Zombie, meet Shotgun.

After taking a break from modding over the summer I'm starting to get back into it again. My wife and I caught up on seven seasons of Game of Thrones and after watching the White Walkers I have to say that I'm glad to be back to real zombies again.

Version 2.4 Released

I figured the best way to get back into this is to go over my laundry list of to-do items and pick a few items off. There are outstanding bugs still out there too, but the prospect of bug fixing is not very motivating sometimes. The items included in the version released yesterday include:

- Updated Extra Spawns config to be daily % based
- Increased range of Spawn Limit check
- Added 10% zombie health option
- Added 1% legendary zombie spawn chance
- Added switchblade to death alternative spawn
- Increased shotgun damage and added stagger to zombies

Fixing Shotguns

I can't believe it has taken this long to address shotguns in Zombie Walkers. They have been laughably weak since practically the beginning and as a traditional zombie slaying device that just doesn't seem right.

The difficulty with shotguns seems to lie in the spread of the shot and connecting with the head. Only a percentage of the shot actually hits the head in game terms and the damage doesn't seem to be very high even though the weapon has a higher base damage that other single shot weapons. I can only theorize that the damage is spread out and only a small portion actually hits the head unless precisely ranged and at very close range.

Version 2.4 increases limb damage received by zombies from shotguns by 4x. This should be enough to make even partially connecting head shots take them down and in my testing seemed to be. Admittedly, I was testing at level 1 with a base double barrel and I'll be interested to hear feedback from shotgun wielding players when they try it out.

Another tweak to shotguns included was an automatic stagger affect to zombies when they are hit. This helps in cases where the shot doesn't connect direct enough with the head and makes sense. Shotguns have stopping power and will now cause zombies to stop and stagger as if they were just hit by a sledgehammer.

Extra Spawns Adjustment

There have been reports in the past of too many zombies spawning, especially in downtown Boston. One possible culprit is the "Extra Spawns" feature. Up until now, the config for extra spawns was based on a time range (eg. 2 - 5 days). That meant if you visited an area and initialized the extra spawn points there and the left and came back a week later, 100% of the spawn points would trigger on your return. Given that the spawn points could be as little as 2000 units apart there could be an awful lot of them in certain areas.

As such I have decided to move away from a date based config to a percentage based config. When you enable extra spawns now you will be able to choose a percentage chance each spawn point will trigger each day. This flat percentage means that it doesn't matter how long you were gone before returning to an area and should help avoid spawn spikes.

Another spawn related adjustment I made was to increase the range of the spawn limit check from 4500 to 8000 units. This means it will now check a wider area for existing zombies before spawning more if you have reached the configurable limit (default 50).

Moving Forward

There's no shortage of ideas out there and plenty of previous posts on this blog outlining future ideas that I could pursue. In the short term I may play around with some kind of noise-based attraction so that zombies will investigate activity from a further range. Another related idea would be looking into attracting zombies to dead bodies to feed which could make for some interesting moments and give players a chance to use the bodies as bait. Maybe making resurrection time configurable would help?

I'm always interested in feedback so if you happen to be reading this and have any thoughts feel free to let me know.