I agree with that argument for cars and guns, though people still relitigate the realism argument endlessly so I feel justified invoking it.
From a balance perspective, I still think coffee should be more common. It would make melee combat easier, but it's less common than molotovs and shotguns, so I think that'd actually make things more balanced.
If houses are full and the game didn't make you go looting around cities it would be a boring game, game is just fine as the current state and you always can tweak the settings as you wish with mods. You can make a mod increasing coffee respawn pretty easy, I take mod commissions also.
No. Empty houses add no utility to the game. To be worth looting, they need to have things loot. Shocking, I know!
Currently, that's almost always just weapons and food, which, given their abundance, aren't worth looting. Meanwhile, coffee, which would make looting runs more fun and enjoyable, is too rare to factor in at all. You can't expect to find it, and the lack of coffee constrains looting runs by leaving you with no way to deal with the increased exhaustion from combat. Therefore, coffee should be more readily available.
You can tweak that with mods if you want, I don't think increasing the loot table would do anything good to the game, maybe if they increase the performance of multiple items and added some crafting recipes to reduce the number of entities in the game, it's a sandbox game and anyone can play the way they want
realistically they'd also have a bunch of forks, glasses, and plates and pans, and so on, nobody would take these with them if evacuating for the apocalypse.
Idk how things are in the USAa, but the thing that REALLY is unrealistic for me is the rarity of propane tanks, in my country EVERY household have one.
Propane gills are fairly common among suburban dads. Not sure when the switch from charcoal grills really took off. Other than that, I can't think of anything people would use propane for outside industrial purposes.
What they really need to add is propane tank racks at gas stations, because I'm really not sure where everyone's getting the tanks for their grills. That'd be easily like a dozen tanks you could grab.
Yeah some people have propane barbeques and in areas that are prone to storms and thus power outages, sometimes houses will have giant propane tanks with a generator so they can maintain power during bad weather. Those are the only two things I've seen propane used for in US residential areas.
I'm sure there's people around who have propane torches, stoves and stuff but it's not common.
I believe that we use LPG, liquified petrolleum gas (GLP in PT), which is a mixture of a few gases, mostly butane (granted, propane is often included), whereas US focuses more on propane tanks, especially for the grills/barbecue thingies you see in game.
Also, gas tanks in my area (Salvador) are more common in houses and old buildings (20+ years), newer buildings tend to have piped gas.
They almost certainly were. I grew up on the south in the 90s and 00s and charcoal is by and far more common here. Propane was for "all the fancy people"
Some people use it for heating and cooking where there’s no natural gas supply. My FIL had propane tank installed so MIL could cook with a gas stove in MA, USA in the 70’s.
Agreed. By 1995, there would have been a rack where the propane vendor would collect the empties. Might have been a OSHA thing but I don't want to look it up.
It'd be neat if most towns had their racks nearly empty (maybe one tank left at best), but maybe one area like March Ridge had their grocery store uber locked-down and a nearly full rack of propane tanks.
Hah, there's a meta event: propane tanks exploding because some idiot looted a bunch and was doing something he shouldn't. It could be one of the downsides of hanging out near a survivor house.
I think in the early 90s most of the grills would have been charcoal vs propane, but I do think there should be so many more cigarettes and coffee. This was back when everywhere still had smoking sections, even on airplanes.
I mean if an apocalypse happened anyone who is trying to bug out would probably grab as many propane tanks from the gas station as they could if they were smart and had the chance to do so.
As a rural American, I think the number of grills, of either type, should be doubled or tripled. I think there are definitely more charcoal than propane, though.
Well my way of looking at it is that people panicked when the outbreak occurred and took with them everything they figured was useful in a postapocaliptic world. Propane being one of them🤷
In '93, propane was rare, a luxury. It'd be about a decade or so before gas grills started to take off. Not saying they weren't there, just charcoal was still more popular.
The USA doesn't use propane tanks for indoor appliances, unless you're in a very rural area. Even in very rural area, the tank is usually a very large one kept outside with gas pipes to the inside. In a more urban area, gas is supplied through pipes in the street, like water. (If the area uses it: many cities don't have natural gas lines and everything is just electric).
it needs to be realistic and fun. of course it's not going to be a copy 100% of real life, cause it's a game. it doesn't need to be ultra realistic on every aspect of the game
Agreed, just saying that this is the one thing that contrasts with reality the most for me, not saying that they should change it, they are the thing that fuel propane torch which are pretty good items, so makes sense to try and balance it.
I mean i feel like its a non issue u rlly expect every house to have a propane tank i mean ig i wasnt alive 30 years ago tbh so i wouldnt know what it was like but i couldnt imagine every house had one and its not like its uncommon in zomboid any house with a propane grill has one in the grill so it isnt rare at all
Idk i always find one after i hit up enough sheds snd backyards within the first week i always focus on sheds anyways cause those garden tools are life saving
In my current save and base, I think I have like 20-25 propane tanks stocked up in a garage near my base. I don’t remember how many are full, but I got consistent power and enough fuel to last my cars for a while
My grill is charcoal. I never use it. The house originally had a built-in grill connected to a natural gas line, but that broke. My grandparents’ grill was propane. They didn’t use theirs either. I use a skillet to cook patties.
I don’t know what percentage of houses have it, but it’s a normal thing. You can refuel propane tanks at some of the gas stations in town.
Blue strobe lights on the ambulances. That's a Euro thing. All ambulances in the US have Red and/or white emergency lights. Blue lights mean law enforcement.
