72 hours respawn

[DuDun]

Do people play with default settings?

This is the one thing that's discouraging me. I don't want to tinker and go easy mode, but this setting alone makes it feel like progress is futile.
The very act of killing Zombies in a neighbor, go back home to rest, sort loot, wash clothes, cook, exercise, check the farm, occasionaly chop, saw transport wood, rest etc etc... takes 2 or more days.
So I decided to probe some opinions. Do people really play with these numbers?

[The early worm deserves the bird]

I think a lot of people just turn respawn off. I know since it's been an option I've turned it off

[Death]

I usually extend this to about a week.

[REDACTED]

I felt the same... I set mine to 96 hours or 4 days.

Respawn unseen though I set to 720 hours or 30 days. I think that means they wont respawn unless I havent been there for 30 days. The map is huge, it takes longer than that for me to build a small base and loot most towns or cities.

Respawn multiplier I set to 0.05

I play with x2 pop but I also set the starting pop to 0.1 and max pop wont be until 60 days.

I want to be able to clear areas and feel like ive made progress but I also dont want an empty town after i've built up a base.

I do this because i've done the initial grind several times and never seemed to make it to end game so this gives me some breathing room at first. But trust me with x2 pop theres still plenty of zombies to smush.

[Quill]

I turn it off. I like to feel as if I'm making some sort of progress in the world. Kentucky has only so many people. It may have a lot but it's not endless

[OKOK]

It turn off. Cause I want to be able to drive around and some day go back and fore from to other town or area.

It put some benefit in clearing a clear road.

If they keep respawning. Than why kill them at all.

[Death]

Originally posted by OKOK:

It turn off. Cause I want to be able to drive around and some day go back and fore from to other town or area.

It put some benefit in clearing a clear road.

If they keep respawning. Than why kill them at all.

In my opinion the game gets pretty boring without it after you've survived for about a month. So I say what's the point of even playing with it turned off since it's not like you're very likely to clear the map anyway?

[Animalman]

Isn’t zombie respawn obsolete with zombie resurrection? I haven’t played since that update yet so I don’t know if you can turn it up and down.

Maybe max setting force all corpse to resurrect unless destroyed

[Grishnerf]

no respawn makes lategame boring.

if you still about to learn the map/game then its better to turn it off.

i usually increase respawn amount but make it every 10 days.
so you have some kind of feeling secure for few days, but in the long run you need to clear
parts around your map every few days.

[DuDun]

Honestly feeling like the devs underestimate the relevance of a default settings.
It sets the baseline for a game's challenge level.

If I'm always going to end up playing sandbox mode, I'm unhappy with my performance in the game, because I'm not playing the game's basic mode.

But if I'm playing default settings I'm unhappy with my impact in the game, because after 3 days there are ever less resources available in the world but the same amount of zombies roaming around.

Yes, it's challenging, but when you leave your base after doing your shores and find even more zombies than the last time you checked, that's far more frustrating than it's challenging (because peak growth).

Funny thing: I've been playing builder mode assuming it'd be a "more relaxed experience" as the description suggests. Then I decided to check builder settings on the sandbox, and learn that it's just as hard as apocalypse or survival, but you get less resources and your character status change easier, which consequently makes it harder and less relaxing...

[DoktorFar]

Originally posted by DuDun:

Do people play with default settings?

This is the one thing that's discouraging me. I don't want to tinker and go easy mode, but this setting alone makes it feel like progress is futile.
The very act of killing Zombies in a neighbor, go back home to rest, sort loot, wash clothes, cook, exercise, check the farm, occasionaly chop, saw transport wood, rest etc etc... takes 2 or more days.
So I decided to probe some opinions. Do people really play with these numbers?

The number of zeds respawning is only a fraction of the cells desired pop value. you can change the amount that respawn. I like this and have even increased the numbers. My reasoning is that we are supposed to be in a country previously populated by more than 200 million people, now populated by more than 200 million zombies.... in terms of a final solution to the zombie problem it doesnt matter how many you kill, you are so hopelessly outnumbered. And the respawns represents that, in my mind at least.

