[2020] current state of game

Today zombies only know where you are based on your visibility + audibility, unless it’s the Blood Moon in which case they sense you until death. Anything else is a bug.

Zombies in rooms (so-called sleepers) spawn in well before you enter a room, unless perhaps one’s hardware is struggling to keep up.

The Blood Moon can be made less frequent or disabled entirely, for those that don’t like the key premise of the game.

Originally posted by Dapitbull:

Originally posted by Crater Creator: Zombies in rooms (so-called sleepers) spawn in well before you enter a room, unless perhaps one’s hardware is struggling to keep up.

This is not true, I have had them spawn under my feet as I was WALKING, they also still spawn in rooms after cleared. This has been an issue for a long time but continues to never get fixed.

As far as hardware another untruth, I am running RTX 2080TI , I9 processor, 64GB of Ram and fiber internet.

Your experience is unusual. I hope you’ll consider filing a bug report on this, because the devs can’t fix what they can’t reproduce. I think it’s important for people to know the dev’s intentions: they aren’t trying to spawn zombies close to the player.

Originally posted by RasaNova: ...But, yes there ARE some rooms where they don't spawn til you enter. These cases are rare, they are scripted ambushes triggered by the player entering.

I’m doubtful of this. If I see an ambush spot ahead of time, I’ve always been able to go around (because of the 100% destructible nature of the game) and find the zombies spawned in, waiting on the other side of the wall or whatever. Having made POIs myself (though not for a while), I’ve seen no mechanism to spawn a zombie (activate yes, but not spawn) off of a trigger.

Originally posted by Ihateeverybody:

Originally posted by RasaNova:
These spots do exist, I've brought up specific examples in anothet thread discussing the topic. SylenThunder even posted a link to (I think) a dev talking about trigger points for spawns on the 7d2d forum.

Notable examples include the salvage yard, where there are 3 or 4 small rooms you enter from a ladder through a hatch, they do not spawn til you go through those hatches. And in the large apartment building there's a collapsing floor with several zombies that spawn once you fall through. There are some others as well, these are 100% reproducible and easy to verify. Believe me I've TRIED to get them to spawn from a normal distance!

6 Floor Apt Building, on the Main Floor through the Locked Door on the Right after coming up from the Parking Garage. I know it well, I fell once. NOW I CLEAR THAT ROOM FIRST. They won't spawn till you enter.

Okay. I investigated this to see what's going on. I'd post screenshots but Steam overlay is wonky.

There's a sleeper volume encompassing the largest part of that room (the POI is apartment_brick_6_flr). But sleeper volumes can't have complex shapes, so it doesn't include the hallway. Sleeper zombies seem to spawn when you get within 10 blocks or so of the sleeper volume. That's fine in most instances, and no doubt the level designers try to make them spawn in before you see them, if you take the main path.

But you're not taking the main path. You're going through the locked door to clear that room first. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with doing that, except it unfortunately puts you far enough away, with no walls in between, to see the sleepers spawn.

It's not a scripted ambush (only) triggered by the player entering, as RasaNova put it. The spawning is triggered by getting close, from any direction. I notice there's now a trigger setting on sleeper volumes that can be set to passive, active, or attack. That wasn't there when I last published a POI, in A17. But I still don't see any way, on any setting, to link a sleeper volume to a separate 'trigger volume'. As far as I can ascertain, no such trigger volumes exist. The sleepers merely spawn when the player gets within a fixed distance of the sleeper volume, from any direction.

So the takeaway is, seeing them spawn is an oversight on the level designer's end. It'll have to be fixed on a case by case basis and, realistically speaking, with users like you reporting in wherever it happens. There's no global fix, because extending that spawn range out further globally would no doubt cause other issues in other POIs.

Originally posted by Woj: Thanks for the info everyone. especially crater creator, you made it easy to decide to stay gone!

Whatever floats your boat, Woj. Happy to provide info.