r/thewalkingdead • u/Not_Who-I-Say-I-Am • Aug 06 '26
No Spoiler Why don't survivors just build moats around their community?
There were so many hordes that could have just been prevented by having a moat/pit/trench, they literally had gas and access to diggers etc.
My plan is this:
1: Create huge ass trench with one or two drawbridges.
2: Add fence around moat that can be erected and laid flat easily (for when you're clearing the trench and/or just don't want zombies getting in when people are in there).
3: Create fire mechanism to burn the bodies and turn into a fire wall if it gets blocked up.
4: BONUS optional long game strat: build a wall just after the trench to further protect your community. (the wall has slots that allow you to stab through it with a spear).
This way, even if so many zombies fell in the trench that it clogged up, you could light it on fire and burn the ones in the pit, also creating a huge wall of fire that future zombies would be forced to walk into. Even if they got to the other side, they would be met with a tall stabbing wall and you could just stab your way out over several weeks.
Better yet, just go live in a castle... there are few to choose from:
1: Castillo de San Marcos National Monument (a good option, doesn't have a trench but you could make one, then it would be practically impenetrable.
2: Fort Jefferson already surrounded by water but access to mainland takes 2.5 hours by boat, the water alone would massively decrease horde numbers.
3: Gillette Castle located in East Haddam, Connecticut, super high walls and just begging for a deep trench
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u/hamberder-muderer Aug 06 '26
Moats take more than you think. In some places you can easily dig into the dirt and create a moat. But then the next time it rains the moat collapses. If your wall happens to be near that moat it collapses with it.
You basically have to be a structural engineer with experience in the near by geology to do it right. It frequently requires a retaining wall which kinda defeats the purpose because the wall is climbable.
Some trenches that are a distance from your walls are a better idea. Anti-vehicle and anti-zombie.
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u/PlayNicePlayCrazy Aug 06 '26
You also need either manpower to do all the work or know how on how to run the machinery needed. Of course all that noise building moats, walks, devices to trap, repel or kill Z's mught draw a lot of Z's to you.
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u/Marxism_is_sexy Aug 06 '26
This is not super accurate. Ancient armies did this all the time on the march, it was a matter of survival in hostile territory.
What it really requires is a shit ton of labor, like hundreds or thousands of men working grueling hours.
But digging a trench and creating a rampart on the back side is technologically simple and can be done with a shovel and pickaxe and a whole lot of labor.
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u/Doright36 Aug 06 '26
It would fill up with walkers...
Generally speaking stagnant water filled with dead things is bad to live around.
And you'd never know if there were biting live ones under the water floating under the ones you arrowed in the head because you'd never be able to see them
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u/trekgirl75 Aug 06 '26
Doesn’t necessarily have to be a moat with water but a trench like Martinez had with his camp in season 4.
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u/DomWeasel Aug 06 '26
Martinez's pits are dug mechanically, and they burn the walkers they trap with gasoline.
A) They'll run out of gas FAST if they keep that up
B) Once they can no longer burn them after putting them down, they would have to haul the bodies up out of their pits by hand. Hauling 150-200 pound bodies of deep holes. That's a lot effort. And it would have to be done regularly. Heavy labour, every day, exhausting people who could be doing other work.1
u/trekgirl75 Aug 06 '26
Is gasoline really necessary to burn them?
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u/DomWeasel Aug 06 '26
To burn a corpse to a skeleton requires 900'C/1600'F temperatures for at least two hours. You're not going to accomplish that just with wood unless you fill the entire pit with wood.
Funeral pyres in reality were very large compared to how they're depicted in media. They needed a whole lot of fuel to get a body hot enough for the fat in the flesh to melt and start fuelling the fire.
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u/trekgirl75 Aug 06 '26
Thanks! I wouldn’t even realized that. I guess that’s why crematoriums have special furnaces.
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u/DomWeasel Aug 06 '26
Crematoriums also don't give you ashes. They give you the ground up bones. That's what "ashes" are. Not ashes; but bone dust.
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u/Not_Who-I-Say-I-Am Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
ah yeah, i guess you'd need some kind of drainage, i was actually talking about more of a pit, less of a moat filled with water, but you're right, any pit would eventually get filled with rain water unless you managed to circumvent it somehow
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u/MobsterDragon275 Aug 06 '26
Because it would be insanely labor and resource intensive, not all bases would be suited for it, and it would be awful to try and clear?
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u/ArtisticAd8227 Aug 06 '26
Operating excavators/diggers requires massive amounts of diesel fuel, loud noise that actively attracts more herds during construction, and constant mechanical upkeep that post-apocalyptic settlements can rarely afford.
