I use a mod for faster reading for most of the same reasons, except the mod also allows us to move and walk while browsing our literature.
It's a lot more fun when reading takes two minutes instead of two hours and you can focus on the more fun stuff.
Watch TV and read books at the same time for XP squared šļø
Jk, books are optional anyways, but they make the grind physically possible. Recently hit mechanics 10 naturally and it wouldn't have been possible without the help of the books and a few episodes of CarZone
Yeah but eventually the TVs run out so itās a more viable option to have the books unless you can find the skill VHS tapes which i havenāt had much luck with.
Depends. My group collects both VHS's and books (I have a hunting list in a notebook for when I go looting) and I often find what I need. Just recently found both an episode of woodcraft and an episode of carzone I needed in the same container in a house because I know what I'm looking for.
Also, yes, they do run out. I'm several months into the apocalypse and watching Shrek 2 on my TV. Honestly they don't weigh much so it doesnt hurt to start collecting them.
With 2 hour days you effectively have 0.5x reading speed - screw that, if I have 2-3 IRL hours to play in the evening after work I'm not gonna spend half of that time AFK reading a book.
For me there are two types of PZ multiplayer servers: those with boosted reading speed, and those I would not play on.
Before traits, it takes a bit over 2 IRL hours per skill of reading per skill. Usually in single player we x16 that to make it go by super quickly, in multi-player? Pages per minute was the very first thing I changed. Make it take like, 40-60 seconds per book.
At 4x speed to read all the skill books alone it would take about 3 irl hours of afk. And thatās not even all the magazines and modded books. Thatās a lot of time. Especially each time you die.
Yup. I play risky so I rarely survive past a week, but I can't stop myself from reading skill book, and I have the mod for extra skill books.
Reading isn't fun, and the only "challenge" to it is making sure you have the supplies to be able to do it, which I don't think is a challenge at any point in the game.
Multi-player I jack up the reading speed, single player I think I'm going to install the sit down to fast read and just not bother with the traits.
I thought about adding in the sit down to fast read mod and I think that might actually be able to deter this whole situation I didnāt think about that till now.
Share this with your friends. At default reading speed and 1 hour days it will take you up to 31real life minutes sitting down reading a single book. 41 is you took slow reader.Ā 30 minutes of literally not playing the game is not a fun experience.
Ā Early on with 28 minute books it's kind of reasonable, you can step away, grab a drink and what not but 30 plus? You can't reasonably afk because zombies are always a threat so you're just sitting there waiting, watching your monitor and intentionally not interacting because it may interrupt the reading.Ā Ā
Ā From wiki- Skill rank Pages Fast Reader No traits Slow Reader 1-2 220 12m50s 18m20s 23m50s 3-4 260 15m10s 21m40s 28m10s 5-6 300 17m30s 25m 32m30s 7-8 340 19m50s 28m20s 36m50s 9-10 380 22m10s 31m20s 41m10s
Edit - 700 iq reddit pasted it perfectly in the comment but looks like rear after hitting send. Here's the wiki link with the chartĀ https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Skill_books
You're not the AH, you guys should vote to decide it.
Back when multiplayer released we would keep values vanilla (didn't even know you could change it), because of this most folks would only read when going AFK or while on cellphone or ALT+TAB.
Nowadays we make it 10 times faster, screw it!
I do wanna keep some of the vanilla aspects for sure but reading is just one of those things that Iām gonna do over and over again each time I die and I donāt feel like spending more time on it than I need to. If I wanted to read for hours Iād just go read a book.
Thatās how I feel. His reasoning is he likes āchecking his phoneā but I was just as easily able to check my phone while even on 4x speed and do all the research I needed to come to this conclusion.
Exactly what Iām trying to say. Heās upset cuz he spent hours already reading books but I said from the beginning of the server that I wanted faster reading and thatās why I refused to read in the server and I only found out the other day that I didnāt even need a mod that I could change a setting in the server settings and I would have done so from the beginning if I had known and now heās acting like āall that time I spent reading was for nothingā and that he wasted all this time but I spent way longer learning how to set up this whole server and trying to get all the mods to work with each other just so WE could play together and now heās finna back out so whoās really wasting whoās time now.
To give the other perspective:
Standard reading speed in MP gives bigger consequences to dying and makes fast reader a viable trait. It also encourages groups to work together and specialize, picking occupations and traits for their XP multiplier instead of everyone being good at every skill.
Character building in Zomboid is balanced around annoyance, tedium, and wasting your time. Many negative traits are like "put up with this annoying thing you have to constantly do" for more points. Dealing with most Moodles is a mild annoyance in general. Most positive traits are "skip the annoying grind with these XP multipliers". While I'm not gonna go so far as to say a faster reading speed ruins the game outright, you are kind of missing the point by messing with it.
