PC Returning old hand looking for advice I thought I'd never ask for

Ghostlight

Ghostlight

New member
So I am coming back to the game after an absence since A19 came out, having played thousands of hours previous to that. Normally I build massive complex bases to combat and kill the horde on blood moon. This time around, my usual friends are now fathers and have little time to play, and I have a lot less free time myself. Long story short, if I get back into A20 I can no longer be bothered building such elaborate bases this time (never thought I'd say that). I am therefore looking for other ways I might handle horde night, if I no longer obsessively care about killing them all and just want to survive. I don't want to turn the blood moon off as the game needs that panic night for long term interest.

So what's the best approach?

Ride around all night on a bike?

Head to a building away from my simple live-in base and hide on a roof till it's all over?

Something else? (though I refuse to exploit the AI with an infinite ramp, if that is still a thing)

Also, can anyone advise of the actual mechanics here when you do not kill the horde. I have Max Zombies set to 24 as I always had. So will I get 24 zombies spawned in and that's it? Then they will run around wrecking the POI I am hiding in till morning? Will all 24 still be there in the morning? Will the rest of the horde spawn in if I start killing them?

Many thanks!

 
Vulturehorde will kill you, if you try to drive a vehicle during hordenight.

Look out for a large concrete building and hide on the roof. You might have to kill some vultures. As long as you kill no zombies, there is no respawn.

No more respawn if hordenight is over.

 
Ghostlight said:
I refuse to exploit the AI with an infinite ramp, if that is still a thing
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It's a thing, not exactly as perfect as before, but absolutely doable.

There's plenty of usable options to just survive; electric fences are pretty much enough to disable any horde for the night, given you can repair them. Make any base, for the first couple horde nights figure out where the traffic is going, trap those areas.

A large enough POI with routes to upper floors destroyed will have them just pointlessly beating on things. Doesn't have to be massive, but the bigger the better.

You could honestly just run around, have a couple mega crushes to make it easy. Depends a bit on settings of course.

Vehicles will spawn vultures - not impossible, but not exactly a chill ridearound.

Max 24; it is limited by your gamestage somehow, so you won't see the 24 early on. Not sure of the scaling, but essentially "yes" to your question, you'll get to the max amount and have those in the morning. No more spawns after 4:00.

 
Has to be a large concrete building? Would a typical house not work? I'm based right beside this huge water tower looking structure (with COC written on the side) how about that?

Or if I just built a huge, solid concrete (and later steel) cube, say 10 x 10 x 10, and just nerd pole up and sat on top of that? Perhaps with an iron cage on top so I can fight Vultures from within it and ignore non-flying zombies completely. (I'd have a wee hollow in top so cops cannot hit me with spit?

 
Anything will work for the first few hordes, as long as they can't find or break a route to you. Either reinforce from there, or build something.

Ghostlight said:
solid concrete (and later steel) cube, say 10 x 10 x 10
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That's a 1000 blocks, 800 of which are useless :) It will last, but adding any amount of brainpower to it will make it a lot easier to craft and maybe allow for some easy XP farming while at it ... :)

Say, 8 blocks on the ground (corners and middles), a 10x10 solid on the level they're actually hitting. And above that walls to protect you from spitters and a floor you can safely drop some boomers thru. Ceiling on top with a turret to pop birds on it.

 
IMO, the most fun way to deal with horde night is still just to hole up in a good POI. Construct some additional reinforcements where needed, knock out a few ladders, and make sure you have exit routes from each section to fall back to another in a way that zombies have difficulty following. It's a ton of fun either for strong defenses or for a running battle, and if the place ever gets too torn up you can just pick up any emplacements and then reset the POI with a quest (or move on to another POI!)

Right now my standard "easy night" blood moon handling defensive area (which has lasted me maybe a hundred days) is one building with a ladder on one end, a truck between it and a second building, and some blocks I placed down between the two to retreat, heal up, and let the zombies run off the edge before returning. Just kill em dead as they come up the later, basically.

If you really want to cheese them, just go up the smoke stack on the pill factory or something, from what I understand if you get that high they simply can't find you and you just have to worry about the occasional vulture. And if you have parkour or the drop shoes or the heist book or build a breakfall, even if they did get up there it would be pretty easy to hop down to the roof proper.

 
I was in the same boat, I played alpha 19 quite a bit but it's been months and it's always a lot to relearn coming back to this game, especially for a new alpha.

