Riamus

As I said, if they made it bright everywhere with no lights, there'd be no reason to use lights. That's intentional. There are some lighting/shadow improvements that are being done but the main idea of dark interiors when you have no light is intentional. Besides, if it's a big problem, you do have a torch when you start. Again, what you want isn't what others want. Seeing a map that is filled with tons of names of POI would be pointless, imo. That's something with little enough value that it would be something for a mod, not for vanilla. The compass shows you if the last zombies are above or below you. Maybe not what floor, but up or down. That's enough. The game shouldn't need to hold your hand. I would agree that some POI could have the number of remaining zombies that trigger the compass display adjusted as some larger POI don't show the remaining zombie locations as soon as I think would make sense. As far as a speed run goes, if your intention is to speed through a POI and still kill every zombie, then you'll probably be faster by following the intended path. Breaking through is when you want to skip stuff more than if you want to kill everything faster. At least in most POI. They don't want the chainsaw to be a weapon of choice. It's there as a tool and just for fun with zombies but not as a main weapon. They aren't likely to change that. However, changing damage on a weapon/tool is very easy if you want to mod it. The only thing I'd say about picking up misplaced blocks is that I think there should be a timer that lets you do so for maybe 5 seconds. But after that, it shouldn't be possible to pick it back up. I don't build with steel often because of this... at least, not until I have a weapon that can one-shot a misplaced block to remove it. But you get far more experience upgrading blocks anyhow, so it isn't a big deal. Just a pain if you misplace a steel block without a good weapon to break it. Why not just use more than one generator? I use a ton of lighting, as well as sensors and powered doors, and I don't use switches... ever.

"Become" meaningless? You say that like the magazines made it meaningless. Crafting wasn't meaningful even before magazines. I actually craft more with the magazines than I did before them but it's still only specific things because I choose to loot often and so will always get better stuff faster that way. It does need improving, though.

Although a great idea, I'm not sure that we'd see it. Changing wall paint/wallpaper would probably be easy except that the choices available are so limited that you really can't do much change and still have it look okay. For something like that to be worth it, they'd need to give us more paints. That in itself would be amazing but they seem intent on that being limited due to memory usage instead of finding a way to increase it. But layout variations inside buildings like you suggest isn't something that is going to get done randomly (AI isn't there yet). That means it requires being done by hand and basically creating new POI for each variation. If you do that, you can already get the variations by just having those as extra POI that might get placed. No need for anything extra beyond the work to make variations of the POI. I don't see them doing that -- after all, a completely new POI is more interesting than a variation in an existing POI's layout. But it is something any POI designer could choose to do themselves as custom POI. Again, though... it isn't as interesting as a new POI, so most probably wouldn't want to do that. As far as loot, they can already place loot in different places. Any object, including loot, can be done as a part, allowing it to be randomized. The problem with loot is that they do a large loot room. You don't want that to be somewhere you reach before getting to the end of the POI when following the intended path, so it needs to be at the end of whatever path you intend players to use. It would make breaking through directly to the loot room difficult since it could be in different places but at that point, you're just trying to force people to play the way you want rather than really doing something to make the game better. If loot was scattered instead of in a loot room, you could easily spread that out randomly. But they like loot rooms and I think a lot of players do as well, so I don't think they'll move away from that other than perhaps making a POI now and then that doesn't use a loot room.

A quick example of rivers being placed at biome boundaries... This could make fore some interesting maps but requires some trial and error to get something that will work well in the game. Many biome transitions go straight through mountains with noise biomes, which end up looking bad. If you use environmental biomes, you can end up with a circle river around a mountain. A handcrafted biome map could be the best use for this option.

