Bloodmoon mechanics details. How did it get so insane?

[Markus Reese]

Hey all. Just finished up with the most insane blood moon ever had. It was exhausting for myself and fellow player. I am wondering if anybody has any idea what made it so difficult.

Setting first:
So my bro and I have played the game more than a fair bit. Different servers, different saves. Unmodded. We have refined our base building to be quite good without feeling meta or gimmicky and feel like something fitting the game world cause we like to keep with a roleplay feel.

Settings are mostly all default, but we do set it for 90 minute days instead of the 60 minute. We build a second base location separate from home base after we learned zombies could spawn in our claim area and as such spawned within our walls.

I went an int focused build. Decent with shotgun, but mostly Baton and robotic turrets. Bro went agility and mainly used the machine guns.

We wanted this time to play with base in the cold biome, so we moved in as soon as we could. First two weeks, we got stuff needed to move in. Our blood moons went well without any issue. Shoot, we had them end well early. Third blood moon we did in same location because cold fort wasn't built. It was over before 1am.

Problem:

Night 28: It was 6 hours of unending radioactive zombies. Police. Armored exploders. Several thousand rounds of good ammo. My pair of tier 5 robot turrets alone ate up 8k and ran out before fight was done. It was relentless. To give an idea how much? We both gained six levels by the time it was done on standard xp rate.

So what changed between the two weeks? What tripped so this one did not end until timer. We weren't hiding and were just killing everything in non stop and unrelenting til sun up. For gamestage? Bro was lvl 60 iirc and died a few days before. I am 64 and died once in first week due to a bug.

Some pics to see how much our gunfire destroyed the ground. Only a couple spots were a boomer.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3113562312

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3113562295

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3113562283

[esthergray]

I honestly can't say but it was crazy for me too, a few days ago. I glitched through the steel bars that are between me and the zeds and found myself in the pit that my sledge knocks them into. I just knew I was dead but I made it back into my raised path base. The cops spit was crazy and a demo blew up in the pit taking out the blade traps. If this hadn't happened I know would have been dead when I fell in. When I came out to repair in the morning my sledge was off on the ground instead of the path. Damage to the base was way more than usual. I guess things like this happen.

[Dwarf_Bastard]

I once thought it was only the day counter that affects the zombie amount and how difficult to deal with they are.

Well, not that simple.
The gamestage[7daystodie.fandom.com]

With 90 min/day setting you will get more time to lvl up and to gear up. It also affects the gamestage. So, yeah, forth Blood Night might be a decent throuble already.

[Markus Reese]

What threw me off was just how much of a disparity between day 21 and day 28 has been. The 90 minute days is something we have had since we have started playing because we felt the days too short to be satisfying for our gameplay pace.

It just felt like way more than it should have been. It felt like something we get around our day 50s. And never get more than a couple levels.

The difficulty was just on the number of zombies. It never ended. Biome doesn't play a factor does it? I could not find anything on how many waves usually occur.

We have been higher levels and well later into the game and not had waves like that.

.... Oh wait, my bro streamed it. Can see for yourself from his perspective. From 1h20 to 1h45

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2003493797

Ooh, could the twitch integration have bugged something?

[Reeva!]

For me, I noticed something interesting with crawling zeds.

If you shoot their legs off, zombies become crawlers, and crawlers are really bad at getting out of ditches. They tend to make it deeper if anything, but since they don't deal a lot of damage, they just get stuck there, taking up the zed limit. This reduces pressure on your base by quite a bit with multiple crawlers.

Radiated zeds though, are really difficult to dismember, and if you manage to do it, they still deal a lot of damage, either creating massive ditches or simply getting out of it quicker. This leads to them still dying, so more fresh zeds spawn. Crawling zeds are also harder for your turrets to shoot, so if they do get out of their ditch, thas a lotta ammo going into the ground.

This tiny little detail becomes a bit of a problem when fighting radiated hordes. Not only do they absolutely ruin the environment, but they can mess with your turret AI a lot. I'm never concerned with a crawler reaching the wall, the turrets on the other hand just refuse to leave them alone, pumping entire magazines into them, missing most of the shots, and the rest of the horde starts piling up. When Demolition zeds join hordes, it becomes a nightmare.

It's only gunna get worse, then you'll realize why people almost feel forced to cheese them at lategame.

[Reeva!]

Originally posted by Markus Reese:

What threw me off was just how much of a disparity between day 21 and day 28 has been. The 90 minute days is something we have had since we have started playing because we felt the days too short to be satisfying for our gameplay pace.

It just felt like way more than it should have been. It felt like something we get around our day 50s. And never get more than a couple levels.

The difficulty was just on the number of zombies. It never ended. Biome doesn't play a factor does it? I could not find anything on how many waves usually occur.

We have been higher levels and well later into the game and not had waves like that.

.... Oh wait, my bro streamed it. Can see for yourself from his perspective. From 1h20 to 1h45

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2003493797

Ooh, could the twitch integration have bugged something?

That's weird, they shoulda stopped spawning after a while, you killed tons and tons. Not really sure what twitch integration does, if they can mess with zombies or your gamestage then yeah it's probably that.

