PC This game has really lost a lot of the fun.

Yup. I loved that. The danger/challenge was not that the zombies were bullet sponges or could enrage (i.e the nonsense we have now in A18), it was that the moment you focused on one zombie to bring it down, another 6 had surrounded you from the sides and rear! Was amazing.
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I tried A18.2 in insane difficulty and I was very frustrated by the fact the zombies were almost never stunned from my sledge power attacks , the fact they are bullet sponges and the fact they do not get decapitated because the perk description is misleading. Decapitation chance is based on a lot of things including damage.

I've seen another player play perma death insane difficulty and he kept hitting and running zombies. This is what I also had to do . So that makes the game painfully grinding. Eventually I just locked myself in my base, killing zombies with traps because I couldn't kill more than one zombie per minute , wondering how the hell am I suppose to get out of the base without dying.

Then to make things worse I've used iron blocks to make a defensive base. But the iron frames do not have poles, 50/100 pillars and even miss the top wedges. Generally all the block variants (wood,iron,cobble,brick and rebar) are missing models except for the cobblestone blocks . It appears the devs play with nothing except the cobblestones and those got all the block models while the rest did not.

I tried to make a run to the burning forest for a quest, then proceeded to die to a dog that skipped my horizontal spikes (because zombies step on diagonal traps but not horizontal traps) got 2 iron sledge power attacks on its face and still ate my face.

I'm personally not touching insane difficulty again because the game is imbalanced, grinding and boring.

Edit: You know what? There is no point continuing playing this game. If perks are misleading, if zombies are overpowered, if core block models are missing what's the point of playing this game. Might as well go play minecraft with zombie mods,at least that might feel more survival type than this game and it will run at steady fps.

 
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Hollow, are you aware you can change the difficulty setting for your save at any time? We never start a new map on Insane, though we often end up there. It's just pointless due to bullet sponges. I've always thought that bullet sponge enemies was a very poor way to implement difficulty / challenge. If Insane instead hugely increased zombie numbers and there was scope to kill a few while dodging and weaving through the others, I'd be all over it.

Instead we typically start on a low to middling difficulty. As soon as we start to feel we are OP, we increase it one notch, and we never decrease it. That's our rules. I mean once you get a gun and a few bullets, default difficulty becomes trivial and you will genuinely want to increase the challenge. We usually make the first difficulty increase around day 5 - 7, and just go from there as necessary.

Maybe try that approach and you will enjoy the game more. There is absolutely no shame on playing on a difficulty that you find fun.

 
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Hollow, are you aware you can change the difficulty setting for your save at any time? We never start a new map on Insane, though we often end up there. It's just pointless due to bullet sponges. I've always thought that bullet sponge enemies was a very poor way to implement difficulty / challenge. If Insane instead hugely increased zombie numbers and there was scope to kill a few while dodging and weaving through the others, I'd be all over it.
Instead we typically start on a low to middling difficulty. As soon as we start to feel we are OP, we increase it one notch, and we never decrease it. That's our rules. I mean once you get a gun and a few bullets, default difficulty becomes trivial and you will genuinely want to increase the challenge. We usually make the first difficulty increase around day 5 - 7, and just go from there as necessary.

Maybe try that approach and you will enjoy the game more. There is absolutely no shame on playing on a difficulty that you find fun.
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I've changed some rules to make it feel more like an apocalypse and less than a trivial thing. For starters I changed the number of respawnable zombies and animals to triple amounts, always running on easy difficulty

which seemed ok.

As you said zombies feel too easy once you hit a certain point and this requires XML editing. The ideal game for me would require the following:

-lootable zombies (fixed with higher chance for lootbags , have to change lootbag contents to stop dropping dog food cans)

-running zombies (easily changed on settings)

-animal herding (requires mod)

-no demolishers (hard to edit)

-hordes with at least a couple hundred of zombies (I don't know how to do that)

-headshots that actually work as described (that would require some serious xml editing)

-zombies that never respawn

All those changes just to enjoy a game a little bit more. However, if the game settings were more like the ones in Don't Starve (almost anything is customizable) I would have no problem whatsoever.

Edit: Actually ever increasing zombie hordes would be really cool. E.g. you get 10 zombies at day 1 and every progressive day you get more zombies, more animal packs to the point you have hordes with couple of hundred of zombies until your computer crashes. But that requires gamestage editing and I'm not familiar with it.

 
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-no demolishers (hard to edit)
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Actually that one is easy. Find the file entitygroups.xml then do a mass replace of the following text:

Replace: zombieDemolition

With: Any other zombie name type you like to replace thenm with (look through the file for plenty of examples, I suggest some variant of Cops zombie to keep the difficulty up there).

