Zombies spawning next to me on the first day?

[AnAngryHorde]

Is it working as intended for zombies to pop out of thin air in front of you just outside of the house where your bedroll is? Before you've even reached the first night?

I last played 7dtd a couple of years ago, but reinstalled it today. I've only just started the game, (doing the quest to craft wood frames), using the easiest settings possible without turning off the zombies. I walked a minute up the road to find a house with a floor that doesn't constantly collapse. It's full of zombies, so I put my bedroll down outside just in case, and go in and clear them out. With the house and the surrounding area cleared, I move my bedroll from just outside the house to upstairs, inside. Not a minute later, I start hearing zombie noises outside as I'm looting the house. I don't think much of it and figure I'll clear them out once I've finished looting. Turns out that the sound is not zombies wandering around, but actually beating down the locked back door, which I found out when a lumberjack zombie appeared in my bedroom. I narrowly avoid death and escape outside, where there is another lumberjack zombie wandering around. Fine. Many arrows later, I've taken out the one that cornered me and the other one that was outside, but now there are 2 more lumberjacks in the area that I didn't see arrive. It is possible that I just didn't see it as I was focused on fighting, but the area is backed up against a mountain and there aren't a lot of places they can come from. I kill one of them, and find that instead of being down to 1 zombie in the area, there are now 3. I back off a little to chop some trees while keeping the zombies in view. I'm around 7 meters to the side of my house, and the 3 zombies are spread out about fairly close in front of it. While I'm chopping wood, I watched another zombie literally spawn out of thin air next to my house.

Is this normal? Is there something I'm supposed to do to stop that from happening?

Also, as a side question - none of the 10 or so zombies I've killed so far have been lootable at all (despite loot settings being on high), and one of them disappeared within 5 seconds of death, without me breaking the corpse. Is that normal too?

[Shurenai]

The first, is a bit abnormal; you should never get a chance to see a zombie spawn in front of you. Most likely this occured because the game is lacking CPU or ram resources in some way; and is struggling to properly load zombies; IE: It queued the spawning of those zombies well before you saw it spawn in, but it was stuck in queue as the system worked to finish the tasks before that zombie spawn.. The result, when it reaches that zombie, it refers to the information that, at the time, was accurate of the player not being in line of sight, and finalizes the spawn loading the zombie into the world. Someone else can probably explain/elaborate better.

The zombies being unlootable is intentional; The way the ragdolls used to hang around for ages, turn into gore blocks, and slowly decay was a big strain on resources, and caused performance issues as more and more zombie bodies piled up. So what they did was change it so that ragdolls fade away rather quickly (5-10 seconds), but have a chance to spawn a bright yellow lootbag when killed, that has loot of an arguably useful nature. So you dont have to loot 99 empty bodies to find that one that has something; now you just listen for the loot bag sound, and look out for the bright yellow bag appearing and it always has something in it. The result is that on horde nights or when dealing with other large quantities of zombies, performance remains higher; And it helped reduce the insane lag in certain enormous POIs with lots of zombies that essentially forced you to stop and break every single zombie body down to nothing or by 1/4 of the way through you're stuck at 1fps.

[AnAngryHorde]

Thank you for your response.

Originally posted by Shurenai:

Most likely this occured because the game is lacking CPU or ram resources in some way; and is struggling to properly load zombies; IE: It queued the spawning of those zombies well before you saw it spawn in, but it was stuck in queue as the system worked to finish the tasks before that zombie spawn..

That makes sense, but I'd be surprised if the game was struggling with hardware issues - I'm using a gaming PC that should have no trouble at all processing anything the game does. Good to know that spawning in view is not intentional though. Am I right in thinking that zombies also shouldn't spawn on the doorstep of the house with the bedroll during the day, or is that not the case?

Originally posted by Shurenai:

what they did was change it so that ragdolls fade away rather quickly (5-10 seconds), but have a chance to spawn a bright yellow lootbag when killed

That's great, I really like that change!

[Shurenai]

The area that a bedroll protects from zombie spawns has reduced a bit; It protects about 15~ blocks each direction give or take...usually enough to clear sleeper spawns from inside the house, but not enough to keep zombies from spawning on the doorstep; You can place down a Land Claim Block (yes, they have a use in singleplayer now) as well; which protects a much larger area from zombie spawns.

Originally posted by AnAngryHorde:

That's great, I really like that change!

You are like..literally the first person besides myself that I've seen say that they liked this change. XD Glad to hear you like it though.