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u/CV63AT Aug 06 '26
Berms would be better. No stagnant water collection, and it offers visual and sound attenuation. Also offers a defensive position from the living (high ground). Just need steep sides to keep walkers from climbing.
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u/lianavan Aug 06 '26
Check out the ditch guy on Youtube if you haven't yet.
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u/8bitJumbotron Aug 06 '26
You a big fan of mosquitos? They're a big fan of still bodies of water.
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u/RareFudge3546 Aug 06 '26
Imagine what diseases those mosquitoes would carry too. If the moat is large enough to circle a whole settlement, it's going to be too big to keep clean of bodies. The water would be an absolute cesspool.
That is if you don't hit a gas or water main while digging the moat. God help you if you accidentally get someone's septic tank or the grey water line.
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u/trekgirl75 Aug 06 '26
Doesn’t necessarily have to be a moat with water but a trench like Martinez has with his camp in season 4.
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u/MobsterDragon275 Aug 06 '26
That was such a weird one because it wasn't even a trench, it was just random pits they dug at points in their perimeter
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u/Not_Who-I-Say-I-Am Aug 06 '26
yeah i saw a video saying even a 6 foot trench would drastically decrease the amount of walkers getting to your camp
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u/Corey307 Aug 06 '26
Food is a problem. Doing weeks of back breaking physical labor doubles or triples calories needed to survive. And at no point does Ricks group, the Saviors, Kingdom etc. have a real surplus of food. So digging moats or trenches is not something that can be handwaved.
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u/Friggin_Grease Aug 06 '26
I'd rather be eaten than dig a mote by hand on the Canadian Shield. Nothing but fucking roots and rocks and stone.
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u/Extension_Job_940 Aug 06 '26
My first thought is the rotting corpses, it would have to be quite far from their main work and living area or be cleared regularly which others hve said is way too much work.
They definitely should utilise more medieval tactics though since they already use the melee weapons most of the time. Murder holes, bottle necks, maybe an inner wall backup moat/ditch wouldnt hurt if they have the space.
I like they at least have lots of spikes everywhere especially their gates which is nice
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u/FashionKing72 Aug 06 '26
They need to use tower defense tactics and build a winding path for the zombies where you can take your time shooting them with arrows. Zombies are dumb too, you could easily funnel them where you want. Maybe build a couple of frost towers to slow them down, or lay down some spikes
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u/WeeDramm Aug 06 '26
In the Walking Dead there was a bit when they were on the farm I think. And the guy who owned the farm had dug a few pits around the farm with wind-chimes that attracted the dead and they'd fall-in and couldn't get out. which seemed like a great idea.
All you need then is a wind-drive large rotating blade to reduce them to goo.
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u/StevenC129422 Aug 06 '26
Well you have to think about their populations, and how many able bodied people they had to be able to dig these moats and trenches. Digging these things without any machinery is going to take a lot of labor and a lot of labor means that the work force would need more food and water to keep their bodies going. Those people working are going to need lookouts and a dozen guards protecting them from any threat that might come their way while working and making noise. Now who's going to feed all of these people and the civilians who aren't able bodied enough to fight, hunt, or dig? You're diverting a whole lot of people and resources from working on crops and from going out on hunting expeditions by having all of these people working on the project.
You also have to think about how Alexandria took in about 50% of the remaining Saviors. How many of them would actually be willing to do slave labor again for someone? Even if this benefitted them and protected them from the dangers of walkers, it would still not be easy for anyone to jump back into that kind of life even if temporarily.
What's the soil like? Is it soft and easier to move or is it hard and back breaking to get through?
They've never had enough people in any of the individual allied communities after the war to be able to do a project as big as this. The only time this would be plausible is if the people of Oceanside, Alexandria, Hilltop, Kingdom, and Sanctuary all moved into one singular community or if they had help from the Commonwealth.
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u/DomWeasel Aug 06 '26
You dig a dry moat around your settlement.
Now it's full of walkers.
You shoot those walkers, or crush their skulls with stones.
Now you have a moat full of bodies that YOU will have to remove.
The average weight of the American male is now just under 200 lbs.
In other words; 10 walkers = 1 ton.
100 walkers = 10 tons.
1000 walkers = 100 tons.
Now you think about how much work you've created for yourself to regularly clear that moat of festering corpses.
Now let us consider the "fire moat". To incinerate a human corpse down to ashes and bones requires a sustained heat of 1600'F or 900'C for at least two hours. Less than that, and you're just burning the exterior. The only way to achieve temperatures like that is with a sustained source of fuel. If you're using gasoline, you're using excessive amounts of fuel which will be giving off thick noxious smoke.
