So this explains why I've never been able to simply outrun zombies. Also, the ducking behind corners and waiting is a huge tip, as I like too keep windows and doors intact incase I need an emergency safehouse.
I don't mind ravaging other houses in a neighborhood to make a quick escape. If I need an emergency safehouse I'll just go to a brand new chunk where the zombies haven't broken into or out of anything at all.
Oh you can absolutely outrun zombies! But only if you are running through a zombie-free area and the only ones are the ones behind you! The usual problem with outrunning zombies is attracting all the news ones xD
Extremely vital information. I've been trying to survive Riverside and I take the 2-floor house on the outer suburbs of the town as my base. Lotta trees there and I always say "I'll lose them in the trees" figuring the time it takes for them to also go through a tree means they have that same "blinded" sight you do when pushing through one. Now I know it's gonna take a lot more than that to break them off.
designate a part of the city you don't like, start screaming and lead them there, when you get a molotov torch them. It's easier to lose them in cities, since you just sprint forward for 3 seconds and then stand behind a house, then loop around
The restaurant bro. Its the best base in Riverside imho. Once you break the stairs you're basically 100% safe, you have tons of space to farm on the roof as soon as you can build stairs, you can build a bridge to the river in order to fish, and you already have a normal bed, 4 fridges and 4 stoves upstairs. Once you get a generator and a bunch of gas cans, you're golden forever
@@darkfangulas yes that's the one. I always steal that gnome since it's nearby, and a TV from the neighbor a bit of the ways east. There's a longer ranch home that has a VHS TV in it, and the little shack that's closer has an antique in it.
One of my super favorite things about the zombies is how, even if you set their sight and smell to poor, when it is foggy, they can still see you from outside the ring of fog where you CAN'T see them. Makes a whole lot of sense that some rotting corpse would have better senses than a living being, I'm sure.
I can't confirm that the thick fog does this, but I know I got some medium fog the other day and the same thing you are describing is true. They seemingly could see me even though I can't see them. I do not believe I was making noise, but it's possible.
Always though this. Back in the day the game was way more playable, then they teased this new “sadistic AI” they were working on claiming how much more difficult it was. I remember going back to previous builds of the game because of how stupid it was at the time. The old strategy used to be to lure hordes into attacking random houses and then leaving through a back entrance but this no longer works as often
That would explain why sometimes when I run back home, double checked the area around the house. See no zombie for a few minutes. Get inside, organising first aid kit, only to have that 1 zombie suddenly walk straight in to where I was inside the house. The same zombie I ran by from the other end of the town. That tracking distance is way too insane.
Huh, this is actually something that cripples the experience for many newcomers, because this level of in-depth meta knowledge is usually not something you think about. You'd think that simply breaking line of sight would be enough, but since zombies cheat, the experience is set up to be even harder than what is realistic. Good video and good on you for explaining this, I just feel the devs should have nerfed the tracking system somewhat.
@@Sleaptime fair enough, guess its hard to ge tinyo the game though as a new player u just wanna stop playing when u are being chases by so many zombies
this is exactly the problem me and my buddies had, the zombies are literally in such unrealistic numbers and with supernatural tracking abilities that the game just becomes running simulator, even if you think you might finally be far enough away to escape the 2000+ zombie horde behind you a new 4000+ zombie horde appears right in front of you then you go 2 more feet maybe feeling a bit frisky and turn a corner and now there is a new 10000+ zombie horde. that plus complete hacks to always no matter what know your exact location makes the game unplayable for us. why is some abandoned ghetto cul de sac have more zombies in it than people in your current country of residence? how come i can walk out into the woods to some abandoned mine camp or something completely obscure and have more zombies in it than every episode of twd combined? ruins the game, nerf the zombie spawn theres no reason for a new billion zombie horde to spawn for every new pixel that comes on my screen and theres no reason for them to instantly see you from 20000 miles away with perfect tracking capabilities
Since I posted this, I have learned a little about avoiding zombies and I'll attempt to share what I have learned. It helps a lot if you have a densely packed forest near you. You get a horde on your tail, run into the woods where there is literally no line of sight for either you or the Zs. As soon as you are certain that a fair distance has been put between you and the horde, crouch and begin quick-sneaking. This is almost guaranteed to have them stop tracking you because in addition to the amount of trees blocking their line of sight, you'll also reduce aggro range by sneaking, as sneaking produces less noise than running or walking; doing that will definitely make more time pass than 7 seconds before they can reaquire you with direct-tracking. Of course, there is always the possibility that you will run into that jump-scare zombie between the trees, but if you keep your cool and have somewhat of a bead on what your surroundings looks like, you should be able to come out on top. I STILL say that the amount of time that zombies have before the direct-track loses it's lock could do with being halved or something to that effect, but I hope I could provide at least some assistance.
My one major gripe with this game is how a half brain dead rotting corpse can lock onto you from miles away like a military trained sniper. Their view distance just needs reducing globally.
Their old Ai was perfect. Not too hard, not too easy. Herding large groups of zombies away from your base after a noise event was possible if you were experienced and didn't panic. Now the controls are so clunky, you walk in a half circle if you change direction(what??). The zombies are smarter than people AI in most games. I really really hope they fine tune this before they call the game finished.
@@_--Reaper--_ eh, id be wary of that due to my experiences with the "1 week later" setting back on b40 (which sets zombie senses to poor), had zombies consistently ignore shouts and even not notice other zombies getting their skull bashed in right next to them, with the only thing that would seem to reliably get their attention being running, so basically as long as you didnt run the game became a joke difficulty wise. would be interesting to see if it is still like that now with the changes to pathfinding and the addition of sneak mode, as ive avoided that mode ever since and just play sandbox if i want something a bit easier than your standard survival.
@@pineappleparty1624 This was already covered in a different thread, but the old AI was incredibly flawed and made the game trivial, you didn't need a wall or anything, just crouch walk in a straight line, eventually if they can see you, they just pretend they don't. This new one requires some fine tuning, but makes hiding you know, actually hiding. Honestly if they just shook off the tracking through a house section of it, it would be fine.
I usually never comment on a video, but this video is so informative and really helps me out a lot that I must thank you. Ive been trying to find videos about zombie pathfinding because I always have difficulty losing them, but I couldn't find any until now. You've earned yourself a subscriber
This is pretty much killing the game for me right now as a newcomer. I never expected such a game to be easy or anything and I have quite a few hours on CDDA, but zombies in this game ironically have a better tracking of the player than most stealth games with "intelligent" guards. I tried to use the park ranger as a noob "crutch" hoping to use trees - no success. Tried as a burglar with inconsipcious and gracious on top as another crutch - no success. All my runs currently are reading books and watching tv on fast forward, going on 2-3 loot runs, at some point attracting a small horde, trying to lose the horde through whatever goes for 15 minutes but instead attracting a big horde, getting bored and altf4 to play something else. All this time I tried to find logic, but apparently it's just cheating.
@@Solano1111 i wish i could like this game more. But the zombies pathfinding system honestly ruins it for me. Especially since this is pretty much how i die most of the time.
@@bananafone1414 When I started playing I would aggro a bunch of zombies (something like an alarm ringing) and then run around town hoping that at SOME point I would end up somewhere without zombies. The problem was, there was no such place. Except deep in the woods at which point I was hungry, thirsty, tired and exhausted, and there was no way to go back without aggroing all the zombies again. And it was no fun feeling so helpless. After trying over and over, I realized that zombies were actually easy to lose around houses. 10 million zombies following you? Walk into a house, go out the back, they all get stuck inside and around it, and stop tracking you, even if it's a very small shed. After playing for some time, I also discovered the easy way to defeat small crowds of zombies : draw them one by one, by sight, staying at the max range. It feels like one zombie moving should make them all turn and follow, but thanksfully it doesn't work like that... yet (it should imo but I'm a masochist). Then I discovered the absolutely op technique of herding zombies to a fence or a window so that you can bash their heads in really easily. It's tricky because if you don't time it right, you might trip and die, but it's by far the most efficient way I've found to kill zombies early game and defeat actual hordes following you. Even stronger in multiplayer with friends to help you manage the flow of zombies. Then since you can survive a bit longer, you get to find different weapons, learn how to handle your moodles to keep your strength up, and can start reliably fighting zombies without having to push them down (by swinging a weapon at them), which means you don't have to cower from 3+ zombies coming at you anymore. The game is tough to learn but also rewarding and it has tons of layers of complexity, so you don't get bored of it quick.
