When I played the game before the multiplayer release, it was on Parsec but the audio was awful and it didnt sound that much to be useful enough, so I picked the deaf treat and it was worth it as I was playing while in company, it wasn't that bad in that specific context.
i used to take deaf as "free points" My runs were very flaky back then where sometimes i would make a few months in, while other times i would sleep in a house with the alarm going without knowing it
Deaf in multiplayer where you know you’ll have backup actually helps a lot with the negatives of being deaf. I play some music and chill out on the server and just make sure I have eyes on the back of my head. However we have a mod for schizophrenia. And nothing is funnier than the schizo asking me if I’m hearing those gunshots and then me saying “I can’t hear anything” Best duo
My group plays with night sprinters. With keen hearing you can react to a sprinter in time to at least push it away, but with deaf, you cannot spin your character around fast enough by the time you see them behind you. It's always funny when someone asks who set off a house alarm and no one else responds, so I know it was me.
I was playing with friends as a deaf 9 strength 9 fitness veteran, and I made her as a gag character day one. Little would I know she would live for months and be the sole survivor of many groups. We eventually just started dropping me off at different hotspots of zombies and have me go blasting and swinging to the point I think I got up 10,000 melee and gun kills combined
@@amauruss That's actually really scary, I never considered house alarms. Imagine playing by yourself with Deaf and you accidentally set off a house alarm. You would be fucked because you wouldn't even know that it's going off.
You know, i dont think the problem with deaf is not hearing the zombies. Its not hearing the house/car alarms and chopper events. You can be just extremely cautious with zombies, but if you hit a house alarm without even knowing... Thats the pain.
As a player who almost exclusively plays WITH deaf, part of my procedure entering a house is looking out and checking if hordes were alerted. +12 trait points and a more quiet, peaceful game 🫡
13:21 Nothing like accidentally vaulting over a stair railing and injuring your ankle because your character is attracted to it like flies on a wet turd.
Reminds me of one time I opened the upstairs bathroom door only for I shit you not, 30-40 zombies come rushing out, I jumped over the railing and luckily didn't break my legs
@@Zorro9129 Yeah XD. My base actually has a 1x1 outhouse,aswell as a 2x2 storage room with 3 crates in it,so I actually have 2 panic rooms at my base ironically enough XD
Lowkey sounds overpowered. I barely use guns anyway (in vanilla) because I don't make it long enough to stockpile ammo so the panic trait will not affect me. I hate reading a skill book and then my character gets bored... makes no fucking sense. How can you even get bored in a zombie apocalypse?
@@friendofp.24 Ever had no internet and forced yourself to read a guidebook about a topic you have no interest in? Though, if you are interested in it you wouldn't get bored.
There is a mod in the workshop that I use, it's called "Grow Tabacco", it makes it so you can make cigarrates. It's pretty useful since cigarrates are a limited item that you are dependent on.
It was on screen, but I didn't mention it because cooking can reduce unhappiness by enough I've never had to rely on anything else. Just a bowl and foraging makes for tons of happiness meals.
@@hunterlovejoy7651I think you do get sick when smoking as a smoker actually. It’s just that a smoker has two smoke less cigs overall two reduce the same amount of stress
I tried a deaf playthrough somewhat recently. As awful as it seems it honestly wasn't that bad (mind you I'm pretty good at the game). Making sure to close windows and doors behind you, as well as periodically looking around and checking around places before you loot is honestly 90% of it. Bathroom zombies still suck, mostly because the game STILL PLAYS THAT DAMN JUMPSCARE SOUND, but the easy solution is just to flash doors open and closed real quick. House and car alarms suck too, but as long as you pay attention and gtfo as soon as you see an abnormal amount of zombies approaching the house, you'll be fine. That just leaves the helicopter event, which I was dreading, but I barely even realized when it happened, by virtue of having already cleared most of my base area. I suppose it would be more scary if you hadn't, but at that point you should have a working car to drive away in. In the end, I didn't die to any deaf-related incidents, I died because I got overconfident and was bitten from the front while fighting a horde. Sucks, but hey, overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.
