Riamus

I get that stars vary and there is overlap, especially between different quality of items (stone, iron, steel). But to have a level 2 steel spear and get a level 4 steel spear in quest rewards and thinking that I have an upgrade only to find out the level 4 is quite a bit worse than the level 2 was upsetting. Oh well. Hopefully they balance the stat levels before gold.

Another variation of that could be that if another trader is selling something, you can request it from your current trader at a higher price to cover having it brought to your trader. This saves you from running to every trader looking for something, but costs more to cover gas and time (and takes maybe 24 hours to arrive).

That's interesting to know. It has seemed like everything was always the same in a game and it sounds like although things can be randomized at creation, they are not within a game. Still partially useful in making games differ from one another even if they don't keep a game changing throughout play.

Now that you have that song stuck in my head, we need a card table with a game halfway finished of solitaire... Perhaps with a deck of 51. Gotta lose at least one for the apocalypse after all. 😁

I have had this happen with guns as well, though it has been a while since it happened and that might have been in 20.5... not certain. Now I seem to almost always hit, so either something changed or I just got better at knowing where to aim. Probably the latter. Lol. It may also have been that it happened with pipe guns, which I never use anymore, so that may also be the difference. I don't remember exactly what I was using other than a hand gun.

I would love to see some randomness in containers and loot rooms. Zombies are already somewhat randomized in that it will select only some of the possible zombies each time unless the POI is set to see all possible zombies. Having things like cabinets be randomly open or closed, having multiple possible loot room locations with only one chosen, having crates appear in only some of the possible locations so, like zombies, each run is a little different. Since it's already being done for zombies, the code is already there and mostly it is just copy and paste with some limited changes to handle the different objects. Of course, each POI would have to be updated and that takes much more time. It would still be nice, though.

I can see what you mean about the character background. It isn't too unusual in a game to have a restriction based on your choices. Any RPG (which this sort of is) has such limitations based on class choices and often race choices as well. Although this is a sandbox game, I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with having some restrictions. You pick what you like most. And since a large number of players are in multiplayer games, you have certain players pick up certain backgrounds to allow for all customization options in their game. Still, I'd be open to having more customizations available to everyone as well, particularly the light colors, which because it's already available in the POI editor, should be easy to enable within the game. More paintings/posters would also be nice as you're always seeing the same few over and over. Repeating POI isn't too bad because there are a lot to see, so it's not constant. But with the paintings, there are only a few (3?) and a limited number of posters, so you see the same things in every POI. Having more variety would certainly help in the POIs, but would also be nice in your base.

Just wanted to say thanks for that. I managed to find the drone and get it back and then used creative mode to get my equipment back more or less. I appreciate the help.

Hmm. I hadn't thought of using god mode. I'll try that out. Other than being upset about it, losing the hotbar items isn't too bad. I have backups, though lower level. And at my loot stage/game stage, I'm sure I'll get new ones at the previous level soon enough. Was more interested in recovering the drone. Thanks. 😁

Beyond more information, here's are general instruction for installing a mod on an item in case you're missing a step. Click the item you want to add a mod to. Click modify. Look in your inventory for any mods that show a green mod icon on them. These are available for that item. If the mod icon is gray, it cannot be used in the item you clicked modify on. Drag an appropriate mod onto the item under the mod section (cosmetic is for dyes). Alternatively, on PC, shift click the mod to automatically add it while in modify mode.

I'm still not sure why this is a problem with the exception of loot rooms. Anything else can be looted everywhere, so is it a big deal? As mentioned, other than the first time through, you cannot double dip any destructible loot like construction materials and salvaged items. Those are generally the things people would want to double dip on. And doing it once is not really that big of a deal. Other loot containers are random items that you could find randomly anywhere else, with the exception of bookshelves, medicine shelves/cabinets and mailboxes. I suppose those could be an issue, but not a significant one. Other than bookshelves, the others are limited enough in quantity in a POI that they aren't a big deal. Only bookshelves might be an actual problem and I'm sure something other than auto starting quests can be done to solve that. For loot rooms, all that is needed is to make the containers non-interactive (other than destroying them) except while on a quest. Easy fix. When it comes down to it, consider that once you know the quest POIs in your game, you could just as easily check what quest is there, not accept it, go loot the POI, drive back and get the quest, then go complete the quest. Sure, it is a bit more effort since you have to travel, but anyone who really wants to double dip is still going to do so. No change will prevent that unless you make quest POIs locked to only allow access while on the quest, which isn't a good option at all. Making it so that leaving a quest area doesn't fail the quest but instead restarts you like it does if you exit the game in the middle of a quest would make adding an auto start acceptable, though still not necessary imo. Not sure why they don't do that already. They could also make it so each container that has been looted within the past 6 game hours can't be looted again even if reset for a quest (not counting quest containers). The downside is that they have to track everything you loot in the past 6 hours, which isn't ideal. But it does make it so you aren't as likely to wait to complete the quest for 6 hours just to double dip. Granted even 6 game hours might not be enough as some higher tier quests may take more that long to compete so you could complete it and then compete it again right away. Might need a longer time frame. Still not ideal either way, though.

