PC How bad is it for bunker lovers these days? (Haven't played since like Alpha 16)

I normally live underground and haven't had any problems, even on horde nights. Make sure you dig through mostly rock, and go to bedrock. That's all there is to it.

On a horde day, you need a long tunnel to escape the diggers. Move maybe 25 yards when you think they're getting close, and they despawn. Rinse and repeat.

 
I think the main complaint is that the zombies deface the surface and then other players can tell that there must be a base there. Digging zombies are another nail in the PvP coffin for those who want this game to be balanced and tuned for PvP gameplay.

 
I personally think the vanilla settings of the game are off for both PvE and PvP.

You can easily tweak them to make it feel a lot better for PvE. For PvE I do the following.

- Reduce block damage on blood moons

- Put blood moon zombies on anything but sprint

These 2 settings already make it possible to bunker above ground without having to repair the entire base every horde night.

For PvP it's a different story. Better forget about balance and fairness in that aspect.

 
No, the point is making a zombie survival game that is somewhat realistic, this includes zombies not digging Minecraft troll mode on your bunker. Also, the point of having a bunker is being hidden, if you have to place obvious "there is people underground here" blocks on top of it it defeats the purpose.
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So you want bunkers that are un-discoverable to both players and zombies then? Again it sounds like you want bunker simulator while in the bunker and zombie/PVP game when outside the bunker. I'm not saying this is a bad thing but it seems like it's the type of game you want to play. That type of game is already possible, you could mod the zombies to change their noise detection radius, there are many mods like this out there already. Why not start a bunker-lovers server? Sounds like an interesting idea. But even with such a mod wouldn't you have to have an entrance somewhere on the surface anyway? Just be choosey with where you build your bunker and make that singular entrance one that zombies can go into as well. If you allow zombies a way down they will take it instead of digging. You don't need a wealth of creativity to be able to design such an entrance.

 
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So you want bunkers that are un-discoverable to both players and zombies then? Again it sounds like you want bunker simulator while in the bunker and zombie/PVP game when outside the bunker. I'm not saying this is a bad thing but it seems like it's the type of game you want to play.
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Speaking as a former bunker-lover, that's about right in my case.

My playstyle (and that of the people I play local multiplayer with) has always been...

  • Go out during the day to loot/scavenge, but have a safe base to come back to at night to sort the day's pickings, cook, and craft.
  • Use melee 90% of the time, with bows 9% and firearms only in emergencies (the other 1%).
  • Mining is tedious and anti-fun, so none of us do it, as is building big complex structures.


In A15-A16 this would work fine with a bunker base. We'd spend the night in the base where the lack of zombie digging would mean we (and more importantly our stuff) were safe. On horde nights we'd have a separate platform over a bed of spikes - simple enough that it wouldn't require lots of boring mining for the materials, and the fact that the zombies would (if they got through the spikes) run round in circles underneath us rather than bashing our supports meant that it wouldn't require lots of maintenance and repair either. Similarly, using melee and bows meant we might not have killed all the horde-night zombies by the end of the night but we never needed to spend ages mining for materials to make gunpowder or the like.

In A17, the changes to zombie AI changed all that. I've not dug anything underground since A17 dropped. After a bit of a shaky start, I managed to work out good ways to keep zombies away and now I always use an existing POI - sealing up the ground floor and putting a zombie-proof entrance on the upper floor. The new AI makes above-ground bases just as safe as bunkers used to be, and upgrading the base from wood to brick to concrete is pretty much just for the sake of paranoia these days. Wooden bases are (assuming you have a separate horde-night structure of course) perfectly safe in A17-A18. They're just as safe as bunker bases used to be.

Horde-night structures were a bit more of a fiddly problem to "solve", but having established that we could make them safe we simply turned horde-night off. It's just not worth the time that you need to spend doing boring repair and resource gathering work. If we want some excitement we'll go do a quest at night instead.

Anyway, I've rambled a bit there - but my point is that as someone who enjoyed having bunkers that were zombie-proof; yes, the ability to have that is no longer there. But I don't miss it, because it's so easy to build a zombie-proof base above ground these days.

 
Anyway, I've rambled a bit there - but my point is that as someone who enjoyed having bunkers that were zombie-proof; yes, the ability to have that is no longer there. But I don't miss it, because it's so easy to build a zombie-proof base above ground these days.
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Except that fully 100% zombie proof underground bunkers are still quite possible. This is the bit I don't get, some people seem to think that digging zombies have foreclosed all underground building, but they didn't.

