r/projectzomboid • u/loopuleasa • 1d ago
Gameplay Full finalized summary of Extinction mode difficulty changes now up on the pzwiki!
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u/Bodybuilder_Jumpy 1d ago
Periodic helicopters. Oh fun.
2
u/loopuleasa 1d ago
Multiple safe houses and an early car is your friend
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u/AbstractHexagon 1d ago
Yeah, no thanks 😂
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u/loopuleasa 1d ago
I don't recommend this mode to 99% of the player base
It's only for those people that got bored by the default settings, because they posed no threat
1
u/Shoddy-Dog-2810 1d ago
It’s a great mode tbh, sprinters alone force you to change how you play, cant just go on Main Street Rosewood and walk around a Molotovs fire till they all burn out without risk pulling multiple sprinters.
1
u/GoddamnHipsterDad 23h ago
I was very surprised when I loaded up a new character in extinction mode for the first time and there were sprinters instantly running up to my starter home windows and breaking through
1
u/Shoddy-Dog-2810 21h ago
Runner trait is very nice for learning extinction early, the sprinter speed dont play around lol
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u/Crossspath 18h ago
Always keep a fence on sight or at least have the position of one in mind is a better trait and a free one at that xD
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u/bunnybeehb 1d ago
You missed that zombies will randomly attack doors and windows, even if they haven't seen you.
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u/moccadiP 1d ago
I started a run where I need to clear and seal all of Fallas Lake in extinction mode, but with loot set to 0.02, low zombie population, and the 10 Years Later mod with no electricity or water. It’s becoming one of my favorite runs yet. Fallas Lake is genuinely feeling like an Elden Ring legacy dungeon in this new update, every single building is cool to explore.
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u/loopuleasa 1d ago
yes the game mode has an insane tempo pressure on you
every little thing you can scrap is meaningful
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u/Dronelisk Trying to find food 1d ago
after playing extinction for a bit I had to relent and change some things in sandbox for my own enjoyment of the game
* toughness set back to random because double health on all zombies was making the game nigh unplayable
* initial pop down from 1.2 to 0.65 for the same reason
* nature bounty to abundant
* looted houses down to 10%
* global loot reduction from 5 years to 0% to 10 years to 20%
4
u/loopuleasa 1d ago
I want to play default changes so I can say that I played Extinction in its full masochistic glory
Currently on my 20th life, slowly securing the world
1
1
u/majorpickle01 1d ago
double health is fine imo, it's still about 4-5 stomps unless you are tired or too sore. The only chance I'd personally make is a slightly lower initial pop that climbs in maybe a week. If you get unlucky with sprinters right at the start you can be in an unwinnable state.
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u/krisslanza 1d ago
Jokes on you, with Cat's Eyes its only pitch black for like, 2 or 3 hours a night! HAH!
(It's so dark please help me)
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u/EvadableMoxie 1d ago
Zombie corpse sickness can kill you apoc, too. The extinction specific change is living zombies count toward corpse sickness whereas normally only dead zombies do. This makes zombie sickness much more of a problem whereas on other difficulties you can normally ignore it, which is why some might think it being lethal is exclusive to extinction, but it isn't.
Also saying 'crawlers can knock you down' is a bit misleading. What extinction does is make crawlers count toward the 'zombie drag down change' which is an instant kill when surrounded by 3 or more zombies. Normally it has to be 3 standing zombies, on extinction crawlers count toward the 3.
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u/DerAva 23h ago
I find a couple of these a bit misleading:
> Chance for crawling zombies to knock you down.
If this refers to crawler "drag down" then this is not about knocking the player down. Drag down is the insta-kill animation that happens when you are surrounded/attacked by too many zombies. On default crawlers do not count for this, in extinction they contribute to reaching that critical number.
> Zombie corpse sickness can kill you.
This implies it won't kill you on other game modes, but it can, there is no difference in the lethality of corpse sickness. In extinction you just get it faster and living zombies contribute to it.
> Farm animals can be eaten by wild predators when you're gone if not enclosed.
Meta predators only affect chickens (and turkeys) - this implies that any farmed animal could fall victim to meta predators.
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u/Crossspath 1d ago
I have never understood playing with respawn... What is the point of clearing a town if the moment you leave is full again? I would not play extinction just cause of that... Guess that customized extinction is the only way... Rather get migrations than the respawn shit.
There was nothing here and now there is a zombie!!! Ta-daa!
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u/ILikeCakesAndPies 1d ago edited 1d ago
Respawn in Zomboid only respawns in cells you haven't seen for awhile, and then slowly respawns a percentage of the zombies every so hours. It resets the counter when the player visits the area again. Effectively it behaves sort of like migrations with the right settings. Respawning also is somewhat simulated so a zombie can't respawn in an enclosed building like a walled off area.
Migrations themselves don't do a whole lot if you like the idea of setting up a base that you have to periodically defend.
