[Looting Brew Barrels.]

1 hour ago, Krougal said:

Well that brings up another good question I've never heard asked or answered around here.

How long ago was "the fall" ? Judging from the state of most buildings (barring the obvious external destruction of some) I'd say pretty recent.

That would determine the availability of a lot of things. Most people don't think about the fact that fossil fuels are organic and don't last forever; the gasoline would go bad in about 2 years.

 

We recently learned that the bombs fell several years ago.

[Loot: The Inversion Principle]

If I woke in the world of 7D2D and had to make my way, I'd perish. (I'm no good at any of the things required of the player character.) But pretending that I were more capable than I am, I'd suspect that I was being @%$#ed with on a pretty grand scale. Because the quality of loot in an apocalypse should be the inverse of what we find.

 

Finding crappy, handmade tools and no guns early on makes no sense: proper tools and weapons are *abundant* in the modern world. With the advent of the apocalypse, *new* tools and weapons cease being made. As things get used up, they vanish from the dying world. (I'm more willing to believe that armor found early on is garbage: the world has not needed quality armor til now, so it'll be a while before crafters are turning out decent stuff.)

 

Players should be able to find canned goods, bottled water, medicines, clothes, tools and weapons right away. (When they are also utterly lacking in the better survival skills.) As they struggle with the loss of decent supplies, as they run headlong into the need to repair and improvise, they should be learning new survival skills along the way.

 

The idea that I should find high quality stuff at roughly the same time as I've gained the skills to make great use of it seems deeply weird to me.

 

I've seen lots of complaints about the loot system in the forum, and I've seen modders take a stab at balance. The Romero mod adds in scrap tools, which makes more sense to me than the stone tools of vanilla 7D2D, but even that mod lacks the inversion principle.

 

Are there any mods taking this tack?

 

(I'm open to being talked around to a different way of thinking. There's clearly some world building in the background of the game that might render a lot of my thoughts invalid.)