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[alway]

No crashes for hours, then a crash when I go back to the shelter and the NPC gets into combat. Something about them fighting creatures seems to be a likely cause of the crashes.

[Kaitol]

Yeah. It seems like 50% of the time I shoot offscreen I crash. Definitely something buggy.

Edit: More like 90% of the time I shoot at a zombie offscreen. Squirrels? Fine. Rabbits? Fine. Cougars? Fine. Zombie? Crash.

EditEdit: Nooooo, the dead body holding the railgun that was in that supermarket the first time is gone T_T Damn you crash!

[jester]

Recent events have caused me to regret my policy of burning and melting every zombie corpse I can find with acid and fire.

[Greiger]

I got that odd bug with the cars stopping for no reason while still keeping velocity again.  Have a little more information now that might help in tracking it down.

It always seems to happen nearby a VW bug I had abandoned in the street at one point.  Seemingly when the map tile it's in gets loaded.  I also sometimes get the stopping vehicle off map debug message when nearby it.

Also hitting the e-brake in that 'frozen' state fails to reduce the car's velocity, and makes it permanently lose control, so you can't reduce the car's velocity to 0 anymore to safely leave the vehicle to save and reload.  Attempting to leave the vehicle in that state with an apparent velocity over 0 causes a crash.

[Nighthawk]

How do you guys survive early game with static spawning? I always go into a city, try to creep around, but the zombies see me, catch up (fast zombies and such with uberspeed) and whap whap whap pain pain pain, and then I'm dead.

I feel like the game should be changed so tons of zombies still spawn, but only regular ones, and over time, if these regulars survive, they mutate into special zombies. This way, the first city you visit will have tons of normal zombies that you can escape, and eventually clear out, but as you play, you have to leave cities for more supplies, and run into the zombies that have been sitting around and mutated into tougher forms.

But enough of my nonsense theories - how DO ya'll survive early game?

[Il Palazzo]

I walk around the wilderness looking for farms, mines and sewage treatment stations. There's bound to be a car somewhere...

Food and drink is provided by looting the zombieless outskirts of towns.

[SalmonGod]

I don't go near zombies until I have at least a nail board or wooden spear, which you can make within a few turns of spawning.  Then, with the aid of Quick which I always take at character creation, I aggro a few zombies at a time and kite them into windows and shrubs.  I've even taken down hulks this way, with zero combat skills on my character and no advanced equipment. 

At a window, you can take on a horde without ever being attacked, unless there's a hulk or brute.  Out in the open, you just lead a zombie onto a shrub, hit him twice (once if hulk or brute), then lead them to the next shrub.  It's cheap but effective.

[Nighthawk]

I feel like there should be an option to peek through the blinds/curtains of a window. Perhaps simply an extension of the peek command set to 'X'?
It would make life much easier.

[Orb]

Zombies now spawn loosely in the suburbs, but once you hit the market area, there will be swarms. AVOID SHOPS AT ALL COSTS. You'll probably want to be heavily equipped before you think about looting shops. The suburbs can handle most of your needs. I generally live in the suburbs, diving into a house, looting it, and hitting the next. I do that for days until I get a fairly good equipment set. Then I start to consider the inner city.

Right now it's day 11 and I still don't even have a gun.

Also, a suggestion for a different game mode. With the static spawns, there's now a chance to flesh out stealth game play, I think. Before zombies would just spawn randomly and it was impossible to hide from them.

For a rough idea, I would basically reduce the visual abilities of zombies significantly. Maybe like 16 tiles in every direction. This would be unaffected by night, making night more dangerous (as it should).

Hearing should be improved a bit, as to compensate for the lack of sight. If you fire a gun, you should expect a swarm.

Zombies would also be much, much more dangerous. They should be faster than you (without drugs) and do more damage than they do now, and have a higher accuracy. Specials would also be boosted accordingly. Hulks should be able to easily kill you single handedly at almost every stage of the game.

At the same time, zombies spawn rate should be decreased. I should be able to sneak into a market place, with maybe having to silently take out one or two zombies.

Finally, wildlife would be buffed. Wildlife should be more rare, but when you attract the attention of a cougar, you should be afraid if you don't have a firearm on you.

