PC Zombie Counts and Options

[Tehnomaag]

In my opinion the number of "wandering" zombies is pretty OK. Once you get the hang of it dealing with small amount of zombies during a daytime is relatively trivial even on higher difficulties. There is always an option to up the difficulty some to punish yourself more for over extending and getting hit by a random walker but at some point it just makes the fights more tedious as zombies turn into damage sponges.

So yeah - the "danger" part is POI's / dungeons with a more limited manuevering room and if you miss some sleepers in closets behind you and wake them up by making a lot of noise fighting someone then you can get jumped occasionally by a surprise sleeper creeping up on you from behind. At higher difficulties and early game with little to no armor it can be pretty punishing to get hit by a zed doing 150% or 300% of the normal damage per hit.

There is a lot of options to up the challenge for people who look for it. Up to an optional permadeath mode and additional intermediate steps like the option to delete the stuff you had on you when you died, droppign everything, dropping only backback or toolbelt, etc. Option to make zombies faster even during daytime, etc etc.

 

[Nauman Marwat]

Vultures always attack you if you are in a vehicle. They hate vehicles with a passion.

Lol I use that as a bait.

 

[Ghostlight]

Thanks for all that. I'm happy editing XML. A quick question on "resapwndelay". I have set their awareness/sight to 200 so they should be coming for me at all times from a large distance. However if I kill them all, will that be it for a full day. In short, can respawndelay be set at a value less than 1 such as 0.1? I see little point in a larger zombie count if I can just kill them and be back where I started in an empty world.

 

[w00kien00kie]

Decimal/float values may actually work looking at the code. Will need to test to be sure.

 

[Roland]

Also, what if zero is used as a value or what if that part is deleted completely?

 

[Ghostlight]

Edit - yes, take Prisma's advice. Unless you want to learn the XML and get into modding, use someone else's modlet. I'm a glutton for punishment so I DIY some of this easier stuff.
Original post below.

Sure. If you want to directly edit spawning.xml, then look for this section:

<biome name="pine_forest">
 <spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="3" time="Day" entitygroup="ZombiesAll" />
 <spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="4" time="Night" entitygroup="ZombiesNight" />
 <spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="14" time="Any" entitygroup="EnemyAnimalsForest" spawnDeadChance="0" />
 <spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="21" time="Any" entitygroup="FriendlyAnimalsForest" spawnDeadChance="0" />
</biome>

Simply change "maxcount" to however many zombies you want in each spawning area* and change "respawndelay" downward if you want them to respawn more quickly (in game days).

OK I will trying this tonight. However one thing does confuse me. Is the snippet of XML above the current settings that I can expect to see when I edit my XML? Because that would imply there is only 1 zombie per pine forest area and it respawns in 3 days if killed. Much as I complain about the lack of zombies, I do see more than that!! How come?

 

[Roland]

I think it is per chunk. And there can be several chunks around you loaded at once. In the options if you have view distance to max I believe the game loads a 10-12 chunk radius around you so that is a lot of potential spawns. For A18, TFP changed it so that the more distant loaded chunks would no longer spawn since you may never interact with them directly and only the few chunks immediately around you would spawn.

Also in my own modlet I copied and pasted the “spawndeadchance = 0” to every entity spawning line instead of just the few shown above in the code snippet and that seemed to make a difference—but it may also just be in my head.

 

[Adam the Waster]

OK I will trying this tonight. However one thing does confuse me. Is the snippet of XML above the current settings that I can expect to see when I edit my XML? Because that would imply there is only 1 zombie per pine forest area and it respawns in 3 days if killed. Much as I complain about the lack of zombies, I do see more than that!! How come?

same its very confusing. mostly due to the fact that i have a brain of a zombie monkey

 

[Boidster]

OK I will trying this tonight. However one thing does confuse me. Is the snippet of XML above the current settings that I can expect to see when I edit my XML? Because that would imply there is only 1 zombie per pine forest area and it respawns in 3 days if killed. Much as I complain about the lack of zombies, I do see more than that!! How come?

Yes, the snippet I showed is the default values.

I think it is per chunk.

Really? Probably I'm confused due to ignorance about how it decides if it will spawn zombies into a chunk. Maybe it is max 4 per chunk (under my new settings) but the odds of any chunk spawning a zombie are really quite low and maybe even the code does a nearby-chunk test to make sure it doesn't overpopulate due to RNG shenanigans (imagine if 6 adjacent chunks all 'rolled' max 4 spawned zombies - insta-horde!). So it appears as if the spawn area is much larger than a single chunk, but really it's just that only 5% or whatever of chunks actually get a spawn trigger activated.

I will say that I am getting 'bothered' by zombies around town quite a bit more now. Even had a cheerleader drop into my under-construction pit trap while I was working. It startled me 'cause it has been so long since really any zombies bugged me when working. Feels like old times!

