Project Zomboid - The farming simulator disguised as a zombie survival game

[Pepsi-Cola]

because im severely autistic i'd opt to play Cataclysm before this game, but i think if you're a normal person who just wants to play a fun video game and not a psuedo-video game simulator with barely any graphics it's a good choice.

It's funny because I think the same thing could be said about Dwarf Fortress vs. Rimworld. Sure, Dwarf Fortress is a million times more complex and is a much more dynamic experience, but is that worth the hours of boredom and the realization that you're playing the excel spreadsheet equivalent of video games?

 

[The Wizard]

Sure, Dwarf Fortress is a million times more complex and is a much more dynamic experience, but is that worth the hours of boredom and the realization that you're playing the excel spreadsheet equivalent of video games?

Yes.

 

[NewFriend]

Oh, for a moment I thought that the game has taken a turn for the worst and that the project got assraped be retarded devs. I'm glad to see that this is basically just a shill thread with a guide.

 

[Polyboros2]

Picked it up on sale since reading this post. Haven't given it a deep dive, just tutorial and a trial run where I ran around my starting neighborhood, looted some buildings, made a house to dump books I was too dumb to read, opened an unlocked window to get into a house only to discover there were home alarms in this game.

Definitely going to give it more of a go, and, if I enjoy it enough, will try to pull in others for co-op. As it stands I like 7 Days to Die a lot more, even if it's a lot more focused on surviving the weekly sieges than surviving the world itself, in the realm of looting simulators (of which I lump in fallout cause that's how I play it) I really like 7 Days.

This however seems a lot like Minecraft, the community is going to make the game infinitely more playable than the Devs could. I'm going to get familiar with the games before mods, but is there any recommended quality of life mods? Stuff that doesn't radically change the game play, but makes the playing easier (like the actually interaction with the game and mechanics, not the difficulty directly)?

 

[ProfDongs]

The game is rough but it's still one of my favorite to go back to and see how they're progressing. I bought it way back on when they were only selling on Desura, and while development has been the slowest I've ever seen it's been fine with me. AI would be great and will make it a different game, but I want to see them do it right, even though I don't expect it to be nearly as ambitious as they want it to be given the state of everything else.

I've put about 400-450 hours into it, and am just starting to get into a new character with the latest update. Excited to see what the next town looks like when it's fully realized.

 

[cybertoaster]

I feel this game requires a level of patience and autism I dont have

 

[bigoogabaloogas]

I feel this game requires a level of patience and autism I dont have

You're on the farms, so you definitely have the autism to play this game

 

[Screw Danlon]

Started playing it because of this thread, but haven’t tried the beta yet, because I wanted to try a couple days with a stable version to learn the basics.

I’ve put probably 100+ hours into Cataclysm DDA, so a lot of the basic concepts: stay quiet, 1 zombie at a time, only keep stuff you need, stay quiet and run rather than fight are all pretty much second nature.

There’s some things I like a lot over Cata:
* I don’t have autistic piles of random shit everywhere that I need to keep straight.
* I feel like I have a good grasp on why a zombie is or isn’t seeing/pursuing me.
* I really like the view cone
* I feel like when I screw up and die it’s more likely to be my fault than the game just screwing with me. (Fuck shocker zombies.)
* Being real-time means I don’t spend entire hours bored doing crafting
* Drinking bleach kills you, but it also takes a while. I was quite amused that it actually worked.
* Books with recipes in them seem to be very short, so I can just read them and drop them, rather than keeping them on me.

There’s also a few things I really don’t like:
* It’s a lot harder to tell when a zombie is actually dead. I keep having zombies that appear to be dead, and I can’t do the ground hit animation, but then 5 or 6 seconds later they get up again. And because slow reactions kill, this can be a problem.

* Lots of things that seem like they should be useful aren’t, things that seem useless aren’t: whiskey and bleach, for example. Bleach seems like it should be able to make disinfected rags... I can’t find a way to do it. Meanwhile, whiskey seems like you‘d drink it to make you happier... but it can also be used to make disinfected rags.

* The inventory management is still something of a pain - between trying to make sure that what you pick up goes into the bag you want, or trying to move things from one bag to another, it’s really finnicky. It took me an entire game to realize that if I wanted to transfer things between two bags, I needed to actively equip both of them, not just have them in my inventory.

* In Cata you can usually find a quiet area on the edge of a town with a couple undamaged buildings to make a good short-term forward base, but here it seems like every single house I find has at least a few zombies around it, and nothing is undamaged.

 

[SITHRAK!]

I'm vaguely interested in this title, but some of the reviews have me concerned. Specifically, item/function gatekeeping, and crafting..

For example, you need an un-craftable shovel or trowel to plant seeds. Meaning your ability to grow plants is 100% dependent on lucky scavenging.
You need an un-craftable axe to fell trees, as a saw won't work, and you can't just, say, push over smaller trees with a car.
That seems to me to be against the spirit of most of these kinds of games.

