7 days

[Slamz]

It's actually not too bad to clear houses at night even with gamma set normally (i.e., it's dark) --

Sneak around (crouch all the time)
Carry a torch
Look for zombies
When you find some or see what's probably a trap, put the torch on the wall and then use the shotgun and sneak-kill one of them.
Aim for the head
Know what your escape plan is
Have more than 1 torch (you can get some animal fat from road kill to make a couple torches)
Carry wood spike traps for emergencies. Easy to make and can save your butt.

Usually I don't get into trouble unless I woke up a lot of zombies coming from different directions.

Bring a painkiller or two with you (white pill). You can only pop 1 every few minutes and they make you thirsty but it's a big boost to your health if you get beat up.
To fix your max health (black bar damage) use a bandage or however many you need. Regular bandages won't raise your main health but they'll fix your max health and stop bleeding (you do not have to be bleeding to use one) and they're trivial to make.
Put 1 point into "Healing Factor" under Fortitude. You don't need any points in Fortitude to do this and it will give you a very basic level of natural health regen. (At 3 points it will slowly fix your max health, too.)

Also, we can make ammo now about as well as ever. Just be sure to grab any paper and brass you can. Brass is probably easier than paper, really, but I find I don't use much shotgun ammo. Whatever weapon you're going with, though, you should plan on getting the perks for it even if that means a lot of us are doubling up on something, because while the perk lets you craft the weapon it also gives you sizable bonuses while fighting with it.

[Crice]

I logged on this morning and had some bad lag, maybe it was on my end but now we have storage... and now I need to make more drop boxes for outside. Enjoy!

Sneaking skill whatever it is called works great. I sneak in and loot and leave.

[Slamz]

For Blood Moons maybe we should try something simple:
Get on the roof of some other building.
Knock down the ladders.
Hang out and see how many zombies we can shoot.

We'll have to defend ourselves from birds but maybe we could build a cage or safe room up top. Save us a ton of construction from building a whole facility.

Zombies will end up trying to knock down whatever structure we're standing on but that's not going to be easy. (Although I wonder if they could knock down a corner and end up with enough debris to jump up...) The laundromat catercorner from us has a nice roof ready to go.

We see how much XP we can farm by shooting them and have some haybales to jump on if it's time to bug out and run off into the darkness.

I'm thinking minimal use of traps for blood moons. Traps buy you some time in the sense that it respawns the zombies who have to run in again but you don't get any XP from them. If the purpose is to farm them for XP until we run out of health/ammo/building then we should just be trying to kill them with weapons. If you use a "real weapon" then your job is to get kills and then escape. If you use crap gear then your job is to be the last out in the event of a breach while the people with good gear get some distance.

Junk turret kills seem to generate XP and zombies seem to ignore them so we can deploy those too.

[Vllad]

I am going to ORD for a few days. Made a ton of food that should last you guys. Should be back on Thursday.

[Dharus]

I am going to ORD for a few days. Made a ton of food that should last you guys. Should be back on Thursday.

You haven't been restricted from flying yet?  Doctors are getting grounded.

[Vllad]

I am going to ORD for a few days. Made a ton of food that should last you guys. Should be back on Thursday.

You haven't been restricted from flying yet?  Doctors are getting grounded.

Not at all.

[Arsilon]

Mk III of the bunker is mostly done. Just need to upgrade it all to reinforced concrete (may do the base in steel) then build the bird/spit shield.

[Slamz]

BTW, if you haven't tried trader missions, it's not a bad way to go. Fetch quests and zombie clear quests will both send you to a property, reset it and have you clear it. Basically if you were going out for some random clearing anyway, you might as well do it as a quest, since you're guaranteed to get a freshly reset property to do it on, plus the trader rewards to boot.

[Arsilon]

BTW, if you haven't tried trader missions, it's not a bad way to go. Fetch quests and zombie clear quests will both send you to a property, reset it and have you clear it. Basically if you were going out for some random clearing anyway, you might as well do it as a quest, since you're guaranteed to get a freshly reset property to do it on, plus the trader rewards to boot.

This is especially handy if we're needing brass. Having a fully reset house with intact radiators is pretty handy (if you have the books that give you brass returns for faucets & doorknobs even more so -- if you don't leave them be for someone that does).

