6:01 How do I get this menu on the map? My guess is it's a dev mode thing. Is there a way to get it outside of dev mode? A mod? That'd be pretty helpful
@@tommeakin1732 A mod called "eris_minimap" can help you out here, if you want an alternative to launching in debug mode. when you launch the save, you'll have to click the "see zombies" checkbox in the minimap itself
@@tommeakin1732if running PZ through Steam, If I'm not mistaken you go to game properties and add "-debug" to the launch options textbox. If running it native, right click the executable or a shortcut to it, select Properties, and then uhh I don't remember the name of the tab but you put "-debug" in the textbox meant for launch parameters like this. (Sry I'm on my phone)
I once had a genius idea that descended (or rather, ascended) into madness fairly quickly. I discovered that you could build staircases and higher floors, and then dismantle the staircases, and the structure would float. And so it began - the project of building a safehouse at the height of the third floor. It would only be accessible via sheet ropes attached to the windows, which zombies couldn't climb. Then me and my friends began building wooden roads at the same height that led all across the map and let us get to places safely. We then realized that our max speed is capped by our characters' running speed and decided to widen the roads, find a way to build a ramp and bring a car up there. Unfortunately, the campaign fell apart right there, but it was an ambitious project.
@@sjonnieplayfull5859 The campaign fell apart because we just stopped playing the game. It just... naturally happens sometimes. People drift away from games and even from each other all the time. As for clearing out the zombies, we did slay tons of them, but there are a lot of them on the map, they migrate and new ones spawn regularly too (at least that's how the settings were when we played). Eventually it's just easier to build around an infinite enemy xD
@@Lernos1 Did you figure out a way to get a car up levels? I guessed maybe that was what stopped your game, because I gave it a thought and I can't think of any way of doing it.
@@Elrond_Hubbard_1 My original plan was building some sort of a ramp for the car to get to an upper level, but I never tested it. I guess I would've been disappointed then, because apparently, from what I've read, the game engine is coded in such a way that only the player character (and zombies, of course) can properly have physics along the vertical axis. I don't know if there's a mod that can change that, probably not. But I heard there was a helicopter mod, guess that's one way to have an over-the-road vehicle...
I like to scatter broken glass around my base, in single player and especially multiplayer. It helps me determine if a zombie is close or really close.
I collect alarm clocks and watches and set them to various different times and spread them out around my base it pulls zombies out of tree lines and from inside nearby houses and leaves them in nice clumps on the road where I can fight them later
@@fahrradmittelfranken8207 oh I was responding to the guy above me that used alarm clocks to move zombies away from his base. I don't know why I couldn't @ him
My biggest issue with player made buildings is they don't "act" as real buildings, there is a plethera of graphical bugs that can come from player built bases that just make them just undesireable
in reality, player made buildings make more sense as they follow a strict "closed structure and roof" system (even if those walls are just frames) while a lot of buildings ingame have no roofs (a usual method to break into gunshops when no sledge or fire) and things like roof tiles are these magical floating things that obey no rules. premade buildings also have magical indoor zones that cannot be affected. you can destroy a skyscaper to ashes and on every level where it was it will be indoors. my point is, it's all a mess.
@@SharpForceTrauma I've thought about using a map expansion mod for a player base but to fix issues like that and the graphical bugs , but all the mods come fully furnished which defeats the fun of building the base and decorating
@@breach_meidithfucking hell can this game be janky as fuck sometimes, one time I was trying to run over the spiffo boss from ehe, it got up under my car and sent it flying into the interior of a nearby store
I know mods aren't the ideal solution to these issues, but there are a few that make player made metal fences and walls and barricades indestructible. That feels like a decent compromise at the moment. Weaker player made structures are still vulnerable, but there is a way to make your base fully secure.
Honestly, I wish there was an option in game to disable zombies targeting walls themselves anyway. I can understand doors, windows, and fences but the walls of every other building can't be attacked so why can mine?
Player-built chain link fences are also not flammable for some reason (nothing else -at least player-built- metal has this immunity), so with invincible metal walls, assuming that it includes chain-link this is extra-useful.
I always try to stay in a pre-built house and then build extensions around it. Pre-built houses have their advantages as you mentioned while player-built structures help fight boredom living inside.
There's a specific house in Riverside, near the gas station, which has a long pre-built wall behind it (to the north) with a few tiles of space between the house and wall. That house is usually where I try and base out of, since downtown Riverside is within easy walking distance, but also far enough away that whatever I do at base won't attract the hordes from downtown.
@@HelghastStalker you can also base up at the junkyard, assuming that isnt what you were referring to, as it is also far enough from downtown to avoid most of the riff raff, while still being close enough for walking to be viable, and the fence is large enough that most of the time zombies wont path around and will simply stand there waiting to be shot. it comes with a small trailer you can use for temporary shelter, and plenty of cars to grind mechanics or cannibalize for spare parts to fix your dream car. it's not far from the bar.
@@AtrociousAK47 I know where the junkyard is, but I generally don't base there because it's a pain in the ass to haul or build infrastructure that I need to live long term in that trailer or build a custom home. If I could point to where I normally base out of, you'd see why I prefer it so much, especially since it's a possible spawn house. That being said, the Junkyard *is* an awesome place to set up a temporary "camp" to grind mechanics and maybe lure zombies into an easy(ish) killzone to clear the area and level weapons skills. Put a proper gate on the fence, fortify that trailer to make it safe to sleep in at night, set up some rain barrels for water, and stockpile some canned food in the trailer, and it's a decent little bolt hole if downtown Riverside gets too hot.
I based up there for quite a while with a couple friends of mine on my last server, sure was a bit scary till we were able to get a gate built, and honestly the only thing that was an issue moving over was a stove, since you need lvl 3 electrical to move them, we mostly used a microwave and I think either a bbq grill or an antique stove we found in a nearby warehouse, everything else we found in nearby houses or in town somewhere I was also fhe group mechanic, so naturally I enjoyed having the space for my my small fleet of vehicles that we scavenged, my most prized ones being a white suv we found parked in the driveway of a house in the fenced in row of houses off to the east, with a key for it inside said house, and a Toyota '87 landcruiser w/ roof rack I found. Did eventually leave there for a few weeks, maybe a month, to go setup a base in the gatehouse at fort redstone after me and one of my friends made a harrowing trip there right as thick fog rolled in, with us forgetting the extra supplies we brought in the car, which was left outside the gatehouse, as we got pushed deeper and deeper in the base. when I eventually went back to riverside in a fillabuster's army truck I found along the access road to the gate house to reloacate all my shit, the place was overgrown with trees, and my other former comrade's gear was still where I had left it, felt kind of strange tbh.
3:40 - Though, I'd say that. Since we can build Walls in Lv 1 through 3, Lv 1 should be destructible, Lv 2 as well but tougher. Lv 3 however should be equal to that of a regular wall and thus ignored. I've always seen it similarly as it was in the original Dawn of the Dead where the build a fake wall that looked the same as the other walls, only destroyed later because one of their own who became a zombie remembered the path to take. That's how I see the walls in Zomboid and I think that Lv 1-2 Walls should be like that.
Maybe with build 42 and being able to use clay, they could also add bricks and brick walls as a more balanced way to have unbreakable walls while still having it be balanced because the bricks would take a long time to make so it would be a late game thing.
Cute to see how a feature/property of zombie pathfinding, probably intended to stop players from forming comical walls that trivialize the game, interacts with meta events to make zombies super aggro towards your DIY house
1:58 that is actually terrifying, watching them all path towards the noise. in game you never know how many move or how large the range is. i just hear it as "oh theres gonna be zombies in that area now."
i think ''memory'' hsa big part to play in this. With low memory, the zombies further away won't have enough interest/memory to get to the meta event spot. So it'll only attract the closer zombies for a medium-ish group But with high memory, all zombies will have enough interest/memory to get to the meta event spot. Causing a massive horde to eventually form.
in zombie settings you can turn off damage to player buildings at all. If you build a brick wall, there is no way a human beign would destroy this wall before their body fell apart.
@@asdasdasd-gx7zsa thousand people punching a brick wall for a human lifetime would not cause any significant damage if the builder was the slightest bit competent.
There's a setting where you can have the zombies attack random buildings. It gets chaotic real quick if you have them be able to trigger house alarms also.
The fact they can break metal walls at all is BS. You're not breaking a welded metal wall with your hands, it's just not happening. A 1 inch weld holds like three tons. Flesh doesn't beat steel and if they're massing up in such quantities to damage the metal wall they should be actively crushing each other to death, which would then stop them from damaging it as the ones in front stop pushing.
@@jackbright2125 Who's to say you're using actual steel? A couple of things here: 1) You know how difficult it would be for some random nobody who doesn't know the first thing about metalwork to actual construct stable steel structures? You're not just going to read a couple of books and then spend three days welding random shit together before you "Eureka!" your way into building steel structures (that are stable). And then where are you going to get that steel? Do you have a foundry that will allow you to superheat steel to it's melting point so that you can pour it into molds/casts in order to reshape the steel into what you need? Raw steel is usually shaped into large raw cylinders or coils for easy transportation, where they are then melted down a second time and reforged into necessary shapes. Not only that, but if you're just one man trying to build a structure from steel, have fun - it's going to take at least six months of twelve hour work days before you're even close to building a medium size home or wall (steel is also notoriously difficult to build structures with. There's a reason we only use it for supports and use materials easier to mold for our buildings, like concrete and lime). 2) The player buildings in PZ, with the exception of perhaps the gate, look very much "jury-rigged", as in cobbled together out of sheets of scrap metal and aluminum. This is actually fairly realistic when we're considering what either a couple of metalworking amateurs or one very skilled metalworker would actually be able to create without the help of heavy industrial tools... and while scrap metal and aluminum definitely can be stronger than wood if worked correctly, it's certainly not going to withstand the pressure of hundreds of bodies piling up against it forever. 3) If you want a game that both sticks to the "realism" schtick and allows you to craft shit like steel walls and buildings, then you're probably better off playing Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. You can build steel structures in that came, and it is exactly as ridiculously time consuming as one might expect.