They did this on horde night for me. Many of them say attacking the nearby telephone pole rather than my base. It is too bad that they do that. I was thinking it would look nice to put a relay on top of it and run wire from there to my base. Just got the visual effect. 😁 But with zombies knocking poles down, it isn't worth it.

I understand what you are saying about double dipping. I admit to doing that myself for certain things that might be either outside or just inside a quest POI before starting the quest. I don't mind removing the ability to do that if that is what they want to do. However, I don't like the idea of automatically starting a quest considering you fail if you leave the area. Here are some situations where this is a problem... You have multiple quests (multiple traders or more often the open trade path what and a regular quest from that trader) and go past one of them to reach the next. It automatically starts as you get there and then you either are stuck doing it or else fail it because you want to go to the other one. Note that this also affects if you are trying to go do something else while holding a quest as well and happen to go past your quest area. And it will affect multiplayer shared quests as well if you have a shared quests and your own quest. You can't just have it affect current quest either because otherwise people will just unmark the quest, double dip, and remark it. There may be a way to prevent double dipping, but auto starting quests is a bad idea if you fail when leaving the area. I think this is a minor issue anyhow. It can only be done once per loot reset and any destructible loot items like salvaged cars or construction materials won't reset except after you start a quest, so you can only double dip those once per POI per game. So it isn't too major. Lot containers resetting isn't a big deal except for the loot room at the end. And again, since it is once per loot reset, I still don't think it's much of a problem.

I wish think that the saving needs improved. At the very least, if it tries to save and gets an error, it should not then try to overwrite backup files as well. I had an unexpected issue with hard drive space going to 0 while playing the game due to unexpected background update unrelated to the game. The game failed to save and then failed the save on the .bak file as well, causing loss of both files. I'm not sure the best option if cloud saves aren't possible. In reference to Roland questioning when you would make such a save, it would be on exit only as many cloud saves are done on steam and other platforms. Local saves can be fine whenever the game wants, but cloud saves are backups of the play session. You might lose hours if you played a long time at once, but you wouldn't lose an entire game. Much better option. But moot if the saves are too large for that. I think maybe the game could give the option of a separate backup location where it would save 2 copies of your saves upon exiting the game (this can be optional for people who don't have space for it). This allows saving backups to a separate drive (or even to something like Google Drive or Microsoft One Drive if possible for people with those set up) so that even a complete loss of the hard drive with the normal save installed won't result in loss of the saves. This could even be set to only keep one backup, but to only overwrite that backup after successfully loading the current save say that you know the save is good before overwriting the backup. Otherwise, two backups allow a user to see if a game fails to load before losing the latest backup (oldest backup would have been overwritten with corrupted save upon exiting the game, then you load the game and fail to open the save, so you or the game itself can load the other save without having lost the data on the save due to backing up the corrupted save. Just one option. Also, just having backups of all days it's good instead of only a few parts of the save. I lost my drone (it is still on the map but invisible) and its inventory as well as my tool belt when my game failed to save a region properly when I had zero space. At least the rest of the game is okay, but there is no way to get those back. And yes, me running out of drive space isn't the game's problem. I have a small SSD for boot and because the game takes forever to load and runs poorly on my HDD, I had to install it on the small SSD, which means very little free space and unexpected updates/downloads can be an issue for me. Eventually, I'll update the computer to but for now I live with it. Still, I have enough space on my HDD to save stuff if it wasn't saving to %appdata% it was at least backing up somewhere else.

