sadly environmental zombie spawns seem not to get listed in the logfile. If they were we could have generated statistics simply by counting those lines in normal logfiles.

All of that makes sense aside from the part where you do it unpaid.. you really can't be bothered to just play a game of which you moderate and close it every hour as opposed to 2-4? Very little testing needs to be done, the point is if you notice a difference in enemy spawns or anything getting backed up and not being removed as it should.

 

[meganoth]

All of that makes sense aside from the part where you do it unpaid.. you really can't be bothered to just play a game of which you moderate and close it every hour as opposed to 2-4? Very little testing needs to be done, the point is if you notice a difference in enemy spawns or anything getting backed up and not being removed as it should.

What does "close it every hour" mean?

And I was saying that I would not expect you to do it unpaid. Since I have no beef with zombie spawns I definitely won't.

There is a big difference between subjectively noticing fewer zombies and providing hard facts. How do you show zombies "backing up" ? How do you show it isn't just randomness or a group of zombies not noticing you?

 

[Darklegend222]

What does "close it every hour" mean?

And I was saying that I would not expect you to do it unpaid. Since I have no beef with zombie spawns I definitely won't.

There is a big difference between subjectively noticing fewer zombies and providing hard facts. How do you show zombies "backing up" ? How do you show it isn't just randomness or a group of zombies not noticing you?

Forgive me for assuming you meant me and not you, I didn't comprehend that part. I find it relatively easy, on worlds where I constantly explore and don't kill anything i see. Then I see absolutely nothing after 2-3 days other than a random stray. The moment I begin killing anything again though, especially at spawn is where things start getting fixed.

Then you have the issue of having explored so far and chunks being rendered to the point it's probably best to restart anyway. I have made threads on this before and the answers I got were "you're not exploring far enough and depleting spawns in your area, or you're going too far out and not killing anything". Thus I decided to restart my game every in-game day at 04:00 and I've never had an issue since.

Me and Roland had a tiny conversation about deer, he said they're a night creature (which I don't think we're both sure of). I am sure though that after a game closure and reopen can allow a deer to spawn during the day as I saw a deer within the first minute of spawning, then again at 07:00 the next day (with restarts at 04:00 roughly).

As you said though, it's hard to get concrete evidence since the logs don't provide anything, but I can tell it fixes a lot of problems. Many people were saying they didn't see any zombies and maybe an animal without any restarting. Meanwhile I happen to be the one restarting and I can't travel on a road for 600m without seeing and killing at least 5 chickens, rabbits, maybe a boar and a deer. Chickens and rabits are plentiful and I get around 3 stacks of meat by day 3-4.

 

[meganoth]

Forgive me for assuming you meant me and not you, I didn't comprehend that part. I find it relatively easy, on worlds where I constantly explore and don't kill anything i see. Then I see absolutely nothing after 2-3 days other than a random stray. The moment I begin killing anything again though, especially at spawn is where things start getting fixed.

Then you have the issue of having explored so far and chunks being rendered to the point it's probably best to restart anyway. I have made threads on this before and the answers I got were "you're not exploring far enough and depleting spawns in your area, or you're going too far out and not killing anything". Thus I decided to restart my game every in-game day at 04:00 and I've never had an issue since.

Me and Roland had a tiny conversation about deer, he said they're a night creature (which I don't think we're both sure of). I am sure though that after a game closure and reopen can allow a deer to spawn during the day as I saw a deer within the first minute of spawning, then again at 07:00 the next day (with restarts at 04:00 roughly).

As you said though, it's hard to get concrete evidence since the logs don't provide anything, but I can tell it fixes a lot of problems. Many people were saying they didn't see any zombies and maybe an animal without any restarting. Meanwhile I happen to be the one restarting and I can't travel on a road for 600m without seeing and killing at least 5 chickens, rabbits, maybe a boar and a deer. Chickens and rabits are plentiful and I get around 3 stacks of meat by day 3-4.

I don't see much difference to my experience though. Sure, there are lulls around my base especially, but if we are talking about rabbits for example I just need to drive into a random direction, stop and crouch for a few seconds and most of the time I see 1 or 2 of them highlighted in green around me. The difficult question is: Are we seeing the same thing and interpret it differently or is there an actual objective difference?

Even if I did now restart the game every hour and noticed more zombies (which I wouldn't be surprised if it happened) this would still not tell us much, because from my viewpoint the game works as expected even if I don't restart.

