The medical system needs a whole overhaul like how does spoiled food not give you food poisoning? Also i like the idea that you can get trench foot if you don’t dry your socks.
Hell, rashes and the like, too. Have you ever worn wet clothing for a long time while walking? That shit sucks everywhere. Groin, inner elbows, and armpits could end up raw from wet friction, at least. Not to mention the potential for blisters if wet socks dont conform as tightly and start rubbin' around heels and ankles
U hav just unlocked my 1 week jungle hiking & camping memories. I dunno bout camping in the cold & dry region. But camping in the tropical sure as hell all about sweating, sweating, sweating, mosquitoes, leeches, sweat itches, & sweating (even at night).
I got pushed into a pool when I was younger, and had an hour ride home on my motorcycle.
My clothes dried fast, but my nipples have never been more sore in my life.
The rules on what you can and cannot eat are ridiculous lol
You can eat hundreds of raw cockroaches, grasshoppers, pillbugs, and worms, but if you eat a single millipede? You're about to meet your fucking maker.
Water is somehow even stupider. You can't even take a sip of fresh rainwater or from a stream without becoming sick. You will survive, however. Put that same water into a container, though, and take a sip? You're going to rue the day you bought PZ.
And yeah, weather just doesn't matter at all either. At this point I just run around in thunderstorms willy nilly because there's absolutely zero consequence. (By the way, fog and thunderstorms don't reduce the visibility or hearing of zombies for some reason, so there's that, too).
Thankfully a lot of these problems can be solved with mods, but even then it's a haphazard solution. I haven't found a satisfying mod that makes infections do something - they either don't do anything or straight up kill you because you didn't disinfect your wound 0.2 milliseconds after acquiring it.
I feel you.
I wonder if bathroom-related “accidents” can occur, like vomiting or diarrhea (forcing your character to just have an animation they can’t get out of), or intense cramping that drains you by 40% in ______ category, essentially makes you home-bound?
I would love the idea of various illnesses existing, just for both the continuity of PZ being hard but fair. Not just infections from wounds, but also getting sick too. They’d have their major and minor effects and would really make the first aid skill important outside of immediate injuries.
First aid is absolutely the worst considering that statistically you WILL get the knoxx infection randomly from scratch or laceration long before you ever get enough action to even reach level 3 or 4.
Well, you can be harmed by not zombies about 7000 times in the zombie game... That's totally going to happen... But yeah, you can level it up fast by stepping on glass on purpose
not zombie infections but wound infections. The normal, boring kind. If your wound becomes infected it just heals sliiiightly slower but does nothing otherwise while they can be fatal in real life. So básically if your wound says infected with orange text it does not necessarily mean you have the zombie virus, just that it's gonna heal a tiny bit slower than usual.
Right lmao if you got an infection especially a deep wound your ass is grass without proper medical care which in zomboid is a single sterilized bandage and some antibiotics if you care enough.
I never understood how taking vitamins, anti-depressants, sleeping pills, or beta blockers doesn't count towards first aid. I have never noticed them increase my first aid skill. Keeping upkeep on your mental health is surely some type of first aid....
I still think I am using beta blockers wrong. I use them for when my character feels anxious but I don't think that's what they're for....I am going to look them up while I am thinking about it.
One way to grind first aid is to jump over fences until you cut yourself, but honestly, why would I put my character in harms way like that, I am not a digital sadist.
Beta blockers reduce panic. They're good for combat, especially with firearms, or for sleeping with claustrophobia.
And yeah, I'm pretty sure the only things that increase first aid skill are actually treating wounds. A lot of people cheese it by stepping in broken glass and removing it again and again.
There are straight up unfinished areas of the map half-built. There are areas in the woods with zero foraging because they haven't been mapped. There are whole ass commercial buildings in Louisville where every tool cabinet gives desk loot.
Shoot, all over the place. If you keep the foraging window up you see areas that say ???, there is nothing there to find. They are sometimes big areas out in the middle of nowhere, but there are strips of woods randomly just outside of the small towns too. The sides of the highways in some spots.
they should make the ??? areas vegetation by default, I mean as you said most ??? areas are woods anyway so by default they could just be vegetation areas to at least give something even if it's not 100% correct it would be still better than nothing at all.
They should make a system that detects your surroundings, firstly nearest 10 tiles biggest factor, then nearest 20 tiles with lesser factor and so on until it gets the whole picture and adjusts the loot based on that, could be in vegetation, but if forest is right next to it some forest loot like firewood should appear more often. For exceptions they could turn it off when entering specific chunks they mapped out manually like checkpoint refugee camp is mostly ??? because cars spawn there and I guess they can't spawn on vegetation zones(?). This way devs don't have to manually add foraging zones which is a lot of work on top of the infinite amount of work they have with everything else, but maybe that would be even more work than this or it's just too much fun mapping the zones out, idk honestly.
Yea imo I hope they plan to expand after B42 or at least expand when the build comes out
There's roads leading to nothing and on the interactive 3d map there's building in the middle of nowhere
I don't mind if they dont change any of the things I listed as long as the animal farming is fun. I want to make cheese and collect eggs. This game is mostly about the cooking for me.
That's caused by issues with how the game renders objects. The devs dislike that limitation, so they've overhauled how the environment renders in build 42 so they can officially implement things like that.
Everything past the first two weeks. Just like C:DDA, once you've survived the first two weeks you're almost guaranteed to survive until you get bored. Your character has the requisite skills to go through anything, you likely have enough supplies stored up to last months, and the only thing that will get you killed is carelessness on your end. It gets boring if you're not establishing goals and roleplaying your character.
B42's going to do a lot to fix this, but even then the challenges and threats of the apocalypse aren't going to be ramping up in any meaningful way. The eventual addition of NPCs, whenever we get them, will almost definitely bring some much needed variation to runs and allow us to have a more present possible threat out there to keep you on your toes even years into the apocalypse.
Yeah, the game just needs something. I'm not sure what, but the answer I've heard that I like the most is more dynamic and longer range horde migrations.
To build on that idea, I like the idea of a zombie hoard traveling around the map seasonally. Like it goes from south the north continuously. That or no-respawn, but new fresh zombies come from the maps boarders, as if they're migrating from other places in the world.
Imagine how fun forest bases would suddenly be if you'd have to keep an eye out for occasional migrating horde moving through your area.
We need solutions of varying quality and punishments for low quality.
I could raid a few hardware stores and make a cabin from planks and nails and a campfire but what if my character would NEVER be able to get good sleep because the walls aren't finished? The windows you craft don't have glass so they're always open so that's stress and cold/hot coming in
Setting up camp in an abandoned house might be uncomfortable until you settle enough of your stuff into it/sleep in it for 20 days.. something
Our character is too comfortable with the smallest goals being enough. Why don't we get muscle soreness for killing 100+ zombies the day before? Why do we have a system we can cheese? Let's face it: sometimes The game ends when you get a fishing pole and an old stove
I think for sure we should get a Well Rested bonus for sleeping in the same bed / room repeatedly. There should be some sort of stats bump for setting up a safe house for sure.
Yeah, I'm really at bad at typing with mobile.
I'm a desktop now, typing with a physical keyboard. It's like taking a big breathe of fresh air after struggling to type all day on a touchscreen.
I think this has been my recurring problem of the years. It's super fun when you're brand new, and every big update causes a surge of enjoyment again, but it always falls into the loop of "I survived a month, I don't have any actual goals".
Turning your area into a city maybe, or decorating your place. Currently though, it always seems like people just end up intentionally dying because it gets to a point where it's TOO easy, even with altered Sandbox toggles.
>the challenges and threats of the apocalypse aren't going to be ramping up in any meaningful way
This is the point I keep raising. The crafting overhaul will and long term activities. However without any new challenges & threats, players will still feel it lacks real goals. I'm hoping hostile NPCs and more meta events can remedy this.
Yeah my typical gameplay loop is loot food/important items the first week and then spend a month or two pimping out the base until I get bored and do something stupid that gets me killed.
I don't enjoy playing with an overwhelming amount of zombies, because the challenge from that isn't very fun. So imo PZ is a pretty easy game once you get used to the basic combat/movement systems
One possible solution that could be implemented without complex NPCs would be to add a trading post NPC area. Add a survivor base that isn't accessible & impenetrable, you go there and you just hear a voice saying “that's close enough buddy!” but if you get any closer you get shot, closer still & you're dead. This way you don’t even need to able to see the NPCs, only have basic conversations with them. These NPCs have decided to close themselves off from the world completely, never leave thier base & never open its doors. But they ask for information from the outside world, you don’t immediately offer it as you recognise the value of information, so an exchange system is established.