One thing I've noticed regarding performance on a 4 year old mid range desktop (at that time) is that playing the game in the pregen maps (at least the 8k one), I get really bad lag in cities (even smaller ones), especially when on a vehicle. But in RWG maps, this rarely happens. Of course, I'm not on ultra and I'm in the process of slowly turning up settings from what were medium because of the severe lag on the pregen map, but I'm able to sit at 60fps most of the time even in cities when not moving around quickly, and bounce between 25-60 when moving (it bounces between those constantly). If I turn off vsync, which I usually do in games, I can get up to 80fps, but it fluctuates even standing still down to around 20, so I don't bother. So even on a slower machine, the game works pretty well... If you avoid pregen8k and perhaps the other pregen maps as well. This may be why there are such large discrepancies in comments, where some with high end machines suffer severe lag even on lower settings while others do not on ultra settings. If you are using the pregen maps, try a RWG map and see how it works for you. You might see most of the lag disappear. As to ultra settings being "endless", I think that is a mistake. If you make that preset such that it will keep being better on better hardware, but at the same time it is so much better that high end hardware users are always having lag because of it, that isn't a good thing. I noticed one setting having "ultra+". Perhaps have ultra preset not be endless, but allow a custom option for specific settings of ultra+ that ARE endless. That should make ultra work better for most users and still allow this endless option. Just a thought.

The spear is one if my two favorite melee weapons in the game. It's long reach makes it possible to kill 5-6 enemies coming at you at once with melee without getting hit if you are good at timing your attacks and moving. Sure, one you have a decent gun that's better (I ignore pipe weapons most of them time except if it's all I have for the first horde night), but until I have a good ammo production, I stick to melee most of the time. The other melee weapon being the stun baton at least at level 4 (less isn't really any good). For the spear, the power attack being a throw is annoying and it had gotten me into trouble when I get jumped unexpectedly by a large group of zombies and accidentally click RMB instead of LMB and then have to try and grab my spear again or switch weapons, which is very inconvenient. I support any change that let's me never throw my spear. There will never be a reason I want to do so. A one shot weapon that you have to chase down is useless to me.

This is tied to how blocks are set up to attach to one another on all sides. If you have a top block that is against a wall, it won't fall, for example. But if it isn't touching anything other than what it is sitting on, it will fall. I think different block types should have different attachment values for each side such that a stack of concrete can't stay up if only attached to anything other than it's bottom edge. The same for something like a bag. This has to vary by item as things like wall blocks need to be able to attach on all sides. Maybe it is just set when creating the POI, but not affecting building things in game.

Here are a couple suggestions I had posted for the game in general discussion. I condensed them for here so they are easier to read. A "Lock" option for items in inventory to prevent moving the item(s) when using the R key. For use with vehicles (keeping gas cans in there) and drones with medical mod (keeping medical supplies in there). Refuel a vehicle that has Gas in its own inventory without having to transfer the Gas to our inventory to refuel and then transfer it back to the vehicle. Make it possible to retry lockpicking after grabbing a lockpick without having to hold E and selecting it again. This is a pain when you break lockpicks multiple times in a row. I saw the video of the new gas fire environmental hazard. The pipe was red. This should really be changed. In the US at least, red is generally your fire suppression/sprinkler system and the game is based on the US of you go by the flags. Gas lines, if color coded, are usually yellow. If not color coded, they'd usually be black. There may be different colors in some states and quite possibly elsewhere in the world, of course. But I think the number of red gas pipes around the world are very low, even if they aren't yellow or black. Better to use the color most commonly seen or else black (or your unpainted iron/steel color that you use for other pipes) to avoid color coding entirely. The game has some minor character creation options that I feel are nice to have in the game. I'd like to suggest another option to consider for further character creation choices. I think adding something like a character background would be nice. What I'm suggesting is having basically an option of prior job, career, or hobby. Here's the idea of how it would work. The player chooses the background when creating their character (it would require being able to have separate profiles for each game played). This background would allow for a special "ability" that is not game changing and does not affect your ability to play the game in any way. It should *not* be something where players feel one of the choices is better than the other for meta reasons. Here are some possibilities: If you were an artist, you might have the ability to make unique paintings (it doesn't have to be more than a few) that cannot otherwise be made or purchased or found that you can hang in your base. If you were an electrician, you might have the ability to create lights that are different colors for your base, vehicles, and light mods. I know you can change light values/colors when editing POI, but I don't believe that's currently an option in the game itself when making your base. This might also allow you to make undercarriage lights for your vehicles (maybe even the bicycle? ). Those are just a couple of examples. As you can see, they don't have any "real" effect on the game and only offer a cosmetic option. I think that's crucial. The lighting itself is already available, so would be a very quick thing to add to the game and even the artwork wouldn't be too hard to add. Undercarriage lighting would be new and would take more time to add, of course. Other options include a background that offers a few extra "paints" (wallpapers can be from a separate background from paint colors or textures depending on how you do it), being able to add a logo to armor/clothing instead of dye, being able to make a flag with a number of options for how it looks, etc. I believe the additional option for characters would interest both new and old players alike without risking unbalancing the game and with minimal effort.

