Settlements appear devoid of zombies on my low-population Nasdara PVE server (max. 16 players). Zombies take a long time to appear and walking between settlements can often result in not seeing a Zombie for a long time.
The perception is that they are either a) taking too long to spawn or b) spawning behind the player after they have already left.
An observation is that unlike the other maps, Nasdara defines no smin/smax for Zombie territories except for one zone near the gassed tunnel.
Comparison across dayzOffline.chernarusplus / enoch / nasdara / sakhal (2199 zombie_territories.xml zones):
static zombies (smin/smax > 0) exist in only 83 zones; total smax is 2-8% of sum dmax per map (Chernarus 113/5205, Livonia 217/2582, Sakhal 78/2547, Nasdara 10/3943)
statics are used almost exclusively in NBC/Army/ArmyHard/City/Industrial/Firefighter/Solitude zones; settlement zones (villages, r 50-80 m) ship with smin/smax = 0 on every map.
where statics are used, smax is roughly 25–50% of dmax, smin about half of smax (typical smax 3-10)
events.xml Infected configs are identical across all four maps (nominal 50 / min 25 / max 100-250 / saferadius 100 / <position>player</position>)
Possible Causes?
Is the lack of static zombies in zones of a certain size and players passing through quickly not causing enough of a trigger for the dynamic zombies to spawn? I was surprised that Nasdara defines basically zero static zombies anywhere unlike the other maps.
Another thought is that the layout of some locations is very open and could it be its hard for the game to find a place to spawn a zombie that isn't in the players line of sight?
Either way on a PVE server the Zombie population seems to be incredibly sparse and removes a lot of the environmental danger element.