ElDudorino

If you compare the old models to the current ones I find the old ones tend to look more decayed. Not all are equal, though. Thug / skatepark zombie looks like he's been dead forever, while party girl / stripper looks like she just turned 5 minutes ago. Anyway, there's no official story in this game that I'm aware of and I'm not sure which elements in the environment like movie posters and newspapers are there as jokes and which are 'canon' - and I'm not sure the devs are either - but one possibility is that zombies have been around longer than the apocalypse. The Pop n Pills factory and Higashi Pharmaceuticals were experimenting on people who now are zombies, but did they become zombies due to experimentation (possibly as human trials of the flu drug Z-Tronix or whatever it's called that was advertised during the flu outbreak) or were they already zombies before and that's why they're being experimented on? So certainly there is some possiblity that zombies have been around a long time but only became a threat after a more recent event. Maybe because they're the main survivors of post-nuclear war radiation, etc. (Personally I think the flu drug turned everybody into zombies and the nukes were an attempt to eradicate the zombies and the movie posters are non-canon jokes but really who knows?) We do know the world ended long enough ago for the Duke to have come to power and the survivors in the different PoIs to have died, of course. This was a longer post than I thought it would be but I don't care to edit it on my phone, so...

The humanoid zombies are pretty much interchangeable for me even if some are stronger or can spit/explode. But those effing dogs. I hear the sound and I'm immediately in high alert mode. Even when I'm armored enough that they can't hurt me.

I appreciate the feedback, I'll mess with it a bit more later but it sounds like it might be a dead end since I don't have the knowledge to really change the game mechanics.

I've never even filled out one skill tree, let alone all of them. Like playless, I'm usually 'done' around level 50 where I more or less feel like a god. I definitely always take at least the first two levels of Parkour, though. I usually grab those early on then max it out after I've gotten my main skills out of the way. That skill changes the game more than any other skill for me.

They should just make the shovel ignore the short grass. And make the tall grass *way* less common. You should be able to dig through the short grass but sure it looks nice so go ahead and keep it in place.

I've created a modlet that increases zombie spawns and adds <property name="CanMobsSpawnOn" value="true"/> to the shapes that appear in PoIs, hoping it would cause random zombies to spawn not only outside but also inside of PoIs. The result is that I have lots of zombies spawning on the ROOFS of PoIs. They don't actually spawn indoors. I'm not sure if there's some code that tells zombies never to spawn indoors, or if it tells them to always spawn on the topmost available block (so they don't spawn in tunnels etc) or what. Does anybody know where I should look to mod that rule out so that zombies can spawn pretty much anywhere? (Hopefully they wouldn't spawn inside a land claim / bedroll area but anywhere else should be fair game.)

Forget the ammo capacity, it doesn't have the speed to be an SMG replacement. The full auto mod only adds like 15% rate of fire or something, so it's a barely noticeable difference. That said, you'll still be using it like it's semi auto regardless and the Cripple Em mod is kinda useless, so I guess full auto is the better option between the two.

I'm not sure what effect questing has on leveling speed; it might actually result in slower leveling in some cases because of the time you spend traveling. On one game where I didn't talk to traders at all I was level 50 by the end of day 30. I don't avoid zombies, though; don't want them sneaking up on me, after all.

So I checked over various old save files and I've never leveled that slowly, even when I was brand-new and spent half my time staring at perk menus, sorting inventory, or hiding in dark corners so nighttime zombies wouldn't see me. On average now I get more like 1.5-2 levels per day, depending on settings (but always at 100% xp). I know the conversation has kinda moved on but it was bugging me that I knew that number didn't make sense.

Don't forget the free 4 points from the starter quest. I took a point in miner 69er and sexual tyrannosaurus and then rushed BB/DA in one game and I think I had them both maxed in around 2 weeks. Standard days and exp rate. I geared myself out, got a motorcycle, bought a handful of solar banks and solar cells, collected my 500 steel blocks, and then chugged a Fergit'n Elixir to reset my points and respec into combat skills while I went off to build my steel base. It was kinda unfun but maybe not for the reason you're thinking; the problem was I was way too powerful way too fast. My game stage was barely even introducing feral party girls for horde night and I had a Q6 steel club, Q5 auto Shotgun, full Q5/6 steel armor, a handful of good book sets completed, and a base foundation of 5 layers of steel. Then I didn't want to just sit around for 40 hours waiting for the hordes to get difficult.