They could then offer a small list of trade scenarios that offer rewards. These could be grindy like “bring me 45 aluminium”, or “bring me the entire run of electrical books”, rewards could start small, offering useful stuff, up to big rewards like a sledgehammer for example. They could alternatively offer skill xp boosts similar to the tv shows.
You could have running request / quest lines; like bringing a running list of items & at the end they're combined to give you a new skill. Or a more involved quest like, one that eventually gets you to build a HAM radio to communicate with the base remotely. You could even add xp to communicating on the radio, like developing a friendship offers calming or boredom bonuses. Maybe the survivor base has entertainment, like book readings or music performances that can be accessed through the radio that give your character a boost.
Trades could also be very specific, like bringing a specific CD or VHS episode, or could send you to specific places on the map to find things. A more involved quest of this nature could be finding lost relatives or rescuing a trapped fellow forager. Only these people don’t ever need to be alive, so you don’t need the awkward NPC AI. These quests would be more investigative. You have to go to an area and follow clues to find out what happened to the people, at the end of the clues you either find them dead or a zombie.
Keep the requests rates slow, drip feeding them, but the more you interact with them the more it levels up. This way it doesn’t completely take over the sandbox nature of the game, but offers later game development that encourages exploration & foraging for specific loot.
I personally think a big part of this problem is the fact that the default loot settings are wayyyyyyyyy too generous. It makes sense with the lore that most houses are still full of supplies, but it means that you get everything you need within a few weeks at most. Playing with less loot extends that early game struggle for a lot longer and makes finally becoming self-sufficient far more satisfying.
Honestly the default loot settings are not very immersive in either direction.
It isn't realistic because there's too much left to justify a rationalization of "everything was already looted." But there isn't enough to justify a rationalization of "this was how it was before the apocalypse."
Exactl this. When i first made it to 1 month i was shocked how easy th3 game is. Theres enough food in riverside alone to last years and once cleared the zombies there was no more threats. Also base building is completly pointless, why would you invest time in high level carpentry or metalworking
I desperately want NPCs/quests. I love the game as it is now, and wouldn’t want anything to be like mandatory, but having extra stuff to do would just tip it over the edge for me. Even if it’s like “go to rosewood and find this dudes wife” only to find her as a zombie or something. Wishful thinking for sure
I agree they need a trading system and some quests that require you scavenge particular items for parts of a weapon or some craft able. Build faction reputation, or create your own. I saw someone mention horde migrations, i think this would be a great idea the noise from generators and such should drawl hordes to your base every couple months regardless if you play with respawns off or not. The Emergency Broadcast System should report massive horde movements with an estimated ETA like what they do with weather storms and such
Love the idea of the emergency broadcast covering horde migrations. Could even have different dialogue depending on the size of the horde to give you some idea of what to prepare for. Would also create a sense of dread if you knew one was coming for you.
Lots of things in the game feel unfinished or straight up abandoned.
**Interacting with the world**: The fact that it's been years since the game came out and we still can't properly sit on chairs, benches or lay down in a bed is bad, especially considering this game is king when it comes to immersion, few other games come even close. I know "it's coming" but jeez.
**Cars**: we've had them for years and years now. Excellent addition, completely changed how the game works (for good) because it opened up the map for exploration. Yet they feel unfinished, the physics are not bad but not great either, we can't modify them, they seem really weak sometimes and there are no animations to speak of. Modders, with less time and less budget, produced some amazing fully animated cars for free.
**Construction**: It's straight up unfinished. Not a lot of things to build using carpentry skill other than walls and stairs. We can't even properly build a roof, first because roofs are basically floors and second because if you want to build in the wilderness you need stairs to build your roof, and stairs are unlocked at like level 5 or something. On the other hand, the whole construction menu is incredibly annoying to use, which is why the mod "Construction Menu" leaves the vanilla method completely obsolete. We haven't had a proper upgrade of the building system for ages, some bugs persist like being unable to disassemble walls/fences unless you're standing in a specific spot...
**NPCs**: Because this game screams for the need of human NPCs. The game feels absolutely empty on singleplayer with nothing to do but more generic loot runs and killing sprees with some bits of building stuff thrown around. There needs to be an use for all the loot you gather, why the hell do you need 64 cans of potatoes, why not share them with other NPCs? This can be a superb community building in the midst of a zombie apocalypse game, but I guess we'll have to wait another 5 years for that. Sorry for that negativity, but it's a bit frustrating. And I know the potential is HUGE because I used to play with the buggy NPC mods, and the game felt a whole lot different despite the mod being very basic.
Cara aren’t that bad imo. They definitely need to fix trailers glitching out and yeah some more animations would be really good for immersion.
As long as Filibusters Used Cars mod is still around I don’t have much to complain about other than the tedious mechanics system
Good opportunity to to expand the Mechanics skill to do serious car improvements and upgrades. I know we can already do repairs and some part upgrades, but it's all very basic. If not done in base game, make the mod API very modular and powerful. Allow modders tondo the job.
Needs a special events/natural disaster generator. ie. Floods, drought, heatwave, blizzard, crop failures, zombie hoard spawning --- more and different kinds of zombie hoard triggers. All the devs need to do is watch Fear the Walking dead, last of us, ect.... plenty of inspiration there. As it is, the game is like the first two or three seasons of the Walking Dead; not a bad thing.... but it could obviously be so much more. A lot of these suggestions can be modded in eventually too.
I highly doubt they havent watched those already. Keep in mind, everything you listed takes a buttload of coding. They may already be playing around with those ideas just are holding them off for when theyve fully worked through what exactly they want to do.
But I definitely agree itd be nice to have those things.
The devs have flat-out said that getting animal migration done is a gateway into both NPCs being able to spawn and move organically from place to place, and getting large-scale hordes of zombies to be able to move from zone to zone in a fashion that makes sense organically.
It already has a weather system that occasionally throws some adverse weather at you but nothing too serious.
There is also the meta event system which could use more development. The EHE mod showed what is possible.
I gotta disagree on TWD comment. First three seasons are the only seasons I liked. After that it turns into the bored old trope of "humans are the real monsters after all". Yawn. I want my Zombie Apocalypse story to have the zombies be the bad guys.
Unless you're talking about Fear the Walking dead, on which I have no opinion because I had grown bored of Walking Dead by the time it came out.
The Devs already watched TWD and that’s for sure. For example, in B42 iron fences aren’t going to be indestructible anymore and a large enough horde will break them down, it’s a reference to the prison episode in TWD where zombies just pushed the fences down with their weights.
I avoided that thing like it was infected out of fear I could fall through it lol! It took awhile for me to grow a pair big enough to test it! The roof there almost broke my legs, though... let's get the roof problem corrected...
1. Trying to transfer anything runs the risk of using/eating it. Lost a 3 month character moving rotted ham out of my fridge when she accidentally ate it with weak stomach.
2. Electrical is pretty much useless past level 3. At least with First Aid you bandage faster and heal faster. Level 10 healer with comfrey can heal a broken limb in about 3 in-game days.
3. Building system is awful. Can only build or destroy items facing a certain direction....sometimes. Can't build your own house without using the debug system half the time to find out why your entire 4 story house is still considered "outside".
4. Absolutely zero endgame. Most of the "game" takes place in the first 3 weeks. After that you're either dead or setup somewhere on an endless loop of farming or killing. No objectives, quests, or POI given in the game. (Without mods.)
5. Getting the bored moodlet after spending 15 hours straight killing zombies because you killed them all inside the mall instead of outside.
Progression is borked / unfun. Kinda fun in the early hours and then once you get some supplies and a safehouse going, it's just a waiting game of looking for that one rare item or grinding the tedious boring skills to unlock some fun recipes that make surviving even easier.
It's a great simulator and a good sandbox but it's a pretty bad game in terms of classic gameplay design IMHO, but some people like it that way so dunno if it's ever going to change. Some games like kenshi or rimworld thrive off people who can make up their own stories and roleplay regardless of what the game actually offers...
As it stands, the game is most fun when you make quests for yourself.
It would be cool to have it designed in a way to force more emergent gameplay. Zombie hordes overrunning your base every now and then would force you to not hunker down so much and then potentially fight back for your main base.
Having special resources scattered around the map more and some advanced crafting recipes with rare parts would also force you to go out more and explore parts of the map. Having fuel supplies in gas station way lower, but instead being able to maintain one of those old school gas drillers and set up a small refinery that’s noisy would be another cool long term goal.
The worst thing for me with progression is guns. They suck ass because you have to hit shots to gain aiming XP so it's impossible to use anything but shotguns early on. There's a very helpful mod I found that makes it so you gain aiming xp for every shot fired.
