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[Gamerboy4life]

Burned through seven characters in the last 45 minutes.  I'm going to go out on a limb and say it, Static Spawn renders the game simply unplayable.

Not really, people who say static spawn is impossible play too agressively. You can't clear the entire town in day. When my character gets injured, (Any limb gets below yellow) I take a day or two to rest and read.

It's been about 2 weeks in game and I've only cleared the north side, (Still afraid of goin' down south, here be spidars everywhar and all that jazz,) but I've amassed a large collection of ammunition and weapons from a local gunshop, tools from hardware store and zombie corpses, plus a tonne of food, and an infinite supply of meat because of the rabbits everywhere, and water because a river is only 5 tiles away from my base.

All I need is a welder, and I can fix the quad in the garage to go loot other towns.




Also, that feeling of success you get when you loot houses and almost all of the food is rotten. Yes, it's so sweet.

[Aqizzar]

Burned through seven characters in the last 45 minutes.  I'm going to go out on a limb and say it, Static Spawn renders the game simply unplayable.

Out on a limb with you, though perhaps not the same one.  Those rapid deaths may be related to your playstyle, for me Static Spawn seems highly playable...

Two of games the Evac Shelter was placed in the middle of a city.  One of them had a Zombie Brute waiting outside the door.  Another game had me right on the edge of a swamp surrounded by no less than eight Giant Mosquitos.  Last two games I was immediately swarmed by Zombie Dogs before getting within four blocks of an outlying neighborhood.

The point I'm making here is, the last nine characters I started had absolutely no chance of getting anywhere.  Everything that you need to do anything is inside a town, and not once have I managed to survive more than an hour anywhere near buildings.  I get that 'roguelike' means 'there is no guarantee of survival', but this has become 'there is guarantee of no survival'.

[Nienhaus]

Burned through seven characters in the last 45 minutes.  I'm going to go out on a limb and say it, Static Spawn renders the game simply unplayable.

I just started a new one and played for about 2 hours in a size 7 city and I'm still alive, Even fought a bear.

[DeKaFu]

I'm going to pitch in and say that I've found the game much easier (in a good way) since static spawn went in. It seems pretty easy to clear out a small section of town to live in and never be bothered by zombies again until you feel the need to go out and meet them. I guess it's a difference in playstyles, since I tend to set up long term bases and cautiously clear an expanding area around them until I own the entire town. Well, me and the spiders.

I was just thinking earlier today that I'll be a bit sad when NPCs become the default, because for some reason I really dig playing as the last person in the world. I like to think they just woke up some morning during/after the cataclysm and every other normal(ish) human in the world had simply vanished. Just as an inexplicable thing they don't want to think about too hard.

[Flying Dice]

Static spawn works much better with classic zombies. When all you really have to worry about are dogs and being surrounded, it's much safer early on. I tend to play static-classic for my long-haul characters and dynamic-nonclassic for the crazy burnout ones.

Also, try turning city size down if you have it way up. I've got it at around the halfway point and in the past ~20 characters I've yet to see a shelter spawn closer than 6-7 map tiles away from a city.

[Darkmere]

Static spawn with special zombies, spawned with little forest and a huge city. On spring, year 2, with no problems.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

@Aquizzar as an addition to Flying Dice's post
   Also if you want to have all the special zombies but are having trouble with the numbers you can turn that down as well in the options. I do advise you go and put both city and spawn rate both up to max and debugging it so you can see the whole map then go and look around. It is quite amazing to see and makes it feel more like a modern city with a modern population count all turned into zombies. Of course these setting would make it basically unplayable for a normal game so remember to set it back to normal and reset the world.

[Imp]

Two of games the Evac Shelter was placed in the middle of a city.  One of them had a Zombie Brute waiting outside the door.  Another game had me right on the edge of a swamp surrounded by no less than eight Giant Mosquitos.  Last two games I was immediately swarmed by Zombie Dogs before getting within four blocks of an outlying neighborhood.