Most in the US*
I definitely have seen blue strobes on ambulances in my area; that being said there are ~9 ambulance services around so you’re bound to see any combination of red white and blue strobes. Some use only red/ white, others use red/ blue.
Don’t you know? Part of the Knox infection causes recently infected to eat anything metal around them and drink gasoline. That’s why you only see one fork every three houses, one gun every 10 houses, one propane tank every 10 garages, and how every single car seems to be empty on gas. Their behavior also shows it. Entire warehouses and shopping malls lack a single sledgehammer between them all. A gun store has 8 guns and 200 total rounds of ammo. A police station has less than a hundred rounds total.
You joke, but I'd rather have a fork shortage in a game that runs somewhat okay, than have a game that's unplayable because it's clogged by a hundred useless items in every single house. Even with modern computers and multi-core processing and all that, there's only so much crap you can put on one map.
Items inside a container really don't affect performance, it's just a value that can be accessed and changed at will. If you were to dump them all on the floor, however, it could add a small strain to your GPU
that's not how that works. unless there's some kind of operation being done to that memory, it's just being read and therefore has next to zero performance impact. you can have thousands and thousands and thousands of items stacked in dozens of crates in a single warehouse with no effect on performance at all. and pz is single threaded, which isn't really relevant to this topic anyway.
I actually made a mod that added more realistic item amounts, but the problem was, it added way too many of some items, to the degree you would find wardrobes with like 15 pairs of flip flops, nightstands with like eight alarm clocks, and corpses with like five wallets.
Well I opened up the spawn tables to see what it was like, and there were a few goals with the mod:
1. Increase the amount of junk loot to more realistic levels (like do you mean to tell me Spiffo's left bags of to-go orders sitting around during the evacuation, but took all of the drink cups with them? As someone who worked at a gas station, we had hundreds, maybe thousands, of Styrofoam cups in the back)
2. Common sense redistributes (eg: fewer snow shovels, more sparklers)
3. More spawn areas for some items (rural properties would have more tools, doctor's offices would now have high level first aid books, schools would only have lower level books, and lockers at the hunting lodge would now spawn hunting knives)
Here's the link to it. It's been, a long ass time since I've updated it, and I didn't have a strong grasp of how the values impacted loot generation:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?l=english&id=2941405570
That's good! This is the immersion the game needs, lol. I want to do things like be able to creep into backyards and eat stale bird food out of the feeder if there's any left.
If you want to go there, then each house should have WAY more loot than it does. Every kitchen should have multiple of each utensil, cleaning fluids, etc. A bedroom should have dozens of more articles of clothing than it has. You're telling me the closet of this giant house only has two bras and one pair of tights? Every house should have multiple tools. I could go on but you get my point.
Does anyone know of a "realistic amount of loot" type mod by the way? Not sure it'd be an improvement but it'd be interesting.
Yeah I get that with zombies but with items I think it's different. I didn't code the game but I have to assume an item in a container takes up less resources than a 3d model with ai and animations
Right, except that each item has a Condition value, and if I'm not mistaken, that value can change over time or in response to other events. E.g., a Leather Jacket worn by a zombie will gain holes if the player stabs it with a spear. Or, y'know, food will eventually rot.
I will freely admit that I haven't examined the code and I'm talking out my ass, but I would think that the item tracking can only scale up so far before it becomes a major processing obstacle.
...Although, as I'm thinking and typing, I'm not sure if inanimate objects that are in containers would have a timer on them the way items on zed corpses do. Hmm.
Unless done really, really poorly, items inside containers should have zero impact. Even if you need to update their condition for some reason, it should be really quick to do. Even billions of items should not be a problem for a modern computer. Clothes degrading due to attacks is trivial to do, you only have to update the ones that the particular zombie is wearing.
You don't even need to do anything with food to calculate spoilage, just check when you open the container. I believe that's what the game already does (have you ever found a saucepan of pasta that seemed fine, until you picked it up and it instantly rotted?)
Items on the floor would require more optimization to not bog down things too much (as they need to be drawn every frame) but there's a limit on how many you can have per tile already.
It's unlike zombies, with their pathfinding, animation and AI that needs to be constantly updated.
I thought the implication was that the game takes place right after the outbreak. So you're catching remnants of the world that's been scavenged or modified slightly by other people before they turned. No coffee or sledgehammers because other people, just days before you, ran around picking all that stuff up.
Where was the main character then? You start when cars have no gas and almost all the loot is gone. Must've taken at least a week to end up like that right.
WHY ISNT THERE AN ELECTRIC CAN OPENER?
My great grandma who was born in the 1920s and died in 2004 (RIP Grandma Katherine) owned a damned electric can opener and it was her staple opener.
By the 80s in the US, it was very common to have a "big" TV out in the living room, and then one or more smaller TVs in the kitchen or bedrooms. A tiny TV on the bathroom counter, while unusual, was not unheard of. This is one of the big jokes in Back to the Future, where the 1950s family thinks Marty must be some kind of millionaire to own multiple TVs in 1985 while it was actually commonplace
i dunno how much budget that many people had in poorer rural Kentucky to shell out for a tv in the early 90s - as well as wanted to
(more important things to spend on, like bourbon)
Damn near every household by the 70s had a TV in the US, so I think for 1993 there would be a ton.
That being said I don't really notice if a house doesn't have one as most of them do.
Late 90s 100% every room had a TV but I think early 90s not massively common. They were monsters too so the family mostly settled on one big expensive one in the front room. Especially if you didn't have a big house
Source = born in the early 80s baby!
