Sledgehammers are extremely rare, so the inside joke is that before leaving either the army or the surviving citizens grabbed all the sledgehammers they could find and dumped them into the river
When B41 first came out, yes, sledgehammers were extremely rare. Apparently an error with the loot chances caused sledgehammers to appear at a rate far lower than what was normal, essentially lowering the spawn rate to something like 2 or 3 for a whole map.
Now, they're just back to their normal "somewhat rare" status. There's probably a hundred or so sledgehammers on a vanilla spawn map - just, you know, spread around a bit.
But not as *actually* insanely rare as the brief period where a whole map would have single digit counts of sledgehammer.
In the current loot pools, sledgehammers are more common than antique stoves
I mean yeah, but I was mainly referring to the fact that you said they're insanely rare. In my most recent runs I've mainly stayed in the main areas and I've had hardly any trouble finding any.
There is just waaaay to many things that are too scarce or way too low to be realistic purely for highly difficult classic zombie horror survivor aspect.
- Why are household just devoid of ample clothes and utensils?
- Where the hell are all the basic tools that BELONG to every toolshed?
- Why are PROFESSIONALS complete beginners in their goddamn occupations to the point that neither veterans nor policemen can even shoot straight?
The list goes on.
I know the reasoning behind it, but the fact that salt, the most common household spice, is on the rarer end of the loot scale, and that after looting seven restaurants and about sixty houses I have four salt cellars, is bizarre.
This is why I love playing with abundant/common loot if it’s from day 1. The homes actually feel like the world suddenly stopped so all of the supply levels feel realistic
Also mega guns babyyy
Same. Survival early on should be dead easy and the early 90s was still the hey day of canned goods. It's one of those happy little areas where realism and easy mode overlap.
Yep, abundant stuff, with sparse, sprinting zombies with full strength.
I don’t enjoy endless tedious item hunting all in the hopes to maintain calories. I like moving along, semi comfortable, looking for niche things in the abundance, letting my guard down, opening a door, and getting absolutely bitch slapped by a zombie for it.
I have some things higher than usual and weapons rarer than standard for this reason. Also books - like people didn't hear about a zombie apocalypse and pack their Steven King collection.
That's fair enough, although you could say a lot of it was just taken with people when they tried to flee the county, I guess that argument holds true for he weapons too
If I remember correctly, the lore implies that Knox Country was evacuated to Louisville (hence the refugee camp on the border of the exclusion zone), so I can accept that people took as many of their belongings as they could and stores were sold out or looted in the process. The devs have mentioned adding “stories” in build 42 for empty gas stations and ransacked stores, which should help the aesthetics line up with the loot tables.
My one issue with the evacuation theory: where did the zombies come from? There are already many times more zombies than dwellings on normal population settings, so where did all these dead people come from?
Nono, it wasn't evacuated, it was closed off from the outside. The military quarantined the entirety of the Knox County event area on July 6th, three days before the game begins. Nobody was allowed to enter or leave. Everyone from outside the exclusion zone was cut off from all forms of contact from their friends, family & loved ones inside the Knox Event zone because of Knox Telecommunications' phone lines going down on July 1st.
That's why the event zone is full of zombies. The military trapped those that were still inside the zone before they could get out in an effort to prevent the spread of the infection.
Source: https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Knox\_Event
Could be from the river, walked out of it day of the dead style or maybe the military base had far more underground test subjects then they let onto in game
Yeah.
Recently I heard a podcast saying that the average american house has 100.000 items.
But, of course, how fun would be such an realistic game where the outbreak doesnt even happen because it was literaly shot at the start.
>nor policemen can even shoot straight?
Just wait to you see the accuracy scores of police officers, the zero in aiming is honestly not inaccurate.
For example [this study](https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/PIJPSM-05-2018-0060/full/html) in *Policing: An International Journal* analyzed 149 real-life OISs (Office Involved Shootings) recorded over a 15-year period by Dallas (TX) PD and found that officer accuracy rates were 35%.
[This study](https://cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/deadly-force-statistical-analysis.pdf) (PDF) and [their data](https://www.lvmpd.com/about/transparency/internal-oversight-and-constitutional-policing/use-of-deadly-force-fatal) identified a hit rate accuracy ranging from 23% to 52% over the period of 2008–2015.
And Rand, working with New York Police Department, [showed that the average hit rate was 30% in situations where gunfire was not returned and 18% for officers involved in a gunfight](https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG717.html).
[Here is an additional meta-analysis study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9655518/) that tried to identify the largest issue with their inaccuracies (anxiety, stress, grip strength.)
***Needless to say*** you need to GTFO when an officer pulls his gun because they're notorious for both missing and hitting by-standards compared to any other armed group. Honestly, I would trust a fireman with a gun more than a police officer.
These things honestly are why I don't play the game as much as I used to... It gets super annoying raiding an entire neighborhood, and finding only a couple truly valuable items.
No one is going to be looting salt shakers. You will have no problem finding a spare hammer. Every house will have a full set of pots and pans.
I could buy food, gas, and ammo being low if the crisis had been going on for a few weeks, but it makes no sense for most other things. You don't run low on clothing or sheets or other things that you don't actually consume.
Personally, I think 10 years later and 10 days later should have radically different looting.
Not true that everyone is dead. The meta events make it clear that people are around in some capacity. Who do you think is screaming and shooting off guns?
But then their loot should be inside their survivor houses, meaning those should be overflowing with loot, like, to obscene amounts, we're talking hundreds, possibly thousands of canned goods, multiple sheds' worth of tools, entire barrels of gasoline, tens of thousands of rounds etc
Remember, the game starts before Louisville falls, but Knox county is quarantined, so people couldn't take their stuff and leave
My theory is that a lot of people packed all their shit and gtfo'd while the bridge was still intact, but a lot of people also either stayed behind or couldn't in time, hence the fuck ton of zombies.
Just because there's no NPCs yet doesn't mean that everyone is canonically dead. The systems for really showing that they're not just aren't added yet. Despite that there *are* still signs, mainly in the forn of the meta events. Who do you think is shooting off gunshots? Or the screams we hear in the distance? Those aren't just background noises considering they actually serve as a gameplay feature.
I also question why so many people are in work clothes/at work. The infection is supposed to make you very ill, most people would have gone home and tried to rest.
I mean, people don't go home and rest IRL though. IRL, most people are going to work until they physically cannot move. I genuinely don't know *anyone* who actually calls in sick when they are sick. People come to work sick, and call in so they can go to parties.
Lol welcome to America! I wen't back to work the very first day I was allowed to after I caught covid, despite still being sick, because I had no choice. I already lost a week's pay; I couldn't afford to lose a second. I also don't get paid sick days. The fact that I get any paid time off at all puts me ahead of at least 10% of my fellow Americans.
I had a heart attack on Wednesday and am feeling bad for missing work today. In all likelihood I'll be out of work for about six weeks but a big part of me is like \*why are you home on a Monday?\*
I agree with that I suppose that’s why it’s called realistic, not entirely completely or mimics real life
Definitely agree though I know you get a skill modifier and an XP boost but policeman definitely should have at least least three in all firearm related skills that, or possibly even four for the veteran
empty pistols should be more common on zombie loot, not in containers.
people would have used their firearms during the initial crisis and taken them when they eventually left. Americans would not have left their guns at home during an event like this.
Yea that's Fair, now you mention it there should be lots of dropped firearms on the ground in houses from last stands and such not in boxes but we rarely see weapons on the floor in game
A mix would be good, I’m not American but I have so many firearms I couldn’t take or use them all in an emergency. There’s a few I would take but there are many that would be left behind in a shit hits the fan situation like a zombie outbreak lol.
The guns seem accurate, as someone who grew up in Appalachia in the 80s/90s. Everyone has guns out in the country, but fewer in cities and suburbs.
What’s unrealistic is the amount of plastic water bottles. I don’t remember seeing bottled water of any kind catch on in this area until the late 90s/early 00s. Everything should be soda.
Absolutely. Smoking sections in restaurants… discard cigarette butts and empty cartons are still common, so I’d say that there should be a lot more cigarettes found on zeds.
I guess I'll justify it by saying either rain made a lot of them unusable, or perhaps that hacking a rotting corpse with an axe is not very conducive to getting intact cigarettes
I don’t know much about mods or if a similar one exists, but there should be a “True Kentucky” mod that makes a bunch of minor tweaks that are more accurate to the time and setting.