Apparently their crafting system is set up as (item/s) + (recipe)= outcome.
Whereas for most crafting games it's (item attributes) + (recipe)= outcome.

To illustrate the difference, let's look at a camp fire:
Normal game: (flammable item) + (dry wood) + (incendiary) = campfire.
Where (flammable item) could be paper, dry leaves, rubbing alcohol, gasoline etc, (dry wood) could be sawmill offcuts, gathered sticks or broken furniture and (incendiary) could be a blowtorch, matches, gas lighter, zippo, firebow etc.
Zomboid might have specifically (paper) + (dry wood) + (zippo), meaning that if the devs haven't built alternative recipes into the system, your toon could freeze to death in a house full of (matches) (broken furniture) and (rubbing alcohol).

Any truth to these rumours?

EDIT: I also bought Underrail because it looked like something I'd like, then found that it was pure consolidated autism with a million different character builds, only six of which were viable. Is P:Z like that as well?

 

[It's HK-47]

That just sounds like people are extraordinarily shit at the game, to be honest. Occasionally you can struggle to find a specific piece of loot like a trowel or an axe, but there's plenty of alternatives such as just digging with your hands (With a small chance to injure yourself), using a smaller hand axe which are much more common, or a crappy stone axe that you craft with foraging, and when it comes to alternate recipes, I've never felt like I was wanting for kindling, because just about anything that would reasonably be a flammable item can be used to start a fire, and foraging for small sticks is practically a guaranteed drop.

Unless you've manually set your loot values to be extremely low just for funsies, finding the tools you need really won't be one of your biggest problems, especially since there's a sort of logic system to the loot. Hardware stores will always have hardware-related loot, gas stations will always have snacks and gas canisters, gun stores will always have ammo, garages will always have tools, etc. You can occasionally find items that are not where you'd "logically" expect to find them, but I'd say the loot is probably around 95% logic-based, unless you're in a storage unit in which case you'll just find all kinds of random shit.

Either way, in my hundreds of hours spent playing this game, I've never struggled to start a campfire and usually don't struggle to find basic tools, both because the loot system and alternate recipes make a lot of sense, and because I use a specific mod called Def's Long Term Survival to help "bridge the gap" in places where I think Zomboid got unreasonable in a way that didn't make any sense. Craft Helper would also be a good idea if you're just starting out, since it displays all the recipes that an item can be used for, to save you a trip to the nearest Wiki entry.

PZ doesn't really operate on "viable builds" though, only viable strategies. The character level-up and skills tab is almost a moot point when you first get started because you're probably not going to live long enough to see any significant amount of skill-ups, and even if you've been alive for 5 in-game years and maxed every single stat and put on every piece of "end game" armor, if you mess up and don't check your surroundings before looting a container in a dark room, a zombie's just going to bite you and bring the whole thing to an end.

It's a great feeling and not enraging in the slightest.

 

[ProfDongs]

I'm vaguely interested in this title, but some of the reviews have me concerned. Specifically, item/function gatekeeping, and crafting..

For example, you need an un-craftable shovel or trowel to plant seeds. Meaning your ability to grow plants is 100% dependent on lucky scavenging.
You need an un-craftable axe to fell trees, as a saw won't work, and you can't just, say, push over smaller trees with a car.
That seems to me to be against the spirit of most of these kinds of games.

Apparently their crafting system is set up as (item/s) + (recipe)= outcome.
Whereas for most crafting games it's (item attributes) + (recipe)= outcome.

To illustrate the difference, let's look at a camp fire:
Normal game: (flammable item) + (dry wood) + (incendiary) = campfire.
Where (flammable item) could be paper, dry leaves, rubbing alcohol, gasoline etc, (dry wood) could be sawmill offcuts, gathered sticks or broken furniture and (incendiary) could be a blowtorch, matches, gas lighter, zippo, firebow etc.
Zomboid might have specifically (paper) + (dry wood) + (zippo), meaning that if the devs haven't built alternative recipes into the system, your toon could freeze to death in a house full of (matches) (broken furniture) and (rubbing alcohol).

Any truth to these rumours?

EDIT: I also bought Underrail because it looked like something I'd like, then found that it was pure consolidated autism with a million different character builds, only six of which were viable. Is P:Z like that as wwell?

Scavenging generally turns into knowing/finding what stores or building have more tool item pools for getting specific stuff like shovels, trowels, and sledgehammers that can't be crafted. I don't think I've ever had a start where I could not find a shovel or trowel within the first two hours though.

Axes can be crafted, you just have to forage outside for chipped stones, tree branches and then use rope/twine/ripped sheets. They have horrific durability but are enough to fortify a house with boards if you have nails. Fireaxes and Wood Axes are semi rare but you will end up finding one either on a zombie or in a crate eventually.