Here is a test maybe if you are playing on a pregen world: Play the game for 2 hours, don't restart. Drive to the center of 2 towns you haven't been before and 2 you already have been, but not in the last 3 in-game days. Write down the coordinates, the time and the number of zombies you saw after standing there, shooting with a shotgun 3 times (once per minute) and waiting for 5 minutes. Also tell us which pregen world, your player level and what armor you have on you.

I then do the same and count as well. This way we will see if our games are fundamentally different and we also see what number of zombies to expect in visted areas after respawn and new areas.

 

[Darklegend222]

I don't see much difference to my experience though. Sure, there are lulls around my base especially, but if we are talking about rabbits for example I just need to drive into a random direction, stop and crouch for a few seconds and most of the time I see 1 or 2 of them highlighted in green around me. The difficult question is: Are we seeing the same thing and interpret it differently or is there an actual objective difference?

Even if I did now restart the game every hour and noticed more zombies (which I wouldn't be surprised if it happened) this would still not tell us much, because from my viewpoint the game works as expected even if I don't restart.

Here is a test maybe if you are playing on a pregen world: Play the game for 2 hours, don't restart. Drive to the center of 2 towns you haven't been before and 2 you already have been, but not in the last 3 in-game days. Write down the coordinates, the time and the number of zombies you saw after standing there, shooting with a shotgun 3 times (once per minute) and waiting for 5 minutes. Also tell us which pregen world, your player level and what armor you have on you.

I then do the same and count as well. This way we will see if our games are fundamentally different and we also see what number of zombies to expect in visted areas after respawn and new areas.

I can do that, I'll be turning on cheat mode and giving myself a bicycle, a side by side Q1 shotgun, quality 1 stone sledgehammer, and all scrap armor quality level 3. As I don't have a save on a pre-gen world I'll just make one and go from there, it is a weekend after all!

I'll take the time to jot the numbers down and see if I can't come up with a spreadsheet

 

[Darklegend222]

I don't see much difference to my experience though. Sure, there are lulls around my base especially, but if we are talking about rabbits for example I just need to drive into a random direction, stop and crouch for a few seconds and most of the time I see 1 or 2 of them highlighted in green around me. The difficult question is: Are we seeing the same thing and interpret it differently or is there an actual objective difference?

Even if I did now restart the game every hour and noticed more zombies (which I wouldn't be surprised if it happened) this would still not tell us much, because from my viewpoint the game works as expected even if I don't restart.

Here is a test maybe if you are playing on a pregen world: Play the game for 2 hours, don't restart. Drive to the center of 2 towns you haven't been before and 2 you already have been, but not in the last 3 in-game days. Write down the coordinates, the time and the number of zombies you saw after standing there, shooting with a shotgun 3 times (once per minute) and waiting for 5 minutes. Also tell us which pregen world, your player level and what armor you have on you.

I then do the same and count as well. This way we will see if our games are fundamentally different and we also see what number of zombies to expect in visted areas after respawn and new areas.

I've uploaded the spreadsheet to Google Drive, the link is here:  https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PbeV3Yqh918DWQw3f09L-ehRHvOG7rUO?usp=sharing It's a major mess. It got the job done and for video settings I had grass distance set to low, and everything else set to ultra. DoF and motion blur were disabled. I put a note section on the far right which is just a giant blob of text so I wish you the best of luck going through all of it. I took note of everything as I saw it. https://pastebin.com/qBFtuHxZ. From what I've gathered, it seems that the wilderness and POI zombies don't have their information being as backed up anymore. In A19.6, there were times it didn't matter how much I explored, I wouldn't see a zombie for 4-5 in game days unless they were in POIs. Since city tiles are now technically POIs, it doesn't have everything as obstructed as before (at least from what I've gathered and my very limited knowledge).

 

[meganoth]

@Darklegend222: Ok, finally had time to do the test as well, though I had to use the stable version now. Don't know if that is the reason for the discrepancy, but at the places where you specified town 4 and 5 there was only wilderness in my world.

I didn't count zombies on the way to towns, just rode into the central place, then looked around. Since driving in already made some zombies follow me I usually saw 2-3 zombies attack me without a shot fired and since I used the shotgun to get rid of them that got me another 0-2 zombies. Which isn't that much really.