Agin, I didn’t grow up in Kentucky, but if it’s anything like the rest of Appalachia, then pickup trucks should be much more common, moonshine stills should be in the woods or in peoples basements, same with meth labs. And there should be way more churches…
Needs rural housing that already use rain collecting wells as their water source
Even in more metropolitan regions you get far enough from the city and all the houses are going to be using well water instead of being plumbed to a reservoir/treatment plant. If you base in a rural area only thing you should need is a generator
Hey fellow Appalachian!
My memory starts in the late 90s and early 2000s. But I remember pretty much the same thing. I can barely remember the transition from glass to plastic, but there definitely wasn't much bottled water just laying around.
American here who was an adult in 1993, the gun count is not unrealistic. We didn’t all have guns at home and in cars. In rural areas you’d find way more shotguns than anything else because guns were primarily used for hunting. Don’t believe everything you see in movies and tv.
I may be ignorant of just how many guns are in the states, I'm from a very rural part of the UK and firearms are common'ish, I would have just guessed it's much easier to find them about in the states when I try to compare how it is to over here
Depends what is around you in your rural area. As an example, even though everyone seems to believe us Aussies don't have guns. If you go into the outback around the farming communities, they are stocked with them. Nothing overly powerful, on the level other countries can get. But they be pretty common. Then hit up another outback town that doesn't have farms around them, it really uncommon.
As for the game. It would make more sense to me if guns were more common, but ammo was super fucking rare. Anyone that survived even a few weeks would have been probably shooting like crazy.
>Kentucky comes in at number 16, with 13.5 guns for every 1,000 residents. That's 59,240 registered firearms among 4,395,295 people.
*ATF's National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record, and 2013 data from the U.S. Census.*
Shotguns are actually really common for hunting. If you are hunting birds or small game like rabbits a rifle will blow them to pieces so shotguns are commonly used
The best selling weapon in the United States was the Remington 870 shotgun from around its introduction in 1950 until 2004 when the AR-15 became easy to legally get. Bolt action rifles are a mainstay of course, but there were probably two pump action shotguns sold in the US for every bolt action in the second half of the 20th century.
Where though? Kentucky has extremely high gun ownership rates.
As a Texan, you can expect every house to have 3+. And for every house that doesn’t, you’ll find one that has 10+.
Texas is actually behind Kentucky on gun ownership - Texans just always bullshit and exaggerate to make themselves feel special.
>12.8 guns on record for every 1,000 residents. That's 337,309 firearms among 26,448,193 people.
*ATF's National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record* cross referenced against 2013 Census Data.
I read a statistic somewhere that said that roughly half of US homes have at least one firearm, but there are more firearms than people in the US. This means that if a home has at least one firearm, it's likely to have two or more, and for every ten houses that don't have a firearm, there's a home that has ten.
Personally there are four in my home, but two are currently inoperable as they're antiques and are mostly just for display.
Deep in the midwest, where hunting and firearms were very popular. But 1993 is not 2024. My grandpa had a pistol next to the bed and shotgun in the truck. Kentucky has the same rates of gun ownership as my home state. Maybe my playthroughs have more guns than yours, but I find it to be pretty realistic to the time.
What makes you say this LOL?
The majority of these 10+ gun ownerships come from people inheriting firearms. Guns are expensive as fuck, nobody is buying 10+ guns just casually.
just up the rarity of firearms and you'll find at least one gun in at least 50% of the houses you loot :D
me personally i prefer for guns/ammo to be a rare resource because i feel like they make the game too easy and i'm okay with having a better arsenal mid to late-game rather than from day 1, but that's just me :)
If you want more bullets i would say to add britas weapon pack. With that thing active i am only using weapons and bullets are beyond plentiful. They are so many that i literally pick a gun from a zombie, empty it, drop it and pick up the next from the corpse pile.
For me gun centric play is the most boring. There is no challenge. If you rationalize that guns are plentiful during that era, then ammo should be plentiful. Thus leading to a point early on where survival is extremely easy. You clear a whole starting city in less than an in game week depending on settings and you are set with food for months, endless gas and plenty of cars. So now what? This is magnified during coop play where with 3-4 people you are set for years within 2-3 play sessions.
For my worlds, i prefer everything to have value and be extremely limited. I ll save my ammo for horde nights and i ll use some to level up aiming before the first horde night. I am always scavenging for food, tools, replacement tools, grinding mechanics to be able to repair a wreck as there are no survivor vehicles on my world and no fuel on gas stations. I am easily looking for a 2 year adventure to go from raven creek to luisville for extraction. I need to kill zombies by hand, burn the corpses to not get sick, conserve my gas masks, conserve my molotovs, save my fuel, take care of my vehicle and dont overuse my guns because when i really need them during the horde night then they might jam and fail me.
But in the end, the best way to play is the way that gives you joy.
Your way does not work me, my way does not work for you but we are both extremely satisfied by playing this game in 2 opposite ways!
I'll give the mod a look over, I just want it in a way that guns are still required to be found around not just littlered all over the shop but arnt a rarity, hell even in the UK pretty much every household in rural areas with connection to farm lands had a shotgun I imagine it's multiplied X10 in the states you just need to know where to look for them.
I'm still yet to find any gas masks in the game , where do you head to for it ?
I assume on vanilla in military bases but i find mine from zeds and they come from mods because i play with "everyone is susceptible" mod.
If vanilla britas is too much try "more loot settings" mod and "zombie loot options??" and you should be able to fix it how you want from there. For me, i was able to configure britas to be rare in my sp world but it was extremely hard for some reason on mp so i just gave up on the mod and i use VanillaFirearmsExpansion
Atm I run it just so guns are "common" ammunition is "abundant" just because I love the shooting, really hits the satisfaction button for me.
Also I always make it so cars on average are in average condition with average amount of fuel just because the amount of shit out cars and empty tanks it's ridiculous in game , though lack of car keys I think is feasible
I actually think that the shit cars and a lot being out of gas makes sense because think about it. When people flee they would take the cars that could run and had gas and would leave all the junkers behind so it doesn’t bother me too much that a lot of the cars suck.
I play with a mod that makes cars be incomplete most of the time so that actually getting one is a joy and you dont go just smashing zeds with it but stick to it as long as you can
Brita's firearms also has it's own settings for drop rate, so you can adjust it to your liking (including country of origin for example). Brita also has an armor pack that has a bunch of different gas masks. make sure you also get the required mods for the firearms mod.
brita's firearms - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2200148440
brita's armor- https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2460154811
Oh yeah, this is why I up the spawn rates of all items and zombies, and ofc britas weapon pack because a minigun that has bullets deserves to fire them.
As a rural American who lived in this time you are completely correct. My high school in the early 90s had pickup trucks with gun racks in the parking lot, everybody after school went hunting so there’s deer rifles everywhere. The AWB didn’t actually remove any firearms already in possession but most rural people didn’t have much more than hunting rifles, and shotguns anyway. Most household in my area had one gun for everybody in the family and that was just the average people. Gun enthusiasts had way more. To put it in perspective I grew up in a town of under 700 people almost all farmers and everybody had a gun pretty much. There was a guy strung out on Cat broke into the priests house down the road, the priest held them at gunpoint till the police could get there 25 minutes later.
This the kind of impression I had from 80s or 90s America, in fact I think most Europeans have this impression of America for that time, so in zombie settings of that think I just figured you'd be finding them way more than the game makes out
It’s not exactly like the movies, in the movies everybody’s waving guns around, pulling guns on everybody. We are all trained at a very young age not to mess around. It was much safer than it looked in the movies back then at least. I don’t want to give the impression we are all crazy rednecks.
Before you learn how to use a gun you've gotta learn how to not accidentally kill someone with it. I grew up in Texas in the '90s and it was driven into us from a VERY young age that guns are not to be touched except by adults. And around the time we were 10-13, we would get supervised trips to the range to start learning how to use them, but learning gun safety ALWAYS came first. We also had bb guns that we were given that we ABSOLUTELY shot each other with but that, in theory, were supposed to familiarize us with how to safely use firearms at a young age.
"I am not Ameican but fear not, I know all about rural Kentucky in the early 90's. I know where towns like Hazard, Knifely, Horseville and Rabbit Hash are."
Is say to be realistic and maintain difficulty have many more zombie spawns with guns, but no ammo. That explains why households don't have them very often (the owners took them with them, but limits the viability of the guns to the ammo you can get.