This is the rough idea, anyway. I'd mod it myself, but I don't know how to mod.

[Zyxl]

Given how there exist very cheap and effective strategies for dealing with zombies even with little/no equipment, how hard would it be to implement some of these in NPC AI?

Like an NPC that can shrub kite, uses windows, and generally just doesn't engage everything out in the open.

[Nighthawk]

-StealthSnip-

I like a lot of this. Zombies should not have amazing eyesight, but it makes sense for hearing and smell to be sharper. Not sure I agree with the buffing zombie accuracy part, since a reanimated corpse/half-dead virus'd human is not exactly that accurate in combat.

[Kaitol]

Why should zombies be dangerous. They're corpses with black goop making them move. I mean, they're probably not even smart enough to form a fist. The only reason normal ones should be dangerous is if you're stupid enough to get cornered/surrounded or you get bit a lot and don't take care of them. Mainly they stop you from leisurely looting everything in sight without you bathing in hordes of specials.

As for strategies. Smash and grab. You can make javelins to throw at anything fast enough to catch you. Just break into something near the edge, hopefully near a forest. Break in, loot it, leave. If nothing spots you, repeat. If something does run into the woods and if you can kill it/them do so. Then repeat step one. If not, just run till you lose them, then regroup.

[Greiger]

After discovering that my truck can launch very small vehicles in amusing ways without taking any damage itself I decided to play bicycle-ball.

Unfortunately a bike decided to do a 180 and hit my truck head on.

Spoiler: Then strange things happened (click to show/hide)

After traveling backwards (while sideways because I hit the e-brake in panic) for a few turns at high speed my truck eventually recovered from its skid, slowing rapidly to a much more sane 250 mph, where I regained control and stopped it.

I did not actually travel the distance implied by the speed.  If I would have to guess I think I was only flying backwards at about 300 for 2 turns.

Moral of this story?  Car collisions are weiiiiird.

[alway]

@Greiger: Congratulations, you win the CataRL land speed record.

As for general survival, yeah, windows are your friends. Pulling zombies to a house and then defending from windows is a great strategy, as it both clears the nearby areas safely and provides decent skills to start with. Plenty of zed corpses for butchery survival training as well as nice combat xp. Keep in mind that dead zeds also drop random assortments of items, including everything from backpacks and tools to the occasional gun or clip of ammo. Early game, this is easily the best way of getting equipment, augmented with what you find in the cleared areas you pulls the zeds from. It also results in periodic pseudo-safehouses on the map where you make your stands, each full of goodies looted from zed corpses. Food will be a bit tight initially; though squirrels, wolves, and the occasional spider should keep you on your feet. After a few days, squirrels will be throwing themselves en masse into broken windows, so you don't really need to worry after that.

Cooking and water purification should be done over an open fire, preferably in the street (indoor fires have a good chance to burn places to the ground, as I discovered with 2 houses and a gas station). Easiest fire-making material can be got by destroying furniture or counters for wood.

Also, collect warm clothes ASAP. You can get frostbite now, and nights can get really cold on occasion. Being chased by zombies is a very inconvenient time to lose feeling in one's legs due to frostbite. And while I died at that point, I would imagine losing one's legs to frostbite isn't any better.

[Sirian]

I've been giving this a try and I really like it, it has this sort of fallout vibe and I got used to the ASCII pretty fast. It's really challenging too, even though I'm using the "classic zombies" option (special zombies are too weird -and OP- for me). One thing I noticed is that you can use the points from negative perks to increase your base stats. I've died many times already, but my current run is going pretty well, basically I stopped going into shops and I'm just looting a couple zombie-less houses, and reading books to increase my skills.

That sewing book in particular was really a godsend, it allowed me to turn sheets from broken windows into backpacks, a trench-coat, cargo pants... and all clothes made with sewing are a perfect fit, meaning they have way less encumbrance penalties. Also I realized that, while you can stack backpacks, they really get in the way when you're fighting, so now I'm extra careful about that.

Right now I'm running "Fast healer", "Night vision", "Fast learner", "Disease resistant" and "Light step", with "Heavy sleeper", "Poor hearing", "Glass jaw", "Addictive personality", "Truth teller" and "Ugly". Stats are 12 intelligence and 10 for everything else.