I mentioned this in the title but this is an extension of Zombies | Introducing Hunting Routes. Go read that before reading my post.
So NarcolepticHound has pointed out something that I’ve never even thought about, but now that it’s been brought up, it makes so much sense and could add so much depth to the normally bland Unturned maps.
So, I think food searching should be more than just hunting paths. Zombies could every now and then go out of the town to a nearby forest and search around until it finds something (Whether it be berries, dropped items by players or just a player). Places could have their own food-search node, that acts similarly to a deadzone node, only difference is instead of being a deadzone, connecting that node with a navigation (either by just making it touch with a navigation that zombies have access to, or if Nelson makes some sort of link to button that can be used to link a food-search node with a navigation node. Navigations should also be able to be connected to eachother (so having 2 navigations collide will allow zombies to go in both if they spawn in either one of those), in order to allow for more complicated routes than just a forest next to a city.
These zombie movements should only happen if a player is around to see them, if not, zombies will go in their normal ‘sun-bathing’ mode, as NarcolepticHound refers to it as (that is, if zombies even spawn when a player is not around).
Zombies could also be fed by players by just dropping a food item. This doesn’t HAVE to be in the game, just a fun thing that adds to the immersion. Maybe you could create little zombie traps where you make a road with berry pies and it leads to a caltrop or snare. People could really mess around with this thing.
Maybe zombies could get hallucinogetic effects when eating poisonous berries. You could lead a zombie to a poisonous berry bush and, if hungry, they’d eat it (hunger could be caused by them chasing you for too much, but that’s Nelson’s call. Maybe they’d just eat it right away without needing to be hungry), and their chasing player paths would change. Maybe indigo berries will cause them to instead of going in a straight line to chase a player, they’d find very inefficient paths of going around every object they see thinking the player would be too dumb to see them. Maybe orange berries would make them go in squiggly lines instead.
Now that I think about it I’m going a bit off-topic.
But basically, I think having food nodes be linked using navigations would be better than straight lines because it would be much harder to set up traps since zombies just go rogue and do their own thing, rather than following a set path that can be easily exploited. This method isn’t perfect either, but it’s harder to exploit