@@bananafone1414 Usually houses will have 4 zombies at most, if you run into 4 zombies you're probably fine (using fences or windows to fight them). But usually when facing a big horde, from a chopper, gunshots, alarm or whatever, you don't stop at one house. You go to a row of houses, that you've hopefully cleared earlier so the windows and doors are unlocked, and go through each of them, and by the last one, hopefully you only have around 4 zombies or less following you and you can face them with the last window you crossed. You can then rest and recover and go back, drawing a few zombies at a time through fences and windows to clear the way back. I find it impossible right now to sneak around zombies. I find that you inevitably end up drawing hordes of them when trying to. So there comes a point when you have to fight, and if you need to fight anyway, you might as well do it from the get go, when it's safe to do so, to create a safe area you can fall back to later. I'm usually more of a stealth player, but in Zomboid, you have to go barbarian.
You’ve gotta be kidding me lmao. I was getting chased so much, It got to the point where I thought the zombies could literally smell me 😂. I had no idea they had actual wall hacks
You have to walk around and gather up the ones on your escape path first, then lose them or if you are confident in your combat kill a path through to always be able to retreat down.
Why does everyone say the zombies have 6 second memory of when they last saw you... Looks like they just have a few seconds of supernatural ability to track you through buildings rather than remembering your last position. Big difference.
This is actually an exploit fix that was added in version 41.53. Let me explain: In version 41.50, the player could elude zombies by simply running in a straight line in crouch stance. The distance was relatively small and this worked very consistently as a measure to escape zombies. The developers patched this in out in build 41.53 with the current behavior that you are describing. At the time, I erroneously thought this was a bug due to a zombie line of sight bug that was in 41.52. Perhaps a more simplistic way to describe the current pathfinding and line of sight logic is this: If a zombie detects you, and you can draw a straight line from the player to the zombie, the zombie will continue following the player for a very extreme distance. Zombies will get bored of you after a certain point, but we're talking a distance of something ridiculous like a quarter or half mile.
Zombies automatically pathing to your last known location makes sense. Zombies in hunting mode having a larger radius of awareness makes sense. Zombies seeing through solit objects to artificially make losing them harder does not.
Yeah it’s ridiculous when I can play a file for nearly 30 minutes straight of just running from a horde through trees and houses because one zombie saw me when I spawned
I never realized how powerful this is until I tired it out. I appreciate the advice!!! I didn’t think it would work as well as it did with larger groups. I had no clue they could see through buildings like that.
They dont see through building, they just have something called memory, all humans have it, though it should stop pathfinding as soon as you break line of sight, so at the house corner. From that point they should look around and try to spot you, if you moved out their standard/alerted status vision range they shouldn't track on you.
Dude, as someone with 460 hours who has been playing since 2014, you are a legend for these videos. I didn't think there was much more I could learn about this game but when I watch these videos everything is new to me. They explain the weird little things I've noticed about this game over the past 7 years.
As someone who also has had this game since 2014 I am disgusted at what they did to this game. It's not playable unless you watch this video to have any clue what the devs were thinking when they remade the pathing. I won't be playing this game anymore until its fixed. There was nothing wrong with the gameplay before this. It had just enough challenge for a game you would spend weeks-months on one session. It's sad, i used to recommend this game to a lot of people. Now I regret it.
It’s a bitter feeling seeing new fans of this game defend the questionable decisions that these devs make. Just because they made something that’s interesting doesn’t mean they’re angels. They’ve had plenty of backlash in the past and it was well earned, the unfair path finding is just one of many questionable decisions they’ve made.
@@squattingheads Coming from someone who _does_ like this detail in their pathfinding, that's a really weak excuse lmao. I like it because it makes it difficult to exploit the AI, adds a necessary challenge, as well as create an illusion of realism that makes the player feel like they're being hunted by the animalistic predators that are the zombies.
@@SlowWinterNuts except they’re not. Zombies are rotting corpses with a barely working brain. They shouldn’t be able to see you through a wall, nor should be clustered all over the place. The game is a constant run of evading one horde just to run into another one and have to go a another marathon just to do it again. The pathfinding could work if there wasn’t a horde per frame and you can actually outrun them. Zombies are broken down bodies, how can they keep up with a healthy male?
@@SlowWinterNuts Except in the video he's still breaking the AI, the only alternative is breaking their tracking by forcing them to bash/climb stuff. Or killing every bastard. That's not good game design, it's choppy at best. You're forcing players to break your game to play it. This game is incidentally better in MP because it breaks zombies' tracking to something that's far more reasonable.
Not a fan of how the zombies work and this actually gives you a visual representation of why I feel that way. It's so bad and gamey that I don't even bother with sneaking, breaking line of sight or any of the sensible things you'd assume one should do and just lead them past as many doors/windows as possible and gtfo. It's just sad that we have to fight cheese with cheese...
Came back to this game after a few years to find out you now need a phd in the pathfinding and line of site algorithms in order to understand how to lose a zombie because they now have wallhacks. You basically have to change your identity and hide in a foreign country for 10 years for them to give up searching for you. You could travel to fucking mars and they would still see you through their fucking telescope and they would build a rocket just to hunt you down. This game just isnt fun any more everytime you go outside you end up on an hour long chase trying to lose zombies so you can go back to your safehouse.
Eh.. its one problem the game has for sure. But there's still ways to reliably lose zombies if you can't or don't want to fight them. I personally often bring a very firearm-oriented playstyle, and clear out huge hordes with firearms, so it applies less to me. But there's still reliable ways you can get away from zombies, it's not Impossible and you can get adept at it with practice.
Very interesting, I’ve always wondered why zombies seem set in following a route sometimes, even when I’m right there and assume the zombie is tracking me. It also seems to explain when I duck out of a car, oftentimes zombies will walk up and check the drivers seat before reacquiring me.
Me and my friend has been STRUGGLING with figuring out EXACTLY how to avoid the zombies, they seem pretty damn smart to us until i see this video and kind of understand whats going on by your example this information is so important to have thank you!
You're not alone. In my opinion as someone who has played this game since 2014, this new pathing is way way way OP. They need to fix it. Any normal person would assume the AI is broken and just get a refund straight away. But yeah at least someone cracked the code and explained these magically smarter than human zombies lol...
This is what makes the tall wood fences in the suburbs so useful if you accidentally pop a house alarm while looting tbh. The alarm pulls zombies to the house and you can take advantage of their pathing to ball them up and pull them to a fence and hop it to break line of sight. Then if you're quick about it you can loot other neighboring houses relatively unbothered by zombies on the street because the bulk of the zombies that saw you will be by the fence, and if you were careful then the ones that didn't will have pathed to the house. You only have so much time to take advantage of this though, because after a little while the game will start breaking up the zombies into smaller groups and forcing them to spread out.
With rally groups turned on (its default) the zombies immediately start spreading each group to be 15 tiles apart as soon as the noise ends and they finish their current path. If you turn off rally groups or reduce its minimum spread you can end up with hundreds of zombies crowded around a house for a few hours and its great.
I honestly never understood how a half-rotten corpse can see you at a distance of 20 meters, I understand that in the end it's a game, but when he sees you at a distance of three houses, at night, without lighting, it's not zombies, but some kind of vampires
@@Retanaru is it cheating? We dont know how the zombies work. They are walking dead. maybe they smell that you went through the door. Its a game. it needs obstacles. Seems like a good compromise to make the game challenging
What's really annoying me is that I try to clear a neighborhood by growing The Horde while walking through it.. I then draw them through an area pretty far away and drag them through a forest. Lose line-of-sight with them all and somehow they end up running back into the neighborhood as a horde from several blocks away.
