Weather

Some missions have special **weather** conditions that change the way they have to be played.

## Sandstorm

In levels with **sandstorms**, units will suffer from a speed decrease of 30%, the only exceptions being Heavyweight units who possess full immunity, except Red Hood. Although it isn't mentioned in the weather description, movement speed for all zombies is increased by 70%.

Missions hit with a sandstorm tend to have a few running zombies present in them, Girl and Runner in particular. This makes fast, spammable units like Redneck and Mechanic the best option for their completion to ensure that the fast enemies don't land a hit on the bus if they are used well. Otherwise, the Mechanic 2/2 Team Power must be relied upon to repair any damage done to the bus.

Two units, in particular, are uniquely affected by this weather: Specops and Flamethrower. When Specops is used, he cannot be dropped from the sky. Instead, he will come out of the bus just like every other human unit. While this means he will be ready to fight immediately instead of having to wait until after he arrives and lands on the ground, he cannot be dropped in the player's preferred position. When Flamethrower is used, his namesake weapon has its effective range reduced by 50%. Flamethrower's attack range is comparable to that of Willy's, and of similar note, Flamethrower can now melee attack the barricade just like him. However, Flamethrower will always try to attack it with his weapon's fire before attacking it with melee. While this means he can be used to destroy the barricade, the countless downsides Flamethrower possesses and how these missions further worsened them simply makes doing so wholly inefficient and a large waste of time when literally every other melee unit available will suffice. Dr. Norman's weapon, despite behaving similarly, does not suffer from the range penalty.

A cosmetic effect of this weather is that particle effects such as the smoke from fire or the snowflakes from Nitrogen will be blown to the left.

It should be noted that sandstorm weather is currently present only in stage 2.

## Rain

In levels where it's **raining**, the fire debuff can't be applied on anyone, and fire pools fade away instantly after their creation, rendering their potential damage useless.

Obviously, fire-related units and rage abilities are highly discouraged from being used on missions with rainy weather. In particular, Molotov is rendered completely useless, being unable to even burn corpses off the ground unlike every other unit and rage ability that is capable of leaving behind a fire pool from exploding on death/destruction. Interestingly enough, such missions rarely have large swarms of enemies, and fire-resistant enemies like Epidemiologist and Slob also often appear there, implying that rain is barely just an indicator of such zombies' presence.

For the first 15 to 25 seconds of the mission, weak and hard lightning begins to strike, however, these bolts are purely cosmetic and are incapable of targeting units. After the initial grace period, and after 1-3 hard lighting strikes, there is then a 50% chance for the lightning to strike any random unit on the battlefield. The lightning strike is visually similar to Paramedic's special attack. After a unit has been struck, or if the random chance failed, no units will be struck by lightning for the remainder of the mission.

## Trivia

* In the past, sandstorm weather used to function differently:
	+ Units were not slowed down and enemies were not sped up;
	+ At random intervals, a strong gust of wind (indicated by the sandstorm becoming denser) would blow, slowly pushing units back, extinguish anyone currently on fire, and cause fire pools to disappear.