Zombie spawn diminishing after long play time

[White-Gandalf]

Version

2.4 b5

Platform

Windows

After long play times - usually after more than 100 hours in a game -, zombie random spawns always diminish until they reach zero.

This diminishing occurs on two different scales: Locally on chunks often visited, and globally at a smaller scale. It applies to random zombie spawn as well as to random animal spawn. It does not apply to wandering hordes, screamers or their hordes, blood moon hordes or sleeper volumes in POIs. ONLY to random spawns.

The diminishing occurs gradually, over multiple ingame weeks. Enemies get fewer and fewer. In the later phase, just animals remain. Then, those, too, vanish.

For example, in my current streamed solo game, i am at about day 120 (90 minute days, thus about 200 real time hours in the game), and the random spawn got reduced to literally zero around my home base as well as around my horde base in the wasteland. Only when i drive to seldom or never visited areas do i see any zombie or animal at all. Still drastically below the expected normal density for that area. For example in the snow biome at night about 1 enemy in an area of 100 m^2 - with random spawn already gemodded to 6 times vanilla density.

This buggy behavior appeared over multiple game releases over multiple years in a multitude of game instances, but really got into my focus only since i regularly stream 7DTD on community servers (since about 2 years or so). It appears on local solo games as well as on server hosted games.

Since we didn't realized the cause of what we experienced, we in a first countermeasure increases zombie spawns to multiples of vanilla, up to 6 times. That helped as long as the spawn was not already completely dead. But when the spawn got completely locked up, even that 6 times density does not lead to any enemy at all.

I append the log of and a link to the stream of my current solo game, where i encountered completely locked random spawn.

 

[Jugginator]

We did fix this for vanilla. What are you spawn boost mods doing? They could be conflicting with our fixes.

 

[White-Gandalf]

I experienced this behavior with vanilla as well as with spawn boost mods. I don't see a difference.

The spawn boosts i use for random spawns set the "maxcount" numbers in "spawning.xml" to multiples of the vanilla setting.

In my current playthrough (watchable on my VODs on twitch), i started the game with "vanilla x 2" boost. This led to diminishing spawns since about day 70 or so, and to nearly complete shutdown of spawns around day 110: In the real time hours before and after the day 112 horde in the wasteland, there was not a single enemy (zombie or animal) in an area of at least 100 meter around the horde base. Not at day time and not at night.

In that stream, i exited the game to the starting screen, exchanged the spawn boost mod from "x2" to "x6", then restarted the game. This didn't change anything in the game in that stream.

A day later i did a debugging session at the start of the stream, where i tested the x6 spawn boost in a fresh test game. It appeared as expected with a drastic amount of enemies in all biomes. After that, i restartet the normal playthrough, and at that time, the spawn seemed to have reappeared - with a sufficiently high amount of enemies (bigger than vanilla, more or less as requested). Thus, for the moment being, the issue did go away by itself - although only after a complete restart of the game engine.

I still don't know what causes the diminishing, but i have some ideas where it could stem from. The funpimps, of course, would have the better options of debugging this matter. However, for that we would need to bestow a game save with wracked spawn to the funpimps, or the funpimps would have to put debugging output into the log. At the current state, i cannot identify any debugging output in the log concerning random spawns.

For reference, in the modded "x6" "spawning.xml" the settings go from...
<set xpath='//biome[@name="pine_forest"]/spawn[@id="dz01"]/@maxcount'>6</set>
...to...
<set xpath='//biome[@name="wasteland"]/spawn[@id="nz03"]/@maxcount'>40</set>

 

[valeskas]

The funpimps, of course, would have the better options of debugging this matter.

Actually, not exactly true. dnSpy supports debugging unity games, with conditional breakpoints and decompiled source and the ability to change source of specific methods and compile it back. All the good stuff. Any good programmer can debug it, given the easy repro. (waiting 150 hours is not easy repro)

 

[seven]

I know it was still happening as recently as 2.1 with vanilla spawning. When I mentioned it faatal said he had worked on it and thought it was fixed. I've done different things with spawns since then so can't say what's happening now.