I think they've said they aren't going to add animal husbandry but it might be something they'll consider as a DLC. They did seem to be considering fishing, though. But I haven't seen any comments about it be the devs in quite a while, so not sure where they stand on it now. I'm pretty sure they said no to horses in the past. I know there's a mod that has horses. Although horses are fun to ride, when you're in a zombie game, it seems unlikely that any horse will live long. I'd be interested in display racks if there were more variety in weapons and armor. They'd still be nice for using in a POI and could be okay for base decorations, but when every single "X" weapon looks like every other "X" weapon, it doesn't seem worth it to me. Of course, Skyrim did it and most their weapons are pretty plain, so I suppose it is fine. Stuff filling in with rain sounds nice, but there are problems with that. The current weather system doesn't track weather. It determines what the weather is where you are located but nowhere else. It would need a complete rework to have any real way to fill holes with water. They *are* updating weather in the future, so that could be possible. But also keep in mind that rain doesn't usually fill dirt holes up with water unless it's raining really hard. Water soaks into the ground pretty quickly except in certain cases, such as a very clay-laden terrain. So having things like mines actually filling with water isn't very realistic within the timeframe of a game. I can also see many people complaining about their mines being filled with water. A kickstand for all three 2-wheeled vehicles would be great.

Not stopping horde night before 4am is odd, but not exactly much of an issue. Other than the early horde nights, they usually last the full time anyhow. The issue with sights is something many people complain about, while many others don't care. It could get changed but probably won't. Water isn't complicated. It's just different. Skill trees are fine. LBR can use some TLC but isn't going anywhere. I can see fine inside if there are windows, so check your graphics settings. If there aren't any windows and you don't use a light, then it makes sense that it would be very hard to see. If it was easy to see without a light source, then there'd be no reason to have torches or helmet light mods in the game. Sound options and other settings have been said would be added as part of the UI update. What exactly they'll add is unknown. Some things not being able to be picked up seems intentional, so unlikely to get changed. If there is something specific you feel really needs to be allowed to pick up after placing it, you should say what it is and why it is necessary to be able to pick it up. The game isn't a casual building game where you place things and then move them all over the place afterwards and that's not a bad thing. Some lights are bright and some are dim. I would agree that having the option to adjust the brightness /intensity of lights (as well as color) would be great. But if they don't offer that, then it's just a matter of using lights that aren't so bright if that bothers you. Lighting has a big impact on FPS and is why POI designers often have pretty strict guidelines for how they do the lights if they care about not lagging out the players, so it's possible they won't allow changing light settings. It would be really bad if the map added labels to every single POI. Traders are useful because they have value. Nothing else has any real value to know it on the map. Quests are marked and you can mark anything you want if there's something you care about. But what you care about and what others do aren't going to be the same, so the game shouldn't be marking anything other than traders. Changing labels instead of deleting and replacing them would be nice. The game should *not* kill a zombie just so you can complete a quest. That's not a very good idea. Quests are easy to complete. If you're down to only a few zombies, they'll be shown on your compass anyhow. If you don't want to follow the intended path through a POI, you'll probably miss stuff and spend a long time trying to find the last zombies. It's better to go through the intended way at least once to learn where the zombies are. Then you can bash your way through and you'll know where to go to kill the zombies. The only issue right now is that some buttons don't work and unless you break them so they trigger the zombies, any zombies attached to the button trigger will never spawn. That's a known issue that I'd assume will be corrected for 1.0. They intentionally made tools weak against zombies and strong against resources. Otherwise, people would mostly only use things that work both as tool and weapon and ignore everything else so they can save space. Player animations are being updated. Whether that includes different eating animations for different food items is unknown but it's not really that big of a problem. Why should you need to be allowed to craft an industrial generator? Lol! Magazines and Books *are* marked when read/completed as was mentioned by someone else. It just isn't as clear as it could be for new players. Once you know it's there, it is fine.