People who are infected or people who have the fear of blood trait also gain anxiety, when combined with the smoker trait one cigarette will remove all stress and -10 unhappiness, this can also help with boredom gained by staying inside and eating bad
Ambiguous amphibian did it first, I find aa a lot more entertaining than private lime, so if you enjoyed his series search ambiguous amphibians all negative traits
So me and my friends played a 'real selves' run, where we basically recreated ourselves in game. I was at a huge disadvantage. Asthmatic really is a killer. You want to jog? Near instant exertion. Fight? Near instant exertion. Carry heavy loads? Near instant exertion. And yet... I never died. My friends did. Mostly because I was constantly lagging behind sitting on the ground trying to recover stamina. Which regens VERY slowly. Don't take asthmatic.
The joke used to go You don't need to be the fastest, just not the slowest. The opposite I guess applies in this game cause everybody wants to get into the action..
By the way, someone deep dived into the code concerning Lucky and Unlucky, turns out they hardly do anything because the game has a lot of other factors, such as zombie density of the area, and these traits don't affect any of these other factors. The guy who made the thread used the Sledgehammer as a primary example, in most circumstances there was no change whatsoever. Then he used an extreme example with a hypothetical safehouse in a low-pop neighborhood, where the traits' effects would be most prominent, and it ended up as a... 0.47% difference between the 2. Or in other words you'd need to find 200+ safehouses to find one more sledge with Lucky over Unlucky, 400 over not having any trait. You can basically double that for a more average density area. Did a bonus calculation for the chance of finding a magazine in a hardware store, with Lucky you'd find 1 more magazine every 100 store over Unlucky, 1 more every 200 over no trait. The guy's conclusion is that Lucky is at its best with high loot settings in low pop areas and only really helps with stuff that is very common to find in the first place, for the rarer stuff, the effect is so small it basically disappears into nothing because of rounding. Might be worth making a video about this, considering how many people pick, and think, that Lucky does a lot when it might be the worst point investment in the game in actuality. If you're interested, the name of the thread on reddit is "the Lucky trait won't really help you find a Sledgehammer" and all the code's been posted so it seems legit.
Maybe the anti stealth traits aren't valuable to very experienced players, but I usually take them because I've never had any success with stealth and if I'm going to have to kill those zombies anyways I might as well get some free points.
It's quite the opposite: anti-stealth traits are a must pick for very experienced players. You basically always run Conspicuous and Clumsy, because not only you don't care about stealth, but you also want to aggro zombies faster and better
@@TheIziPizi hurts newer players, doesn't affect experienced players, you simply stop running before a fence and take a slower lounge which negates the 20% chance, me and my friends consistantly do that even with sprinters without any issues and we're far from being gods in PZ, haven't tripped even once in my past 400~+ hours
Anti-stealth traits are free points and should always be taken. Stealth doesn't help make your area safer and making your area safe is the only way to survive consistently. Stealth only helps move through an area with less (read: not none) zombies on your back.
I quite like hearty appetite for two reasons, the one you mentioned of constantly reminding me to eat because I tend to be low on calories but it also is good for foraging because having a hungry moodle gives boosts to finding food.
I had no idea about that bonus.. I've been thinking of taking that trait because I play.. Sort of a road warrior who moves and fights often and thus burns calories fast
Being hungry makes your foraging instincts flare up. I'm known for literally sniffing out decent spots in unknown terrain. I don't notice the right smells if I'm stuffed, but when peckish, going on slightly hungry? yeah. ain't no shrooms hiding from this nose.
Here's something about underweight and why it's actually one of the best traits. Salads, stews, soups, stir frys and every other "prepared" dish eaten have more calories than what they would if eaten individually. For example, if I were to eat a salad comprised of only 1 lettuce, I would gain more calories than what I would if I just eat the lettuce head without putting it in a bowl. The best thing about this is it seems intentional as the higher your cooking skill, the more calories get magically added to your dish. This makes gaining weight super easy (and therefore makes underweight very easy) as long as you have a bowl and some stuff from all of the fridges you pass by in the first couple of weeks. Great vid!
is debuff of underweight removing when you get enough weight? i guess the answer is yes and the only permanent debuff you gain is -1 fitness, am I right?