[SylenThunder]

Keep in mind also that the difficulty and your calculated gamestage are boosted by the biome you are in. So if you did one bloodmoon in the forest, and another in the snow, even with the same base character gamestage for each of them, the snow biome will be a good bit more difficult.

[Kryzx]

OP, that sounds pretty normal to me, even just playing solo and I'm also using a horde base in the snow biome in my latest playthrough going 84+ days already on survivalist difficulty @ Lvl 100+.

The game can't handle throwing anything more than 64 entities (or less if you're playing with less than the maximum, 8 is default) at one time and the game is going to throw several hundred/over a thousand at you in a (by default settings) 6 hour window. I usually will reach day 28 (4th blood moon) before I can't keep up with all the zombies the game is trying spawn on me, but I try the best I can, at least to gain as much XP as I can.

As far as I know, unless TFP changed something recently, biome shouldn't affect the amount of zombies, but since it does change your gamestage, it will change the difficulty of your blood moon waves. It will also affect the loot bags the enemies drop too.

Maybe it's because you & your friend have been playing on the longer day lengths that's why it appeared so unusual that your blood moons didn't stop during the night? Also, considering your levels it's also not unusual to see demos that early too, even if you perished not too long ago. You didn't mention the game difficulty you're playing on, but you said default settings? So you're playing on Adventurer difficulty or is it higher? Did you make any changes to that between your playthroughs together by any chance?

EDIT: Disregard, I see you're playing with Twitch integration stuff, so that changes a lot of things, LOL.

[Markus Reese]

Originally posted by SylenThunder:

Keep in mind also that the difficulty and your calculated gamestage are boosted by the biome you are in. So if you did one bloodmoon in the forest, and another in the snow, even with the same base character gamestage for each of them, the snow biome will be a good bit more difficult.

So biome does affect the spawning on bloodmoons? Thanks. I suspected that, but could not find confirmation anywhere in my searching before posting.

For Kryzx, we had seen a couple demos the prior bloodmoon, but not comparable to the scale of that one which is what confused us. The twitch integration doesnt affect base game challenge. It just adds spawns, buffs, and debuffs. Is also a common occurence.

I am on mobile, but I should find previous blood moon for comparison maybe.

It was a fun challenge. We survived, but it just ate so much and did get frustrating at the end. Going to be spending days just mining to rebuild stockpiles XD. Also at least have some plans to help enhance the fortifications.

[SylenThunder]

Originally posted by Markus Reese:

Originally posted by SylenThunder:

Keep in mind also that the difficulty and your calculated gamestage are boosted by the biome you are in. So if you did one bloodmoon in the forest, and another in the snow, even with the same base character gamestage for each of them, the snow biome will be a good bit more difficult.

So biome does affect the spawning on bloodmoons? Thanks. I suspected that, but could not find confirmation anywhere in my searching before posting.

For Kryzx, we had seen a couple demos the prior bloodmoon, but not comparable to the scale of that one which is what confused us. The twitch integration doesnt affect base game challenge. It just adds spawns, buffs, and debuffs. Is also a common occurence.

I am on mobile, but I should find previous blood moon for comparison maybe.

It was a fun challenge. We survived, but it just ate so much and did get frustrating at the end. Going to be spending days just mining to rebuild stockpiles XD. Also at least have some plans to help enhance the fortifications.

Yes. And if you do the BM inside of a POI, that can add an additional challenge. It boosts the loot stage as well though, so it can be very rewarding.

[Markus Reese]

Ha ha! Thanks! Is good to know am not crazy. Now am curious what a wasteland blood moon is like!!!!

It was 'almost' rewarding. The rewards were despawning well before we could ever get them. (looking into mods) Otherwise it cost us lots more supplies than we recovered. We did get a tier 6 steel shovel though XD!

[Kryzx]

Originally posted by Markus Reese:

For Kryzx, we had seen a couple demos the prior bloodmoon, but not comparable to the scale of that one which is what confused us. The twitch integration doesnt affect base game challenge. It just adds spawns, buffs, and debuffs. Is also a common occurence.

Gotcha, I'm unfamiliar with the Twitch stuff TFP is doing, but I figured it could make things very stupidly difficult or just silly things (like big heads, etc.) depending on what your viewers are doing.

Anyways, if you can't keep up with the repairs & replenishing your ammunition on your horde base, you may want to think about having your horde base back in the desert or forest biome for the time being.

It's rewarding in the harder biomes only if you can design a horde base to minimize the damage you have to repair. At some point though, you'll reach the max gamestage cap and it won't matter where you have your horde base anymore.... if you both don't get bored that far into your game.

Regardless, you both got a lot of XP & levels + decent loot, so I'd say it was well deserved! Keep the show going!

[Markus Reese]

Well, damage was mostly superficial. Doing some hardcore mining to get new ammo into production, but is a few days. Lead being the worst part. Gonna need stacks of that. Will see how it goes. Maybe will change interval of the blood moon if resupply becomes too tedious. Replacing a lot of the ground with asphalt soon. 3k units of that currently in the mixer.