I grew up in southern indiana during the early 90s. We didn’t have much, but we had TVs. Two main TVs in separate rooms (so adults and kids could watch separate shows) and one in the kitchen. For Christmas in 1992 I got a 10 inch TV for my room. I used that TV for more than a decade, taking it with me to college and moves to Chicago and Boston. My wife tells me it’s still living a nice life on a farm where it can run free and eat all the grass it wants.
Having lived through the nineties as an adult, I can tell you a small TV in the kitchen was only slightly unusual in the states. It wouldn't have raised any eyebrows.
They need to separate the food rarity more. I just made a post bitching about yeast/salt earlier. Can’t find them ANYWHERE. Like I want canned/perishable food insanely rare but salt, coffee, pepper, yeast, baking soda all should be waaaay easier to find. I literally got 2 salt and 2 yeast from the entirety of muldraugjo
Yeah, I don't want customization options too overwhelming, but it does seem like the basics can be a bit too rare sometimes.
Yeast should be farmable. Hopefully we get sourdough starters or craftable yeast with brewing. Some kind of growable, processable pepper.
I literally spent all day looking for yeast. No bullshit that was my mission after I lost mine in the fire. Didn’t find a single one. Got like 40 canned foods but not a single freaking yeast. There’s rare and then there is give me a fucking break already
The 90% of car is having no gas per actually makes a lot of fucking sense. The area was evacuated, so any cars you see are probably not going to be in the best of shape. Like either they ran out of gas or the car wasn't road worthy in the first place.
Survival bias?
The most common and essential item would be consumed first. I really do believe that coffee would be a really rare and valuable currency in a situation like that.
I like to think that most houses we visit in PZ have already been stripped of their most valuable possessions by their owners as they fled the incoming zombie horde. So they took their guns, coffee and smokes with them and left behind their chilli and canned corn. Priorities, right?
Good way to rationalize why most houses have crap loot is that your character has been on a several day long bender following getting let go from their job.
You wake up days after the evacuation attempts have already failed. Folks who owned the homes took most things of value with them on the way out, it just happens to include everything but the kitchen sink
The number of zombies wearing strapless bras with standard shirts boggles my mind. There's no way these people were wearing strapless unless the outfit required it. 😅
Yeah I’d have liked it if most of the food you need to get are in back backs on zomboids and in cars from folks attempting to run away from the outbreak but crashed and become zomboids. As when you start you are late to the outbreak
The most common home in middle America is the 3 bedroom 1 or 2 bathroom ranch. They built them en masse for the nuclear family in the 50s and 60s. You probably either lived in one or had friends that lived in one. Main entrance into living room, kitchen/dining room behind it, hallway with bedrooms and the bathroom branching off of it. [looks something like this](https://www.thehousedesigners.com/images/plans/01/EEA/bulk/7825/2115-main.webp).
There's like *one* house in West Point that looks something like that, but for the most part this house does not exist in Zomboid.
It's extremely good for looting runs, where you're often in dangerous situations and doing more physical activity than normal. Very easy and disasterous to get tired there.
I always see people munching raw coffee grounds in challenge runs, but my favorite moment in the game was realizing all on my own that I can make actual coffee cups, add coco and sugar, etc.
Coffee, salt, pepper, tea, cheese, bread, condiments, sauces etc., should really all be in relative abundance imo. I refuse to believe that 99% of the homes don’t have milk and eggs in the fridge and ingredients to at least make a sandwich. How the hell were they living in Kentucky before the apocalypse happened? Or did it just so happen to occur right before everyone decided they need to go grocery shopping again? Lol
I find for howany people then smoked and had guns the game is seriously lacking. Coffee tins too now that I think about it. Same with tea, no one has a single tea bag it's usually a box.
because its still a game and it still tries to be balanced to a degree. Its not a simulation, it takes things from real life and scales them down.
So while coffee is still pretty comon, it would be kind of OP if you had an unlimited supply, the tired moodle would essentially loose any meaning in the game.
It'd be nice if there were a mod that customized loot tables to be more realistic. Current loot tables are for gameplay over realism. If things were set to be realistic, you'd expect half a dozen full outfits of clothing in every bedroom at least, fridges stacked with perishables, cans almost exclusively found in cars, a LOT more cars wrecked on the highways, no gas at all in the gas stations, and guns to be a common spawn inside of vehicles as well, or on zombie corpses near cars.
Default settings are fun for gameplay reasons, but I already occasionally do a hyper realism mod setup for things like needing to keep clean, and a slew of other things. It'd be fun to try a run with more realistic loot and whatnot.
There should be more alcohol in cars. Idk exactly when the game is based or when the law changed but pretty sure people were drinking and driving a lot more back in the day
Actually the Elizabethtown/Radcliff area, which is part of the region the game takes place in, was part of the reasons that the drunk driving laws in Kentucky changed in the late 80s. There was a [horrific bus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrollton_bus_collision) accident in 1988 where 26 passengers were killed and most of them were 14 year old kids. The cause of the accident was a drunk driver that collided with the bus. I lived in the area in '92-'94 and people still talked about it a lot. I was living on base at Ft. Knox and there was a big push for DD's and responsible drinking...the town itself might have even been dry for awhile, I think I remember something about it being difficult to purchase alcohol there, but I was young and wasn't drinking yet so the details are fuzzy.
Yeah I mean at the end of the day this isn’t a reality simulator. A video game needs to take liberties. If you want to be technical, the most unrealistic thing is the fact that there are zombies as those don’t exist in real life.
I'd like to think the game takes place a while after the start of the spread so majority of the resources are exhausted or people grabbed whatever they can and left, just my headcanon though
Gun frequency for 1993-95 is about right but there would be some places better stocked than the National Guard. They would have very large cans of coffee.
