Project Zomboid - The farming simulator disguised as a zombie survival game

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ProfDongs said:
The play is to have a generator you leave at a gas station, you only need to turn it on when refueling anyway. There are plenty around especially in storage lockers.
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I was planning on doing that if I get a second one. The trailer park is right across from a storage unit (Bubba hid in one, door drawn, while he wrote his last testament before then setting out back for home) so maybe I can turn one up the next time I take the risk of gassing up. I have no idea what the factory situation is, but I assume it's horrible and that I'm at real risk if I go to the station that some bullshit could draw a horde down on me from the trailer park or the factory or both.

I don't really need the generator once my freezer food is eaten. In that I could try boiling my water with campfires. This forest I use, I was going to try to wall it off (looks like that may not be wood-efficient) on its two ends to make it even safer to forage in. I'm already used to maintaining darkness at night (I think I read they can't see light through curtains, but I don't trust it).
 
You'll still want refrigeration for raw meat and veg that you farm/forage/trap/fish if possible to reduce loss to rotting so while you can do without, you're generally better off with a working generator. A working oven is also a large convenience boost. And if possible you'll also want to board over any windows in your place; they block zombie sight in addition to making it take longer for them to break in.
 
Doing my run as @Null in Zomboid

I spawned in as Null, he's overweight, but an amateur mechanic - which is the best I can manage to fit in 'Computer nerd' to zomboids 90s setting - with cooking and trained as a first aid person.
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He has a safety vest on because he has autism. House I spawned in has a shotgun, and a 9mm pistol with some ammunition, which was nice. I found a leash in the cupboard (For slobbermut?) and some screwdrivers. I didn't grab any food because lorewise Null is on a diet and will not keep food in his house.
Current weight: 105.
Null as he is...does not like walking, it makes him very sweaty and upset. So we're off finding a car. Normally I go burglar, but Null would not engage in such naggardry. So instead we gotta search the bodies and houses for car keys. Six houses in and so far NOBODY!!! had any keys. Null did find a rifle with no magazine and no ammunition though, which is now taking up space in his freshly looted and stylish trauma bag from a crashed ambulance.

Null found a boarded up house and entered it through a non boarded window, while fighting two zomboids, his baseball bat broke and he was forced to Rodney King two negro zombies in an act of premeditated self defence from an ambush position. After defending himself from two blacks that did not see him until he was beating them in with a baseball bat so hard that it snapped, he found very little of use. It seems the house was boarded up because it was a crack den rather than a survivor fortress.
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After much searching, and much pre-emptive self defence, Null finally finds a free car with a free key on the body of a man he beat into chunky salsa with a spiked baseball bat!
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He did get his neck clawed open though in an unlucky hit from a zomboid, so now has a dirty ripped sock bandaging the wound. Hopefully he finds some painkillers, disinfectant and and actual bandages, or pretty soon he'll need to get himself some antibiotics! Null has gone to sleep in the West Point hardware shop upstairs. Tuckered out from sliming out all the zomboids.
 
robobobo said:
One thing Zomboid does not make sufficiently clear is that being slightly tired turbofucks you. The description makes it sound like you're a tiny smidgen worn out, but in actuality it halves your melee damage. If you get caught out in a dangerous situation when the tired debuff kicks in, it's likely to get you killed. So make certain to get a full night's sleep and get back to a safehouse reasonably early after doing what you're doing for the day. Don't pick the flaw that makes you get tired faster at character creation, it's not remotely worth it, and it may even be worthwhile to buy the bonus that you don't need as much sleep.
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The energy drink mod helps a lot, it reduces fatigue like coffee. Though it's not lore accurate, as most energy drinks didn't exist in 1993.
 