I believe the worst enemy of a player's base is the player itself. You can barricade all your corners and holes but at some point some player will try to cook meat the lazy way, turn on the microwave and watch the base and themselves being set on fire.
to be fair about the metal pot in microwave thing, that was a fairly recent change, so it still catches returning veteran players off guard from time to time, as evidenced by posts you see on r/projectzomboid, also it's one of those small details you dont normally expect to see in a videogame, and from what I understand is a bit of a myth irl that only really happened with much older examples from like the 60s and 70s, and the worst that could happen on a modern example is it simply dies, no fire or explosion.
I remember trying to heat up some water to sterilize some bandages, but I didn't have an oven anywhere near so I put a cooking pot in a microwave and left the house for a few minutes - when I came back everything was ablaze
@@thegamingraven1691 When I played with my brother months ago, he put something in the oven and then went afk while standing right next to the oven. I was panicking, but it was hilarious after when he returned.
@@AtrociousAK47 "examples from like the 60s and 70s" my guy, how old are you? I know that microwaves today have voltage regulators that can detect a short and adjust power but even just 10 years ago if you put a fork in a microwave it looked like lightning, and *burned many homes down*. I'll never forget putting a gold rimmed plate in and it crackling with blue electricity shooting off the gold.
Glad to catch this early. Now can learn how to curb the “fearer” of my hard-earned base being destroyed. Now I just need to live long enough to make my own base to begin with.
Same. I recently bought PZ and after reading through the comment section, I think I am going to turn off zombies being able to destroy buildings. The challenge will be to survive long enough to see my home finished!
cheese the game and build it suspended above ground level? that way the only thing they can destroy is a stairs leading up in case they aggro. you can rebuild those or even have ropes as an 'elevation measure'.
My favorite place to build bases is on top of large pre-built buildings roof that are inaccessible without building stairs or on top of water sources like lakes and rivers.
so to summarize, 1-pathfinding basically gives zombies carte blanche to wreck anything built/placed by a player if their alerted to your presence, or a meta event causes them to path find past/through your base. 2-player built walls do not negate sickness from rotting bodies, but pre-built do 3-no matter what, fire is the bane of your existence when it comes to base building 4-be aware of chunk borders, and try to build nestled into a corner in order to minimize potential pathing issues from migration or meta event attraction tldr pre-built buildings are typically better than building from scratch, especially in multiplayer, but from scratch bases let you control points of entry and exit
Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead has a great way to deal with this, instead of just making all playermade structures have different hp values, there is a certain damage treshhold for an enemy to actually deal damage. While cataclysm has hundreds of different enemies and PZ only one, I still think that it could work by making a zombie treshhold instead, a wooden door should fall to a single zombie, that makes sense. But a metal fence should require atleast 5-10 for it to collapse. Same thing with plastered walls or log walls.
Zomboid already implements something like this. The number of zombies attacking a tile multiply the damage dealt exponentially. A single zombie will be thumping walls for days, 3 can crack a wall quicker than you'd think, and 10 will fell it in seconds. Window barricades don't follow this rule and only tank a finite number of hits though. That's why I build bases on lakes nowadays.
My go-to spot for building my own base is the lake in the woods just east of Muldraugh. No zombies at all (I think a couple can appear at first, but once they're cleared out I never see another enter that space), a nigh-endless supply of trees for lumber, a lake right there for fishing, and a pretty quick and easy path back into town. I don't know anything about zombie populations or migration patterns or any of that; I just got curious about the lake I saw on the map, went to explore the area, and fell in love.
Honestly my favorite thing to do is combine the base building aspects with prebuilt houses, there's one house in the south east of Rosewood that has a good large yard with gardens in it. Down the street from the Fire station. I usually make that home base, and then after making a perimiter fence with player made structure, I eventually try and reclaim Rosewood in totality and once that place is recaptured, I use it as main home and basically loot run into the other towns and such to bring humanity back to Rosewood so that, in my head, the government is then able to firebomb everywhere but rosewood, because in my settings I turn off respawning zombies, turn on "dead zombies can sometimes get back up", and up the peak zombies count so there is still an ENDLESS horde that, unlike in Vanilla, CAN be eradicated with enough time.
Good to know about those rain barrels, I've been wanting to do a run without doing much carpentry to speed things up a bit so going to grab those would be great. If only metal crates spawned in the world...
A handful of saucepans and cooking pots hold as much water as the first level of rain barrel. The rain barrel isn't really a crucial item, because just about every house has a cook pot, saucepan or both. Once you have looted about 10 of each, you'll be able to store enough water to make it between rains. And this isn't even counting the other good, rain catching items: gardening cans, metal buckets, and paint buckets. Finally, there are so many Water Dispensers on the map, each holding 250 units of clean drinking water, that grinding carpentry levels for rain barrels - and the rain barrels themselves - are really pretty unnecessary.
@@broastedgarlic7354 For me its less about the ability to gather water, but reducing the annoyance of having to constantly boil water because i dont have a barrel and plumbed sink.
If you set your target grounded zombies and sprint key to the same button and press it before you start aiming you will very quickly hit the zombie on the floor and move into the hitbox range much faster. If you are worried about accidently sprinting, ive been using it for over a year and that does not happen, you cannot sprint while aiming.
4:30 Uploader had to use an explosive to make a fire because Antique Stoves *never* produce fire from burnt food (or any other condition). All hail Antique Stove Superiority.
One thing I always wanted to know: why is there such a large amount of zombies on the edge of the map? The bottom right corner has 1000s of them despite not being anywhere near the world border, makes basing in the woods impossible!
There didn't use to be so many zombies around the edge as far as I know. They were only added after they included the bits and pieces of the next map update (I assume to make it dangerous to go out there).
@@Retanaru it's especially annoying for woodlands bases and around March Ridge An near impenetrable wall of zombies, 10s of cells deep is no fun for my simple woodlands lifestyle Also last time I checked, they are generic Civilian zombies
@@jw69440 I dont know the legit reason as why the developers have spawned them there or what code may be making it happen. But in lore as far as I know the area we play in its quarantined from the rest of the world, so any zombies that wander away (as they just shamble with time), or chase survivors who think they can escape the quarantine, its built a massive wall of zombies at the border, idk just a fan theory.
@@jw69440 Well my guess is that A) it's a "soft border" which the players hit before the hard border, and hard borders can be more of an unimmersive thing to bump into, and B) They want to make it harder for you to be truly safe from the zeds. If you're close enough to those zed pop zones, meta events like the heli are still a threat to you. Obviously there's lots of spots on the map where you are far enough away from those pop zones; but it'd be even easier to be totally safe if you could just walk in one direction and be sure you'd never see a zed again.
@@tommeakin1732 i'd need to factcheck it myself, but I believe that these border areas have a higher population count than the rest of the map combined excluding LV, despite not having any buildings aside from the unfinished settlement to the top left. I get having to have a soft border, but it covers about 45% of the playable space
If you're a base builder, definitely consider the indestructible constructs - it frees you from a lot of restrictions, including having to actively kill zombies around the builds to keep them safe. Thats the good thing about PZ - you can adapt the game's ruleset to your playstyle in many ways with Sandbox - you can make it a horror game where every zombie encounter might be the last one, or turn it into left4dead experience by giving you enough guns and ammo to go wild.
I personally play with the setting that makes zombies break random objects, player built or not, but I just disable them destroying player constructions. This does still let zombies break barricaded windows, but they don't destroy walls or such. I like this setting because it; A - Prevents bathroom ambushes, zombies will break out of small windows. B - Makes it very atmospheric IMO, as zombies 'attract' each other by the noises they make, and it's pretty cool seeing the zombies crash against walls.
Another commenter already mentioned this, but I think when you get up to the maximum level of carpentry (when you're walls look similar to normal ones) they should then become non targetable. Especially if you plaster/paint them, as the zombies really shouldn't be able to recognize them as player built structures at that point (I know it's hard coded in, but still). Obviously some players could exploit this (walling off whole sections of towns/cities), but honestly it's a ton of work/time/effort to do that, so I wouldn't mind it.
Learnt semi-hard way that Zombers will break stuff to reach noises, was playing modded with the True Music Mod (or whichever it was) Was around my base doing a bit of looting at the Sports Stadium in Louisvillie (Modified area, made it into a Evacuation Center that was overrun so I was camped out by some Military Tents) I had just got some boxes for storage and I put one down and placed a Boombox on-top and was jamming to some tunes, forgot to turn it off when I walked away to the nearby Canteen to grab breakfeast, so some Little Zoombers Decided to go and Break my Box because they didn't like the Music. Very Tragic when I came back and I didn't hear any music.
It's one of those small details that I really enjoy about 7 days to die, how zombies will choose the path of least resistance to get to you. This can of course be abused, but it is a solution I think would work lovely.
Nah fuck that. Nobody likes it, since it requires you to build a trap base a very specific way, other wise defense systems are useless unless you just build a massive metal tunnel full of traps.
2:28 I hated this issue so much when I was building a base on a MP server. I found this cool nice area to a river in some modded map but didn't know how much zombies there were in the nearby forests and ended up getting sick quick. But I found out that if you go to the second level even with so many bodies outside that corpse sickness is slowly going down just by hanging around in the second level. Nice video dude!
