I really do think its random and how soon you get a gas powered vehicle and how much you mine. I've had games where I'm swimming in food and others where I wasn't remotely comfortable until day 30 or so, where one barf and I'd be literally unable to fill my stomach completely.
LOL! That sounds too hilarious not to put in the game.
Too true, that's fair. I suppose I've gotten lucky, the first EXP I did struggle a bit.
Sure, but if you perked up clubs/bats to the same level as knuckles, they still work better (at least this was my experience). I'm not saying any of the melee weapons are totally worthless and unusable (any melee weapon works just fine in a 1v1 fight, some just take a lot longer to kill the target), but they really felt lacking in comparison. I did additional testing with all melee weapons/perks maxed after trying them out in my 'real' game and the clubs/bats were consistently the easiest to fight high end zombies with on average, even with all perks for every melee weapon maxed. And as mentioned by another poster, clubs/bats also have great CC making it even easier to fight tougher enemies with them that take many hits to kill.
I could be wrong about this because frankly it's almost impossible to test melee reach in this game due to how enemies and the player sometimes seem to be able to hit from further then should actually be possible, but my experience with the spear is it felt like it had the exact same reach as any other melee weapon, it just looks like it has more reach. I didn't feel like I could stay out of range of the target any better then with a club. If it did/does indeed have noticeably more reach then I would probably say it's fine.
I've seen what you describe happen sometimes, but on the other hand there are some sleepers who seem to have location triggers regardless of how stealthy you are being, where once you pass a certain invisible trigger they just activate no matter what. The combination of what you described and what I described definitely does take away a lot of the attraction of stealth perks, which already have the huge problem of doing absolutely nothing for the player on horde nights (which generally are the hardest part anyways unless you cheese them), and in A18 you have so few skill points that 'wasting' points into something that doesn't help you all the time is already a questionable strategy.
I exclusively use the spear until I get a good sledge and have perks, but I still use a spear along with it. It has great reach, hell I use it as a ranged weapon half the time, including throwing it as a pre-strike. I think the hitbox tapers off at range, so you need to be more accurate though. I do say hitboxes are a bit inconsistent, but I don't find ther crazy range people say they run into. I think that's a network lag thing (I don't play online)
I play offline as well, so it's not lag, although it's true the reach issues are worse online due to lag (they aren't as drastic offline as some clips i've seen of online play). As for 'hitboxes', I mean there aren't real hitboxes in this game (at least for weapons) you just need your crosshairs over the zombies head when the swing animation completes. (I know some basic hit detection along the path of the swing was added in A18 but it seems 50/50 if that actually works as advertised, and even if it does it seems to do so little damage it's basically irrelevant in practice, but that is a whole other tangent). Either way back to the point: I think you'd find clubs actually have surprising 'reach' as well. Maybe I needed/need to look harder but it doesn't feel like spears have longer reach by default.
Stop playing in the newb zone - forest. Play like a man in the burnt biome and let me know how much meat you got. =) Just busting chops.
Actually I prefer wasteland or snow biomes haha. I get tired of the 24/7 crackling in the burnt. Honestly after 4 / 6 animal kills you're set for the whole game.
I think in experimental higher ranks of Chef reduce the meat required from 5 down to 1 at 5/5. Also the reason for the 5x to craft with Meat, is the same AFAIK as with Bones, to make it so for example only 1 rank of Huntsman actually has a tangible difference in the total meat/bones from a corpse (if you lower the values by 5x there will be a lot of rounding down with Huntsman causing some levels of that perk to have no effect), as before when corpses gave 1-2 bones, you only saw a difference at rank 5/5 Huntsman. I could be wrong about this however, but this seems to be the intent behind these changes from my observations.
Idk, theres a few locations in some POIs I swear have a location trigger (or if there is no such thing, something is causing it to behave in such a way that I can't distinguish it from one). Even if it is based on hearing ability, it seems like at the very least there are 'zones' in each POI and sleepers can't hear across those zones, because I consistently trigger certain groups while walking on the exact same block into a room, but even if I'm firing a gun or using a chainsaw standing just before that specific line of blocks that seems to trigger them, they never wake up. And this is across multiple clears of the same POI after resetting via quests, it's pretty consistent in some cases. But I'll admit that it's possible my observation isn't perfect, I wasn't specifically testing for this just noticing patterns on average.
I play online in a small group, but even with the exp setting turned way up and doing nothing but hunting zombies for exp, we couldn't possibly have a weapon-crafting skill maxed by day three. To say nothing of steel production (which can take multiple weeks to find a crucible and the skillbooks required to make the steel-tier tools/weapons) and a solid supply of other miscellaneous crafting parts like glue, tape and mechanical/electrical junk.
I actually noticed this in on the Special Tots POI/ building and same I'm perked up in agility with STEALTH BOOTS. My noise meter was only like 10 or so, when the feral on the stairway woke up and then came down for me.
Ooo nice that's good to hear. Yeah limiting the range is definitely good to trade for a wider spread that does crowd control. Can't wait to check that out
If your town has crappy power as you say it does then Yes, you need a UPS. Not only for the game, that's a minor thing, but for your actual data files and your hardware itself.
I think it's quite good that they multiplied both harvests and recipe costs for meat by 5. It gives them the ability to put in perks like Master Chef 2, which makes a recipe cost 4 instead of 5. Huntsman perk shows a difference in harvest yield, instead of being rounded down into nothing (as is still pretty much the case with rotten flesh).
