Best zombie population settings for very slow growth

[Fried Chicken Quan]

Just want someone's opinion on the best settings for slow zombie population growth. Like after 8-10 months, there are zombies all in the urban areas but at the beginning, i just want to chill and work my way up.

Having a hard time with the settings because I feel like they populate so much at a time and out of no where

[Zaidah]

Put the "peak population" setting to max (as well as the "population setting" to high/max, and a very low starting population). Put the "Max peak pop" at 300 days or something to your liking.

You could also turn off respawn, that way you could see your effort being reward for clearing zombies regularly.

[J's]

Like Zaidah said, you need to set your initial population to very very low settings (combined default is or was 0.35 so factoring in your population multiplier, let's say 4 (max), you could set it to 0.05 for a net of 0.2 or even lower) AND increase your Peak Day from 28 to whatever feels right for you (up to 365). I have always assumed the transition between initial an peak is linear so if Peak Day is 100, then each day would get 1% of the difference between initial and peak added (or substracted) to the initial setting.

Between day 1 and Peak Day, your population will transit from the initial multiplier to the peak day multiplier... both of them are affected by the same population multiplier.

You can also try to tweak redistribution and respawn settings to make them more gradual/slow. At their extreme (say 0.00001 or lower), I figure you'd get an additional way to slow things down.

I have a guide about zombie population settings... let me know about your experiment as there is a section about suggested settings and the user's experience with them.

[Shift]

It's as simple as increasing peak day and setting a starting value lower than 1. The longer the peak day, the slower they'll grow.

My chill playthroughs are with 0 starting, peak day at 6 months, peak population at 4 and base value at 1.

[ZeroEffekt]

Originally posted by Zaidah:

You could also turn off respawn, that way you could see your effort being reward for clearing zombies regularly.

Further, you can also adjust the Migration settings so zombies shuffle in from unexplored areas (ie; black fog of war on map) in whatever size you want. That way you still 'have a reason' to put up defenses in cleared areas and don't have to worry about what zombies are respawning in which houses on your street.

This would still provide you with a persistent threat, but only to the degree that "the more you explore the surrounding area, the further away they are when they walk into your world". However, I think the group sizes are static, so you would have to figure out if you wanted small or larger hordes wandering into your chill-for-x-amount-of-time buildup scenario in a semi-regular fashion.

I prefer this because, given enough luck and time, you can effectively cheese the game build walls around unexplored pockets of woods and leave a single opening for zombies to shuffle out of (yay combat training & loot). Also, you can strategically explore areas to bottleneck where the zombies can shuffle in from (exploring to rivers is a godsend in this regard).
It's admittedly a bit meta, but it isn't exactly unrealistic/unimmersive. It's just a modicum of control in a game that WON'T 'might kill you', because it absolutely will. It's always just a matter of time.

[Fried Chicken Quan]

TH:ank u guyS U all get awards
best answrs NA