I personally see deaf as a great trait because I found out after taking it for the first time that I already played like I couldn't hear zombies in the first place by always checking and double checking things, the only downside was lack of immersion because I didn't hear the zombies lmao
I already played without sound before I realised I'd get +12 or whatever from deaf. I guess just playing this game too long makes me a bit stressed/sad, but without all the noise it was completely fine, I could turn on a movie or some funky tunes and chill out all night. So it's always nice to re-start and remember that "oh yeah, I forgot I just get 12 points for absolutely nothing, that's neat"! Told my partner about it (we play together with friends sometimes, although I also play on my own without sound) and he said that I don't know the half of it. Apparently setting traps makes noise (obviously, I had no clue). And cutting down trees makes noise. And so much more! So what happens is I go outside, do a bunch of loud shit obliviously, and come home completely unaware of anything. Then he goes to the same spot for some reason and there's a hoard of zombies there attracted to all the noise. Kills them, comes back home. I had no clue! I'm naturally super hypervigilant too, which means I'd be checking and double checking my surroundings whether or not I play with sound. Overall, deaf is a pretty neat mod, just make sure your team has your back with all the zombies you unknowingly attract (that is, if you've spent so little time playing with sound on that you don't know what activities make noise). ^^
13:07 Hey, actually. Small note. Restless sleeper is actually viable if you combine it with an occupation that gives you night owl, as the even further increased rest rate from that trait pairs up perfectly with restless sleeper's "ability" to wake up every few hours. As normally night owl will never wake you up early enough to take advantage of the added sleep regen
I used to run that combo back in b40, didnt know the restless sleeper description was misleading, or that nightowl was supposed to be non-functional/ only useful with alarms.
Awful trait, I never take it. Will never bother to search for a specific item whose only purpose is to counter a neg trait I chose to take because I'm stupid. If it was dynamic and you could get rid of it then maybe I'd consider it. But a permanent moodle literally all the time? Fuck that shit.
@@el10leo it's really easy to manage negative effect, wdym? I remember scouting for some cigs and had like 100 of them. That can be either 50 or even 100 days of being satisfied for having nicotine in your body, if you don't plan to fight zombies - don't smoke, that negative effect doesn't need to be satisfied right away.
@@el10leo think of it as simply adding another mechanic to the game. I don't think you will have any real use to cigs if you don't have a smoker. Chain smoking 2 cigs without having smoker trait will get you Queasy and you'll probably just read a newspaper whenever that rare night terror happens. Stress rarely happens in the game unless you're a Smoker or you have Fear of Blood and rocking Fear of Blood without Smoker is kinda insane...
The deaf perk unironically makes the game so much fun. If youre ever feeling a little too confident, make up a deaf character. I once was playing a deaf man who was running around muldraugh shirtless with nothing but a pocket full of butter knives (before the combat and momentum update). Genuinely one of the silliest gaming experiences i had and it was great. Still terrifying tho
Conspicuous/ Inconspicuous may be small in offline, but in pvp, it means the zombie horde chases the other guy instead of you when you’re both shooting or fighting hand to hand. Enormous advantage.
I dont PvP and have a mirror to that experience. I'm playing with a friend on private so its just us two and I pull aggro a lot just by being conspicuous and having clumsy. Lets me pretend to be the tank
I reckon it could prove useful even in Update 42 when animals are introduced, but Update 43? (...When it EVENTUALLY arrives, that is!) *Stealth may very well have a new meaning in Project Zomboid.*
The thing is, I take Sunday Driver because I don't have fast reaction times, so I go slowly to avoid crashing into stuff, having an in-built limit at 30mph is pretty good for me, and I rarely use vehicles near zombies, and when driving I drive around them as much as possible, which has worked so far.