New archipelago map confirmed with 1000 islands. 😁 Considering in every A20 gamer I play, I get way more archery books than anything else and easily max it out before any others even though I never use archery, it doesn't sound like much of a change. 😀

My game crashed, causing multiple issues. The worst being the loss of my hotbar items. Those are gone for good, but one other issue that I'm hoping might be possible to recover is my drone. It was following me when I crashed. Now, it shows up on the map and compass next to the front gate of one of the Rekt traders. When I go there, I can't see the drone, but I can see the yellow drone icon in front of the gate. When I approach, the icon disappears. When I move back, it appears again. I can't interact with it or see it. Logs show that it is loading/saving 1 drone, but I can't seem to access it. I'm guessing it might be placed underground or something (though the icon suggests it's sitting on top of the ground), but it's a trader location and I can't exactly dig for it. Is there any way to reset the position of a drone manually or via console? Or to set it to Follow mode again (I'm assuming since it isn't following that it somehow was set to Stay mode)? Maybe that will cause it to come to me on its own? The logs show positions of vehicles regularly, but the only place it shows position of the drone is a warning: WRN DroneManager already loaded #0, id 11060, [type=EntityDrone, name=entityJunkDrone, id=11060], (581.0, 38.1, 3470.8) I notice it says JunkDrone... is that significant or just the way the drones are named? As a note, this all happened after a crash that corrupted one region file. Deleting the region allowed me to load the game, but initially my motorcycle was gone and not showing on the map. I grabbed a minibike so I could look for it more easily and when I got near the area, I was suddenly on the motorcycle and the minibike had disappeared. I drove the motorcycle to the trader to try and get the drone that showed there, but when I got off the motorcycle, I was teleported back to the minibike, which was now half buried and bouncing up and down and I couldn't move or attack (though I could open inventory). My hotbar still had all items at this point. I had to force close since I couldn't do anything. When reopening, all hotbar items were gone and I was on the minibike with my motorcycle by the trader where I had gotten off of it when I was teleported to the half-buried minibike. Frustrating to say the least. I'm just hoping to recover the drone and its inventory. It's at least something even though I lost all my best weapons and tools from my hotbar.

Yeah, I know it was a lot. I didn't want to make a bunch of posts, but maybe that would have been better. Oh well. Maybe some of it will be read - hopefully at least the QoL/suggestions at the beginning. As a note, I determined the cause of the 20 minutes freezing seems to be "UnloadUnusedAssets" that occurs every 20 minutes. I'll have to search the forum to see if this has ever been looked into before. Thanks.