I usually follow Nurses advice to lose the horde in the woods and it works 100% of the time. But when in urban areas like towns and streets, this is useful info I need. Another thing about losing them in the woods... Idk if anyone done this but most zombies will stop their tracks if you lose them in the woods at half way, so I've fire a shotgun blast far off in the woods thinking that will follow the noise deeper in the woods. I haven't found out but I'm assume it worked. 😅 I wonder if you try and test how noise works?
I dont want to say it because looks like you aint gonna agree anyway but...losing zombies in the woods does not work. Maybe half blind zombies with short memory then yeah, but not normal ones (unless u are moving much faster than they do, but then you should be able to lose them everywhere)
@@himedo1512 but they aren't solid objects, so the game doesn't set the zombies to indirect tracking, it keeps them on direct. It's more likely you and others are losing them after the woods before they exit and you erroneously assumed it was the woods. Only solid objects can set zombies to indirect tracking.
@@Bobdylan12121 yes they are...? Trees, big bushes, ect... Block LOS of completely. And in thick woods you can't see more than like 2 tiles around your because there is so much shit in the way. And the video literally shows it working with trees
@@himedo1512 He clearly says in the video that trees are not considered solid objects, and do not always completely block LOS. He obviously recommends against tree lines and then tells you how to use them better given the Meta information. Zombies track through even solid objects at times, LOS does not always matter as stated in the video
Great vid This is why you go into sandbox settings and set zombie sight and hearing to poor. Dead, gunk filled eyes and ears can hardly see as well as the game makes it seem, and definitely cant differentiate a living human from another z as easily.
incredibly helpful video, i figured that moving behind houses would usually make the zombies lose sight of me but i never knew it's so much more complicated. thanks a lot!
when you just start playing, you struggle to shrug off zombie, when you've play for a long time, you struggle to let zombie follow you so you can deal with all of them
The game should have a new feature of letting you hide inside vehicles. The player would be completely hidden from any zombies outside but would also not get to see what's out there making it a very risky move when hiding from a horde.
The zombies are cracked in this game. I literally cannot stop getting spotted by zombies. I usually get a trash spawn and am forced to go to other houses to find supplies, except an entire hoard of zombies follows me and it’s impossible to lose them.
After one of your last vids explaining how turning zombies aren't tracking you, I've noticed that even with minimal sneaking and lightfooted it is possible to run up on a zom and behind them while they turn and they won't see you, although they hear you and turn around again. I was always under the impression that they are tracking you as soon as they start to turn their heads, but not so. It isn't until they "see" you. Never would have noticed that if not for your in depth videos. Thx.
The game has been in alpha since like 2013 . It's extremely in-depth. A full tutorial that taught you almost everything would be longer than a whole story campaign for most games. What game recently has not had a huge amount of info available online? Does Minecraft have bad game design for not having a tutorial? This game is about surviving as long as possible. People are going to take some extreme measures to do that. This isn't necessary info to play, it just helps. This will probably change in the next build anyway.
@@maxgb2000real it does now, but back in the beginning it did not and you would have to look up everything. From crafting to mechanics. I think it’s the reason it grew so much because all of the players interacted with each other and everyone was watching videos about how to do things. I’m not a huge fan of the hand holding it has now. I wish there was an option to turn it off :/
To be fair, the point of the game is learning from your mistakes and past lives. That's why you're able to keep playing as new characters in the same persistent instance of the world that contains all the things you did as your previous character. The game is supposed to closely mirror how a scenario like this might play out for an average person if it were real, but still gives you the opportunity to build on your previous progress in a way that enhances the lore of the world. "This is how you died."
You don't have to. You're supposed to learn from your mistakes and accept that you're going to die a lot while doing that. I learned the way zombies behave by experience
Multiplayer with high amount of zombies is impossible. I played in a 4x zombie server. Muldraugh was so full of zombies that it was insane. The problem here was not the amount of zombies but that they would chase me from miles away, now I know why. The only thing I did in that server was run until my character couldnt run anymore and then got eaten. I ran in stealth mode though, trying to avoid by hugging corners and such, and got chased either way. When fatigue hit I was slower than the zombies, so I had to stop stealthing, and walk normally instead, which attracted more zombies. It was impossible.
Omg, this is so broken. Now you have to fight unintuitive algo, instead of just play as it feels like to be playing against dead bodies. I remember in earlier builds (back in like 2015-2016) zombies' behavior being somewhat intuitive and close to how someone braindead might actually be tracking source of disturbance. Shaking them off your tail was not easy but it was possible to do without alerting new ones. Hell, it was a great deal of suspence just to sneak behind them into some house. Now, many years later, it is totally gone. I tried build 41 and I cant even last two days cz dead meat spot me crouching behind a window away from the end of the screen. And to actually see them that far away (to look outside screen bounds) you have to adapt fighting stance, which in turn breaks crouching mode, making you visible to even more zombies. Situation when you cant sneak past a zombie on another side of a screen in a middle of a night is nuts. And it even wont be fixed with sandbox options, lol. No matter how "deaf" and "blind" i make them, they just feel(!) me from more far away than I can see them (most recent PZ build). I dunno, maybe devs play on 8k resolution on maxed out zoom, but I get spotted by zombies long before they appear on my HD (even when sneaking with all the "thieft" traits). I spent several hour trying to digest this new (for me) algos, got tired, started yet new game with no electricity, spawned in center of a house, and only pressed crouch. Not a single movement after that. In a middle of a night(!) two zombies were passing by my lawn, they both spotted my through my window and broke in. I dispatched them with bare hands standing right there in my room, didnt move a tile. Sounds (I assume) attracted several more zombies to another side of my house, they started to bang another window with me not in line of sight, so I crouched my way into a windowless room, closed the door and stood still. And yet they somehow found me, started to bang on my door and eventually got inside. PZ devs have clearly lost last pieces of sense. Also, what's up with all those guns? I remember gun being a rare item, available mostly at police stations and such, and now there is a loaded gun or a rifle like in every second residential. In my ten to twenty runs on apoc preset I found only two bottles of water and ONE bag (and it was duffel), but like 30 guns of all kinds. This is crazy. Now PZ is the most broken zombie game ever.
I tend to move fast, act fast, and be nomadic. I love this system because I can and need to sprint up to a window, smash it open, hop through, and then barrel out the other side to lose zombies because just outpacing them isn't feasible
Hey dude! I'm making a "101 Tips For Project Zomboid" video and I'd really like to use a bit of footage from this video and direct people to it to learn more about zombie aggro and losing them in a chase. Credit would be given on-screen and in the description. Would you be okay with that? :)
Thanks for this video. I too have been substantially frustrated with this game. No other game has made me forget that I enjoy it as much as this title has. I have to reload a multiplayer game I'm playing with friends in order to remember. Still, there are facets of the game that still make me facepalm. This video confirms that they cheat. I knew they did, but having corroboration is nice. Walking through walls, furniture, seeing in the dark, biting through armor, are the ones that stand out. Anyone playing certain RTS titles over the decades can kinda relate. Watching those hero units wander over to your local mobs and kill them (so you can't) in WCIII, or watching Hydralisks track your fogged/distant transports outside their vision in SC, or having NOD forces attack your massing army out in the sightless fields of battle... Yeah. A.I.'s cheat like a mo-fo. It gets old. Seeing this though should help in the future...a wee bit. ...but only in the multiplayer I have going on, solo runs...are impossible...for me. That radar of theirs, man...
I don't need to lose zombies, my lumberjack mows them down. Sarcasm aside, this is a great source of information, I never would've guessed it was this complex.