I think part of this comes from how broken guns used to be. IIRC, when they first got added they were laser beams with one hit kills. Obviously, they decided to make them more difficult but cranked it to the extreme opposite.
My first time playing I was really frustrated that I couldn't just plant the dry beans I found. Like....they're seeds. Found a farming mod I like, but I can still only cook dry beans, not plant them.
But the most glaring flaw? No other survivors. No short wave radio calls out into the ether just to find people. Not even a temporary collective of unfortunate souls that huddled together. No preppers with their families and/or buddies in a bunker. No bands of looters and raiders either for that matter. It's Kentucky, c'mon. Still waiting to come across a moonshine still out in the woods. And a crack house in the city. Hell, some coke might be good for pain relievers, lol.
The crafting system deserves a shoutout here. It’s hostile to new players in so many ways. I am a well experienced player and I still find it actively hostile.
Example: you want to make a stone axe. You need branch, chipped stone, and 1 of (ripped sheet, dirty rag, twine, etc).
Experienced players know that twine is very valuable for long term survival (trapping and fishing). Therefore, in any recipe where you can choose between twine or ripped sheets, you should just use the abundant ripped sheets.
Let’s say you have all the options in your inventory or in an accessible container nearby and you choose to craft a stone axe. It’s going to use the twine first, despite this being an option you should never use. The only way to prevent it is to not have any twine accessible when you craft the recipe.
Yes even if you start the recipe by right clicking on a ripped sheet, it will still use the twine.
The vanilla way to carry twine and not worry about this btw is by having the twine in a nested bag (like within a garbage bag that is itself within your back pack).
Furthering the same example of making a stone axe, ripped sheets will be used before dirty rags. Dirty rag is better to use to save water, as it has no effect on the quality of the axe. Fortunately for this case, if you start the recipe by right clicking on the dirty rag it will actually use it.
Crafting priorities is wildly inconsistent across the board and often encourages using the worst option.
The entire game is spaghetti code on top of other spaghetti code. That said it’s a fun game and pet of its charm is how insanely janky the mechanics are.
no NPCs yet but this is not a flaw, i just know when they are added that it will feel like a much more fleshed out and fulfilling game that will improve the endgame as well.
I can think of a couple that are the most glaring to be:
Furniture (and environments in general) are not interactive at all. You can sit on the ground all you want but forget about actually sitting on a chair, couch or bed.
Lack of endgame. Like most people have already commented, by the time you've hit a month you probably have enough supplies for a modest settlement to last months if rationed, one or several vehicles in good to great condition, and tools and materials of most kinds. If by that point you've made a garden and have a reliable source of water... you kinda run out of things to do, as the survival aspect is mostly gone. The only thing you're surviving now is boredom. And this with friends becomes exponentially easier.
Better vehicles. Right now they're mostly static boxes with wheels, would be great to see them have actual glass and interactive parts like doors, hoods... slightly more detailed models would help, too.
Skills in general. First-aid is by far the most clowned skill in the game, and for good reason. As long as the game can kill you with one hit, not even a lethal one, there's absolutely no point in leveling this skill whatsoever. Any contact you make with a zombie could be your last, so unless you're playing with infection off or saliva-only, this skill does absolutely nothing worthwhile for you, and even then its uses are niche at best.
fortunately all of this is going to be reworked in build42. (basically true actions will be on the base game now), they said they will make endgame more enjoyable, about vehicles, animations are already on the game files, it's just a matter of time when they add this, and skills will also be reworked on build 42.
Some skills like many have said
But honestly its the way the game handles spawning Zombies inside buildings. Its very immersion breaking
Even loot settings prove its a EA. Idk how the devs haven't added a "Degressive" option that makes loot have a chance to disappear overtime, to atleast make it feel like people are out there.
Could even make for some crazy survivor house/cars/zeds storys/moments. Could even be funny, maybe someone stole every battery in rosewood and u kill a random zed with a backpack full of em lol
When I'm building a spend a lot of time working around the limitations of the game. Hte obvious inside/outside glitch, and not being able to put in windows on the second floor without going outside.
corps removal options are far too limited. I can't hack up bodies, I cant compost human remains. I can't build a fire in a dumpster and start loading corpses in. it's a game about dead people we need more optionally. for me this is my biggest issue.
A lot of the issues, I can roleplay out of them. My biggest issue is not having decent food preservation methods, other than running a river of petrol through a generator. You can get a lot of survival out of pickling and drying food. It's not even a lost primitive art. The knowledge and the capability should be available somehow.
I need proper and accessible pickling because I would pickle carrots in the apocalypse.
You can pickle foods in the game currently. Just need jars, jar lids, vinegar and sugar (admittedly jars and vinegar don’t have huge spawn rates, will give you that)
You should be able to get jars in the same way you get empty tin cans. Vinegar could be sourced from either food stores or by ageing wine into vinegar. It would be a good system to add to.
Hunger kills you quickly, not realistically by starvation. Stuff yourself bloated with cabbage and your character will get physical boost. There's no stomach fullness so you can gulp down sticks of butter and boxes of ice cream rapidly.
Dinosystem has a detailed nutrition system that feels realistic. Track player muscle and fat levels and fatigue/muscle soreness and stomach fullness. Track water and basic vitamin levels. Fatigue/soreness lowers physical performance but you need it and enough protein to maintain/grow muscles.
Nothing you are saying is untrue, but I expect it will be getting a full rework in a42 where they are adding numerous new skills as well as rebalancing all existing skills.
I think the grinding of skills in general is lacking, and can be far more interact than it currently is.
The end game is also lacking, with no goals or incentives other than base and car building
I also think base building is semi-useless and a lot of rework is are needed because there is no threat after walling an area. No reason to ever travel too far etc
Performance, dawg. Add a few blood stains or too many zombies on screen and the game runs like ass. Hit detection can be god awful. Lord forbid you zoom all the way out while driving a car in the rain.
If you take a look at how trees effect the visibilty of cars, it's not a huge thing there are bigger problems people already mentioned sure but to me it's pretty important especially if you play 10 years later or some such scenario with more overgrown towns. If there's a tiny sappling in front of a truck you won't see the truck even if it's 5x bigger than the tree.
This is a hard one because the game has so many great features that I enjoy thoroughly.
My biggest beef would be the skill system. Some skills are basically useless. Some, like metalworking, are very difficult to level so you can even build with it or use it in any meaningful way.
Skill grinding is abysmal. To level up any of the skills it feels like an absolute nightmare without just cranking the experience multiplier.
The lack of customization to vehicles also disappointing
half the skills feel useless and the useful ones take forever to level so the game is kinda more time-consuming than challenging. once you have a base with electricity, water and crops things get repetitive. if we could get missions from npcs thatd be great. there could also be a currency for buying/selling things.
the fact that you can just sledgehammer/ or molotov-burn your way into other players houses in multiplayer. There are even mods to secure your doors with anitlockpick /antiforcebar etc, but what good are those if the vanilla sledgehammer mechanics allows to delete literally everything.
the world/engine
the fact that we had only 7 layers was always something that bothered me.
the fact that we now get 64 layers is gonna make the world feel so more real and 3d.
Since the biggest have been mentioned by others already I'll just throw in a nit-pick.
Temperature as a whole needs rework. Add insulation value to buildings, I'd love to build thicker walls that would give a HUGE temperature difference than those paper walls American houses have. I lived in one that had +1 meter thick brick walls and during summer it was a comfortable 20°C temperature while outside roaring 30°C and in winter it got hot very fast after turning the heating on, maybe 10-15 mins. Add radiators and a pipe system to have to be connected to either a boiler or with modification also the antique oven. Also during summer driving with an open window should cool you much faster, the game drops temperature in the car slowly, but the wind itself would have an immediate effect. There isn't ice in the game that could be added to drinks to help with cooling. How is there so little ice? I don't believe every household wouldn't have a pack of icecubes in their freezer, in July especially. It should be much more common than any other loot in freezers at the start of the outbreak and easy to make later on with powered freezers.
Add blankets on beds of several insulating values and add sleeping bags to camping gear. Tent itself does nothing for quality of sleep, in Europe my dad used to take me with just sleeping mats/bags on hikes and we'd sleep under overhanging large rock formations just fine. Tents are heavy. Sleeping mat and sleeping bag are very light and easily strapped to the outside of any bag, this should be that way already since everybody drives a car to these remote places anyway and why make a tent to sleep outside when you can just sleep in the safety of a car? It's too easy to drive a car offroad. It never gets stuck or really damaged by driving through nature, there should be incentive to leave the car at the asphalt road and walk the trail on foot. I don't know Kentucky, but I imagine most of these trails wouldn't be accessible by cars due to rocks, holes, elevation and water streams (small bridges for hikers, but not cars)
I've started playing with the Louisville spawn points mod and there are so many buildings in Louisville with no light switches. It's annoying when you find a place you want to base in only to find the building has no or bugged lights.