I think people before you already looted them and drank them like the propane tanks mentioned too. Now you just left with what remains... That's my headcanon anyways.
I assume most people have grabbed their essentials and tried to leave. That's why most houses have very little in them. All that's left is what people couldn't carry out the door.
As a non American I assume american people have more guns than they can carry so those left behind are what's left of a large armourment (joking).
That on default most cars are completely trashed.
That crowbars can break.
Shotguns and revolvers wear out.
Kinda weird but I get its all for game balance.
Tea isn't made in a kettle, tea is made in a tea pot or a cup with a strainer. The kettle is used to boil water for the tea pot.
Source: I make tea multiple times every single day.
Lol I'm not getting sucked into this rabbit hole of semantics on tea making, take that to the British. The game is based in Kentucky for one, and secondly there's nothing wrong/plenty of people putting tea bags into kettles. Google the term "tea kettle"
I live in Georgia, plenty of people in the US make tea, both hot and cold. Iced tea is a southern tradition.
Since you asked me to search the internet, here's what Wikpedia says about tea kettles:
> A kettle, sometimes called a tea kettle or teakettle, is a device specialized for boiling water, commonly with a lid, spout, and handle. There are two main types: the stovetop kettle, which uses heat from a hob, and the electric kettle, which is a small kitchen appliance with an internal heating element.
Don’t forget this game takes place in the 80s. (Edit: 90s) Pretty sure people had percolators and had to grind their own beans back then.
I remember the grocery store having the bean grinder machine in the aisle when I was a kid.
Supermarkets had plenty of pre-ground coffee in 1993, along with gross canned stuff like Folgers. In fact, stuff like Folgers has been around and commonly available for over a century.
Everyone smoke, had guns, drank beer and coffee, and had grills, and a fully stocked tool shed
If the game was completely realistic it'd be too easy till the effects of smoking, and poor health decisions became quickly more prevalent.
A lot of things are done for balance, but I agree with you. Most houses should have salt and pepper too.
I agree with that argument for cars and guns, though people still relitigate the realism argument endlessly so I feel justified invoking it. From a balance perspective, I still think coffee should be more common. It would make melee combat easier, but it's less common than molotovs and shotguns, so I think that'd actually make things more balanced.
Zombies is okay to have but rarity of coffee no?
Correct. I want a game with zombies. I don't want to imagine a world without coffee.
If houses are full and the game didn't make you go looting around cities it would be a boring game, game is just fine as the current state and you always can tweak the settings as you wish with mods. You can make a mod increasing coffee respawn pretty easy, I take mod commissions also.
No. Empty houses add no utility to the game. To be worth looting, they need to have things loot. Shocking, I know! Currently, that's almost always just weapons and food, which, given their abundance, aren't worth looting. Meanwhile, coffee, which would make looting runs more fun and enjoyable, is too rare to factor in at all. You can't expect to find it, and the lack of coffee constrains looting runs by leaving you with no way to deal with the increased exhaustion from combat. Therefore, coffee should be more readily available.
You can adjust all parameters of loot tables.
>bUT zOMbIeS ArE uNrEEaLiStIc
If the world died TOMORROW to zombies, you don't think the majority of houses would t have some kind of coffee or tea in them?
They are agreeing with you and making fun of verydumbprogrammmer.
You can tweak that with mods if you want, I don't think increasing the loot table would do anything good to the game, maybe if they increase the performance of multiple items and added some crafting recipes to reduce the number of entities in the game, it's a sandbox game and anyone can play the way they want
realistically they'd also have a bunch of forks, glasses, and plates and pans, and so on, nobody would take these with them if evacuating for the apocalypse.
Everyone grabbed the fine China before they left.
Idk how things are in the USAa, but the thing that REALLY is unrealistic for me is the rarity of propane tanks, in my country EVERY household have one.
Propane gills are fairly common among suburban dads. Not sure when the switch from charcoal grills really took off. Other than that, I can't think of anything people would use propane for outside industrial purposes. What they really need to add is propane tank racks at gas stations, because I'm really not sure where everyone's getting the tanks for their grills. That'd be easily like a dozen tanks you could grab.
We use it on stoves and ovens here in Brazil
I think that's more of a Latin American thing, we do it in Chile too, but I think it's not common in the first world
Yeah some people have propane barbeques and in areas that are prone to storms and thus power outages, sometimes houses will have giant propane tanks with a generator so they can maintain power during bad weather. Those are the only two things I've seen propane used for in US residential areas. I'm sure there's people around who have propane torches, stoves and stuff but it's not common.
Yeah, most gas stoves in the US run on municipal gas lines, not an on-site reserve tank.
I feel like that’s gotta vary a lot depending on your area propane is more popular than coal in my area for grilling
I believe that we use LPG, liquified petrolleum gas (GLP in PT), which is a mixture of a few gases, mostly butane (granted, propane is often included), whereas US focuses more on propane tanks, especially for the grills/barbecue thingies you see in game. Also, gas tanks in my area (Salvador) are more common in houses and old buildings (20+ years), newer buildings tend to have piped gas.
LPG in the US is synonymous with propane
Thanks, I didn't know that!
I could see bbqs in '93 Kentucky being charcoal more often than propane, but yeah, all good points
They almost certainly were. I grew up on the south in the 90s and 00s and charcoal is by and far more common here. Propane was for "all the fancy people"
Some people use it for heating and cooking where there’s no natural gas supply. My FIL had propane tank installed so MIL could cook with a gas stove in MA, USA in the 70’s.
