I haven't had chance of late to put up a bit of an update so its been ace reading the updates @Greboth and @tronic44.
Its been nice to get on to the map and check it out. Definitely makes it different when the first two traders we've found are right in the centre of two large towns. I love the idea of having min camps/bases so we don't have to travel back and forth in the day as you lose so much time doing things like that. I've had some good nights so far like Greebs mentioned, with hordes (and I mean hordes!) of Zombies everywhere, even in the day. Having a base in a town certainly makes things a little interesting!
Skills wise, I've continued to look at Advanced Engineering and Grease Monkey to enable us to get Bicycles and eventually some 4x4 trucks. It also gave us the chance to get a Workbench and we finally made a Chemistry Station 2 days ago once Rich found a Beaker. I'm going to keep focusing on that but also some bartering skills. I'd suggest someone looks at doing the same as the Quests and Traders can give HUGE loot gains, especially with books.
Definitely need to think about a few things, not in any order:
A huge main base for everyone
Mini bases for each town/large section we find
What types of things we need for bases
What books people want/need to write
What other skills could be really helpful for someone to have
I definitely feel this time round this server map is for keeps for a long time. Its fecking huge and lots to explore and also learn too. We've all talked about new things that we might know of but never gave it a try so we really should start doing that. It'll help each other then as we learn new fancy things for all of the bases!
Maybe a big party up night where we can all meet up and get a good start on a main base perhaps?
until