ElDudorino

I use melee and crossbow the vast majority of the time and then guns for backup. Clubs are fast, can knock down multiple enemies, stun on hit, and give you essentially infinite stamina once you're perked up so it's easy to take on hordes as long as you're only facing 2-3 at a time due to choke points or maneuvering. But sure, in a place like the Crack a Book T5 I'm switching to guns when I trigger a room full of a million fast zombies. I've never felt like I should be using melee 100% of the time. Guns as the backup for intense moments at the cost of ammo and possibly waking up a wasteland full of angry dudes feels like the way it would really go down and feels basically "right."

I popped over here to see if people were talking about the iron armor. It seems pretty unpopular over on the Steam forum. Personally I don't "get" the design... Like why does the helmet have a handle, why does the gauntlet have a bunch of rebar pegs on it (impractical for zombie combat and would get caught on everything), and how would you actually put on, let alone move in, this armor? The design seems pretty out there. Plus, since it's a set, couldn't a little bit of effort have gone into making the pieces look like they fit together? Seems like the survivor just grabbed the first metal bits he found lying nearby. Also, they call this "iron"... Will there still be a steel tier above that? Because this is already 500lbs and has ridiculous coverage, so where can you possibly go from there? The existing iron armor design is a bit wacky as well and I don't spend much time looking at it so it's not a change that will negatively impact my play experience but at the same time it doesn't really seem like an improvement.

You can comment out the line in progression.xml under the relevant perk (e.g. perkJavelinMaster) that controls quality and then paste it into your recipe in recipes.xml. By default it uses a level range but you can set it to be a specific level. Except, it turns out I'm a numbskull and the quality level wasn't changing as my perk level changed with my implementation. So I could make recipes that craft different levels but they'd all be unlocked at the same time and you'd get early access to crafting higher quality. I was trying to find a one or two-line solution that locks higher levels behind progression but had to leave to deal with an emergency. I know it can still be done if I make duplicate item entries in items.xml and make each item unlockable by the perk at different levels (tested leveled unlocks successfully) but that would be a super-tedious solution so I'm trying to figure out just how a recipe can reference a skill level when setting crafting level. Still! Possible! But more annoying than I'd initially thought.

You can do this! All you have to do is make copies of the recipe in recipes.xml and make some sort of tweak to each copy because every recipe has to be distinct. That's easy enough, as you can just hard-code in the increased costs per quality level, and that'll make each level a distinct recipe. As an example, in the screenshot below I made three versions of the Stone Spear recipe, all at different tiers. One requires the normal ingredients and goes up to Q2, one requires no fibers but more wood and goes to Q3, and one requires the normal ingredients but can only be made in the workbench and goes to Q4. As a nice little time-saver you can actually move the passive_effect determining crafting tier from progression.xml directly into recipes.xml so each recipe has different rules for what tier they'll craft at. But here's the thing... do you really want to see 5-6 recipes for every item? That recipe list will be crowded as hell, and just awful to navigate. I've proposed this solution before: You can have one basic version of an item and one leveled version of an item. Have the basic one either stop at quality 1 or maybe go up to like Q3 but always cost the base amount, and then have the leveled version unlock at skill level 3 and it will let you craft quality levels 4-5 (or 4-6 if you're into that) and will require an amount that scales by level- or an amount of your choosing. Whichever way you choose to do it, it's not actually that hard to create the mod for it. But my preferred method is to just mod out the increasing cost per level because I think it's silly that I'd need more materials at higher level. Realistically you should require FEWER materials at higher level. Plus, in the existing system I basically never craft because I'll always find something better before I have enough materials to craft a high tier. That, to me, validates the notion that the parts multiplier at higher levels is a bad idea.

This will only happen if there are no nearby PoIs of that tier. The same thing somewhat happens in the handmade Navezgane.

The flipside of this is that you can get your tier clear rewards again from each trader. So you can get those 500 steel blocks and the bonus bundles again. Quest rewards are much more substantial than loot from PoIs anyway, unless your loot stage is super high.

Why use the trader quest rewards selection UI? Just add a second combo box to the crafting UI. We have one for selecting quantity and should have one for selecting quality. The value in the combo box would get capped to whatever your perk level allows in the xml (using the existing code that currently dictates the selected level) and would be used to determine the quality, adjusting the parts needed as required and the final product created. This is how any other game would have done it and it's how 7DTD should do it. That they don't have this kind of boggles my mind.

You can build a writable storage crate and once placed you can name it by holding E. But another option is to make a regular storage crate and use paint. They have crate paint options for a few standard item types like ammo, food, etc. that look nice but once you get to the point that you have lots of crates for specific things you'll probably want the writable ones.

Maharin was overstating the difficulty involved but the idea is that any option they add has to have its functionality maintained with each update, so if they overhaul the way one function works then every option needs to be reworked to match the new code and then tested to make sure it still works in the same way. It's not the biggest deal but it's not nothing. I agree that more customizability within the game would be great but I did come to the conclusion after a while that the game will just never be quite what I want without mods. The devs have different ideas than I do about how the game should play and so modding is pretty much a necessity. They've already opened up a lot of options for tweaking via exposed xml files and support for modlets to patch them in (as well as more in-depth mods), and given their support for modding I wouldn't be surprised if they add some sort of mod search interface into the later versions of the game.

I've never tried but can't you remove vultures from PoIs as well if you remove them from any groups they're part of in entitygroups.xml? Or if that fails, set their groups in gamestages.xml to have an emptyChance of 1?