A few things: 1. Completing a tier just requires 7x{tier} points, and you get 1 point per tier of each quest, so you can clear tier 5 with 7 t5 quests or 9 t4 quests for example. 2. The rewards for a tier completion aren't random items; there's a specific set of items for tier completion. These are generally bundles, extra dukes, and stacks of 500 blocks. 3. There is no tier 6 for quests and Fetch quests aren't offered at Tier 5. Anyway. Yeah, traders are mega-overpowered already, so expecting to gear you up according to your loadout would just make them even more ridiculous. But also, maybe I haven't specced into machine guns but I plan to later, so I'd still like that M60, thanks. And AtomicUs5000, you're not crazy. I think the game is more enjoyable without traders, too.

I've seen a few people bring up the black-and-white color scheme of this mod (technically of SMX) and ask how to change it. I found it hard on my eyes and it was really hard to see certain items in my inventory, such as the screwdriver and sunglasses. For anybody who wants to change this, you can go into Mods\SMXlib\Config\XUI_Common\styles.xml and the file is chock full of comments to help you figure out how to customize the look. Here are a few lines I changed: <style_entry name="smxlib_element_background" value="7,7,7,195" /> <style_entry name="smxlib_element_backdrop_1" value="32,32,32,195" /> <style_entry name="smxlib_element_backdrop_2" value="64,64,64,195" /> <style_entry name="smxlib_element_separation_1" value="255,255,255,195" /> <style_entry name="smxlib_element_separation_2" value="128,128,128,195" /> Here I kept the RGB values the same but added a 4th number (alpha value) to make the black background semi-transparent, so you can see through it. <style_entry name="smxlib_slot_main_background" value="170,170,170,160" /> <style_entry name="smxlib_slot_slot_background" value="170,170,170,160" /> <style_entry name="smxlib_slot_item_background" value="170,170,170,160" /> Here I changed the item backgrounds to a semi-transparent gray. You can see the result below. Maybe you'll hate it and the point of this post isn't to say that this look is "better" but basically to tell you that if you want to change the colors in the UI, it's pretty doable.

Yeah, some randomness would really go a long way towards keeping things interesting. Having a bunch of zombies constantly running down the same path makes it so that not only is their behavior super easy to exploit, but you basically have to exploit it because those zombies are going to funnel into one spot regardless. (Assuming you aren't fighting the horde on foot)

What's great about this is that somebody flew over and dropped this crate down on purpose. "They're having a really rough time surviving down there... Let's give them a single Tylenol in a crate we'll drop into the middle of a lake. That should help." I like to imagine that they really are trying to help, and not that I'm the unwilling participant in some twisted game show, but sometimes you have to imagine really hard.

On day 100 you probably have nothing to gain by doing quests. But if you were tackling them from day 1 you'd be decked out with Q6 top-tier gear two weeks into the game, when your loot stage is still at the point of barely giving you Q2 iron weapons. You also get a bike, bundles of vehicle parts, and from T5 missions you can get 500 steel blocks- enough to build an entire steel base from scratch before the blood moon is even throwing ferals at you. Basically, traders make looting obsolete. To be fair, I actually enjoy the game more when I'm ignoring traders entirely, because you get a much more natural progression, good drops are actually rare and exciting, and as noted, you actually get to experience more PoIs this way and see more of the game. But, it is hard to refuse the siren call of easy, overpowered quest rewards, and the feeling of progress that comes with completing a quest tier.

Do all PoIs have the possibility of giving a quest or just certain ones? I definitely have gotten stuck doing the same locations over and over even on my latest map where I was parked at the intersection of 3 cities. Between my last two games where I did quests on different maps I must have cleared Zelekt (restaurant_01) like 7 times, including 2 quests in a row yesterday. Not that I entirely minded because Zelekt is super quick, super easy, and gives great loot. Part of why it's super easy is that the boss room enemies get stuck on a railing and can't attack you, of course... I think most PoIs are tier 1 and 2 though so I probably blaze through them and then there is a smaller pool of T3 and T4 to choose from, resulting in fewer quest options.

Might need a poll to confirm that. I am a new player (I was aware of the game but never played before a20) and honestly the blood moon was a big disappointment for me. My first blood moon I jumped up on top of the main building at the drive-in, lined the top with spikes, built a little tower in the middle, and clutched my pistol terrified while waiting. The thunder and everything freaked me out, and then the tense music kicked in. And then 3 in-game hours later I wondered why there were no zombies. Turns out they were just beating on the walls at the bottom and achieving nothing. So that was anti-climactic. My second blood moon was in a cobblestone box with spikes all around it. I put a cobblestone block in front of the door and stood there blasting anybody who got close. Then I 'beat' the horde and it got quiet, so I logged out for the night. Logged back in and it turns out that restarts the horde so I fought them all again. In the morning, the only damage of note was to my spikes. I still get tense every 7th day and worry about my fortifications because I'm a natural worrier and I take the zombie apocalypse too seriously but realistically what happens is I get exponentially stronger each week and the enemies barely get any upgrades. So blood moons go from too easy to trivial after the first week. Zombies following a predictable path just means they're a super easy threat to neutralize, even as you crank them up. I play on Survivalist with 20-count blood moons, all other settings default, which is a pretty big settings bump over Adventurer/8-count but it doesn't make blood moons any more threatening. Maybe on day 210 they will be but I'll have started a new game by then because there's not much to do in-game by that point.