I am a new player, having just started playing shortly before A21.6 was released. First, I wanted to say that this is a very fun game already. I have read through a lot of pages of discussion about A21 and wanted to provide my thoughts on the changes as well as some suggestions for improvements from the perspective of a new player. It is a lot, I know. First, some suggestions for QoL improvements and other features suggestions: Please consider adding a "Lock" option for items in inventory to prevent moving the item(s) when using the R key. This is mainly for vehicles and drones. For vehicles, I like to keep a stack of Gas in the inventory so I don't have to spend time trying to get some if I run low. For my current drone (well, until my game crashed and I appear to have lost it though it still shows on the map- along with all held items), I used the medical mod, so kept some medical supplies in the inventory there. I use both vehicle and drone to store loot until I return to my base and then need to transfer it to the base's chests. It is a pain to use R to quickly get the loot out, but then have to manually put back the items I want to remain - especially when it auto-closes the inventory and then you have to hold E and select inventory to open it back up again. Being able to lock items so they don't get taken out when using R (you can choose to allow manually moving them or not, either is okay with me), it will make handling inventory transfers much better. Please allow us to refuel a vehicle that has Gas in its own inventory without having to transfer the Gas to our inventory to refuel and then transfer it back to the vehicle. Please consider a way to make lockpicking less annoying. It's fine if it can break a bunch of lockpicks if you have bad RNG luck. The annoyance is that you have to keep holding E and selecting lockpick after each attempt, which with the delay when you hold E, just gets annoying fast. Some sort of quick "retry" button or something would be much appreciated. I saw the video of the new gas fire environmental hazard. The pipe was red. This should really be changed. In the US at least, red is generally your fire suppression/sprinkler system. Gas lines, if color coded, are usually yellow. If not color coded, they'd usually be black. There may be different colors in some states and quite possibly elsewhere in the world, of course. But I think the number of red gas pipes around the world are very low, even if they aren't yellow or black. Better to use the color most commonly seen or else black (or your unpainted iron/steel color that you use for other pipes) to avoid color coding entirely. The game has some minor character creation options that I feel are nice to have in the game. I'd like to suggest another option to consider for further character creation choices. I think adding something like a character background would be nice. Now, I'm not talking about one of those text boxes many RPGs add for bios that are almost never read and don't have any impact on the game. What I'm suggesting is a VERY limited "class" option. And, no, I'm not suggesting adding classes as you might be thinking and might be about to scream "No!" to. 😜 What I'm suggesting is having basically an option of prior job, career, or hobby. I'm not actually sure how many years after the world came apart that the game is set, so perhaps your character has never worked an actual job or perhaps it is soon enough that your character would have had a job (assuming they are old enough) before the fall. Even if it's too many years after for it to make sense as a job, it might be considered a hobby or an interest. Here's the idea of how it would work. The player chooses the background when creating their character (it would require being able to have separate profiles for each game played). This background would allow for a special "ability" that is not game changing and does not affect your ability to play the game in any way. It should *not* be something where players feel one of the choices is better than the other for meta reasons. Here are some possibilities: If you were an artist, you might have the ability to make unique paintings (it doesn't have to be more than a few) that cannot otherwise be made or purchased or found that you can hang in your base. If you were an electrician, you might have the ability to create lights that are different colors for your base, vehicles, and light mods. I know you can change light values/colors when editing POI, but I don't believe that's currently an option in the game itself when making your base. This might also allow you to make undercarriage lights for your vehicles (maybe even the bicycle? ). Those are just a couple of examples. As you can see, they don't have any "real" effect on the game and only offer a cosmetic option. I think that's crucial. The lighting itself is already available, so would be a very quick thing to add to the game and even the artwork wouldn't be too hard to add. Undercarriage lighting would be new and would take more time to add, of course. Now, I do suggest cosmetic abilities as they avoid metagaming issues and complaints and balancing. However, if you wanted to, you could consider having ones specific to each weapon type that would add a very small increase to damage (maybe only +1-3 or something like that). So a police officer gains bonus damage on batons, while a baseball player gains bonus damage on bats, and a fireman gains bonus damage on fire axes. I think this would be minimal enough to not be a big deal for metagaming and balancing. However, it should not include the top end weapons that you can't get until mid game (such as SMG). I'd recommend it only for the early weapons as a slight bonus when starting the game, where you don't yet know what weapons you'll find and have the potential for it giving a bonus to a weapon you end up not using because you found something else that was better in loot. I think that option is okay, but I personally prefer the cosmetic options. Other options include a background that offers a few extra "paints" (wallpapers can be from a separate background from paint colors or textures depending on how you do it), being able to add a logo to armor/clothing instead of dye, being able to make a flag with a number of options for how it looks, etc. I believe the additional option for characters would interest both new and old players alike without risking unbalancing the game and with minimal effort. Some general thoughts: Water voxel improvements sound great. Hopefully it means no more "dry" areas in the middle of lakes and ponds. Looking forward to that and to see how it works in regard to sharing space with other blocks. The new