I really appreciate the answer. I'm not a good programmer, I usually take the path most difficult, but looking at the server code again and seeing all the guessing it does, it gives me the heebies.

When they are out of player vision they have x time to either get refreshed by the OG player who got it's attention or to find another client to latch onto, if not it'll go back to client control and be simulated if that chunk has been unloaded. That's how it's SUPPOSE to work, but we've seen it do some stupid stuff before. It definitely seems to be some kind of band-aid to make the game more stable online.

The whole client/server zombie thing is what makes some of the fighting in PZ MP dangerous. Like if you've ever fought side by side with a friend and seen the zombie just turn on a dime and hit you. Stuff like ping really will effect it, why I've heard some people call it being ping diffed.

Not sure if this answers your question, but I'm happy to try to answer them. Sadly the other creator of the mod has been kind of MIA.

Hey Mopop! With this mod, I think the server is just talking trash when it says the zombie is stale. It has to be a byproduct of the code when the client/server don't agree. I never dug into the java much to see exactly what the server did when a zombie was removed from a square/world via client side though.

Question: With the "out of vision" zombies, was it the server updating the clients or the other way around?

Also now that I think about it with the ways stales do work, basically they can come back, but we never figured out how. We guessed it might be noise, but not all noise was equal. This is why some people on servers report how a group of zombies just dumps on them for no reason.

IIRC they're just standing there out of vision of the player till re-activated somehow as when we were testing the mod, somehow we got it to where stale zombies could be seen, but they were just standing in place, could be killed, but drop one of those weird 3D corpse you can't loot...it's very odd indeed.

No Mo Culling guy here, I don't think it will actually stop the zombies being set as stale from being removed. Mainly what our mod did was fix some code that was throwing false stales when zombies were updating, it does not stop the stale process itself. We tried that approach first and it gave some very...strange results lol.

This is hard to answer. The way this game handles zombies is insane.

In SP: they will be gone for good. In MP: on the surface they are removed from the world. I was told by some very smart modders that these zombies would re-spawn somewhere else later. I did a lot of testing on this and I never came across a re-spawned zombie. My best guess is you would only have 50 zombies to kill.

Do the despawned zombies get permanently removed from the world or do they respawn elsewhere? For example, if there were 100 zombies on the map and 50 despawned, where did they go? Do they respawn later or can I only kill 50 zombies now rather than the original 100?