I agree that the negatives of Sunday Driver are somewhat overstated. That being said when I was a noob I did get trapped by it, so I can't deny that it is (for me anyways) a true noob trap. It's just that if you go back to the game with more experience you can work around it, making it a viable option once you understand its limitations
Fear of Blood goes hand in hand with Smoker. Your character is covered in blood, 4th stage of Stress and everything, no water nearby: smoke a single cig and you reset the stress level to zero. Repeat it until you find water. Hearty Appetite is great, I take it for my min maxing foraging build (because if does up the chances to find food with foraging by 5% in this and that category) and yes, I still lose weight even with this trait. Had to down some of those 3k calorie fishes you can catch using maggots from all the rotting corpses around your base. Finding food in this game is real easy. I can't see myself picking Illiterate... simply because I want to have a working fridge at home. How can I have one if I can't read the generator magazine? And no... an illiterate electrician makes zero sense to me haha. Claustrophobic is you constantly listening to heartbeat ASMR while reading books and having to do micro sips of Whiskey so you can sleep at night, other than that it's free points. Hell, pair it with Cowardly even... none of it will matter if you survive long enough. Playing with Weak, Unfit and Obese really sucks early game but they've become bread and butter for me now. Never take Sleepyhead because you think it's cute to have a character that likes to sleep a lot just because you also sleep a lot IRL. It's one of the worst traits in the game followed by Asthmatic, Deaf and Illiterate. Also, pairing Sleepyhead with Restless Sleeper will screw your game completely and it is the equivalent of spawning in West Point with sprinters only with 4x+4x pop...
In SP you can hit "More" on your saves, like how you add mods, and actually select new character. Next to that is a drop down which allows you to switch between them. So if you have one character but they will never have a specific skill you could make a different character to run your generator for you. I find that's really useful for maintaining my base while I'm off doing other things. Mechanic is there I can switch to to check traps and crops. Of course that may not be something everybody wants but since we don't have NPCs without a mod..
@@quarreneverett4767 Sleepyhead basically making you fatigue/tired faster and longer, and Restless Sleeper making you wake up every few hours, and decreasing the fatigue/tiredness decay rate
"Fear of Blood goes hand in hand with Smoker. Your character is covered in blood, 4th stage of Stress and everything, no water nearby: smoke a single cig and you reset the stress level to zero. Repeat it until you find water." Nah bruh fear of blood and smoker sucks don't ever take these traits. "Hearty Appetite is great, I take it for my min maxing foraging build (because if does up the chances to find food with foraging by 5% in this and that category) and yes, I still lose weight even with this trait. Had to down some of those 3k calorie fishes you can catch using maggots from all the rotting corpses around your base. Finding food in this game is real easy." U know what else upps the chances of finding food?Just having the hungry moodle lol. Also why not just catch fish using spears?What's the point of fishing rods exactly?They're literally infinite I have like 50 spears at my base XD. "I can't see myself picking Illiterate... simply because I want to have a working fridge at home. How can I have one if I can't read the generator magazine? And no... an illiterate electrician makes zero sense to me haha." As for illiterate I never pick it either because it sucks yeah indeed lol,tho not because I wanna have power but because I don't wanna spend literal months of my life leveling everything up lol(tho all I realistically need in all of my runs is just 7 fitness and strength(getting to 8 takes AGES lol)and 10 foraging:Pretty much it lol). "Claustrophobic is you constantly listening to heartbeat ASMR while reading books and having to do micro sips of Whiskey so you can sleep at night, other than that it's free points. Hell, pair it with Cowardly even... none of it will matter if you survive long enough." U don't actually have to take the micro sips of whiskey at night u can just fast-forward time to the max,wait till the panic moodle goes away,click sleep,fast-forward again and click"Yes"lol. No need for any alcohol whatsoever. ALSO:Getting panicked from claustrophobic COMPLETELY resets ur boredom moodle,so u can just read books indoors on max speed,set it to regular speed so the panic moodle kicks in when u get bored,then reset it back to max speed while watching carpentry,fishing etc in the early days;). Also yeah I always take cowardly aswell because if I'm out foraging at night(which I rarely ever do but whatever