I hope that NPCs you recruit require/get buffs from amenities and having their own decorated rooms. I DONT want NPCs to be "ai controlled" players because worrying about them getting killed randomly by a single zombie would be annoying, but if you could recruit them and have a reason to expand your currently occupied buildings by building additions, it would be a good middle ground between just sitting hunkered down in a premade all game or building a whole base from scratch
hey wake up, its more then 10 years after PZ released and there is still no NPCS or even Build42. The dev had a mental breakdown on twitter some weeks ago, talking about selling the company. This game will never have any NPC's besides that janky mod.
Project Zomboid is a really creative and hard game, but it also sounds like an absolute chore and after some time playing and getting to know some machanics you will start to Interact with those incredibly meta stuff you can never forget and the magic of the game fades away...
Pretty much. My favorite bit is how flipping light switches is REALLY GODDAMN LOUD somehow so window blinds don't actually matter much. It's all just overtuned to the point where most of it's mechanics are pointless because you need to just cheese everything.
It's pretty terrible. Horrible UI, mechanics that don't make sense. A game that has been in development for 11 years, living off charity still looks and plays like a pre alpha build.
It should be that plastered walls, enclosed in a proper roof, with a door, count as a house and cant be destroyed by zombies. Maybe throw in a size limit to avoid an impenetrable base.
I tried building my own base not long after I started playing. I only built a couple of walls before zombies wrecked them and I realized all that crap was stupid and a waste of time. My favorite place to live is, I believe it's called Rosewood? I haven't played in a while so I could be misremembering. But theres a police station, fire station, and gas station all really close together. I used to like living in the fire station, but later on I started living in the building just up the road. It has a bunch of random shops and stuff on the ground level, but it has one singular door that leads up to the second floor and there is a collection of apartments up there. THAT is the best base ever. You don't have to worry about boarding up windows and all that crap, you just have the singular door, staircase, and door at the top of the staircase to create a safe area. And you can use ropes out the windows to enter and exit by the opposite side of the building if you really want to so you don't even bring zombies near the door. You have plenty of space to redesign to fit your needs as well as a big roof for all your water collecting and farming needs. And you live literally right above or right beside a book store to get a lot of your starting books. The apartments already have faucets and freezers and TVs and so on. You can dissassemble anything you don't want and keep the rest to make it look aesthetically pleasing as well as being incredibly functionally useful. And ultimately you could eventually destroy the staircase up if you want to be cheesey and make your base completely impervious, but even if you don't want to cheese, only having that ONE entry point is awesome. What I like to do is convert one of those big ground floor shops into a garage to house my vehicles and vehicle tools. They seem rather perfect for that too because they are large open areas that you only need to move a handful of things out of the way to make it work. Love that place. So good.
You mentioned placing your generator a bit away from your house, but another good thing is to have a another generator as a decoy even further from your house. Not too far away, though, of course.
If you want to make a nice looking base near good loot and water, build in the fenced off military checkpoint. You got only 3 entrances to worry about and a bunch of stuff to do nearby.
something I have done in personal servers is find an existing building in a clearing (such as twiggy's) and putting large fences and custom buildings around it. me and my friends actually made the twiggy's commune once where we built a small city around the bar and used the bar as sort of a town hall.
I remember I finally got Zomboid figured out and survived for something like 2 months. I started farming, building, all the good stuff. Then, in the backyard of my base, I was standing next to a campfire in the rain, left for about 10 seconds to get a snack, and the fire spread one tile directly underneath me and killed me before I could get back to the game. It's a fun enough game, but I'm not playing so long as bullshit like that can happen.
Great video, I love that you actually address people's gripes with the player built structures in the game instead of just saying they must not know how to play the game. This is a really really great guide that I'm sure will prevent hundreds of hours of frustration at least.
I love it when a single weak strength zombie breaks a level 10 plastered wall by simply headbutting it for a few minutes 🤗 I’ll be placing composters around my base until they add/improve proper barricade system.
I avoid some of these issue by always building a base in the upper floors of a vanilla building. Also I have in the past built towers with stairs as a base level. Rather that is with the upright posts at the back of stairs. If you build two levels of stairs and then delete them again you can end up leaving those uprights in place. You can create a platform that I think (not tested 100%) the zombies wont attack. You can then place down wooden floors on top of this platform and build whatever kind of house you want.
They are, but they are not really supposed to be. Moving them will cause them to no longer be invulnerable. There was a time when they couldn't even be moved either (making them the only wall that even players can't break without a sledgehammer), but for some reason they patched the movable part without bothering to change the destroyable part. That being said, the fence blocking exploit still exists too.
3:20 To make it more realistic, they should be able to attack walls, but if they are of high enought quality, they should be near indestructible, imagine punching a wood wall with you hands, even if you hit it full force a 1000 times, you barely make a dent on it
That could easily be accomplished with a simple material based DR, or damage reduction. If a zombie attacks, the wall just eats a certain portion of the damage before the rest affects the wall's HP. At a high enough DR rating, the walls would just be invincible to zombie attacks. Specifically and only _zombie_ attacks. Because zombies attack with their teeth and bare hands, not weapons, cars, fire, or explosives. So walls wouldn't just be the end all solution in multiplayer servers, but you can choose to build up however many locations as you like into unbreachable fortresses in singleplayer. Though I would argue for any wall without supports behind it being vulnerable to a large mass of zombies literally pushing it over as a rotting groaning corpse tidal wave. The support could be a roof, a perpendicular wall, an actual brace, whatever, but if it's just free standing, there should be the risk that the sheer mass of bodies can push through.
I think the best place for the base is the iron fence gated community with 3 houses inside since there is one narrow entrance to the huge zone and last time i played the iron fence was indestructible by zombies (or they never attempted attacking it) and the tight entrance can be easily maintained and all the zombies will often get stuck on the iron fence outside your base and not even bother to pathfind around (prob since it's quite the distance). The gated community is pretty safe and then you're close to the city proper with all the things you could possibly want.
Kinda sucks that the game disincentives proper base building to such a degree. I love the idea of building a base from scratch out in the woods, foraging and fishing and minding my business, but the game REALLY does not want you to play that way. Even without zombies constantly pathing towards your location, it’s such a chore. The game really just wants you to engage nonstop in repetitive, uninteresting combat until you eventually die. I have such a hard time staying invested in PZ because of how hard it works to incentivize a high-risk playstyle when the game would really benefit from some flexibility. Also, it’s insane that metal structures burn, and that zombies can destroy them. For a game all about becoming self sufficient, it really hates when players try to sustain themselves without being limited to urban centers.
Some good points in this video and one of the main reasons I never build my own base. I started just modding homes to fit my needs, even if I gotta add a 2nt/3rd floor. Also fishing is not really inf fish/food it can run out within a time frame based on server settings, but ya probably not need to worry about it unless multiple people are fishing in same area.
There is one more way to prevent zombies from atacking your outer walls You can build them so far away from your actual base that the perimeter wall is outside of loaded chunks.
My first big base was in the SE Riverwood upscale neighborhood. It has fences surrounding a block of 6 houses. Since the fences enclose these houses completely except for the road, all you need is a couple chain link fences and a some gates. Then you have six secure houses you can do whatever you want with.
Player-built chain-link fences don't burn (IDK why it's only player built and only chain link though). So in theory in a big enough safehouse on a server with destroying disabled, fire spread disabled, invincible player constructions, and no tresspass, it could be made fire-safe. But that is a a combination of hypotheticals that will [generally] never happen.
One of my favorite buildings to base at is the Metalworks shop in Louisville, in that industrial park across from the hospital. No zombies tearing at walls, and it only has a few doors and windows on the ground floor
you know, i just build out in the woods in a place within driving distance of a town. it's rare to see more than a few at a time and i often go days without being bothered at all. looting is more difficult because of the distance to a town, but the work around is to make an outpost on the edge of town and collect everything there for later transport.
I really wish there was a midground of the base damage options in game, I don't see how a single zombie or even say two would be able to rip it's way through a timber wall, but the option to disable construction attacks makes it too safe, some mid point where zombies can kill themselves by attacking your barricades seems like a nice middle ground
Take an old wooden door, made of planks and inch thick or more. How long do you think it'd take to claw through it with your fingernails? Just turn off building damage. It's the realistic option.
The idea rhat zombies need to just break random objects is a weird mechanic to begin with. I think they shouldnt attack unles they aggro on you. First time I built a base it was annoying as hell to come back for the first time sneaking around, kiting zombies in my path, only to arrive to a mob tearing down my walls as if the scent of 100 people was eminating.
If someone interested - in last devlog of build 42 devs mentioned stone cutting, as well as same named skill. They also mentioned that using stone cutting and new stone materials, player will be able to build indestructible for zombie walls, or at least hard enough to them not being able to break through just buy bumping their heads in it for several hours. It will probably take time to balance, but i think with time we will have really good reason for player builded communities.
