Help needed: several questions

[arcana75]

Playing it for over 10 hours been having fun after the initial hurdle of dealing with zeds and the various mechanics that aren't well documented (fair enuff it's a 1-dev EA game). Have a few questions hope fellow players can help answer:

1) Archery, so I keep still and I see the crosshair "shrink", but it never goes to red though I read somewhere it's supposed to go red. Is it supposed to stay white, and you fire once the crosshair stops shrinking? And there's no way to improve the aim while on the move? The crosshair expands if I move. AI seems to be alot better almost unfair they can fire and hit accurately while moving.

2) Food - it takes how many days for crops to mature? Should I rely on crops or should crops go towards cooked meals for better sustainability? I've yet to cook anything because I lack the proper ingredients.

3) If I get an AI follower to cook or make something, he'll go off to "find stuff" if a particular ingredient is missing. In this case, does the AI magically get the components, or does it have to properly loot the components? For example if I try to cook a stew and lack a carrot, the AI walks off saying he's looking for a carrot and leaves the camp. Will he keep looking until he finds a carrot or is there some cheat mechanic that he'll magically get a carrot in due time?

4) I have a small base that I took over from an initial 4-man community. Now every day there's 3 looters that will hover outside the base. Problem is the looters stop my people from working, and if I intervene they run off saying they don't want to die, and they can run indefinitely while I run out of stamina before I can catch them. The only way I deal with them is sneak around them as they return, then snipe them from behind with a bow. What's the mechanic that draws looters, is it presence and does lowering presence reduce the odds of looters?

5) I try to recruit existing members of a community, using the brain scanner I butter up someone to the top-right quadrant (ADMIRE), and ask them to join. They reply I'm an alright person but no thanks. So I shouldn't bother to recruit them since there'll always be something holding them back or I just haven't gotten their ADMIRE value high enough?

6) Do I need to bury zeds or just human corpses, or no need at all? TBH I don't even know if burying them does anything I just figure my community doesn't want corpses lying around and they seem to attract zeds.

7) Is the white strain a death sentence? Sometimes I get hit, my health isn't even half gone but I fall down and die. I look to the left and the infection bar is there, looks white, can't be sure.

8) The only people who'll visit my base are travelling traders. Does killing them affect my community morale?

9) If I throw a molotov at a cabin, do the occupants take damage?

10) Is there a finite # of people on the map? If I slowly whittle down a hostile community it won't magically recruit more right?

[Acerbic]

1) The crosshair will turn red when they're close enough for the 'perfect shot'. The lower your archery, the closer you need to be.

2) Crops as food is fine for the first 10 days or so, but you definitely want a farm as soon as you can so you can cook. Cooking is way more beneficial. Also it takes about 2/4 days, depending on the crop. I don't have exact estimates because I don't really pay attention. I just go about my business, then harvest when everything is ready. You also have a limited time to farm before winter hits, so it's best to start asap.

3) Ai has to loot the components. They'll search your buildings for what they need. If you don't have it, then they'll tell you and stop what they're doing.

4) Building draws looters. Presence effects the size/strength of their groups. If you're in a position to set traps for them around your base, I'd advise doing so, as chasing them can be a pain in the ass.

5) You have to get the admire/fear value in specific spots to be able to recruit people. You'll notice (with the brain scanner) when you're asking them to join, part of the 4 emotional responses turns green. The white diamond (starts right in the middle, normally) is you, it needs to be within the green in order to recruit people. Refugees are by far the easiest people to recruit since all you really have to do is speak to them (you can offer them a gift if they're resistant, but it definitely won't take you anywhere near as long as community members to get them on your side)

6) Human corpses draw zeds, so if you want less of them, then yes, bury the dead. Your dead, specifically, will lower community morale if not buried. Zombie corpses are fine.

7) Yes. White Strain is almost instant death. There is no cure.

8) I... don't actually know the answer to this. Killing anyone outside your community doesn't appear to effect your community, so it shouldn't, but I've never killed a trader, so I'm not 100%

9) Yes

10) Again, not 100%, but I don't think so. I know if you clear the community, more will move in if you don't do anything with the base. I don't know if communities themselves actually recruit from refugees.

[Nautixx [GER]]

8) It will affect depending on your mates characters and relations. Some will gain respect or approval while others will lose. As this is dev beta you can check via F8 > Character Editor > Memory. (Having an insight is no cheating.)
Furthermore you could ask your members "What's up" after killing them. If they say "I will never forgive you for killing XYZ" they don't approve.
However you could stealth assassinate them in the woods outside your base and no one will recognize if the green tree symbol is full.

10) There is a max cap of how many people can be on your map. NPC Communities who lose members will recruit new ones. You can see this if you know everyone of a certain community and there are strangers one day. That's when they recruited someone new.

[arcana75]

Thanks Acerbic for the answers very helpful!

Archery - I have 5 stars in archery, I notice now the red appears when it's rather close maybe 5 metres. Is that right?

Cooking & farming - Day 19, recruited someone with 5 stars cooking gotten him started on cooking as a role. The AI seems to pick its own recipes so wasn't too sure what it would do if it ran out of a particular ingredient.