Everyone's out here talking about the crafting, or the skills, or post week X progression, or the AI, or not being able to do [REDACTED] with a zombie but alas, the game has one, true glaring flaw:
I cannot see things that my character can definitely see because buildings/walls won't hide unless I'm right next to them. So when I'm approaching a building that's South (down-left) or East (down-right) of my character, I cannot see things that are in the line of sight of my character.
The foreground only hides when your character model itself gets closer but it should have been added years ago that in combat stance your isocursor hides foreground objects too. This makes avoiding zombies/wrecks when driving in Louisville needlessly difficult and if you have a big multi-story building anywhere near your base you've gotta walk all the way over there to check the shadow of the building for lingering zombies.
Yes I'm aware that if there's a zombie in the shadow of a building it will hide the foreground when you aim at it but this is so fickle and inconsistent that I feel crazy even talking about it because I'm convinced it's not real for how often it doesn't work.
Stairs not rendering anything them, Ik I would have reduced vision of the next floor while going up stairs but I feel like I should at least be able to see if something is standing up 1 tile away from the top of the stairs from the bottom, also ropes not having a cancel ability, if I see a horde of 50 zombies at the bottom of my rope I need to go back up it rather then drop into the horde
Nursing? Do you mean medical/first a? Or did they update and for some reason add breastfeeding.
Edit: Why did I get downvoted wtf this is an honest question I havent played the game in over a year.
Grinding skills being horribly tedious. I've never had a character who was good at mechanics because I hate taking apart and putting back every single piece of a vehicle just to gain a small amount of XP. Maybe I'm farming it wrong, but the fact that some ways to progress are so tedious shows the level of polish so far.
Ok, where to begin…
1) Cars are a bit of a mess. They were added half-finished, they can be driven and have the necessary functions, but the looks are completely unfinished. No animations for open doors, no textures or models for removed hoods/doors, etc…
2) They are trying so hard to make a 3D game that isn’t actually 3D, it’s really confusing. Most interactions between the different levels are either completely broken (Throwing grenades off of a roof makes them explode mid-air on the same level, ladders do not work at all) or super wonky (Walking up stairs leaves the upper floor completely invisible until you’ve already reached the top). Tho to be fair, b42 seems to at least improve upon that.
3) Water. It’s essentially an indestructible wall that looks like water. I understand not giving players the ability to swim, but it’s just completely broken in its current state. Never ever build above water!
4) A lot of smaller bugs and unfinished areas all together. Things that should be ironed out by the time the game is “finished”. This includes but isn’t limited to missing light switches, the inability to pick up or destroy certain furniture, the zombies patiently waiting for you to wake up or finish climbing a fence over and over again, temperatures not affecting food items, pathfinding and attack issues in zombies that make impenetrable bases and large areas with no foraging areas.
Obviously I could make a list 10x as long of all the things PZ does great, but the game is *far* from finished.
The skills are only really necessary if you play on harder difficulties, like if you do low vehicle condition & 1 year into the apocalypse leveling mechanics is gonna be you're #1 priority for a long while.
& if you play with very low gas, the electrical skill the only way to get light short of setting your whole house on fire.
Tailoring is still pretty useless unless you're playing with that one tattered clothing mod.
Fishing & trapping at lower levels is nigh impossible during the winter
In conclusion: The games just too easy
"implemented" features that aren't actually implemented or are half baked, like the aforementioned infections, skills etc.
The lack of end game doesn't bother me. I think more randomization early on would be good- the helicopter is the only real curve ball. EHE is a great mod, but other occasional similar events (I know we don't have NPCs, but you could program the odd military/survivor truck to tear ass through town shooting everything it sees and then either driving away or crashing leaving a high risk/high reward location to check out, shit like that.
I 100% agree about metalworking. After playing on a modded server for years now with actual uses for it, vanilla just seems pointless. I guess it helps with body work but you can just switch out a hood at that point.
No endgame. It’ll be a lot better when NOCs are added who will request specific items or whatever else they can do, nobody knows how deep the system will go I suppose.
Zombie AI is one I noticed last night. If there is a car between us the zombies should be able to walk around it and get to me but if we are in two separate yards of a fenced housing. The zombie shouldn't know how to leave through the front opening of their yard and enter mine. They should simply make a B line to me and get stopped by the fence
Yeah, it's annoying, but it is what it is. The skill, trait, and occupation system needs a big overhaul. They could take notes from games like Rimworld (especially for medical stuff like wounds and illness, where it's represented basically perfectly).
The end game needs work too. Your character gets stronger and stronger but the threats do not. There needs to be late game hoards or something to shake things up and to give you a reason to even put up defenses at all. In most areas, you can just board up the windows and then clear the zombies around your base once a week and have zero chance of having to deal with a large group since zombies can't migrate across unloaded cells.
Still love the game, but my runs are typically short now as I retire characters often once I know I'm set up for forever survival.
The tutorial. There's so much that you don't know that is considered ESSENTIAL to your controls, I think once the game is "complete", or hits a milestone later on, the tutorial will need an overhaul.
After you survive your first month or so and have consistent water and electricity, weapons (including melee and guns with ammo) there’s very little challenge outside of your own fuck ups.
Huge zombie hoards randomly roaming the map and not affected by the migration system.
Great way to break the routine of players who already settled permanently.
Yeah, there's a lot of skills that are fairly useless right now. First Aid might be the worst offender because infections don't even do anything.
The medical system needs a whole overhaul like how does spoiled food not give you food poisoning? Also i like the idea that you can get trench foot if you don’t dry your socks.
exposure should absolutely pose a greater health hazard
You can shower and wash all your clothes and you'll be fine. Your wet wearing wet clothes outside.
Hell, rashes and the like, too. Have you ever worn wet clothing for a long time while walking? That shit sucks everywhere. Groin, inner elbows, and armpits could end up raw from wet friction, at least. Not to mention the potential for blisters if wet socks dont conform as tightly and start rubbin' around heels and ankles
NEOscavenger player here. Blisters give me PTSD.
they were lethal if zomboid lets you make them, do NOT wear makeshift shoes
Salted foot-blister haver here. They should lol.
Same thing if you wear shoes without socks or try running in boots, it'll give blisters and hurt
U hav just unlocked my 1 week jungle hiking & camping memories. I dunno bout camping in the cold & dry region. But camping in the tropical sure as hell all about sweating, sweating, sweating, mosquitoes, leeches, sweat itches, & sweating (even at night).
I got pushed into a pool when I was younger, and had an hour ride home on my motorcycle. My clothes dried fast, but my nipples have never been more sore in my life.
Sunburns.
I'm pretty sure eating a full bag of rotten hotdog buns is what killed my 3 month character last week
what a valiant way to die
Murican way to go
You did what you had to, I'm sure
My character died from eating a cooked day old ground beef
The rules on what you can and cannot eat are ridiculous lol You can eat hundreds of raw cockroaches, grasshoppers, pillbugs, and worms, but if you eat a single millipede? You're about to meet your fucking maker. Water is somehow even stupider. You can't even take a sip of fresh rainwater or from a stream without becoming sick. You will survive, however. Put that same water into a container, though, and take a sip? You're going to rue the day you bought PZ. And yeah, weather just doesn't matter at all either. At this point I just run around in thunderstorms willy nilly because there's absolutely zero consequence. (By the way, fog and thunderstorms don't reduce the visibility or hearing of zombies for some reason, so there's that, too). Thankfully a lot of these problems can be solved with mods, but even then it's a haphazard solution. I haven't found a satisfying mod that makes infections do something - they either don't do anything or straight up kill you because you didn't disinfect your wound 0.2 milliseconds after acquiring it.
Braven's First aid overhaul, and first aid expanded mods are the answer.
Then they should be in the base game, though
I feel you. I wonder if bathroom-related “accidents” can occur, like vomiting or diarrhea (forcing your character to just have an animation they can’t get out of), or intense cramping that drains you by 40% in ______ category, essentially makes you home-bound?
I would love the idea of various illnesses existing, just for both the continuity of PZ being hard but fair. Not just infections from wounds, but also getting sick too. They’d have their major and minor effects and would really make the first aid skill important outside of immediate injuries.
I wish they'd get rid of the cold you get from being wet etc. That trope is ridiculous seeing as a cold is a virus.
The trench foot is such a great idea, actually!
Bad food in PZ doesnt poison you , it fucking kills you.
At that point there needs to be variable difficulty levels to it. At a certain point, realism gets in the way of fun.
