“They are not wandering. They know where the people are.”
At every dusk a wave spawns and comes for the living. There is no separate battle screen and no special enemy: they are ordinary ferals, using the same barricades, the same weapons and the same rules you do.
How many
Wave size is a curve on the night number, scaled to the seats the run was stood up for. A run hosted for two faces roughly two fifths of the numbers below; one hosted for eight faces half again as many.
It is fixed when the run begins and never moves after. Somebody dying does not soften tonight; somebody going quiet for two days does not either; and a friend who joins on Thursday raises nothing. Difficulty that tracked attendance would turn a hard week at work into something the group could resent you for, and no game should be able to do that.
Gathering half the district into your hold does not raise it either. The people you bring home are defenders, not a bill.
| Night | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forecast | 2 | 4 | 7 | 10 | 14 | 19 | 24 | 80 |
Those are forecast numbers. What actually spawns is the forecast minus half of the wave zombies still standing from previous nights, rounded down — so leftovers are a two-for-one discount rather than a free pass. The field on any given night is roughly the forecast plus half of what you failed to clear. Killing them permanently is the only thing that shrinks it.
Where from
The forecast is rolled from the run's seed and published free in the day banner: an exact count and a compass face. They arrive at the map edge on that face, spread about four cells either side of whatever the district thinks is the heaviest concentration of living people, and land on the nearest street.
That "heaviest concentration" weighting only picks the spawn face and the wording of the forecast. It is not how they path.
What they walk towards
This is the part worth internalising. All night, on every tick, every wave zombie is re-pointed at whichever claim is nearest to it — or, if nobody has claimed anything, at the nearest living player. Not at the biggest group. Not at the loudest. The nearest.
Which means a second claim on the far side of the district is not a decoy, it is a second front. And it means anything you leave lying between the spawn face and your hold is something the wave walks past on its way to you.
At the wall
They tear down one barricade level per successful attempt, at roughly 40% a go at night. A closed door goes at about 55%. Then they walk in. They only work on a section that has living people inside it — an empty room is not interesting to them.
None of that paragraph is wave-specific: it is how every zombie works on every door, in every mode. The wave is just the night the arithmetic gets tested.
- The wave grows on a curve. The last night is roughly ten times the first.
- The forecast — count and direction — is free, accurate, and published before dusk.
- Every zombie walks at whatever claim is nearest to it, all night, every tick.
- Leftovers carry over at half price. Killing them is the only way to shrink the field.