Demolisher on Day 7, Game stage 76 WTF

[chewie81]

Well this is crazy, built my standard day 7 horde base and was totally unprepared for the waves of Demolisher and irradiated zombies and so forth. Felt like a Day 70 horde more than a day 7 horde. my fighting platform is 7 blocks high if that make a difference

Playing vanilla setting with the exception of 64 max zombies and slightly longer days.

Multiplayer with my friend his GS was 71 at the time and we have just unlocked tier 3 quests

I have set up my horde base in the Desert Biome

*added additional info*

[Kryzx]

Originally posted by Keiks87:

I had three direwolfs on my day 7 hord. I play on easy. I did not even have birds or a cop or some of the other harder zombies. pineforest too. had just unlooked tier 2

I just had this happen + normal dogs & vultures as well in another playthrough solo. Level 21 (6 days survived) * 1.2, which showed I was at GS32 (gamestage) in the party menu. I leveled up during the event, which pushes it to GS33. In the forest biome & had a quick horde base setup on the roof of a T3 POI.

Dire wolves, zombie dogs, & vultures show they should start to spawn in GS40 group for blood moons. Not sure why this is happening when blood moon horde spawns in the XML state it only spawns from gamestages equal & lower....

[chewie81]

Just an update - Day 14 horde in the desert, we were much higher game stage (the two of us around 120 GS) and level, No Demolishers. quite a few radiated, a few cops and hell hounds and wrights. at day 14 we have approx 3000 zombie kills between us.

I am starting to wonder if the Blood moon difficulty calculation for the first night might have a quirk or bug to it if you are way to efficient in levelling and push the envelope. I think I might have to start a new world and see if we can replicate it, when I can be bothered lol.

*I also edited my main post to fix an error see that post for edit notes*

[Kryzx]

As far as I can tell with your info @chewie81 for your Day 7 blood moon, that would put your group's base gamestage at ~141.

76 + 35.5 = 111.5 weighted gamestage. (Takes the highest player's gamestage total entirely, then each player with the next highest gamestage is cut in half each time, so the 2nd player would be 50%, next is by 25%, 12.5%, and so on...)

(111.5 + 6 days survived) * 1.2 = 141 actual gamestage for your group for blood moon spawn calculation.

However, since you were in the Desert biome, I'd assume the gamestage was higher, but I'm not sure HOW it's applied. All we have in the biomes XML file is just a "gamestage_modifier" & "gamestage_bonus".

So... does the modifier multiply the player/groups weighted total or the actual gamestage total? Is it applied to the players beforehand? And does the bonus get added before or after the calculation? Is it applied to all players in the group as well? Not to mention, will POIs affect the gamestage calculation as well by a certain amount? Addition or a multiplier? There's nothing else mentioned in the gamestages XML for these new calculations, so I'm not sure of the formula TFP created for pulling data from the entity spawns. Not to mention they just made more changes with the V1.2 release, so who knows what else could be happening on the backend of things.

BTW, the first chance of having demo zombies spawning are GS147.

[Kryzx]

Just had an interesting blood moon on Day 28. Level 55 @ T3 POI horde base located in forest biome. I pulled up my party UI to see my gamestage was 98 before the horde night happened, which seems right... ((55 + 27) x 1.2)

Had radiated AND demolition zombies on the 1st wave. Like I posted above, blood moon hordes should only have demo zombies starting at gamestage 147. Radiated zombies can spawn at the earliest is gamestage 133 (Moe is the only one though), but I was also getting radiated spiders, Toms, Joes, Janitors, and others too.

I'm not sure what is going on with the spawn tables anymore, because it isn't making any sense to me as to why we're seeing harder gamestage groups unless the formula has changed.

EDIT: See @Pain Weasel's post further down for the new "scaling" of gamestages if you have a Blood Moon Count of more than 30 in your settings. The game actually was spawning blood moon hordes as if I was at gamestage 162 with the new changes.

[Uncle Al]

My guess is it's your 64 zombie setting combined with the spawning changes in the last patch.

The change was that now any one horde group can only spawn 30 zombies at a time. If more are meant to spawn, tougher zombies spawn instead. I assume this is aimed at enhancing performance on consoles.