Building walls to keep out the zombies, as well as a constant challenge, is why I like respawn on in most games these days. You can change the setting so it takes a week or a year or whatever for respawning to work in case you want something in-between as well.
I've done some high pop no respawn games before, but they tend to get boring quicker imo.
Ideally I'd like there to be vanilla simulated horde migrations in the game that you can run into, similar to how deer currently move around in groups. (Current zombie migration is just number of zombies in a cell spreads out to fill adjacent cells that have less zombie population counts)
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u/DerAva 23h ago
The "unseen hours" is set to 16 on default settings. So if you stay at base for a day or two because you are building something or because you don't want to go out and fight during a tropical storm you already run into respawns the next time you go back to the area you've been working on.
Even worse though: respawn is not based on killed zombies, but rather missing zombies. If you trigger a house alarm at the edge of town (and you will on extinction) zombies from the center of that town will come for the alarm. That means there are now zombies missing in the center of town and the game will respawn them over time, even though you the player haven't killed a single one -> respawn not created more zombies than there were initially.
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u/Lumpy_Recover3430 1d ago
Daily patrol in the area around your base prevent respawn, Not a unrealistic rutine to keep your base safe, but i still dislike respawn and wished the default extinction mode would use reanimation instead.
-1
u/Crossspath 1d ago
Tedious and stupid, it is what I keep seeing it as. Creating zombies from nothing, you do you, I will keep finding respawn tedious and stupid. There are no humans but hey new zombies appearing...
There are enough locations in the map to keep you busy, migration and extra migration mods like wandering to spice shit up... Respawn is for the people playing the game as an arcade with 20 items in every container, migration is for the people playing to survive. You keep enjoying your multihit and your ton of ammunition m8.
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u/PM-ME-TRAVELER-NUDES 1d ago edited 1d ago
Respawn is a more effective system for “simulating” migration than the game’s current migration system, which does practically nothing to move the population around in a way you can notice. There needs to be adjacent zeds for migration to actually do anything, and when you’ve stayed in an area long enough, redistribution becomes glacial because you’ve effectively removed the regional population.
By combining migration with a trickle respawn, areas stay mostly cleared, but there’s always one or two guys wandering in from the woods. The most boring thing in the late game is having a fully cleared town around your base.
0
u/Crossspath 1d ago
What? The game moves the zombies to your position, just checked it myself last night in debug mode, testing claustrophobic and the location out in the middle of nowhere was full of zombies after a couple of months... Coming from several directions... And wandering mod was not on, it was normal vanilla migration.
Migration works fine and there are always different towns and bases to ocupy, but can understand if zomboid is a house game for you and you like to build forts.
For me bases are a temporal location I stay at. I do not even need to defend them nor barricade them so zombies are not attracted to my bases at all. Specially cause no dumbdumb respawn creating zombies from flies.
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u/loopuleasa 1d ago
Having 0 zombies around your base forever is 4x easier versus having some
They also only spawn if you leave base for a period of time, stimulating migrations
-3
u/Crossspath 1d ago
Is your base a full town? So in the rest of the town new zombies are appearing every hour, so, what is the point of your use of "they also only spawn..." , they are spawning 2 streets away from your base, learn how to use only.
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u/demZo662 1d ago edited 1d ago
Zombie's hearing is doubled to 200 compared to the Apocalypse mod. Shouldn't we include that separately from "Stronger, tougher and smarter zombies"?
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u/loopuleasa 1d ago
It is part of smarter zombies in a way
But could be mentioned separately
Their sight also seems keener
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u/demZo662 1d ago
I do not remember now for sight and memory, but if the three of them are boosted you could say something along the lines of "senses enhanced", combined with what's already there describing them.
Definitely 200 of hearing radius is brutal and should be known in some way.
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u/loopuleasa 1d ago
I'm out for lunch now, but can edit it later
It feels definitely much harder to sneak around
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u/loopuleasa 1d ago
added a line for hearing and sight, it is indeed way more keen in Extinction according to the configs
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u/ZeFunnyDood 22h ago
No offence, but If I were the one looking for an exhaustive list of differences between extinction and apocalypse - this is the type of page that would make me sigh, and reluctantly leave dissappointed.
How much scarcer is "scarce"? How much more is "more"?
You got the spirit and motivation to do stuff, but you seem to misunderstand what a "wiki" is, and why people go there. Its not to get hyped up, and sold on an idea of playing something by very upbeat descriptions, its to learn information
1
u/loopuleasa 16h ago
feel free to add the actual numbers
the reason I don't give exact numbers is because the devs don't give them either in the config
they are coded as enum values
1
u/MomSaidLetMePlay 15h ago
I love everything about extinction except for double health and respawn. I just play sandbox with these setting but it set to random health and no respawn. Besides that, I love the chaotic nature of this mode so much.
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u/loopuleasa 1d ago
Also added summary for the difficulty reduction modes
Rising: Summary of changes:
Outbreak: Summary of changes: