[What was the point of the water change?]

1 hour ago, meganoth said:

 

Can you craft buckets from clay? Can you fill the bucket from a lake or swimming pool?

 

If your answer is yes to both you have the means to produce any amount of water you might need at the moment even on the first day. You need some more time and effort than in A20, but thats about it.

 

No. Buckets are crafted using forged iron bars, same as vanilla. In fact, it's the *exact* same iron water bucket that already exists in vanilla 7DTD. Silver merely modded it so that it can be placed on a campfire and its contents boiled.

Considering the rarity of finding buckets in loot or on traders in the very early game, the cost of crafting them, the time required to collect and boil water in them, AND the fact that buckets aren't stackable, this solution is much more well-balanced and less "gamey" than dew collectors, in my opinion. Plus, as I mentioned before, it's the same bucket from the base game. So if you continue to draw water from a swimming pool, it will eventually run out of water.

 

[What was the point of the water change?]

I've tried A21 without jars (vanilla) and with jars (via mods). What I've discovered is that I kinda dislike jars after all, lol.

 

BUT I also hate the fact that I can build a campfire right next to a lake and somehow cannot get any of that water into a pot for boiling. I'm not complaining about "realism" here. My complaint is that TFP went about the water rebalance in such a hamfisted and clumsy way. It feels like an artificially restrictive change made purely because they couldn't figure out a less over-engineered solution.

 

The absolute best solution I've found is Silver's water bucket mod. No, it doesn't bring jars back -- jars are unnecessary with this mod. It allows you to scoop murky water with a bucket from a POI and then boil the filled bucket on a campfire. 3 minutes of boiling produces 3 jars of clean water. The bucket mod is balanced, uses existing game assets and mechanics, and allows water collection without ruining the thirst mechanic during the early game. Scooping water slowly depletes the POI water source, boiling the water takes an appropriate amount of time + fuel, and buckets are non-stackable so water hoarding is vastly reduced compared to what was possible with glass jars.

 

I really don't understand why we ended up with dew collectors when instead the devs could have simply tweaked water buckets to do something that a bucket should be able to do; gather and transport water!

[teragon maps]

On 7/25/2023 at 1:26 AM, Riamus said:

I assume you mean the country tiles?  No.

Ah, okay. Hopefully soon, then. The large, isolated highway rest stops and intersections are probably my favorite new RWG feature in A21. I was bummed out when I realized Teragon wasn't generating them.

[teragon maps]

On 7/23/2023 at 4:54 PM, Riamus said:

The new version of Teragon is out.  Much of the documentation is now integrated into Teragon, though screenshots of examples and comparisons can still only be viewed in the documentation file.  The link to it is on the Help Center tab.  I recommend reviewing it with this new update as there has been a lot of new information and changes made to the documentation for this update.

 

Teragon's new UI allows you to dock and undock tabs to place them where you like.  This even allows you to use multiple monitors.  If you have any questions, feel free to ask here or on Teragon's Discord channel, which is the best place for answers.  The Discord link is on the Help Center tab.

 

Good to hear. Does the new version of Teragon support A21 highway tiles now?

[redbeardt's BiomePrefabExclusion mod?]

Is a working version of this mod floating around out there?

 

After a quick look through the DLL, the mod appears to make the "AllowedBiomes" prefab tag functional with RWG, which would obviously be incredibly useful. But it errors out upon loading (in A21).

 

Does anyone have a link, or if the mod is abandoned, perhaps the original source code?

 

[Water-based Tile System - Proof of Concept..... - Pre-Release! now available]

Sorry for the (slight) necro, but is the Swamplands project still being worked on for A21? I remember playing around with this a bit in A20 and it seemed to have so much potential.

[Traders and quests need to be nerfed]

23 minutes ago, RipClaw said:

My playstyle is as normal as everyone else's. Everyone says their playstyle is normal. So "normal" is meaningless in this context.