As for the campfire example, lets say you are in a house that has matches spawned in it. Campfire Materials needs two things 1 Plank (or logs), and a bandage/sheet/book/magazine/newspaper/twigs. The plank you can get from breaking a door down, and then you either find one of the secondary items in the house, scavenge outside for a twig, or just take your/a zombies clothes and tear them into a ripped sheet. You have your Campfire Materials and matches, now all you need is fuel which conveniently can be the ripped sheets or any of the secondary items for the Campfire Materials.

There are definitely better character builds you can go for, but nothing to the level of Underrail. Character Skills/Traits are determined when you make a character with a list of negative traits that give you points to spend, as well as positive traits that cost points to get, and depending on what class you pick will determine how many points you start out with. There are negative traits you will always want to go for because they can be easily mitigated or don't have that great an effect on game, where as the positive traits you will get in return make a huge difference. Most character classes are kind of samey and just give you a better start in certain areas with EXP boosts, and some will have innate skills but they will be more costly though. Once you figure out a build that works you will probably stick to that one. You will almost always end up leveling carpentry, farming, and cooking due to the nature of the game.

 

[Screw Danlon]

Well, I’m in the middle of my first reasonably successful run. Alive 10 days so far.

Playing on the Muldraugh map, using the basic medium difficulty sandbox, with 2 minor tweaks - I bumped up the length of time water would last to 1 notch above electricity, and I changed the starting month to March. My character had no starting skills - this time I just took difficult to see and difficult to hear.

I got fairly lucky - I spawned near the Corlson’s(?) doctor’s office, which had a full upstairs apartment. Managed to clear out the area around the building, and the house across the street. Got a key to the car... no gas. I also got lucky and found a leather jacket and a polo sweater, and with both of them on, my bite risk got a lot better.

Stayed in the apartment for a couple days doing night raids to the nearby houses and general store. In Cataclysm night raids are common because zombies can’t see in the dark. Here, that may also be true... but I also can’t see, so it balanced out.

Finally on day 5, I had cleared most of the road between the doctor’s office and the large warehouse (I have to say, that online map is really helpful) so I snuck in there and managed to recover a full set of tools and a couple planks, which let me board up the door to my apartment and start using a rope to get in and out. Also managed to find a crowbar, which was good because my weapons kept breaking.

Day 6 I started scoping out the little trailer park behind the doctor’s office, and found 3 police zombies... all of which had bullet proof vests. So with that, I feel like I’m pretty safe from bites.

I’ve found 3 car keys, none of them have gas, but I do need to find one soon, because at this point, I’ve cleared out every building nearby.

Right now my two biggest problems are that I’m running out of room in my safe house to store things neatly.... and I can’t find a needle anywhere. I’ve found suture needles, but no regular needles, so I can’t patch any clothes.

 

[Screw Danlon]

So I lost the character I had a good run with due to something really stupid, and it pissed me off so much I haven’t gone back for a couple days.

Basically, I found a van, decided to take it to the tattooist - I had been unable to find needles anywhere for over a week, of searching, so I figure a tattooist must have needles. Got there, managed to take out the 2 zombies waiting by the door - shoved 1 down, stood on him, cleaned out the other one out strategy.

Got into the place, tossed it... still no needles, but I got a few things I needed. On the way out, I see 5 zombies charging at me... so I sprint back to my van, but I can’t figure out if I need to tap E or hold E to get into the van. So when one doesn’t seem to work, I do the other... at which point my character gets into and then immediately back out of the van. And then, one of the zombies charges into me and pushes me just out of the interaction range, I get mobbed by 5 zombies and die within about 3 seconds.

Now, I can accept that I clearly was playing it too fast and loose if the difference between survival and death was that half-second... but at the same time, I feel like I had successfully pulled it off and managed to squeak out by the skin of my teeth... had not the interface screwed me.

 

[It's HK-47]

Playing on the Muldraugh map

Bit of a late reply, but it's worth mentioning that Muldraugh itself isn't just a map, it's part of the larger, unified map for Knox County. With the exception of some modded maps and some of the challenge modes, all of the available starting locations take place on the same map, the world's just so large that unless you drive for a decent chunk of time, you won't see much of anything but highways and trees on your way between the towns.

If you ever want to dive into a map that's more of a city and less of a small township like Muldraugh, I'd recommend Raven Creek. There's a pretty large difficulty spike if you start there because it's a dense population zone so your first day or two will mostly be sprinting around and screaming while you try and find anything to use as a weapon, but it's probably my favorite map addition because of how difficult it is to survive there. South Muldraugh isn't bad either, if you want something similar but on a much smaller scale that just adds an expanded area to Muldraugh, since most people seem to really enjoy that town because of its centralized location on the map.