How Does The Zombie Respawn System Work Exactly?

[Queen Niijima]

For context: I am currently experimenting with a sort of extraction-ish kind of playthrough where you have a completely safe and isolated hideout (literally outside of the playable area) and despite adjusting the zombies spawns so they would reappear every hour and setting the unseen hours to zero, I would teleport back to an area I haven't visited in several in-game days and it will still be completely devoid of any threats with the exception of a few in the buildings i haven't searched the first couple of times around.

I do have the zombie population set to "low" since I am dealing exclusively with sprinters and migration enabled so that might have something to do with it, but I still feel like they are not respawning at all.

So my question is: Do the zombies respawn all at once with the right settings, or is it a gradual process with the respawn multiplier only adjusting the limit that can show up?

[Armagenesis]

It's probably because you set the unseen hour to 0. And because of the low population, yes.

Respawned zombies "appear" at the same time the moment you reach the respawn time. The amount of zombies respawning, from my own experience, is a percentage of the overall population. Which in itself is capped based on your population setting. So if you have 0.3 population and 0.4 respawn multiplier, for example, you will have 0.12 of the overall population respawning across the entire map.

[Queen Niijima]

Originally posted by Armagenesis:

It's probably because you set the unseen hour to 0. And because of the low population, yes.

Respawned zombies "appear" at the same time the moment you reach the respawn time. The amount of zombies respawning, from my own experience, is a percentage of the overall population. Which in itself is capped based on your population setting. So if you have 0.3 population and 0.4 respawn multiplier, for example, you will have 0.12 of the overall population respawning across the entire map.

So if I wanted the zombies to respawn every in-game hour exactly, I should set unseen to maybe 0.1 or something that isn't a definitive zero? I guess that does lead me to question if the unseen hours is the actual main controller for the respawns and not the regular setting above it.

I have had previous playthroughs where I did play on "insane" population but I noticed sometimes I would run into a similar issue and again the respawn settings were the same. This time, its just a drastically smaller wall of zombies then the first time around in that scenario.

[Armagenesis]

Originally posted by Queen Niijima:

Originally posted by Armagenesis:

It's probably because you set the unseen hour to 0. And because of the low population, yes.

Respawned zombies "appear" at the same time the moment you reach the respawn time. The amount of zombies respawning, from my own experience, is a percentage of the overall population. Which in itself is capped based on your population setting. So if you have 0.3 population and 0.4 respawn multiplier, for example, you will have 0.12 of the overall population respawning across the entire map.

So if I wanted the zombies to respawn every in-game hour exactly, I should set unseen to maybe 0.1 or something that isn't a definitive zero? I guess that does lead me to question if the unseen hours is the actual main controller for the respawns and not the regular setting above it.

I have had previous playthroughs where I did play on "insane" population but I noticed sometimes I would run into a similar issue and again the respawn settings were the same. This time, its just a drastically smaller wall of zombies then the first time around in that scenario.

To my knowledge, yes.
You need to set the respawn and respawn unseen hours at 1 hour minimum if you want respawns to happen.

[Queen Niijima]

Originally posted by Armagenesis:

Originally posted by Queen Niijima:

So if I wanted the zombies to respawn every in-game hour exactly, I should set unseen to maybe 0.1 or something that isn't a definitive zero? I guess that does lead me to question if the unseen hours is the actual main controller for the respawns and not the regular setting above it.

I have had previous playthroughs where I did play on "insane" population but I noticed sometimes I would run into a similar issue and again the respawn settings were the same. This time, its just a drastically smaller wall of zombies then the first time around in that scenario.

To my knowledge, yes.
You need to set the respawn and respawn unseen hours at 1 hour minimum if you want respawns to happen.

Ah alright, I'll see what happens when I try that. At least I gotten really good at creating a standardized base design for the amount of times I started over from scratch messing with the settings.

EDIT: Yup, that did it. Having the distribution set to "uniformed" also help keep it fairly populated but at the cost of having the out-of-bounds base no longer possible (they spawned out there too). Thanks for the info.

[Animalman]

It work on faith.
Its hard to tell because of it is infrequent. lets just say if you left the area for a while few days and couldn't get back expect maybe a few respawn.
Some confusion in that if a zombie is laying against a wall, sleepy,
that he spawned in. but its not true. When off screen a zombie can get resorted to that position. And you don't have to go too far for too long before that happens