The dead on DeadZone Core are not set dressing. They hear a pistol at a hundred metres and a rifle at two, an engine as it passes and a generator while it runs. They see thirty metres by day and half that at night, less in fog and rain — which is exactly the weather you should be moving in.
Three kinds of dead
Most of them shamble, and a crowd of shamblers is still a sentence. One in ten is a runner: upright, fast, mortal to a headshot, the reason nobody reloads in the open. At night a screamer walks the streets, and its cry pulls every walker within earshot onto whoever it saw. A stopped car is not shelter: six hits break the glass, ten drag you out.
The nests
Sixteen hearts breed the dead where people died crowded — the two hospitals, five stations, Legion Square, the Boulevard, the airport, the ranch, the sawmill, the trailer park, Harmony and Fort Zancudo — and the two radiation rings grow their own. Burn one down and it stays quiet for a while; it always grows back.
Why you go anyway
The loot lives beside the heart. Medicine in the wards, pistol calibres and vests in the stations, seeds and fuel and tools in the county, clothes and valuables in the city, rifle ammunition and gasmasks at the fort. Containers refill slowly, so the map — not one building — is the larder.
- Hearing by weapon class, engine speed, horns, crashes and running generators
- Sight that drops at night and in rain or fog
- Walkers, runners and night screamers
- Sixteen fixed nests at real landmarks, plus the radiation rings
- Loot zones on the same landmarks — risk and reward on one map