As a dev, I'd consider offering an option to choose the tracking system, simplified for "zombies stop following you soon after breaking direct sight", regular for "zombies follow you, or the general direction of last sight of you, for a short time" and complex/realistic for what you've described.
i think this is why even though project zomboid seems fun in concept, i never have fun playing it and log off after a few quick deaths. it feels like i cant go outside because one zombie seeing me is instant death, its so hard to lose that invariably ive attracted another zombie by the time ive lost the first one, and it just gets worse from there. its less a zombie survival game and more like a game about stephen king's The Mist
Fucking called it. I had the feeling there was something fishy going on with zombie memory, and lo and behold, they have xray vision for like three full seconds. I wish this game didnt have so many of these cheap artificial difficulty increases, or at least provided the option to turn all of them off.
@@_--Reaper--_ still a band-aid for a decapitation. AI with cheats isn't challenging "smart" AI it is lazy coding and indicates how dumb their current AI model is. They need to actually make it better instead of making decaying zombie eyes equivalent to superman x-ray vision.
I have noticed that if you vault a large fence the zombies will track to where you should have ended up, or will just stay on the other side of the tall fence. Often I will move to the other side of the yard and leap another tall fence just to be sure, seems they can never track you anymore if you do that
usually, when encountering a horde, I enter a house and let them break through it to get distracted inside since their pathfinding never made a lot of sense to me at the time. The wallhacks gag was also relatable
The problem is not how to lose zombies, the problem is how to avoid getting in a worse situation everytime you turn a corner. West point is a mess, a small group starts following me and o get rid of them I encounter several other groups that start chasing me. This stuff goes on endlessly, I just have to move forever and I can’t stop in any safe house.
Planning. You need to pull the zombies in the area you are planning to escape to into your horde before trying to lose them around a corner. Otherwise you are just walking around a corner into a new group of zombies.
@@Retanaru I heard this before but I don't quite get it..: how do I plan if I'm exploring the map and I don't know the surroundings? this usually happens in my first exploration. F.e. let's say I'm looking for a car and I roam around searching for a parking lot... I keep attracting more and more zombies and in the end I'm just running for my life instead of finding what I'm looking for.
@@DonBozzi While at the parking lot, find a good building to lose the zombies behind. Draw the zombies away from the building. Even yell a bit. Make sure to attract the zombies that are behind the building and on your escape side. Now kite the whole pack into a tight group. Head behind the building and wait a few seconds. Then run to the other corner so that when the zombies cross behind the building they still cannot see you. Now the parking lot is clear and you can search the cars.
I really like your channel bro, very detailed explanation to the mechanics of the game. And not very long videos and right to the point, which I appreciate :)
this is honestly making the game so boring for me, once the horde alerts on you its just infinite hold w and constant hoping to lose some of them, and theres guarantee for you to be exerted and tired when you finally lose constant infinite hordes of zombies.
What about sound? Does that factor in at all for their tracking? How about the perks that affect how easily seen you are or how much noise you make? Is the 20 tiles example in the video only for default character traits?
As a new player, i curved this by modding the zombies ability to see and hear with "definitive zombies" mod. I tweaked it to where their sight, intelligence, and memory are all nerfed by 1-3 stages depending on the weather. If you dont want zombies tracking you back home from the county over, then i suggest you do this. It will make zombies harder to horde up, but it will help you get experience killing smaller hordes as practice for normal settings.
I have a question why i always bump into horde, when i'm already trying to lose one? I lost so many runs to that, once its big, i can't escape it. escaping it only makes it larger.
You need to circle around them to clump them up and then cut back to where they came from to lose them. If you keep heading off into fresh territory you will keep running into more and more groups of zombies.
basically just expect absolutely everywhere to have several large hordes unless you know that you have gone to that spot that youre going to specifically and cleared it out entirely. zombies spawn all over the place in towns and nowhere in the town is safe by default so you have to clear it out yourself. run back into an area that you have cleared out and then come back to fight them later from somewhere in the cleared area that they didnt go to. its one of the reasons clearing out a big area in a town is important. and just be extremely careful to not attract entire hordes at once anyways because theyre a pain in the ass to deal with
How far can a zombie pathfind around a tall fence to get to you? I want to build a base at the refugee camp but I don't want to put it somewhere the Expanded Heli Events mod can send down a horde from St Peregrin and evict me, but I can't block the path to where I can't myself drive North.
So this explains why I've never been able to simply outrun zombies. Also, the ducking behind corners and waiting is a huge tip, as I like too keep windows and doors intact incase I need an emergency safehouse.
I don't mind ravaging other houses in a neighborhood to make a quick escape. If I need an emergency safehouse I'll just go to a brand new chunk where the zombies haven't broken into or out of anything at all.
Oh you can absolutely outrun zombies! But only if you are running through a zombie-free area and the only ones are the ones behind you! The usual problem with outrunning zombies is attracting all the news ones xD
I thought that ducking was autocorrect
Leaves some margin of safety before cutting corner so that you have time to react when there's a zombie.
nice car mods, I use a combination of them on my server
Extremely vital information. I've been trying to survive Riverside and I take the 2-floor house on the outer suburbs of the town as my base. Lotta trees there and I always say "I'll lose them in the trees" figuring the time it takes for them to also go through a tree means they have that same "blinded" sight you do when pushing through one. Now I know it's gonna take a lot more than that to break them off.
designate a part of the city you don't like, start screaming and lead them there, when you get a molotov torch them. It's easier to lose them in cities, since you just sprint forward for 3 seconds and then stand behind a house, then loop around
The restaurant bro. Its the best base in Riverside imho. Once you break the stairs you're basically 100% safe, you have tons of space to farm on the roof as soon as you can build stairs, you can build a bridge to the river in order to fish, and you already have a normal bed, 4 fridges and 4 stoves upstairs. Once you get a generator and a bunch of gas cans, you're golden forever
Don't panic, just herd/lure/kite em out of the area then stealth run around the block
Is that the house to the left (west) of the town where theres a gnome on the neighbours lawn ?
@@darkfangulas yes that's the one. I always steal that gnome since it's nearby, and a TV from the neighbor a bit of the ways east. There's a longer ranch home that has a VHS TV in it, and the little shack that's closer has an antique in it.
One of my super favorite things about the zombies is how, even if you set their sight and smell to poor, when it is foggy, they can still see you from outside the ring of fog where you CAN'T see them.
Makes a whole lot of sense that some rotting corpse would have better senses than a living being, I'm sure.
Smell isn't even an option in the current stable build. It was turned off way before they removed the setting too.
I can't confirm that the thick fog does this, but I know I got some medium fog the other day and the same thing you are describing is true. They seemingly could see me even though I can't see them. I do not believe I was making noise, but it's possible.
1. There is no smell mechanic;
2. The fog only affects the players' vision. Zombies can see through the fog as if it was a bright sunny day.
Why do people always whine about "realism" on zombie games ? Have you ever seen a zombie in real life ?
@@sigmamale4147 I have it. Usually we call them crackheads.
This system needs a big rehaul. It's kind of nonsensical how far the zombies can track you for and how they wallhack to keep following you.
They used to stop tracking you after you jogged away a bit in sneak stance. But yeah, they should probably tone it down a bit
You are 100% right. IDK why they even changed their old pathing, before sneak stance was a thing.
Always though this. Back in the day the game was way more playable, then they teased this new “sadistic AI” they were working on claiming how much more difficult it was. I remember going back to previous builds of the game because of how stupid it was at the time.
The old strategy used to be to lure hordes into attacking random houses and then leaving through a back entrance but this no longer works as often
@@c.dl.4274 I used to loop them into the forest. Of course it backfired on me when a noise event had them all pouring out lol.
I like it, it adds to the persisntance of zombies found in many other zombie media
That would explain why sometimes when I run back home, double checked the area around the house. See no zombie for a few minutes. Get inside, organising first aid kit, only to have that 1 zombie suddenly walk straight in to where I was inside the house. The same zombie I ran by from the other end of the town. That tracking distance is way too insane.
Huh, this is actually something that cripples the experience for many newcomers, because this level of in-depth meta knowledge is usually not something you think about. You'd think that simply breaking line of sight would be enough, but since zombies cheat, the experience is set up to be even harder than what is realistic. Good video and good on you for explaining this, I just feel the devs should have nerfed the tracking system somewhat.
