A warm hello to all Project Zomboid players and sorry for the TLDR post !
What has started as a faction on private romanian server, now has turned into a server itself !
Driven by overwhelming desire for hardcore challenges in unforgiving and punishing survival situations......
We like to present to you, Za Boyz Hardcore Survival Server !!!
GENERAL DISCLOSURE
Za Boyz is an upcoming private dedicated PVE B42 unstable whitelisted server; we have it running also on B41 with the best mods out there, but B42 will come out pretty quick (according to the last blogpost) with the immense crafting overhaul, so we decided it would be perfect to run it again seeing how we now have the possibilities for a more versatile sandbox experience that we sought out after all, once 42 reaches the unstable.
>>>> The Server is online but unreachable at this point, and will remain as such until the TIS enables MP in B42. We are playing B41 MP now but only to test some survival settings mentioned below.
To get to the point, Za Boyz will rely deeply on B42's mechanics and features and take advantage of every new stuff when it becomes available (updates from TIS) henceforth, the following general sandbox and loot settings are in order.
GENERAL SANDBOX AND LOOT SETTINGS
· Starting in the Apocalypse, many years later (not the mod / challenge, just the setting).
· The start hour, month and day will probably be default in the summer, giving players time to prepare for the upcoming winter.
· World hours are set to emulate IRL, so even if no one is online, time will still pass, 24h IRL is roughly 3 days in-game.
· Sleep is enabled for a better immersion and balance adding to realism (fatigue - endurance).
· Farming, nature abundance, are set to extremely poor (seeing how players do complain about crops yielding too much harvest, well now you will be getting almost none, same goes for foraging).
· Car spawns rates are very low and other car-related settings including condition, initial fuel, are as well at the lowest possible option.
· Gas stations spawn with very low fuel (hopefully this will be addressed and random setting will become available).
· Generator spawn rate is close to 0 so if you find one, it's your holly grail.
· No META / helicopter events, the settings are punishing enough...
· No water or electricity.
· Weather is cold, dry.
· Rain and Fog FXs are moderate.
· World erosion is very fast, takes 1 day to reach 100% growth.
· Safehouses, respawns in safehouses are enabled.
· Food rot and spoil are normal.
· Refrigerator effectiveness is set to high. Normal setting is just sh*t, frozen food will rot in your freezer in an unrealistic timeframe, breaking immersion and realism. To somewhat compensate for this, seeing how IRL freezers can hold up frozen goods for at least 6 months - 1 year without rot, the setting is increased.
· Although food preservation mechanics will allow players to preserve their food more properly with the new brewing discipline, fresh food will always have a place in your diet, as such we feel the need for refrigeration effectiveness to be ramped up, is justified.
· Stats decrease fast (hunger, thirst, fatigue) to better work in conjunction with world hours.
· Regarding food and survival essentials, loot setting is NONE.
· The rest as follows, mechanics, weapons, ammo, medical, literature and other, are set to insanely rare.
· Mechanics maybe one day will benefit from a mod running on a particular workstation that will enable you to build your own car parts (this is now done with mods, each of them worse than the other) or car, seeing how the devs talked about extensive tech mods that could spring up after the awesome crafting overhaul is finished.
· As of such, mechanics will remain until that day comes, with insanely rare loot setting and switching to NONE once we get our hands on some mods capable of delivering this.
· Same goes for weapons, ammo and medical - maybe, or perhaps surely, once B42 will reach stable, we will see extensive tech mods, good mods that will enable different crafting and building opportunities at a workstation, outside of what the devs intended to.
· Literature, others (which include electronics, pens, paperclips, notebooks, etc) will forever be doomed to follow an "insanely rare" setting, since you cannot create those items in the vanilla game and it kinda doesn't make sense for a well established survivor in the Apocalypse to produce pens and paperclips, notebooks and books, cordless phones, headphones, video games (The Indie Stone, you are doomed ! 
), etc.
FIRE, OHH... FIRE !!!
· Fire is enabled and spreads for a better immersion, simulating IRL situations.
· If you thought you may use it to cheese zombie hordes, well I'm disappointing you from the start. Zombie hordes will never exists here, zombie pop multiplier is very low - 0,2 with a peak pop multiplier at day 180 of 1,2 - respawn is disabled (at least we haven't decided 100% but still), migrations in empty parts of the same cell are possible and zombies will form groups but no more than 5, maybe 6 (maybe) zombies / group. The zombie stats and behavior are random, on a normal group encounter you can have 2-3 sprinters, 1-2 fast shamblers / shamblers, probably a crawler sometimes. The sprinters will jump for your neck from the start making it impossible to escape them (also considering the fact that they can be superhuman sprinters) while the fast shamblers follow them, complicating the situation further. If you fire your gun, many more could come since some will have pinpoint hearing and others eagle vision. You can't outrun them (not the sprinters) and soon you will find yourself overwhelmed, bitten and dead. In B41 we have a mod called "Roll" which is god-given and drastically improves your chances of surviving a sprinter jump, if reflexes are not long dead and you use them correctly.