lol)it will alert me of that one pesky zombie right beside me lol,so it saves lives literally. I play with weak/feeble(whichever gives -5 strength)and out of shape/unfit(the -4 fitness one),aswell as very underweight. Drop obese and go very underweight dude:Trust me. U'll level up strength FAR easier due to being able to eat a lot of protein,unlike with obese... Ps:The main source of protein is fish;). U also gain weight FAR easier and faster than lose it(at 3x the speed I think!So u can gain 3kgs in 1 day and only lose 1(or whatever the weight measurement is in this game. Pounds?Kilos?I don't freaking know man lol). "Never take Sleepyhead because you think it's cute to have a character that likes to sleep a lot just because you also sleep a lot IRL. It's one of the worst traits in the game followed by Asthmatic, Deaf and Illiterate. Also, pairing Sleepyhead with Restless Sleeper will screw your game completely and it is the equivalent of spawning in West Point with sprinters only with 4x+4x pop..." I agree with this one yes. However u can pair Wakeful with Restless Sleeper and get the most benefit out of it THAT way,because,y'know:With wakeful u regain wakefulness(aka lose sleepiness)easier. Combine this with Restless Sleeper and u can go a long time without sleeping;). Good luck;) Also wtf was that last comparison XD
@@Ugh718 I'll defend my points. I have 1.2k hours in the game, I'm sure most of the info I'll say here can be useful to someone else if you really think all of it is wrong lmao. - fear of blood is annoying because of you constantly having to clean yourself but I've been playing for so long with it, I'm used to the trait already. And like I said: one single cig as smoker and you can reset even then 4th stage of stress. Not having smoker means you smoke 2 cigs and you get queasy - in the long run you won't smoke cigs because reading magazines and newspapers won't get you sick, then you'll have tons of cigarettes you've looted just sitting around and you're not smoking them - I don't like that, it's like I'm ignoring a mechanic and making the game easier. - yes, I know being hungry increases the chances of finding food through foraging, I do that all the time, especially while foraging farms. Hearty Appetite gives you a flat bonus % on mushrooms, berries, animals and package food - for a min maxing foraging build I'll take literally every vanilla trait that gives me radius bonuses and % on food - ideally pairing with a nice occupation (like how being a Chef gives you +50% on mushrooms). Foraging is so broken you might as well just skip farming entirely. I can't simply "eat a fish" literally every single time the character gets hungry with HA or else you might gain unwanted weight. The usual mushroom salad during a killing zombie spree break does the trick well enough. Spearfishing sucks in winter and has lower chances to catch fishes compared to rods, I just don't usually do it. Of course if you have 10 levels in fishing, nothing of this matters. Plus I like the idea of fishing with rod and bait, it makes sense in my head. - the player will want to read: period. No reading means no books to reduce stress (since apparently you hate smoker), no bonuses to skills, no recipes... you can't even make actual bread without reading, you can't identify poisonous food apart from holly berries, you can't fix cars, you can't treat crop diseases, no power, so no gas from gas stations, you'll be almost fully ignoring electrical, trapping and metalworking from your game... unless you focus your build into this or that aspect, which is lame imo (like being the illiterate electrician, illiterate mechanic or illiterate chef, or spending points into these respective traits). It might have so value on multiplayer obviously. - Yes I'm aware of speeding up time and resetting panic but veeeeery early game it doesnt work if you're coward + claustrophobic. As soon as you click on the bed to sleep, you'll gain panic again - it never actually worked to me. Maybe it's a framerate issue idk. Drink alcohol... have a beta blocker, sleep in a bigger room. Claustro + coward is literally free points, considering time survived and zombie deaths will increase panic regen late game. - very underweight with its shitty 60% damage reduction for melee, with West Point spawn, aiming for Louisville, with insane pop and actual 0 strength from weak? No thanks, I'll pass... I'll pass even if you give me all the machetes you can find. No matter how many spiffos I'll raid for their burgers,. Obese is the way to go in CDDA as well. There's no rush to lose weight. Remember, I'm eating all that mushroom/berry salad from foraging, I'm good trust me. - imho restless sleeper is only viable if you, like you said, have wakeful AND then have security guard as occupation... not worth it.
@@Retanaruat this point in rs I have two goals which are cremate a urium shade, and chop a fire giant in half with only a halberd spec. That would be italian fingers chef kiss.
