Khyron

1) A 'repair equipped item' hotkey. In the heat of combat if a gun breaks it'd be great if I didn't have to open the menu and navigate through it to repair. Likewise if I'm doing intense digging/mining/logging it'd just be nice to hit one key to resume. It's not a huge deal but little stuff like this can really improve the game's flow. 2) Automatically group up similar items that have been dropped. When I am butchering a corpse but I don't have enough room for all the bones in my inventory, it'd be rather nice to see a single lootable bag of 20 bones instead of 20 individual bags of bones scattered all around the place. I imagine it'd probably be less resources too, both in rendering and keeping track of 1 loose item rather than 20 loose items. 3) Lawn blocks. Purely for aesthetic, it'd be nice to be able to place down grass blocks that don't grow weeds for my lawn. Is it silly of me to care about that during a zombie apocalypse? Absolutely. But with all the other amazing blocks and tiles available to us, I still find myself wishing for it so I can build my dream-home with a fenced-in yard and no weeds growing everywhere that I have to mow with my fists. 4) 'Special Order' from traders. Give them a request they'll fulfill at their next restock, but bump up the price accordingly. Would be suuuuuper helpful when you're looking for a book or two to complete a series, or if there's a specific armor piece or mod you just can't find. Maybe even limit it to perk books/weapons/mods instead of recipes as well, for balance? I dunno, just tossing that out there as an idea.

I think it's worth using the honey. While it won't cure you, it buys you a lot of time. During the time when the honey is treating your infection, the infection % will not rise at all. Meaning you gain 10% worth of infection in TIME. The amount of time it takes for the infection to reduce by 5%, and then the amount of time it takes for the infection to raise back that 5%. During that time you should be actively hunting down tree stumps for more and more honey. They're commonplace enough. Every time you grab another jar, immediately consume it. You extend your life AND it stacks. If you down 1 honey, reduce your infection by 4%, then down another jar you won't waste any of the first jar - it'll add 5% to the original and give you a 10% reduction over time. If you can't find enough tree stumps for honey, try to find a city and look for a shamway (They often have well-stocked pharmacies), look for a Pop-N-Pills hospital (Dangerous because big and full of zombies but good loot is available), or look for a Pop-N-Pills store. A Crack a book store also has a teeny tiny chance of having Wasteland Treasures : Honey book which gives you a teeny tiny chance of getting honey from ANY tree, not just tree stumps, which can be super worthwhile. There are a lot of ways to live through this, giving up is IMO the last resort - fight on! Keep at it! You can get past this! Show your fierce determination to overcome adversity and other such motivational phrases!

Likewise, if you're facing down a horde of zombies throwing your weapon - even if you have a backup - is a bad idea. What if the backup breaks? What if you can't reach the spot where you threw the first one to recover it until much later? It turns a multi-use thrusting weapon with excellent range into a single-use projectile, which is fine against 1 or 2 zombies but terrible against a horde. Don't get me wrong here - I love the spear. I love the idea of using it against zombies. It's by far my favorite melee weapon, but the throw makes it difficult to use effectively. If I have multiple spears they either take up multiple spots on my already crowded hotbar, or they take up multiple spots within my pack and encumber me much more than other melee weapons - they don't stack, which makes them far more cumbersome than other weapons. Anything that can bring the spear up to par with the other weapons in the game is, in my opinion, wonderful. Hence the idea of using bungee cords to make a DIY-retraction system.

Meanwhile masters of the sea figured out how to tie a rope to a spear (harpoon) and use it not only to kill their prey but also drag it back to them, or to recover the spear if it doesn't get hooked into the beasties. No reason that wouldn't work well on land too!

Permadeath is often a feature a lot of survival games are hesitant about, but I think it's a good option for those who want the added challenge of doing a 'perfect' run. That said, I think there's 2 good ways it could be implemented in the game. 1) Complete permadeath. When you're done with a run, you're done. finito. The save deletes and you start over, either on the same map or a different one. 2) Character permadeath. When you die, your character's done. You can spawn in a new character (Heck, maybe even force it to use a different character you've created?) and have to level up again but your old character's stuff is still out there in the world, if you can find it. Of course, depending on the gamestage your old character was at, their stuff might have degraded a bit and/or zombies might have infested their base, making reclaiming it anything other than a walk in the park..... Personally I like the idea of my survivor dying, his stuff getting scattered around, and stumbling across it as I survive the area he died in. Or travelling to my former base only to find it overrun with cobwebs and zombies - lots of useful loot, equipment, and amenities if I can deal with the ferals inside. That sort of thing. Would make for a fun system where death simply means passing the torch to someone new, that kind of thing.