The results:

town      Before shots        After shots

1                   3                          1

2                   2                          0

3                  3                           2

I had expected more, so I made another visit to town 3 at night and shot 20 times, but even that added only another 2 zombies.

This seems to suggest that that one event with ~10 zombies coming from outside while I was raiding a POI raid at night must really have been a wandering horde and not the result of feral sense. Or player level/gamestage makes a difference or I just had luck.

 

[theFlu]

Hmm. This isn't exactly usable data, but .. I started a new game having read this thread. Pretty basic settings, 60 min, warrior, feral sense..

I landed near a small town, figured I'd mostly just clear POIs for a while, not exactly nomad, but not building anything either. Ran a few quests since the trader is right there, so I moved around a bit, but not that much.

Day 1, cleared my "stash house." A burnt building with a few inhabitants. Day 1 night spawns showed up, got ate by a dire. Quiet @%$#s still, first indication of danger was a row of teeth on my derriere. I was just messing about anyway, so I figured I'd just try if something has changed about running from those.. nope, couple chomps later the puppy had earned his ham. Spawned upstairs, turned it around and charred him on the grill afterwards. I guess you can call that recycling.

That wasn't the point though.. sleepers aside, after clearing the area it remained perfectly clear until day 4, the 3 day respawn. The trip to the trader is about 300 meters, and between my base and Jen's, there were about 5 daytime zeds. I think that was roughly the case on the first day as well. In the night, some more friends showed up, but there was a wandering horde at that time too, so, nothing exact to say.

I'd say the five zeds weren't too few for the area, it's a noob-friendly small town location; but I guess I would like to see them respawn at least daily, maybe even twice a day. Having the place clear for days feels.. safe

 

[Ghostlight]

First of all, A20 gives off much better first impressions than A19

I guess a full set of guns on day 1 is going to impress anyone.

 

[Ghostlight]

In the forest the towns are as empty as in A19. Feral sense doesn´t change that at all. I constantly can travel a few hundred meters without seeing a single zombie. Wether it has changed or not, this is just a huge flaw.

More zombies should be everywhere, not just in harder biomes.

I completely agree. This has always been a problem in recent alphas, and I have always had to change the XML files to add many more zombies. The thing is, these settings need to be dynamic and dependant on gamestage (if that is still I thing, I just reinstalled yesterday and haven't played much yet). At the start of the game, the numbers are more or less OK. But later, with an established base and good gear, you want a TON more zombies in the world, just to keep it fun and interesting. I remember in alphas from waaay back being genuinely scared to enter big towns early because the number of Zs in the streets was very intimidating.

 

[Ghostlight]

In two posts above, the defense was essentially "why shouldn't the player be able to, if they want to?".  So where was that defense when some of us liked to dig deep underground bases and crouch in fear during horde night?  Where was that defense when some of us liked to ride our mini-bikes around during horde night? 

I think everything and anything a player can devise to handle horde night should be allowed. Making changes to the game specifically to shut down any popular strategy (beyond exploits) is not a good idea. Look at Demolishers. They single-handedly took a ton of very fun base designs off the table.

Also why can't I ride round on my mini-bike to avoid the horde? I've not heard that before.

Can someone tell me...

1) Which file has that setting to control zombie count and respawn in the open world (it's been so long since I played)

2) How to edit a post on these forums.

 

[saltychipmunk]

Honestly So many issues with hoard night would be solved if they just make it so the zombies are after our crafting stations / storage  and not just us. 

That would fix hoard base cheese , that would fix buff cheese , that could fix  pathing exploit cheeses.

I just don't get it. it seems clear that the desired gameplay TFP want is for players to fortify their base and survive waves of zombies.   You get exactly that if you make it so zombies go after your valuables. 

 

[theFlu]

so the zombies are after our crafting stations / storage

It's a nice idea, but it wouldn't really change anything And it can't realistically be implemented.

- they can't just load extra chunks to load you storage in to be attacked if you've placed it a 100m away. Too heavy to compute for TFP's tastes.

- if it was implemented somehow, people would at Best be forced to have a concrete bunker "behind" their defenses. Having all routes to the cache leading through your defenses would preserve whatever current cheese you're using.

- since you can move your stuff around pretty easily, you might just make "lure" boxes and stations within your defenses. This would lessen the onslaught on yourself, spreading the damage, and done right, give you great opportunities for easy DPS, especially via explosives. All this would depend on the implementation, of course, but the players would figure out new exploits within a week.