I thought I had ghost hearing and was pleasantly surprised by the rimworld music, I think somehow rimworld players and project zomboid players overlap a lot and I'm not entirely certain why that is yet
This is also true for the negative traits in PZ's spiritual ancestor: *Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead* For example there's a negative trait where you are morbidly obese, and struggle to move at a decent speed. But they don't tell you that *you start the game with a F__K ton of calories to burn* which is actually a positive thing to have when trying to survive in the winter. You also eventually lose the weight as you play, so it's literally free character points if you survive.
The amount of food you find in that game is constantly a massive amount. This means you're going to have to be careful you don't make your character vomit from overeating if you try to eat food before it goes rotten. And so much food that lasts longer is the chocolates and candies. Being overweight might have been useful in some early version (I don't think it was), but now it means letting all the food you come across rot instead while you repeatedly undereat. Unless you do specificially go for a winter start, where several foods are frozen solid when you loot them. But in this case I'd say a winter start just makes the game easier. Assuming you remember you need to have a fire to defrost things.
@@TailsClock >Unless you do specificially go for a winter start, Quoting what I had originally said: >actually a positive thing to have when trying to survive in the winter.
@@TailsClock I also usually turn towns down to 0 and use the innawoods mod, which makes starting as obese incredibly OP as all your other calories must be scavenged from the wilderness.
I'm subbing because you're the only one in 4 different trait guides that made me go, "Ooh, OK THANK you." I'm newish and was trying to understand the impact of the time loss due to reading with the Slow Reader trait. Every youtuber made it seem like 100% free points and you addressing it helped me understand what the tradeoff is better.
Obese used to be my favorite negative trait. But that was several builds back when you couldn't die from hunger, just suffered the debuffs. I'd only eat if I needed healing or some extra carry weight. Obviously that wouldn't work now. I took both of the sleep negatives on one playthrough. It actually was a fairly long playthrough, but that was so irritating. Never again will either of those traits ever be on another of my characters. I went through a phase of playing deaf runs. Interesting and tense times. Those runs make you really realize how much you rely on sounds in this game.
So for solo... short sighted, slow reader, weak stomach, conspicuous, prone to illness, smoker, high thirst, slow healer, underweight and thin-skinned.
Claustrophobic is worse than it sounds, at least during the first few months. Even if you're outside, you're usually still panicked from the last time you were indoors. Fortunately, this issue becomes non-existent by month 3-4.
the thing is panic actually decreases quite quickly after a couple weeks in game, and even before that the only way you'll be affected by the panic after going outside is if there's a horde of zombies right outside your base, in which case you'll get panicked anyway unless you're playing as a veteran. and even if that somehow *is* a problem, it's not too hard to find beta blockers to make it a complete non-issue. the worst part about claustrophobia is sleeping, but even that's pretty easy to get around if you know the places you can sleep early on, or if you find beta blockers. and as you said, the issue becomes non-existent a few months in, so at that point it's just 4 free points
I truly appreciate the statement that this can be listened to rather than watched in the beginning. It is very appreciated to even have someone factor that in when considering their audience.
I used to use the smoker+fear of blood combo as smoking ciggs would counteract the anxiety from being bloody. Washing the clothes wasn't that big of a deal, until the water shut off
Recently found your content and its been super insightful and entertaining. Don’t ever feel like a long rambly video isn’t what some of us want to see, I love this kind of stuff
Now there's gotta be a Paralyzed trait like maybe if you are paralyzed waist down you need a wheelchair or crutches and then there's a paralyzed neck down which disables all of your movements except like a 140 degree range of movement, and deaf and blind makes you a vegetable
Personally I'd love to see more CDDA traits make their way over to Zomboid. Wayfarer or Nomad specifically would I think be good choices. Wayfarer matters a lot more in cdda due to being able to mod em out to be unstoppable death machines, but I don't like vehicles in either game.
Another nice thing about Smoker trait is that it also helps with the Unhappiness moodle, so you if you need to gain weight, you could eat a stick of butter and immediately smoke afterwards to remove the unhappiness you'd receive from the butter.
I feel like zomboid needs more traits with both drawbacks and bonuses. Such as Heavy Tread: Makes more noise while running but stomping on zombies is much more deadly.
I actually like starting as obese characters. There is a certain sense of progression when you start at 105 and slowly become lean and mean zombie killer...