Presence - so it kinda makes sense to get rid of watchtowers if I don't have the gear to use them. I destroyed 4 watchtowers the frequency of looters seems to have dropped off. I built some spike traps, will my community walk into them?

Recruitment - Now it makes sense I thought the green was a graphics glitch! Refugees seems difficult to recruit they always spawn so far away from me. So far except for the 1st 2 people I recruited who were looters who surrendered, the rest were guards of visiting traders.

White Strain - seems like if just 1 latches on, even if I shake it off it's instant death. Makes it very difficult to get through a pack of white strain zombies.

Hostile communities - seems like my game has more hostile communities than zombies. I've found maybe 7 communities 5 are hostile one had over 15 people more than I could count. No idea how I'll ever be able to take them out.

[arcana75]

Originally posted by Nautixx GER:

8) It will affect depending on your mates characters and relations. Some will gain respect or approval while others will lose. As this is dev beta you can check via F8 > Character Editor > Memory. (Having an insight is no cheating.)
Furthermore you could ask your members "What's up" after killing them. If they say "I will never forgive you for killing XYZ" they don't approve.
However you could stealth assassinate them in the woods outside your base and no one will recognize if the green tree symbol is full.

I might try that thanks!

Originally posted by Nautixx GER:

10) There is a max cap of how many people can be on your map. NPC Communities who lose members will recruit new ones. You can see this if you know everyone of a certain community and there are strangers one day. That's when they recruited someone new.

Darn that's rough means I can't whittle down hostile enclaves....

[Nautixx [GER]]

Winter will deal with most communities as they go out and look for food if they don't have enough.
4 Communities (with one very weak) alive after my first winter. The whole west and north turned into a warzone on my map eventually drawing the attention of white strains. Now there are white strain almost everwhere ^^

[sf]

Just some additions.

Re: archery
Red is a perfect shot guaranteed to hit, but your DON'T need to wait for red shot all the time. E.g. when an infected is just inches away from you, chances are you won't miss even if it is not red (i.e. projectile not perfect, but so close that deviation doesn't matter anyway). In some cases, it is probably better to take more chance shots without moving in close enough to get it to red. (e.g. rabbits)

Re:food
I think carrots takes around 3 days(?) but it may be influenced by temperature/weather/watered status as well. I was planning to document it more closely, but freezing temperature hits me very fast in my current game ... (by early fall, the temperature is already dipping below freezing now and then). If you are short of seeds, you should consider stop planting them earlier than what the game automatically disallows new planting, as any planted stuff will die in the persistent cold (not sure how long). Likewise, do not start planting too early when winter seems to be over. There can still be cold spells that are long enough to kill your seeds, unless you really have a lot of spare ones. One way to stop planting new seeds, while still taking care of existing ones, is to just delete the farm zones. It will not affect existing seeds/plants already on the ground (which will still get watered/harvested as long as you have farmers assigned), just no new seeds planted.


Re: Presence and towers
Towers are good though. Not only do they increase sight range (by a LOT, sometimes the targets don't even know where the attacker is), but they also offer excellent cover to the person inside, so it will benefit even chicken fence. For other fences, tower is required to shoot over walls. you may need to judge things on a case by case basis. But later on, you may even want to use towers to draw in raiders/looters, as they often "import" new items from "outside". Regardless of towers or not, get bows and arrows, early and many.


Re: Hostile communities
You can kill them off slowly if you don't wait so long such that they recruit. One good way is to anger them (turn hostile), which will cause them to chase you, and sometimes plan a raid on your base. Then just pick off their main strength using the advantage of your base as defenders. That can usually weaken them a lot making it easier for you to hunt down the rest either with help or by yourself. The traditional way is to simply have more archers. The easy way though is to stealthily toss a molotov where they are mostly in a small area.

If they have a wooden fence, you can burn down a fence section with molotov so that you can sneak into their base to either ambush them while they go in/out, or use more molotov to flush them out if they hide in their houses.

Winter may offer opportunities as many bases with a lot of population can go hungry, which may cause them to come out of their base more often to look for food.

Another unconventional direction may be to make use of infected. Somehow get some of them infected so that it breaks out inside, hopefully spreading the infection. I think there was a raider community in my game that killed itself off that way (could be IS though, as the last few members I found where white and there was no generic white infected around). But how this is done is tricky. Maybe leave a trail of "mysterious meat" near their base?

Empty bases can be settled by BOTH refugees or looters/raiders. If it is a wire fence, one way to prevent the latter case is to just take over the gates (leaving the rest of the fence/base as it is), and set them to "always closed". This also prevents refugees from using it, but I think it is preferable to having a new looter/raider base springing up. You can just ignore it, or use it as a remote outpost when you are exploring (store things inside to be shipped to your base at your own pace, since nobody can access the buildings within, it is as good as owned)

If an abandoned base is wooden though, it prob will not work as hostiles will burn it down. But the reverse is true: if a wooden base gets taken over by looters/raiders, they will be easy to break into.