environmental hazards (broken gas lines) look great. I do think that you should find a way to make them similar to electrical wiring in that if you break the pipe connecting the valve to the broken part, it will shut off the flame or move the flame to the appropriate pipe piece. Having a single piece of pipe that is on fire without being connected to anything would really look bad. If you could make it so that breaking the pipe will shut off the flame on the broken piece and start a flame on the new end of the pipe, that would be ideal, though I understand that's a lot more work since the broken piece on fire is a specific block that is different from the other pipe blocks. Perhaps all the pipes could be set up with a check on attached blocks... if there is another pipe attached, it is automatically "off" and if there isn't, then it is automatically "on". The difficulty there is if you break the pipe in the middle, do both ends light on fire? Because they shouldn't. Maybe it's set up as a one-way pipe where it only checks the "out" end for another pipe piece connected to it? Seems doable with a little work. Please consider adding additional vehicle types to the game (props, not drivable). Please consider at least one of each type of personal vehicle - coupe, sedan, pickup, SUV, minivan and maybe even a sports car or convertible. I know you're adding a couple new prop vehicles, but we really need at least one of each major type of vehicle as I listed so that we can have variety that makes sense and allow for POIs that make sense. I'm sure not everyone out there drove a sedan or utility vehicle/ambulance. If you could also add a semi rig as well, that would be great, but less important. Still, having one considering you already have semi trailers would be nice. If possible, it would be nice to see the occasional prop car crashed, such as partly in a ditch or up against a guardrail or something. I did see a utility vehicle that was crashed through a POI wall, which was nice to see. Having more of those would be great. I'm sure if the apocalypse happened, many people would leave their vehicles and flee, but many others would end up trying to drive away and crash. It would probably require additional car props that show crash damage, but it would help to make the world more believable. And I think having so many cars sitting in the middle of the desert is a bit strange. It could perhaps be believable, but only if you really work at it. Maybe that needs toned down somewhat or at least place them closer to roads/paths so it looks like they tried fleeing away from the roads instead of that they were all just driving around the desert for no reason. In the same way, the wasteland has so much debris so far away from buildings that it really looks strange. I guess the idea is that the hilly wasteland terrain is the rubble of buildings and the debris is just what's left on top of the piles of destroyed buildings. The problem with this is that you have partial buildings on top of the rubble terrain, which wouldn't be the case if the terrain was the crumbled remains of lots of buildings. It just looks odd. I'm not sure a good way to improve it, but maybe you can talk it over and come up with some ideas. Please look into how zombies sometimes stand/crawl/stand/crawl repeatedly in a short time. It gets really annoying to try and hit one when it keeps laying down every half second or so due to some object it is next to and it thinking it needs to crawl. Because there's no animation between standing and crawling, they just blink up and down repeatedly at times, forcing you to move around to get them into a position where they don't do this so you can actually hit them. Note that this is more of an issue with melee as you're usually far enough away with ranged that they won't stay in one space and keep doing that the way they can with melee. Removing cans and jars from the game seems like a poor way of making water become a challenge, but I'm open to seeing how it works. Personally, I think that few game developers understand the idea that a game can, of course, do things for better gameplay at the cost of realism, but that doing so in a game that is meant to be semi-realistic needs to have a believable and understandable reasoning behind it. Making clean water is something that anyone can do with very little training. As someone mentioned, a picture would be enough to understand how to do it, which works well with the magazines being used to teach you. And if you can learn to forge metal from a magazine, you certainly can learn to make clean water from one. At least you do still allow boiling murky water, but removing options that would allow you to boil water from water sources makes no sense. You can carry water in a bucket, but you can't boil it? You can't melt snow? These make no sense and if you can't make some background story or something that explains WHY you can't do those simple things, then you shouldn't remove them as options. There are other ways to make water more difficult in the early game. Removing an option that is so obvious a solution to water (carry water in a bucket and boil it) that almost any new player will assume is possible when they have a bucket is a really bad idea. Even without actual containers, you are able to make so many items that the idea that you can't make a container of some kind to carry boiled water is crazy. It doesn't have to be glass, which admittedly could be a challenge for someone to make IRL. But you could put a plastic bag inside a boot and carry water, it's so easy to come up with ideas. It isn't exactly difficult to carry water around if you needed to. Better options would be to reduce water in the world significantly and/or make most of the water irradiated, requiring special tablets to make it potable. That allows you to use water that isn't irradiated (very limited sources available) while reducing the amount of water sources in the game and making it understandable and believable. You improve gameplay without ruining realism. The dew collectors are nice and all, but their sizes are likely to make them an eyesore due to the numbers you'll likely end up needing. You'll probably have players placing them away from their bases if zombies don't attack them just to avoid looking at them (such as on top of a POI that isn't questable. That really isn't what you want your players doing with a new base feature. As I said, I'm open to seeing how it works, but I don't think my opinion will change. And even without considering that, you're still removing water options that are so obvious that removing them is a bad idea. It would be nice if you could have the ground next to your base go right up