· Anyone who thinks he / she can take on a horde with these settings, I'm sorry for you but you are nothing more than textbook retarded.
· We decided we need the fire to be almost perfect like IRL, not because we cheese zombie hordes with it, like most "veteran PZ players" (fu**ing impostors !) but because it breaks immersion.....leaving a stove on fire will burn down your house also your neighbors' house, maybe not the first time, but the chances are high and it happened to many people around the world, so why not in Zomboid? you cook a meal and go out for a loot run also forgetting to turn off the oven, eventually upon return, guess what ?! THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE !! (*AC/DC - The House Is On Fire plays in background*), and later, your good friend and neighbor Joe runs out in flames outta his house because the fire SPREAD.....naturally....(don't know really why is there even to begin with, the option to disable spread, maybe TIS will light up the mystery).
· Hordes were never a thing for us.
· As controversial as this sounds, they pretty much weren't for us to be honest, and don't resemble much of a threat, at least not to us.
· We prefer fewer zombies but harder zombies, proper zombies, sprinters with superhuman trait and eagle-eyed vision, superhuman and thought fast shamblers with eagle-eye vision and pinpoint hearing, smart crawlers that pretend to be dead and lunge at you when passing by.
· It is very, very easy (and believe me, I've tried, that's why I'm here writing all this sh*t) to handle hordes of zombies, even 2000+ zombies at once. I have killed a horde of 2500+ zombies, fast shamblers with normal stats. You can kite them and leave them in the woods, big deal. Or just have the perfect combination of traits and a max level skill i.e long blade / long blunt, and you will take them down like flies....they will never catch up with you, even if you walk away....this is sh*t !
· More, with the addition of a cheese tactic like a flaming molotov for example, it becomes really stupid just walking around with a zombie horde behind (zombies, not snails, zombies) that will never catch you and slowly burns away....it's sh*t, it's no fun, it's child’s play.
· We want our zombies to be feared in the way that they were meant to.
· Playing the game with default settings, I'm afraid to say this but, it's actually for children (no, I mean seriously, a child could escape a "classic" horde, no stress).
· This is our vision for a hardcore survival game that PZ can be when configured accordingly.
· If you think you can take on a horde with these settings, prove it to us !
· But also, please let us record the whole thing, for posterity and some laughs 
· Furthermore, there shall be ZERO tolerance for players that burn down entire buildings / neighborhoods deliberately and unthreatened- permanent ban with no appeal.
· Sorry for the TLDR section, but things must be clear from the start.
READ BEFORE BLEED !
Zombie behavior and stats: careful here !
We play with random zombies like real men ! What this means? Well you won't know what type of zombie you will encounter.....be it a tough sprinter with superhuman strength, a weak and fragile shambler, a strong and eagle-eyed fast shambler, etc.
· Transmission: very high both through saliva and blood.
· Speed: random
· Cognition, memory: random
· Can fence lunge, can destroy constructions, can drag down, activity both, urban focused.
· Population multi: 0,2
· Start population multi: 0,2
· Peak day multi: 1,2
· Peak day: 180
· Groups: 5, maybe 6 (not yet decided)
· Respawn: not yet decided, probably 0 but still working on how this unfolds since the difficulty in clearing out areas of zombies will be a real challenge with the above settings.
· Redistribute: 24h
MODS.....
As much as we like having a nice vanilla+ playthrough experience (with some great mods to compensate for lacking features), we also are looking towards some degree of expansion to this, as such the following can be said about mods:
· Skill recovery journal.......well this is a compromise: when you die you lose everything, I'm talking about XP, and seeing how you will die a lot here (this is a f***ing hardcore server), it's safe to assume that recovering about 70% of XP and still losing 30% is somewhat of a good trade-off (numbers can be modified, i.e we can also go with 60-40)..... that is, you remember to write your XP down in the journal...
· Car mods: this is a again a trade-off because most car mods, if not all of them, don't follow sandbox settings correctly, meaning they have different spawn rates, locations and conditions.