I think something that could somewhat fix this issue, is no longer considering something player-built if the playable character that built the structure dies. That way, you could have a strategic sacrifice relatively early on creating a long term pay-off
Honestly, shit like this is why I say keep respawn off. It’s not cheating, and you alone are *never* going to kill all of those zombies anyways. It makes it actually possible to temporarily clear zombies from your base (no promising the zombies won’t naturally migrate back to the area of your base)
Even if building your own base is a trap. You could make a very small first floor that's disconnected from the second floor. You can then use a third/forth floor to setup rain collectors and a garden. Then you setup plumbing for the other floors. From there all that's missing is refrigerators/freezers and electricity. In the case of electricity it could be taken case of by solar panels from a mod or a normal generator. From there all that's truly needed is decoration and a wood burning stove, though don't forget to build this structure in a location nearby a fishing spot if you want access to more food/emergency water (the result is basically a safe haven from the apocalypse. All you need to do for survival is maintaining it and every once in a while gather more wood, though you'll still want to gather your own food as you could starve if you don't)
here's some suggestions for change i suppose: • meta events (or generally most attractions) should push zombies towards repathing unless they have trouble doing so or they catch line-of-sight of you in passing. i know, repathing is laggy, but there isn't any reason why they don't do that considering the zombies are smart enough to bash on doors and climb through windows. • once a player structure is qualified as 'enclosed', it should give the same benefits as prefab houses do with regards to corpse sickness. includes a size minimum, because the stinky corpses shouldn't be covered by a small 3x3 box. • eventually fix the unpathable objects to be breakable by zombies? its impressive how walls are outright worse than just having a box. • salvaging a portion of plaster from wall drops, paint chips feel like they would be immutable - but that insulation is still good with some glue. maybe.
Build your shacks on top of stilts, destroy the stairs, and use sheet-ropes to get in and out. Zambos won't destroy all your sheet ropes if you place enough, spaced far enough, so it's the best anti-zimbuh housing technology! (Technically the stilts aren't necessary since buildings don't have gravity. 😆)
I am the kind of a guy, who hates driving in the middle of hordes. So when it was time to move from rosewood, I set my course to warehouse District between Rosewood, Muldraugt and March Ridge. None of the warehouses there are suitable for living. So I built a base on the roof top of a diner. Being on roof prevents both corpse sickness and random attacks. And it's a great outpost too, if you don't mind the time commitment
luckily i play with respawn off so zombies barely walk into my west point storage base. the only time a large group appeared was when i triggered 3 house alarms consecutively, but by that time i was already a spear god lol
I decided to hold up in the fire station and fortify it since zombies are infrequent around the areas i frequently roam through and had to level up my carpentry QUICK because a zombie broke down one of the front doors before i had the thought to fortify it and got extremely paranoid that zombies would start wandering through and catch me with my pants down
The big issue here is that "builder" players and "minmaxing" players are usually the opposite Its like asking creative mode minecraft players to speedrun the game, kind of (the more a player is drawn to making and decorating a pretty base the least they are probably interest in mechanically "beating" the game and spending time learning how to do that) So basically this is a huge flaw in PZ's design
Do you know the name of the mod? Tbh I probably wouldn’t use it as I think I like the constant challenge of having to deal with zombies who just can’t seem to get enough of me 😂
After about a 1000 hrs I just use indestructible player construction option, I honestly can't be bothered anymore by Zeds constantly fucking up my fully reinforced base. Seriously, a rotting piece of walking meat can break through fully welded in steel bars on my windows? I THINK NOT.
The way you secure a base in project zomboid is counter intuitive and very very VERY labor intensive. You need 3 things; 1) a perrimeter wall far enough from the main dwelling/ building thst zombies will not detect you from the outside. Randomly wandering zombies will not start attacking a structure until they sense your presence, so if you're far enough back, that wall is invisible and the roaming zombies just walk right past you. 2) an escape route. The wide perrimeter skirt is good, but not perfect. It very tempting to use that buffer zone for gardening, or maybe you fire off a gun too close to home, or a wandering zombie saw you pul in, or you didnt make the zone wide enough (idk how many squares but it needs to be broad) and they hear your generator. One way or another a few zombies will get clued in to your presence. At that point, the only way to save your base is to get out fast. If you fight the zombies on your hone turf, it only calls more of them to your location. An elevated walkway from you base to at least 2 perimeter locations is good, which brings us to 3) an external sniper tower. This is NOT for you to eliminate all the zombies. Its for you to take a couple long range shots at the zombis still banging on your house, deliberately calling all the zombies in the area away from your house. Only a few shots, then you jump in a car, and take the battle to the streets. Once far from home, shotguns are your friend, especially sawed off. Never stand and fight a swarm, back towards your car then run, drive somewhere else, do it again and again till you thin out the swarms.
Generally a pretty good idea to find a house or apartment building, knock out the bottom flight of stairs, and build ontop of that Use sheet ropes to get in and out
I prefer building a ladder on the ground floor and then a "stilt house" above it. That way the house is safe and keeps any errant zombies from destroying your beautiful work. This can be done as an add on above an established vanilla house to allow claim and the ladder being within the safe zone keeps out any theives.
Player Built anything shouldn't be attacked unless the Zombies can't find a path around. Then the Zombies target Doors/Windows/Furniture in the way. Basically the devs took the lazy way out and in turn negatively impacts the entire system.
I recommend playing the game with zombie respawn turned off. If the game is supposed to rely on realism, then it makes no sense that zombies would magically appear anywhere. It does make the idea of a base itself kind of redundant. I built a huge fortress in Louisville, but I've cleared out all the zombies in a decent radius around my base, so there's never going to be a horde that attacks. That's why I focused more on the visuals of my base, rather than actually designing it with defence in mind.
I usually just use some mod that lets me construct indestructible fences and gates. There are just some construction types that a human can't smack down. Sure, they are undead and feel no pain. They can swing hard enough to break something without caring about the damage and holding back. That doesn't mean they can punch through a brick wall given enough time. That means that a brick wall will leave you with a hoard of broken-armed zombies, given enough time.
I find rebuilding from the half destroyed ruins of your base after an intense attack where you barely got out alive just as satisfying as building it from scratch
My recommendation is to build your base/house within a pre-made structure, example being the Storage lots just outside Riverside, anywhere you can easily fortify gaps heavily. Highly recommend doing it on-top of a pre-made structure. I also really hope they make more staircase directions, having only two ways limits your creative ability. I do have a question in regards to generators, if you wall it in, will the noise distance be reduced as the sound in-game becomes muffled?
there is a really nice gas station in the middle of the map between riveerside, rosewood and muldraugh. its a 2-story building and very well defendable
this is why i learned the best way to make a base is to go to a school, if it has a seccond floor its even better, i use the classroom as a homemade apartment for myself and i can build what i want inside said building, it also saves up on A LOT of materials hehe, my favorite school to build a base on is Riverside school
from someone who has build his base himself: build your base in the Woods on some road, always build everything on the second floor, do not put windows on the first floor, yes, reaching level 7 in carpentry is pain and dying while having it is hell on earth, but you can live with it, just make sure you stockpile enough food before you grind xp (i sawed logs to get xp) and complete your base before you go on another potentially lethal scavenging run
shoutout to the zombies that always attack the same fence tile over and over and over again I'm based south of West Point in those storage containers and I fenced all of it in with metal fences. Every day I wake up because new zombies spawn somewhere in my cell/close to my cell, walk to the same fence tile, just to destroy it overnight it's annoying asf but I don't really wanna change that setting in the sandbox options because it feels like cheating and not very immersive
6:01 How do I get this menu on the map? My guess is it's a dev mode thing. Is there a way to get it outside of dev mode? A mod? That'd be pretty helpful
I completely forget to put an alert that you need to be in debug mode to see that. You might be able to see it with the cheat mod.
@@Retanaru I tried with a cheat mod on and there's no drop-down menu when looking at the map
Oh you have to press ALT and F4 simultaneously.@@tommeakin1732
@@tommeakin1732 A mod called "eris_minimap" can help you out here, if you want an alternative to launching in debug mode. when you launch the save, you'll have to click the "see zombies" checkbox in the minimap itself
@@tommeakin1732if running PZ through Steam, If I'm not mistaken you go to game properties and add "-debug" to the launch options textbox. If running it native, right click the executable or a shortcut to it, select Properties, and then uhh I don't remember the name of the tab but you put "-debug" in the textbox meant for launch parameters like this. (Sry I'm on my phone)
I once had a genius idea that descended (or rather, ascended) into madness fairly quickly. I discovered that you could build staircases and higher floors, and then dismantle the staircases, and the structure would float. And so it began - the project of building a safehouse at the height of the third floor. It would only be accessible via sheet ropes attached to the windows, which zombies couldn't climb. Then me and my friends began building wooden roads at the same height that led all across the map and let us get to places safely. We then realized that our max speed is capped by our characters' running speed and decided to widen the roads, find a way to build a ramp and bring a car up there. Unfortunately, the campaign fell apart right there, but it was an ambitious project.
Lol Asperger's
How did it fall apart?
Also: clearing out the zombies might have worked as well 😁
@@sjonnieplayfull5859 The campaign fell apart because we just stopped playing the game. It just... naturally happens sometimes. People drift away from games and even from each other all the time. As for clearing out the zombies, we did slay tons of them, but there are a lot of them on the map, they migrate and new ones spawn regularly too (at least that's how the settings were when we played). Eventually it's just easier to build around an infinite enemy xD
@@Lernos1 Did you figure out a way to get a car up levels? I guessed maybe that was what stopped your game, because I gave it a thought and I can't think of any way of doing it.
@@Elrond_Hubbard_1 My original plan was building some sort of a ramp for the car to get to an upper level, but I never tested it. I guess I would've been disappointed then, because apparently, from what I've read, the game engine is coded in such a way that only the player character (and zombies, of course) can properly have physics along the vertical axis. I don't know if there's a mod that can change that, probably not. But I heard there was a helicopter mod, guess that's one way to have an over-the-road vehicle...
I like to scatter broken glass around my base, in single player and especially multiplayer. It helps me determine if a zombie is close or really close.
last time I tried that zombies walked through it without making a sound. Was this fixed?
I collect alarm clocks and watches and set them to various different times and spread them out around my base it pulls zombies out of tree lines and from inside nearby houses and leaves them in nice clumps on the road where I can fight them later
this is as simple as it is genius
@@MMW1299 I've actually tested it now and it's just theory. Zombies do not make any glass sound when walking over glass shards.
