Disappearing zombies, the ugly side of PZ game play

[Good Thyme]

Hey there, long time player but don't post often.

Wow is this game good with its survival crafting elements. But just ran into a sad realization after playing the game for a while- the zombies simply disappear when you save + reload the game.

I'm not talking a few zombies, or zombies that are far away, i'm talking about every single one, even the ones right behind you. I confirmed this absolutely with my most recent game play experience. Finally 'got good' enough to hit the chopper event consistently, and this play through i decided to try using a vehicle to avoid the zombie hoard.

Drove out to a field, and came up to a point where I was being followed by about one hundred zombies along this small strip of road. Keeping the car at 5 MPH, i was able to gather a nice clump and was leading them along this road. It was at this point I was called in to work and had to save to continue later. Only to my dismay, EVERY. SINGLE. ZOMBIE. was gone along with the helicopter, the event simply ending. Alone in my car, the world felt completely dead in this moment.

So i was loaded into a completely empty scenario, the entire game play moment gone. I never realized that the zombies and events were so heavily obstructed by simply saving and reloading the game.

The only solution from a play ability standpoint I can think of is to leave project zomboid running when leaving the computer. This will avoid the game deleting every zombie upon reload, but sometimes you have to close the game out...

How has your game play experience been around save and reloading for you? Have you also noticed this game play feature taking away from the enjoyment of the game?

[Puppers]

Been playing since 2014 it has maybe like 5 times in the last whatever many years and thousands of hours. The times it did happen itt saved my ass. AlllLsoooo not sure if mods are the cause or not.

It does NOT take any enjoyment away from the game for me personally.

[Snake of Eden]

The only time I ever had zombies poof is after a crash. Sometimes it's because I have 10k moving around and on fire or sometimes just a mod went mental. But never noticed otherwise. I try to always save in a safe place and never had an on-call job, lol.

[фуррястый нянь]

shiiii

[Good Thyme]

Originally posted by Puppers:

Been playing since 2014 it has maybe like 5 times in the last whatever many years and thousands of hours. The times it did happen itt saved my ass. AlllLsoooo not sure if mods are the cause or not.

It does NOT take any enjoyment away from the game for me personally. :PawHeart::frightenedDog:

good question about the mods, and sorry to not say in the original post.

This is completely vanilla with no mods on standard unchanged default apocalypse settings.

[Good Thyme]

Originally posted by Snake of Eden:

The only time I ever had zombies poof is after a crash. Sometimes it's because I have 10k moving around and on fire or sometimes just a mod went mental. But never noticed otherwise. I try to always save in a safe place and never had an on-call job, lol.

Right, the game crashing has not really been an issue. This is the mechanics of zombies despawning when saving and reloading the game.

[Manwith Noname]

Heh, I've had the opposite problem in the past couple of months. Updates resurrecting zombies.

[Kaldrak]

I mean, usually even if you save and quit if a bunch of them are chasing you they are still right there on your tail. It sounds like maybe a bit of a synchronization problem? Happens sometimes, but I've only noticed it happen when the game crashed.

[ShattyNice]

I literally just had this issue. Had a group of zombitches gang bang me and ended up rage quitting mid death. Loaded my game back later only to find myself massively bleeding and no zombies in most of Westpoint.

[Liro Raériyo]

pretty sure the reason why this happens is that your character data and the world data are separate files and save independently of eachother, crashing (or even a failed save) will cause a mismatch as zombie position is saved to the world data, character data is saved rather frequently, while world data is much less frequent, i think it does it every time you sleep in single player as thats when it has the lowest resource impact as it doesnt have to render anything perfectly.

so your game might actually be bugged and unable to consistently (or at all) save the world when you quit, only when you sleep for whatever reason, this sounds like the kind of thing that you might need a total fresh install to fix.

[Good Thyme]

Originally posted by Liro Raériyo:

pretty sure the reason why this happens is that your character data and the world data are separate files and save independently of eachother, crashing (or even a failed save) will cause a mismatch as zombie position is saved to the world data, character data is saved rather frequently, while world data is much less frequent, i think it does it every time you sleep in single player as thats when it has the lowest resource impact as it doesnt have to render anything perfectly.

so your game might actually be bugged and unable to consistently (or at all) save the world when you quit, only when you sleep for whatever reason, this sounds like the kind of thing that you might need a total fresh install to fix.

In my example, this huge hoard of zombies would have been elsewhere upon the start of the day as the helicopter brought them all in. You may be right as this lines up with most any of the zombie despawn issues I've had.

So another workaround could be to at least only ever log out after sleeping, This way the game has locked in the zombie positioning to avoid the despawn of relogging.

[Lime]

Having the same issue, really demotivating. Hope it gets fixed soon

[Bender24k]

Honestly I think I am having something like this too in MP. Where are all the Zombies? I only have 6 mods running. I feel like there are 10% of the zeds expected in my section of Louisville. Take a drive away from my hangout and BAM zombies everywhere. Weird.

[Rex]

the game is hardcoded to despawn to many zombies in mp

[Drizzt]

the devs have talked about this previously - the game only saves a few zombies near the player - and so you shouldn't lose any zombies that are currently chasing you - maybe you may if you quit while being chased by a horde - i also think that it is not consistent - maybe even affected by caching - and so loading soon after quitting will retain the zombies, but if much time has passed, maybe with PC resets or other tasks overwriting the cache, then the big disappearance will happen

may well be more prevalent on servers too (i only play local single player)

but either way - i have experienced this many times - when i have quit there have been zombies in the area, and when i reload there are none - i think it is the player chunk that gets emptied (also respawns have their own mechanic for zombie despawning near the player from what i can tell)

anyway - i remember EnigmaGrey talking about it, and agreeing it was not ideal - but it is just the way things are at the moment

i am sure they will think about it at some point - maybe they have already been working on such persistence features as part of Build 42 - since they will be including domestic animals that will need to persist, and so the same logic may well be applied to wild creatures and zombies

from a technical standpoint - i imagine it is that it is fine for the game to process the player being chased by hundreds of zombies in real time - but writing the exact state of every one of the those zombies to the save file every few seconds would likely tank the performance - especially since there are already performance concerns when many zombies are actively pursuing the player

all games need to balance these things - and this is likely an area where they haven't yet worked out the best way to do that

maybe it needs to have an additional file that it saves when exiting the game, but not while running, that stores all of the zombie states currently in memory

either way - i would be interested to know the precise technical details of how and when it saves zombie states - and which ones it saves etc - and what the actual conditions are that make for a save to be reloaded and still be surrounded by zombies, or instead to be in an empty chunk (and if it is a caching thing, and if it does actually empty the chunk like it often does when respawning)

also - quick note - it always keep the player zombies persistent - i have had scenarios where i have died multiple time in the Rosewood police station, by spawning somewhere else and running back there to be killed by the horde - and then finally spawning in the police station - which is then empty apart from my personal zombies

[Dead End]

The only solution from a play ability standpoint I can think of is to leave project zomboid running when leaving the computer. This will avoid the game deleting every zombie upon reload, but sometimes you have to close the game out...

This has to be the DUMBEST thing i've ever heard... why would anyone even bother posting this .. The term "Think before you speak" comes to mind, but you typed it!! which takes thought.. all i can say is WOW