If there were two of you in the group, that's 128 zombies (the zombie setting is per player in the group) so the 'extra' 98 worth of zombies gets put into raising the effective gamestage of the 30 that actually spawn.

[Crater Creator]

Originally posted by Uncle Al:

My guess is it's your 64 zombie setting combined with the spawning changes in the last patch.

The change was that now any one horde group can only spawn 30 zombies at a time. If more are meant to spawn, tougher zombies spawn instead. I assume this is aimed at enhancing performance on consoles.

If there were two of you in the group, that's 128 zombies (the zombie setting is per player in the group) so the 'extra' 98 worth of zombies gets put into raising the effective gamestage of the 30 that actually spawn.

Yup, this is my understanding too. I believe you’ve identified the missing factor contributing to the OP’s experience.

Before December, if you set that BM zombie count to 64, and you had a group of more than one person together, then the game would say ‘that’s nice, but I can’t do more than 64 in total at a time’ and that was that. Now the game has a mechanism to at least try to provide an equivalent to the level of challenge you ask it for, by scaling up the zombies it can spawn to compensate.

Are Demolishers on Day 7 the same as 128 simultaneous zombies on Day 7? No, but something’s better than nothing, I’d say. The question would be if anyone’s actually noticed that they’re not getting zombies in sufficient numbers. The dev’s theory of the case (borne out of necessity of performance on the worst case hardware, as Uncle Al alludes) appears to be that more than 30 zombies on screen go largely unnoticed anyway, and so can be culled so long as the rest are buffed.

[Kryzx]

Originally posted by Crater Creator:

Yup, this is my understanding too. I believe you’ve identified the missing factor contributing to the OP’s experience.

Before December, if you set that BM zombie count to 64, and you had a group of more than one person together, then the game would say ‘that’s nice, but I can’t do more than 64 in total at a time’ and that was that. Now the game has a mechanism to at least try to provide an equivalent to the level of challenge you ask it for, by scaling up the zombies it can spawn to compensate.

Are Demolishers on Day 7 the same as 128 simultaneous zombies on Day 7? No, but something’s better than nothing, I’d say. The question would be if anyone’s actually noticed that they’re not getting zombies in sufficient numbers. The dev’s theory of the case (borne out of necessity of performance on the worst case hardware, as Uncle Al alludes) appears to be that more than 30 zombies on screen go largely unnoticed anyway, and so can be culled so long as the rest are buffed.

It DOES feel like the actual number of zombies provided to me on a blood moon is not 64 like you mentioned. If anything, it's close to ~32 (maybe even 24), so the scaling up of harder entities would make sense if that's how it works now.

I just wish it was explained better in the XML files....

[Pain Weasel]

Originally posted by Kryzx:

Originally posted by Crater Creator:

Yup, this is my understanding too. I believe you’ve identified the missing factor contributing to the OP’s experience.

Before December, if you set that BM zombie count to 64, and you had a group of more than one person together, then the game would say ‘that’s nice, but I can’t do more than 64 in total at a time’ and that was that. Now the game has a mechanism to at least try to provide an equivalent to the level of challenge you ask it for, by scaling up the zombies it can spawn to compensate.

Are Demolishers on Day 7 the same as 128 simultaneous zombies on Day 7? No, but something’s better than nothing, I’d say. The question would be if anyone’s actually noticed that they’re not getting zombies in sufficient numbers. The dev’s theory of the case (borne out of necessity of performance on the worst case hardware, as Uncle Al alludes) appears to be that more than 30 zombies on screen go largely unnoticed anyway, and so can be culled so long as the rest are buffed.

It DOES feel like the actual number of zombies provided to me on a blood moon is not 64 like you mentioned. If anything, it's close to ~32 (maybe even 24), so the scaling up of harder entities would make sense if that's how it works now.

I just wish it was explained better in the XML files....