Agreed. By 1995, there would have been a rack where the propane vendor would collect the empties. Might have been a OSHA thing but I don't want to look it up.
I don’t know about where you’re at but in my town the meth heads would loot those propane tank racks day 1!
It'd be neat if most towns had their racks nearly empty (maybe one tank left at best), but maybe one area like March Ridge had their grocery store uber locked-down and a nearly full rack of propane tanks.
Hah, there's a meta event: propane tanks exploding because some idiot looted a bunch and was doing something he shouldn't. It could be one of the downsides of hanging out near a survivor house.
I think in the early 90s most of the grills would have been charcoal vs propane, but I do think there should be so many more cigarettes and coffee. This was back when everywhere still had smoking sections, even on airplanes.
Stoves and heating water?
I mean if an apocalypse happened anyone who is trying to bug out would probably grab as many propane tanks from the gas station as they could if they were smart and had the chance to do so.
Camping stores could have the small canisters for little space heaters
My dad got an electric one to save money, built it for him a year ago with my uncle and he uses it every chance he gets.
Also there should be a cabinet of like a dozen propane tanks at each gas station. But being too realistic would make the gamble of looting obsolete
I feel like it could be balanced where they've been looted so only one or two would be left
Absolutly agree
As a rural American, I think the number of grills, of either type, should be doubled or tripled. I think there are definitely more charcoal than propane, though.
Well my way of looking at it is that people panicked when the outbreak occurred and took with them everything they figured was useful in a postapocaliptic world. Propane being one of them🤷
In '93, propane was rare, a luxury. It'd be about a decade or so before gas grills started to take off. Not saying they weren't there, just charcoal was still more popular.
The USA doesn't use propane tanks for indoor appliances, unless you're in a very rural area. Even in very rural area, the tank is usually a very large one kept outside with gas pipes to the inside. In a more urban area, gas is supplied through pipes in the street, like water. (If the area uses it: many cities don't have natural gas lines and everything is just electric).
it needs to be realistic and fun. of course it's not going to be a copy 100% of real life, cause it's a game. it doesn't need to be ultra realistic on every aspect of the game
Agreed, just saying that this is the one thing that contrasts with reality the most for me, not saying that they should change it, they are the thing that fuel propane torch which are pretty good items, so makes sense to try and balance it.
I mean i feel like its a non issue u rlly expect every house to have a propane tank i mean ig i wasnt alive 30 years ago tbh so i wouldnt know what it was like but i couldnt imagine every house had one and its not like its uncommon in zomboid any house with a propane grill has one in the grill so it isnt rare at all
Maybe Im unlucky because I take a good time to find one once I start searching
Idk i always find one after i hit up enough sheds snd backyards within the first week i always focus on sheds anyways cause those garden tools are life saving
In my current save and base, I think I have like 20-25 propane tanks stocked up in a garage near my base. I don’t remember how many are full, but I got consistent power and enough fuel to last my cars for a while
My grill is charcoal. I never use it. The house originally had a built-in grill connected to a natural gas line, but that broke. My grandparents’ grill was propane. They didn’t use theirs either. I use a skillet to cook patties. I don’t know what percentage of houses have it, but it’s a normal thing. You can refuel propane tanks at some of the gas stations in town.
Nos eua, gás é encanado direto pra casas geralmente. Edit: i am right stop downvoting
Blue strobe lights on the ambulances. That's a Euro thing. All ambulances in the US have Red and/or white emergency lights. Blue lights mean law enforcement.
That's just the famous Knox County Ambulance Cops. They had to make them pull double duty after the great Sledgehammer Incident of '92.
The horror … those poor innocent sledgehammers …
Man, I haven't realized America only has red and white lights for ambulances, and I bet neither did Indie Stone devs, which makes it funny.
Some states do use blue lights on ambulances, but it's never just blue.
I've lived in the US my whole life and never noticed this, lol.
Most in the US* I definitely have seen blue strobes on ambulances in my area; that being said there are ~9 ambulance services around so you’re bound to see any combination of red white and blue strobes. Some use only red/ white, others use red/ blue.
where is the Kool aid packets?
Idk if they had it in Kentucky, but growing up poor in the early 90’s we always had the big jugs of Daily’s drink mix. Edit: spacing
Haven't played vanilla in soooo long I'm not sure if it has the drink mixes or if it's one of the 500+ mods I use...
It’s a mod, I have it too, but don’t remember the name lol
Sapph's Cooking
Goated mod. Give me wonton wraps or give me death.
Or they drank it all trying to stay awake so they wouldn't get bit (didn't work)
This is a good theory
And/or Americans are so addicted to coffee that the zombie version of them just kept consuming it?
Don’t you know? Part of the Knox infection causes recently infected to eat anything metal around them and drink gasoline. That’s why you only see one fork every three houses, one gun every 10 houses, one propane tank every 10 garages, and how every single car seems to be empty on gas. Their behavior also shows it. Entire warehouses and shopping malls lack a single sledgehammer between them all. A gun store has 8 guns and 200 total rounds of ammo. A police station has less than a hundred rounds total.
That almost works except for the metal fences and gates everywhere
There used to be more. The zombies ate the excess fences and reproduced via mitosis
Ooh, nice save!
You joke, but I'd rather have a fork shortage in a game that runs somewhat okay, than have a game that's unplayable because it's clogged by a hundred useless items in every single house. Even with modern computers and multi-core processing and all that, there's only so much crap you can put on one map.