Right now I am greatly enjoying: 


 Which is not a load of work to build (especially since it starts with the single tower that by itself is viable for quite a few horde nights). It works well for SP but there are plenty of fighting positions for MP. Not to mention it looks really cool.

 
As stated just stand on top of a POI made of concrete (making sure to remove access to the roof). Move to another one once that POI is on its last legs. You will probably want to make a little pillbox for yourself with bars in part of the ceiling to shoot at vultures. Alternatively you can just turn Horde night off in the settings.

You also don't need an elaborate base to take on the horde. A elevated platform with stairs leading up to it coupled with electric fences on the path between the stairs and where you are standing is sufficient. Just place some bars between you and the zombies and you can shoot them while they are stun locked by the fences. Later on you will want to add blade traps and dart traps for Demos.  

 
I have always made my horde and living bases the same....usually a foundation of 2 or 3 solid layers of blocks above ground level, then a normal base on top of that....crafting stations, storage, lighting.  Walled and roofed.  

The complexity of the base is that I add an "approach"  thats usually around 15 blocks long....that lets me put in 4 blade traps on the ground, with a spot in between each of them. the room is 3 high, so I put electric fences on the ceiling hanging down over the blade traps (and i use the in between the blades blocks to put some a block lower for the girls and dogs).  The approach is ALSO 2 or 3 solid layers above the ground, with a ramp into the entrance that has a turn, so cops can't shoot me from outside.  

The idea is a single-file walk to me with no movement obstacles like barbed wire or spikes that might make them path around...but instead the electric fences and blade trasp slow and damage everything and its shooting zombies all lined up.

It USES the AI, as opposed to ABUSING the AI....using classic, historical defense strategies of making your position unassailable except from a specific direction, and then concentrating all your defensive energy on that one direction.  In this case, the walls are not attackable because they're elevated, and the solid base (even if only the outer blocks are ever upgraded) just isn't a practical or viable target.  The zombies will occasionally whack at the walls, but they rarely even take a block out...they usually just hit it a few times, lose interest and move to the wide, easy access, ramp that points in many directions so its easy to path up.

Or just stand on top of any house and shoot the vultures....odds are the zombies won't take it down before morning...and if they begin to, run to a new house and repeat.

 
I’ve used the junkyard building on the second floor. The only prep is tear out 3 vertical blocks worth of both staircases. I then access it using wood frames that I pick up after I get up there. Pretty comfy and the lighting is good.

 
theFlu said:
That's a 1000 blocks, 800 of which are useless
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Not useless. Remember I plan to not engage the horde while sitting on this massive thing. They will therefore slowly and surely destroy it as they will be able to smack on it for the entire night (6 game hours on my server) with no player intervention. Hence a lot of the cube will certainly be destroyed. Therefore it's 1000 blocks in a solid cube formation to ensure enough of it is not destroyed, and thus guaranteeing it will not collapse under us.

My other thought would be a square pyramid, pointed at the top and 45 degree ramps making up all 4 sides. I'd be inside it, access via a tunnel from underground to a hatch some distance away. Again, I will not be engaging them. I've never seen them dig down on a 45 degree slope before, however all my previous pyramids have had an opening tunnel on one side to funnel them into a long kill corridor inside the pyramid, so I am not 100% sure of this idea working.

Kosmic Kerman said:
You also don't need an elaborate base to take on the horde. A elevated platform with stairs leading up to it coupled with electric fences on the path between the stairs and where you are standing is sufficient. Just place some bars between you and the zombies and you can shoot them while they are stun locked by the fences. Later on you will want to add blade traps and dart traps for Demos.  
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Sorry but are you claiming this would work for a day 300 horde on highest difficulty? I doubt it personally, and that is what we'll be playing. With many many thousands of hours under our belt with this game we do really know exactly what we are doing. We simply have never tried a run where we deliberately did not NOT wipe out the entire horde every bloodmoon up to highest gamestage possible, that's the new part of the planned experience.

Limdood said:
The complexity of the base is that I add an "approach"  thats usually around 15 blocks long....that lets me put in 4 blade traps on the ground, with a spot in between each of them. the room is 3 high, so I put electric fences on the ceiling hanging down over the blade traps (and i use the in between the blades blocks to put some a block lower for the girls and dogs).  The approach is ALSO 2 or 3 solid layers above the ground, with a ramp into the entrance that has a turn, so cops can't shoot me from outside.  