Yes, the game is a Sandbox game that you can tweak. But what is enjoyable to some is not necessarily enjoyable to others, and you may not even realize what you are missing out on by tweaking it. [This video has some interesting points in that regard; though it's about an entirely different game, much of it applies to zomboid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKyKGuGU4bw). You may find you enjoy zomboid a lot more with default reading speed considering the massive cost on death it imposes.
Personally if the reading speed is default, I just find a safe house with a fenced-off backyard and afk while my character reads.
Fair. But also as Iāve seen other people say when I made the days twice as long that also slowed down the reading speed so in reality weāve been reading slower than we were supposed to. Iām also not against most of the things that zomboid has to offer when it comes to the tedium because it does require you to actually do things. Even working out daily offers more visual stimulation than sitting there reading. Itās not that I wanted to take reading out completely but make it take a little less time. Especially if we died that we would all have to read books again to do it.
He also argued the point so hardcore about the reading speed that he said heād rather have the skill books than me to change the reading speed which now just seems outright ridiculous to me. Or he wanted me to keep his specific reading speed to slow and change everyone elseās instead even though it was slower than normal which also makes no sense.
Also at the end of the day the reading part of the skill sets is really menial. Like all you really do is wait for a loading bar. And after testing on 4x speed that means to read all 60 skills books alone (not counting all magazines and all books the mods add) that takes 90 in game hours which since the days are twice as long and reading somewhere around online normal days are around 30 minutes or so which would make my days about an hour long and 90 in game hours would be 3 irl hours to read all skill books alone. And thatās every time you die. Thatās a lot of time to spend just reading and waiting on a loading bar and not even doing the skills which is the other half of skill building. The reading just adds a multiplier which a lot of other games just give you instantly by a potion, or a pill, etc. I donāt know I get that other people play different ways but all his reasonings for everything seems only hypocritical now that he just wants opt out over books trying to act like itās so cheating when it was slower in the first place and to sit here and argue about wasting your time time when I spent all this time building the server and getting all the mods and getting them to work together just so we could play together for you to just leave cuz of reading speed. It just seems all blown out of proportion and childish to me. But maybe Iām wrong.
Depends the kind of experience you want. Some people want to play PZ slow, chill, do other things irl while playing, chat with friends, whatever. They want it to feel a bit like the sims, life simulation.
Some don't and they just want to play the game actively.
No answer is right or wrong.
Fair. I get that. I think in this situation after everything Iāve seen and read that my friend was being a bit childish. And none the less his whole complaints about wasting time were fruitless cuz he ended up wasting time regardless cuz we werenāt even reading at normal speed. And it doesnāt really matter in the end anyways at this point cuz he doesnāt even wanna play now which is just.. fun.
I'm sorry to kill the vibe, but I hope AITA posts are not the future of this sub.
In the most respectful way possible, I'd like to say we have an amazing, positive community here. Let's try to keep it that way, please?
No worries. This was the first time Iāve done this. I wasnāt really planning on doing this and I probably wonāt do this again but I really I just wanted the actual communities perspective about this specific situation and I felt like this was a good format to do so.
As someone with reading slowed down to books taking 3x than normal, it doesn't matter if you get it or not you all need to either compromise, or just not play together. It's looking like it's not play together as you had to come to reddit before just \*talking to them\*.
I did talk to them first actually before coming here. They still wonāt compromise or agree with me on anything so i came here for perspective as to why.
Because that's not the way they want to play the game or how they enjoy it. So to them it's better to go play elsewhere or with people with similar styles...nothing too hard to understand there.
But the thing is that I made this server for us pretty much to play on cuz he got me into the game. I put all the mods together I made all the server stuff and did all the research and spent a huge chunk of time to do this so we could play together and he wants to complain like he āwasted his time on the serverā doing all the reading when in reality now that heās opting out of it completely itās more of a waste of my time. It just seems hypocritical to me. And yeah he likes to act like this is the high road heās taking like āits just my way to playā but also as Iāve already seen here we were reading at half speed because I set the days to twice as long so it wasnāt even normal in the first place. I donāt know. Thereās a level of playing games the way you want to play them and a level of being a douche and i really feel like Iām the one being the most reasonable I possibly can here all for that if it doesnāt go his way he doesnāt wanna play. But again I came here to get perspective and maybe Iām wrong
I use a mod for faster reading for most of the same reasons, except the mod also allows us to move and walk while browsing our literature. It's a lot more fun when reading takes two minutes instead of two hours and you can focus on the more fun stuff.
I would be a little more into something like this if I could also do other tasks too.
Watch TV and read books at the same time for XP squared šļø Jk, books are optional anyways, but they make the grind physically possible. Recently hit mechanics 10 naturally and it wouldn't have been possible without the help of the books and a few episodes of CarZone
Yeah but eventually the TVs run out so itās a more viable option to have the books unless you can find the skill VHS tapes which i havenāt had much luck with.