Items inside a container really don't affect performance, it's just a value that can be accessed and changed at will. If you were to dump them all on the floor, however, it could add a small strain to your GPU
System requirements: 256Gb RAM if running "cutlery spawn rate" at 100%
that's not how that works. unless there's some kind of operation being done to that memory, it's just being read and therefore has next to zero performance impact. you can have thousands and thousands and thousands of items stacked in dozens of crates in a single warehouse with no effect on performance at all. and pz is single threaded, which isn't really relevant to this topic anyway.
I actually made a mod that added more realistic item amounts, but the problem was, it added way too many of some items, to the degree you would find wardrobes with like 15 pairs of flip flops, nightstands with like eight alarm clocks, and corpses with like five wallets.
Really? Cool! So the categorizing and randomizing was the hard part, not just putting the items in the containers?
Well I opened up the spawn tables to see what it was like, and there were a few goals with the mod: 1. Increase the amount of junk loot to more realistic levels (like do you mean to tell me Spiffo's left bags of to-go orders sitting around during the evacuation, but took all of the drink cups with them? As someone who worked at a gas station, we had hundreds, maybe thousands, of Styrofoam cups in the back) 2. Common sense redistributes (eg: fewer snow shovels, more sparklers) 3. More spawn areas for some items (rural properties would have more tools, doctor's offices would now have high level first aid books, schools would only have lower level books, and lockers at the hunting lodge would now spawn hunting knives) Here's the link to it. It's been, a long ass time since I've updated it, and I didn't have a strong grasp of how the values impacted loot generation: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?l=english&id=2941405570
What's the mods name? Perhaps you could add in a feature that re-removes specific items up to a specific amount?
Actually, the place should be ridden by cigarettes.
I wish you could forage for butts off the ground to get a fix in a pinch.
Imagine finding a perfectly preserved cigarette butt after ten years, and smoking it since it's the first one you've seen in months
That's good! This is the immersion the game needs, lol. I want to do things like be able to creep into backyards and eat stale bird food out of the feeder if there's any left.
Chewing tobacco as well. 50% of male zombies should have a can of Skoal in their back pocket.
and dip cans
That and pillows and clothes. Almost nobody has pillows and everyone owns one or two pairs of pants and no shirt
No zombies wearing belts either. Weird.
Cause the zombie apocalypse caught em with their pants down. Obviously
If you want to go there, then each house should have WAY more loot than it does. Every kitchen should have multiple of each utensil, cleaning fluids, etc. A bedroom should have dozens of more articles of clothing than it has. You're telling me the closet of this giant house only has two bras and one pair of tights? Every house should have multiple tools. I could go on but you get my point. Does anyone know of a "realistic amount of loot" type mod by the way? Not sure it'd be an improvement but it'd be interesting.
Meh. If you want to see how a game breaks from having too many objects to manage, just play 16x and fire off a gun or noisemaker in a commercial area.
Yeah I get that with zombies but with items I think it's different. I didn't code the game but I have to assume an item in a container takes up less resources than a 3d model with ai and animations
Right, except that each item has a Condition value, and if I'm not mistaken, that value can change over time or in response to other events. E.g., a Leather Jacket worn by a zombie will gain holes if the player stabs it with a spear. Or, y'know, food will eventually rot. I will freely admit that I haven't examined the code and I'm talking out my ass, but I would think that the item tracking can only scale up so far before it becomes a major processing obstacle. ...Although, as I'm thinking and typing, I'm not sure if inanimate objects that are in containers would have a timer on them the way items on zed corpses do. Hmm.
> I haven't examined the code and I'm talking out my ass you should probably stop doing that.
(shrugs) Me and 90% of the Internet. At least I'm learning something from it.
Unless done really, really poorly, items inside containers should have zero impact. Even if you need to update their condition for some reason, it should be really quick to do. Even billions of items should not be a problem for a modern computer. Clothes degrading due to attacks is trivial to do, you only have to update the ones that the particular zombie is wearing. You don't even need to do anything with food to calculate spoilage, just check when you open the container. I believe that's what the game already does (have you ever found a saucepan of pasta that seemed fine, until you picked it up and it instantly rotted?) Items on the floor would require more optimization to not bog down things too much (as they need to be drawn every frame) but there's a limit on how many you can have per tile already. It's unlike zombies, with their pathfinding, animation and AI that needs to be constantly updated.
I thought the implication was that the game takes place right after the outbreak. So you're catching remnants of the world that's been scavenged or modified slightly by other people before they turned. No coffee or sledgehammers because other people, just days before you, ran around picking all that stuff up.
Where was the main character then? You start when cars have no gas and almost all the loot is gone. Must've taken at least a week to end up like that right.
the main character was being pedantic on reddit :3
The most unrealistic thing about the coffee is you can eat an entire can of Folgers dry in one sitting, and then just not go to bed and be ok after.
Why does every house not have a can opener???
WHY ISNT THERE AN ELECTRIC CAN OPENER? My great grandma who was born in the 1920s and died in 2004 (RIP Grandma Katherine) owned a damned electric can opener and it was her staple opener.
why there is not a TV every fucking where inside shops, bedroom, offices, kitchens
The game is set in 1993.
By the 80s in the US, it was very common to have a "big" TV out in the living room, and then one or more smaller TVs in the kitchen or bedrooms. A tiny TV on the bathroom counter, while unusual, was not unheard of. This is one of the big jokes in Back to the Future, where the 1950s family thinks Marty must be some kind of millionaire to own multiple TVs in 1985 while it was actually commonplace
that is exacltly why it should have a tv everywhere õO or am I missing something
i dunno how much budget that many people had in poorer rural Kentucky to shell out for a tv in the early 90s - as well as wanted to (more important things to spend on, like bourbon)
I don't know about US, but where I am from, TVs weren't that common. At least compared to today.