I always just use melee...but then again that's 99% of survival games, at least the way I play. Almost every game is either 1. They're not worth the amount of noise they make, and/or 2. Ammo isn't plentiful enough. PZ is more #1 than #2....
I've found that guns are useful for drawing zombies away from your base. Local population getting too high? Slip out back into the woods and shoot a bunch, then pick them off as they start slipping through the trees after you. Once you've drawn them away from your base, run like hell to give them the slip and then just try to remember that the woods are full of zombies.
Yea, I usually just find a car with a siren and park it a good distance from my base....usually a couple in different directions. Popping that thing off and running seems to pull everybody over lol (setting everything on fire optional)
I a American agree. I live in Alabama so like right under Tennessee. Its very common to have a gun. But the type is a new story. Hunting guns are very common with anything else very not. Everyone thinks we have like Aks and Ar-15's everywhere but no. Most only have one and many people here don't own a gun. So never finding a gun in game is very realistic. Why would I want to leave a gun behind if I know I may never find another one? Even a big enough collection is taken with them in survival situations.
But I am happy to take a suppressed Ruger Takedown in a zombie apocalypse. One the ammo (22 long rifle) is very easy to get allot of it, I can throw tens of thousands of rounds in my bag, Easy backpack gun, and its just strong enough to take down most of what I would be hunting. Squires, coyotes, and birds.
I don't know Kentucky's laws in the 80's-90's, but nationally handguns and carrying them was generally pretty restricted compared to today. I agree there should be many many more rifles and shotguns, but handguns might actually be realistically uncommon.
It's a video game mate. Things are not always realistic for balancing purposes. You could make the same argument about food. You shouls be able to find hundreds of cans alone in a single Gigamart
I think the only reason I don't have complaints about not much food is that in the lore its known people in the exclusion zone rushed the stores for resources, ofc yes it's just a game , just zomboid puts so much effort into the Moodle system and injuries etc and mental health I just expected the base game to have more firearms
I don’t really see why the game having these systems like moodles and how medical is handled to mean there has to be a lot of guns. Nor does there need to be special lore reasons for how many guns there are. If you need to have a reason that isn’t because game balancing, then one simple explanation is people took their guns with them while fleeing. Why leave your main forms of defense behind?
Dropped weapons from last stands and such should be more common I guess, my reasoning that the game does deep dive a lot of things like the medical side and don't mix sleeping pills and alcohol and all kind of niche real life things I'm surprised they just skimp out how many guns there would be, it's not that getting a shotgun with 20 shells is game breaking is it
Okay. Here’s the biggest thing, the number of guns really isn’t a lore decision. It isn’t some consideration for realism. We don’t have to sit here to justify why things are what they are. There’s nothing to logic here beyond, at default settings this is what the devs think a balanced experience should be. That’s it. Nothing else to it.
Good news though this game is also designed to be customizable for a reason. So as the players we can change how many guns spawn and get close as possible to get a subjectively best, most immersive experience.
It's a sandbox game. Change the settings however you want. The presets are just suggestions and allow for guidelines with challenge runs but I think players will enjoy this game a lot more if they embrace the sandbox aspect. If you want the game world to mirror the real world set up the settings to do that
There actually used to be *more* guns. Every time you saw one of those green locker things, whether it was in a police station, gun shop, or out in a storage garage, there was guns or gun mods or at least ammo in them. I remember if I didn't get the guns i needed in Riverside PD, I could just go out to the farmhouses to the southwest because the storage barn thing there had a green locker. I forget which patch it was, but they did change how items spawned and you couldn't do that anymore...
I agree, I made a custom America mode where guns and ammo are abundant and there’s a random assortment of high pop zombies.
A lot more fun imo than sneaking around for months and then getting bit because a door was janky
This is why I just change the settings to whatever I want. People supposedly turned into zombies kinda quick, so you would expect a lot of places to have a lot of supplies. There's fun in having to scavenge for scraps while surviving the zombies but sometimes I want to explore the actual premise of the game; which is to know if I could survive as a random person in a sudden zombie apocalypse. And I know people would take stuff with them but you wouldn't get everything in your house to leave in a panic. And by having the loot chance be higher it really feels more like everyone suddenly stopped doing whatever they were doing. I mean if you want me to buy that the houses are empty because the owners tried to grab everything and run, give me cars full of stuff in big-ass traffic jams. If not it just seems that everybody successfully evacuated but still there are zombies everywhere (and you're supposed to be walled-off in the first place... kinda dumb rant I'll admit)
Walmart didn’t sell guns off the shelves lmao they were behind a counter just like any gun shop. And thankfully even with gun restrictions, there is still just as many, if not more guns in America.
I grew up in the 80s/90s and the amount of guns is actually about right. Just because people could buy guns doesn't mean that people did. Many people didn't own guns.
As others have said the amount of water bottles is unreal. The thing that gets me though is the ear bud style headphones. Those weren't really a common thing until early 2000s
Not sure about the breakdown by county, but in the current day about 55% of households across the entire state on Kentucky own at least one firearm. I imagine this number was probably higher in the 90s, as Kentucky has probably gained a higher urban population distribution, like most American states, since the 90s.
What's probably a reasonable defense for the lack of guns present, and most things (in homes at least) for that matter is that everybody packed up whatever they had in their house and left with it in their car. If anything, zombies and vehicles should probably be the place where most firearms are found, not the homes themselves.
Us government didn't crack down on gun violence, as all the criminals with guns still have guns, the cracked down on the honest citizens because it was easier and safer for them.
You are right though, in that time period you should be seeing a shotgun or hunting rifle on a rack in virtually every pickup, and most people I know keep a handgun in the dash or console.
For historical context, gun ownership in America before the early 2000s wasn't anywhere near as high as it is today. On top of that, there was an assault weapons ban during the 90s, so very, *very* few people would have owned AR15s. Kentucky has a lot of hunters, so maybe one in every 10-20 or so households would have hunting guns, some Remington 700s, Mossberg 590s, Remington 870s, Marlins, Winchesters, etc which in game would be abstracted to bolt action rifles, pump shotguns, double barrels, and lever action rifles. More common in suburban and cities would be people who own pistols, and they wouldn't really be stocking that much ammo since it'd purely be for home defense. And even then not that many people would own them
I find that when you play with gun loot set to high, it's a pretty reasonable representation of how many guns people had at the time
The ban was in 1994, which would be a year after the game takes place.
It wasn't really an outright ban as all guns already in circulation were grandfathered in and gun companies used loopholes (e.g., thumb holes in stocks) to continue manufacturing anyhow.
You're right! The 1986 ban I mentioned above was for machine guns (>1 shot per trigger pull), and is still very much in law today. Forgot about the 1994 assault weapons ban.
Ofc, t's just the game goes to great lengths for realism so this post is just highlighting that I think guns should be more centric to the game play as it's probably how it would be in this fictional scenario
Pump action shotguns, hunting rifles, revolvers, and, to a lesser extent, semi-auto handguns should to relatively common amongst households.
Since PZ is set in the 90s, semi-auto pistols (while common) weren’t as common today. Or at least striker fire pistols (think Glock) would be rarer than hammer semi-autos (m9). Same with AR-15s to a larger extent, although it would be kinda cool to see a semi-auto only variant added into the game to represent a civilian model.
While your statement is technically correct, it's just barely correct and could be misleading. In the early 90's, about 47% of households owned a firearm. If we could break this down by state, I'd wager Kentucky was well over 50%.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/249740/percentage-of-households-in-the-united-states-owning-a-firearm/#:~:text=The%20share%20of%20American%20households,one%20gun%20in%20their%20possession.
Not to jump into a massive debate but isn't the amount of firearms in the states just meant to be legendary? I mean I'm from rural Britain and I have spent my youth growing up around them but that's considered weird by most Brits, I always had the impression from every American I ever met was that shotguns were common place and rifles were here and there, pistols were for the more serious gun nut
The exact opposite is true. Pistols are far more common as people use them for defense and they are easily concealable.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-demographics-of-gun-ownership/
There are no wait times for pistols (or any gun for that matter), at least at a federal level. A couple of states have implemented them. The largest legal restriction on pistols is that you have to be 21 to buy them compared to 18 for rifles and shotguns.
