This could be a bug report, I am not sure. Given it was put in the patchnotes as fixed I am going to work under the assumption that it is working as intended.
Zombie can no longer equip weapons as of the chapter 3 update. (I am on PlayStation, should that become relevant to the discussion)
They will however still equip the first set of armor you equip to them from your inventory. They take on the stat bonuses and armor value of the equipped armor. Sand masks provide gas immunity for example. You can’t take it off of them or swap it out with a different set. It drops on bond break.
Noticeably, all zombies have had their armor rating reduced to 0. Regardless of tier or faction, they came out at 0 for me. I tried to check @Xevyr ”What if I was a zombie” spreadsheet to see how big the disparity was from their old natural armor, but it didn’t have that information and I’m not sure where else to check.
Was this a change that occurred before chapter 3? I think I remember seeing them have natural armor right before the update, so I think this is new. If so:
Is it intended that we armor our zombie? Given that they last two days that seems excessive.
If this is new, why did they not receive a bump to hp to compensate for their now lack of natural armor? Is this an intentional nerf?
That’s because this change happened at the launch of Chapter 2, their armor was removed completely then on purpose, so it’s not a bug, they actually changed it so they have 0 armor, which is why I deleted that column from the spreadsheet as it was previously there, but is no longer relevant.
As for the armor stuff, you’re not meant to be able to put anything on them… so if you can still equip an initial set of armor on them, then that is unfortunately still a bug
Yes, that’s why. Because it was an intentional nerf along with their damage bonus from the player also being nerfed. They only gain one third of any damage bonus from the player (follower damage buffs / armor / authority bonus)
I had a feeling you would know the answer. Seems like the armor part is still bugged after the update, on PS at least. I think that some change was made given that once on them it cannot be swapped or removed.
Yea, though their expiration is linked to the serverruntime field in the savegame (which is also used for decay calculations)
By default the database does not appear to have that field in most cases so you’ll often see them last indefinitely on servers where decay was never enabled / fixed (the “server age 0” bug)
There’s also a server configuration setting in the form of a multiplier that you can use to change the amount of time followers with limited lifespan last.
Yeah 2 or 3 days(I can’t recall if it’s 48 or 72 hours), if you are in a private server I think the thrall decay timer can have an effect on them. If turned off they stay forever I believe.
Thank you so much for the answer. My partner has a couple zombies and they’ve lasted a very long time; he originally built a pen to put them in (bad experience with a summoned horse, lol) but they’ve just been hanging around juggling, doing the Thriller dance, and adding some unsettling ambience to the area with nary a bad intent or (additional) degrading flesh.
Which now makes sense because we have decay turned off on our server.
so no need for the pen