It isn't intended that you max out the skills within the first week. You can easily unlock every skill by around day 30-40 with 2 hour days, double that for 1 hour days. Making it faster isn't a good idea. And making you choose what to do isn't a bad thing either. I never max out a tree's attribute points right away. It isn't necessary and I use skills from every tree instead of focusing on one thing. Sure, it means I don't do the best possible with my weapon as quickly, but that's a choice I can make and it's not bad to be able to choose such a route. Having it be at the cost of having better skills in one tree faster is a good thing.

You sure do want to make it appear far worse than it actually is, don't you? Heh. First of all, unless you really want to unlock everything, half the stuff isn't necessary. For example, if you never use a spear, unlocking spear books is not necessary. You can cut your magazines by around half, give or take, just by ignoring those you don't have any use for. It is also extremely easy to get tons of magazines with little effort. There are only a couple magazines that are particularly time consuming to get - vehicles, being one of them. But if you don't feel like spending much time looking, it's very easy to just quest at bookstores and you'll find everything you need in a very short amount of time. You should also avoid being the Jack of All Trades if you want to get magazines completed quickly. The more you spread out your skills, the less chance you will get the magazines you want. If you focus on one thing, you'll get those magazines quickly, but if you focus on 10 things, you're going to take much longer to complete anything. Of course, I spread skills out anyhow, but I'm not in any rush. After all, magazines are for crafting and most crafting I don't have any need for. As far as books go, they have always been random and could take a long time to get the ones you wanted. But you can use bookstores if you really don't want to wait. Now, I am not saying the magazine system is well-designed because I don't really think it is. There are a number of problems with it that should be fixed. But they aren't going back to LBD, so that's not an option in vanilla. What you can do that would actually have a chance of being listened to is to give constructive feedback that explains the problems and offers valid solutions to those problems that they would consider (saying to go to LBD isn't a solution they'll consider). If all you post is a complaint about it, it'll just be ignored for the most part and nothing with come of it. If you just want to complain and don't care about offering options that might actually be listened to, then that's up to you. But if you actually care about trying to get the game in a better state, try offering constructive feedback rather than just complaining about stuff. It'll have a better chance of actually getting somewhere.

Not sure about the snake, but the chicken is in the most recent or almost most recent screenshot of the updated animals. It's partially hidden, but there's two there... one alive and one dead for whatever reason.

The trailer looks good.

Update for the next release... Scale Height Map can now be used on specific biomes. Depending on how you do your settings, you can get some pretty interesting transitions between biomes. In this example, I scaled snow and wasteland up a lot and so I got these cliffs. Not exactly what you want on your actual map but it shows what you can do. With less scaling, you can still get specific biomes to be raised higher than others or lower mountains in specific biomes. Below are 2 more examples, where I used separate Scale Height Map commands for each biome, with them scaling the biome up most for the highest biome and less for each lower biome. I also increased the smoothing for the biome transition area. The effect you get is a slight change in elevation between biomes. With a bit of adjustment, this has potential to make for some interesting maps. Icons will now appear next to your selected command and any related commands. In this screenshot, I have a heightmap command selected, so all heightmap commands show the mountain icon next to them. This makes it easy to find all related commands. Different commands have different icons. New command: Create Single Town. This new command lets you create a town in a specific location. It is not a replacement for using a Mask Map but gives you an alternate way to place towns in specific locations. Mask Maps let you specify where towns can be placed and they will be placed only within the bounds of the mask. This command lets you specify a starting point for the town and it will then generate a town in that area but the town is not confined to a specific location the way it would be with Mask Maps. You can select the town type that you want to place with this command. New parameter for Create Towns allows you to balance the number of each tile variant you have on your map. Tile variants are tiles that share the same district and the same tile type. For example, if you have 5 tiles for the Residential district that are Corner tiles, this parameter will attempt to place an equal number of each of those 5 variants on your map. If unchecked, this is entirely random, making it possible to have a lot of one variant and none of another variant. Prior versions were random (i.e. unchecked). This will likely help those of you who are using custom tiles. It won't make much difference if you're only using vanilla tiles as there are not usually any variants to choose from, though it sounds like that may change in 1.0/A22. New parameters weight_outskirt and weight_center for the Town Property List allow you to have more or less of specific districts in the center or outskirt area of your town. For example, if you have 3 districts (commercial, downtown, industrial) in the center of your town, you would normally get about the same number of tiles for each district. If you choose to weight the downtown district at twice the others, you will see about twice the downtown tiles in your town than the other districts. These are in addition to the new items I mentioned above. And stamps are almost ready for initial testing, so we are getting closer to having them ready. There are also some new things that are being looked at that may or may not appear in the next release. These include creating plateaus, placing rivers along the transition area between biomes, so each biome is separated by a river, and automatically filling any basins (depressions) on your map with water, regardless of what elevation it is at on your map, if it meats certain criteria. So there are a lot of things to look forward to in the next release and the following releases.