@@fahrradmittelfranken8207 oh I was responding to the guy above me that used alarm clocks to move zombies away from his base.
I don't know why I couldn't @ him
My biggest issue with player made buildings is they don't "act" as real buildings, there is a plethera of graphical bugs that can come from player built bases that just make them just undesireable
My hope is that the performance improvements they keep showing off fixes all that messed up lighting and layering.
Not to mention no power or water even if they're still running, and there's no way to connect your player structures to the utility lines
in reality, player made buildings make more sense as they follow a strict "closed structure and roof" system (even if those walls are just frames) while a lot of buildings ingame have no roofs (a usual method to break into gunshops when no sledge or fire) and things like roof tiles are these magical floating things that obey no rules. premade buildings also have magical indoor zones that cannot be affected. you can destroy a skyscaper to ashes and on every level where it was it will be indoors.
my point is, it's all a mess.
@@SharpForceTrauma I've thought about using a map expansion mod for a player base but to fix issues like that and the graphical bugs , but all the mods come fully furnished which defeats the fun of building the base and decorating
@@breach_meidithfucking hell can this game be janky as fuck sometimes, one time I was trying to run over the spiffo boss from ehe, it got up under my car and sent it flying into the interior of a nearby store
I know mods aren't the ideal solution to these issues, but there are a few that make player made metal fences and walls and barricades indestructible. That feels like a decent compromise at the moment. Weaker player made structures are still vulnerable, but there is a way to make your base fully secure.
With enough skill we should be able to build concrete walls and reinforce weaker or damaged walls with makeshift barricade.
name pls im looking or exactly that
Honestly, I wish there was an option in game to disable zombies targeting walls themselves anyway. I can understand doors, windows, and fences but the walls of every other building can't be attacked so why can mine?
Unbreakable Metal Fences + Gates!
Player-built chain link fences are also not flammable for some reason (nothing else -at least player-built- metal has this immunity), so with invincible metal walls, assuming that it includes chain-link this is extra-useful.
I always try to stay in a pre-built house and then build extensions around it. Pre-built houses have their advantages as you mentioned while player-built structures help fight boredom living inside.
There's a specific house in Riverside, near the gas station, which has a long pre-built wall behind it (to the north) with a few tiles of space between the house and wall. That house is usually where I try and base out of, since downtown Riverside is within easy walking distance, but also far enough away that whatever I do at base won't attract the hordes from downtown.
@@HelghastStalker you can also base up at the junkyard, assuming that isnt what you were referring to, as it is also far enough from downtown to avoid most of the riff raff, while still being close enough for walking to be viable, and the fence is large enough that most of the time zombies wont path around and will simply stand there waiting to be shot. it comes with a small trailer you can use for temporary shelter, and plenty of cars to grind mechanics or cannibalize for spare parts to fix your dream car. it's not far from the bar.
@@AtrociousAK47 I know where the junkyard is, but I generally don't base there because it's a pain in the ass to haul or build infrastructure that I need to live long term in that trailer or build a custom home. If I could point to where I normally base out of, you'd see why I prefer it so much, especially since it's a possible spawn house.
That being said, the Junkyard *is* an awesome place to set up a temporary "camp" to grind mechanics and maybe lure zombies into an easy(ish) killzone to clear the area and level weapons skills.
Put a proper gate on the fence, fortify that trailer to make it safe to sleep in at night, set up some rain barrels for water, and stockpile some canned food in the trailer, and it's a decent little bolt hole if downtown Riverside gets too hot.
I based up there for quite a while with a couple friends of mine on my last server, sure was a bit scary till we were able to get a gate built, and honestly the only thing that was an issue moving over was a stove, since you need lvl 3 electrical to move them, we mostly used a microwave and I think either a bbq grill or an antique stove we found in a nearby warehouse, everything else we found in nearby houses or in town somewhere I was also fhe group mechanic, so naturally I enjoyed having the space for my my small fleet of vehicles that we scavenged, my most prized ones being a white suv we found parked in the driveway of a house in the fenced in row of houses off to the east, with a key for it inside said house, and a Toyota '87 landcruiser w/ roof rack I found. Did eventually leave there for a few weeks, maybe a month, to go setup a base in the gatehouse at fort redstone after me and one of my friends made a harrowing trip there right as thick fog rolled in, with us forgetting the extra supplies we brought in the car, which was left outside the gatehouse, as we got pushed deeper and deeper in the base. when I eventually went back to riverside in a fillabuster's army truck I found along the access road to the gate house to reloacate all my shit, the place was overgrown with trees, and my other former comrade's gear was still where I had left it, felt kind of strange tbh.
Yes, this here is the way. You always use a prebuilt as a core and then build around it. Never fails.
3:40 - Though, I'd say that. Since we can build Walls in Lv 1 through 3, Lv 1 should be destructible, Lv 2 as well but tougher. Lv 3 however should be equal to that of a regular wall and thus ignored. I've always seen it similarly as it was in the original Dawn of the Dead where the build a fake wall that looked the same as the other walls, only destroyed later because one of their own who became a zombie remembered the path to take. That's how I see the walls in Zomboid and I think that Lv 1-2 Walls should be like that.
There is definitely room for detailed mechanics surrounding the destruction of walls and fences.
Maybe with build 42 and being able to use clay, they could also add bricks and brick walls as a more balanced way to have unbreakable walls while still having it be balanced because the bricks would take a long time to make so it would be a late game thing.
@@falloutfart9917 That's a good idea, and it'd also look nice from an aesthetic standpoint to have brick walls and wood doors/roofs.
Imagine if there's a high-enough carpentry skill that lets you 'fortify' your walls using buckets of cement, then it makes your walls indestructible.
Cute to see how a feature/property of zombie pathfinding, probably intended to stop players from forming comical walls that trivialize the game, interacts with meta events to make zombies super aggro towards your DIY house
1:58 that is actually terrifying, watching them all path towards the noise. in game you never know how many move or how large the range is. i just hear it as "oh theres gonna be zombies in that area now."
i think ''memory'' hsa big part to play in this.
With low memory, the zombies further away won't have enough interest/memory to get to the meta event spot. So it'll only attract the closer zombies for a medium-ish group
But with high memory, all zombies will have enough interest/memory to get to the meta event spot. Causing a massive horde to eventually form.
You can increase the health of player built structures in settings so you can fight them before they break all your stuff
Sounds like the best solution to me.
I play games like this because they're difficult.
Many of the other options seem like they make things too easy.
in zombie settings you can turn off damage to player buildings at all. If you build a brick wall, there is no way a human beign would destroy this wall before their body fell apart.
@@stalker2011mixa Only if it's a single zombie unfortunately,
@@asdasdasd-gx7zsa thousand people punching a brick wall for a human lifetime would not cause any significant damage if the builder was the slightest bit competent.
Hmm yes I have watched the entire video and am now ready to give my invaluable input. Ignore the upload time and the length of the video
all my homies watch at 2x speed
@@slyseal2091 so true
When I saw zombies starting to break my walls I was:
Then why they aren't attacking other houses? This is stupid
Because your house is WEAK and didn't do enough pushups.
There's a setting where you can have the zombies attack random buildings. It gets chaotic real quick if you have them be able to trigger house alarms also.
@@Boututu yep, I know about that, and most pf my runs where using both options, real chaos, real funny
The fact they can break metal walls at all is BS. You're not breaking a welded metal wall with your hands, it's just not happening. A 1 inch weld holds like three tons. Flesh doesn't beat steel and if they're massing up in such quantities to damage the metal wall they should be actively crushing each other to death, which would then stop them from damaging it as the ones in front stop pushing.
@@jackbright2125 Who's to say you're using actual steel? A couple of things here:
1) You know how difficult it would be for some random nobody who doesn't know the first thing about metalwork to actual construct stable steel structures? You're not just going to read a couple of books and then spend three days welding random shit together before you "Eureka!" your way into building steel structures (that are stable). And then where are you going to get that steel? Do you have a foundry that will allow you to superheat steel to it's melting point so that you can pour it into molds/casts in order to reshape the steel into what you need? Raw steel is usually shaped into large raw cylinders or coils for easy transportation, where they are then melted down a second time and reforged into necessary shapes. Not only that, but if you're just one man trying to build a structure from steel, have fun - it's going to take at least six months of twelve hour work days before you're even close to building a medium size home or wall (steel is also notoriously difficult to build structures with. There's a reason we only use it for supports and use materials easier to mold for our buildings, like concrete and lime).
2) The player buildings in PZ, with the exception of perhaps the gate, look very much "jury-rigged", as in cobbled together out of sheets of scrap metal and aluminum. This is actually fairly realistic when we're considering what either a couple of metalworking amateurs or one very skilled metalworker would actually be able to create without the help of heavy industrial tools... and while scrap metal and aluminum definitely can be stronger than wood if worked correctly, it's certainly not going to withstand the pressure of hundreds of bodies piling up against it forever.
3) If you want a game that both sticks to the "realism" schtick and allows you to craft shit like steel walls and buildings, then you're probably better off playing Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. You can build steel structures in that came, and it is exactly as ridiculously time consuming as one might expect.
I believe the worst enemy of a player's base is the player itself.
You can barricade all your corners and holes but at some point some player will try to cook meat the lazy way, turn on the microwave and watch the base and themselves being set on fire.
to be fair about the metal pot in microwave thing, that was a fairly recent change, so it still catches returning veteran players off guard from time to time, as evidenced by posts you see on r/projectzomboid, also it's one of those small details you dont normally expect to see in a videogame, and from what I understand is a bit of a myth irl that only really happened with much older examples from like the 60s and 70s, and the worst that could happen on a modern example is it simply dies, no fire or explosion.