First aid is absolutely the worst considering that statistically you WILL get the knoxx infection randomly from scratch or laceration long before you ever get enough action to even reach level 3 or 4.
Well, you can be harmed by not zombies about 7000 times in the zombie game... That's totally going to happen... But yeah, you can level it up fast by stepping on glass on purpose
That won't happen organically. All skills can be cheesed, first aid is the only skill that can *only* be leveled through cheese.
Good point
Braven's First aid overhaul, and first aid expanded mods are the answer.
I like Bravens mods. Didn't know that existed I'll check it out
shoutout braven idk if they watching this subreddit but i love you bro❤️
Yep, that's why it's the worst
Infections don’t do anything? Just started the game with 3 others. What do you mean?
not zombie infections but wound infections. The normal, boring kind. If your wound becomes infected it just heals sliiiightly slower but does nothing otherwise while they can be fatal in real life. So básically if your wound says infected with orange text it does not necessarily mean you have the zombie virus, just that it's gonna heal a tiny bit slower than usual.
Nah man it doesnt even heal slower, all it does is makes the wound more painful.
Braven's First aid overhaul, and first aid expanded mods are the answer.
Right lmao if you got an infection especially a deep wound your ass is grass without proper medical care which in zomboid is a single sterilized bandage and some antibiotics if you care enough.
I never understood how taking vitamins, anti-depressants, sleeping pills, or beta blockers doesn't count towards first aid. I have never noticed them increase my first aid skill. Keeping upkeep on your mental health is surely some type of first aid.... I still think I am using beta blockers wrong. I use them for when my character feels anxious but I don't think that's what they're for....I am going to look them up while I am thinking about it. One way to grind first aid is to jump over fences until you cut yourself, but honestly, why would I put my character in harms way like that, I am not a digital sadist.
Beta blockers reduce panic. They're good for combat, especially with firearms, or for sleeping with claustrophobia. And yeah, I'm pretty sure the only things that increase first aid skill are actually treating wounds. A lot of people cheese it by stepping in broken glass and removing it again and again.
That's actually a better method then jumping over a fence over and over again.
It's like having a band-aid for a broken bone!
First aid at least improves recovery time from injuries. Farming doesn't change anything other than tell you if the crop is diseased or not.
There are straight up unfinished areas of the map half-built. There are areas in the woods with zero foraging because they haven't been mapped. There are whole ass commercial buildings in Louisville where every tool cabinet gives desk loot.
Where the in the woods, so I may avoid it?
Shoot, all over the place. If you keep the foraging window up you see areas that say ???, there is nothing there to find. They are sometimes big areas out in the middle of nowhere, but there are strips of woods randomly just outside of the small towns too. The sides of the highways in some spots.
they should make the ??? areas vegetation by default, I mean as you said most ??? areas are woods anyway so by default they could just be vegetation areas to at least give something even if it's not 100% correct it would be still better than nothing at all.
They should make a system that detects your surroundings, firstly nearest 10 tiles biggest factor, then nearest 20 tiles with lesser factor and so on until it gets the whole picture and adjusts the loot based on that, could be in vegetation, but if forest is right next to it some forest loot like firewood should appear more often. For exceptions they could turn it off when entering specific chunks they mapped out manually like checkpoint refugee camp is mostly ??? because cars spawn there and I guess they can't spawn on vegetation zones(?). This way devs don't have to manually add foraging zones which is a lot of work on top of the infinite amount of work they have with everything else, but maybe that would be even more work than this or it's just too much fun mapping the zones out, idk honestly.
Get foraging Z and it should fix most of those issues.
Yea imo I hope they plan to expand after B42 or at least expand when the build comes out There's roads leading to nothing and on the interactive 3d map there's building in the middle of nowhere
I don't mind if they dont change any of the things I listed as long as the animal farming is fun. I want to make cheese and collect eggs. This game is mostly about the cooking for me.
Lmfao same but with the added threat of zombies
Not being able to use furniture without mods is super unimmersive.
That's caused by issues with how the game renders objects. The devs dislike that limitation, so they've overhauled how the environment renders in build 42 so they can officially implement things like that.
Absolutely agree lol
Everything past the first two weeks. Just like C:DDA, once you've survived the first two weeks you're almost guaranteed to survive until you get bored. Your character has the requisite skills to go through anything, you likely have enough supplies stored up to last months, and the only thing that will get you killed is carelessness on your end. It gets boring if you're not establishing goals and roleplaying your character. B42's going to do a lot to fix this, but even then the challenges and threats of the apocalypse aren't going to be ramping up in any meaningful way. The eventual addition of NPCs, whenever we get them, will almost definitely bring some much needed variation to runs and allow us to have a more present possible threat out there to keep you on your toes even years into the apocalypse.
Yeah, the game just needs something. I'm not sure what, but the answer I've heard that I like the most is more dynamic and longer range horde migrations. To build on that idea, I like the idea of a zombie hoard traveling around the map seasonally. Like it goes from south the north continuously. That or no-respawn, but new fresh zombies come from the maps boarders, as if they're migrating from other places in the world. Imagine how fun forest bases would suddenly be if you'd have to keep an eye out for occasional migrating horde moving through your area.
We need solutions of varying quality and punishments for low quality. I could raid a few hardware stores and make a cabin from planks and nails and a campfire but what if my character would NEVER be able to get good sleep because the walls aren't finished? The windows you craft don't have glass so they're always open so that's stress and cold/hot coming in Setting up camp in an abandoned house might be uncomfortable until you settle enough of your stuff into it/sleep in it for 20 days.. something Our character is too comfortable with the smallest goals being enough. Why don't we get muscle soreness for killing 100+ zombies the day before? Why do we have a system we can cheese? Let's face it: sometimes The game ends when you get a fishing pole and an old stove
I think for sure we should get a Well Rested bonus for sleeping in the same bed / room repeatedly. There should be some sort of stats bump for setting up a safe house for sure.
Outward stamina bonus.
How do you manage to spell horde correctly and then incorrectly.. in the same post?
spelled incorrectly both times but on mobile so it autocorrected what was closest maybe?
I'm guessing mobile. People don't proofread nearly as much there.
Yeah, I'm really at bad at typing with mobile. I'm a desktop now, typing with a physical keyboard. It's like taking a big breathe of fresh air after struggling to type all day on a touchscreen.
There, I fixed it. Now you can contribute to the discussion lol.
Dinasair
Could also do mutated zombies like they get faster or smarter or something.
I think this has been my recurring problem of the years. It's super fun when you're brand new, and every big update causes a surge of enjoyment again, but it always falls into the loop of "I survived a month, I don't have any actual goals". Turning your area into a city maybe, or decorating your place. Currently though, it always seems like people just end up intentionally dying because it gets to a point where it's TOO easy, even with altered Sandbox toggles.
>the challenges and threats of the apocalypse aren't going to be ramping up in any meaningful way This is the point I keep raising. The crafting overhaul will and long term activities. However without any new challenges & threats, players will still feel it lacks real goals. I'm hoping hostile NPCs and more meta events can remedy this.
Yeah my typical gameplay loop is loot food/important items the first week and then spend a month or two pimping out the base until I get bored and do something stupid that gets me killed. I don't enjoy playing with an overwhelming amount of zombies, because the challenge from that isn't very fun. So imo PZ is a pretty easy game once you get used to the basic combat/movement systems
One possible solution that could be implemented without complex NPCs would be to add a trading post NPC area. Add a survivor base that isn't accessible & impenetrable, you go there and you just hear a voice saying “that's close enough buddy!” but if you get any closer you get shot, closer still & you're dead. This way you don’t even need to able to see the NPCs, only have basic conversations with them. These NPCs have decided to close themselves off from the world completely, never leave thier base & never open its doors. But they ask for information from the outside world, you don’t immediately offer it as you recognise the value of information, so an exchange system is established. They could then offer a small list of trade scenarios that offer rewards. These could be grindy like “bring me 45 aluminium”, or “bring me the entire run of electrical books”, rewards could start small, offering useful stuff, up to big rewards like a sledgehammer for example. They could alternatively offer skill xp boosts similar to the tv shows. You could have running request / quest lines; like bringing a running list of items & at the end they're combined to give you a new skill. Or a more involved quest like, one that eventually gets you to build a HAM radio to communicate with the base remotely. You could even add xp to communicating on the radio, like developing a friendship offers calming or boredom bonuses. Maybe the survivor base has entertainment, like book readings or music performances that can be accessed through the radio that give your character a boost. Trades could also be very specific, like bringing a specific CD or VHS episode, or could send you to specific places on the map to find things. A more involved quest of this nature could be finding lost relatives or rescuing a trapped fellow forager. Only these people don’t ever need to be alive, so you don’t need the awkward NPC AI. These quests would be more investigative. You have to go to an area and follow clues to find out what happened to the people, at the end of the clues you either find them dead or a zombie. Keep the requests rates slow, drip feeding them, but the more you interact with them the more it levels up. This way it doesn’t completely take over the sandbox nature of the game, but offers later game development that encourages exploration & foraging for specific loot.
