Crazy overpopulation is B42

I’ll start out by saying this is NOT me complaining, I love smashing zombie skulls in. But am I crazy for thinking in B42 there are a lot (and I mean a lot) more zombies than B41? I went with a custom sandbox game and went with easier settings to learn the new areas and I wanted to build a cool base so wanted tools and materials to be more abundant. So I selected fragile zombies, population high (my usual on B41, I still wanted some challenge), but no respawning.

Spawned into Echo Creek (new favorite start area) And man, I was not prepared for this. Had to kill 340 zombies on day one in Echo Creek just to clear the immediate area and get to sleep. About 1k zombies to clear the whole town, seems like a lot for such a small town but i figured whatever. After a couple weeks of game time, I went to clear the small town (not named) directly northeast of EC area, seemed like the next most smallest area and they have a doctors office and military surplus store. Man, I was not prepared. Took over 5k kills to clear this little town, like 4 full game days of smashing skulls in with baseball bats (got long blunt to 6 though!). This really took it out of me. I was expecting like 1-2k but got 3x that.

Now I’m regretting this high pop setting, I figured it wouldn’t be so bad since the zombies were fragile and most would die in one hit. But spending days of real life time to clear a small town enough to loot it seems crazy to me, it wasn’t like this in B41. Given this, i used sandbox settings mod to lower pop to normal amount. The next big area I went to scope out was Rosewood (second smallest spawn area I believe?). And immediately said “nope nope nope” and left. Obviously didn’t count but killed 2k by fire and other 1k by weapons and got NOWHERE. Easily 10k+ in Rosewood. This is on normal settings now! I hadn’t been anywhere near rosewood yet so it would have loaded in fresh with the normal pop count. And it’s just unbelievable.

Sooooo I lowered to low pop settings. This is a crime I never thought I’d commit but man this is just a slog. On low, I decided to look at the weapons and shooting range west of EC. I couldn’t even get to fence without killing a quick 500 zombies. A quick glance inside the gate confirmed my fears. Even more heavily populated than Rosewood. Probably less zombies than all of Rosewood but man they are packed in there!

So IDK. Maybe the mod is on the fritz and changing the pop mid game is either not doing anything or making things worse, not sure. But on the lowest possible settings, some areas are just completely overrun. If I was a newer player, I would just stop playing as it seems pointless, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking that. Gonna try a few fresh worlds on lowest pop settings and check on Rosewood and the gun range near EC and see what it’s like. But wanted to start a discussion, am I alone in thinking that zombie pop counts seem exaggerated in B42?