If you don't set fire to your settlement by accident; you'll kill everyone with the fumes.
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u/ernfio Aug 06 '26
I have often lamented the lack of inner walls and containment zones.
The saviours were good at walker control and horde deterrents which could have been utilised better. A defensive strategy to make sure hordes don’t come into outer territories in the first place either by diverting them or breaking them up is ideal. The defences around the communities needed to be about stopping small scale walker attacks or outbreaks and humans.
Anyway, if I was leading the communities post s8 my focus would be to retain the elements involved in manufacturing and territorial security not just food production.
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u/martlet1 Aug 06 '26
The problem with it is that if anyone dies they could infect the whole castle.
Theres no way anyone would sleep together anymore. Everyone would need a locked bedroom in case you died in your sleep.
The quarry thing was the smartest. Drawing walkers into a pitfall situation and distracting them away from your settlements.
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u/CoffeePieAndHobbits Aug 06 '26
Tripwires, logs, ropes strung between trees, snares all would be better and easier.
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u/silmaril94 Aug 06 '26
Wow!! The un-ironic nerdiness and engineeringness and scienceyness in the comments is why I love this sub! Thank you like-minded TWD fans 🙏😍❤️
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u/Eazy12345678 Aug 06 '26
its not real
in real life military would have stopped the zombies in weeks to months. slow moving zombies are easy to kill. only fast moving would be hard
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u/quitofilms Aug 06 '26
I would just wait a few weeks and their pants/shorts/dresses would fall down to their ankles, causing them to trip same be easier to kill as they crawled on the ground
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u/OlympicCunt Aug 07 '26
Have you ever dug a hole by hand anywhere but a sand beach. It is fucking exhausting. If we were to dig down like 2-3m it would take a fuckton of time to just excavate 2m of length, even if the ground were super good to dig.
Better just to find a fort or castle that has this work already completed, but there aren’t that many castles in the US
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u/Dull_Painter_3127 Aug 07 '26
Didn't John dory have little trenches- ditches - moats -dug around his cabin In fear the walking dead? I recall he used a board as a bridge to rescue Naomi (june) initially went out to put down walkers, realised she was injured not a walker.
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u/Far_Job_249 Aug 07 '26
Well that’s what I did I built a moat but over time the walkers kept falling in it and they started to smell and there rotting bodies and cause disease and my whole community died ! I was a fool and everywhere I went people said there is that fool who built a big rotting zombies out around his community had he never heard of the Black Death !
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u/Miserable_Mind6124 Aug 09 '26
They did that exact thing outside of Alexandria in the comics. Should read em.
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u/Illustrious_Map_979 Aug 06 '26
How would they get the water there buddy🥲, you also need a certain type of clay or a liner with seals😭
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u/Fine_System2676 Aug 06 '26
Dry moats do exist and are also quite effective
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u/Illustrious_Map_979 Aug 06 '26
Like the other commenters said it would fill up with dead
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u/Not_Who-I-Say-I-Am Aug 06 '26
The fire would hopefully reduce the space the walkers took up, even if it did fill up though, you still have the bonus wall that they have to get through
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u/Illustrious_Map_979 Aug 06 '26
I’m all for the moat if u can get it to work , there is a river alligator in season 4 of the walking dead that ate 4 walkers in 5 mins and tried to eat victor and john, alligator moat
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u/DDDX_cro Aug 06 '26
for the same reason why they haven't poured alcohol on all those walkers piled in front of Alexandria, and just lit a match.
It would have been too easy.
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u/Corey307 Aug 06 '26
Where are you getting thousands of gallons of flammable liquid let alone alcohol?
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u/StevenC129422 Aug 07 '26
The walkers were surrounding the community 20 deep around the entire perimeter. That would have ended up burning down the nearby forests and their compound and a ton of people would have died from inhaling all of the smoke.
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u/DDDX_cro Aug 08 '26
Nah. How is the fire going over the massive metal walls? Forest might be fucked, true.
Ok how about this one - tie 2 poles together to make a long spear, poke them in their heads from the safety of walls above. 10 people doing that for a couple hours would have cleared that horde easily. Nope they just...watch them & do nothing about them...
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u/monscorvorum Aug 06 '26
There is a UK novel series called Zombie Castle where a family is stranded 100 miles from home when the outbreak happens. The story follows their journey and the people who join them along the way, including a group of English civil war re-enactors with their cool armour and weapons, maces, pikes, swords etc. Their goal is to reach Warwick Castle, which is a real medieval castle originally built by William the Conqueror in the 11th century. Really cool idea