Chunky Salsa said:
Doing my run as @Null in Zomboid
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Null has awoken from his sleep and I made him do burpees until he got upset. So after a shower, a drink and a breakfast ham roasted in the oven, he set off to explore the world. He eventually came across the hunting lodge. What a find!
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The inside has some stocked fridges, and a lot of ammunition for guns that Null knows will draw in zombies if fired, which is of dubious current use; but will be taken regardless so that when he finds a proper place to settle down into, he can have an entire armoury which he won't use. Amazing. After clearing out the zomboids, and loading up the back of his truck with ammunition; he relaxes and finds warmth by the fire while the outside is foggy.
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Finally Null went to the shooting range, and found yet more guns and ammunition! Wonderful! Now Null has decided to find a nice place to base up in. So he pulls into a motel called "Guns a Blazin", and after returning several thugs to the street, he had a nice sleep until 5am, and ate a hearty breakfast of sardines from a can. Delicious!
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While driving around, Null decides to risk his life by taking the military checkpoint. He has all the gear needed to dismantle the barricades there, and so he begins his journey to matyrdom or Louisville!

Also as a side note, I find it very amusing to take all my screenshots from this angle, and have Zomboid Null kubrick stare at the camera.
EDIT: Immediately after posting this, I unpaused and immediately hit a tree, bringing Null to critical damage and nearly killing Null. He's gone to ground and is recovering in a trailer in the construction yard. Zombies can break down those gates, didn't know that!
 
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Regarding generators: Generators will use fuel at different rate depending on how many appliances are within it's range (30~32 tiles iirc), and will also take damage over time. They can be repaired with scrap electronics (which can be farmed en masse from dismantling electronic objects like digital watches, radios/walkie-talkies/TVs/etc.), and refuelled from gas cans; but to repair and refuel them, they must be deactivated. Perishable foodstuffs on a fridge melt and spoil pretty fast with no electricity. Subjectively, this is either a minor or no issue; which can be mitigated by working as fast as possible on the generator, or keeping two generators side by side, to activate one while maintaining the other one. For the sake of convenience, generators do not consume fuel or take damage while their map sections are unloaded [while still working]

Regarding exercise: depending on the routine selected, specific parts of the body (arms, legs, or the upper body) will begin to accumulate 'fatigue points', which after 12 hours [build 41, not sure if there is a different in b42] are converted over time into 'pain points', which will only decay once all fatigue points have decayed. Painkillers mitigate, but don't remove, the debuffs caused by pain points on arms, legs, or body. Exercise regularity reduces the gain rate of fatigue points.
 
Chunky Salsa said:
Null has awoken from his sleep and I made him do burpees until he got upset. So after a shower, a drink and a breakfast ham roasted in the oven, he set off to explore the world. He eventually came across the hunting lodge. What a find!
View attachment 8370352
The inside has some stocked fridges, and a lot of ammunition for guns that Null knows will draw in zombies if fired, which is of dubious current use; but will be taken regardless so that when he finds a proper place to settle down into, he can have an entire armoury which he won't use. Amazing. After clearing out the zomboids, and loading up the back of his truck with ammunition; he relaxes and finds warmth by the fire while the outside is foggy.
View attachment 8370356
Finally Null went to the shooting range, and found yet more guns and ammunition! Wonderful! Now Null has decided to find a nice place to base up in. So he pulls into a motel called "Guns a Blazin", and after returning several thugs to the street, he had a nice sleep until 5am, and ate a hearty breakfast of sardines from a can. Delicious!
View attachment 8370358
While driving around, Null decides to risk his life by taking the military checkpoint. He has all the gear needed to dismantle the barricades there, and so he begins his journey to matyrdom or Louisville!

Also as a side note, I find it very amusing to take all my screenshots from this angle, and have Zomboid Null kubrick stare at the camera.
EDIT: Immediately after posting this, I unpaused and immediately hit a tree, bringing Null to critical damage and nearly killing Null. He's gone to ground and is recovering in a trailer in the construction yard. Zombies can break down those gates, didn't know that!
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Null is fucking DEAD!
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Tragic. Now to redo it all in build 42 I guess.
 