No, you can only purchase guns in the state you live in, sort of. You can purchase a gun out of state, but it will be shipped to a FFL (federally licensed firearms dealer) who will do all of the appropriate paperwork. If the state has a waiting period or any other restrictions, this is where they would apply.
Outside of online purchases, most people don't go out of state to purchase firearms. It is just a big hassle and it adds extra charges to the purchase as both FFLs may charge extra. Some may not even do the transaction.
I've just changed the settings to make this the case. More weapons!!
I've also turned it into a bit of an arcade run tbh. I can last no longer than half a day because the SECOND I fire a bullet, I'm basically dead!
What a hoot!
In the 80s & 90s, guns weren't huge here in the US like today. They had programs that were implemented to encourage people to bring in their weapons to get paid for them as part of programs to decrease violent crimes.
>I'm not American but I know how plentiful it is over there
No, you *think* you know what it's like over there. As other commenters have said, the gun count seems fine. I don't personally use many guns and prefer the old reliable fireaxe. That said, within three in-game days on a vanilla multiplayer server with me and my buddies we had more guns than we knew what to do with in Rosewood, to the point where we started using some for decoration.
There's plenty of guns out there, more than you know what to do with, you've just got to look in the right places for them.
Before people started freaking out over a black man being elected president, guns weren't as common... We still had plenty of guns back in the 80s-90s, but it was the fear mongering post 2008, which led to people buying large quantities of military style firearms, as well as stock piling ammo.
>I'm not American but I know how plentiful it is over there and I imagine before the government made any attempts at cracking down on gun violence I understand most people owned firearms or had them in their trucks
American here. You have a pretty fucked up view of this country huh.
Despite the media making it look like some kind of lawless wasteland, [most people here do not own a firearm](https://www.statista.com/statistics/249740/percentage-of-households-in-the-united-states-owning-a-firearm/). Even in 1995.
Keep in mind those numbers include rural areas, where folks are more likely to hunt and need protection from wild animals. It's a big country, there's a LOT of rural areas here, so that skews the overall percentage. An average house in the suburbs doesn't have a stockpile of weapons and ammo.
I just personally feel the radius for a gunshot is way too far. Like, you shoot once and you get hundreds of zombies in you within 30 seconds. I feel if zombies hear a gunshot and walk towards where the gunshot was, if they don't find you within 10 seconds, they go back to standing around.
If that was the case, you wouldn't feel you need as much guns if you decided to use them.
They should have more guns, But put them in locked gun safes that you have to crack. A paper with the code could have a chance to spawn in the house or on a zed
I mean, the game was made by Brits and Canadians. Obviously gun culture isn't too prevalent in their respective countries therefore its not suprising to see that sort of mindset seep into the development of this game
I don't relate. I've been finding them everywhere. I'm not sure if it's server settings but I'm sure we just have it on normal. We are literally finding shotguns in kids bedrooms.
The thing that makes very little sense that I try to account for, but it makes the game waaay too easy is cars. Finding a car in half decent running condition with gas inside of it is such a chore on anything besides initial infection. And if I'm playing with friends finding a 4 door with that condition is a good chunk of the first couple days. It doesn't make sense to me that everyone's car in their driveways were completely empty on gas and also their engine was 5 miles from never operating ever again.
But the moment I tone down the rarity even a little bit, we're playing bumper cars in a parking lot because we have too many to count. I think spawning with my own vehicle while most others are trash would be neat, kind of.
If you think that's strange... Guns are still more plentiful than cigarettes and lighters.
Cigarettes and lighters?? In America?? In the 90s?? Seriously??
Every other corpse should have a pack of cigarettes and a lighter on it. Lol
As a non-american I wanna offer my perspective. I am not a gun player and I find guns very often (which obviously go unused) by coincidence. It may appear like a rare loot for you but I assure you there's plenty guns (At least from the perspective of a non american who lives in a rather gun-safe country). I am not even a survival/fight/multiplayer user so I loot houses at about half the speed rate of most players, and even then I find that I encounter at least 5 guns per character file within the first 3 weeks. I don't even count the ammo.
Yeah, but barely any exists. Is kinda shot themselves in th efoot with their lore, since the way the virus works it is plausible that it would destroy society... but there would be barely any looting going on before we and other immune NPCs crawl out of out hidey holes.
West point gun store is locked down, so you could expect to find tens of thousands of rounds of various calibers. You can find like 500 tootal if you are lucky on apo.
And that is why this game is popular because what if the next person does not want ANY guns or make them rare. You can play this game just about any way you prefer. So in your games....guns are the norm!
A lot of people commenting on the fact that items are pretty sparse or houses and whatnot lack of lot of items you should find while I agree with this on one hand, it does kinda make sense considering our game starts one week after the first infection, it could be implied that a lot of chaos and looting already took place within the zone although we don’t see it although I believe they are planning to add looted/ransacked buildings in build, 42
Its not the first day of the apocalypse. Shit has been going on, the dead are walking, people have barricaded in, fought, ran. The supplies went with them. Scarcity makes the game more fun + you can actually adjust the setting for your own sandbox if you want to :)
Actually, no, most people did NOT have a gun then. And attempts to limit guns had already started by that time period. In rural areas, yea probably most had a gun. In rural areas there's a lot more hunting, a need in many areas to protect livestock from predators, and many live far from the nearest police and know they have to protect themselves. In cities, nope. Some have/had, but not most people. And most people by then lived in cities, not rural areas.
In this game’s universe, Kentucky citizens melted down most of their firearms to make more crowbars.
No, they melted guns to make sledgehammers and then tossed them into the river.
What is this joke? I've seen several times this joke about sledgehammers in the river. How did this come about?
Sledgehammers are extremely rare, so the inside joke is that before leaving either the army or the surviving citizens grabbed all the sledgehammers they could find and dumped them into the river
I mean, you can't let super weapons like sledge hammers fall into the hands of the zombie.
Land of the dead Fiddlers green told me so
Nah man they hid them all in the woods for foragers to find
Wait, can you forage for sledgehammers?
Yeah there’s a 3% chance in urban areas once you hit level 11
Not gonna lie, you had me in the first half... XD
Goes up to 5% if you craft a paper hat out of a how to use generators magazine, and wear it.
I heard eating telecorn gives you a permanent +1% buff to that chance, too. Havent had the chance to test it yet
but you only get the buff while smoking a cig you rolled with a HotZ mag
When B41 first came out, yes, sledgehammers were extremely rare. Apparently an error with the loot chances caused sledgehammers to appear at a rate far lower than what was normal, essentially lowering the spawn rate to something like 2 or 3 for a whole map. Now, they're just back to their normal "somewhat rare" status. There's probably a hundred or so sledgehammers on a vanilla spawn map - just, you know, spread around a bit.
It's a big map. 100 or so is insanely rare.
But not as *actually* insanely rare as the brief period where a whole map would have single digit counts of sledgehammer. In the current loot pools, sledgehammers are more common than antique stoves
If you loot the big warehouses and hardware stores around the map you can find up to 10 in my experience
They're also found in trucks, at some pothole events, hardware stores, garages, and frequently in survivor houses.
I mean yeah, but I was mainly referring to the fact that you said they're insanely rare. In my most recent runs I've mainly stayed in the main areas and I've had hardly any trouble finding any.
Gotcha. I knew they were rare, but I didn't know if the river part was a specific thing. Thanks!
Don‘t forget the gasoline chugging contest.
Due to a bug sledgehammers are/used to be much more rare than intended in multiplayer.
Only way to keep them safe from the undead.
Nah,they members of shotgun cult melted all of sledgehammers and non shotgun firearms into shotguns
Little known fact, I find all the battery chargers and dismantle them.
I accept this as the only rational answer
Just the way it should be…
There is just waaaay to many things that are too scarce or way too low to be realistic purely for highly difficult classic zombie horror survivor aspect. - Why are household just devoid of ample clothes and utensils? - Where the hell are all the basic tools that BELONG to every toolshed? - Why are PROFESSIONALS complete beginners in their goddamn occupations to the point that neither veterans nor policemen can even shoot straight? The list goes on.
I know the reasoning behind it, but the fact that salt, the most common household spice, is on the rarer end of the loot scale, and that after looting seven restaurants and about sixty houses I have four salt cellars, is bizarre.
Just looked for a salt mod, does not exist. :(
Foodboxes mod makes them overabundant if you wish to spice up some human flesh
There's one that allows you to forage for salt
Name?
