Do lights attract zombies?

[Silamon]

If I leave lights on at my hideout, will that attract zombies or is it just sound that does that?

[Nordil(Hun)]

Originally posted by Dire:

In my experience Zeds seem to react to lights being turned on even with sheets covering the windows.

I believe sheets still give off some light as seen if you look at your home from the outside. Zeds see that slight flicker of light and react to it.

No. They just wander around supposedly aimlessly. But if you increase the zombie count, you will notice that if you do not "build things", eventually they for some reason will congregate near your base. Building things is the only way to keep areas clear for now:(
(Happened to me, no matter what i did, how many hordes i disposed of, every friggin time they were just coming over to loiter around my base.:P Was ridiculous. Allthough i learned a few issues cuz of this, and eventually gave up on even trying, and all i did is wanted to grab a friggin hammer!:P even when there was no meta event no helicopter, for some reason when the hordes moved, they moved in to surround my base. And i snuck even in my base!)

[PhantomDgen]

As far as i know zed usually react to light if the source its on their cone of vision, so holding a lantern and pointing to him inside the cone of the zombie should atract him in disregard of your lightfooted/stealth.

[꧁༒☬ GΞX ☬༒꧂]

Even if this one is old, this thread appears on top of any search engine and confuses people a lot (especially in my server).
So to clear this up: Light itself does NOT attract zombies. You can literally flashlight into the face of a zed in a moderate distance and it won't notice nor care about you.
The switching operation is buggy. Whenever you turn on/off your switch, you will generate noise, more than with a damn shotgun. This bug hasn't been fixed for years, and may even take another 10 years to be even noticed by the slow devs.
If you have lights on, leave them on. If they are off, leave them off, unless it is safe to do the switch.

Visual effects are, again, NOT attracting the zeds. You can test this yourself while in debug mode and enabling zombie path findiing logics, to see what attracts them. Close all curtains and spam the switch, you will see how they home towards you.

[Grizzly]

Originally posted by ꧁༒☬ GΞX ☬༒꧂:

Even if this one is old, this thread appears on top of any search engine and confuses people a lot (especially in my server).
So to clear this up: Light itself does NOT attract zombies. You can literally flashlight into the face of a zed in a moderate distance and it won't notice nor care about you.
The switching operation is buggy. Whenever you turn on/off your switch, you will generate noise, more than with a damn shotgun. This bug hasn't been fixed for years, and may even take another 10 years to be even noticed by the slow devs.
If you have lights on, leave them on. If they are off, leave them off, unless it is safe to do the switch.

Visual effects are, again, NOT attracting the zeds. You can test this yourself while in debug mode and enabling zombie path findiing logics, to see what attracts them. Close all curtains and spam the switch, you will see how they home towards you.

thats... patched
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyMbWbCZxvE
(he has a comment pinned that its patched out)

[Prowler™]

Turning on and off light switches used to cause a gigantic sound pulse that alerted all nearby zombies to your location. This should no longer be the case.
If you leave a window uncovered you will be detected by zombie line of sight, which will make them path to your last location and search it.
If you make any noise at all for whatever reason IT WILL NOT BE BLOCKED BY WALLS. Again, zombies will hear it and search that location for the source.
LIGHT SOURCES ARE NOT DETECTED BY ZOMBIES.
Campfires make a noise which is what attracts zombies. The fire itself does not. Flash lights don't alert zombies, the noise you make moving around does. Car head light do not alert zombies, the loud engine and radio system do.

Also idle wandering zombies will attack player placed/built objects by default. Don't barricade the outside of windows and nothing will touch them without being alerted.

[Mike]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.