Slight correction... faatal said that they'll try to prevent a broken save between versions but that changes might not make that possible. At least, unless I misunderstand what he said about it. Question: Before 1.0 is released, will someone go through the POI XML and remove all the unused stuff? Things like AllowedTownships and Zoning and stuff like that? Having stuff from old versions that's no longer used just makes the XML more confusing for anyone trying to make their own POI and thinking that some parameter will do something when it doesn't. I know it's a minor thing but it would be nice.

And yet if they said simply, "We're going to call it 1.0" and didn't include any explanation at all, then everyone (including probably you), would be complaining about that. They aren't going to tell us the details about private business decisions between them and Sony or Microsoft. So they either tell us absolutely nothing (pitchforks come out) or tell us a half truth like they did (still pitchforks, but fewer). There isn't a perfect option for them when they aren't going to tell you the specific details. And there's no reason they should have to either. Besides, I thought it was pretty clear that this move was almost guaranteed to be due to Microsoft or Sony, so they let you read between the lines to find out the (likely) truth as it was. That's enough. As SylenThunder mentioned, this was responded to earlier. In short, they are planning on trying to keep you from needing to start new games with these updates but cannot guarantee it won't be required. They will try to make the saves at least possible to load. Mods should work similar to saves and probably are less likely to break. The biggest thing that may break are POI if they change blocks again in any of the releases. That being said, I would not expect the bandit release to work properly without starting a new game. It changes too much for that, imo.

I've done that but wouldn't say that I like it. 😁 Besides, A21 drops aren't ever all that good, so not worth it.

I agree with you on this. It is one thing to have integration that can only happen rarely that can tip the balance for good or bad without it breaking the game. It is something else entirely to be able to trigger practically non-stop hordes and stuff like that just to troll the streamer. I don't find that fun to watch at all. The Dev stream where they showed off the integrations leading up to A21 was not at all enjoyable to watch for me. I rarely watch anyone play a game anyhow. I never saw the appeal. I normally only so that if I'm considering buying the game and a steam of it happens to be available so I can get an idea what the game is really like compared to what the advertisement videos of the game show. Twitch for me is mainly just for things like live AD&D campaigns with pretty well known actors/actresses and voice actors. Those can be a lot of fun.

Fair enough. Most are in-have transactions intended to get you to buy something while playing when you are invested in whatever you are doing. Price is small enough for each item to make it seem cheap so you will buy one, then another, and another, until as you said, they pay many times the cost of the game itself. And yes, I would agree that if they sold a single outfit as a DLC, I would probably consider it a microtransaction even if sold outside of the game. Either way, calling a cosmetic DLC a microtransaction is nothing more than sensationalism intended to get a rise out of people.