The idea is a single-file walk to me with no movement obstacles like barbed wire or spikes that might make them path around...but instead the electric fences and blade trasp slow and damage everything and its shooting zombies all lined up.

It USES the AI, as opposed to ABUSING the AI....using classic, historical defense strategies of making your position unassailable except from a specific direction, and then concentrating all your defensive energy on that one direction. 
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Sounds great but way more elaborate for what I am looking for. I mean if I wanted to destroy the horde, I know right now exactly what to build, but it would be a major construction project that we simply won't have the time to invest in this time round.

 
Limdood said:
Or just stand on top of any house and shoot the vultures....odds are the zombies won't take it down before morning
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With 3 of us playing and 24 zombies per player on blood moon and max difficulty, they eventually will once GS is high enough, I think.

 
If you manage your game stage well you don't need massive construction the first 3-4 horde nights. Just don't make it a goal to kick every Z you see and it keeps the game stage low.

I spend the first 2 in a cobblestone shack, 5x5 that uses arch windows for walls. Mostly just mele weapons. Switch off a lot to repair and drink stamina boosts.

By the time I need something bigger I'm 3 game weeks into it and have had lots of time.

 
Ghostlight said:
They will therefore slowly and surely destroy it as they will be able to smack on it for the entire night (6 game hours on my server) with no player intervention.
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Welcome back btw :)

Unless you get 64 demos up, they're going to need 6 real hours to dig through a 100 blocks. Given a 10-cube, they will essentially only dig the at-face-height layer anyway; some of them will stack for a while and they may break a block or two at the 4-height, dogs and crawlers will chew on the 1-height, but neither of those are going to be an issue. That's why I suggest making the layer they're actually attacking as strong as you can, and focusing some fire on the innards once they pile up into there.

All the layers above 3 will be truly useless since the collapse is going to happen once the zeds have fully cleared the layer 2. Usually they are way too confused to accomplish even that though.

If you want, you can make the 3rd layer out of bars (at the moment, the bar blocks are just as sturdy as their full counterparts.) That will effectively prevent them from piling on top of each other once they've managed to dig themselves a couple blocks into the defensive layer, while still allowing you to fire upon the concentrated mass. If for nothing else, each grenade is a swing or two lost per zed.

Another trivial option would be to wire a sexy 60x2 electric fence system up-down through the center of the borg cube to make most zeds inside just get permastunned. Needs a stack of electric parts, but that's what wrenches are for... :)

All that said, if you want, using 1k blocks to completely AFK will work just fine. I'd just find it, well, kinda boring :)

EDIT: Adding, I haven't tried a cube structure ever; if entirely solid it may by some fluke lead into the zeds creating a staircase though it. Nothing I've seen suggests that would be at all likely, but, I guess it might happen, and thus you might want to have some kind of non-solid layer at some suitable height to prevent that.

 
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At some point we have to ask ourselves just how much cheese we can live with.

Everything where you put an obstacle between you and a zombie where you can kill them but they cant kill you is cheese. Without cheese you would die every night. What is acceptable to you?

one of the more basic methods is going to any given 2 story building and knocking out the lowest level of ladder. That should be enough to survive a night as the zombies wont be able to reach you while you can potentially melee or shoot them. Go up to 3 blocks high for extra safety.

Thats my typical gameplan, roam for the first week and on day7 just defend a random house and let the zombies tear it down.

Alternatively you could build a few horde forts, 9x9 bunker with the best material you can muster with a roof escape, when they tear through the walls bail and run to the next one. Cheap and fairly easy to do.

My advice is just knocking out the stairs on any random poi.

 
You could go for a light armor agility build, stack movement speed and when needed use consumables like mega crush, beer and coffee. You can out run the zombies that way and pick them off in the open field. 

 
bloodmoth13 said:
Without cheese you would die every night. What is acceptable to you?
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Very good question and very hard to answer. I would always look at infinite ramps and stilt bases as cheese because to me those exploit the AI's failings (rather than USING the AI's behaviour to my advantage as limdood described above in his approach). So putting stuff between us would be fine.

 
I read somewhere that building in water will keep most of the horde at bay, maybe find a lake and build your crafting base there, and wait out the horde nights that way?

 
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