to the wall of the base instead of dipping down 1/4m or so all the way around the base. More corner pieces for things like railings, fencing, and the trellis for under a deck would be nice. Many of the types have corners, but not all of them (such as the trellis). This is problematic at times due to even a small item taking up an entire block of space. Without a corner piece, it can be a challenge to align these railings/fences/etc. properly around corners because you're stuck placing the "block" on the outside of the corner since you can't place two of them on either side of the corner from the inside because the "block" will overlap even though the pieces don't. Similarly, being have to place items like furniture in the same block space as a thin "block" item would be very helpful. I'm not really expecting much here as this is something that would likely take a LOT more work to do. But personally, I like making a POI house have thin walls as opposed to 1m thick walls. This works except that you can't place anything on or against the walls (whether that is on the inside or outside, depending on which side of the wall the rest of the "block" is. This also limits abilities to place things on custom-made tables or furniture items - a cylinder piece with a flat top as a table that looks different from one of the few tables in the game, for example, because that flat top would have a lot of empty space above it from the "block" that nothing could sit in and you're left with anything you put on top of it "floating". Food is really odd to me in this game. In order to not be hungry in the game, it seems like I have to eat something like 10,000 calories a day (or more) unless the food is cooked. I get that you want to have cooked food be far more useful than uncooked/canned food. That does make sense. But you run out of food too quickly with uncooked foods. If I were to eat 3 cans of food in a day (any kind of canned food in a normal-sized can), I'm not going to be hungry by the end of the day IRL. In the game, you're likely to need 8-10 cans of food or more to avoid starving. I think it would be more valuable to have the food values adjusted so you don't need to eat so much to stay alive. Have cooked food offer benefits over canned/uncooked food to make it worthwhile (including healing) without making it 10+ times more filling. After all, a can of soup is going to fill you up about as much as a chili dog IRL, though perhaps less than a steak and potatoes dinner (but only by about half). Of course, an egg would be far less filling. My point being that the differences in how filling the food is makes no real sense. It's there entirely for gameplay and entirely without realism in mind. I'd suggest adjusting it to be more in line with the amount of food you'd actually need to consume and then just have cooked foods offer other benefits (as they sometimes do now). And then just reduce the quantity of canned foods that you find in the game to compensate. Make it so that in order to have a decent amount of food, you almost have to farm or do a lot of hunting. With far limited canned food options, you keep a survival aspect while making the game more realistic. I know you're working on the drone, so you're probably already fixing this, but it's annoying to have the drone be in the way of an attack or tool use. It doesn't allow itself to be injured by you, which is good, but it also prevents you from targeting through it. In tight spaces, it can be a pain to try and get the drone out of the way. It has also managed to block me from going through a doorway by sitting in the doorway. I barely had room in the room I was in to move far enough to get the drone to move out of the doorway so I could get through. Since you can't pick it up when it has stuff in its inventory and you can't control it directly, this is a problem. Hopefully you'll also make it reappear next to you (if set to follow) after a short period of time (perhaps 10s) even if it can't find a way through to you. I know it does so if you go far enough away from it, but in some POI, you stay close enough to it, but in other rooms, that you aren't far enough for this to work. This would resolve pathing issues even if it "teleporting" isn't realistic. Unless you can fix the pathing issues in tight POI spaces, this would be the best solution I can think of. Note that it should appear behind you instead of in front of you. As it stands now, even in my base, it would often get stuck on the lower level and I'd have to spend time moving around in the right way to get it to figure out how to change floors or else just exit the base far enough to get it to teleport out and then go back inside. The changes regarding schematics and magazines sound good overall, but I'm concerned they won't really work well with this particular game. Games that focus heavily on crafting and do well are games where the loot options are either not as good as your crafting options, or games where you can craft things that can't be looted (not necessarily better, but different), or games where there are noticeable differences in stats of items so crafting gives better options to get the higher stat versions of items compared to luck of finding those items and them also having higher stats. This game does have some different stats between items, but the differences are honestly so minor that I rarely even bother comparing two items of the same tier and level to see which is better. If I have a T6 Steel Shovel, I'm not usually going to see if the T6 Steel Shovel I just looted (or crafted) has better stats than what I am using. You can loot everything you can craft (and currently more than you can craft until you allow T6 crafting) and often far sooner than you can craft them. So in this game, lengthening the time to craft better items is more likely to make crafting less appealing than it already is. As it stands now, I can typically find better items in loot far sooner than I can make them. Not due to lack of parts, but simply because in a single player game, there are just too many perks that are important to spend too many points on higher tier crafting right away. In MP, it might be different when people can specialize, but you are also looting far more, so are still getting good loot faster than crafting in most cases unless someone is going 100% down a specific crafting perk line. With the new magazines, sure you might find them more often and not have to put points in perks or deal with finding specific volumes, all of which are good... but you're also making it so that you're going to spend a lot of time trying to find enough magazines to craft a specific item and you're going to get those magazines