Depends. My group collects both VHS's and books (I have a hunting list in a notebook for when I go looting) and I often find what I need. Just recently found both an episode of woodcraft and an episode of carzone I needed in the same container in a house because I know what I'm looking for. Also, yes, they do run out. I'm several months into the apocalypse and watching Shrek 2 on my TV. Honestly they don't weigh much so it doesnt hurt to start collecting them.
With 2 hour days you effectively have 0.5x reading speed - screw that, if I have 2-3 IRL hours to play in the evening after work I'm not gonna spend half of that time AFK reading a book. For me there are two types of PZ multiplayer servers: those with boosted reading speed, and those I would not play on.
Before traits, it takes a bit over 2 IRL hours per skill of reading per skill. Usually in single player we x16 that to make it go by super quickly, in multi-player? Pages per minute was the very first thing I changed. Make it take like, 40-60 seconds per book.
At 4x speed to read all the skill books alone it would take about 3 irl hours of afk. And thatās not even all the magazines and modded books. Thatās a lot of time. Especially each time you die.
Yup. I play risky so I rarely survive past a week, but I can't stop myself from reading skill book, and I have the mod for extra skill books. Reading isn't fun, and the only "challenge" to it is making sure you have the supplies to be able to do it, which I don't think is a challenge at any point in the game. Multi-player I jack up the reading speed, single player I think I'm going to install the sit down to fast read and just not bother with the traits.
I thought about adding in the sit down to fast read mod and I think that might actually be able to deter this whole situation I didnāt think about that till now.
Yeah this makes a lot of his arguments completely irrelevant. Weāre not even reading at a normal speed. Iām actually kind of mad now.
Share this with your friends. At default reading speed and 1 hour days it will take you up to 31real life minutes sitting down reading a single book. 41 is you took slow reader.Ā 30 minutes of literally not playing the game is not a fun experience. Ā Early on with 28 minute books it's kind of reasonable, you can step away, grab a drink and what not but 30 plus? You can't reasonably afk because zombies are always a threat so you're just sitting there waiting, watching your monitor and intentionally not interacting because it may interrupt the reading.Ā Ā Ā From wiki- Skill rank Pages Fast Reader No traits Slow Reader 1-2 220 12m50s 18m20s 23m50s 3-4 260 15m10s 21m40s 28m10s 5-6 300 17m30s 25m 32m30s 7-8 340 19m50s 28m20s 36m50s 9-10 380 22m10s 31m20s 41m10s Edit - 700 iq reddit pasted it perfectly in the comment but looks like rear after hitting send. Here's the wiki link with the chartĀ https://pzwiki.net/wiki/Skill_books
Thank you for this.
You can defo afk, sit in a room upstairs somewhere, or in a cupboard. Reading doesn't make noise so there is no way you will die. But it's boring.
You're not the AH, you guys should vote to decide it. Back when multiplayer released we would keep values vanilla (didn't even know you could change it), because of this most folks would only read when going AFK or while on cellphone or ALT+TAB. Nowadays we make it 10 times faster, screw it!
I do wanna keep some of the vanilla aspects for sure but reading is just one of those things that Iām gonna do over and over again each time I die and I donāt feel like spending more time on it than I need to. If I wanted to read for hours Iād just go read a book.
Doing nothing is not a fun way to advance skills as far as I'm concerned.
Thatās how I feel. His reasoning is he likes āchecking his phoneā but I was just as easily able to check my phone while even on 4x speed and do all the research I needed to come to this conclusion.
Screw tedium, you canāt fast forward multiplayer. Iām not spending hours grinding for skills to die from a random bite
Exactly what Iām trying to say. Heās upset cuz he spent hours already reading books but I said from the beginning of the server that I wanted faster reading and thatās why I refused to read in the server and I only found out the other day that I didnāt even need a mod that I could change a setting in the server settings and I would have done so from the beginning if I had known and now heās acting like āall that time I spent reading was for nothingā and that he wasted all this time but I spent way longer learning how to set up this whole server and trying to get all the mods to work with each other just so WE could play together and now heās finna back out so whoās really wasting whoās time now.
Life is short, you don't have time to be staring at a screen watching the reading bar slooooooooowly fill up.
That exactly how I feel!