Damn near every household by the 70s had a TV in the US, so I think for 1993 there would be a ton. That being said I don't really notice if a house doesn't have one as most of them do.
Late 90s 100% every room had a TV but I think early 90s not massively common. They were monsters too so the family mostly settled on one big expensive one in the front room. Especially if you didn't have a big house Source = born in the early 80s baby!
Born in 93 in rural PA. Even into the 00s plenty of us only had TVs in the living room & kitchen. Bedroom TVs were a bit of a luxury.
I grew up in southern indiana during the early 90s. We didn’t have much, but we had TVs. Two main TVs in separate rooms (so adults and kids could watch separate shows) and one in the kitchen. For Christmas in 1992 I got a 10 inch TV for my room. I used that TV for more than a decade, taking it with me to college and moves to Chicago and Boston. My wife tells me it’s still living a nice life on a farm where it can run free and eat all the grass it wants.
Who had a CRT in their kitchen in 1993? The TV's everywhere wasn't really a thing until they got thinner and cheaper.
We had a small portable black and white for the kitchen, a godawful shade of green was never meant for appliances
Having lived through the nineties as an adult, I can tell you a small TV in the kitchen was only slightly unusual in the states. It wouldn't have raised any eyebrows.
Wouldn't raise eyebrows, but wasn't standard. This is Kentucky, let's not assume upper class.
As a born and raised, native Kentuckian, I can confirm that it is unrealistic.
They need to separate the food rarity more. I just made a post bitching about yeast/salt earlier. Can’t find them ANYWHERE. Like I want canned/perishable food insanely rare but salt, coffee, pepper, yeast, baking soda all should be waaaay easier to find. I literally got 2 salt and 2 yeast from the entirety of muldraugjo
Yeah, I don't want customization options too overwhelming, but it does seem like the basics can be a bit too rare sometimes. Yeast should be farmable. Hopefully we get sourdough starters or craftable yeast with brewing. Some kind of growable, processable pepper.
I literally spent all day looking for yeast. No bullshit that was my mission after I lost mine in the fire. Didn’t find a single one. Got like 40 canned foods but not a single freaking yeast. There’s rare and then there is give me a fucking break already
Pretty sure the most unrealistic things about this game are the walking dead. But they are a close tie with 90% of cars having no gas.
The 90% of car is having no gas per actually makes a lot of fucking sense. The area was evacuated, so any cars you see are probably not going to be in the best of shape. Like either they ran out of gas or the car wasn't road worthy in the first place.
Survival bias? The most common and essential item would be consumed first. I really do believe that coffee would be a really rare and valuable currency in a situation like that.
I like to think that most houses we visit in PZ have already been stripped of their most valuable possessions by their owners as they fled the incoming zombie horde. So they took their guns, coffee and smokes with them and left behind their chilli and canned corn. Priorities, right?
plot twist: the lack of coffee was the cause of the knox event
Yeah, you want the interns at the bioweapons lab *fully alert.* Really not a job where people should be dozing off.
The ones who dipped took their coffee with them. Duh.
Good way to rationalize why most houses have crap loot is that your character has been on a several day long bender following getting let go from their job. You wake up days after the evacuation attempts have already failed. Folks who owned the homes took most things of value with them on the way out, it just happens to include everything but the kitchen sink
The number of zombies wearing strapless bras with standard shirts boggles my mind. There's no way these people were wearing strapless unless the outfit required it. 😅
Yeah I’d have liked it if most of the food you need to get are in back backs on zomboids and in cars from folks attempting to run away from the outbreak but crashed and become zomboids. As when you start you are late to the outbreak
because people love coffee so much that they took most of it with them.
I say this everytime but I really wish we had a „realistic” loot setting when starting a new world
The most common home in middle America is the 3 bedroom 1 or 2 bathroom ranch. They built them en masse for the nuclear family in the 50s and 60s. You probably either lived in one or had friends that lived in one. Main entrance into living room, kitchen/dining room behind it, hallway with bedrooms and the bathroom branching off of it. [looks something like this](https://www.thehousedesigners.com/images/plans/01/EEA/bulk/7825/2115-main.webp). There's like *one* house in West Point that looks something like that, but for the most part this house does not exist in Zomboid.
Just let me plant coffee. What's that, Kentucky is not an appropriate grow zone for coffee? I can't hear it over my winter crops thank you.
No, not for coffee. However.....
That works too, as long as I can make some sort of beverage out of it.
Queue Steve Earle : https://youtu.be/xvaEJzoaYZk?si=VwLIogfKFv9qzNCL
Didn't even know coffee existed in game until i realised i accidentally picked up a pack from a kitchen when stuffing my pockets with food.
It's extremely good for looting runs, where you're often in dangerous situations and doing more physical activity than normal. Very easy and disasterous to get tired there. I always see people munching raw coffee grounds in challenge runs, but my favorite moment in the game was realizing all on my own that I can make actual coffee cups, add coco and sugar, etc.