while looting, so you're very likely to find better items in loot faster than you can craft them even more now than before. I'm thinking that the odds of needing to craft items will reduce even further unless you're trying to craft many high level items for a large group of players. It does prevent issues of not being able to find a specific schematic, but overall, I think it only really benefits (possibly) specific crafting items that are less likely to be found or found in quantity (traps, electrical items, ammo, vehicles) and make crafting tools, weapons, and armor (and most mods) even less worthwhile. Games where this work have different mechanics, which allow this type of thing to work well. This game just doesn't. Maybe it'll work, but I think most players who don't craft much still won't craft much and many who do craft will end up crafting less - at least with weapons, tools, armor and most mods. Performance issues: I've noticed performance issues loading the game and within the game that would be nice to have looked at. When loading the game, even after moving the game to a SSD (the game took almost 10 minutes to load on an HDD because it was using 100% of the HDD speed while loading, causing a lot of "not responding" problems), there is still one loading point that seems to be problematic for me. It's on the INF [DECO] line. At that point, the game will go to "not responding" for a couple of minutes before continuing on. It will then, due to that, give a warning (WRN Forcing mesh processing after large delay), which shows that such freezing during loading is not intentional. I have disabled mesh options entirely and will test that out next time I load the game. Perhaps that will solve the problem during loading, though I like what having that enabled offers in the game itself. Edit: The loading still froze in the same area (this time, the line after the [DECO] line) but didn't give the Warning. Around every 20 minutes or so, the game will usually freeze when I open a container or inventory, for up to 3-4 minutes at a time (in a "not responding" state). This has been enough at one point to disconnect me from the server. This happens with single player maps/games. And it is almost like clockwork... right around every 20 minutes, this tends to happen. However, I noticed in my recent game that it wasn't happening (or at least, it didn't happen for more than 5-10 seconds, which although still annoying isn't anywhere near as bad), so perhaps it is map-based (normally I used the Pregen8k map). I'll have to take a look and also try to see what warnings or other info is shown when it happens. Note that when this happens, the game time can sometimes continue to advance, but when I come out of this freeze, any personal timers (broken bones, etc.) have not advanced in time. A better backup system should be used to better handle crashes. My latest game crashed and corrupted one region. Thankfully, this wasn't where my base was, so deleting the bad region didn't remove my base. However, this is what happened... I had been riding my motorcycle when it crashed, saying it couldn't save the game. When I removed the corrupted region save file and loaded the game, my motorcycle was gone as well as my drone. Okay, annoying but not critical. I saw my drone on the map at a trader, so figured I'd go grab that after getting another vehicle and trying to find my motorcycle, which wasn't shown on the map. I ran all the way back to the base to get a minibike so I could go out searching for the motorcycle and also go to the far trader where the drone apparently was located. When I was almost to the base, I happened to hit F1 and saw an INF line that stated the coordinates of the motorcycle. So I finished going to the base and got the minibike since the base was close. I drove to the coordinates and when I got there, I was suddenly on my motorcycle and the minibike was missing. Okay, whatever. I'd rather the motorcycle anyhow. I drove to the trader to get my drone and when I got off the motorcycle at the trader, the game froze... sort of. The game kept running and I could do some things like open inventory, but I couldn't move or attack. After a short time, it teleported me to where I had originally crashed and my minibike was half in and half out of the ground, bouncing up and down with me standing on top of it, again unable to move or attack. My motorcycle appeared on my map where I had gotten off of it at the trader. I had to force close the game because I was stuck there. When I reopened the game, I was on the minibike. My drone and motorcycle showed up at the trader, so that was all good. However, all my held inventory items (toolbar items, not armor items) were gone. Not in inventory or on the ground... gone. That was a lot of high level tools and weapons all gone, including a level 6 pistol I had just gotten prior to the original crash. Very upset (I'd rather lose the motorcycle than all those equipped items), I still drove on the minibike to the trader to collect the motorcycle and drone. When I got there, the motorcycle was fine. The drone showed on the map and even showed the map icon in front of me ... until I got close to it. Then it disappeared (still showing on the map). If I moved away, it appeared again. If I went close, it disappeared again. I can't see the actual drone - only the icon (like you'd see if it was out of sight on the opposite side of a floor or wall really close to you). Apparently I can't get it back now. So I lost the drone and its full inventory as well as all equipped items. I had a great game going and now I'm not sure if I'll play that one again because it's so frustrating. Why not have a backup in place that will backup around every 5 minutes or so and include everything - regions, inventory, equipped items, etc.? I know there are some backups, but not everything. And it appears that it can lose the data with the current setup. A 5 minute backup that will NOT overwrite the old backup unless the current save is valid would be helpful. Or even have 2 backups - one at 5 minutes and one at 10 minutes. That way, it can throw an error message if it can't save the file without corrupting your current game and your backup both. As it is, I'm going to have to start making daily backups of my own manually so at worst I only lose a day of time instead of the entire game. But I shouldn't have to do this manually. It should be built-in and working. I know it's still alpha, so I'm giving it some leeway here, but it should really be looked into. Okay, that's all for tonight. Great game, even with the issues. Keep up the great work and I'm definitely looking forward to A21 even with some changes I'm not too sure about.