Walls Spikes and Traps base defense

Originally posted by Licker of Windows: But the screamers spawn inside the main base.....

1. Size matters. Screamer scouts spawn X distance away from the chunk area that generated the heat that instigated the spawn.

2. There is no mechanic that prevents screamer scouts from spawning in your base. Your Land Claim Block only prevents POI sleepers, and your bedroll only prevents sleepers and random biome spawns.

3. This is how the scout mechanic currently works.

The activity level required to trigger is 25%. A single campfire burning fuel with no other activity takes over an hour to hit 25%.

Once that triggers, it then has a 20% chance to spawn a screamer.

If nothing spawns, reset activity level, and wait 4 minutes without accumulating additional activity level.

Repeat activity level build up, the 20% chance, and the 4 minute cooldowns until one spawns.

When one does spawn, wait 22 minutes for a long cooldown before starting over.

This is information straight from the devs.

As the others have stated, it really is hard to judge or give you advice with such limited information.

Originally posted by Macdallan: I have never had a screamer spawn inside any of my bases - not saying a glitch/bug won't or can't happen but I always place a land claim and a sleeping bag as those prevent spawns in a certain area. If your base is really big you might need to bump up the land claim area in your map settings.

See #2 above.

Originally posted by neock: if thats how screamer scouts work, then please explain why i get a new screamer coming at me every few minutes, even when roaming around.
not only that, bedrolls create a spawning deadzone. this is supposed to stop ALL spawns. so one of three things is happening.
1, your misinformed.
2, someone lied. be it the devs or you. dont know, not accusing.
3, something is criticly broken in unexpected ways

I believe that they can also appear randomly, but I would have to dig into the code more to check, and honestly I've kinda given up on 7 Days for the time being. I have too much other stuff going on.

The information I provided is based on direct information from the developer (like the quote on how they work), and from my knowledge of the game mechanics as being part of the internal testers and throwing things at the game for the past decade.

If the LCB defeated all spawns, that would go completely against the intended gameplay. You could just set the LCB size to 81 meters, and then be forever safe inside of your base because nothing will ever spawn there. The devs have stated that their intention is for you to never feel safe. This is why they have added extra mechanics to prevent you from just escaping the bloodmoon on a vehicle. Similarly though, they give you the ability to change the settings and mod the game to make it play however you want as well.

Originally posted by SeaofBiscuits: They need to fix that then. Zombies can literally only spawn so much. maybe like 60 or 70 which is sorta of worthless for a town of defenders. I mean all our crew does is mostly mine and build.

See realistically that mechanic would attract thousands of zombies like the Resident evil scene with the white house surrounded. however it doe's not which forces the game to be boring eventually. Literally just make a tower of death, GG.

I am now definitely worried about the bandits being added if the zombies aren't spawning correctly.

Curiously this came up just today in the Dev Diary[community.7daystodie.com]. They were discussing performance, CPU usage and multithreading in regards to the AI, and faatal had previously noted that the zed AI does utilize multithreading.

Originally posted by faatal: Our AI is not that expensive. AI does not constantly think. There are delays built in. The most expensive part is typically the pathing, which already runs on multiple threads.

Finding cover is a good amount of processing, but that is ray casting, which is fairly cheap and could be threaded, and pathing which is already threaded.

One bandit will probably have the overall overhead of 2 or 3 zombies, so if we can run 30 zombies coming at you then 10 bandits will be fine.