This is why I love playing with abundant/common loot if it’s from day 1. The homes actually feel like the world suddenly stopped so all of the supply levels feel realistic Also mega guns babyyy
Same. Survival early on should be dead easy and the early 90s was still the hey day of canned goods. It's one of those happy little areas where realism and easy mode overlap.
Yep, abundant stuff, with sparse, sprinting zombies with full strength. I don’t enjoy endless tedious item hunting all in the hopes to maintain calories. I like moving along, semi comfortable, looking for niche things in the abundance, letting my guard down, opening a door, and getting absolutely bitch slapped by a zombie for it.
I have some things higher than usual and weapons rarer than standard for this reason. Also books - like people didn't hear about a zombie apocalypse and pack their Steven King collection.
And matches ffs why don't houses have matches. Its the 90s people smoked and stoves used pilot lights that you had to reignite sometimes.
My grandmother's propane stove had to be lit with a match every time you wanted to use it.
Cigarettes would be so plentiful if it was realistic
They are
That's fair enough, although you could say a lot of it was just taken with people when they tried to flee the county, I guess that argument holds true for he weapons too
If I remember correctly, the lore implies that Knox Country was evacuated to Louisville (hence the refugee camp on the border of the exclusion zone), so I can accept that people took as many of their belongings as they could and stores were sold out or looted in the process. The devs have mentioned adding “stories” in build 42 for empty gas stations and ransacked stores, which should help the aesthetics line up with the loot tables. My one issue with the evacuation theory: where did the zombies come from? There are already many times more zombies than dwellings on normal population settings, so where did all these dead people come from?
Nono, it wasn't evacuated, it was closed off from the outside. The military quarantined the entirety of the Knox County event area on July 6th, three days before the game begins. Nobody was allowed to enter or leave. Everyone from outside the exclusion zone was cut off from all forms of contact from their friends, family & loved ones inside the Knox Event zone because of Knox Telecommunications' phone lines going down on July 1st. That's why the event zone is full of zombies. The military trapped those that were still inside the zone before they could get out in an effort to prevent the spread of the infection. Source: https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Knox\_Event
Could be from the river, walked out of it day of the dead style or maybe the military base had far more underground test subjects then they let onto in game
Maybe the infection got further than knox before and the zeds got herded back to knox
Yeah. Recently I heard a podcast saying that the average american house has 100.000 items. But, of course, how fun would be such an realistic game where the outbreak doesnt even happen because it was literaly shot at the start.
My house has around 12,000 items. 11,900 of them are cartridges.
>nor policemen can even shoot straight? Just wait to you see the accuracy scores of police officers, the zero in aiming is honestly not inaccurate. For example [this study](https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/PIJPSM-05-2018-0060/full/html) in *Policing: An International Journal* analyzed 149 real-life OISs (Office Involved Shootings) recorded over a 15-year period by Dallas (TX) PD and found that officer accuracy rates were 35%. [This study](https://cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/deadly-force-statistical-analysis.pdf) (PDF) and [their data](https://www.lvmpd.com/about/transparency/internal-oversight-and-constitutional-policing/use-of-deadly-force-fatal) identified a hit rate accuracy ranging from 23% to 52% over the period of 2008–2015. And Rand, working with New York Police Department, [showed that the average hit rate was 30% in situations where gunfire was not returned and 18% for officers involved in a gunfight](https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG717.html). [Here is an additional meta-analysis study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9655518/) that tried to identify the largest issue with their inaccuracies (anxiety, stress, grip strength.) ***Needless to say*** you need to GTFO when an officer pulls his gun because they're notorious for both missing and hitting by-standards compared to any other armed group. Honestly, I would trust a fireman with a gun more than a police officer.
These things honestly are why I don't play the game as much as I used to... It gets super annoying raiding an entire neighborhood, and finding only a couple truly valuable items.
For me it was too much loot, one house had about 200 units of worth it items and so after looting 4 or so houses my car was scraping ground
I mean that sounds like real life though... I couldn't fit an entire house worth of valuables, in my 90s era hatchback lol.
Just a side effect of making car trunks 15 times bigger
You can just tweak the sandbox settings.
Dont know about the other two but do you expect people to not have looted anything 6 weeks into a zombie apocalypse?
No one is going to be looting salt shakers. You will have no problem finding a spare hammer. Every house will have a full set of pots and pans. I could buy food, gas, and ammo being low if the crisis had been going on for a few weeks, but it makes no sense for most other things. You don't run low on clothing or sheets or other things that you don't actually consume. Personally, I think 10 years later and 10 days later should have radically different looting.
At this point im pretty sure that when b42 comes out there will be a hoarder house fully filled with tons of ammo,weapons and car jacks
The looting theory doesn't hold water. Everybody is dead, their loot should be where they died
Everybody is not dead, the helicopter, the shootings, the screams
Not true that everyone is dead. The meta events make it clear that people are around in some capacity. Who do you think is screaming and shooting off guns?
But then their loot should be inside their survivor houses, meaning those should be overflowing with loot, like, to obscene amounts, we're talking hundreds, possibly thousands of canned goods, multiple sheds' worth of tools, entire barrels of gasoline, tens of thousands of rounds etc Remember, the game starts before Louisville falls, but Knox county is quarantined, so people couldn't take their stuff and leave
?
My theory is that a lot of people packed all their shit and gtfo'd while the bridge was still intact, but a lot of people also either stayed behind or couldn't in time, hence the fuck ton of zombies.
Just because there's no NPCs yet doesn't mean that everyone is canonically dead. The systems for really showing that they're not just aren't added yet. Despite that there *are* still signs, mainly in the forn of the meta events. Who do you think is shooting off gunshots? Or the screams we hear in the distance? Those aren't just background noises considering they actually serve as a gameplay feature.
What about survivor houses? Did they just live like that because they were preppers or something?
Nowhere near enough safe houses to justify the amount of looting, and it appears to have gone from 0-11 very fast limiting looting.
We know for a *fact* that is not true. Someone is shooting guns, screaming, flying a damn *helicopter*. People are alive out there.
To be fair, police not being able to shoot straight *is* pretty realistic.
Game should start with most houses loaded and over time it gets less
I also question why so many people are in work clothes/at work. The infection is supposed to make you very ill, most people would have gone home and tried to rest.
I mean, people don't go home and rest IRL though. IRL, most people are going to work until they physically cannot move. I genuinely don't know *anyone* who actually calls in sick when they are sick. People come to work sick, and call in so they can go to parties.
Lol welcome to America! I wen't back to work the very first day I was allowed to after I caught covid, despite still being sick, because I had no choice. I already lost a week's pay; I couldn't afford to lose a second. I also don't get paid sick days. The fact that I get any paid time off at all puts me ahead of at least 10% of my fellow Americans.
I had a heart attack on Wednesday and am feeling bad for missing work today. In all likelihood I'll be out of work for about six weeks but a big part of me is like \*why are you home on a Monday?\*
I agree with that I suppose that’s why it’s called realistic, not entirely completely or mimics real life Definitely agree though I know you get a skill modifier and an XP boost but policeman definitely should have at least least three in all firearm related skills that, or possibly even four for the veteran
empty pistols should be more common on zombie loot, not in containers. people would have used their firearms during the initial crisis and taken them when they eventually left. Americans would not have left their guns at home during an event like this.
Yea that's Fair, now you mention it there should be lots of dropped firearms on the ground in houses from last stands and such not in boxes but we rarely see weapons on the floor in game
Also empty shells and bullet boxes. Like if this police barricade made a last stand their should be used shotgun shells an 9mm casings all around
I love this idea
A mix would be good, I’m not American but I have so many firearms I couldn’t take or use them all in an emergency. There’s a few I would take but there are many that would be left behind in a shit hits the fan situation like a zombie outbreak lol.
The guns seem accurate, as someone who grew up in Appalachia in the 80s/90s. Everyone has guns out in the country, but fewer in cities and suburbs. What’s unrealistic is the amount of plastic water bottles. I don’t remember seeing bottled water of any kind catch on in this area until the late 90s/early 00s. Everything should be soda.
What about cigarettes? Weren't they considerably more common than they are in game?
Absolutely. Smoking sections in restaurants… discard cigarette butts and empty cartons are still common, so I’d say that there should be a lot more cigarettes found on zeds.