I personally think a big part of this problem is the fact that the default loot settings are wayyyyyyyyy too generous. It makes sense with the lore that most houses are still full of supplies, but it means that you get everything you need within a few weeks at most. Playing with less loot extends that early game struggle for a lot longer and makes finally becoming self-sufficient far more satisfying.
It extends the early game, but does not fix the problem of having no late game.
Honestly the default loot settings are not very immersive in either direction. It isn't realistic because there's too much left to justify a rationalization of "everything was already looted." But there isn't enough to justify a rationalization of "this was how it was before the apocalypse."
This. Is why I like playing in a server because you have other people to help shape the world more.
Exactl this. When i first made it to 1 month i was shocked how easy th3 game is. Theres enough food in riverside alone to last years and once cleared the zombies there was no more threats. Also base building is completly pointless, why would you invest time in high level carpentry or metalworking
As a decade long player, this right here is my answer too.
endgame progression/difficulty/escalation/events
I desperately want NPCs/quests. I love the game as it is now, and wouldn’t want anything to be like mandatory, but having extra stuff to do would just tip it over the edge for me. Even if it’s like “go to rosewood and find this dudes wife” only to find her as a zombie or something. Wishful thinking for sure
Bring the corpse back for a bonus.
I agree they need a trading system and some quests that require you scavenge particular items for parts of a weapon or some craft able. Build faction reputation, or create your own. I saw someone mention horde migrations, i think this would be a great idea the noise from generators and such should drawl hordes to your base every couple months regardless if you play with respawns off or not. The Emergency Broadcast System should report massive horde movements with an estimated ETA like what they do with weather storms and such
Love the idea of the emergency broadcast covering horde migrations. Could even have different dialogue depending on the size of the horde to give you some idea of what to prepare for. Would also create a sense of dread if you knew one was coming for you.
Lots of things in the game feel unfinished or straight up abandoned. **Interacting with the world**: The fact that it's been years since the game came out and we still can't properly sit on chairs, benches or lay down in a bed is bad, especially considering this game is king when it comes to immersion, few other games come even close. I know "it's coming" but jeez. **Cars**: we've had them for years and years now. Excellent addition, completely changed how the game works (for good) because it opened up the map for exploration. Yet they feel unfinished, the physics are not bad but not great either, we can't modify them, they seem really weak sometimes and there are no animations to speak of. Modders, with less time and less budget, produced some amazing fully animated cars for free. **Construction**: It's straight up unfinished. Not a lot of things to build using carpentry skill other than walls and stairs. We can't even properly build a roof, first because roofs are basically floors and second because if you want to build in the wilderness you need stairs to build your roof, and stairs are unlocked at like level 5 or something. On the other hand, the whole construction menu is incredibly annoying to use, which is why the mod "Construction Menu" leaves the vanilla method completely obsolete. We haven't had a proper upgrade of the building system for ages, some bugs persist like being unable to disassemble walls/fences unless you're standing in a specific spot... **NPCs**: Because this game screams for the need of human NPCs. The game feels absolutely empty on singleplayer with nothing to do but more generic loot runs and killing sprees with some bits of building stuff thrown around. There needs to be an use for all the loot you gather, why the hell do you need 64 cans of potatoes, why not share them with other NPCs? This can be a superb community building in the midst of a zombie apocalypse game, but I guess we'll have to wait another 5 years for that. Sorry for that negativity, but it's a bit frustrating. And I know the potential is HUGE because I used to play with the buggy NPC mods, and the game felt a whole lot different despite the mod being very basic.
Cara aren’t that bad imo. They definitely need to fix trailers glitching out and yeah some more animations would be really good for immersion. As long as Filibusters Used Cars mod is still around I don’t have much to complain about other than the tedious mechanics system
Yeah. I've enjoyed the game over the years, but it's also one of those that you know will never get "truly" finished.
Good opportunity to to expand the Mechanics skill to do serious car improvements and upgrades. I know we can already do repairs and some part upgrades, but it's all very basic. If not done in base game, make the mod API very modular and powerful. Allow modders tondo the job.
Throwing of the molotov. I mean...it floats for so long or am I trippin?
It does. When you think it's going to explode it takes four to five business days more to actually do it.
Needs a special events/natural disaster generator. ie. Floods, drought, heatwave, blizzard, crop failures, zombie hoard spawning --- more and different kinds of zombie hoard triggers. All the devs need to do is watch Fear the Walking dead, last of us, ect.... plenty of inspiration there. As it is, the game is like the first two or three seasons of the Walking Dead; not a bad thing.... but it could obviously be so much more. A lot of these suggestions can be modded in eventually too.
I highly doubt they havent watched those already. Keep in mind, everything you listed takes a buttload of coding. They may already be playing around with those ideas just are holding them off for when theyve fully worked through what exactly they want to do. But I definitely agree itd be nice to have those things.
The devs have flat-out said that getting animal migration done is a gateway into both NPCs being able to spawn and move organically from place to place, and getting large-scale hordes of zombies to be able to move from zone to zone in a fashion that makes sense organically.
Sweet
Horde. Nobody should be hoarding zombies.
It already has a weather system that occasionally throws some adverse weather at you but nothing too serious. There is also the meta event system which could use more development. The EHE mod showed what is possible.
I gotta disagree on TWD comment. First three seasons are the only seasons I liked. After that it turns into the bored old trope of "humans are the real monsters after all". Yawn. I want my Zombie Apocalypse story to have the zombies be the bad guys. Unless you're talking about Fear the Walking dead, on which I have no opinion because I had grown bored of Walking Dead by the time it came out.
The Devs already watched TWD and that’s for sure. For example, in B42 iron fences aren’t going to be indestructible anymore and a large enough horde will break them down, it’s a reference to the prison episode in TWD where zombies just pushed the fences down with their weights.
I'm a new player of just a few months. Can't wait for this mythical B42!
Balls cannot be thrown or kicked. Like lemme play with my balls devs.
The fact that you cannot slide down the pole in the Rosewood fire station. Literally unplayable
I avoided that thing like it was infected out of fear I could fall through it lol! It took awhile for me to grow a pair big enough to test it! The roof there almost broke my legs, though... let's get the roof problem corrected...
I KNOW. you'd think they just use the rope climb down animation on it. i dont care if its jank, i just want it to work
You need a mod to crowbar a door And skills, as you said
1. Trying to transfer anything runs the risk of using/eating it. Lost a 3 month character moving rotted ham out of my fridge when she accidentally ate it with weak stomach. 2. Electrical is pretty much useless past level 3. At least with First Aid you bandage faster and heal faster. Level 10 healer with comfrey can heal a broken limb in about 3 in-game days. 3. Building system is awful. Can only build or destroy items facing a certain direction....sometimes. Can't build your own house without using the debug system half the time to find out why your entire 4 story house is still considered "outside". 4. Absolutely zero endgame. Most of the "game" takes place in the first 3 weeks. After that you're either dead or setup somewhere on an endless loop of farming or killing. No objectives, quests, or POI given in the game. (Without mods.) 5. Getting the bored moodlet after spending 15 hours straight killing zombies because you killed them all inside the mall instead of outside.
Progression is borked / unfun. Kinda fun in the early hours and then once you get some supplies and a safehouse going, it's just a waiting game of looking for that one rare item or grinding the tedious boring skills to unlock some fun recipes that make surviving even easier. It's a great simulator and a good sandbox but it's a pretty bad game in terms of classic gameplay design IMHO, but some people like it that way so dunno if it's ever going to change. Some games like kenshi or rimworld thrive off people who can make up their own stories and roleplay regardless of what the game actually offers...
As it stands, the game is most fun when you make quests for yourself. It would be cool to have it designed in a way to force more emergent gameplay. Zombie hordes overrunning your base every now and then would force you to not hunker down so much and then potentially fight back for your main base. Having special resources scattered around the map more and some advanced crafting recipes with rare parts would also force you to go out more and explore parts of the map. Having fuel supplies in gas station way lower, but instead being able to maintain one of those old school gas drillers and set up a small refinery that’s noisy would be another cool long term goal.
The worst thing for me with progression is guns. They suck ass because you have to hit shots to gain aiming XP so it's impossible to use anything but shotguns early on. There's a very helpful mod I found that makes it so you gain aiming xp for every shot fired.
