[2020] Wandering hordes suck now, and nights are always uneventful. How can we improve things?

I have been away for about 2 years, and I must say, the game is looking more polished than ever. A lot of things make more sense now, many issues have been ironed out.

But one thing that somehow seems to have disappeared along the way is the feeling of danger you used to get during nighttime. I remember way back where there was always a scramble to get a makeshift shelter up by first nightfall, and add spikes and defenses asap by day 2 / 3. But nowadays, the sun sets, and..... nothing happens all night?

One thing I noticed is that wandering hordes are now extremely rare, and so few in number. I remember there used to be at least two wandering hordes every day in the past. (Remember those day 6 dog packs?). Now I consider myself lucky if I see even one horde per week. I tried editing the xml's to increase their frequency, but none of the numbers I changed seemed to have a noticeable effect.

It could also be partly due to the fact that we are always traveling nowadays, so even if a horde does spawn, we never run into it. I think if you are traveling, then the game should either spawn the horde in your path, or at least wait until you are stationary.

Speaking of traveling, I hate that all we encounter are single wandering zombies sprinkled across the map. I think zombies should always spawn in groups of at least 5-10, maybe even up to 20. I once again tried to edit some xml files to accomplish this, but didn't have any success.

I also noticed that the heatmap is completely broken in the current version. We run 3 forges, 3 workbenches, 2 cement mixers and a chem station nonstop, and I have yet to see a single screamer the entire game.

I play with a friend, and what we have decided to do is set it to blood moon every night, day length to 90, and set the night length to 2 hours, to get some mini hordes every night. But this means we don't get the nervous excitement of preparing for a 7-day horde. Oh and also, you can't actually do this on singleplayer either, as you're stuck with 18 as the maximum day length option.

So, any recommendations on what else we can do to make things more dangerous at night, or just in general? I'm open to mods, xml editing, whatever. I just want to feel like the open world is more than just a bunch of empty roads acting as background scenery while I travel from quest to quest.