"there is not world of warcraft stealth here, just realism" ah yes, the rotting corpses with eyeballs turning into jelly having perfect view behind their heads so realistic
Clumsy is actually positive for sound. Still not worth because of tripping. Stealth is a trap in Zomboid beyond the first few minutes. The only viable way to survive in any zombie-infested area is to kill everything. Leaving anything alive is a very bad plan. Combine this with the fact that fighting zombies in cramped interiors is also a very bad idea - it's the best way to get cornered or surprised. Both of these facts added together means that the best strategy in Zomboid (that includes with sprinters), if you don't want to play in a zombie-free area (because it's boring and nothing ever happens), is to stay in a very wide, open area with ample line of sight, make a shitton of noise, and kill everything to create a safe space where you can chill, regen endurance, etc... And with sprinters you'll just have to do the same, but with less noise, and fences/windows. So anyway sound is your ally. When your character makes noise, unless you're deaf, you gain instant knowledge about every zombie in a decent radius around you, because they'll start growling and banging on doors. If you're outside, it doesn't matter, because zombies will see you before they hear you, and you want to aggro them anyway. If you're inside, it's positive because while you may not see every zombie in every room on every floor of the building you're in, you will hear them once they are riled up. The most dangerous zombie in any building is a silent and still zombie. I like to call them ninja zombies, because they can show up in the most unexpected ways and surprise the shit out of you. Deadly around doors. Shouting and killing zombies doesn't necessarily help, because sound has that randomness element where zombies might or might not completely ignore a sound event. I've had situations where I swung indoors at 4 different zombies and shouted twice and yet a zombie stood still and silent right behind a door instead of pounding on it. But the thing with movement noise is that it's like a siren: it creates a repeating noise that ticks several times per second. When you jog, it's as if you had a small siren on top of your head, and a few seconds of jogging all but guarantees that anything nearby will be riled up. Increasing the range of that siren (which starts out super small) only makes you safer. I wish I could have Graceful's trip reduction with Clumsy's sound increase. But tripping makes it a 0 in my book.
One last thing: Restless Sleeper can actually be good, it depends. The worst part of this trait is that it slows down the rate of resting. You'll rest slower than without the trait. The "you wake up halfway in your sleep" part simply doesn't matter. Take a microsip of a beer can and go back to sleep (until they fix this exploit, then you'll have to manage sleeping tablets in your inventory which will be a minus). One good part that's never talked about though is how it forces you to get up at ~30 fatigue (if you went to sleep at 60) which is bad if you wanted to stay up for a very long time but is good if you wanted to min/max your time. Resting below 30 fatigue is 3x slower than resting above 30, so even with RS's slower rate of resting, it will still be faster if you take advantage of the fact that you can choose to never sleep below 30. You could do this anyway with alarm clocks, but it's annoying to figure out the best timing without a mod to tell you your exact fatigue. And finally the only reason I take this trait right now: alarm clocks are exploitable and in combination with sleeping pills/alcohol can be used to instantly rest from whatever to ~20 fatigue without spending any time. This exploit cannot go below 17 as you can't go to sleep anymore, so RS makes literally no difference if you do this, literally free points.
I was looking for something Zomboid related to listen to while I get some work done, you saying out loud this is a vid I can just listen to was a nice coincidence! Great vid, thanks!
When I'm not doing something specific I play a lumberjack with weak, brawler, athletic and then fill out the rest of the traits. Stone axes are very good for their weight and your axe skill will level very quickly unlike spears which takes forever even though they end up being better for pure zombie slaying purposes. It only takes 3 or 4 fire axes before you are ready to go pure stone axe and no longer have to worry about looting vs foraging and fishing. At some point I go to the baseball bat factory and make a bunch of spiked bats to level my long blunt to the point I can fall back on a normal bat and still have a good clear speed when I run out of stone axes.
Negative traits are, like you said, far more interesting than positive traits. I love making characters with mods that add more traits and see how many points I can get from negative traits and still get a playable character. That said, I like that you didn't simply call smoker free points. I never take that trait. Having to scavenge for cigs that their literal only purpose is to counter a trait I got is simply not worth it. Maybe if it gave me like 10 points I'd consider it, but even then, I hate having a smoker character.