I remember trying to heat up some water to sterilize some bandages, but I didn't have an oven anywhere near so I put a cooking pot in a microwave and left the house for a few minutes - when I came back everything was ablaze
@@thegamingraven1691 When I played with my brother months ago, he put something in the oven and then went afk while standing right next to the oven.
I was panicking, but it was hilarious after when he returned.
@@AtrociousAK47 "examples from like the 60s and 70s" my guy, how old are you? I know that microwaves today have voltage regulators that can detect a short and adjust power but even just 10 years ago if you put a fork in a microwave it looked like lightning, and *burned many homes down*. I'll never forget putting a gold rimmed plate in and it crackling with blue electricity shooting off the gold.
@@AtrociousAK47 Holy run on sentence Batman
Glad to catch this early. Now can learn how to curb the “fearer” of my hard-earned base being destroyed.
Now I just need to live long enough to make my own base to begin with.
Same. I recently bought PZ and after reading through the comment section, I think I am going to turn off zombies being able to destroy buildings. The challenge will be to survive long enough to see my home finished!
cheese the game and build it suspended above ground level? that way the only thing they can destroy is a stairs leading up in case they aggro. you can rebuild those or even have ropes as an 'elevation measure'.
you mean fear?
My favorite place to build bases is on top of large pre-built buildings roof that are inaccessible without building stairs or on top of water sources like lakes and rivers.
so to summarize,
1-pathfinding basically gives zombies carte blanche to wreck anything built/placed by a player if their alerted to your presence,
or a meta event causes them to path find past/through your base.
2-player built walls do not negate sickness from rotting bodies, but pre-built do
3-no matter what, fire is the bane of your existence when it comes to base building
4-be aware of chunk borders, and try to build nestled into a corner in order to minimize potential pathing issues from migration or meta event attraction
tldr pre-built buildings are typically better than building from scratch, especially in multiplayer, but from scratch bases let you control points of entry and exit
Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead has a great way to deal with this, instead of just making all playermade structures have different hp values, there is a certain damage treshhold for an enemy to actually deal damage. While cataclysm has hundreds of different enemies and PZ only one, I still think that it could work by making a zombie treshhold instead, a wooden door should fall to a single zombie, that makes sense. But a metal fence should require atleast 5-10 for it to collapse. Same thing with plastered walls or log walls.
Wooden Door should fall to a single zombie? XD HAve you seen a standard wooden door? :P Those are pretty sturbdy :P
Zomboid already implements something like this. The number of zombies attacking a tile multiply the damage dealt exponentially. A single zombie will be thumping walls for days, 3 can crack a wall quicker than you'd think, and 10 will fell it in seconds.
Window barricades don't follow this rule and only tank a finite number of hits though.
That's why I build bases on lakes nowadays.
My go-to spot for building my own base is the lake in the woods just east of Muldraugh. No zombies at all (I think a couple can appear at first, but once they're cleared out I never see another enter that space), a nigh-endless supply of trees for lumber, a lake right there for fishing, and a pretty quick and easy path back into town. I don't know anything about zombie populations or migration patterns or any of that; I just got curious about the lake I saw on the map, went to explore the area, and fell in love.
Honestly my favorite thing to do is combine the base building aspects with prebuilt houses, there's one house in the south east of Rosewood that has a good large yard with gardens in it. Down the street from the Fire station. I usually make that home base, and then after making a perimiter fence with player made structure, I eventually try and reclaim Rosewood in totality and once that place is recaptured, I use it as main home and basically loot run into the other towns and such to bring humanity back to Rosewood so that, in my head, the government is then able to firebomb everywhere but rosewood, because in my settings I turn off respawning zombies, turn on "dead zombies can sometimes get back up", and up the peak zombies count so there is still an ENDLESS horde that, unlike in Vanilla, CAN be eradicated with enough time.
Good to know about those rain barrels, I've been wanting to do a run without doing much carpentry to speed things up a bit so going to grab those would be great. If only metal crates spawned in the world...
A handful of saucepans and cooking pots hold as much water as the first level of rain barrel.
The rain barrel isn't really a crucial item, because just about every house has a cook pot, saucepan or both. Once you have looted about 10 of each, you'll be able to store enough water to make it between rains.
And this isn't even counting the other good, rain catching items: gardening cans, metal buckets, and paint buckets.
Finally, there are so many Water Dispensers on the map, each holding 250 units of clean drinking water, that grinding carpentry levels for rain barrels - and the rain barrels themselves - are really pretty unnecessary.
@@broastedgarlic7354you need rain barrels to get clean running water but that's about it,also they are needed by irrigation mods.
@@broastedgarlic7354 For me its less about the ability to gather water, but reducing the annoyance of having to constantly boil water because i dont have a barrel and plumbed sink.
Metal crates do spawn. But the only place I found them so far was a metal shop in Louisville.
@Domo-mq8tm that's why you boil in batches and fill a bunch of empty bottles...
If you set your target grounded zombies and sprint key to the same button and press it before you start aiming you will very quickly hit the zombie on the floor and move into the hitbox range much faster. If you are worried about accidently sprinting, ive been using it for over a year and that does not happen, you cannot sprint while aiming.
4:30
Uploader had to use an explosive to make a fire because Antique Stoves *never* produce fire from burnt food (or any other condition). All hail Antique Stove Superiority.
I thought about doing the microwave with metal thing, but really wanted to throw the molotov.
@@Retanaru Heh, fair enough - I thought it was a clever way to highlight how good the An. Stove is.
One thing I always wanted to know: why is there such a large amount of zombies on the edge of the map? The bottom right corner has 1000s of them despite not being anywhere near the world border, makes basing in the woods impossible!
There didn't use to be so many zombies around the edge as far as I know. They were only added after they included the bits and pieces of the next map update (I assume to make it dangerous to go out there).
@@Retanaru it's especially annoying for woodlands bases and around March Ridge
An near impenetrable wall of zombies, 10s of cells deep is no fun for my simple woodlands lifestyle
Also last time I checked, they are generic Civilian zombies
@@jw69440 I dont know the legit reason as why the developers have spawned them there or what code may be making it happen.
But in lore as far as I know the area we play in its quarantined from the rest of the world, so any zombies that wander away (as they just shamble with time), or chase survivors who think they can escape the quarantine, its built a massive wall of zombies at the border, idk just a fan theory.
@@jw69440 Well my guess is that A) it's a "soft border" which the players hit before the hard border, and hard borders can be more of an unimmersive thing to bump into, and B) They want to make it harder for you to be truly safe from the zeds. If you're close enough to those zed pop zones, meta events like the heli are still a threat to you.
Obviously there's lots of spots on the map where you are far enough away from those pop zones; but it'd be even easier to be totally safe if you could just walk in one direction and be sure you'd never see a zed again.
@@tommeakin1732 i'd need to factcheck it myself, but I believe that these border areas have a higher population count than the rest of the map combined excluding LV, despite not having any buildings aside from the unfinished settlement to the top left. I get having to have a soft border, but it covers about 45% of the playable space
If you're a base builder, definitely consider the indestructible constructs - it frees you from a lot of restrictions, including having to actively kill zombies around the builds to keep them safe.
Thats the good thing about PZ - you can adapt the game's ruleset to your playstyle in many ways with Sandbox - you can make it a horror game where every zombie encounter might be the last one, or turn it into left4dead experience by giving you enough guns and ammo to go wild.
Also, make yourself immune to the zombie virus
Makes the health system worth it
Why else would you be alive?
Why is everyone else infected?
One thing I never understood is how zombies can break through your plastered walls but can't break through houses
I often turned it super deadly, where making it to a point where I could even consider making a base was impossible.
I personally play with the setting that makes zombies break random objects, player built or not, but I just disable them destroying player constructions. This does still let zombies break barricaded windows, but they don't destroy walls or such.
I like this setting because it;
A - Prevents bathroom ambushes, zombies will break out of small windows.
B - Makes it very atmospheric IMO, as zombies 'attract' each other by the noises they make, and it's pretty cool seeing the zombies crash against walls.
Another commenter already mentioned this, but I think when you get up to the maximum level of carpentry (when you're walls look similar to normal ones) they should then become non targetable. Especially if you plaster/paint them, as the zombies really shouldn't be able to recognize them as player built structures at that point (I know it's hard coded in, but still).
Obviously some players could exploit this (walling off whole sections of towns/cities), but honestly it's a ton of work/time/effort to do that, so I wouldn't mind it.
Source?
The wiki doesn't state anything like this so it's likely false
@@carlosd.ambuyo3529 They are saying that it should be added, not that it already exists.
@@nothingtoseehere9648 They aren't saying its in the game, they are saying that the devs should add it
@@thematriarch-cyn ah ok
Learnt semi-hard way that Zombers will break stuff to reach noises, was playing modded with the True Music Mod (or whichever it was) Was around my base doing a bit of looting at the Sports Stadium in Louisvillie (Modified area, made it into a Evacuation Center that was overrun so I was camped out by some Military Tents)
I had just got some boxes for storage and I put one down and placed a Boombox on-top and was jamming to some tunes, forgot to turn it off when I walked away to the nearby Canteen to grab breakfeast, so some Little Zoombers Decided to go and Break my Box because they didn't like the Music. Very Tragic when I came back and I didn't hear any music.
generator in comfortable gun distance outside your base is great zombie bait. I like this tip a lot.
It's one of those small details that I really enjoy about 7 days to die, how zombies will choose the path of least resistance to get to you. This can of course be abused, but it is a solution I think would work lovely.
Nah fuck that. Nobody likes it, since it requires you to build a trap base a very specific way, other wise defense systems are useless unless you just build a massive metal tunnel full of traps.