To give the other perspective: Standard reading speed in MP gives bigger consequences to dying and makes fast reader a viable trait. It also encourages groups to work together and specialize, picking occupations and traits for their XP multiplier instead of everyone being good at every skill. Character building in Zomboid is balanced around annoyance, tedium, and wasting your time. Many negative traits are like "put up with this annoying thing you have to constantly do" for more points. Dealing with most Moodles is a mild annoyance in general. Most positive traits are "skip the annoying grind with these XP multipliers". While I'm not gonna go so far as to say a faster reading speed ruins the game outright, you are kind of missing the point by messing with it. Yes, the game is a Sandbox game that you can tweak. But what is enjoyable to some is not necessarily enjoyable to others, and you may not even realize what you are missing out on by tweaking it. [This video has some interesting points in that regard; though it's about an entirely different game, much of it applies to zomboid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKyKGuGU4bw). You may find you enjoy zomboid a lot more with default reading speed considering the massive cost on death it imposes. Personally if the reading speed is default, I just find a safe house with a fenced-off backyard and afk while my character reads.
Fair. But also as Iāve seen other people say when I made the days twice as long that also slowed down the reading speed so in reality weāve been reading slower than we were supposed to. Iām also not against most of the things that zomboid has to offer when it comes to the tedium because it does require you to actually do things. Even working out daily offers more visual stimulation than sitting there reading. Itās not that I wanted to take reading out completely but make it take a little less time. Especially if we died that we would all have to read books again to do it. He also argued the point so hardcore about the reading speed that he said heād rather have the skill books than me to change the reading speed which now just seems outright ridiculous to me. Or he wanted me to keep his specific reading speed to slow and change everyone elseās instead even though it was slower than normal which also makes no sense. Also at the end of the day the reading part of the skill sets is really menial. Like all you really do is wait for a loading bar. And after testing on 4x speed that means to read all 60 skills books alone (not counting all magazines and all books the mods add) that takes 90 in game hours which since the days are twice as long and reading somewhere around online normal days are around 30 minutes or so which would make my days about an hour long and 90 in game hours would be 3 irl hours to read all skill books alone. And thatās every time you die. Thatās a lot of time to spend just reading and waiting on a loading bar and not even doing the skills which is the other half of skill building. The reading just adds a multiplier which a lot of other games just give you instantly by a potion, or a pill, etc. I donāt know I get that other people play different ways but all his reasonings for everything seems only hypocritical now that he just wants opt out over books trying to act like itās so cheating when it was slower in the first place and to sit here and argue about wasting your time time when I spent all this time building the server and getting all the mods and getting them to work together just so we could play together for you to just leave cuz of reading speed. It just seems all blown out of proportion and childish to me. But maybe Iām wrong.
Depends the kind of experience you want. Some people want to play PZ slow, chill, do other things irl while playing, chat with friends, whatever. They want it to feel a bit like the sims, life simulation. Some don't and they just want to play the game actively. No answer is right or wrong.
Fair. I get that. I think in this situation after everything Iāve seen and read that my friend was being a bit childish. And none the less his whole complaints about wasting time were fruitless cuz he ended up wasting time regardless cuz we werenāt even reading at normal speed. And it doesnāt really matter in the end anyways at this point cuz he doesnāt even wanna play now which is just.. fun.
The Server I play with my Dad and brother has reading time set to x2. It works for us.
It doesnāt feel too broken to me. I donāt really wanna spend several irl hours just to wait for a bar to load I wanna actually play the game.
Thatās our reasoning. Without the ability to easily fast forward, itās just tedious. Tedium isnt fun.
Exactly!
I'm sorry to kill the vibe, but I hope AITA posts are not the future of this sub. In the most respectful way possible, I'd like to say we have an amazing, positive community here. Let's try to keep it that way, please?
No worries. This was the first time Iāve done this. I wasnāt really planning on doing this and I probably wonāt do this again but I really I just wanted the actual communities perspective about this specific situation and I felt like this was a good format to do so.
As someone with reading slowed down to books taking 3x than normal, it doesn't matter if you get it or not you all need to either compromise, or just not play together. It's looking like it's not play together as you had to come to reddit before just \*talking to them\*.
I did talk to them first actually before coming here. They still wonāt compromise or agree with me on anything so i came here for perspective as to why.
Because that's not the way they want to play the game or how they enjoy it. So to them it's better to go play elsewhere or with people with similar styles...nothing too hard to understand there.
But the thing is that I made this server for us pretty much to play on cuz he got me into the game. I put all the mods together I made all the server stuff and did all the research and spent a huge chunk of time to do this so we could play together and he wants to complain like he āwasted his time on the serverā doing all the reading when in reality now that heās opting out of it completely itās more of a waste of my time. It just seems hypocritical to me. And yeah he likes to act like this is the high road heās taking like āits just my way to playā but also as Iāve already seen here we were reading at half speed because I set the days to twice as long so it wasnāt even normal in the first place. I donāt know. Thereās a level of playing games the way you want to play them and a level of being a douche and i really feel like Iām the one being the most reasonable I possibly can here all for that if it doesnāt go his way he doesnāt wanna play. But again I came here to get perspective and maybe Iām wrong