[Slamz]

What did we set blood moons to, anyway? Apparently the way it works is that on a blood moon, it calculates the next blood moon, which is interval + [random value, if any]. So if you set it to 5/3, it means a blood moon 5-8 days after the last blood moon. I think we thought it meant 5 +/- [0-3]. But it's only 5 + [0-3]. For the effect we wanted, we want an interval of 0 and then a random value of, say, 5.

We should think of how to spice up blood moons though. They're supposed to be a super dangerous event but the way we play it's more of a farm or minor inconvenience. Zombies can't deal with rooftops, for the most part. We could just go stand on the roof of the firehouse and knock out 2 rungs of the ladder and probably be fine. Shoot zombie birds and hope they can't knock the whole structure down, which is the only way they'd get us.

There are lots of ways to spice it up but we'd have to think about it. Would be nice to make it harder without making it suicidal or "total victory vs total defeat".

[Vllad]

We have the bloodmoon set at the lowest settings. I am not sure how it went while I was in ORD but it certainly can be set to toughen the standards. I still think we can make adjustments to non blood moon nights. We certainly don't have things maxed out.

[Slamz]

Yeah I kinda got bored once we figure out how to cheese the zombies. They really need zombies to climb surfaces, spiderman style, because right now all you REALLY need to do is get on any roof and stand there and do nothing. It's actually better if you don't shoot them because then they'll just spend all night flailing at your support structure and won't keep spawning birds. Kill any birds and then twiddle your thumbs.

There are a ton of options though. I was messing around some in single player but it's hard to decide what to do without setting arbitrary rules for ourselves (like "no running away". Running away is too easy. On the other hand, if we set zombies to nightmare speed then it's hard to even fight them normally).

Jack up the zombie ability to bust walls and you kinda ruin the point of building defenses at all.

Step up the difficulty and you just up your ammo requirements and make melee that much less viable.

I wonder about something like:
16 zombies per person
Zombies "jog"
Leave their block damage as-is (there will, after all, be shitloads of them)

My thinking is that by making them merely jog we get more of a chance to fight them as ridiculous hordes of them stream in. 16 of them will beat up any structures so they shouldn't really need a damage boost. It doesn't really help or hurt our ability to run away because that's easy even on Sprint. It just gives more chances to shoot them coming in and maybe even risk some melee.

This might make them hard to cheese too because there will be so many more boomers, spitters and birds. I suspect we'll need larger structures because they'll tear up anything small. (Actually thought about taking over the top floor of a hotel and block off some of the stairs. You'll catch a break between waves as the next wave has to work its way up.)

[Vllad]

Why not do 16 and just let them run? You can still out run them? I am not talking nightmare but actually normal run.

[Veraphim]

Is there any way to make corpses last longer? Zombies will climb on each other and I think piles of bodies can actually turn into ramps but in practice it never really works that way since bodies disappear after like 10 seconds.

If we could up the corpse timer to like 2+ minutes and add 16 zombies per player then they might be able to build corpse ladders up to us even if we knocked ladders/stairs out from under our holding spot.

[Slamz]

Greater numbers of zombies might get interesting anyway because I think I've seen zombies climb other zombies. They jump around and land on each other's heads. Presumably they could pyramid their way into buildings that way, if there's enough of them.

[Crice]

I did Blood Moon solo today. Drove into the woods and got out of the jeep and waited. Only had 4 zombies attack me. It was odd and really boring.

I am not sure we will ever make this game hard or interesting enough. Why don't we try a pvp server?

[Vllad]

We did a bloodmoon last night. It lasted until 1:30 in the afternoon the next day. It was a good one. We started with Slamz motel idea, it went badly and we shifted to Arsilon's tower. It worked like a charm. Some where able to climb up but the problem is the pit filled and we couldn't empty it.

It got really hard once the sun came up and we kept getting screamers. The Screamers were summoning more Screamers. It took all day to clear it. Was quite good.

We burned through every bit of ammo. We are back to not having enough ammo. Your place is in need of repair Arsilon.

[Slamz]

I fixed up the hotel a bit but it needs more. The problem was I didn't block off the other staircases well enough so they found a way through there and wormed their way up that way. My plan worked for me just a lot more rapidly than anticipated:

Hotel idea is you start at the bottom and retreat your way upward. One or two can stay at the door while the rest go up a floor and shoot down (and place turrets). As the door gives out you retreat up a floor and repeat. When you're at the top and out of places to shoot from, you drop down, land on the hay piles and run away.