 

[Roland]

Well I did say "I think". It could be per 2 chunks or per 3 chunks or even in a particular radius around the player. Whatever "it" is, it isn't exposed to xml so we have to work with whatever it is.

I do know that "it" is not an entire biome.

 

[Niil945]

If anyone knows, there's a line displayed on the console when a bloodmoon happens that indicates how many zombies are part of a wave and also says how many can be alive at once. That number goes up with game stage. Is this a remnant of past scaling that's now defunct? It seems that the amount of zombies alive is still capped at the 8 per player (default server values).

 

[Shin]

The devs must do what they feel is best to deliver a product that makes the most money. Modders don't have to operate to that standard level, they just help to fulfill the devs goals.

Sry, had to come back and fix that post.

 

[Boidster]

I think there is a difference between maximum alive per player and maximum that will be spawned in a horde. As you kill zombies, more will take their place until the horde is done.

From gamestages.xml:

<spawner name="BloodMoonHorde">
 <gamestage stage="1"><spawn group="feralHordeStageGS1" num="2" maxAlive="3" duration="1"/></gamestage>
 ...
 <gamestage stage="10">
   <spawn group="feralHordeStageGS7" num="15" maxAlive="6" duration="1" interval="24"/>
   <spawn group="feralHordeStageGS10" num="15" maxAlive="6" duration="1"/>
 </gamestage>
 ...
 <gamestage stage="97">
   <spawn group="feralHordeStageGS85" num="137" maxAlive="32" duration="2" interval="21"/>
   <spawn group="feralHordeStageGS91" num="137" maxAlive="32" duration="2" interval="23"/>
   <spawn group="feralHordeStageGS97" num="137" maxAlive="32" duration="7"/>
 </gamestage>
...

Taking GS 97 as an example, I think you will see a maximum of 411 total zombies during the horde, though each wave has a duration. So the first wave (feralHordeStageGS85) lasts either 2 in-game hours or 137 killed zombies whichever comes first.

If you had 2 players playing and a max of 8 per player, then you'd see 16 at a time until you ran through the 137 or hit the 2 hour mark. If you had 5 players, you'd see a max of 32 (the maxAlive from the <spawn group...> entry) at a time.

That's how I interpret it anyhow...

 

[Niil945]

Gotcha, so the maxAlive value doesn't matter at all except in multiplayer as it's going to default to 8 alive per player cap regardless (or whatever the server is set to). Thank you for the clarification.

 

[Boidster]

Gotcha, so the maxAlive value doesn't matter at all except in multiplayer as it's going to default to 8 alive per player cap regardless (or whatever the server is set to). Thank you for the clarification.

Yesbut, at the lowest gamestages (see GS1 and GS10 in my example), it has a maxAlive of 6, which I presume would override the game setting of 8. Not too long after GS10 the maxAlive rises to 8 or above and then the game's setting would take precedence. I think.

The game setting is to control performance on your potato, the spawner setting is to control the maximum pucker-factor of the horde. If you run on four potatoes wired in parallel, you conceivably could set the game to maxAlive=32 (technically it's 'BloodMoonEnemyCount' in serverconfig) and experience the power of a fully armed and operational GS100 horde.

 

[Niil945]

Hrm, so if there's a way to capture console output I might be able to script dynamically updating the game preferences to that ever increasing BloodMoonEnemyCount for some fun times. I like the idea of the amount increasing predicated entirely on GS as opposed to the player based caps. Maybe something to tinker with on the list with trying out some of the game changing mods like Darkness Falls and Ravenhearst for our next game.

 

[rivle]

For everyone who wants more Zombies in the world.

maxcount="60"

respawndelay="0.01

Just copy the file to "7 Days To Die\Data\Config" and have fun.

spawningxml.zip

 

[SylenThunder]

Just be aware that having maxalive higher than 90 will cause some issues. You usually will end up with slideshow bloodmoons, or no BM's at all. May also affect screamer hordes.

 

[rivle]

Just be aware that having maxalive higher than 90 will cause some issues. You usually will end up with slideshow bloodmoons, or no BM's at all. May also affect screamer hordes.

Thanks for the info. I changed it to 60, it should be now fine for bloodmoons too. I hope at least

/Edit

Works fine for me on bloodmoons, but you need a good pc. Before i had 40-60 fps, now only 30+.

It is just for testing, but it was fun.

I dont recommend using guns at night with this setting

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

I don't know what you're talking about. My game has loads of zombies because the PC has one super important advantage over the Xbox version and anyone who plays the PC version with not enough zombies to their liking is seriously short changing themselves. This game was made to be modded and there are a number of modlets that increase zombie counts-- double, 4x, 8x, 16x...whatever you want. Just do it. Much more productive than using every single thread to repeat yourself ad nauseum.
And in case anyone is worried that I'm trying to repress this feedback don't concern yourself. The devs know. They are fully aware of the zombie counts and how players feel about it. They've definitely heard. There is no need to continue beating this dead horse in every single thread you visit.

I hope we get the slider for the number of zombies back in the menu. Like promised.