I thought it was unrealistic that zombies could batter down walls with a few smacks, then I remembered that they're American made walls.
2:28
I hated this issue so much when I was building a base on a MP server. I found this cool nice area to a river in some modded map but didn't know how much zombies there were in the nearby forests and ended up getting sick quick. But I found out that if you go to the second level even with so many bodies outside that corpse sickness is slowly going down just by hanging around in the second level. Nice video dude!
I hope that NPCs you recruit require/get buffs from amenities and having their own decorated rooms. I DONT want NPCs to be "ai controlled" players because worrying about them getting killed randomly by a single zombie would be annoying, but if you could recruit them and have a reason to expand your currently occupied buildings by building additions, it would be a good middle ground between just sitting hunkered down in a premade all game or building a whole base from scratch
I think having extra survivors function as a lives mechanic, while still doing busywork around your base would be a nice middleground
hey wake up, its more then 10 years after PZ released and there is still no NPCS or even Build42. The dev had a mental breakdown on twitter some weeks ago, talking about selling the company. This game will never have any NPC's besides that janky mod.
I love building my bases, however, I always build on a second or third floor, on the water, or behind all metal fences. Best to be safe
I think it makes perfect lore sense for a player constructed base to be a flying fortress, which largely spares you from wandering zombies.
Just Minecraft your house in the sky?
Project Zomboid is a really creative and hard game, but it also sounds like an absolute chore and after some time playing and getting to know some machanics you will start to Interact with those incredibly meta stuff you can never forget and the magic of the game fades away...
Pretty much. My favorite bit is how flipping light switches is REALLY GODDAMN LOUD somehow so window blinds don't actually matter much. It's all just overtuned to the point where most of it's mechanics are pointless because you need to just cheese everything.
The devs made the game incredibly annoying on purpose to make it feel "hard".
I think when you learn it goes from Hard Realistic Game to Unfair Meta Game you learn to exploit or die to the Obtuse Meta Gameness of it.
It's pretty terrible.
Horrible UI, mechanics that don't make sense. A game that has been in development for 11 years, living off charity still looks and plays like a pre alpha build.
@@JuanAntonioGarciaHeredia well, now you're just getting personal
It should be that plastered walls, enclosed in a proper roof, with a door, count as a house and cant be destroyed by zombies. Maybe throw in a size limit to avoid an impenetrable base.
I tried building my own base not long after I started playing. I only built a couple of walls before zombies wrecked them and I realized all that crap was stupid and a waste of time.
My favorite place to live is, I believe it's called Rosewood? I haven't played in a while so I could be misremembering. But theres a police station, fire station, and gas station all really close together. I used to like living in the fire station, but later on I started living in the building just up the road. It has a bunch of random shops and stuff on the ground level, but it has one singular door that leads up to the second floor and there is a collection of apartments up there. THAT is the best base ever. You don't have to worry about boarding up windows and all that crap, you just have the singular door, staircase, and door at the top of the staircase to create a safe area. And you can use ropes out the windows to enter and exit by the opposite side of the building if you really want to so you don't even bring zombies near the door. You have plenty of space to redesign to fit your needs as well as a big roof for all your water collecting and farming needs.
And you live literally right above or right beside a book store to get a lot of your starting books. The apartments already have faucets and freezers and TVs and so on. You can dissassemble anything you don't want and keep the rest to make it look aesthetically pleasing as well as being incredibly functionally useful. And ultimately you could eventually destroy the staircase up if you want to be cheesey and make your base completely impervious, but even if you don't want to cheese, only having that ONE entry point is awesome.
What I like to do is convert one of those big ground floor shops into a garage to house my vehicles and vehicle tools. They seem rather perfect for that too because they are large open areas that you only need to move a handful of things out of the way to make it work.
Love that place. So good.
You mentioned placing your generator a bit away from your house, but another good thing is to have a another generator as a decoy even further from your house. Not too far away, though, of course.
If you want to make a nice looking base near good loot and water, build in the fenced off military checkpoint. You got only 3 entrances to worry about and a bunch of stuff to do nearby.
something I have done in personal servers is find an existing building in a clearing (such as twiggy's) and putting large fences and custom buildings around it. me and my friends actually made the twiggy's commune once where we built a small city around the bar and used the bar as sort of a town hall.
The fact that metal barricades and constructions are literally the same as wooden ones infuriates me to no end
I remember I finally got Zomboid figured out and survived for something like 2 months. I started farming, building, all the good stuff. Then, in the backyard of my base, I was standing next to a campfire in the rain, left for about 10 seconds to get a snack, and the fire spread one tile directly underneath me and killed me before I could get back to the game.
It's a fun enough game, but I'm not playing so long as bullshit like that can happen.
Great video, I love that you actually address people's gripes with the player built structures in the game instead of just saying they must not know how to play the game. This is a really really great guide that I'm sure will prevent hundreds of hours of frustration at least.
I love it when a single weak strength zombie breaks a level 10 plastered wall by simply headbutting it for a few minutes 🤗
I’ll be placing composters around my base until they add/improve proper barricade system.
The trick is to build a second floor with a sheet rope, then sledge hammer to first floor down. I’ve never seen a zombie fly before
I avoid some of these issue by always building a base in the upper floors of a vanilla building. Also I have in the past built towers with stairs as a base level. Rather that is with the upright posts at the back of stairs. If you build two levels of stairs and then delete them again you can end up leaving those uprights in place. You can create a platform that I think (not tested 100%) the zombies wont attack. You can then place down wooden floors on top of this platform and build whatever kind of house you want.
every project zomboid vid i view is 'here is how to fix the game that has been in development for 20 years'
Wait, are composters zombie proof? If I understood that right, this will be much more epic than fence + path blocking object around my base.
Crawlers don't appear to attack them either.
They are, but they are not really supposed to be. Moving them will cause them to no longer be invulnerable. There was a time when they couldn't even be moved either (making them the only wall that even players can't break without a sledgehammer), but for some reason they patched the movable part without bothering to change the destroyable part.
That being said, the fence blocking exploit still exists too.
3:20 To make it more realistic, they should be able to attack walls, but if they are of high enought quality, they should be near indestructible, imagine punching a wood wall with you hands, even if you hit it full force a 1000 times, you barely make a dent on it
That could easily be accomplished with a simple material based DR, or damage reduction. If a zombie attacks, the wall just eats a certain portion of the damage before the rest affects the wall's HP. At a high enough DR rating, the walls would just be invincible to zombie attacks.
Specifically and only _zombie_ attacks. Because zombies attack with their teeth and bare hands, not weapons, cars, fire, or explosives. So walls wouldn't just be the end all solution in multiplayer servers, but you can choose to build up however many locations as you like into unbreachable fortresses in singleplayer.
Though I would argue for any wall without supports behind it being vulnerable to a large mass of zombies literally pushing it over as a rotting groaning corpse tidal wave. The support could be a roof, a perpendicular wall, an actual brace, whatever, but if it's just free standing, there should be the risk that the sheer mass of bodies can push through.
I think the best place for the base is the iron fence gated community with 3 houses inside since there is one narrow entrance to the huge zone and last time i played the iron fence was indestructible by zombies (or they never attempted attacking it) and the tight entrance can be easily maintained and all the zombies will often get stuck on the iron fence outside your base and not even bother to pathfind around (prob since it's quite the distance).
The gated community is pretty safe and then you're close to the city proper with all the things you could possibly want.
Were not making it outta knox county with this one!
Kinda sucks that the game disincentives proper base building to such a degree. I love the idea of building a base from scratch out in the woods, foraging and fishing and minding my business, but the game REALLY does not want you to play that way. Even without zombies constantly pathing towards your location, it’s such a chore. The game really just wants you to engage nonstop in repetitive, uninteresting combat until you eventually die. I have such a hard time staying invested in PZ because of how hard it works to incentivize a high-risk playstyle when the game would really benefit from some flexibility. Also, it’s insane that metal structures burn, and that zombies can destroy them. For a game all about becoming self sufficient, it really hates when players try to sustain themselves without being limited to urban centers.
Some good points in this video and one of the main reasons I never build my own base.
I started just modding homes to fit my needs, even if I gotta add a 2nt/3rd floor.
Also fishing is not really inf fish/food it can run out within a time frame based on server settings, but ya probably not need to worry about it unless multiple people are fishing in same area.
I don’t ever build a base from scratch, I like to turn a regular building into a base themed on whatever that building was.
There is one more way to prevent zombies from atacking your outer walls
You can build them so far away from your actual base that the perimeter wall is outside of loaded chunks.
Punch a wooden wall for long enough and you just break your arm, or outbreak happened in town full of karate masters?
I look forward to every one of these videos. You do an excellent job. Thank you.
Yes i love when me and my uncle have a conversation about this game and he gifts it to me on steam I just get a video about it out if the blue
My first big base was in the SE Riverwood upscale neighborhood. It has fences surrounding a block of 6 houses. Since the fences enclose these houses completely except for the road, all you need is a couple chain link fences and a some gates. Then you have six secure houses you can do whatever you want with.
Player-built chain-link fences don't burn (IDK why it's only player built and only chain link though). So in theory in a big enough safehouse on a server with destroying disabled, fire spread disabled, invincible player constructions, and no tresspass, it could be made fire-safe. But that is a a combination of hypotheticals that will [generally] never happen.
One of my favorite buildings to base at is the Metalworks shop in Louisville, in that industrial park across from the hospital. No zombies tearing at walls, and it only has a few doors and windows on the ground floor
you know, i just build out in the woods in a place within driving distance of a town. it's rare to see more than a few at a time and i often go days without being bothered at all. looting is more difficult because of the distance to a town, but the work around is to make an outpost on the edge of town and collect everything there for later transport.