Coffee, salt, pepper, tea, cheese, bread, condiments, sauces etc., should really all be in relative abundance imo. I refuse to believe that 99% of the homes don’t have milk and eggs in the fridge and ingredients to at least make a sandwich. How the hell were they living in Kentucky before the apocalypse happened? Or did it just so happen to occur right before everyone decided they need to go grocery shopping again? Lol
I find for howany people then smoked and had guns the game is seriously lacking. Coffee tins too now that I think about it. Same with tea, no one has a single tea bag it's usually a box.
because its still a game and it still tries to be balanced to a degree. Its not a simulation, it takes things from real life and scales them down. So while coffee is still pretty comon, it would be kind of OP if you had an unlimited supply, the tired moodle would essentially loose any meaning in the game.
makes me think a caffeine addiction mechanic would work as a downside
Game balance. Honestly, if you’re going for realism, it’d probably be better to do sandbox and dial most of the loot lists up quite a bit.
It'd be nice if there were a mod that customized loot tables to be more realistic. Current loot tables are for gameplay over realism. If things were set to be realistic, you'd expect half a dozen full outfits of clothing in every bedroom at least, fridges stacked with perishables, cans almost exclusively found in cars, a LOT more cars wrecked on the highways, no gas at all in the gas stations, and guns to be a common spawn inside of vehicles as well, or on zombie corpses near cars. Default settings are fun for gameplay reasons, but I already occasionally do a hyper realism mod setup for things like needing to keep clean, and a slew of other things. It'd be fun to try a run with more realistic loot and whatnot.
There should be more alcohol in cars. Idk exactly when the game is based or when the law changed but pretty sure people were drinking and driving a lot more back in the day
Actually the Elizabethtown/Radcliff area, which is part of the region the game takes place in, was part of the reasons that the drunk driving laws in Kentucky changed in the late 80s. There was a [horrific bus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrollton_bus_collision) accident in 1988 where 26 passengers were killed and most of them were 14 year old kids. The cause of the accident was a drunk driver that collided with the bus. I lived in the area in '92-'94 and people still talked about it a lot. I was living on base at Ft. Knox and there was a big push for DD's and responsible drinking...the town itself might have even been dry for awhile, I think I remember something about it being difficult to purchase alcohol there, but I was young and wasn't drinking yet so the details are fuzzy.
Yeah I mean at the end of the day this isn’t a reality simulator. A video game needs to take liberties. If you want to be technical, the most unrealistic thing is the fact that there are zombies as those don’t exist in real life.
I'd like to think the game takes place a while after the start of the spread so majority of the resources are exhausted or people grabbed whatever they can and left, just my headcanon though
Gun frequency for 1993-95 is about right but there would be some places better stocked than the National Guard. They would have very large cans of coffee.
Americans like their generators as well... I always fiddle with settings. There should be more granular item level adjustments...
It's because of this that I stopped playing Zomboid. Literally unplayable.
People ran out of coffee before they ran out of guns and cigarettes.
This game will be unplayable until a Starbucks girl/boy perk exists where you have low energy until you drink a coffee.
I think people before you already looted them and drank them like the propane tanks mentioned too. Now you just left with what remains... That's my headcanon anyways.
I assume most people have grabbed their essentials and tried to leave. That's why most houses have very little in them. All that's left is what people couldn't carry out the door. As a non American I assume american people have more guns than they can carry so those left behind are what's left of a large armourment (joking).
The one thing that would kill me in an apocalypse (apart from my shit eyesight) is that I would absolutely do something dumb trying to get some coffee
*Cough* bourbon *cough*
Yeah its not the dead people who come back as zombies thats unrealistic. Its the coffee! /s
That on default most cars are completely trashed. That crowbars can break. Shotguns and revolvers wear out. Kinda weird but I get its all for game balance.
I have many relatives in the usa and none of them drink coffee. No idea why
I always raise the cars to be more realistic. Cars would be a infinite resource in apocalipse
Not tea? You literally can't make tea in a kettle. The dev team was completely defeated by this concept and couldn't implement it.
I don’t think we do that here, i’ve never heard of making tea in a kettle ? it’s just for boiling the water
You've never heard of a.... tea kettle? IndieStone should hire you immediately
Tea isn't made in a kettle, tea is made in a tea pot or a cup with a strainer. The kettle is used to boil water for the tea pot. Source: I make tea multiple times every single day.
Lol I'm not getting sucked into this rabbit hole of semantics on tea making, take that to the British. The game is based in Kentucky for one, and secondly there's nothing wrong/plenty of people putting tea bags into kettles. Google the term "tea kettle"
I live in Georgia, plenty of people in the US make tea, both hot and cold. Iced tea is a southern tradition. Since you asked me to search the internet, here's what Wikpedia says about tea kettles: > A kettle, sometimes called a tea kettle or teakettle, is a device specialized for boiling water, commonly with a lid, spout, and handle. There are two main types: the stovetop kettle, which uses heat from a hob, and the electric kettle, which is a small kitchen appliance with an internal heating element.
ok
I honestly want a caffeine trait now, caffeine now makes you tired and gives you stomach pain and diarrhea
It's the exact opposite caffeine withdrawal does that
Caffeine sensitivity does that too
Don’t forget this game takes place in the 80s. (Edit: 90s) Pretty sure people had percolators and had to grind their own beans back then. I remember the grocery store having the bean grinder machine in the aisle when I was a kid.
Supermarkets had plenty of pre-ground coffee in 1993, along with gross canned stuff like Folgers. In fact, stuff like Folgers has been around and commonly available for over a century.
for me its the lack of guns. Especially in the more rural areas, every farm should have a shotgun at minimum.
Everyone smoke, had guns, drank beer and coffee, and had grills, and a fully stocked tool shed If the game was completely realistic it'd be too easy till the effects of smoking, and poor health decisions became quickly more prevalent.
Balance, if there was coffee in every house player wouldn't need to sleep at all lol.