 
...
I'd personally like to see the devs completely stop adding new stuff and focus on fixing what's already in the game:

Things that need to be fixed:

Horrible FPS performance

The loot gating system

The horribly grouped perks

Zombie AI needs to go back to stupid levels and be unable to dig

Lootable zombies

Easier farming

Harder food management
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My FPS is fine (since I switched off reflections and bloom), but I couldn't agree more with the rest. Succinctly put. I too really hope the devs decide to work on all of those before adding new stuff.

 
-hordes with at least a couple hundred of zombies (I don't know how to do that)
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Should be easy to change, BUT the reason why TFP is not doing this is afaik that the engine (or your CPU) is unable to handle that many Zombies at once. Even Bloodmoon is limitied to iirc 64 because of performance issues not because they do not want more zombies. And bloodmoon with 64 Zs is also already well known to make your fps drop into the basement.

 
That figure (64) is your maxAlive setting and indicates only the max number of zombies that can be alive in the world at any one point in time (per player in your group). No new zombies will spawn in till you kill some of those 64.

This figure has no bearing whatsoever on the total number of zombies your horde will contain. Total zombies in the horde is already in the hundreds. I'm at work so I can't check from here, but the last time I was looking in that file I was looking for which gamestage Demolishers appear from, which was gamestage 153 and I noticed that the total number of zombies in that particular horde is 216. Again I *think* this is per player in group.

 
A18 is much more fun than A17.I never got past day 21 in A17, I got bored and restarted. A17 I put in less than 200 hours, even Ravenhearst/War of the Walkers and the other MODS just couldnt make it any more appealing.

A18 I now actually get up to a day count that I havent done since A15

500 hours in A18 and still going strong.
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I started plaing in alpha 15 and played maybe 10 hours of alpha 17 because i didnt like it at all. Alpha 18 though i already have around 100 hours and i play WoW constantly. That being said i still prefer 16.4 much more though...

 
Edit: You know what? There is no point continuing playing this game. If perks are misleading, if zombies are overpowered, if core block models are missing what's the point of playing this game. Might as well go play minecraft with zombie mods,at least that might feel more survival type than this game and it will run at steady fps.
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You can understand the perks by reading; the info is all there.

You can turn down the difficulty and change it as you like before or during play.

You CAN build the stuff you want with a little work, and the feedback is clearly being considered to make it simpler, but not easier.

Minecraft is at full release; this is early access alpha.

If you want to try stuff, have fun, succeed and fail, and give useful feedback for the full release, cool.

If not, play something else; but stop acting like this is something being done to you; you have chosen to play an early access game, you have chosen not to do your homework, you have chosen to play on harder settings, you have chosen to spend your energy wishing for the game you want rather than playing the game you have.

That's on you, sunshine.

 
That figure (64) is your maxAlive setting and indicates only the max number of zombies that can be alive in the world at any one point in time (per player in your group). No new zombies will spawn in till you kill some of those 64.
This figure has no bearing whatsoever on the total number of zombies your horde will contain. Total zombies in the horde is already in the hundreds. I'm at work so I can't check from here, but the last time I was looking in that file I was looking for which gamestage Demolishers appear from, which was gamestage 153 and I noticed that the total number of zombies in that particular horde is 216. Again I *think* this is per player in group.
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I could be wrong but that is just the total count before the horde night ends. So if you can kill all 216 before 4am, your horde is done. Max alive is still 64 I think unless you mod it higher I believe.

 
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You can watch the server console if playing a solo game and see that it spawns a set number out of X amount. i.e. 64 alive at once out of say, 300 total. If you kill one zombie it will automatically spawn another to keep the current alive count at 64 until you get to the last 64 in the blood moon wave. Once that's done it sometimes ups the GS and spawns an additional wave. It seems to do this repeatedly at times and happens more often if I kill the entire wave quickly. I've seen 4 distinct waves all in one night, numbered 0 through 3, but I don't know if the number of waves spawned are capped.

 
Maybe I've painted myself in a corner by playing only "Dead is Dead", but I find I'm building fortitude if I want to live.

So, I'm taking a vacation from the survival game that's has become just another Adrenaline Rush game.

Edit: Of course, "Dying" only makes the game even harder as Game Stage keeps ticking up while the player has stopped gaining, exacerbating the problem. So maybe "Dead is Dead" is now the only easy mode.

 
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You can watch the server console if playing a solo game and see that it spawns a set number out of X amount. i.e. 64 alive at once out of say, 300 total. If you kill one zombie it will automatically spawn another to keep the current alive count at 64 until you get to the last 64 in the blood moon wave. Once that's done it sometimes ups the GS and spawns an additional wave. It seems to do this repeatedly at times and happens more often if I kill the entire wave quickly. I've seen 4 distinct waves all in one night, numbered 0 through 3, but I don't know if the number of waves spawned are capped.
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This is something I've never heard of before. I always get 3 waves. Always have (as far as I can remember). This is not through console interaction, just observation that there is a distinct pause of about 10 to 20 seconds where no zombies come at all. I assume that is the changeover to the next wave. Anyways, always been 3 waves per horde night. I didn't know it could vary. :/

- - - Updated - - -

Maybe I've painted myself in a corner by playing only "Dead is Dead", but I find I'm building fortitude if I want to live.
So, I'm taking a vacation from the survival game that's has become just another Adrenaline Rush game.