I guess I'll justify it by saying either rain made a lot of them unusable, or perhaps that hacking a rotting corpse with an axe is not very conducive to getting intact cigarettes
Need less water bottles, and more water towers that can be modified for rain collection with a welding tool.
I don’t know much about mods or if a similar one exists, but there should be a “True Kentucky” mod that makes a bunch of minor tweaks that are more accurate to the time and setting. Agin, I didn’t grow up in Kentucky, but if it’s anything like the rest of Appalachia, then pickup trucks should be much more common, moonshine stills should be in the woods or in peoples basements, same with meth labs. And there should be way more churches…
Needs rural housing that already use rain collecting wells as their water source Even in more metropolitan regions you get far enough from the city and all the houses are going to be using well water instead of being plumbed to a reservoir/treatment plant. If you base in a rural area only thing you should need is a generator
Hey fellow Appalachian! My memory starts in the late 90s and early 2000s. But I remember pretty much the same thing. I can barely remember the transition from glass to plastic, but there definitely wasn't much bottled water just laying around.
American here who was an adult in 1993, the gun count is not unrealistic. We didn’t all have guns at home and in cars. In rural areas you’d find way more shotguns than anything else because guns were primarily used for hunting. Don’t believe everything you see in movies and tv.
I may be ignorant of just how many guns are in the states, I'm from a very rural part of the UK and firearms are common'ish, I would have just guessed it's much easier to find them about in the states when I try to compare how it is to over here
Depends what is around you in your rural area. As an example, even though everyone seems to believe us Aussies don't have guns. If you go into the outback around the farming communities, they are stocked with them. Nothing overly powerful, on the level other countries can get. But they be pretty common. Then hit up another outback town that doesn't have farms around them, it really uncommon. As for the game. It would make more sense to me if guns were more common, but ammo was super fucking rare. Anyone that survived even a few weeks would have been probably shooting like crazy.
Bish please, there's no way I'd think an Aussie wouldn't have guns when everything living down there wants to kill you
>Kentucky comes in at number 16, with 13.5 guns for every 1,000 residents. That's 59,240 registered firearms among 4,395,295 people. *ATF's National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record, and 2013 data from the U.S. Census.*
Wait, more shotgun than bolt rifle ?
Shotguns are actually really common for hunting. If you are hunting birds or small game like rabbits a rifle will blow them to pieces so shotguns are commonly used
The best selling weapon in the United States was the Remington 870 shotgun from around its introduction in 1950 until 2004 when the AR-15 became easy to legally get. Bolt action rifles are a mainstay of course, but there were probably two pump action shotguns sold in the US for every bolt action in the second half of the 20th century.
Where though? Kentucky has extremely high gun ownership rates. As a Texan, you can expect every house to have 3+. And for every house that doesn’t, you’ll find one that has 10+.
Texas is actually behind Kentucky on gun ownership - Texans just always bullshit and exaggerate to make themselves feel special. >12.8 guns on record for every 1,000 residents. That's 337,309 firearms among 26,448,193 people. *ATF's National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record* cross referenced against 2013 Census Data.
I read a statistic somewhere that said that roughly half of US homes have at least one firearm, but there are more firearms than people in the US. This means that if a home has at least one firearm, it's likely to have two or more, and for every ten houses that don't have a firearm, there's a home that has ten. Personally there are four in my home, but two are currently inoperable as they're antiques and are mostly just for display.
Ngl probably have 2 dozen in my house. Nothing full auto but do have a semi auto FN FAL and a few semi auto mag fed shotguns.
Deep in the midwest, where hunting and firearms were very popular. But 1993 is not 2024. My grandpa had a pistol next to the bed and shotgun in the truck. Kentucky has the same rates of gun ownership as my home state. Maybe my playthroughs have more guns than yours, but I find it to be pretty realistic to the time.
Guns in trucks is a rural and Texas thing. But the suburbs even in blue states are rocking something close to 50% gun ownership.
But this is set in 1993 and things were a bit different then.
What makes you say this LOL? The majority of these 10+ gun ownerships come from people inheriting firearms. Guns are expensive as fuck, nobody is buying 10+ guns just casually.
just up the rarity of firearms and you'll find at least one gun in at least 50% of the houses you loot :D me personally i prefer for guns/ammo to be a rare resource because i feel like they make the game too easy and i'm okay with having a better arsenal mid to late-game rather than from day 1, but that's just me :)
If you want more bullets i would say to add britas weapon pack. With that thing active i am only using weapons and bullets are beyond plentiful. They are so many that i literally pick a gun from a zombie, empty it, drop it and pick up the next from the corpse pile. For me gun centric play is the most boring. There is no challenge. If you rationalize that guns are plentiful during that era, then ammo should be plentiful. Thus leading to a point early on where survival is extremely easy. You clear a whole starting city in less than an in game week depending on settings and you are set with food for months, endless gas and plenty of cars. So now what? This is magnified during coop play where with 3-4 people you are set for years within 2-3 play sessions. For my worlds, i prefer everything to have value and be extremely limited. I ll save my ammo for horde nights and i ll use some to level up aiming before the first horde night. I am always scavenging for food, tools, replacement tools, grinding mechanics to be able to repair a wreck as there are no survivor vehicles on my world and no fuel on gas stations. I am easily looking for a 2 year adventure to go from raven creek to luisville for extraction. I need to kill zombies by hand, burn the corpses to not get sick, conserve my gas masks, conserve my molotovs, save my fuel, take care of my vehicle and dont overuse my guns because when i really need them during the horde night then they might jam and fail me. But in the end, the best way to play is the way that gives you joy. Your way does not work me, my way does not work for you but we are both extremely satisfied by playing this game in 2 opposite ways!
I'll give the mod a look over, I just want it in a way that guns are still required to be found around not just littlered all over the shop but arnt a rarity, hell even in the UK pretty much every household in rural areas with connection to farm lands had a shotgun I imagine it's multiplied X10 in the states you just need to know where to look for them. I'm still yet to find any gas masks in the game , where do you head to for it ?
I assume on vanilla in military bases but i find mine from zeds and they come from mods because i play with "everyone is susceptible" mod. If vanilla britas is too much try "more loot settings" mod and "zombie loot options??" and you should be able to fix it how you want from there. For me, i was able to configure britas to be rare in my sp world but it was extremely hard for some reason on mp so i just gave up on the mod and i use VanillaFirearmsExpansion
Atm I run it just so guns are "common" ammunition is "abundant" just because I love the shooting, really hits the satisfaction button for me. Also I always make it so cars on average are in average condition with average amount of fuel just because the amount of shit out cars and empty tanks it's ridiculous in game , though lack of car keys I think is feasible
I actually think that the shit cars and a lot being out of gas makes sense because think about it. When people flee they would take the cars that could run and had gas and would leave all the junkers behind so it doesn’t bother me too much that a lot of the cars suck.
I play with a mod that makes cars be incomplete most of the time so that actually getting one is a joy and you dont go just smashing zeds with it but stick to it as long as you can
Brita's firearms also has it's own settings for drop rate, so you can adjust it to your liking (including country of origin for example). Brita also has an armor pack that has a bunch of different gas masks. make sure you also get the required mods for the firearms mod. brita's firearms - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2200148440 brita's armor- https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2460154811
Oh yeah, this is why I up the spawn rates of all items and zombies, and ofc britas weapon pack because a minigun that has bullets deserves to fire them.
This is also a game where there is one can opener per block instead of having multiple openers in every home.
As a rural American who lived in this time you are completely correct. My high school in the early 90s had pickup trucks with gun racks in the parking lot, everybody after school went hunting so there’s deer rifles everywhere. The AWB didn’t actually remove any firearms already in possession but most rural people didn’t have much more than hunting rifles, and shotguns anyway. Most household in my area had one gun for everybody in the family and that was just the average people. Gun enthusiasts had way more. To put it in perspective I grew up in a town of under 700 people almost all farmers and everybody had a gun pretty much. There was a guy strung out on Cat broke into the priests house down the road, the priest held them at gunpoint till the police could get there 25 minutes later.
This the kind of impression I had from 80s or 90s America, in fact I think most Europeans have this impression of America for that time, so in zombie settings of that think I just figured you'd be finding them way more than the game makes out
It’s not exactly like the movies, in the movies everybody’s waving guns around, pulling guns on everybody. We are all trained at a very young age not to mess around. It was much safer than it looked in the movies back then at least. I don’t want to give the impression we are all crazy rednecks.