Yeah why would they make line of sight not important, or do they say that the zombie can hear where u go
@@Hacktheplanet_ they say something like sight sound smell for project zomboid
@@Sleaptime fair enough, guess its hard to ge tinyo the game though as a new player u just wanna stop playing when u are being chases by so many zombies
this is exactly the problem me and my buddies had, the zombies are literally in such unrealistic numbers and with supernatural tracking abilities that the game just becomes running simulator, even if you think you might finally be far enough away to escape the 2000+ zombie horde behind you a new 4000+ zombie horde appears right in front of you then you go 2 more feet maybe feeling a bit frisky and turn a corner and now there is a new 10000+ zombie horde. that plus complete hacks to always no matter what know your exact location makes the game unplayable for us. why is some abandoned ghetto cul de sac have more zombies in it than people in your current country of residence? how come i can walk out into the woods to some abandoned mine camp or something completely obscure and have more zombies in it than every episode of twd combined? ruins the game, nerf the zombie spawn theres no reason for a new billion zombie horde to spawn for every new pixel that comes on my screen and theres no reason for them to instantly see you from 20000 miles away with perfect tracking capabilities
Since I posted this, I have learned a little about avoiding zombies and I'll attempt to share what I have learned. It helps a lot if you have a densely packed forest near you. You get a horde on your tail, run into the woods where there is literally no line of sight for either you or the Zs. As soon as you are certain that a fair distance has been put between you and the horde, crouch and begin quick-sneaking. This is almost guaranteed to have them stop tracking you because in addition to the amount of trees blocking their line of sight, you'll also reduce aggro range by sneaking, as sneaking produces less noise than running or walking; doing that will definitely make more time pass than 7 seconds before they can reaquire you with direct-tracking.
Of course, there is always the possibility that you will run into that jump-scare zombie between the trees, but if you keep your cool and have somewhat of a bead on what your surroundings looks like, you should be able to come out on top. I STILL say that the amount of time that zombies have before the direct-track loses it's lock could do with being halved or something to that effect, but I hope I could provide at least some assistance.
My one major gripe with this game is how a half brain dead rotting corpse can lock onto you from miles away like a military trained sniper. Their view distance just needs reducing globally.
go in sandbox and set them to poor vision hearing and memory
Their old Ai was perfect. Not too hard, not too easy. Herding large groups of zombies away from your base after a noise event was possible if you were experienced and didn't panic. Now the controls are so clunky, you walk in a half circle if you change direction(what??). The zombies are smarter than people AI in most games. I really really hope they fine tune this before they call the game finished.
Yeah this seems shit
@@_--Reaper--_ eh, id be wary of that due to my experiences with the "1 week later" setting back on b40 (which sets zombie senses to poor), had zombies consistently ignore shouts and even not notice other zombies getting their skull bashed in right next to them, with the only thing that would seem to reliably get their attention being running, so basically as long as you didnt run the game became a joke difficulty wise. would be interesting to see if it is still like that now with the changes to pathfinding and the addition of sneak mode, as ive avoided that mode ever since and just play sandbox if i want something a bit easier than your standard survival.
@@pineappleparty1624 This was already covered in a different thread, but the old AI was incredibly flawed and made the game trivial, you didn't need a wall or anything, just crouch walk in a straight line, eventually if they can see you, they just pretend they don't.
This new one requires some fine tuning, but makes hiding you know, actually hiding. Honestly if they just shook off the tracking through a house section of it, it would be fine.
I usually never comment on a video, but this video is so informative and really helps me out a lot that I must thank you. Ive been trying to find videos about zombie pathfinding because I always have difficulty losing them, but I couldn't find any until now. You've earned yourself a subscriber
Running 20 tiles to lose 2 zombie usually has you pulling 20 zombies along the way lmao
Clearly this means you gotta run 200 tiles two lose 20 zombies
@@june9914 Then u Would gather another 200 zombies lol
@@valent9260 no shit
@@mister6091 Then run 400 to lose those too, duh
This is pretty much killing the game for me right now as a newcomer. I never expected such a game to be easy or anything and I have quite a few hours on CDDA, but zombies in this game ironically have a better tracking of the player than most stealth games with "intelligent" guards.
I tried to use the park ranger as a noob "crutch" hoping to use trees - no success.
Tried as a burglar with inconsipcious and gracious on top as another crutch - no success.
All my runs currently are reading books and watching tv on fast forward, going on 2-3 loot runs, at some point attracting a small horde, trying to lose the horde through whatever goes for 15 minutes but instead attracting a big horde, getting bored and altf4 to play something else.
All this time I tried to find logic, but apparently it's just cheating.
yeah i had the same experience, this game is just badly designed
@@Solano1111 i wish i could like this game more. But the zombies pathfinding system honestly ruins it for me. Especially since this is pretty much how i die most of the time.
@@bananafone1414 When I started playing I would aggro a bunch of zombies (something like an alarm ringing) and then run around town hoping that at SOME point I would end up somewhere without zombies. The problem was, there was no such place. Except deep in the woods at which point I was hungry, thirsty, tired and exhausted, and there was no way to go back without aggroing all the zombies again. And it was no fun feeling so helpless.
After trying over and over, I realized that zombies were actually easy to lose around houses. 10 million zombies following you? Walk into a house, go out the back, they all get stuck inside and around it, and stop tracking you, even if it's a very small shed.
After playing for some time, I also discovered the easy way to defeat small crowds of zombies : draw them one by one, by sight, staying at the max range. It feels like one zombie moving should make them all turn and follow, but thanksfully it doesn't work like that... yet (it should imo but I'm a masochist).
Then I discovered the absolutely op technique of herding zombies to a fence or a window so that you can bash their heads in really easily. It's tricky because if you don't time it right, you might trip and die, but it's by far the most efficient way I've found to kill zombies early game and defeat actual hordes following you. Even stronger in multiplayer with friends to help you manage the flow of zombies.
Then since you can survive a bit longer, you get to find different weapons, learn how to handle your moodles to keep your strength up, and can start reliably fighting zombies without having to push them down (by swinging a weapon at them), which means you don't have to cower from 3+ zombies coming at you anymore.
The game is tough to learn but also rewarding and it has tons of layers of complexity, so you don't get bored of it quick.
@@NatTardis yeah i try that. the only problem is i usually run into more zombie while trying to find a new house to stay at thus remaking the cycle.
@@bananafone1414 Usually houses will have 4 zombies at most, if you run into 4 zombies you're probably fine (using fences or windows to fight them). But usually when facing a big horde, from a chopper, gunshots, alarm or whatever, you don't stop at one house. You go to a row of houses, that you've hopefully cleared earlier so the windows and doors are unlocked, and go through each of them, and by the last one, hopefully you only have around 4 zombies or less following you and you can face them with the last window you crossed. You can then rest and recover and go back, drawing a few zombies at a time through fences and windows to clear the way back.
I find it impossible right now to sneak around zombies. I find that you inevitably end up drawing hordes of them when trying to. So there comes a point when you have to fight, and if you need to fight anyway, you might as well do it from the get go, when it's safe to do so, to create a safe area you can fall back to later. I'm usually more of a stealth player, but in Zomboid, you have to go barbarian.
You’ve gotta be kidding me lmao. I was getting chased so much, It got to the point where I thought the zombies could literally smell me 😂. I had no idea they had actual wall hacks
New Zomboider here. It's extremely frustrating to escape because in trying to duck one zombie, voila, there's another now.
You have to walk around and gather up the ones on your escape path first, then lose them or if you are confident in your combat kill a path through to always be able to retreat down.
Why does everyone say the zombies have 6 second memory of when they last saw you... Looks like they just have a few seconds of supernatural ability to track you through buildings rather than remembering your last position. Big difference.
This is actually an exploit fix that was added in version 41.53. Let me explain:
In version 41.50, the player could elude zombies by simply running in a straight line in crouch stance. The distance was relatively small and this worked very consistently as a measure to escape zombies. The developers patched this in out in build 41.53 with the current behavior that you are describing. At the time, I erroneously thought this was a bug due to a zombie line of sight bug that was in 41.52.