EDIT: 1990'ies US pop :P

[Mushroom Steve]

Depends what they're aiming for, but sometimes yeah. In our recent playthrough, our server set it to 5 days. It's to give us the feeling that they're crossing from state lines/etc.

[Actionjackson]

I think 72 hours is fine for me right now... what i changed is "1 hour day"(default) to "2 hour day"... so it does not take 4 hours to go wash myself by the river.

Day one i come in and try clear most of the area i want to loot, and day 2 and 3 i can loot. This is single player mind you where i do all myself, but with 2hour day there is enough time do do different things each day.

[REDACTED]

Originally posted by Actionjackson:

I think 72 hours is fine for me right now... what i changed is "1 hour day"(default) to "2 hour day"... so it does not take 4 hours to go wash myself by the river.

Day one i come in and try clear most of the area i want to loot, and day 2 and 3 i can loot. This is single player mind you where i do all myself, but with 2hour day there is enough time do do different things each day.

Does 2 hour days slow down your hunger and thirst, healing times, generator fuel consumption ect?

Or does it only affect the time but everything else is the same?

[Actionjackson]

Originally posted by D.B. Cooper:

Originally posted by Actionjackson:

I think 72 hours is fine for me right now... what i changed is "1 hour day"(default) to "2 hour day"... so it does not take 4 hours to go wash myself by the river.

Day one i come in and try clear most of the area i want to loot, and day 2 and 3 i can loot. This is single player mind you where i do all myself, but with 2hour day there is enough time do do different things each day.

Does 2 hour days slow down your hunger and thirst, healing times, generator fuel consumption ect?

Or does it only affect the time but everything else is the same?

Reading books and cooking and things like that are unchanged i feel, i did not measure it though.
About hunger and sleep, i get the feeling they are also slowing down according to global time. But i am actually not sure, all i can say is that it does not behave unnatural. I do not have to sleep more often or eat more often with 2 hour days.

In any case, tasks that cost time like looking through crafting recipes, going from A to B, sorting stuff in the house... all these things dont waste as much time with 2 hour days.

I do like it better with 2 hours a days that is for sure, give it a shot.

[Greb]

I've been playing with both respawn off and rally groups off as well, but I'm warming up to the idea of having them both on these days.

Realism is nice and such but when zombies stop spawning and forming into balls which push each other into your personal space the game does get a little dull, you pretty much have one big fight where you want to settle down and then you're zombie free for a long time, really.

Being able to clean out areas semi-permanently and make a dent in the population is nice though, it really is. I think Zomboid is the only real decent zombie game that actually lets me do that, too. Games like Dead Rising are fantastic but even if you kill every zombie in an area and leave and come back, they'll all be magically back and I very often hate that. So generally I like to have respawning off just for that capability. Even if it gets a little boring down the line.

Although again I like to fence sit, or rather change to different sides depending on my mood. For example, in a game where I had encouraged us to play with respawns on for more fun gameplay, it actually made stuff rather unfun because we chose to have a spawn house a moderate distance away from our main base so we weren't stuck in a loop of respawning into hell if it ever got overrun or set on fire etc, but that safehouse was just constantly swarming with zombies around it no matter how much we cleared it out due to respawns while we were away from the area, which generally had the opposite effect of increasing fun, lol.

So I guess it's hard to really decide. Sorry to mention rally groups again considering that isn't a part of the topic, but I'm thinking (with the right settings I haven't figured out yet) that respawning being off, but rally groups being on might make the experience more exciting due to large groups migrating back into your zone and potentially coming to harass you instead of dribs and drabs, etc. It might function like a bit more of an organic respawn system, I dunno. Haven't fully tested it yet.

Migration definitely happens but it seems a little weird. It might be why respawn being off gets so boring, since zombies don't migrate into my chunk very well? Who knows. I've watched it in debug mode before but it always seems like zombies struggle to enter my region again once everything is cleaned out. Not really sure how it works enough to criticise it though, really.