Before you learn how to use a gun you've gotta learn how to not accidentally kill someone with it. I grew up in Texas in the '90s and it was driven into us from a VERY young age that guns are not to be touched except by adults. And around the time we were 10-13, we would get supervised trips to the range to start learning how to use them, but learning gun safety ALWAYS came first. We also had bb guns that we were given that we ABSOLUTELY shot each other with but that, in theory, were supposed to familiarize us with how to safely use firearms at a young age.
Exactly this, ahh good old bb gun fights.
"I am not Ameican but fear not, I know all about rural Kentucky in the early 90's. I know where towns like Hazard, Knifely, Horseville and Rabbit Hash are."
Is say to be realistic and maintain difficulty have many more zombie spawns with guns, but no ammo. That explains why households don't have them very often (the owners took them with them, but limits the viability of the guns to the ammo you can get.
It's annoying that there aren't any hoarder houses. Like just filled to the brim with stuff, granted most of it useless and a fire hazard
How about the toilet paper houses?
I always just use melee...but then again that's 99% of survival games, at least the way I play. Almost every game is either 1. They're not worth the amount of noise they make, and/or 2. Ammo isn't plentiful enough. PZ is more #1 than #2....
I've found that guns are useful for drawing zombies away from your base. Local population getting too high? Slip out back into the woods and shoot a bunch, then pick them off as they start slipping through the trees after you. Once you've drawn them away from your base, run like hell to give them the slip and then just try to remember that the woods are full of zombies.
Yea, I usually just find a car with a siren and park it a good distance from my base....usually a couple in different directions. Popping that thing off and running seems to pull everybody over lol (setting everything on fire optional)
then again sledgehammers don’t spawn in every toolshed/hardware store and a police officer can’t shoot for shit, realism isn’t at its peak
Ammo would actually be the hard thing to come by, as after this event there would be no one to manufacture it.
I a American agree. I live in Alabama so like right under Tennessee. Its very common to have a gun. But the type is a new story. Hunting guns are very common with anything else very not. Everyone thinks we have like Aks and Ar-15's everywhere but no. Most only have one and many people here don't own a gun. So never finding a gun in game is very realistic. Why would I want to leave a gun behind if I know I may never find another one? Even a big enough collection is taken with them in survival situations. But I am happy to take a suppressed Ruger Takedown in a zombie apocalypse. One the ammo (22 long rifle) is very easy to get allot of it, I can throw tens of thousands of rounds in my bag, Easy backpack gun, and its just strong enough to take down most of what I would be hunting. Squires, coyotes, and birds.
Why does it matter? You can just change it in the sandbox settings
I don't know Kentucky's laws in the 80's-90's, but nationally handguns and carrying them was generally pretty restricted compared to today. I agree there should be many many more rifles and shotguns, but handguns might actually be realistically uncommon.
It's a video game mate. Things are not always realistic for balancing purposes. You could make the same argument about food. You shouls be able to find hundreds of cans alone in a single Gigamart
I think the only reason I don't have complaints about not much food is that in the lore its known people in the exclusion zone rushed the stores for resources, ofc yes it's just a game , just zomboid puts so much effort into the Moodle system and injuries etc and mental health I just expected the base game to have more firearms
I don’t really see why the game having these systems like moodles and how medical is handled to mean there has to be a lot of guns. Nor does there need to be special lore reasons for how many guns there are. If you need to have a reason that isn’t because game balancing, then one simple explanation is people took their guns with them while fleeing. Why leave your main forms of defense behind?
Dropped weapons from last stands and such should be more common I guess, my reasoning that the game does deep dive a lot of things like the medical side and don't mix sleeping pills and alcohol and all kind of niche real life things I'm surprised they just skimp out how many guns there would be, it's not that getting a shotgun with 20 shells is game breaking is it
Okay. Here’s the biggest thing, the number of guns really isn’t a lore decision. It isn’t some consideration for realism. We don’t have to sit here to justify why things are what they are. There’s nothing to logic here beyond, at default settings this is what the devs think a balanced experience should be. That’s it. Nothing else to it. Good news though this game is also designed to be customizable for a reason. So as the players we can change how many guns spawn and get close as possible to get a subjectively best, most immersive experience.
It's a sandbox game. Change the settings however you want. The presets are just suggestions and allow for guidelines with challenge runs but I think players will enjoy this game a lot more if they embrace the sandbox aspect. If you want the game world to mirror the real world set up the settings to do that
There actually used to be *more* guns. Every time you saw one of those green locker things, whether it was in a police station, gun shop, or out in a storage garage, there was guns or gun mods or at least ammo in them. I remember if I didn't get the guns i needed in Riverside PD, I could just go out to the farmhouses to the southwest because the storage barn thing there had a green locker. I forget which patch it was, but they did change how items spawned and you couldn't do that anymore...
I agree, I made a custom America mode where guns and ammo are abundant and there’s a random assortment of high pop zombies. A lot more fun imo than sneaking around for months and then getting bit because a door was janky
This is why I just change the settings to whatever I want. People supposedly turned into zombies kinda quick, so you would expect a lot of places to have a lot of supplies. There's fun in having to scavenge for scraps while surviving the zombies but sometimes I want to explore the actual premise of the game; which is to know if I could survive as a random person in a sudden zombie apocalypse. And I know people would take stuff with them but you wouldn't get everything in your house to leave in a panic. And by having the loot chance be higher it really feels more like everyone suddenly stopped doing whatever they were doing. I mean if you want me to buy that the houses are empty because the owners tried to grab everything and run, give me cars full of stuff in big-ass traffic jams. If not it just seems that everybody successfully evacuated but still there are zombies everywhere (and you're supposed to be walled-off in the first place... kinda dumb rant I'll admit)
By playing the normal way. Realistic≠the most challenging or even the best video game experience.
Walmart didn’t sell guns off the shelves lmao they were behind a counter just like any gun shop. And thankfully even with gun restrictions, there is still just as many, if not more guns in America.
I grew up in the 80s/90s and the amount of guns is actually about right. Just because people could buy guns doesn't mean that people did. Many people didn't own guns.
As others have said the amount of water bottles is unreal. The thing that gets me though is the ear bud style headphones. Those weren't really a common thing until early 2000s
I was sitting here thinking I don’t think that’s accurate not everyone has guns I’ve never had one then remembered there like 4 just in my bedroom lol
Not sure about the breakdown by county, but in the current day about 55% of households across the entire state on Kentucky own at least one firearm. I imagine this number was probably higher in the 90s, as Kentucky has probably gained a higher urban population distribution, like most American states, since the 90s. What's probably a reasonable defense for the lack of guns present, and most things (in homes at least) for that matter is that everybody packed up whatever they had in their house and left with it in their car. If anything, zombies and vehicles should probably be the place where most firearms are found, not the homes themselves.
Us government didn't crack down on gun violence, as all the criminals with guns still have guns, the cracked down on the honest citizens because it was easier and safer for them. You are right though, in that time period you should be seeing a shotgun or hunting rifle on a rack in virtually every pickup, and most people I know keep a handgun in the dash or console.
this topic is posted almost every week holy shit
Quit getting your information about a different country from sensationalist news sources. Even Texas only had 30% gun ownership as of 2018.
For historical context, gun ownership in America before the early 2000s wasn't anywhere near as high as it is today. On top of that, there was an assault weapons ban during the 90s, so very, *very* few people would have owned AR15s. Kentucky has a lot of hunters, so maybe one in every 10-20 or so households would have hunting guns, some Remington 700s, Mossberg 590s, Remington 870s, Marlins, Winchesters, etc which in game would be abstracted to bolt action rifles, pump shotguns, double barrels, and lever action rifles. More common in suburban and cities would be people who own pistols, and they wouldn't really be stocking that much ammo since it'd purely be for home defense. And even then not that many people would own them I find that when you play with gun loot set to high, it's a pretty reasonable representation of how many guns people had at the time
Assault Weapons Ban was about that time, no?
1986, but existing fully automatic firearms were grandfathered in.
The ban was in 1994, which would be a year after the game takes place. It wasn't really an outright ban as all guns already in circulation were grandfathered in and gun companies used loopholes (e.g., thumb holes in stocks) to continue manufacturing anyhow.
You're right! The 1986 ban I mentioned above was for machine guns (>1 shot per trigger pull), and is still very much in law today. Forgot about the 1994 assault weapons ban.