The point I'm making here is, the last nine characters I started had absolutely no chance of getting anywhere.  Everything that you need to do anything is inside a town, and not once have I managed to survive more than an hour anywhere near buildings.  I get that 'roguelike' means 'there is no guarantee of survival', but this has become 'there is guarantee of no survival'.

That's amazing to me, you're having the most extreme bad luck.  I've played around 20 characters in the last month or so.  Until very recently, none of them lived much more than about 2-6 hours of play, so usually a new character each rl day.  I've never had a single start where my safehouse was INSIDE a town.  One, it was on the edge of town, with buildings on three sides.  I was able to run away and circle back from a very different direction, headed for a far more isolated house.

Now I have to ask, are you still playing that same single game world?  If so, I say junk it, maybe you just had one awesomely craptastic roll for that world.

The game's never spawned me in a swamp with mosquitoes nor has it spawned me with a Brute within line of sight of the safe house I begin within.  I can think of a strat to try and evade the brute, but those mosquitoes sound deadly.

The zombie dog spawn thingy - watch your surroundings.  The moment you see a single enemy, stop right where you are.  Ensure that it is following you, then lead it back to an area you know is safe (safe house if nothing else) and get into position to use something hard to get past (windowsill, bench, whatever) as a barrier to stand behind.

This should completely prevent your getting swarmed as a rule.  Good luck!

[Kaitol]

Give your characters more starting points if you're not already at 24 or whatevs the max is, take some starting skills in survival and start as a profession with some carrying capacity. You can build a character that pretty much never even has to look at a city most of their life.

And if you start in a swamp just cheat and teleport somewhere not terrible.

And I just started as a punk rock girl with a bunch of negative and positive traits and 18 str, and cleared a public works which had like 7 shockers, 2 spitters, 3 shriekers, a couple grabbers, and like ten normal zombies... with a pocket knife. And none of my HP's were below green. If there had been any brutes they would have died to my dinky knife too! (Hulks are another story but those are hulks) I then immediately walked to a town to the south which had a military surplus right near that public works and cleared out everything that approached me with the same pocket knife. Then I had  military rucksack and I was basically set.

Hell. None of my clothing was even damaged.

Take parkour and quick, and you can basically just trololololo through forests ducking around shrubs and beat the snot out of anything not a Hulk.

It's far from impossible. Some characters are just bad starts. Learn from past mistakes and play cautiously if your character isn't built for combat.

[Aqizzar]

It seems pretty easy to clear out a small section of town to live in and never be bothered by zombies again until you feel the need to go out and meet them. I guess it's a difference in playstyles...

I'd like to see a recording of somebody doing this.  Believe me, I do play cautiously.  I've been playing Cataclysm for a couple years now, and it's definitely taught me to never go on the offensive unless you're absolutely sure you can win.  But even when I enter outlying strips of houses, there's inevitably dozens and dozens of zombies around every corner.  If I come within five blocks of anything that isn't a house, suddenly there's Spitters and Shockers and Skeletons coming from every direction, all of them faster than a Dexterity 12 character, and the endless supply of dogs.

I don't see how there's any possible playstyle except for cheating in a good weapon that would let you get where anywhere near a town, which is where all the building blocks to do anything else with the game are.

After all these new replies, the message I'm getting is: cheat and/or change the game settings.  That does not sell me on the idea that the game is significantly play-tested at this point.

[Iceblaster]

Well there is the thing where you get Self Defense classes, Krav Maga, Unarmed as high as you can with default settings and test your luck.

[Gamerboy4life]

FUUUUUUUCK


I forgot to wear a dust mask when fighting a smoker, I lost the best character I've probably ever had in Cataclysm. Over 300 zombie kills with his bare hands, and that's just the normal zombies.

Didn't have enough time to get back to base and heal.

Fuck.

[Grendus]

It seems pretty easy to clear out a small section of town to live in and never be bothered by zombies again until you feel the need to go out and meet them. I guess it's a difference in playstyles...

