Zombie Jumping

[Cpt. Uriel]

How many blocks can a zombie jump? I built a ditch and I just had a zombie jump 5 blocks to get accros my ditch successfully.

[JimmyIowa]

A spider zombie (the hunched over one that moves on all fours) can leap a huge distance horizontally, well over 10 blocks, and up to 3 blocks high at the peak of it's trajectory.

[Crater Creator]

As JimmyIowa alludes, there’s one type of zombie that specializes in leaping. Making a broad enough gap to defeat them may not be practical. What many do is design the destination side with a lip or similar obstacle, which prevents or interrupts them from landing in a bad spot (e.g. helps them to glance off and fall harmlessly into a pit).

I seem to remember seeing regular zombies jump across small gaps at one point. It didn’t come up often, as they preferred to run where there’s ground under them if such a path exists. But I think all standing zombies technically have the ability. Maybe that’s changed though since I haven’t seen it in a long time.

[Ash Tré]

Aside from simple jumping, groups of zombies are able to stand on each others' shoulders and get up way higher than one individual could climb / jump. I didn't realize it and built some obstacles which I thought would be adequate, but then I saw them do this (oh well).

On the bigger subject of "what kind of obstacles are guaranteed to stop zombies", it seems that nothing works for certain. Water obstacles don't drown them; falling from huge heights onto concrete doesn't break their bones. I guess it's good for "intensity" that the player never has a 100% safe location. However, on the other hand, it kind of takes away from believability when the zombies cannot be hurt by environmental effects like that.

[Crater Creator]

Originally posted by Ash Tré:

Aside from simple jumping, groups of zombies are able to stand on each others' shoulders and get up way higher than one individual could climb / jump. I didn't realize it and built some obstacles which I thought would be adequate, but then I saw them do this (oh well).

On the bigger subject of "what kind of obstacles are guaranteed to stop zombies", it seems that nothing works for certain. Water obstacles don't drown them; falling from huge heights onto concrete doesn't break their bones. I guess it's good for "intensity" that the player never has a 100% safe location. However, on the other hand, it kind of takes away from believability when the zombies cannot be hurt by environmental effects like that.

Zombies do take fall damage. Each fall is capped to take a maximum of one third of the zombie’s maximum health.

[seven]

Most ferals can jump 4+ blocks, regular zombies less. They do prefer walkable paths though like Crater mentioned (except spidey), and jumping a 5 block gap is rare, so it's enough to stop most of them. There is a value maxjumpdistance (or something) in entityclasses.xml if you're interested.