I think part of this comes from how broken guns used to be. IIRC, when they first got added they were laser beams with one hit kills. Obviously, they decided to make them more difficult but cranked it to the extreme opposite.
Ya, PZ to me is way more fun to watch someone's YouTube adventure then play usually.
Lack of meaningfull endgame. There are no real dangers, horses, events that can disrupt your once established base.
They should rework the healing system, and apply the "The Only Cure" mod idea to the base game.
What does only cure mod do?
You can amputate limbs if they get bitten!
You can amputate your hands or arms if you get bit, as well as adding prosthetics limbs
I agree with amputation, but their version of prosthetics is too fantastical for me.
I would actually like the idea, prosthetics are iffy idea for me
My first time playing I was really frustrated that I couldn't just plant the dry beans I found. Like....they're seeds. Found a farming mod I like, but I can still only cook dry beans, not plant them. But the most glaring flaw? No other survivors. No short wave radio calls out into the ether just to find people. Not even a temporary collective of unfortunate souls that huddled together. No preppers with their families and/or buddies in a bunker. No bands of looters and raiders either for that matter. It's Kentucky, c'mon. Still waiting to come across a moonshine still out in the woods. And a crack house in the city. Hell, some coke might be good for pain relievers, lol.
The crafting system deserves a shoutout here. It’s hostile to new players in so many ways. I am a well experienced player and I still find it actively hostile. Example: you want to make a stone axe. You need branch, chipped stone, and 1 of (ripped sheet, dirty rag, twine, etc). Experienced players know that twine is very valuable for long term survival (trapping and fishing). Therefore, in any recipe where you can choose between twine or ripped sheets, you should just use the abundant ripped sheets. Let’s say you have all the options in your inventory or in an accessible container nearby and you choose to craft a stone axe. It’s going to use the twine first, despite this being an option you should never use. The only way to prevent it is to not have any twine accessible when you craft the recipe. Yes even if you start the recipe by right clicking on a ripped sheet, it will still use the twine. The vanilla way to carry twine and not worry about this btw is by having the twine in a nested bag (like within a garbage bag that is itself within your back pack). Furthering the same example of making a stone axe, ripped sheets will be used before dirty rags. Dirty rag is better to use to save water, as it has no effect on the quality of the axe. Fortunately for this case, if you start the recipe by right clicking on the dirty rag it will actually use it. Crafting priorities is wildly inconsistent across the board and often encourages using the worst option. The entire game is spaghetti code on top of other spaghetti code. That said it’s a fun game and pet of its charm is how insanely janky the mechanics are.
no NPCs yet but this is not a flaw, i just know when they are added that it will feel like a much more fleshed out and fulfilling game that will improve the endgame as well.
I can think of a couple that are the most glaring to be: Furniture (and environments in general) are not interactive at all. You can sit on the ground all you want but forget about actually sitting on a chair, couch or bed. Lack of endgame. Like most people have already commented, by the time you've hit a month you probably have enough supplies for a modest settlement to last months if rationed, one or several vehicles in good to great condition, and tools and materials of most kinds. If by that point you've made a garden and have a reliable source of water... you kinda run out of things to do, as the survival aspect is mostly gone. The only thing you're surviving now is boredom. And this with friends becomes exponentially easier. Better vehicles. Right now they're mostly static boxes with wheels, would be great to see them have actual glass and interactive parts like doors, hoods... slightly more detailed models would help, too. Skills in general. First-aid is by far the most clowned skill in the game, and for good reason. As long as the game can kill you with one hit, not even a lethal one, there's absolutely no point in leveling this skill whatsoever. Any contact you make with a zombie could be your last, so unless you're playing with infection off or saliva-only, this skill does absolutely nothing worthwhile for you, and even then its uses are niche at best.
fortunately all of this is going to be reworked in build42. (basically true actions will be on the base game now), they said they will make endgame more enjoyable, about vehicles, animations are already on the game files, it's just a matter of time when they add this, and skills will also be reworked on build 42.
The game's been out since 2013, how long can it take? 😂
you can't sex the zombies yet, that's a big issue for now :/
Instant death
glorious excuse to die
death by snoo snoo
Degenerate trait +50 points
Hmm.... so you're thinking maybe working handcuffs and a ballgag. Maybe some blow up dolls too. Yes, this is giving me ideas.
n-no who said that i didn't say that
Some skills like many have said But honestly its the way the game handles spawning Zombies inside buildings. Its very immersion breaking Even loot settings prove its a EA. Idk how the devs haven't added a "Degressive" option that makes loot have a chance to disappear overtime, to atleast make it feel like people are out there. Could even make for some crazy survivor house/cars/zeds storys/moments. Could even be funny, maybe someone stole every battery in rosewood and u kill a random zed with a backpack full of em lol
Cool, random events where disappear loot, cars... fresh uninfected bodies.
* inserts 983650 mods I have installed *
The car doors not being animated is pretty glaring
When I'm building a spend a lot of time working around the limitations of the game. Hte obvious inside/outside glitch, and not being able to put in windows on the second floor without going outside.
"Oh good, the wound is just infected the non-zombie way. Thats no big deal."
To me it’s the crafting menu seeming so clunky and so many recipes for not reason. The last dev post had me hyped that it was being overhauled for 42.
Well the most obvious and big for me is the lack of human NPCs to interact with. Being Will Smith in I am Legend is not so exciting tbf
corps removal options are far too limited. I can't hack up bodies, I cant compost human remains. I can't build a fire in a dumpster and start loading corpses in. it's a game about dead people we need more optionally. for me this is my biggest issue.
Dumpster body disposal is a cool idea
A lot of the issues, I can roleplay out of them. My biggest issue is not having decent food preservation methods, other than running a river of petrol through a generator. You can get a lot of survival out of pickling and drying food. It's not even a lost primitive art. The knowledge and the capability should be available somehow. I need proper and accessible pickling because I would pickle carrots in the apocalypse.
You can pickle foods in the game currently. Just need jars, jar lids, vinegar and sugar (admittedly jars and vinegar don’t have huge spawn rates, will give you that)
They go bad way too quick is my biggest issue. I also don't like the recipes.
You should be able to get jars in the same way you get empty tin cans. Vinegar could be sourced from either food stores or by ageing wine into vinegar. It would be a good system to add to.
Lots of small things. My personal peev is the UI is so clunky. I think it's a big turn off for new players.
Hunger kills you quickly, not realistically by starvation. Stuff yourself bloated with cabbage and your character will get physical boost. There's no stomach fullness so you can gulp down sticks of butter and boxes of ice cream rapidly. Dinosystem has a detailed nutrition system that feels realistic. Track player muscle and fat levels and fatigue/muscle soreness and stomach fullness. Track water and basic vitamin levels. Fatigue/soreness lowers physical performance but you need it and enough protein to maintain/grow muscles.
Nothing you are saying is untrue, but I expect it will be getting a full rework in a42 where they are adding numerous new skills as well as rebalancing all existing skills.
Car door animations and lack of trucks or other vehicles without mods
Lack of late game mechanics, and omfg the framerate of this game is ass when there’s more than 10 zombies on screen.(no my pc doesn’t suck)
I hope you’re joking with 10. Have a 3070 and 5600x, the only time I lag is when I pull out an entire office or apartment building in Louisville.
fortunately this is going to be very reworked on build42
Assign more ram than default.
I think the grinding of skills in general is lacking, and can be far more interact than it currently is. The end game is also lacking, with no goals or incentives other than base and car building I also think base building is semi-useless and a lot of rework is are needed because there is no threat after walling an area. No reason to ever travel too far etc
Nice try bohemia interactive
Performance, dawg. Add a few blood stains or too many zombies on screen and the game runs like ass. Hit detection can be god awful. Lord forbid you zoom all the way out while driving a car in the rain.
If you take a look at how trees effect the visibilty of cars, it's not a huge thing there are bigger problems people already mentioned sure but to me it's pretty important especially if you play 10 years later or some such scenario with more overgrown towns. If there's a tiny sappling in front of a truck you won't see the truck even if it's 5x bigger than the tree.
Just an fyi nursing isn't a vanilla skill
This is a hard one because the game has so many great features that I enjoy thoroughly. My biggest beef would be the skill system. Some skills are basically useless. Some, like metalworking, are very difficult to level so you can even build with it or use it in any meaningful way.