I'd like to see a recording of somebody doing this.  Believe me, I do play cautiously.  I've been playing Cataclysm for a couple years now, and it's definitely taught me to never go on the offensive unless you're absolutely sure you can win.  But even when I enter outlying strips of houses, there's inevitably dozens and dozens of zombies around every corner.  If I come within five blocks of anything that isn't a house, suddenly there's Spitters and Shockers and Skeletons coming from every direction, all of them faster than a Dexterity 12 character, and the endless supply of dogs.

I don't see how there's any possible playstyle except for cheating in a good weapon that would let you get where anywhere near a town, which is where all the building blocks to do anything else with the game are.

After all these new replies, the message I'm getting is: cheat and/or change the game settings.  That does not sell me on the idea that the game is significantly play-tested at this point.

That's mostly what I've been doing right now. Default settings. Snag a rock, smash up the shelter for a nail board, spend a few hours practicing throwing so you can reliably peg a zombie from four spaces, then carefully edge around the town clearing out a the dozens of zombies waiting for your brains. Take advantage of the zombies poor pathing ability and lure them into bushes and saplings so you can batter them safely and just... take your time. Hard, but not impossible.

Edit: I should add, the cart-shield technique mentioned earlier is a lifesaver. It makes sense - the cart keeps the zombies three feet away while I jam the fire hardened tip of a sharpened 2x4 into them hoping to hit something vital, and zombies aren't smart enough to just go around. But it's very much a life saver.

[Farce]

Alphas man.

Or is this in beta?  I forget.


Anyway, I've not played very extensively since Static Spawn became a thing, but it's a serious pain.  I loved being able to dash through town, feeling like I was surrounded, but left enough gaps to dart past them zambies, smack the zambies capable of keeping up with me, and quickly toss houses for swag before bailing out a window to try to get walls between me and my persuers.  Static spawn makes this pretty suicidal, when the horde starts off HUGE and EVERYWHERE - especially with brute and hulks being static as well, since they're too strong to fight off as a new character and too fast to outrun unless you can lose them in a house.  It's aggravated HIGHLY by the fact that the most easily acquired counter to those - molotovs - are hard to make due to that whole "you need another bottle" thing.  If uhhh.  If someone could fix that, I would be -really- grateful.  Like, revise the crafting to accept more units of something, and also not require a separate container, or something?

Like seriously.  I'm fucking terrified of the city.  I heard it's a lot safer to raid at night... but even then, almost as soon as I step into the city's general vicinity, I always end up hearing zambies all around me, who seem to home in on me like they're laser guided.  Scent or not, it's like, fuck.  It just feels like the city - where all the cool shit is - is practically inaccessible until you're like mid-level, and can manage to stand your ground against the horde.  All if which is a crapshoot, reliant on that you don't get noticed by a Brute or Hulk, which is ALSO reliant on getting proper gear to handle them - maybe AP rounds in an SMG, maybe a shotgun, maybe a molotov (again, hard to make), maybe enough meth to outrun them.

I've played about one game or so with a relatively recent build - streets filled with busted cars, and stuff, but IIRC before the bush-car-death update and shopping carts - and survived with relative ease as a fringer that tried to search the city during the night, but it was difficult to manage to get anything, and felt like I was making very little progress.  The 'no progress' feeling was amplified by the fact that I really didn't have any openings to stop and butcher bodies.  Cremating them was also pretty finicky, as I recall..


On a rather digressive note, turrets have infinite ammo, don't they?  So you could like, mount one on a shopping cart, and just cart it through town as a mobile bubble of bullet-induced safety?  Could I build like, craptons of them, and just scatter them around town, to deal with clearing the streets.


Also, a question, and a suggestion/question:
Once Z-levels are a thing, what's going to be done with trees?  Will they be made all multi-story, and will figuring out how they fall when you chop them down become things, and stuff?

What happens when a zambie revives?  Does it just pop back up at full health?  Would it be a good idea to have them raise as 'battered' [whatever kinda zambie they are], which would denote that they've been put down before, and have them spawn at varying levels of injury and stuff.  Maybe have several different levels of 'battered' prefixes, until they just disintegrate when you slay them for the last time?

[Aseaheru]

I think they get up untill they are pulped or butchered.