Yeah, very true. There are 'normal' situations that are way crazier than the blood moon. I learned the hard (fun) way about this while overnighting in a Wasteland T5 and from dusk til dawn I was fighting a nonstop horde of intense zombies including feral wights. Then the actual blood moon hit a few days later and the worst zombie was a standard cop, not feral or anything. I could be wrong but I think the blood moon happening in the wasteland actually makes the wasteland *easier* than if it were a normal night where you made too much noise.

I very much agree, we should have an idea of what we're making before we make it. This applies to food as well; you don't know what effects food will have before you cook it, and it's not obvious for example that corn makes you thirsty or hobo stew fills you up more than meat stew. Weapons and armor can have a really big range of possible stats, though, and I wonder if it's intentional that the minimum and maximum stats are hidden from the player.

You're overreacting. This game is an alpha and subject to change based in part on player feedback. Better barter absolutely breaks progression, and if that's not the desired goal then TFP should change it (and probably will).

I've been thinking about it and here's what I think would be more interesting: When the blood moon rises, you get swarmed by zombies. But not 8 sprinting zombies who charge straight towards the same point; I'm talking about getting surrounded by 32 shamblers slowly closing in to seal your doom, attacking you and more importantly your base from all directions. You'd need to patrol every part of your base keeping the slow but massive horde held back. This is the more traditional zombie experience but it works for a reason. The blood moon can also for inexplicable reasons cause your vehicles not to start, so although fleeing is an option you'll have to do it on foot or bicycle and weave through the constantly encroaching horde. But also, have harder zombies after the first week. It takes WAY too long for blood moons to become dangerous in the current system.

I like the clear/fetch quests and removing them in favor of WoW-style "gather 12 chicken gizzards" quests sounds awful to me. I do somewhat agree that resetting PoIs is very slightly problematic, but the devs could always add in something like once a PoI has been cleared (either inside a quest or outside of one), you could be forced to go back and defend it from being overrun again. Maybe along with an NPC defender. Obviously this would have to happen after NPCs are added. Or maybe you'd have to patrol a certain area at night and keep the dead occupied so they don't go after certain buildings. There's definitely more they could do with quests or just in-game objectives in general. I don't have a mod to suggest unfortunately.

I think the hordes should get harder, quicker. You can just make a box out of cobblestone and fight through the doorway with occasional repairs to the walls and have no trouble through the first few horde nights even if you crank up the horde size. Every game I start, I stress out trying to find a weapon before the first blood moon and make sure I have plenty of medicine, materials, buffs, an escape plan, and then the zombies come and they aren't that big a deal. Even if zombies had much higher block damage on horde night (I think that's even a setting) that would have no effect on a lot of players since there are so many options to passively keep zombies from your walls anyway. Should there be demo zombies on day 7? Maybe not. But feral cops and irradiated Arlene? ... I don't know, maybe it's not crazy. I don't know if there's a way to make the blood moon still scary for a prepared player, honestly, but I agree that they could do more.

I agree with that, I'm not a fan of the perk/skill system in general. I don't like having to skill into perception for literally one perk (lucky looter) while strength and agility are packed with amazing perks. Then some perks are fundamental to everything you do in the game while others are just QoL stuff. I don't know how I would retool it, though. The current system is acceptable to me as a placeholder since I don't know what system would be better.

You don't have to swap glasses for it to be broken. It gives you stuff that's way beyond you progression-wise whether you use glasses or not. I don't think quests should even give items as rewards except when you clear a tier, and the tier-clearing rewards should be nerfed. No more 500 steel blocks for clearing t5; that's absurdly overpowered as a reward that you can get once per trader. Stuff like the bike for clearing T1 is a nice and suitable reward, though. I would still do quests if they only gave dukes and exp, since the fact that they send you to PoIs full of loot and they also reset the loot is already good on its own. I would also make it so you can pick up multiple quests at once. Grab a few, go out and knock out a few PoIs, head back the next day and get a few batches of dukes and see what you can spend them on. I don't need to be given a Q6 steel club as a reward for clearing a T4 PoI in the bloody pine forest.