Another thing that the game might not make sufficiently clear is how insanely vital it is to park yourself in front of a TV and get every last book you can get your hands on for the first week. Books multiply your experience gain for certain levels of a skill and the Life and Living TV station gives you bulk XP for some very important skills until the station goes off the air. If you read the books before the shows air, the end result is a huge level kick in carpentry and cooking and a couple other skills that will make your life vastly easier than if you miss it; if you game the system hard enough you can be ready to build rain collectors long before the fresh water goes out.
 
robobobo said:
Another thing that the game might not make sufficiently clear is how insanely vital it is to park yourself in front of a TV and get every last book you can get your hands on for the first week. Books multiply your experience gain for certain levels of a skill and the Life and Living TV station gives you bulk XP for some very important skills until the station goes off the air. If you read the books before the shows air, the end result is a huge level kick in carpentry and cooking and a couple other skills that will make your life vastly easier than if you miss it; if you game the system hard enough you can be ready to build rain collectors long before the fresh water goes out.
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Although this is mitigated slightly by level three being the maximum you can get from the TV in Build 42.
 
FedPostalService said:
Although this is mitigated slightly by level three being the maximum you can get from the TV in Build 42.
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VHS tapes also significantly mitigate the TV rush, as you can raid your local blockbuster at any point later in the game after you get a generator. Just make sure that your TV has a VHS player built into it, as the remote farms that make for good homes tend to have older TVs.
 
Enward Cullen said:
VHS tapes also significantly mitigate the TV rush, as you can raid your local blockbuster at any point later in the game after you get a generator. Just make sure that your TV has a VHS player built into it, as the remote farms that make for good homes tend to have older TVs.
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This killed me in my last epic run. Thought I was stronger than I was, got hit by all the AIDS moodles, hid to sleep in a random car what I thought was far away. Woke up surrounded by zombies with no escape. Any other game I would have been pissed off, but I thought, fuck I deserved that.

EDIT: Going the block buster to get tapes I forgot to add.
 
I found a perfectly safe gas station literally right down the road from my house.

I've heard people talk about the devs adding NPCs but it being a clusterfuck because of their autism. I think if they add them they need to think carefully about what they're supposed to accomplish gameplay-wise and design the complexity around that.

I nominate something I've rambled about with State of Decay: zombie soap opera. NPCs have a matrix of personality traits (especially along time preference, moralfaggotry and risk aversion) and they're mostly of note for how they effect social relationships between them and strategy. They sort of Bayesian update their worldviews over time but it solidifies hard after a while. So a sequence of play might be like:
John is paranoid. Jim is paranoid. Jane is trusting (typical woman).
John was ripped off early, so his paranoia hardens and he permanently shifts towards paranoid hostility.
Jim and Janes joined late and had a good experience with another group having saved them. Jim's paranoia weakens/goes away and he becomes open-minded. Jane hardens and permanently shift towards intergroup xenophilia.
John and Jane bicker endlessly, Jim is miserable but sides with whoever is nicer/he owes/depends on, the gay power plays in the band resolve when someone fucks off/gets expelled/gets isolated and shuts the fuck up.

I'm interested in the simulation of stateless societies at both a large scale (like Indian tribes) and small scale (like pirate ships or survival camps). Political decision-making under conditions of complex negotiations (log-rolling, coalition building, mind games) navigating a mixture of real, understandable disagreements about strategic vision and people's stupid social drama. Add incomplete information (don't fully know people's personalities at first, don't know communications/secrets that haven't been revealed) and you get spectacular domino chains of your actions causing stupid bullshit that gets people eaten. Add other groups out there with diplomacy and there's a pressure to have a group. Maybe like one-ish per general region at start and others accrete or merge over time. Which is what zombie soap opera is. Except for heavily-introverted characters, not having friends quickly builds depression.

It would be interesting to be able to role play a useless piece of shit that survives by manipulating other survivors/blowing the chief.
 
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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
I've heard people talk about the devs adding NPCs but it being a clusterfuck because of their autism. I think if they add them they need to think carefully about what they're supposed to accomplish gameplay-wise and design the complexity around that.
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It took them like a decade to put in deer and chickens, I don't think they'd be able to do anything as complex as you suggest. Best you can hope for is to join one of Harvest's multiplayer games where they pretty much do as you describe.
 
Bâtard Consanguine said:
It took them like a decade to put in deer and chickens, I don't think they'd be able to do anything as complex as you suggest. Best you can hope for is to join one of Harvest's multiplayer games where they pretty much do as you describe.
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I remembered someone in here talking about the devs saying they wanted to do things like dialogue trees and everyone knowing that they would never be able to implement something that freeform.
 
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