Whorhay

The other big advantage of the zombie spawns being triggered by entering a volumetric space is that you can work your way through a poi and not be waking up zombies that are 3 floors above you when you fight the zombies in the first room.

Zombies in POI's being all triggered spawns was/is a solution to resource problems, but also the Devs didn't like that people would walk down a street making noise to lure all the zombies out. We'd just pick a street and make a bunch of racket. This would aggro all the zombies who would then bash their way out of the POI's and line up in the street to have their heads bashed in. Then we could proceed to loot all the POI's on the street and only keep an ear out for dog hordes. So now the zombies aren't spawned in at all until the player enters the spawn volume in which they belong.

There are defined volumes in every POI and those volumes have specific numbers of zombies and spawn points for them. When you enter that volume the game triggers the spawning of zombies. Some volumes also automatically wake up the zombies and perform a stealth check to see if they will automajically know where you are.Through experience you can start to suss out where the boundaries of these volumes are and use that to your advantage. The advantages of the volume based spawning is that the game doesn't have to spawn and keep track of the AI for dozens or hundreds of zombies that might otherwise be near you in a POI or City. This also means you can frequently wrench stuff to your hearts content and not worry about waking up zombies that are on another floor or something so long as you haven't triggered their volume.

I haven't done a MP game since the water changes, but in SP I haven't really noticed needing dew collectors. I always loot plenty of dirty water, and dew collectors become more about skipping the need to boil it first. That said I don't usually play in such a way that I need lots of duct tape early on either. For MP is it feasible to make golden rod tea and combine that with pond water to get by?

I'd really like to see a better or more thoughtful trader system. My suggestions: Remove item rewards from regular quests. Every quest gets tagged with a trader tab type, completing that quest permanently improves the traders corresponding tab by increasing the number of items they can stock, the quality range of those items, and stack size ranges. Remove Tier completion bonus and replace with a thanks for all the help bonus that can be repeated every 5 - 10 completions of a given tier with item rewards that are capped by player game stage + some bonus based on Tier, possibly affected by skills. Turning in a Fetch or Buried supplies quest immediately adds a number of items to the traders inventory tied to the trader tab type that the quest was identified as. Change trader restock to a nightly thing, but make it more of a gradual process where a few items for sale get selected for re-rolling to mimic inventory turnover. Give higher tier and higher quality items a heavier weighting for selection to be re-rolled. For me I like doing trader quests but often times the item rewards are pretty bad and it just comes down to picking the item with the best resale value. The Tier completion rewards are usually what I'm really after in order to get vehicles and crafting stations. The main determining factor when doing quests early is how far I have to travel. Before I have a vehicle I won't go more than a few hundred meters, and I definitely won't travel 1k+ until I've gotten to the minibike if at all possible. Otherwise the travel time and corresponding food/water consumption just doesn't feel worth it.

Demolishers showing up is usually my queue to start a new game. They aren't a fun, entertaining, or rewarding enough experience for what they do. In my current game I'm on day 30, level 56, gamestage just hit 102, have a few T6 top tier pieces of equipment with tons of room for improvements. I'm still using melee for most everything except horde night. Game is plateauing, but still fun, once Demo's appear though it just gets tedious and I'll start a new game.

You can do things to get more magazines of a specific type though, namely finding containers of the right sort. When I'm trying to get traps up high enough to make electric fences I bee-line for electronics stores. When I need more Vehicle magazines, I start ransacking every POI that looks like it'd have Pass & Gas crates. That said I think I did prefer the old system of skill points getting you the improved quality and recipes, with random schematic finds for fun variance. I really didn't like how we had to find schematics to make the top tier weapons though, that was frankly a crap mechanic. The magazine system seems to work pretty well, my only consistent balance issue is finding enough crafting station magazines to actually build a Chem station and above. I pretty much always have gas powered tools and vehicles weeks before I have the capability to cook gas.

Hoard it all, and eventually find a use for it when skill points pile up.

Started playing in A9 and don't think I've ever had an infection death. That said I don't hesitate to look things up on-line when I run up against something for the first time, so the learning curve never killed me in that manner. The infection does seem to progress faster than it did years ago, in my latest game I got infected in the middle of a quest on day two, and was past the point of a bottle of honey to fix pretty quickly. The trader had some pills though which I was easily able to afford, which saved me the time scrambling looking for stumps.

1. open voxel sandbox world 2. combat system where enemies are always a threat 3. RNG progression without forced story

Not a complete solution, but If using the auger hold down the trigger, don't spam it as each activation is 1% heat. I've heard that crouching also reduces heat generation though I haven't tested that personally.

I think that zombie closets getting broken should wake up the zombie inside of it. However I also think Arrows, Bolts, Bullets, and spears should be able to penetrate them and hit the zombie inside. So you can shoot every zombie closet but you risk missing the zombie or not killing it and causing a ruckus. Maybe make the closet doors not even readily breakable but instead you have to activate them to open them like a normal door, but the block just vanishes. And even better would be doing the same for all of the stuff like shower curtains that zombie hide behind.

That is correct, however being in a vehicle seems to offer quit a bit of protection against land mine damage and the extra velocity you will likely have also helps a lot by getting your further from the explosion by the time it goes off. However there is always the added risk that the vehicle will get hung up enough on a mine that is proud of the surrounding terrain enough that it will trigger it similar to shooting it with a firearm.

I think the fire escape I was thinking of is actually an access to an area with some AC units, if you go past those there is a ledge that leads around a corner of the building and to an open window into the elevator shaft. And actually going from the 2nd to the 1st floor is a drop of two blocks in the busted up stairwell.

I'd say the book store HQ is the worst thus far in my experience. Large areas with relatively fewer choke points with tons of zombies that seem to be in sleeper zones that wake them all up at once. Your game stage will have a lot to do with how bad that is, in my games they are usually full of radiated zombies. Combined with the game running like a power point presentation in the cities it can be pretty sketchy. Book Store HQ has been my only death in A20 so far where I stood much of a chance and wasn't just shafted by RNGesus. The floors are all wide open but the path from floor to floor should be pretty visible. Scissor lift to 3rd floor, kill zombies > open stairs to 4th floor, kill zombies > stair well to roof, kill zombies > fire escape down, to a ladder in the elevator shaft, down to 2nd floor, kill zombies > open stairs down to 1st/ground floor, kill zombies > different stairs down to basement, kill zombies, loot room, open garage door to the outside.