The new heat map is really problematic for people that like a more immersive experience with most of its fonction now being really "gamey" like no zombies around residential zones, despite it being places where most people would likely die/board themselves in and hundreds of zombies around the gas stations or "interesting places" Like why would there be more zombies at that random dinner than in the residential area ? It is felt even more on Ravencreek with the even bigger emptiness of being around giant residential complexes and still having no zombies around, sadly despite toying with the settings i could not really find a way to fix this, using the "spread out" setting making zombies spawn everywhere even on places it made no sense and even upping the population won't prevent the empty zones from being empty.

For any other players that are willing to try to "fix" this issue the best i found was to reduce maximum numbers of zombies in horde and reduce the minimal distance between hordes, allowing the game to have more small but relatively close groups instead of just random 20 zombies hordes. Yet i found it to only work as a band aid on what i find to be a really big issue with B42, i know it is unstable but the devs really dropped the ball here by changing this and going against realism and immersion which are focuses of the game in order to "nerf it" Don't get me wrong i love difficulty and i for one found the new muscle strain to be amazing but this kind of difficulty just feels cheap to have all zombies being in the same places rather than being spread out like an apocalypse should feel. While the new idea in itself is really good the cities should have kept a "blanket heatmap" that would spawn zombies all around its surface rather than having only those hotspots. Roads could also get this treatment with having some random groupes or even huge hordes or zombies roaming on the road once in a while.

I'm not sure how many zombies other players are complaining about (not you, of course). I agree with you that the zombie density distribution in B42 still needs refinement.
But specifically in Raven Creek, as a regular player, I find the game challenging due to the sheer number of zombies on the map.
I think perhaps many of you weren't paying attention to the release notes for each version of the map I put out, (you can do this from where you load your game, there's a dropdown menu on the bottom left).
I'm starting to wonder if I'm crazy, because I see a lot of zombies, and you all see only a few. That said, the remote areas that previously had small, specific zombie hotspots now have very, very few.

Thanks for the feedback

PD: The dropdown is available on Debug mode, or you can simply delete de zpop folder from the desired saved game.

I did use recently the thing so don't worry the problem isn't here for me, as for the zombie numbers, in some areas they are much for the normal player compared to normal settings but i personally used to play with X3 or X4 zombies so i am used to it and would expect it from an urban area, a city should be populated, my issue with the new heatmap isn't really this since you can always tweak the number of zombies, what i don't like is how as you showed they removed the city wide coverage with low number of zombies to only put hotspots in important locations, it lead to zones being really empty such as residential areas with row of houses and not a single soul, and that can't reallt be changed with settings since there is low to none zombies so upping the numbers to make it more satisfying needs to have insane proportions of zombies in populated areas.

Essentially my issue with the new heatmap is the disparity in population, we used to have some zeds all around with the numbers growing bigger as you went near the commercial zones and now it feels like there is massive hordes near those, while the other areas feel empty.

Essentially you and i might not be looking into the same areas, some streets are filled with zeds while other seem devoid of any life, its really blatant to the eye when you drive around the city you will most likely see how we can have an area with 10 times more zeds than the others.

I feel the same way you do. The best example is the gas station in Echo Creek, which is a vanilla area of the game; you can spend forever there without seeing a single zombie. This is in stark contrast to clearing Guns Unlimited and AMZ Steel in the west, which repopulate senselessly. I want to believe that TIS (The Indie Stone) intends for hordes to migrate towards players, but that it just hasn't been implemented yet.

Well it could work but in my opinion the big issue is on the heatmap itself, i don't know how they managed to blunder it so hard, like indeed having zombies spawning in the middle of nowhere in the forest made no sense but removing the general heatmap covering normal cities to replace everything by spots with big patch of zombies goes against the ideals of this game and feels very "gamey" i mean this game is all about realism and don't get me wrong i like some difficulty, i loved the muscle strain mechanic but the new spawn mechanics feel like gas stations and other stores in cities are dungeons guarded by zombies while the rest of the map is empty, it makes absolutely no sense for the game to have 3 times more zombies inside guns unlimited that there are in the entirety of Echo creek, like i've already cleared both and while Echo creek was devoid of life with at most 50-100 zombies Guns unlimited must have been visited by the entirety of Kentucky to be filled that much with zombies.

I feel like they tried to up the difficulty with this new spawning system, important locations being way more defended as a result of zombies being less spread out but it totally breaks my immersion to see such a huge disparity between the houses where people are most likely to barricade and then die and that random bakery because sure 30 people thought that having fresh bread was the most important thing for now... If i wanna add more zombies i can up the population factor, but i can't salvage what this new system brought.

On a more positive note, it is still unstable and from what i recall before the patch in 42.5 while there were too much zeds i felt like the disparity between POI and the rest of the map wasn't that problematic so i hope they will tweak those settings to make it less obnoxious since after all they told us it would'nt be perfect. I trust the devs to fix this but i gotta admit that they really dropped the ball with this new change, it took away the randomness of my encounters with zombies since they are all in the same predetermined places. (and some of those placements seem overly petty in order to punish players trying to clear those places, guns unlimited or that forest cabin at x9663, y8777 looking at the zombie heatmap for that place is just unfunny.)