BM Hordes can be fought at a separate base, or turned off altogether, and an undergound bunker, at bedrock and beneath a mountain is outside the zombie detection range and therefore as invulnerable as it ever was, especially if the heat producing furnaces and campfires are re-located one chunk away.

 
I hope they don't nerf digging completely, but I feel that normal zombies dig too fast on non-BM nights and during the day....

I wish climbing Zombies were still in the game. I heard it was a thing that everyone complained about so it was nerfed. Perhaps the climber should just have a 5% change to fall back down for every block climbed vertically?

 
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Except that fully 100% zombie proof underground bunkers are still quite possible. This is the bit I don't get, some people seem to think that digging zombies have foreclosed all underground building, but they didn't.

BM Hordes can be fought at a separate base, or turned off altogether, and an undergound bunker, at bedrock and beneath a mountain is outside the zombie detection range and therefore as invulnerable as it ever was, especially if the heat producing furnaces and campfires are re-located one chunk away.
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True, but I'm talking about having a simple underground bunker where the roof of the bunker is level with the surrounding ground. The sort of thing that can be built on day one with a level-one stone axe and shovel.

Digging down to bedrock under a mountain is not "a bunker", It's "a major mining project" - and see my previous post about finding that sort of mining tedious in the extreme.

Simple, safe, underground bunkers are no longer possible - but simple, safe, above-ground buildings are easier to make than they have ever been.

 
Below ground can get intense and fun during horde night and its something I recommend trying once or twice. Its also great when you build a tunnel at bedrock that circles a trader. Just Run/Walk around the tunnel for horde night. You might be surprised what happens there.

Edit: The entrance to the tunnel needs to be "down the road" a bit. :)

 
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True, but I'm talking about having a simple underground bunker where the roof of the bunker is level with the surrounding ground. The sort of thing that can be built on day one with a level-one stone axe and shovel.

Digging down to bedrock under a mountain is not "a bunker", It's "a major mining project" - and see my previous post about finding that sort of mining tedious in the extreme.

Simple, safe, underground bunkers are no longer possible - but simple, safe, above-ground buildings are easier to make than they have ever been.
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Ok, well, a bunker, 1 block down from the surface, is definitely not safe, that's true, but frankly, it never should have been anyway in my own personal opinion (of course), so I don't count that as any sort of loss.

Bunkers, at bedrock, are (ultimately) just as safe as they ever were, indeed, I think those people who were most strident in their criticism of underground bunkers have a much stronger argument to say that digging zombies haven't fixed that, than those who like them have an argument that digging zombies have broken them.

 
Why would one disable zombies in a zombie survival themed game.
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That is exactly what removing digging from zombies would do. It would disable zombies from an entire gamespace in a zombie themed game.

 
I hope they don't nerf digging completely, but I feel that normal zombies dig too fast on non-BM nights and during the day....
I wish climbing Zombies were still in the game. I heard it was a thing that everyone complained about so it was nerfed. Perhaps the climber should just have a 5% change to fall back down for every block climbed vertically?
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Climbing zombies were removed because they didn't work with the new pathing. It had nothing to do with people complaining about climbing zombies.

 
True, but I'm talking about having a simple underground bunker where the roof of the bunker is level with the surrounding ground. The sort of thing that can be built on day one with a level-one stone axe and shovel.

Digging down to bedrock under a mountain is not "a bunker", It's "a major mining project" - and see my previous post about finding that sort of mining tedious in the extreme.

Simple, safe, underground bunkers are no longer possible - but simple, safe, above-ground buildings are easier to make than they have ever been.
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I see this as a valid argument to improve the threat to above ground bases and not to remove the threat from underground bases.

 
My compadres were still using bunkers at the start of A18 and it was still fairly effective for the most part if it was deep enough and not horde night. I kinda miss the old A16 desert bunkers we used to have, felt more survivaly on horde night. But diggers kinda made it pointless.

If given the option I would rather have the zeds not be able to dig like insane moles (or Mad Ones) even on horde night and just have them tear open your defenses and maybe EVENTUALLY dig around to get in through a side tunnel. But what we have are super mutant infected, not really undead. Oh well. If not for the limitations of hardware we could have insane amounts of zombies that are individually not as tough but thousands of them on the screen.

 
That is exactly what removing digging from zombies would do. It would disable zombies from an entire gamespace in a zombie themed game.
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No because you still need to go outside for food and water + go out on quests at the city for loot. If you stay at the bunker forever you die.

 
No because you still need to go outside for food and water + go out on quests at the city for loot. If you stay at the bunker forever you die.
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Water yes, food no. If you don't do anything you also don't burn food.

