Insane difficulty

[WooD]

Does anyone actually play on this difficulty and enjoy it?
I gave it a go and the amount of time i spent clearing zombies makes it kind of dull.

[Owl]

What do you mean? I've played with ONLY sprinters which was very fun but I've never seen a difficulty option in sandbox.

[WooD]

Insane zombie population.
I run out of baseball bats killing zombies for little progress. ;)

[Owl]

Originally posted by WooD:

Insane zombie population.
I run out of baseball bats killing zombies for little progress. ;)

Hmm I suppose I'll give it a try and let you know. I'm sure some people enjoy it though.

[Awstrd]

Experienced Zomboid player here (2000h). I did an insane pop run awhile ago. Played on the 6 months later difficulty preset (which includes insane pop), modified so that zombie respawn was disabled, but helicopter events were on "often".

I spawned in and made a base in the southern area of Muldraugh. Was able to being self-sufficient, get a base going, and survive off the land with fishing&trapping&farming.

On 6 months later, you start in the winter, and once I made it to spring, I stopped playing because of the constant grind of clearing the zombies. (In case you are not familiar with 6 months later, it differs from the default apocalypse settings as follows:)
- Zombie pop is set to "insane"
- The game begins in winter, instead of the summer
- Power and water is off at the start all perishable food is rotten
- Condition of all vehicles is decreased (lower condition, battery often at 0, less chance of containing gas)
- House alarms turned off
- Zombie strength is reduced, but their hearing is increased
- Nature's bounty (ability to forage for stuff) is increased
- Zombies more prone to attacking player constructions, even when player is not in an area

My char's stats showed they had killed thousands of zombies, which did not include the 5+ types I used molotovs and lured zombies into a large ball to kill large hordes and clear large areas Despite this, the area around my base would constantly fill up with large hordes after I killed them, even though zombie respawn was turned off. To make it worse, every time there was a helicopter event (which was around every 9 days or so) a large horde of zombies would flood the area and would destroy the base by breaking through the boarded up windows, and destroying the storage crates I had brought inside. So in addition to constantly killing zombies again and again in the same area, I also had to keep rebuilding and re-fortifying my base. This went on for about 1 month in-game, and then I for bored and frustrated and abandoned the playthrough.

I had thought playing with zombie respawn turned off would mean that I would (eventually) be able to clear out muldraugh or at least reduce the degree to which the helicopter events would be able to attract zombies to my location. If this was happening, it certainly didnt feel like it.

If I had played with the helicopter event on default, I probably wouldnt have to worry about the zombies constantly coming to the base. But even then, the grind would still have been too much. And this was even though I was playing with respawn turned off.

So yeah, my take on this is that the constant grind means that playing on insane difficulty gets boring. If you are playing on multiplayer and need more zombies to prevent the game from becoming too easy and you can share the grind, or if you really enjoy killing zombies in the same area over and over again, then playing on insane population makes sense. Otherwise, I wouldnt recommend playing on insane difficulty because even if your char doesnt die, the boredom from the grind will probably kill your playthrough.

When B42 comes out, I will definitely just stick with regular population. Yes, the zombies wont be much of a threat, but thats fine. I personally find that when I really enjoy when playing Zomboid is the ambience, looting stuff, exploring new areas of the game, and building up a base. Killing zombies is fun to do now and then, but it gets stale if I do it too much and it starts to detract from the parts of the game that I enjoy. And insane pop forces me to do it much more than I would like to, which is probably why I didnt like it.

[Marco]

Normally is for people that want to play a long game, maybe with a goal in mind (visit every town, zero to hero, from RC to LV, things like that), and often use it in conjunction with zombie respawn off.
If you don't like killing zombies, well, that's a different problem :)

[Jambie Lionheart]

My ideal pop tends to be somewhere between 0.5 (starter) and 3.0 peak pop with a 2.0 pop multiplier. Sometimes I'll start at 0 zombie pop if I don't feel like fighting right out of the gate.

But I love the weapon mods too so I'm quite combat oriented. More gore the better too. Killing bloodless zombies is boring. Massive splats though? Never gets old. I love base building too.

[Armagenesis]

I tried CDDA, Winter is Coming, A Storm is Coming, and Descending Fog. All of them at max pop with extremely rare loot settings, with special condition on top of them. I never lasted long enough.

[Kaia]

Hi

i mostly play 16x and insanely rare loot, i am not too sure that is what you referred to in your post. As a disclaimer, i've seen a lot of ppl (youtube content creators) say Oh i'm doing 16x guize, but actually they set day 1 population multiplier to 1. So my comments apply to 16x from the start.

