Hospital POI, 3 days and I give up.

[Letterdief]

I tried to do my first 5 difficulty POI. So I spend two days trying to clear the hospital. Running up and down. Up and down. But I was unable to clear it. I really dig these POI, the concept, but hunting for the last few remaining zombies is a pain in the butt. Can't we get like a skill to see where the zombies are at? Or a way to get em to us? I just gave up on the POI, which is sad, I didn't want to spend another hour trying to figure out where I needed to be.

I think this issue needs to be adressed.

And before people start to say: get guud, learn the POI, I say: I SPEND 3 DAYS (3 hours).

[FPStewy]

Put a ladder on the outside and start with the top :)

[Daffy]

well or it was a random bird flying off.

what i do when this happens ( and it does ) i backtrack once and break down locked doors if i hear nothing i give try to remember if there was any areas i did not get into and auger my way.
once i found the end loot it is very limited how long i am willing to use tracing down the last few no vendor reward is worth days of looking.

[Letterdief]

Originally posted by Daffy:

well or it was a random bird flying off.

what i do when this happens ( and it does ) i backtrack once and break down locked doors if i hear nothing i give try to remember if there was any areas i did not get into and auger my way.
once i found the end loot it is very limited how long i am willing to use tracing down the last few no vendor reward is worth days of looking.

I agree, but still. If zombies have to ability to just smell us from miles away and track us like heat seeking missiles, it only seems fair we also gain ability to hunt them down. Maybe a skill that we can "heighten our senses" briefly for a few seconds, with a cooldown. I don't know. There are a lot of ways to fix this.

I broke every door I could find. I even started to dig down walls because I heard something. I started ground floor, then I went all the way to the helipad. Then I went all the way down again, cleared the basement, then I went all the way up again. Then all the way down again.

It's fine that these POI's are absolute mazes, but I don't find chasing a few zombies fun. Maybe I should pick up fetch jobs from now on, they seemed the most time friendly.

[estancio]

i just watched IZprebuilt do the crack a book tower and he had trouble completing it. the fighting ventured outside a couple of times, and a zombie dog ended up getting stuck out there. He explained what can happen is if a zombie gets too far away, it respawns back in the POI, but not quite *too* far away, and it gets untagged(no red dot) without despawning. He recommended doing a perimeter sweep outside the poi(Careful to stay inbounds) if it happens to you.
not sure if thats what happened to you. sorry to hear about your troubles. something to keep in mind for next time.(sadly there likely will be a next time)

some of them also just bug out. i mean you are supposed to get the orange dot after clearing most of the poi, but you don't always. some zombies don't spawn in unless you hit the specific trigger(i hear its worse on infested and now in 21) if the zombies havent spawned in yet, a skill wouldn't do you any good, i means thats what the orange dot was for.

something needs to be done, a skill won't do it though in these cases. these excessive spawn triggers needs to be removed. and some of these off the beaten path zombie spawns done away with atleast when the poi is in a *clear* quest mode

[Pain Weasel]

Yeah, some of the POIs can be very frustrating.

Some of the POIs, the hospital being one of them, are absurd maze like designs where if you follow the path the devs lay out you end up backtracking over and over, going up a level to get down a level, going down to get up, crawling along a ledge outside a window etc.

The devs want you to follow a particular path, and deviating from that can result in missing parts of the POI and the zombies inside. As a general rule if you break down a door, or have to build anything at all to cross a gap, climb stairs or whatever you are deviating from the path. The path the devs want you to follow shouldn't require any of that. You may have to jump across a gap at certain points, but if it is too far to make the jump, then the path goes elsewhere.

I ran the nursing home for the first time and ended up bypassing a section of the POI by accident and wasting a lot of time trying to track down the last few zombies. The second time I ran it I noticed the path I took the first time was blocked by a barricaded door my shotgun must have blasted apart during a big fight. I never even knew I was off the path until I ran it a second time.

Some general tips:

Don't break doors unless they lead to a dead end room like a bathroom or something.

if you see a broken window big enough to crawl out, try that and see if you can move around the ledge.

if you see a gap with no obvious way to cross it, ignore it. Do not place blocks to cross it unless you want to go off the path.

Keep an eye out for ladders & hatches, particularly in elevator shafts and scaffolding.

[Letterdief]

I appreciate all the feedback. But I am going to be very blunt here.

Why does the player have to jump through all these hoops for what seems to be bad design?
Let me explain what I mean.

They have a game with an open world, where you can break down everything and build everything you want.

Then they added, with the mechanics mentioned above, POI's where they want the player to follow a LINEAR path else the whole game starts to fall apart (bugs etc).

This makes little sense to me. Either make a linear game (F.E.A.R comes to mind) or either make a open world crafting game (Minecraft etc).

Right now, the game tries to be both and both mechanics are working against each other in my opinion. Maybe it's possible to have both, but not in it's current implementation.

Personally, I think they need to loosen up the POI's, giving creativity back to the player, if somebody wants to cheese hospital by making a ladder to the top, they should be able to do that without breaking the game. If someone wants to break down doors inside a POI, they should be able to do that without creating bugs.

Again, I am just being very blunt here, I know. But it was just a frustrating experience. Not going to do anymore Tier 5/6 POI's if they are all going to be like that.

I know the game is early access, I also know TFP don't care about player feedback and only listen to internal feedback, ... but god ... IT'S ANNOYING!

edit: really the tips are appreciated. Just a bit salty atm.