Indie Stone should definitely pay you for all the research and play testing.
I really wish there was a midground of the base damage options in game, I don't see how a single zombie or even say two would be able to rip it's way through a timber wall, but the option to disable construction attacks makes it too safe, some mid point where zombies can kill themselves by attacking your barricades seems like a nice middle ground
Take an old wooden door, made of planks and inch thick or more. How long do you think it'd take to claw through it with your fingernails?
Just turn off building damage. It's the realistic option.
I really hope the team fixes all these issues, because building a perimeter would be pretty cool in the right circumstances.
The idea rhat zombies need to just break random objects is a weird mechanic to begin with.
I think they shouldnt attack unles they aggro on you. First time I built a base it was annoying as hell to come back for the first time sneaking around, kiting zombies in my path, only to arrive to a mob tearing down my walls as if the scent of 100 people was eminating.
If someone interested - in last devlog of build 42 devs mentioned stone cutting, as well as same named skill.
They also mentioned that using stone cutting and new stone materials, player will be able to build indestructible for zombie walls, or at least hard enough to them not being able to break through just buy bumping their heads in it for several hours.
It will probably take time to balance, but i think with time we will have really good reason for player builded communities.
Tendency is that the best games is having the spaghetties code
I think something that could somewhat fix this issue, is no longer considering something player-built if the playable character that built the structure dies.
That way, you could have a strategic sacrifice relatively early on creating a long term pay-off
Honestly, shit like this is why I say keep respawn off. It’s not cheating, and you alone are *never* going to kill all of those zombies anyways.
It makes it actually possible to temporarily clear zombies from your base (no promising the zombies won’t naturally migrate back to the area of your base)
Even if building your own base is a trap. You could make a very small first floor that's disconnected from the second floor. You can then use a third/forth floor to setup rain collectors and a garden. Then you setup plumbing for the other floors. From there all that's missing is refrigerators/freezers and electricity. In the case of electricity it could be taken case of by solar panels from a mod or a normal generator. From there all that's truly needed is decoration and a wood burning stove, though don't forget to build this structure in a location nearby a fishing spot if you want access to more food/emergency water (the result is basically a safe haven from the apocalypse. All you need to do for survival is maintaining it and every once in a while gather more wood, though you'll still want to gather your own food as you could starve if you don't)
idea: mod that makes zombies destroy prebuilt structures same as player structures
After watching this video 5 times I’ve learnt how to destroy player made constructs in my day to day life.
here's some suggestions for change i suppose:
• meta events (or generally most attractions) should push zombies towards repathing unless they have trouble doing so or they catch line-of-sight of you in passing. i know, repathing is laggy, but there isn't any reason why they don't do that considering the zombies are smart enough to bash on doors and climb through windows.
• once a player structure is qualified as 'enclosed', it should give the same benefits as prefab houses do with regards to corpse sickness. includes a size minimum, because the stinky corpses shouldn't be covered by a small 3x3 box.
• eventually fix the unpathable objects to be breakable by zombies? its impressive how walls are outright worse than just having a box.
• salvaging a portion of plaster from wall drops, paint chips feel like they would be immutable - but that insulation is still good with some glue. maybe.
Build your shacks on top of stilts, destroy the stairs, and use sheet-ropes to get in and out. Zambos won't destroy all your sheet ropes if you place enough, spaced far enough, so it's the best anti-zimbuh housing technology! (Technically the stilts aren't necessary since buildings don't have gravity. 😆)
I just turn off "zombies can attack player buildings" settings. I just think it's silly that some walking corpses can slap a solid log wall down
I am the kind of a guy, who hates driving in the middle of hordes. So when it was time to move from rosewood, I set my course to warehouse District between Rosewood, Muldraugt and March Ridge. None of the warehouses there are suitable for living. So I built a base on the roof top of a diner. Being on roof prevents both corpse sickness and random attacks. And it's a great outpost too, if you don't mind the time commitment
luckily i play with respawn off so zombies barely walk into my west point storage base. the only time a large group appeared was when i triggered 3 house alarms consecutively, but by that time i was already a spear god lol
will this sucks I was wanting to make a base but now I don't want to run into this issue.
I decided to hold up in the fire station and fortify it since zombies are infrequent around the areas i frequently roam through and had to level up my carpentry QUICK because a zombie broke down one of the front doors before i had the thought to fortify it and got extremely paranoid that zombies would start wandering through and catch me with my pants down
The big issue here is that "builder" players and "minmaxing" players are usually the opposite
Its like asking creative mode minecraft players to speedrun the game, kind of (the more a player is drawn to making and decorating a pretty base the least they are probably interest in mechanically "beating" the game and spending time learning how to do that)
So basically this is a huge flaw in PZ's design
I stack boxes against large windows, good for storage and acts as a super good barricade.
Fun fact: Zombies will naturally move towards the player's general location due to how their AI is coded, there is indeed a mod that solves this
jesus christ is that horrific
Do you know the name of the mod? Tbh I probably wouldn’t use it as I think I like the constant challenge of having to deal with zombies who just can’t seem to get enough of me 😂
So Indie Stone lied.
After about a 1000 hrs I just use indestructible player construction option, I honestly can't be bothered anymore by Zeds constantly fucking up my fully reinforced base. Seriously, a rotting piece of walking meat can break through fully welded in steel bars on my windows? I THINK NOT.
The way you secure a base in project zomboid is counter intuitive and very very VERY labor intensive. You need 3 things;
1) a perrimeter wall far enough from the main dwelling/ building thst zombies will not detect you from the outside. Randomly wandering zombies will not start attacking a structure until they sense your presence, so if you're far enough back, that wall is invisible and the roaming zombies just walk right past you.
2) an escape route. The wide perrimeter skirt is good, but not perfect. It very tempting to use that buffer zone for gardening, or maybe you fire off a gun too close to home, or a wandering zombie saw you pul in, or you didnt make the zone wide enough (idk how many squares but it needs to be broad) and they hear your generator. One way or another a few zombies will get clued in to your presence. At that point, the only way to save your base is to get out fast. If you fight the zombies on your hone turf, it only calls more of them to your location. An elevated walkway from you base to at least 2 perimeter locations is good, which brings us to
3) an external sniper tower. This is NOT for you to eliminate all the zombies. Its for you to take a couple long range shots at the zombis still banging on your house, deliberately calling all the zombies in the area away from your house. Only a few shots, then you jump in a car, and take the battle to the streets.
Once far from home, shotguns are your friend, especially sawed off.
Never stand and fight a swarm, back towards your car then run, drive somewhere else, do it again and again till you thin out the swarms.
Generally a pretty good idea to find a house or apartment building, knock out the bottom flight of stairs, and build ontop of that
Use sheet ropes to get in and out
I prefer building a ladder on the ground floor and then a "stilt house" above it. That way the house is safe and keeps any errant zombies from destroying your beautiful work. This can be done as an add on above an established vanilla house to allow claim and the ladder being within the safe zone keeps out any theives.
Player Built anything shouldn't be attacked unless the Zombies can't find a path around. Then the Zombies target Doors/Windows/Furniture in the way. Basically the devs took the lazy way out and in turn negatively impacts the entire system.
I recommend playing the game with zombie respawn turned off.
If the game is supposed to rely on realism, then it makes no sense that zombies would magically appear anywhere.
It does make the idea of a base itself kind of redundant. I built a huge fortress in Louisville, but I've cleared out all the zombies in a decent radius around my base, so there's never going to be a horde that attacks.
That's why I focused more on the visuals of my base, rather than actually designing it with defence in mind.
That's why you build your base in a pre-made building. Only problem is, zombies will soon be able to destroy prebuilt buildings in coming updates.
I usually just use some mod that lets me construct indestructible fences and gates. There are just some construction types that a human can't smack down. Sure, they are undead and feel no pain. They can swing hard enough to break something without caring about the damage and holding back. That doesn't mean they can punch through a brick wall given enough time. That means that a brick wall will leave you with a hoard of broken-armed zombies, given enough time.
I find rebuilding from the half destroyed ruins of your base after an intense attack where you barely got out alive just as satisfying as building it from scratch
My recommendation is to build your base/house within a pre-made structure, example being the Storage lots just outside Riverside, anywhere you can easily fortify gaps heavily.
Highly recommend doing it on-top of a pre-made structure.
I also really hope they make more staircase directions, having only two ways limits your creative ability.
I do have a question in regards to generators, if you wall it in, will the noise distance be reduced as the sound in-game becomes muffled?
Floor storage meta is even stronger than I expected.
The problem is they attack player made walls, but they dont do the same to prebuilt buildings.
there is a really nice gas station in the middle of the map between riveerside, rosewood and muldraugh. its a 2-story building and very well defendable
this is why i learned the best way to make a base is to go to a school, if it has a seccond floor its even better, i use the classroom as a homemade apartment for myself and i can build what i want inside said building, it also saves up on A LOT of materials hehe, my favorite school to build a base on is Riverside school
from someone who has build his base himself: build your base in the Woods on some road, always build everything on the second floor, do not put windows on the first floor, yes, reaching level 7 in carpentry is pain and dying while having it is hell on earth, but you can live with it, just make sure you stockpile enough food before you grind xp (i sawed logs to get xp) and complete your base before you go on another potentially lethal scavenging run
shoutout to the zombies that always attack the same fence tile over and over and over again
I'm based south of West Point in those storage containers and I fenced all of it in with metal fences.
Every day I wake up because new zombies spawn somewhere in my cell/close to my cell, walk to the same fence tile, just to destroy it overnight
it's annoying asf but I don't really wanna change that setting in the sandbox options because it feels like cheating and not very immersive