Yeah this is an absolutely terrible mechanic. Having to hold off on leveling up so that you don't become worse at crafting makes no sense and detracts from the game. I modded the game so that leveling doesn't increase item cost but in theory you could also mod it so each item has multiple craftable versions at different part requirements and maximum quality levels.

With a few extra minutes of work you can make your changes into a modlet that will persist across versions. It'll save you trouble in the long run plus it's shareable that way.

There are no T6 quests but you can indeed clear Tier 5 by doing Tier 4 quests. It should take 9 Tier 4 quests to clear Tier 5, though.

To be fair, I started with a20 and recently tried a16.4 to see what all the fuss was about and it does seem like the game has been dumbed down a fair bit. I am comfortable enough with the xml files at this point to fix things like spawn rate and number of zombies alive (same line of code actually) though and think it's worth everybody's while to spend a half hour learning how they all work to fix a lot of the simple stuff. And I'm interested to see where the game is headed since it seems like there's a lot that is being and will be overhauled.

What's a slide thread?

I still think Q6 should be craftable but I also agree that Q6 is too common as a quest reward. Well, really, quest rewards are just too generous in every way. They hand you Q5-Q6 of every item and then wrap up by giving you 500 steel blocks!

I'm definitely too lazy, if I'm driving somewhere I'll sometimes run down animals just because I can but I won't bother getting out to skin them because meh.

That's actually a smart idea. You need places to actually put your items (pockets) but also need to be strong enough to carry them (pack mule). Even then I would want to see Pack Mule open more than 3 slots. That's just not enough. Make it 5-7 and maybe we'll talk about me putting off leveling Pummel Pete / Miner 69er / Sexual Tyrannosaurus.

There aren't even enough armor mods to fill all the mod slots you get. There's no lost opportunity cost for ignoring pack mule. You can take it if you're just into weird stuff but its value is objectively much lower than pretty much every other perk (not counting charisma for singleplayer).

Why not combine multiple stats? I tend to go hard with Strength and Agility. Parkour is absolutely amazing when leveled up, flurry of blows is great, but you want those club and stamina perks, too.

Yeah, the big overhaul mods all seem to have buffed Pack Mule. I actually take it then. It seems like the popular thing to do is increase the backpack size but keep encumbrance as it is, so if you actually fill your large backpack early on you'll be paralyzed. Then Pack Mule unlocks a bunch of slots / reduces encumbrance by a large amount. In the vanilla game you absolutely can say pack mule is objectively a misuse of points because you can max out your slots easily without the perk and even if you wanted to get there sooner the perk barely helps the process.

Apparently I started as an expert because there was never a moment in 7DTD where I had to worry about food. It's just... everywhere. There's so much of it, you can't get away from it. In the one place where you should have to worry about food, which is the snow biome where the freezing effect makes you hungry faster, they've offset it by making animal spawns way higher than other places, plus visibility is high so hunting there is easy. But really, even if getting enough food was difficult, it still wouldn't make sense for a newbie to come in and complain about it after an hour of playing. If you've never played a survival game before, it makes sense that you should die the first time. Just like how if you've never played a strategy game before, it's normal to lose the first time. You're supposed to learn how to play, not complain that the game is too hard. If everybody was starving constantly and less than 1% of players could survive then maybe that would be something to discuss, but it's obvious this poster didn't take the room's temperature before creating a topic, because it would be difficult to find somebody to agree with him in this case.

TC, have you tried the Darkness Falls mod? In my opinion, it has a much more enjoyable skill system. Attributes are gone, thank God. But, to level up perks you need to meet requirements, generally by leveling related skills in a "learn by doing" system. So, you gain points in blunt weapons skill by using blunt weapons, and then when you get perk points from leveling up you can level up the Pummel Pete perk if your blunt skill is high enough. Also, melee weapons have been condensed so that fists, sledges, batons, and clubs share the same skills while blades and spears also share the same skills. It allows you to for example switch between sledge and fists (which are strong in DF) depending on the situation. I think it's a huge improvement over the vanilla game. Unfortunately it's tied pretty deeply into the mod's other features and the mod is a major overhaul of the game so I don't think you'd be able to just take the skill system (and the better farming) without jumping all the way in with the mod. Still, it serves as a model of a much better system than what we have now. For one thing, it has me using skills I otherwise would have ignored because I don't want to level Perception for example.

There is never any point where I've had to consider the possibility that you can starve to death in this game. The first time I played I stayed close to where I spawned for a few days and was swimming in food by day 2 despite not going raiding pretty much at all (which is a great way to get food). A few games later I generated an 8k map where I ran pretty much from the lower-right corner to the upper-left corner at the start of day 1, hid the first night in a dark trailer, then made it to my destination by like mid-day on day 2 and still had plenty of food bar left, which I immediately filled by just eating whatever was around me. This game has some of the easiest survival mechanics of any survival game. I very much believe that keeping yourself fed should be made harder, not easier.

It is super buggy and I've gotten hit plenty of times by 0-frame position change attacks but they JUST added the function, right? So I figure it'll be straightened out before long. The way it works against you in combat actually isn't even my biggest complaint about this feature. It's the way zombies routinely get trapped and frozen in falling positions in crouchable spots. Happens every time I hit the Crack-A-Book store with the boss/treasure room you drop into. I figure that's not an intended feature.