Perhaps a more simplistic way to describe the current pathfinding and line of sight logic is this: If a zombie detects you, and you can draw a straight line from the player to the zombie, the zombie will continue following the player for a very extreme distance. Zombies will get bored of you after a certain point, but we're talking a distance of something ridiculous like a quarter or half mile.
Yeah once they started updating again there's so many little tweaks and fixes that made messing with the game interesting.
Zombies automatically pathing to your last known location makes sense. Zombies in hunting mode having a larger radius of awareness makes sense.
Zombies seeing through solit objects to artificially make losing them harder does not.
They better fix this cos I'm gonna get into this game in the next few days and do not want to be dealing with BS pathfinding logic
Yeah it’s ridiculous when I can play a file for nearly 30 minutes straight of just running from a horde through trees and houses because one zombie saw me when I spawned
@@KatieT97 I feel you
Now I wanna know what's the difference between "navigation" and "basic navigation" in sandbox zombie settings.
I think my next stream will be trying to break the pathfinding and that'll be on the menu.
@@Retanaru Please do, this stuff is extremely useful to new players like me and fun to watch from an implementation perspective
I guess they start opening windows and doors
@@efeerbas2709 there is an option for them to "use doors" but that's 1 level above "navigation"
@@lol_dab oh okay then just started playing so i dont know that much
Incredible work man, I keep getting amazed by your videos. Always super useful info!
I never realized how powerful this is until I tired it out. I appreciate the advice!!! I didn’t think it would work as well as it did with larger groups. I had no clue they could see through buildings like that.
They dont see through building, they just have something called memory, all humans have it, though it should stop pathfinding as soon as you break line of sight, so at the house corner. From that point they should look around and try to spot you, if you moved out their standard/alerted status vision range they shouldn't track on you.
Dude, as someone with 460 hours who has been playing since 2014, you are a legend for these videos. I didn't think there was much more I could learn about this game but when I watch these videos everything is new to me. They explain the weird little things I've noticed about this game over the past 7 years.
As someone who also has had this game since 2014 I am disgusted at what they did to this game. It's not playable unless you watch this video to have any clue what the devs were thinking when they remade the pathing. I won't be playing this game anymore until its fixed. There was nothing wrong with the gameplay before this. It had just enough challenge for a game you would spend weeks-months on one session. It's sad, i used to recommend this game to a lot of people. Now I regret it.
@@EggEnjoyer I said before crouching lol.
I get panicky even before my character feels panicky. This game is GOAT man
It’s a bitter feeling seeing new fans of this game defend the questionable decisions that these devs make.
Just because they made something that’s interesting doesn’t mean they’re angels. They’ve had plenty of backlash in the past and it was well earned, the unfair path finding is just one of many questionable decisions they’ve made.
Why? its a game. It needs obstacles. "realism" most likely would make the game way to easy
@@squattingheads
Coming from someone who _does_ like this detail in their pathfinding, that's a really weak excuse lmao. I like it because it makes it difficult to exploit the AI, adds a necessary challenge, as well as create an illusion of realism that makes the player feel like they're being hunted by the animalistic predators that are the zombies.
@@SlowWinterNuts except they’re not. Zombies are rotting corpses with a barely working brain. They shouldn’t be able to see you through a wall, nor should be clustered all over the place. The game is a constant run of evading one horde just to run into another one and have to go a another marathon just to do it again. The pathfinding could work if there wasn’t a horde per frame and you can actually outrun them. Zombies are broken down bodies, how can they keep up with a healthy male?
@@SlowWinterNuts Except in the video he's still breaking the AI, the only alternative is breaking their tracking by forcing them to bash/climb stuff. Or killing every bastard. That's not good game design, it's choppy at best. You're forcing players to break your game to play it. This game is incidentally better in MP because it breaks zombies' tracking to something that's far more reasonable.
no zombie can see you, if there arent any zombies left to see you. Reduce them all to burning embers
Not a fan of how the zombies work and this actually gives you a visual representation of why I feel that way. It's so bad and gamey that I don't even bother with sneaking, breaking line of sight or any of the sensible things you'd assume one should do and just lead them past as many doors/windows as possible and gtfo. It's just sad that we have to fight cheese with cheese...
Came back to this game after a few years to find out you now need a phd in the pathfinding and line of site algorithms in order to understand how to lose a zombie because they now have wallhacks. You basically have to change your identity and hide in a foreign country for 10 years for them to give up searching for you. You could travel to fucking mars and they would still see you through their fucking telescope and they would build a rocket just to hunt you down. This game just isnt fun any more everytime you go outside you end up on an hour long chase trying to lose zombies so you can go back to your safehouse.
Eh.. its one problem the game has for sure. But there's still ways to reliably lose zombies if you can't or don't want to fight them. I personally often bring a very firearm-oriented playstyle, and clear out huge hordes with firearms, so it applies less to me. But there's still reliable ways you can get away from zombies, it's not Impossible and you can get adept at it with practice.
Very interesting, I’ve always wondered why zombies seem set in following a route sometimes, even when I’m right there and assume the zombie is tracking me. It also seems to explain when I duck out of a car, oftentimes zombies will walk up and check the drivers seat before reacquiring me.
all these videos have taught me is that zomboid needs to work on its stealth/detection
Me and my friend has been STRUGGLING with figuring out EXACTLY how to avoid the zombies, they seem pretty damn smart to us until i see this video and kind of understand whats going on by your example this information is so important to have thank you!
You're not alone. In my opinion as someone who has played this game since 2014, this new pathing is way way way OP. They need to fix it. Any normal person would assume the AI is broken and just get a refund straight away. But yeah at least someone cracked the code and explained these magically smarter than human zombies lol...
This is what makes the tall wood fences in the suburbs so useful if you accidentally pop a house alarm while looting tbh. The alarm pulls zombies to the house and you can take advantage of their pathing to ball them up and pull them to a fence and hop it to break line of sight. Then if you're quick about it you can loot other neighboring houses relatively unbothered by zombies on the street because the bulk of the zombies that saw you will be by the fence, and if you were careful then the ones that didn't will have pathed to the house.
You only have so much time to take advantage of this though, because after a little while the game will start breaking up the zombies into smaller groups and forcing them to spread out.
With rally groups turned on (its default) the zombies immediately start spreading each group to be 15 tiles apart as soon as the noise ends and they finish their current path. If you turn off rally groups or reduce its minimum spread you can end up with hundreds of zombies crowded around a house for a few hours and its great.
I honestly never understood how a half-rotten corpse can see you at a distance of 20 meters, I understand that in the end it's a game, but when he sees you at a distance of three houses, at night, without lighting, it's not zombies, but some kind of vampires
so what you're saying is that the zombies cheat?
Yup, if you were to run around a corner to break LoS and then quickly enter a door they'd all know exactly where you went.
@@Retanaru is it cheating? We dont know how the zombies work. They are walking dead. maybe they smell that you went through the door.
Its a game. it needs obstacles. Seems like a good compromise to make the game challenging
@@squattingheads it’s literally wallhacks
@@squattingheads thats retarded zombies dont work like that
@@angelc4919 Yeah you're right the ai uses a wall hack to decide where you are. Just like how AI in cod uses an aimbot to aim at you.
What's really annoying me is that I try to clear a neighborhood by growing The Horde while walking through it.. I then draw them through an area pretty far away and drag them through a forest. Lose line-of-sight with them all and somehow they end up running back into the neighborhood as a horde from several blocks away.
This makes it lot more obvious why they sometimes still chase you even though they should have lost you.
I usually follow Nurses advice to lose the horde in the woods and it works 100% of the time. But when in urban areas like towns and streets, this is useful info I need.
Another thing about losing them in the woods... Idk if anyone done this but most zombies will stop their tracks if you lose them in the woods at half way, so I've fire a shotgun blast far off in the woods thinking that will follow the noise deeper in the woods. I haven't found out but I'm assume it worked. 😅
I wonder if you try and test how noise works?