· It is unwise to tinker with the code behind it since we have no clue or ideas about creating a mod in java or tempering with it, so only one car mod will be installed, we shall see which one, but of course it will be the most rated and with the highest positive feedback for MP; two ore more mods will break immersion since cars will spawn mostly all over the map and a great deal of them in good condition (no car can be in good condition years after the apocalypse).
· RV interior will be a thing also maybe adding some level of protection to cars with mods will do just nicely like i.e Standardized vehicle upgrades 2 and 3.
· Weapons mods: only one mod - Guns of 93 (if updates continue and the modder is pushing it to B42).
· Crafting mods: only if we decide to run a more tech extensive playthrough.
· Not under any circ*mstances are we going to allow insane mods that, for example, let's you build your very own flying saucer, Elon Musk's Cybertruck or Santa Claus flying sledge... I know all of these sound hilarious and stupid, and they are, but also I'm pretty confident a modder will one day make and promote sh*t like that.... so let's keep it real and down to Kentucky USA, it's better.
· Animal care and Agriculture mods: hope for not needed; we want the crafting system to be vanilla based with smaller exceptions here and there. We will not introduce mods that infect animals and turn animals into zombies, sh*t like that. While this may sound fun, it's hard as it is to clear out the proper zombies, also it will break immersion on some level, mostly because in other zombie games or movies, animals are not that significant / important to zombies (TWD, TLOU).
· Map mods: none as of today, maybe later or as soon as they update to B42 and are compatible with the new map expansion.
· We like the idea of having new locations to explore, to loot, to die for / in, so map mods will definitely be a thing in the future. Also challenge maps like wilderness survival will be added in the future, after B42 Unstable wraps up (finished crafting system overhaul - enabling construction of nu-mediaval-ish settlements in wilderness playthroughs).
· QoL mod: all of them, all of the best QoL mods on the Steam Workshop will find their way here eventually.
· Other mods: none.
· Map challenges: as stated above, probably when we have a fully finished crafting system - wilderness play / many years later (10 yrs later).
THE HUMAN CONDITION
· We are happy to open the server's ports to any new or veteran PZ player seeking hardcore challenges in strict survival situations.
· Player quality means a lot to us so here is some stuff that needs to be addressed from the start:
· We want this emerging community to be comprised of civilized and well-mannered people, respectful and kind to others.
· Someday, maybe, if the server will have a growing success, maybe we will start video content creating / streaming with the community and also new challenges, events, maps, etc, all of which will be recorded and streamed.
· Players will have permission to create their own content using the server logo, name, and addressee.
· Not under any circ*mstances is juvenile, bad and chaotic behavior allowed ! All of these will be met with swift bans and no appeals !
· Player cap......serious circ*mstance...the server is dedicated, we pay for it monthly and will pay for it as much as we feel it's the right thing and the game is enjoyable; the price is how to put it "none-existing" but it's still not a charity....
· Player caping is required for the server to run smoothly without any lags or delays felt by other players connected at the same time.
· It's not the cheapest dedicated server, but it's surely not the best and most expensive they had to offer.
· If the server will be a hit and the community support skyrockets, we have a plan to open up a donations account for server upkeep and more players slots, also a second server should the needs be.
· So hope for the best.
· With all this being said, we will not charge a single fu**ing romanian lion (romanian LEU - national currency, a joke of a currency to be honest, toilet paper is worth more) for anyone who wants to play with us.
· We like building a strong and dedicated community of survivors, and with B42 on the horizon, server wipes, loot respawns and map chunks reload, are a thing of the past.
· As such, for the first attempt at this, player cap is limited to 12 (including 2 admins).
· Regular server maintenance and upkeep is required, so from time to time we will run backups, server restarts, updates, etc.
· Discord integration is not yet available, but will be implemented in the near future (once I will fu**ing figure it out).
· Whitelist is enabled.
· Server is password protected.
CLOSING REMARKS
Za Boyz - New Dedicated PVE B42 Unstable Hardcore Survival server.
Version: Currently B41 (settings testing purpose), soon B42 IWBUMS.
Server IP: 51.38.122.246.
Server Port: 26900.
Server name: Za Boyz.
Whitelist: ON.
Password: Required.
Mods: None.
>>>> Password requests and registrations are opened.
>>>> For server password, PM me and be ready :))) you will have to answer some questions about yourself (sorry, but we really don't want a mind-numbed community bent on childish and puerile behavior).
>>>> Kids.....for the love of God....stay the f*ck away ! (as much as you are entitled to play with us, as such we are entitled to select players and deny entry to anyone we don't feel is right for us).
Edited by ZaggA