I see a lot of people in-game and on forums disparaging spears because of their power attack being a throw. It's strong and penetrates armor but leaves you wide open when facing multiple zombies at once, or if one hit doesn't immediately kill the zombie. I think the throw is a good idea which gives the weapon variety and makes it stand out from the other weapons out there, but I think it could be improved with one simple weapon mod : Bungee cord mod. Spears only. Effect : Automatically returns spears to the owner's hand after a brief delay (1.5-2s delay).

WILD ASS RANDOM THEORY: Armageddon came from a meteor shower. Some of those meteors impacted the moon, which altered its orbit slightly. Now it approaches closer every 7-ish days, in an elliptical orbit. Many of the smaller meteors burned up or detonated in the atmosphere, suffusing it with foreign particulate matter. The particles in the atmosphere are sensitive to the change in gravity. When the moon gets closer, they 'shine' faintly red producing the red haze we see each Blood Moon. In addition, those particles from the meteor shower exist within the Infected and affect their physiology leading to improved metabolism and heightened senses that allow them to hear a survivor's heartbeat and the softest footsteps, smell their natural body odor/pheromones, etc. In theory, protection during a blood moon is possible if you're in a completely soundproof, vibration-dampening room that's been hermetically sealed and the air outside has been recycled enough to reduce the chemical presence of a living survivor to the absolute minimum. But of course in the apocalypse a setup like that is completely infeasible so instead we just use guns, walls, traps, and the like for safety.

Thank you for this. I went ahead and joined the PvE wipeless server since I thought it'd be nice to join a relatively new server where I wouldn't be dozens or more levels below everyone else.

Even the writing could be 'outsourced' a bit to the community. A bit of a bonus for the early access folks. It's simple - set up a forum, have players write up a little story of one of their fun experiences. Take the ones that are the most impactful or best written and turn them into in-game events that happened 'in the past' and make it part of a tattered old journal or scrap of a diary or something like that. Take the tale of a survivor hiding from zeds in a house only to accidentally make too much noise and lure them in and turn it into backstory and lore. Maybe explain the irradiated zombies as a person in a nuke plant who deliberately causes a meltdown to try to kill 'em off only it backfired and made 'em worse. Have someone write a story in a letter about a brother who's planning to take revenge on the Duke for killing a family member or something. Little things like that can flesh out the world so much, without substantially changing the overarching story. A note you find on a zombie talking about how he tried to lock himself away in a closet to protect his family adds flavor without actually committing to any story beats you have to worry about later. No plot holes or anything. Later on it could even be incorporated into a new kind of quest. "Find out what happened to so-and-so", you travel to a POI and search around until you find the lore object the trader wants.

IMHO, adding bits of story and lore throughout the world as the game gets developed would be fun. For example, we get the letter from the Duke and Noah's intro when we start a new game and do the tutorial. Finding a slip of paper in a trash can giving more lore about the Duke would be really interesting. It wouldn't require active story writing, wouldn't be about quests, but could flesh out the backstory of what happened in the world before we were dumped in the middle of Navezgane (Or whatever map we're on). Trader dialogue already reflects this a bit, with Jen mentioning now she can make her payment to the Duke when you complete a quest. What if in one of those nice hidey spots we find fun loot in there was a hastily-scribbled letter from a survivor hiding from the duke? Or what if there were scraps of old newspapers detailing how everything deteriorated to the point we reached already? Crafting a story you move through is one thing, but adding bits of backstory and lore to the game world that are found at random would be significantly less of a time investment and would give the players who've reached endgame something to look for and collect... And unlike an ongoing story, you wouldn't need to design tons of quests and NPC interactions and this and that, it's just random stuff added for fluff that can be put in loot tables to give the community some teasers and bits and pieces of fun info while they spend the bulk of their time working on gameplay systems. Just my 2 cents.

It might sound weird, but I'm very much a lone wolf type. I like to build on my own, I like to hunt and kill and explore and quest by myself - but I also REALLY like to be around an active group of people who are chatting and teaming up and trading and such. I'm not big on PvP and prefer a PvE server with a lot of people around, but at the same time I don't really like the servers that make things TOO easy with +500% XP or +300% loot or whatever. I like to be challenged and to work for my survival. That might sound contradictory, sorry, I'm just kind of a weird guy in that way. Is there a good place for me out there?