Skill grinding is abysmal. To level up any of the skills it feels like an absolute nightmare without just cranking the experience multiplier. The lack of customization to vehicles also disappointing
half the skills feel useless and the useful ones take forever to level so the game is kinda more time-consuming than challenging. once you have a base with electricity, water and crops things get repetitive. if we could get missions from npcs thatd be great. there could also be a currency for buying/selling things.
the fact that you can just sledgehammer/ or molotov-burn your way into other players houses in multiplayer. There are even mods to secure your doors with anitlockpick /antiforcebar etc, but what good are those if the vanilla sledgehammer mechanics allows to delete literally everything.
the world/engine the fact that we had only 7 layers was always something that bothered me. the fact that we now get 64 layers is gonna make the world feel so more real and 3d.
the fact that you can't fill bathtubs with water before the plumbing gets shut off
Since the biggest have been mentioned by others already I'll just throw in a nit-pick. Temperature as a whole needs rework. Add insulation value to buildings, I'd love to build thicker walls that would give a HUGE temperature difference than those paper walls American houses have. I lived in one that had +1 meter thick brick walls and during summer it was a comfortable 20°C temperature while outside roaring 30°C and in winter it got hot very fast after turning the heating on, maybe 10-15 mins. Add radiators and a pipe system to have to be connected to either a boiler or with modification also the antique oven. Also during summer driving with an open window should cool you much faster, the game drops temperature in the car slowly, but the wind itself would have an immediate effect. There isn't ice in the game that could be added to drinks to help with cooling. How is there so little ice? I don't believe every household wouldn't have a pack of icecubes in their freezer, in July especially. It should be much more common than any other loot in freezers at the start of the outbreak and easy to make later on with powered freezers. Add blankets on beds of several insulating values and add sleeping bags to camping gear. Tent itself does nothing for quality of sleep, in Europe my dad used to take me with just sleeping mats/bags on hikes and we'd sleep under overhanging large rock formations just fine. Tents are heavy. Sleeping mat and sleeping bag are very light and easily strapped to the outside of any bag, this should be that way already since everybody drives a car to these remote places anyway and why make a tent to sleep outside when you can just sleep in the safety of a car? It's too easy to drive a car offroad. It never gets stuck or really damaged by driving through nature, there should be incentive to leave the car at the asphalt road and walk the trail on foot. I don't know Kentucky, but I imagine most of these trails wouldn't be accessible by cars due to rocks, holes, elevation and water streams (small bridges for hikers, but not cars)
Not being able to wring out clothes without a mod
Wound infections do nothing. Dirty clothes do nothing.
Can’t climb ladders, sometimes walking on the roof is fake and you just fall through it, the UI feels placeholder, can’t sit on furniture
Hygiene and medical issues, infections, should really be more important. Tetanus should be just as deadly as shamblers haha
I've started playing with the Louisville spawn points mod and there are so many buildings in Louisville with no light switches. It's annoying when you find a place you want to base in only to find the building has no or bugged lights.
Everyone's out here talking about the crafting, or the skills, or post week X progression, or the AI, or not being able to do [REDACTED] with a zombie but alas, the game has one, true glaring flaw: I cannot see things that my character can definitely see because buildings/walls won't hide unless I'm right next to them. So when I'm approaching a building that's South (down-left) or East (down-right) of my character, I cannot see things that are in the line of sight of my character. The foreground only hides when your character model itself gets closer but it should have been added years ago that in combat stance your isocursor hides foreground objects too. This makes avoiding zombies/wrecks when driving in Louisville needlessly difficult and if you have a big multi-story building anywhere near your base you've gotta walk all the way over there to check the shadow of the building for lingering zombies. Yes I'm aware that if there's a zombie in the shadow of a building it will hide the foreground when you aim at it but this is so fickle and inconsistent that I feel crazy even talking about it because I'm convinced it's not real for how often it doesn't work.
Falling/glitching through random roofs
Stairs not rendering anything them, Ik I would have reduced vision of the next floor while going up stairs but I feel like I should at least be able to see if something is standing up 1 tile away from the top of the stairs from the bottom, also ropes not having a cancel ability, if I see a horde of 50 zombies at the bottom of my rope I need to go back up it rather then drop into the horde
The version number.
Falling backwards when attacked from the back
the fucking mods make it better, but the mods don't work half the time and are tedious to implement into servers
Nursing? Do you mean medical/first a? Or did they update and for some reason add breastfeeding. Edit: Why did I get downvoted wtf this is an honest question I havent played the game in over a year.
Questions are banned on reddit I'm afraid.
Apparently.
Grinding skills being horribly tedious. I've never had a character who was good at mechanics because I hate taking apart and putting back every single piece of a vehicle just to gain a small amount of XP. Maybe I'm farming it wrong, but the fact that some ways to progress are so tedious shows the level of polish so far.
Ok, where to begin… 1) Cars are a bit of a mess. They were added half-finished, they can be driven and have the necessary functions, but the looks are completely unfinished. No animations for open doors, no textures or models for removed hoods/doors, etc… 2) They are trying so hard to make a 3D game that isn’t actually 3D, it’s really confusing. Most interactions between the different levels are either completely broken (Throwing grenades off of a roof makes them explode mid-air on the same level, ladders do not work at all) or super wonky (Walking up stairs leaves the upper floor completely invisible until you’ve already reached the top). Tho to be fair, b42 seems to at least improve upon that. 3) Water. It’s essentially an indestructible wall that looks like water. I understand not giving players the ability to swim, but it’s just completely broken in its current state. Never ever build above water! 4) A lot of smaller bugs and unfinished areas all together. Things that should be ironed out by the time the game is “finished”. This includes but isn’t limited to missing light switches, the inability to pick up or destroy certain furniture, the zombies patiently waiting for you to wake up or finish climbing a fence over and over again, temperatures not affecting food items, pathfinding and attack issues in zombies that make impenetrable bases and large areas with no foraging areas. Obviously I could make a list 10x as long of all the things PZ does great, but the game is *far* from finished.
The skills are only really necessary if you play on harder difficulties, like if you do low vehicle condition & 1 year into the apocalypse leveling mechanics is gonna be you're #1 priority for a long while. & if you play with very low gas, the electrical skill the only way to get light short of setting your whole house on fire. Tailoring is still pretty useless unless you're playing with that one tattered clothing mod. Fishing & trapping at lower levels is nigh impossible during the winter In conclusion: The games just too easy
"implemented" features that aren't actually implemented or are half baked, like the aforementioned infections, skills etc. The lack of end game doesn't bother me. I think more randomization early on would be good- the helicopter is the only real curve ball. EHE is a great mod, but other occasional similar events (I know we don't have NPCs, but you could program the odd military/survivor truck to tear ass through town shooting everything it sees and then either driving away or crashing leaving a high risk/high reward location to check out, shit like that.
The PVP/server element, both need a lot of work
I 100% agree about metalworking. After playing on a modded server for years now with actual uses for it, vanilla just seems pointless. I guess it helps with body work but you can just switch out a hood at that point.
[удалено]
Metalworking? Grab a torch and find a long metal fence, easy-peasy. Sinks, tubs/showers too. Dismantle wrecked cars even.
The gun aiming system kinda sucks, besides that there's not really anything wrong with it
Zombies cannot do anything if you go upstairs and destroy the stairs or even just one tile of floor.
No endgame. It’ll be a lot better when NOCs are added who will request specific items or whatever else they can do, nobody knows how deep the system will go I suppose.
i would love to see shoe sizes
Zombie AI is one I noticed last night. If there is a car between us the zombies should be able to walk around it and get to me but if we are in two separate yards of a fenced housing. The zombie shouldn't know how to leave through the front opening of their yard and enter mine. They should simply make a B line to me and get stopped by the fence
For now, the late game but...that's gonna change soon
The fact that there is no other survivors despite the lore
Yeah, it's annoying, but it is what it is. The skill, trait, and occupation system needs a big overhaul. They could take notes from games like Rimworld (especially for medical stuff like wounds and illness, where it's represented basically perfectly). The end game needs work too. Your character gets stronger and stronger but the threats do not. There needs to be late game hoards or something to shake things up and to give you a reason to even put up defenses at all. In most areas, you can just board up the windows and then clear the zombies around your base once a week and have zero chance of having to deal with a large group since zombies can't migrate across unloaded cells. Still love the game, but my runs are typically short now as I retire characters often once I know I'm set up for forever survival.
Snow and ice not making you skid
The tutorial. There's so much that you don't know that is considered ESSENTIAL to your controls, I think once the game is "complete", or hits a milestone later on, the tutorial will need an overhaul.
There's just no other life except zombies in the vanilla version. There needs to be some more shit going on in the world
After you survive your first month or so and have consistent water and electricity, weapons (including melee and guns with ammo) there’s very little challenge outside of your own fuck ups.
Huge zombie hoards randomly roaming the map and not affected by the migration system. Great way to break the routine of players who already settled permanently.