Somehow the whole survival genre developed around this concept, and I agree it’s quite unenjoyable. In general, it’s not fun to chase your own tail, working hard just to stay at the same level. A more interesting approach would be to treat hunger like mana: you need food as fuel to perform activities such as fighting, assembling etc, but not to survive.
So I spent a lot more time with this game.
First I ran a lot of practice games where all I did was run around beat up zombies. Shove them until they fall over and then stand on top of them so they can’t get back up while you curb stomp them or their companions. And if there are too many, you can just walk away to outpace them and line of sight around buildings and trees until you lose them.
After that started a real game and have managed to survive for many days so far. Currently I’ve cleared out my immediate neighborhood and am attempting to infiltrate a warehouse building, but there are multiple packs of zombies hanging about, and it’s become kind of a slog to get through them all.
Before approaching a pack, I need to make sure all the houses nearby are clear, so I have to go through those one by one. Then I can I finally pick apart the pack. This process takes days, since the daytime passes too quickly, and I have to hole up in a nearby house for the night.
During this time my character is constantly exhausted or hungry or bored. Seriously? How does one become bored while fighting for your life. It also rained for a few days, so I couldn’t even do much on those days because I think you can get sick if you get soaked. I had flashbacks of rainy days at elementary school where you were forced to sit in class during recess and read a book or whatever. And then of course after clearing some packs more zombies appeared. Not sure if they just migrated or randomly spawned.
I love the sandbox aspect of this game and all the details, but man it takes so much time to accomplish anything. I feel how Bluddy put it as chasing your own tail is very spot on, since the constantly repeating survival loop leaves very little time during each day to get much done.
I think I read somewhere about there being a setting to extend the length of a day, but I don’t see that in the sandbox settings. I just found a “Stats Decrease” setting which says “How fast a character’s hunger, thirst and fatigue will decrease.” Maybe this is the setting I need in my life. Time to start a new game, I guess.
Reading newspapers and books cures the boredom…
Ah yes I had to go through some nearby houses for those. That helped for a couple of minutes, then I got hungry. Then after prepping and eating some food I was bored again. But really, it was not the time to be bored, haha. Maybe if it was referred to as sanity or something it would be more believable for me.
Thanks barstein, I found that setting after going through the wiki. I’m going to try doubling the duration of a day and also lower all the stats decay settings. Hopefully those will do the trick for me. It’s pretty cool that the game exposed all these different knobs for adjusting the game.
Yeah, it’s a super impressive feature.
Just to point out, I’m pretty sure the game doesn’t expect you to kill every zombie you see and the fact that you are doing so is probably why everything is taking forever and being a slog. The advice I’ve seen is to avoid fighting zombies as much as practical and pick individual fights when you must.
Also, yes, sounds like by default zombies respawn. But that it’s a setting you can change.
Thanks, I had thought that zombies didn’t respawn for the normal difficulty mode, but from checking the settings it looks like they do like you said. The problem was that there were a couple of packs roaming about the warehouse entrance area and also in the street leading up to it. It’s actually pretty fun to kill zombies, but having to go back and eat/sleep/entertain self/etc all the time while trying to make progress was a pain in the butt.
I started up a new sandbox game with double-length day and reduced hunger rates, and it’s so much more enjoyable for me now. I can get a reasonable amount of things done during a day, and my character isn’t constantly hungry and bored all the time. Awesome.
I love all the shows and commercials on the TV broadcasts. They are so damn goofy. And I found out that the news channels would report new developments that conveyed the story of the beginning of the zombie outbreak.
Also ran into a very cool easter egg in this new game:
One of the houses had multiple dead bodies inside, and there was one single zombie inside wearing a hockey mask and wielding a machete. Jason lives! Well, not anymore. I’m now wearing his mask and am using his murder house as my current base. He wasn’t there during my last game, so it must be some random event occurrence. Cool stuff.
Food is actually quite easy to come by, depending on where you start… it’s kinda importart because it drives you to keep moving and exploring. if you have no food or water req, it’s kinda more of just an exploration game? anyway, one suggestion is to cook! if you find a bowl, or a roasting pan, or anything like that you can start preparing fresh food, esp from fridges while the power is on. you can easily have 2 dishes that keep you fed for like 2 days instead of eating things from cans…
you can also speed things up by starting burgler, the ability to hotwire cars right from the start is pretty freaking good
I’ve still only been in the early game stage so I haven’t had issues with lack of food, but I had to constantly keep preparing more. I think maybe part of the problem is that I wasn’t cooking the right things. So far I only know how to stir fry and make salads, and it was just yesterday that I learned I could add more than one ingredient to those. After adding more items, the meals seemed to be a lot more substantial, and I’m guessing doing something more advanced is a more optimal use of ingredients? At least I won’t have to spend time cooking as often.
I figure that later after I learn more about the game, I can go back to the regular settings and things should be alright. Still tons of stuff to learn. I haven’t gotten a car running, fired a gun (not sure how guns can be good with the loud noises…), or even tried farming yet.
edit: Just read in the wiki that increasing Cooking skill will make a dish more filling. That’s pretty cool. I had guessed levels only unlocked new recipes.
Certain ingredients will be a lot better… like some chicken and veggies in a roast that you cook can give -80 or -90 hunger and relieve some thirst and unhappiness. But even something as simple as putting beans in a bowl and cooking it improves the dish a bit. then you can stick the finished poroduct in the fridge and it’ll keep for a while.
For cars, be sure to always try to get in the drivers seat and check the glove box for the keys. they are often in there. otherwise you need mechanics 2 and electrical 1 to hotwire cars… this isn’t that hard to accomplish, if you find the beginner books and the right tools. I only play MP and so don’t know how bad the guns are in single player but they aren’t really very loud in MP for some reason. However, the only gun worth using at the beginning is the shotgun, until you get a higher aim skill. the pistols and rifles cant hit very much if you have 0 or 1 aim.
Cool, thanks for the tips. If I break a window, half the neighborhood will come running, so I figured gun shots would be much worse. I saw some video of some guy holed up in a gun shop fighting off zombies with all sorts of guns. Looked pretty fun.
Perhaps I’ve been playing too much PZ when I heard a helicopter outside my real life house and got worried all of a sudden. Damn helicopters.
I’ve heard guns are somehow nerfed in mp right now and are way way louder in single player so, I’m not sure haha.
as an aside, if you make a fire, oh my god, please be careful and don’t step in it. and if you do, you can apparently right click and extinguish yourself. lessons learned the hard way :( fire kills you SO freaking fast
Heh, my human has not evolved enough to make fire yet. I did find a fire extinguisher, so I put that in my kitchen just in case.
I saw on reddit about the guns being quieter for MP in build 41. I had a single player test game where I tried firing a shotgun, and was immediately mobbed by like 20 zombies. So yeah, definitely only for MP.
While making a fruit salad, the game offered me an option to add bleach to it. From reading the wiki, looks like you can do this to secretly poison your friends. Well then.
yeah, on our server we usually get our bodies home after a bite, then we go out to the yard for a ceremonial bleach drinking event to speed to the process lol
I’ve got some buddies and we all drink bleach
I’m so bored I’m drinking bleach.
Ah haha I haven’t listened to Dead Milkmen for years.
One downside about PZ is I can’t listen to anything while playing in fear of not hearing a zombie and getting jumped.