I dont want to say it because looks like you aint gonna agree anyway but...losing zombies in the woods does not work.
Maybe half blind zombies with short memory then yeah, but not normal ones (unless u are moving much faster than they do, but then you should be able to lose them everywhere)
@@koteeji1295 thick woods completely block line of sight though, so it does work...
@@himedo1512 but they aren't solid objects, so the game doesn't set the zombies to indirect tracking, it keeps them on direct. It's more likely you and others are losing them after the woods before they exit and you erroneously assumed it was the woods. Only solid objects can set zombies to indirect tracking.
@@Bobdylan12121 yes they are...? Trees, big bushes, ect... Block LOS of completely. And in thick woods you can't see more than like 2 tiles around your because there is so much shit in the way. And the video literally shows it working with trees
@@himedo1512 He clearly says in the video that trees are not considered solid objects, and do not always completely block LOS. He obviously recommends against tree lines and then tells you how to use them better given the Meta information. Zombies track through even solid objects at times, LOS does not always matter as stated in the video
Great vid
This is why you go into sandbox settings and set zombie sight and hearing to poor.
Dead, gunk filled eyes and ears can hardly see as well as the game makes it seem, and definitely cant differentiate a living human from another z as easily.
incredibly helpful video, i figured that moving behind houses would usually make the zombies lose sight of me but i never knew it's so much more complicated. thanks a lot!
You just took my gameplay to another level, and made things much easier. Thank you!
when you just start playing, you struggle to shrug off zombie, when you've play for a long time, you struggle to let zombie follow you so you can deal with all of them
The whole zombie "cheating" with pathfinding feels like 7 Days to Die zombies which know what is the fastest way to get to you through fortifications.
The game should have a new feature of letting you hide inside vehicles.
The player would be completely hidden from any zombies outside but would also not get to see what's out there making it a very risky move when hiding from a horde.
Its nutty how one frame of sight has them make up their mind that youre there haha
this video (and a few dozen hours of practice) made me a master at losing hordes
So that's why 5 hordes of zombies is always in my tail even when behind the houses
Cool vid. IMO zeds have too long line of sight, you really need to use that 200% or more zoomed out view to sneak effectively.
The zombies are cracked in this game. I literally cannot stop getting spotted by zombies. I usually get a trash spawn and am forced to go to other houses to find supplies, except an entire hoard of zombies follows me and it’s impossible to lose them.
This is HUGE. I feel every zomboid player should watch this video.
I KNEW IT THEY CHEATING BRO!!! THEY CHEATING!!!
After one of your last vids explaining how turning zombies aren't tracking you, I've noticed that even with minimal sneaking and lightfooted it is possible to run up on a zom and behind them while they turn and they won't see you, although they hear you and turn around again. I was always under the impression that they are tracking you as soon as they start to turn their heads, but not so. It isn't until they "see" you. Never would have noticed that if not for your in depth videos. Thx.
Your short, informative, and easy to digest videos are amazing. Keep up the awesome work!
all this taught me is zombie pathfinding needs improvement
Thank u for bringing this out! critical info that makes you understand the mechanics of such complex and beloved game.
Good game design that you have to look literally everything up online to be able to play this game properly
The game has been in alpha since like 2013 . It's extremely in-depth. A full tutorial that taught you almost everything would be longer than a whole story campaign for most games.
What game recently has not had a huge amount of info available online? Does Minecraft have bad game design for not having a tutorial?
This game is about surviving as long as possible. People are going to take some extreme measures to do that. This isn't necessary info to play, it just helps. This will probably change in the next build anyway.
@@aaronhelmsman Minecraft does have a tutorial
@@maxgb2000real it does now, but back in the beginning it did not and you would have to look up everything. From crafting to mechanics. I think it’s the reason it grew so much because all of the players interacted with each other and everyone was watching videos about how to do things. I’m not a huge fan of the hand holding it has now. I wish there was an option to turn it off :/
To be fair, the point of the game is learning from your mistakes and past lives. That's why you're able to keep playing as new characters in the same persistent instance of the world that contains all the things you did as your previous character. The game is supposed to closely mirror how a scenario like this might play out for an average person if it were real, but still gives you the opportunity to build on your previous progress in a way that enhances the lore of the world. "This is how you died."
You don't have to. You're supposed to learn from your mistakes and accept that you're going to die a lot while doing that. I learned the way zombies behave by experience
2:53 when zombie lowers his arms, he goes to an indirect pathfinding mode.
Multiplayer with high amount of zombies is impossible. I played in a 4x zombie server. Muldraugh was so full of zombies that it was insane. The problem here was not the amount of zombies but that they would chase me from miles away, now I know why. The only thing I did in that server was run until my character couldnt run anymore and then got eaten.
I ran in stealth mode though, trying to avoid by hugging corners and such, and got chased either way. When fatigue hit I was slower than the zombies, so I had to stop stealthing, and walk normally instead, which attracted more zombies. It was impossible.
4x isn't impossible but you really gotta know the game in order to fight zombies on insane difficulty
Aha, so that's how all those burning zombies managed to track me and run into the safehouse me and my friend were operating from.
Omg, this is so broken. Now you have to fight unintuitive algo, instead of just play as it feels like to be playing against dead bodies.
I remember in earlier builds (back in like 2015-2016) zombies' behavior being somewhat intuitive and close to how someone braindead might actually be tracking source of disturbance. Shaking them off your tail was not easy but it was possible to do without alerting new ones. Hell, it was a great deal of suspence just to sneak behind them into some house. Now, many years later, it is totally gone. I tried build 41 and I cant even last two days cz dead meat spot me crouching behind a window away from the end of the screen. And to actually see them that far away (to look outside screen bounds) you have to adapt fighting stance, which in turn breaks crouching mode, making you visible to even more zombies. Situation when you cant sneak past a zombie on another side of a screen in a middle of a night is nuts. And it even wont be fixed with sandbox options, lol. No matter how "deaf" and "blind" i make them, they just feel(!) me from more far away than I can see them (most recent PZ build). I dunno, maybe devs play on 8k resolution on maxed out zoom, but I get spotted by zombies long before they appear on my HD (even when sneaking with all the "thieft" traits).
I spent several hour trying to digest this new (for me) algos, got tired, started yet new game with no electricity, spawned in center of a house, and only pressed crouch. Not a single movement after that. In a middle of a night(!) two zombies were passing by my lawn, they both spotted my through my window and broke in. I dispatched them with bare hands standing right there in my room, didnt move a tile. Sounds (I assume) attracted several more zombies to another side of my house, they started to bang another window with me not in line of sight, so I crouched my way into a windowless room, closed the door and stood still. And yet they somehow found me, started to bang on my door and eventually got inside. PZ devs have clearly lost last pieces of sense.
Also, what's up with all those guns? I remember gun being a rare item, available mostly at police stations and such, and now there is a loaded gun or a rifle like in every second residential. In my ten to twenty runs on apoc preset I found only two bottles of water and ONE bag (and it was duffel), but like 30 guns of all kinds. This is crazy. Now PZ is the most broken zombie game ever.
I've never even seen this game until your videos were randomly suggested, now I'm getting them recommended left and right lmao
Legends say that he is still escaping the zombie
I tend to move fast, act fast, and be nomadic. I love this system because I can and need to sprint up to a window, smash it open, hop through, and then barrel out the other side to lose zombies because just outpacing them isn't feasible
Hey dude! I'm making a "101 Tips For Project Zomboid" video and I'd really like to use a bit of footage from this video and direct people to it to learn more about zombie aggro and losing them in a chase. Credit would be given on-screen and in the description. Would you be okay with that? :)
Of course you can use footage from any of my videos. If you want any other collaboration stuff hit me up on discord. Easier for me to see.
@@Retanaru Thank you sir, much appreciate it! Went ahead and sent a friend request.
Thanks for this video.