I do find it fun yes, but i think it should be alternated with some more chill runs. Granted, at some point, what you find chill becomes relative. For me now, a chill run is spawning in louisville with 4x pop.

I do see the grindy nature of the constant killing, but it's a mindset to be in in order for you to enjoy it.

Before i upped the zombie counts, i was finding myself consistently bored a month in with nothing to achieve and nothing to go for.

16x does that, whereby it not only makes reaching the "current endgame state" be reached later, but it also adds more dimensions to it:

- insanely rare loot + 16x means the lootable food is not plentiful enough for you to build a significant surplus in most cases, and most loot dense areas are simply out of reach until you clear thousands.

- this in turn finally makes cooking and foraging relevant, whereas before you may very well have skipped them entirely. Great in my book.

- it opens up gameplay types and goals; my last run was to reclaim city after city. Granted i died like a beotch trying to reclaim Riverside because it was late and i was sleepy, but it's all part of the journey. Cities like Riverside on 1x don't even have a thousand zombies around i would think. 16 makes them really challenging and it's a refreshing thing to not be bored out of your mind with combat.

- Similarly you can't just claim anywhere and anything and make it your base. You have to flee, regroup, and grab low hanging fruits before you can reclaim goodness. it actually incentivizes wilderness living to some extent that way.


The cons i have with it:
- It's very restrictive in some respects:

- you may need to engage in cheesey things

- even though you eventually swim in weapons you will need to make whatever weapon you find in the early game last by just head-bashing for the first thousand kills or so ^^

- the spawn locations that are good are few and far between. Some places just do not work. And some work a little too well because of B41 inconsistent heatmap. Pushes a lot of folks to go "easy mode" in the mansions above WP. Nice base locations that don't involve just going to the empty manors above west point you mostly have to struggle for. And fishing is highly desireable in this context.

- Eventually the same way 1x is just mind-numbingly boring, having to kill a couple thousands to get in a building does get tedious. Last run on 16x i was trying to get into the supermarket in River side, and i think i killed about 3000 dudes in the vicinity, and zombie migration patterns kept making zombies north of here stream to that area to balance the population out. What this means is for many dense urban locations, you have to clear zounds to get somewhere, but when you do, you actually realize that you depleted a lot of the larger area's population. One of those quirks with PZ i am not fond of, makes no sense and is just tedious.

- 16x is realistically strongly funnelling you into using spears because of how good they end up being while also being effective early albeit extremely tedious. I do play it with short blunt because i just prefer not spending my life in my inventory, but whenever i do spears, you just clear several orders of magnitude more and quicker. So an extra layer of tedium if you will.

[Kaia]

As for some tactics for 16x, outside of the :
. spawn in WP, reach the shore, go up to mansions, fish, grind skills, loot low hanging fruits and go from there inperturbed.
. spawn in riverside, preferably above the school, rush the school library, grab a couple books, run, rush some houses grab whatever you can, run, go to the town exist west of the gated community, lose zombies there, go right jump the fence, settle in the westernmost house in the gated community, clear from there, Heli Event proof if you clear enough.
. spawn in rosewood, preferably in police station, grab whatever you can along the way, make your way out of town to the tiny house right of the first warehouses. grab all the low hanging fruits in the country side, not heli proof, make sure you take a hike. reclaim rosewood from there afterwards.

[LIMP BISQUICK]

I don’t care much for insane pop. Performance issues. The game just doesn’t have many options for dealing with large hordes. You could use fire but I find that boring.

I prefer to play with a mod that adds slower sprinters. Joggers will make you play the game differently. Lots of action in my experience. Sprinters on the other hand you really have to play super slow and probably rely on exploits to get anything done at a reasonable time.

[Animalman]

I enjoy it a lot the 16 is the only way i play single player anymore.
Because i don't like to go the length as it were
i like to jump high, instead of long.

Fire on maximum zombies is not at all boring and is a requirement. I know of no other way to actually kill them outside of the checkpoint fence. I did a tonne of those on insane with some of the guns but its still no walk in the park, because of the tiny funnel area really overwhelming numbers come in from the breach if you are loud on that corner. But i did a tonne of them with guns on that specific run. but its not doable generally speaking anywhere else. So fire is necessary completely but its not boring. Rather its is much less boring than clearing out a town and having no excuse not to just live there and be bored with no zombie threats.

[Nordil(Hun)]

Max pop, respawn enabled...
Random spawn:) 6 months later.
0/0 str and fitness start.