Why is everyone saying there are microtransactions? A microtransaction is when single items or single item sets or something along those lines are sold. It is like in modern Assassin's Creed have, where you can buy skins for your horse, for your armor, for your weapons, etc. These are purchased one skin or skin set at a time. Those are microtransaction. A pack of multiple outfits isn't a microtransaction. Now, I don't think they said how many outfits you would get in the DLC but I would think at least 5 sets and probably cost to 10. That is a cosmetic DLC, not a microtransaction. Not only that, but microtransactions are conducted within a game. A DLC is purchased outside of a game. Now, if you want to say you don't like cosmetic DLC as well as microtransactions, I'm with you. I don't like either and I certainly won't pay money for cosmetic items unless maybe if it is a really big pack for a really low price. But let's not sensationalize things. Call it what it is... A cosmetic DLC.

To expand on what ZZTong asked, POI that have keys or buttons need to be on each person's computer for the keys to work. They are not server side only. It is also a good idea to have any custom POI on each person's computer because you can't see them at a distance if that aren't on your computer.

Ease of access is one thing... when it matters. Having to make one change in settings isn't difficult. Better to be secure in this instance than save someone from making a change to settings one time per save. As I said, the difference between users who forget to make this change is significant... potentially getting stuff messed up in one way or another (destroyed, stolen, etc.) versus having to exit the game to change the setting and then load the game back up. In the end, yes, end users are responsible for making sure they do things, but that doesn't mean developers can't make security a priority. Especially when it doesn't have any significant impact on users.

With 1.0 coming out and plans to finish everything in under 2 years, I'm wondering if there has been any discussion about improving the POI Editor and World Editor? The World Editor lacks the ability to do anything besides mess with POI placements. It would be a huge improvement to be able to save changes to the world that you make in it. And the POI Editor has numerous bugs and many of the controls are either confusing or hard to use or simply undocumented. In short, it's clunky. It was okay to be left in that state while in early access while the game itself was being worked on, but now that things are coming to fruition, it seems like it's a good time to get these updated to be more useful. I'm sure even TFP POI designers would appreciate better editors and I know the rest of us would as well. So... any chance they'll be updated and improved? Maybe not for 1.0, but at least somewhat soon? Please.

Well, you're definitely out of luck for armor considering they are redoing armor. And I doubt they will consider changing weapons when the game is leaving early access in around a month. I do agree that some weapon progressions could be a bit better. Many of the lowest tier weapons could be more cheaply made weapons and probably make more sense. But in the end, they want around 3 tiers of things and what they have fits into that and works.

Although I agree about this, I would say that even if most people play multiplayer and pay attention to the settings, it would make sense to have default settings set to not show online. After all, if you forget to turn that off and someone joins and messes stuff up on purpose, that isn't good. Yet if you forget to turn it on when you want multiplayer, the worst you have to deal with is exiting the game and turning it on. Given the difference in results if you forget, I think it is better to hide the online status by default. I also think it would be good to be able to change that setting while playing the game and not only when starting it. I don't see any reason you should have to exit the game just to change if it shows online. Some other settings for the save could also be allowed to be changed within the game as well, imo.

A possible way to make this work with RWG is to have it check the edge of the POI to see if water is touching the edge anywhere. If so, it attempts to place the POI where the water on the POI connects to the water on the map. Granted, that info isn't in the XML. Still tricky, but it would be a good way to handle it, I think.

You can also set number of players to one and no one can join, though making the game unlisted is better.

Oh, and another POI type that would be great would be ones with docks and a way for them to spawn in places where they stick out into the water. To be clear, I'm not talking about including water in the POI for the dock like on the wedding POI. I'm talking about a dock POI that can spawn next to a river or a lake or the sea, with the dock sticking into the water. More cave or mine POI that spawn well in random locations. A large bus station that is open concept rather than dungeon style would be nice. Maybe another field hospital or two. You would expect to see them all around with this kind of epidemic. Perhaps even some POI that include some special lighting or fog effects or other ambient effects. No cable POI do this but you can see it in and custom POI and it looks really good. Hide some lights and add some fog and you get some really interesting effects. Of course, you need it to look like it belongs, so that is the trick. And there are of course performance concerns with those things, but if you keep it small, like in only one part of the POI, it should be fine.