The further up you go, the longer the next zombie wave needs to reach you, assuming you are killing whole waves. (At the top floor I'm not even sure their pathing is long enough to reach you.)

I worked on it a bit but it needs more. I'm destroying the staircases I had intended to be completely blocked off, and repairing the damage (a lot of which was from my own shotgun).

At Arsilon's, occasionally a zombie would actually reach the top. Had one jumper and a couple regular zombies manage it. They just stack up. I think if you had 5 people in there you might have some real issues. Mostly try to avoid the boomers because things get dicey when they start undermining the tower. I think it helps them stack up better too, when they can go more vertical and less horizontal to get on top.

The boomer splash damage destroyed that ammo box that was in there, though it was quite useful. I burned through most of the ammo in that box. Went back for more and noticed it was gone. (I suppose spitters could have gotten it, too, but I assumed it was boomer splash.)

[Crice]

So we have no ammo which requires more scavenging and or mining etc. The looting via scavenging was terrible which is fine but doesn't make me want to go out and scavenge. I go through 300 rounds clearing a few buildings only to find nothing, so it's really not worth the time and effort anymore. My guess is the end will be because of resource restrictions and limits. Glad the blood moon was fun bummer I missed it.

[Slamz]

Make sure you're spending points in the gun you're using, for the bonuses. Although I suspect that the shotgun is the superior clearing weapon even with no points, just because it's so easy to headshot with it and the point blank damage is so extreme. Use the barrel choke mod to focus the damage and you won't use much ammo.

We should probably use more junk turrets too. Especially for blood moons, there's no reason not to use one. The ammo is just plain iron. They're helpful when scavenging but you end up needing to lure zombies to it (that said, they have also saved my bacon before when I got an unexpected flood and was able to fall back and get some help from the turret I left in the front entrance). The turrets are a lot nicer with points in it but I find them useful even with no points. It's basically free damage and the zombies never attack it. Turrets can be modded with the ammo barrel mod so you don't have to pick them up so much.

[Vllad]

The scavenging isn't useless. We need Brass and every door in every house needs to be knocked down in order to get brass. Assuming you have the door brass thing. Every sink, anything that contains brass we need. Most importantly we need quest done that resets the houses so you can do them twice.

So... scavenging for more food may now be useless since quite frankly we can make everything we need.

However let me list some examples of things we can't make. Brass, Sewing kits, Skematics, etc. We can't have enough things that are only scavenged like Paper, glue, duck tape and most importantly older weapons that we can scrap.

I just think you need to scavenge smartly. We still need it but don't bring home any more pills, canned food and iron. We can mine for that better than you can scavenge it. Bring home the things that can't be made.

Actually scavenging is more important now than ever. Just scavenge the right things.

[AnneWildcat]

What Crice’s said, I don’t know if we turned town the loot settings, but I think the loot settings should be turned back up.

[Arsilon]

Another thing...look at the value of items you find. Even if we don't need the item, don't leave it behind or automatically scrap it. These items can all be sold to the Trader and the money used to buy books/schematics that we otherwise haven't been able to find (assuming it gets mixed into the rotation).

When you go to a trader (which we should be doing based on the point Vllad highlighted above about quests resetting a house so it can be cleared again) it will tell you when the inventory refreshes. Remember to go back and see if there is a new book or specific loot item we need (this is how I ultimately built those Gyrocoptors since I know Dophuz was still trying to level up to get the skill points that way).

[Slamz]

We can't have enough things that are only scavenged like Paper, glue, duck tape

Actually you can make those, though the formula for paper looked like a waste to me. I've been scrapping money (the "dollars") into paper as soon as I find it, though. Some places have rolls of what looks like paper or carpet and they can be demolished for a good paper yield.

Definitely beat body bags for the bones, though, since that's glue and thus duct tape.

I scrap tier 1-3 weapons in the field too, and just bring back the crafting parts you get from scrapping them.

Vera has pointed out that you can also spend your trader money on ammo. We've basically gotten so much easy loot (and haven't been dying much) that we've not really taken full advantage of the traders.

[Crice]

I do struggle with what to bring back, but I have gotten pretty good at it. I break things down in the field. It's good to know the list of things I can prioritize, thank you. I generally try to fit and stack as much as possible in the jeep and on myself and then head home. Yup I scrap the weapons and bring back parts T1-4.