You can always pause the game and open the console to see what entity group is being spawned, it should tell you exactly what is going on.

you'll see something like this:

2025-01-10T09:37:13 6694.039 INF BloodMoonParty: SpawnZombie grp 0 feralHordeStageGS85 (count 11, numToSpawn 137, maxAlive 32), cnt 11, zombieSoldier, loot 0.02, at player 860, day/time 28 22:20

[Kryzx]

Originally posted by Pain Weasel:

You can always pause the game and open the console to see what entity group is being spawned, it should tell you exactly what is going on.

I don't know why I didn't even think about pulling up the console or the logs for that matter.
Couldn't pull up the day 7 or 14 BMs logs unfortunately.

Also, keep in mind for these logs: Nomad difficulty, forest biome @ T3 POI (same exact POI since the 1st BM actually), Blood Moon count = 64, but all other game settings are default outside of permadeath/delete all. I have changed the BM count to 24 with this playthrough to see if there will be changes for day 35 BM.

Day 21 BM:

BloodMoon starting for day 21
2025-01-05T07:31:41 6245.299 INF Party of 1, game stage 131, scaling 1.68, enemy max 537, bonus every 17
2025-01-05T07:31:41 6245.299 INF Party members: 
2025-01-05T07:31:41 6245.299 INF Player id 171, gameStage 78

Day 28 BM:

2025-01-08T02:32:26 11453.403 INF BloodMoon starting for day 28
2025-01-08T02:32:26 11453.405 INF Party of 1, game stage 162, scaling 1.68, enemy max 675, bonus every 22
2025-01-08T02:32:26 11453.405 INF Party members: 
2025-01-08T02:32:26 11453.406 INF Player id 171, gameStage 97

The player ID's gamestage is what I see when I pull up the party UI in-game, so it IS using the same formula for that part.

But, where is this "scaling" multiplier coming from? Is this a part of the new update that came out, like it was mentioned earlier?

[hallow, dmitri!]

Originally posted by Invader Zim:

stuff happens.

As in "ur hack accunt" oh well/

[Pain Weasel]

Originally posted by Kryzx:

But, where is this "scaling" multiplier coming from? Is this a part of the new update that came out, like it was mentioned earlier?

Its the Blood Moon Count. I had to do a bit of testing but I'm pretty sure that is the culprit.

In my blood moon the "scale" was only 1 with a blood moon count of 12. I changed it to 64 and it jumped to 1.68. I changed it back to 12 and it dropped back down to 1.

My guess is that the scale makes up for the fact that even when set to 64 you aren't getting 64 zombies at once. I left the console open as they spawned since it keeps track of the count spawned. Even with 64 in the settings it only spawned 30 enemies before stopping.

edit: OK, got it figured out. I think.

The game will only spawn up to 30 at once during a blood moon, regardless of what the blood moon count says, at least in single player. The more you have it set over that cap the more it scales the game stage. For any zombie amount over 30 the scale is increased essentially by (count - 30) / 50

32 = 1.04
64 = 1.68

Anything <= 24 is 1.

[Kryzx]

Thanks for verifying where the extra gamestage "bump" was coming from @Pain Weasel!

Hopefully it'll be helpful for anyone else wondering why they're getting difficult blood moon horde groups, at least until TFP changes it again haha.

[Pain Weasel]

It looks like we all missed this gem in the 1.2 patch notes:

"Blood moon party maximum active enemy count with increased game stage scaling based on the full count"

I guess I understand what that means in hindsight, although I never would have guessed it would be that big of a bump. I think they could have worded it a bit better though.

[xycotta]

Our last Blood Moon suggests they rolled it back. For example, previously the first bloodmoon had dire wolves. New games today with three party members on a day 5 horde night, it was just normal groups of zombies. Very disappointing.

[Pain Weasel]

Originally posted by xycotta:

Our last Blood Moon suggests they rolled it back. For example, previously the first bloodmoon had dire wolves. New games today with three party members on a day 5 horde night, it was just normal groups of zombies. Very disappointing.

I don't think that means it was rolled back.

Dire wolves have a chance to show up as early as game stage 40 during a blood moon, but it is only a fairly small chance. Seeing them in the first but not the second is unusual, but its just RNG.

I double checked a blood moon with 64 zombies and the scaling is still there.