So get a few stacks of snowballs and 1 glass jar and happily drink water for a few thousand days. Alternatively use one day to get yourself lots of sand, create a few stacks of glass jars, fill them up at a lake

 
Water yes, food no. If you don't do anything you also don't burn food.

So get a few stacks of snowballs and 1 glass jar and happily drink water for a few thousand days. Alternatively use one day to get yourself lots of sand, create a few stacks of glass jars, fill them up at a lake
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Even more so, since you can still do underground farms for all plants, and, of course, there's mushrooms. Forge up a few thousand jars of water, stop once by a lake to fill 'em up, and you could bunker down till just about the end of time.

 
I see this as a valid argument to improve the threat to above ground bases and not to remove the threat from underground bases.
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Yes, it's a fundamental disagreement in how we think the game dynamics should work.

Me: You should have a safe haven you can make forays out from and retreat back to.

You: There should be no safe haven. Everywhere should have danger.

Ultimately there's never going to be a version of the game that suits us both without either an option that can be switched on and off or without there being some tactic that I would be happy to use but which you would consider an "exploit" or "cheese" and refuse to use.

The former would probably be ideal, but since I started playing (A15) it's always been the latter. Although I don't see it as "exploits", because that implies that there's some kind of flaw in the AI that I'm taking advantage of. This is a zombie game, and building bases that zombies' simple behaviour doesn't let them get into seems to be a fundamental part of the genre. The way I see it, it's the developers tweaking of the zombies to make them behave in decidedly un-zombielike ways to get around different base-building techniques in order to provide an artificial "challenge" that's cheesy and is the exploit.

Currently, the stat of the game is a compromise between the two. The above-ground base isn't totally safe - I do have to defend it from wandering hordes by going out and killing them; but its defense is trivial so I'm not in danger while I'm there and, more importantly, not ablative so I don't need to keep rebuilding and repairing it.

 
Yes, it's a fundamental disagreement in how we think the game dynamics should work.

Me: You should have a safe haven you can make forays out from and retreat back to.

You: There should be no safe haven. Everywhere should have danger.

Ultimately there's never going to be a version of the game that suits us both without either an option that can be switched on and off or without there being some tactic that I would be happy to use but which you would consider an "exploit" or "cheese" and refuse to use.

The former would probably be ideal, but since I started playing (A15) it's always been the latter. Although I don't see it as "exploits", because that implies that there's some kind of flaw in the AI that I'm taking advantage of. This is a zombie game, and building bases that zombies' simple behaviour doesn't let them get into seems to be a fundamental part of the genre. The way I see it, it's the developers tweaking of the zombies to make them behave in decidedly un-zombielike ways to get around different base-building techniques in order to provide an artificial "challenge" that's cheesy and is the exploit.

Currently, the stat of the game is a compromise between the two. The above-ground base isn't totally safe - I do have to defend it from wandering hordes by going out and killing them; but its defense is trivial so I'm not in danger while I'm there and, more importantly, not ablative so I don't need to keep rebuilding and repairing it.
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There are a lot of games with built-in safe havens. But it is rather unusual and counterintuitive for a horror game to have them. Understandable that TFP doesn't think it should be your way for vanilla and is on Roland's side in this.

 
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There are a lot of games with built-in safe havens. But it is rather unusual and counterintuitive for a horror game to have them. Understandable that TFP doesn't think it should be your way for vanilla and is on Roland's side in this.
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For that argument, the distinction comes in whether or not you think 7D2D is a horror game or not. I personally don't think it is, it's more of an action game with a horror paint job. You can certainly make it a horror game by tweaking the difficulty, but on its default settings it's not really any scarier than most other games. Resources (especially guns and ammunition) are too abundant, enemies aren't dangerous enough, and the only real challenge comes from horde nights which can be rather easily avoided using basic game mechanics. There's nothing to be afraid of beyond the occasional jump-scare of a surprise doggo.

On the original topic, I think the complaints stem less from 'My base isn't invulnerable' and more from 'It took me a lot of time and effort to make this base and it's objectively worse than holing up in a random POI.' A bedrock-level bunker is, as was mentioned, a major project, but digging zombies sabotage it on two levels. On the first level, digging zombies might eventually dig to it despite having no logical way of knowing it's there beyond 'this is a video game.' But the second level is that digging zombies nullify the greatest advantage of an underground base on a multiplayer server - They tell everybody there's a base there. So you'll get two different but similar types of complaint about this issue.

 
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