I too have been substantially frustrated with this game. No other game has made me forget that I enjoy it as much as this title has. I have to reload a multiplayer game I'm playing with friends in order to remember.
Still, there are facets of the game that still make me facepalm. This video confirms that they cheat. I knew they did, but having corroboration is nice. Walking through walls, furniture, seeing in the dark, biting through armor, are the ones that stand out.
Anyone playing certain RTS titles over the decades can kinda relate. Watching those hero units wander over to your local mobs and kill them (so you can't) in WCIII, or watching Hydralisks track your fogged/distant transports outside their vision in SC, or having NOD forces attack your massing army out in the sightless fields of battle... Yeah. A.I.'s cheat like a mo-fo. It gets old.
Seeing this though should help in the future...a wee bit. ...but only in the multiplayer I have going on, solo runs...are impossible...for me. That radar of theirs, man...
I don't need to lose zombies, my lumberjack mows them down.
Sarcasm aside, this is a great source of information, I never would've guessed it was this complex.
As a dev, I'd consider offering an option to choose the tracking system, simplified for "zombies stop following you soon after breaking direct sight", regular for "zombies follow you, or the general direction of last sight of you, for a short time" and complex/realistic for what you've described.
i think this is why even though project zomboid seems fun in concept, i never have fun playing it and log off after a few quick deaths. it feels like i cant go outside because one zombie seeing me is instant death, its so hard to lose that invariably ive attracted another zombie by the time ive lost the first one, and it just gets worse from there. its less a zombie survival game and more like a game about stephen king's The Mist
probably some of the best advice i've seen for the game, and you make a lot of other great stuff. Thank you!
I've just gotten back into PZ in the last week and this has been my major impediment. Thank you!
This was a genuinely useful video. Also nice Enthumesis avatar, really need to play that game more.
This is cool and all, but since most buildings have zombies on all sides, each attempt to break LOS just attracts another zombie.
Wow, that's actually useful. I wish the guys who make tutorials about walking zombies into forests would mention all this.
Very useful actually. I alway wonder why i would end up with few zombie even though i lost the horde in a forest or why the 2 corner method works.
Fucking called it. I had the feeling there was something fishy going on with zombie memory, and lo and behold, they have xray vision for like three full seconds.
I wish this game didnt have so many of these cheap artificial difficulty increases, or at least provided the option to turn all of them off.
go in sand box and set them to poor vision and hearing and memory
@@_--Reaper--_ I dont want their detection range reduced, I dont want them to see through solid objects.
@@ineednochannelyoutube5384 similar results will be achieved. Try it
@@_--Reaper--_ still a band-aid for a decapitation. AI with cheats isn't challenging "smart" AI it is lazy coding and indicates how dumb their current AI model is. They need to actually make it better instead of making decaying zombie eyes equivalent to superman x-ray vision.
That was super useful, thanks! I feel like I'm pretty good at losing zombies but this will add some new tricks.
Hehe. Explains why I can never really stealth my way out of crazy situations. The zombies all have hacks lmao.
Just wanted to say that the information you provide is outstanding and very valuable.
Thank you.
Ever since I watched this video a few months ago, losing zombies just became very easy (as long as you have cover to use).
I have noticed that if you vault a large fence the zombies will track to where you should have ended up, or will just stay on the other side of the tall fence. Often I will move to the other side of the yard and leap another tall fence just to be sure, seems they can never track you anymore if you do that
Hm. that's an anwful lot of spaghetti code. i didn't know it worked that way, and now i hope they'll rework their AIs soon enough
if they hear a shot, do they walk towards the position of the noise or me if i quickly switch position and for example hide in a garage
Aight Imma return to the game when they actually make zombies like zombies and not wallhacking geniuses with binoculars
Hi, is this zombie pathfinding displayer mod available somewhere?
usually, when encountering a horde, I enter a house and let them break through it to get distracted inside since their pathfinding never made a lot of sense to me at the time. The wallhacks gag was also relatable
The problem is not how to lose zombies, the problem is how to avoid getting in a worse situation everytime you turn a corner. West point is a mess, a small group starts following me and o get rid of them I encounter several other groups that start chasing me. This stuff goes on endlessly, I just have to move forever and I can’t stop in any safe house.
Planning. You need to pull the zombies in the area you are planning to escape to into your horde before trying to lose them around a corner. Otherwise you are just walking around a corner into a new group of zombies.
@@Retanaru I heard this before but I don't quite get it..: how do I plan if I'm exploring the map and I don't know the surroundings? this usually happens in my first exploration. F.e. let's say I'm looking for a car and I roam around searching for a parking lot... I keep attracting more and more zombies and in the end I'm just running for my life instead of finding what I'm looking for.
@@DonBozzi While at the parking lot, find a good building to lose the zombies behind. Draw the zombies away from the building. Even yell a bit. Make sure to attract the zombies that are behind the building and on your escape side. Now kite the whole pack into a tight group. Head behind the building and wait a few seconds. Then run to the other corner so that when the zombies cross behind the building they still cannot see you. Now the parking lot is clear and you can search the cars.
I really like your channel bro, very detailed explanation to the mechanics of the game. And not very long videos and right to the point, which I appreciate :)
Is there an option somewhere in the debugger to show zombie pathing and line of sight? Thanks for the video, helpful.
this game is so damn hard for me ; _ ; why must I be so bad and also drag myself down picking up every blessed item that might be even slightly useful
“You are on the fastest available route”
Check the poor hearing,poor vision, and poor memory in the settings and see how they change all of this.
Neto used the system against the system.
Which was brilliant, but he forgot about the indirect tracking mode
They need to fix zombies in build 42 if u clean urself in a house and a zombie is across the street it will hear u like wtf
How can I see the zombie tracking lines in my game ?
great work im fed up with the how to get water BS .. this is actually helpful
this is honestly making the game so boring for me, once the horde alerts on you its just infinite hold w and constant hoping to lose some of them, and theres guarantee for you to be exerted and tired when you finally lose constant infinite hordes of zombies.
When i first time played the game i realised how far they actually track you so my second gameplay started playing sandbox with short tracking set
Break line of sight for a few seconds. heh its killing floor 1 flesh pound anti-rage mechanics all over again
thank you this was super informative. Would be curious to see how a horde path finding would look like
0:45 - Well that certainly fucking explains it :I
Oooh that’s why I couldn’t escape zombies before ok
What about sound? Does that factor in at all for their tracking? How about the perks that affect how easily seen you are or how much noise you make? Is the 20 tiles example in the video only for default character traits?
As a new player, i curved this by modding the zombies ability to see and hear with "definitive zombies" mod. I tweaked it to where their sight, intelligence, and memory are all nerfed by 1-3 stages depending on the weather. If you dont want zombies tracking you back home from the county over, then i suggest you do this. It will make zombies harder to horde up, but it will help you get experience killing smaller hordes as practice for normal settings.
I have a question
why i always bump into horde, when i'm already trying to lose one?
I lost so many runs to that, once its big, i can't escape it. escaping it only makes it larger.
You need to circle around them to clump them up and then cut back to where they came from to lose them. If you keep heading off into fresh territory you will keep running into more and more groups of zombies.
basically just expect absolutely everywhere to have several large hordes unless you know that you have gone to that spot that youre going to specifically and cleared it out entirely. zombies spawn all over the place in towns and nowhere in the town is safe by default so you have to clear it out yourself. run back into an area that you have cleared out and then come back to fight them later from somewhere in the cleared area that they didnt go to. its one of the reasons clearing out a big area in a town is important. and just be extremely careful to not attract entire hordes at once anyways because theyre a pain in the ass to deal with
How far can a zombie pathfind around a tall fence to get to you? I want to build a base at the refugee camp but I don't want to put it somewhere the Expanded Heli Events mod can send down a horde from St Peregrin and evict me, but I can't block the path to where I can't myself drive North.
how do you turn the tracking visual on?
While playing in debug mode, press f11 go to options and pathfind. checkmark Pathfind.render.path
@@Retanaru thanks :)