8:20 You got one thing wrong there. It is possible to make your character less addicted to smokes by using other means to remove anxiety for a long period of time or to just simply deal with it. However it is never possible to get completely rid of the trait. It's the basically the same as how panic works, but you can go the opposite way as well. Smoker is viable in end game because of this.
Also wasn't sure, the guy who did the data for thin-skinned also did a lot of data mining of a lot of different things, especially valuable is his post on Lucky/Unlucky which finally destroyed all the myths about the traits, his posts are invaluable and one of the best data through the PZ community
"Someone made a decent deep dive of it on the project zomboid subreddit, but the gist of it is that it’s a small percentage of a small number." The subtitle is just the script copy pasted. Mind my voice was blasted before I sat down to read 7 pages of traits so my fault on that lol.
I often pick the thirst. No matter what you always have a bottle or two of watw in your inventory but when the water shut off it becomes, indeed, quit annoying
@@kingol4801 with the no hit thing there's method to the madness though. I think it was mentioned in the video. "Get hit til you learn to not get hit".
I think cowardly is great, almost never has consequences unless you're repeatedly getting shocked, and helps make you aware of zombies in awkward to see spaces.
I'd love to see a video detailing the difference between towing a car base, towing a car with speed demon, and towing a car without speed demon. Answering the question of how much horsepower would you have to have to make up the difference between base and the negative or positive traits
Im listening to this while i work, and the rimworld music is REALLY throwing me off. I keep looking around trying yo figure out where its coming from LMAOOO.
It'd be great to see another vid of this for maybe some modded negative traits, or even positive traits! great vid and it helped me learn a bit more about the hidden stuff cuz i do play with the clear traits description mod :D
Just wanted to comment about unlucky, it's not actually that bad. Rare items get a small boost in their occurrence based on the population intent of the cell in which they are found, which is independent of difficulty level, lucky, or their base spawn chance. For common items it's not really noticeable, but for rare items like machetes and axes it can be the bulk of the spawn chance. I still take lucky every time because I'm the ultimate loot whore.
Not only it's not bad, but the difference between Unlucky and Lucky is so minor (sometimes non-existent), you basically never want to take Lucky. Funny thing is that due to how PZ code works the rarer the item the less effect Lucky has on it's spawn chance increase, basically for some very rare items there's no difference if you take either of the traits. There was a data mine post on reddit on these which gave a great idea why Lucky is basically worthless
@@DezZzO_YT I know the post you're talking about. The data he presents is correct and matches my own, but I don't agree with his conclusion that it's worthless.
@@vRANDv I tested out lucky and unlucky with my own methods before the data mine and played while swapping them for hundreds of hours and couldn't see any real difference, so the post really confirmed it for me that Unlucky is the pick, butI guess to each his own
Nice vid, as someone just getting into Zomboid and wanting a bit more info (since I can't dedicate as much time myself to figuring stuff out) this makes building new characters to mess with stuff a lot easier!
As someone with experience in it I think deaf should add more than just not hearing. It should increase any visibility looking forward since it's our primary sense to take in the world and cause things like increases in sound when walking around because we don't know how loud we're being at any given time. It should give a perk when needing to sleep too because sounds don't distract us. Having an option to know and teach sign makes sense as a communication tool that can only be used when both survivors are visible too.
The main difference between 8 and 9 fitness is the massive reduction to running stamina usage. The rest is all the same per level and that's what you want. Obviously being able to run for a long time is great, but the real goal is the rest of the bonuses.
sunday driver also makes it impossible to tow certain vehicles with other vehicles sunday driver also increases your aggro distance at full RPM, and because you dont have a lot of gears to drive with, you will hit it more often than with speed demon, which can be kept at very low RPM while driving very fast (especially when you use cruise control) the aggro distance is based on muffler quality, engine quality, RPM, and whether you have speed demon/sunday driver or not it costs about 4x the fuel at-speed as speed demon, because speed demon attempts to keep you in the power band (it does simulate to a degree) and your RPMs as low as possible when cruising, meaning you spend less fuel for the same distance its much easier to see when you consider much further distances, but that will hurt you over time