 

I think when you have to repair your primary weapon multiple times over the course of a horde night then 10-15 repairs from Q6 to broken are not really that much. Or did you mean 10-15 repairs per quality level ?

 

I played the Undead Legacy mod in A20 where you either had to use extremely expensive repair kits or repair the items in the maintenance station. If you did not have the necessary level of the maintenance station you had to repair the weapon at the trader for money. I always had several weapons during the horde night that I used until they were broken and then I switched to the next one. This is probably the strategy players would use if item degradation were added to the game. They would then have several identical or similar weapons. I doubt anyone would want to risk the weapon dropping a quality level on horde night and possibly losing a mod slot or the weapon becoming completely unrepairable.

 

But what would definitely happen is that someone would mod out the item degradation. In every game that had item degradation, there were either strategies to get around it or a mod to remove it from the game.

 

 

I've been playing with item degradation for awhile now. It really just isn't as extreme as you're making it out to be. Without it, once you have all top-quality gear, there's basically nothing left to look forward to. I mean, how many QL6 guns do you really need when the ones you have will last forever? At a certain point, even the absolute best loot drops eventually end up being vendor trash when the stuff you have never wears out. It's the endgame wall I mentioned earlier.

That's all a bit off topic, though. Back to the trader issue, in my experience so far, item degradation definitely helps to reduce the feeling that trader quest rewards are always ahead of your crafting level. The rewards are fun now because I know they won't last forever and I'm not left feeling like crafting is pointless in comparison. Admittedly I was reluctant to try it initially (because I usually don't like losing my stuff in games) but I'm glad I did. Definitely in my list of must-have mods from now on. I'm not trying to convince you or anyone else that you should enjoy this particular game mechanic. But it works for me. 🤷‍♂️

 

By the way, to just clear something up -- this particular mod doesn't degrade items to point of being totally irreparable. Once an item degrades to QL1, it can still be repaired endlessly. It's just stuck at QL1 from that point on. So you're never left completely without a tool or weapon in a bad situation (assuming you have a repair kit).

 

[[Prefabs] ZZTong's Custom POIs]

@zztong

I've noticed that cities generated in A21 with your mod active have large sections of tiles missing. The gaps are where you'd generally expect to see commercial, downtown or maybe industrial tiles spawning, but nothing spawns. Just big empty squares in the middle of all the cities. Any ideas what could be causing this? I have no other mods installed that add or modify tile generation.

 

[Improved Hordes [A21.2]]

I'm also wondering about the FastAI mod.

I downloaded it from the Nexus before it was taken down. Does it cause instability issues? Should I stop using it?

 

[Traders and quests need to be nerfed]

9 hours ago, RipClaw said:

It all depends on the implementation. I have read some comments from hardcore players suggesting that the item should lose one quality level for each repair. Q1 can't be repaired and Q6 can only be repaired 5 times. I think that would be total overkill, unless the durability is increased significantly.

 

 

The mod I'm using gives a 50% chance of degradation per repair, so averaged out it feels pretty well balanced. It takes quite a while for a QL6 item to wear down to a QL1. The important thing is that stuff does eventually wear down, which means crafting (and looting, for that matter) always stays relevant even in the late game.

 

[Traders and quests need to be nerfed]

I was partly able to mitigate the "OP trader rewards" problem by simply using an item degradation mod. Now, even if a weapon or tool reward is better than what I can currently craft, anytime I repair that item, it can degrade a quality level.

With this sort of mechanic, quests can give nice rewards without making crafting irrelevant because a top-quality quest reward will eventually wear out and be crappier than what you can craft.

It also makes repairing equipment more of a strategic decision, because repairing too often may shorten the overall useful life of the tool. So it adds a bit more depth to that side of the game, as well.

Another plus with item degradation is that it removes part of the endgame wall you eventually hit in games, where you have the best of everything and there's no point in looting or questing because there's nothing better than what you already have; nothing stays the best for long and so you never run out of reasons to loot or craft.