[optOut]

Hospital took almost all of the daylight hours from one day for me to complete. As pain weasel mentioned, POIs have a "path" the devs intend for you to take. Before moving up or down a level, make sure you've searched and cleared the current level. IIRC around the mid point of that poi you can go down to open a garage door - this is just a fast exit so that you don't have to retrace all the way back to beginning in order to leave (mid point / fast exits are a common theme in many POIs)

[Letterdief]

Originally posted by optOut:

Hospital took almost all of the daylight hours from one day for me to complete. As pain weasel mentioned, POIs have a "path" the devs intend for you to take. Before moving up or down a level, make sure you've searched and cleared the current level. IIRC around the mid point of that poi you can go down to open a garage door - this is just a fast exit so that you don't have to retrace all the way back to beginning in order to leave (mid point / fast exits are a common theme in many POIs)

I cleared floors multiple times, making as much noise as possible to attract zombies.
Also, I only started to break down doors when I got frustrated. I followed the path as intended all the way to the final loot.

[optOut]

Unfortunately, some rooms won't spawn in zeds until you've triggered it. So any amount of noise won't do anything if the zeds haven't spawned in.

[Pain Weasel]

I totally agree with you Letterdief.

A21 removed a lot of the freedom we had to run clear quests in POIs by changing the way zombies are triggered. It is just too easy to miss spawns now, and until they spawn they don't exist so you can't even kill them with console commands. In A20 all, or nearly all, the triggers were area triggers. If you stepped into an area zombies spawned. In A21 there are now also physical triggers like buttons and if you happen to overlook a small button on the wall then there are some zombies that will never spawn. Add on to that many of the POIs being redesigned to be much more convoluted and it just a mess.

Its like a shooter on rails in an open world game.

edit: while we are all venting. We need a vertical indicator on awakened zombies (red dots). I was running one of the apartment tower POIs and near the top a zombie fell off a balcony. He didn't die of course so I had to backtrack all the way through the POI to find him after clearing the roof. I couldn't tell what floor the idiot was on as he worked his way up the tower, only his relative horizontal position. A total waste of time for 1 zombie that should have died from the fall. I understand why they don't take much fall damage but that was just silly.

[estancio]

there were a few in A20 and A19, but yeah its definitely seems alot worse.

As i recall(been a while) there was a little roof area in the hospital with a pile of trash behind a vent plug, spawned a zombie and maybe a vulture. other than clearing the poi, there was no reason to go there(trash), as it was not part of the main path, and so easy to miss. not sure if its still there.

I died once doing dishong tower because there used to be a bathroom that had 3 zombies in it, that was not neccessary to the main path. despite over 2 days before horde night, i didn't find it in time to get back to my horde base(too stubborn to give up). there never should have been zombies there, and i should have, but didn't, get the orange marker or red dots.i think they actually fixed that one in A20(merged the bathroom into the main path.)

[optOut]

Originally posted by Pain Weasel:

We need a vertical indicator on awakened zombies (red dots)

Yes Please!

[Pizzarugi]

I find that building hatches at almost every single doorway to prevent being swarmed by zombies (essential if you want to use melee in infested missions) helps a ton in preventing zombies from wandering away and thus having to backtrack in order to find them. The time they spend breaking your fortifications is time you can use to kill them. In events where I need to walk around the outside of the POI to reach other rooms that zombies would have trouble following as they tend to fall off, I'll punch holes straight through walls from one room to the other so I can fortify them.

There's something you all have to remember: 7DTD is a sandbox game first and a zombie survival second. Reshape the POIs in ways that would give you an advantage. Build bridges, make nerdpoles and stairs to assist with backtracking, put down hatches in doorways to bottleneck swarms that you can kill with little to no risk to yourself. Don't want to drop from a hole in the roof to enter a room you know is flooded with zombies? Go back and break a hole in the wall (or destroy a door that almost always leads there anyway) to enter.

But even with that, there are some T5 POIs I'll just avoid. All of the factories are places I refuse to do missions at. Too many catwalks, too many holes and general verticality, lots of climbing up and down having to backtrack and kill strays that found their way down. I have a lot easier time with Crack-A-Book HQ and Two-Bit Tower by comparison. Haven't gotten very lucky finding one for county jail or general hospital. I did see a Red Mesa earlier, but I passed it up for something easier (wanted to test how effective the hatch strat+robotic turrets would be on an infested POI I've already done).

[...👑 JOST AMMAN 👑...]

@OP: you'll be happy to hear this[community.7daystodie.com] then.

[Plagen]

Originally posted by Letterdief:

Then they added, with the mechanics mentioned above, POI's where they want the player to follow a LINEAR path else the whole game starts to fall apart (bugs etc).

The larger POIs are supposed to be sort of like dungeons with a linear path you CAN take. I have not followed the linear path, like starting from the top, breaking through walls, etc, and the game hasn't broken.

And are you getting lost or why are you having trouble clearing the Hospital?
If you're getting lost, just don't break walls and follow the linear path: Unlocked doors, broken open windows/walls, etc.
If you're having trouble clearing the Hospital, are you on a quest? Because if you are, it usually shows Red Dots when you find zombies and killing all the Red Dots clears that area. When you get to the last few spawn areas, you'll get Orange Dots with elevation markers.
If you're not doing a quest, how do you know it isn't already clear?