PC How are you dealing with the increased chance of spawning a screamer?

Rotor said:
I nerf the zombies to 25% block damage.  I wish I couldo take it to .0000001.  I mean of you want to play Resident Evil then knock yourself out.  Nice game, movies, but not a "true" Z apocalypto.
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Yeah, I have used that since they put it in.

Of course I was the loudest screamer for it, especially decoupling the block damage from the combat damage, so I was particularly pleased when it became a thing.

I want to have a base like the traders surrounded by walls with battlements or even just chain link fence. Those old junkfort POIs with walls made of various scraps and even car wrecks. Those would be fun. I still want to have to defend it and have horde nights, but I don't feel like they should just rip through everything like it is tissue paper. I guess it is hard to find a way to make bases more durable without trivializing hordes. 

I also hated the way wandering hordes used to just destroy a POI that was standing there minding it's own business because they decided to path through the corner of it instead of just going around. I don't know if they still do that, but not with 25% they don't.

 
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I've started referring to Screamers as "Karen from the HOA." Seriously, they need to be toned down. They don't need to come knocking every 5 minutes to tell me my stereo's too loud.

 
Like HybridThunder said, I just modded them out.  They're not dangerous (to me, anyway).  Just annoying more than anything.  Yay for mods!  Problem solved.

 
By offering them delicious sacrifices it seems. Showed up to my home tunnels after a trader trip... the place should be unpathable, and I saw no new damage to the exterior, yet both of my campfires had been eaten. That blueberry pie must've smelled great. Also some other random damage in the place, but lost nothing else.. one beaker the biggest loss (and even that was pointlessly in the campfire.. =/ )

 
i can confirm that screamers and other zombies will attack your home even when you're far away; i'd gone off to do some raiding and came back to half the roof collapsed, loads of debris and 2 dew collectors missing from the roof.   i'd put up some shotgun or smg turrets to babysit my home while i'm away, but of course they're not available early game. i had left forge and a workbench doing stuff before i left, so that attracted them.  of course i could turn those off while away but that defeats the object of using your (limited) in-game time properly. ah well will just have to go with it, though i do think the screamer mechanic was infinitely better in A21. recently in mutiplayer we've been inundated with 2 screamers at once, and sometimes they only murmur and that's enough for them to summon a sea of death. The increased difficulty this brings is still fun, however it's too easy to lose your home and stuff now

 
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I'm starting a new game and being very careful how long I keep the campfire and/or forge on.

Later on I don't worry about it too much

 
@GigglingZombie We have played quite a while now and are on our 2nd playtrough day 41. We have 5 forges running 24/7, chemstations, campfires  and torches. And no defense what so ever. No turrets,  no spikes, no glitchy blocks like the ramp 0.6,  just a single layer cobblestone wall, not even concrete. Never even once something was damaged while we were away.

Chunks you can´t see aren´t loaded. They basically don´t exist if you can´t see them, otherwise even supercomputers couldn´t run this game. There is something else going on.

 
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GigglingZombie said:
i'd gone off to do some raiding and came back to half the roof collapsed, loads of debris and 2 dew collectors missing from the roof. 
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As papa says, that sounds a little sus. Were there damaged blocks around? Stuff you had to repair? If not, that may well have been a collapse from weird SI; perhaps the game not loading the neighboring chunks properly and the added weight of your dew collectors just breaking the roof. Collapses don't damage other blocks, zeds do.

The damage I was talking about in my previous post was from zeds, and I only suspect screamers; but since I didn't witness them breaking stuff, I don't know when it happened. I was spending a good amount of time 50 blocks below that position at the time, which keeps the area loaded ofc - I might've just missed them being active up there while I was mining.

Now that I've placed my heat sources down there (under at least 60 blocks of rock), haven't seen a screamer since.. :)

 
GigglingZombie said:
i can confirm that screamers and other zombies will attack your home even when you're far away;
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This can only happen on a dedicated server. And only if there is another player nearby. Also, as long as the screamers don't see or hear the player, they won't break anything.

 
i didn't imagine the damage happening; it's possible that when i was off raiding, that i wasn't far enough away for the chunks to not be loaded, can't remember; but as to structural stability, the roof was strong enough to support the dew collectors

 
I have a bunker below my house with a steel door that has a permanent hole in it (I maintain it with steel bars, never repairing it 100%). Once the screamers and hordes show up, I just blast them with the pump shotgun through the hole. I also have blade traps just outside the door that can help. Easy!

 
Modding. 🤷‍♂️

I have an accelerated volume of zombies that I added already called the "Flood". So I modded the

heat generation to be consistent with the speed that I play the game. I had to adjust the names,

because I realized why TFP would have lowered the Street AI. Get enough outside coming in and it

lowered the volume generated amount inside, because same names,  that's why I have streetwalkers

and poptops outside, so I get both, and if I overdo it with the battles and don't use stealth effectively,

then here comes the screamers. :thumb:

 
GigglingZombie said:
i didn't imagine the damage happening; it's possible that when i was off raiding, that i wasn't far enough away for the chunks to not be loaded, can't remember; but as to structural stability, the roof was strong enough to support the dew collectors
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I can't confirm since I don't know the code, but I'm pretty sure crops "gain weight" as they grow, meaning a roof that is strong enough to support empty farm plots does not necessarily mean it is strong enough to support farm plots with fully-grown crops.

Obviously you didn't say anything about farm plots, but if you had them up there, that's a possibility. If not, I wonder if dew collectors are treated the same way? Do full collectors weigh more than empty ones?

 
just 3 dew collectors, without mods in fact, i don't believe in putting the new mods in them just to get clean water, i just boil the murky water in campfire when needed; (i don't like being lazy in the game, just because it's an apocalypse doesn't mean i can't make time to boil water on a fire!). maybe the collapse was the structural instability issues that surfaced in v1.0, maybe it was nothing to do with screamers after all; solution for now is to put 2 new dew collectors with the surviving collector, back on the roof; - but i removed the remnants of the original destroyed roof and made an entire new roof and supporting walls; no more collapses so far, (i'm using the Poopy Pants Day care POI as my home; with land claim block and bedroll, but boxes and dustbins within the POI/within the land claim boundary, still frequently repopulate with items (another bug i suspect but's ok, more free stuff :) ) ; but no, no farm plots on the roof in this playthrough; (i often have put loads of farm plots on a roof, usually a reinforced roof), never had any structural collapses in A21. my farm plots are 1-block down into the dirt on ground level outside

 
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Syphon583 said:
I can't confirm since I don't know the code, but I'm pretty sure crops "gain weight" as they grow, meaning a roof that is strong enough to support empty farm plots does not necessarily mean it is strong enough to support farm plots with fully-grown crops.
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I suspect with V1.0 all crops grow to be two blocks tall now, not just corn and yucca. The rest still look like they're one block tall, but when converting POIs from A21 to V1.0 there were issues with blocks placed above the shorter crops. In terms of "weight" the height of blocks might be what the code uses, so it seems quite viable to me that as crops become mature they could add to structural integrity "weight."

 
They are a gigantic pain in the ass. Not so much at the base but they are becoming increasingly frustrating on trader jobs. 3 or 4 shots and I've got a screamer horde on top of a clear to manage. And depending on where you are, what tier job and what POI you are at, it could be a 2-3 screamer horde. Anyone else noticing this or is it just my bad luck?

 
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