Edit: Of course, "Dying" only makes the game even harder as Game Stage keeps ticking up while the player has stopped gaining, exacerbating the problem. So maybe "Dead is Dead" is now the only easy mode.
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Dying makes the game easier. Not only do you stop gaining levels until you pay off the death penalty (hence gamestage stops rising as fast during this time since you cannot level up) but your gamestage is also permanently reduced by anything from 2 to 5 per death, depending on the difficulty level (-2 on easy, -5 on Insane).

 
I use to hide in my base at night but I found it fun to go looting at night. Just grab some health, bandages, repair kits, and all the ammo you can make.

Verily

I say unto thee,

Lay thine eyes upon the field

in which my f**ks are grown.

And Behold

That it is Barren.

Mood: 24:7

 
I could be wrong but that is just the total count before the horde night ends. So if you can kill all 216 before 4am, your horde is done. Max alive is still 64 I think unless you mod it higher I believe.
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Hmm, i looked up the xml file yesterday and there is a count value which goes up to 500 (iirc). I assume that is what you mean.

There is also a maxAlive value which goes up to 256, which i understand means during the whole horde night you will get up to 500, but max 256 simultaniously.

If Ghostlight is right, this would cap in multiplayer at 4 players with 64 per player. So more then 4 players still wont give you more then 256 Zs.

I just wonder, because we are 4 players and with gamestage ~700 we already should see ~150 Zs in parallel. Of course i couldn't count the Zs we actually got during bloodmoon, but i estimate it far far below these 150... 64 sounds more like it looks like. But if the 64 Z limit is for the whole game and not per player, what should the maxAlive setting in the horde config stand for?

 
I was talking about the Max Alive option in the options you see before you start your server. I believe that figure overrides anything in any XML (could be wrong though). It defaults to 8, and it is definitely per player.

 
This is something I've never heard of before. I always get 3 waves. Always have (as far as I can remember). This is not through console interaction, just observation that there is a distinct pause of about 10 to 20 seconds where no zombies come at all. I assume that is the changeover to the next wave. Anyways, always been 3 waves per horde night. I didn't know it could vary. :/
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Number of waves are also determined by gamestage. Of course, additional waves will not spawn if you have not wiped out the existing.

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?111778-Alpha-18-Dev-Diary!!&p=1008486

If you play a game where the BM happens much sooner than day 7 on 1hr+ long days, you'll see there is initially just a single wave.

 
A16: Pros:

You have the stamina of a normal human being.

Stupid zombies walk in a straight lines.

Scrap food 24/7 or turn into cannibalism

Rewarding farming

Zombies get progressively stronger, bases need constant resupply

ALL mining tools are amazing

Level by doing

Build huge bases end game

Cons:

Spikes break zombie legs

Gamebreaking trader and minibike bugs

Multiplayer lags when collapses occur

A17:

Pros:

Power attacks

Quests solve the problem of destroyed POIs

Cons:

Game lags

Level gating

You have the stamina of a diabetic

You build insanely slow

Horrible fps

Fake block graphics

Multiplayer becomes unplayable

Zombies have A* pathfinding algorithm, can dig through ground.

A18:

Pros:

Better graphics

M60

Cons:

Abysmal fps

Horrific performance

Loot gating (steel requires schematics and steel parts)

Fisher price building (iron into junk turret bullets)

Demolishers that defeat the purpose of turrets

The most incomprehensible perk system in a video game ever.

Paper melee weapons, bullet sponge zombies

Fake melee animations, never hit what you aim

Trader still hides his best stuff, then sells them at absurd prices

The devs haven't even finished balancing A18 and they even started talking A19.

I'd personally like to see the devs completely stop adding new stuff and focus on fixing what's already in the game:

Things that need to be fixed:

Horrible FPS performance

The loot gating system

The horribly grouped perks

Zombie AI needs to go back to stupid levels and be unable to dig

Lootable zombies

Easier farming

Harder food management
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Do you change the difficulty? i keep the difficulty at normal and i do not have the bullet sponge zombies.

The zombies need to dig, because guys like me used to build massive underground evil liars, complete with horde night drop traps.

The trader and the quests need some work, and a lot of stuff needs work, but at the same time i see progress, and with an early access game that is extremely important. You don't want another starforge or interstellar marines...

 
Maybe I'm wrong, but I dont like the game as much and I'm trying to understand why.

 
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