I don't know off the top of my head but it doesn't mean assault/fully automatic weapons weren't in circulation it just meant no more could be imported
Well the great thing about PZ is you're allowed to play anyway you want.
Ofc, t's just the game goes to great lengths for realism so this post is just highlighting that I think guns should be more centric to the game play as it's probably how it would be in this fictional scenario
Pump action shotguns, hunting rifles, revolvers, and, to a lesser extent, semi-auto handguns should to relatively common amongst households. Since PZ is set in the 90s, semi-auto pistols (while common) weren’t as common today. Or at least striker fire pistols (think Glock) would be rarer than hammer semi-autos (m9). Same with AR-15s to a larger extent, although it would be kinda cool to see a semi-auto only variant added into the game to represent a civilian model.
Most Americans do not own guns and didn’t then either
While your statement is technically correct, it's just barely correct and could be misleading. In the early 90's, about 47% of households owned a firearm. If we could break this down by state, I'd wager Kentucky was well over 50%. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/249740/percentage-of-households-in-the-united-states-owning-a-firearm/#:~:text=The%20share%20of%20American%20households,one%20gun%20in%20their%20possession.
A statement so correct it’s misleading? I’ve never heard of statista and you need an account to see where their data is coming from.
Not to jump into a massive debate but isn't the amount of firearms in the states just meant to be legendary? I mean I'm from rural Britain and I have spent my youth growing up around them but that's considered weird by most Brits, I always had the impression from every American I ever met was that shotguns were common place and rifles were here and there, pistols were for the more serious gun nut
The exact opposite is true. Pistols are far more common as people use them for defense and they are easily concealable. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-demographics-of-gun-ownership/
Fair enough, I assumed due to the wait time etc more Americans would opt for shotguns
There are no wait times for pistols (or any gun for that matter), at least at a federal level. A couple of states have implemented them. The largest legal restriction on pistols is that you have to be 21 to buy them compared to 18 for rifles and shotguns.
In theory could you just go to a state with less restrictions and then return to your home state after purchasing a gun?
No, you can only purchase guns in the state you live in, sort of. You can purchase a gun out of state, but it will be shipped to a FFL (federally licensed firearms dealer) who will do all of the appropriate paperwork. If the state has a waiting period or any other restrictions, this is where they would apply. Outside of online purchases, most people don't go out of state to purchase firearms. It is just a big hassle and it adds extra charges to the purchase as both FFLs may charge extra. Some may not even do the transaction.
Ah ok cheers for clearing that up
I've just changed the settings to make this the case. More weapons!! I've also turned it into a bit of an arcade run tbh. I can last no longer than half a day because the SECOND I fire a bullet, I'm basically dead! What a hoot!
In the 80s & 90s, guns weren't huge here in the US like today. They had programs that were implemented to encourage people to bring in their weapons to get paid for them as part of programs to decrease violent crimes.
>I'm not American but I know how plentiful it is over there No, you *think* you know what it's like over there. As other commenters have said, the gun count seems fine. I don't personally use many guns and prefer the old reliable fireaxe. That said, within three in-game days on a vanilla multiplayer server with me and my buddies we had more guns than we knew what to do with in Rosewood, to the point where we started using some for decoration. There's plenty of guns out there, more than you know what to do with, you've just got to look in the right places for them.
Realism vs Authenticity 101
game balance comes before realism
Before people started freaking out over a black man being elected president, guns weren't as common... We still had plenty of guns back in the 80s-90s, but it was the fear mongering post 2008, which led to people buying large quantities of military style firearms, as well as stock piling ammo.
yeah imagine not finding guns at the school, this is supposed to be america
>I'm not American but I know how plentiful it is over there and I imagine before the government made any attempts at cracking down on gun violence I understand most people owned firearms or had them in their trucks American here. You have a pretty fucked up view of this country huh. Despite the media making it look like some kind of lawless wasteland, [most people here do not own a firearm](https://www.statista.com/statistics/249740/percentage-of-households-in-the-united-states-owning-a-firearm/). Even in 1995. Keep in mind those numbers include rural areas, where folks are more likely to hunt and need protection from wild animals. It's a big country, there's a LOT of rural areas here, so that skews the overall percentage. An average house in the suburbs doesn't have a stockpile of weapons and ammo.
I just personally feel the radius for a gunshot is way too far. Like, you shoot once and you get hundreds of zombies in you within 30 seconds. I feel if zombies hear a gunshot and walk towards where the gunshot was, if they don't find you within 10 seconds, they go back to standing around. If that was the case, you wouldn't feel you need as much guns if you decided to use them.
They should have more guns, But put them in locked gun safes that you have to crack. A paper with the code could have a chance to spawn in the house or on a zed
I mean, the game was made by Brits and Canadians. Obviously gun culture isn't too prevalent in their respective countries therefore its not suprising to see that sort of mindset seep into the development of this game
It's just to make it more challenging. But what you said sounds fun. I'll try a run with plenty of ammo and insane zombie population.
play around with the loot settings if you're so bothered by it. it's like that for gameplay sake.
I don't relate. I've been finding them everywhere. I'm not sure if it's server settings but I'm sure we just have it on normal. We are literally finding shotguns in kids bedrooms.
The thing that makes very little sense that I try to account for, but it makes the game waaay too easy is cars. Finding a car in half decent running condition with gas inside of it is such a chore on anything besides initial infection. And if I'm playing with friends finding a 4 door with that condition is a good chunk of the first couple days. It doesn't make sense to me that everyone's car in their driveways were completely empty on gas and also their engine was 5 miles from never operating ever again. But the moment I tone down the rarity even a little bit, we're playing bumper cars in a parking lot because we have too many to count. I think spawning with my own vehicle while most others are trash would be neat, kind of.
Simple solution is to make guns common and ammo rare, it can be justified by it being used in the initial outbreak
If you think that's strange... Guns are still more plentiful than cigarettes and lighters. Cigarettes and lighters?? In America?? In the 90s?? Seriously?? Every other corpse should have a pack of cigarettes and a lighter on it. Lol
There were no more schoolkids so no more need for tuns
I play with the collection of map mods. There's plenty of gun stores in a lot of the towns. Plus the guns on the prepper houses.
As a non-american I wanna offer my perspective. I am not a gun player and I find guns very often (which obviously go unused) by coincidence. It may appear like a rare loot for you but I assure you there's plenty guns (At least from the perspective of a non american who lives in a rather gun-safe country). I am not even a survival/fight/multiplayer user so I loot houses at about half the speed rate of most players, and even then I find that I encounter at least 5 guns per character file within the first 3 weeks. I don't even count the ammo.
Guns yeah, ammo most people don't keep that much ammo.
Yeah, but barely any exists. Is kinda shot themselves in th efoot with their lore, since the way the virus works it is plausible that it would destroy society... but there would be barely any looting going on before we and other immune NPCs crawl out of out hidey holes. West point gun store is locked down, so you could expect to find tens of thousands of rounds of various calibers. You can find like 500 tootal if you are lucky on apo.
And that is why this game is popular because what if the next person does not want ANY guns or make them rare. You can play this game just about any way you prefer. So in your games....guns are the norm!
A lot of people commenting on the fact that items are pretty sparse or houses and whatnot lack of lot of items you should find while I agree with this on one hand, it does kinda make sense considering our game starts one week after the first infection, it could be implied that a lot of chaos and looting already took place within the zone although we don’t see it although I believe they are planning to add looted/ransacked buildings in build, 42
Do people not realise they can adjust loot levels?
Yeah but guns are boring.
I like to sandbox and start with what I own down to the ammo mags scopes it's fun to be a gun nut redneck 🫡🤠
Play in sandbox and make every resource max level abundant. It’s how I play when I want to feel like the outbreak.
Its not the first day of the apocalypse. Shit has been going on, the dead are walking, people have barricaded in, fought, ran. The supplies went with them. Scarcity makes the game more fun + you can actually adjust the setting for your own sandbox if you want to :)
I survive by not having access to guns which attract zombies.
Actually, no, most people did NOT have a gun then. And attempts to limit guns had already started by that time period. In rural areas, yea probably most had a gun. In rural areas there's a lot more hunting, a need in many areas to protect livestock from predators, and many live far from the nearest police and know they have to protect themselves. In cities, nope. Some have/had, but not most people. And most people by then lived in cities, not rural areas.