Crater Creator

Isn't it, though? There are base designs where the hit points of individual blocks barely matters. Then there are those that don't build a base at all. I love building and it's a major focus of every playthrough I do, but I'd still say concrete is optional. With that said though, concrete is basically a building tier, not a building track. This will be even more evident in A20 since (and I can't overstate how big a deal this is) A20 will only have 4 building materials. Tier 0 wood, tier 1 stone, tier 2 concrete, and tier 4 steel. So one could say that logically carpentry and masonry are two separate skills, just as one could say that logically logging and mining are two separate skills... but as it shakes out in the game, it makes more sense for any skill(s) to cover the both of them.

From time to time I've thought about ways to incorporate your character's mental health as part of their survival in the apocalypse. I see potential to have stats like humanity, comfort, hygiene, and happiness, that can slip from your grasp if you just spend every day running around outside, by yourself, butchering stinking corpses in your underwear. I can think of debuffs when these stats aren't maintained too. Like if you lose your humanity, you become 'insane' and hallucinate. But it's less clear whether maintaining these stats would be fun for this game, or if it would merely seem like chores: maintenance tasks that are tedious to handle. Like anything else in the game, there should be multiple pathways to overcoming your insanity. There should be more than a skill you get to turn it off. I envision these stats more like wellness or infection: stats you work on over the long term. Like, being near a working electrical system, or spending time working on a farm, would help your humanity. It's not your top priority at the start, but something to work on when you're past basic survival, and trying to thrive. In the early game you'd likely accumulate a lot of fear/insanity, and in the late game you'd look for ways to get your groove back, curing the hallucinations to feel human again.

I'd like to see changes to the starting quest anyway. If you woke up naked and stranded somewhere with no humans around, would your first thought be to start chopping down trees and begin a construction project? Not me - I'd take shelter in the nearest standing structure. An important thing to remember is that building progression will be gutted in A20. TFP says there will be a "simplified upgrade path" with only wood, cobblestone, concrete, and steel. No more reinforced wood, iron, flagstone, bricks, rebar, etc. Because it'll be so thinned out, I don't think there will be space for both carpentry and masonry skills. I think it would be neat to unlock different shapes. As a novice builder, you can manage to hack together big solid blocks and ramps, which look spartan but get the job done. As an experienced builder, you can handle more refined shapes like iron bars, catwalks, and stairs with railings. A master builder can do form and function, with all the trim and interior decor blocks. The updated shape menu could facilitate this.

I would consider it more than quality of life. It's in the nature of POIs for this situation to occur, and it can be deadly. When I encountered it, I’d walked up to a loot container to start looting it, only to discover it was the bait for a trap, and I was standing on a collapsing floor. I had to quickly forget about searching and defend myself from the zombies waiting for me below. Which is great - the collapsing floor did exactly the kind of thing it was designed to do. But this issue with containers makes it more cumbersome and confusing. Not only did I have to prepare for a fight, but I had to recognize what had happened while the container interface was still open, obscuring my vision and preventing my movement until I manually closed the interface. It wouldn't feel fair, if my character died more from me not handling the interface than not handling the game world. I think what’s most jarring is the way it broke an unwritten rule that, while the game is ignoring movement input, the player character won’t be moving. On being hard to implement, the game could perform a single distance check (already implemented to determine if you can begin the search) when the search time is over, and the game is otherwise ready to open the container and show the container interface. This would then be a single calculation instead of checking every update. And since searching only takes a few seconds, it would kick the player out of the interface quickly enough to not impede their ability to react to the fall. Then the interface would stay out of the way of trap gameplay, and you could no longer exploit the game by taking stuff out of a container that's now potentially several floors above you. Not my call, but that's my best argument that this is fixable and worth fixing.

This also occurs with the new street lights, as of b121. Daytime: (should look off) Nighttime: (should light the area if it looks lit)

Duplicate of SDTD-13862. Please see https://community.7daystodie.com/a20-bugs/duplicate/b113-localization-quest_tier3_buried_supplies-r251/?do=getNewComment&d=3&id=251

Can confirm. Players on the Steam forum for instance regularly don't pick up on this bit of UI. I'm still in favor of switching to ❓and ✔️ icons in different colors.

I could share a number of them, but here are two. If I find a better quality armor piece than what I was using, I have to open the character screen select the old armor piece click modify remove each mod one by one click complete (actually press escape because the complete button isn’t there) take off the old armor piece put on the new armor piece select the new armor piece click modify install each mod one by one click complete (actually press escape because the complete button isn’t there) The interface is cumbersome for no good reason. We can see the mods (and stats) on an item when we select it. We should be able to drag and drop mods onto and off of a selected item without opening a separate modify interface. We should also be able to repair armor without removing it first. Since we can’t, they implemented a hack where repairing armor that was previously worn makes you automatically put it on again. Which sounds nice, except sometimes I want to take off armor and leave it off, but also get it repaired, e.g. to sell it, or to put it away in good condition so it’s ready to go the next time I wear it.

Can confirm I'm getting the same thing here, on a fresh game of Navezgane with verified files.

I banged hard on this one today in b118. I deleted the Mods folder (for the record, it was empty), verified files, and started a new game. I did the starter quest, and gaveselfxp to get to roughly the same level I was when the bug occurred. I tried the first trader I was directed towards, and then spawned 10 Trader Hughs. I checked their inventory before and after upgrading Better Barter, and before and after a trader restock. I was never able to reproduce the issue. TL;DR: cannot reproduce the issue.

Yes, that would be a pretty easy mod to make.

Apparently the devs think the answer is no. They've said publicly that they're removing reinforced and downgrade-able materials (source: Madmole in the dev diary, right here on the forum). Alpha 20 is planned to only have wood, stone, concrete, and steel.

True enough. There's probably no more action-oriented way to showcase the 100%* destructible voxel world than with explosives. Ideally the gameplay should be designed to take full advantage of the underlying tech the game has (it's why I continue to advocate for a return of procedural caves). In fairness to the OP, though, they did say a reason other than playing with voxels.

Okay, I see the real source of the problem now. The player can't repair armor that they're wearing. They always have to take it off first. So the game compensates for this clunky, multi-step process by remembering which items were worn and re-wearing them automatically after a repair. That's affecting me in the use case where I want to put armor away. For instance, I wear armor for horde night, and then I want to take it off for faster movement, but I also want it repaired ahead of the next time I want to wear it again. Instead of "take off, repair," or "repair, take off" my only option is "take off, repair, take off again." Putting it in a chest instead of the backpack makes it more obvious, but the chest isn't the root issue. The better user experience, in my view, would be to make the repair button available for armor you're wearing. Then the player's intention would be clear: they only take off armor if they want to take off their armor, and not just because it's a clunky intermediate step to getting their armor repaired. Bottom line, yes it would be better if you didn't automatically wear after repairing something in a chest. But that's something of a bandaid fix. If you're in a position to do so, I'd be grateful if you could mention this underlying clunkiness issue and proposed solution to the devs. It might be an A21 thing though, when the clothing/armor overhaul is scheduled. Thanks for reading.

Blasting hunks out of the environment can serve constructive purposes, too. My ultimate A19 base was designed around a giant pit to cause (partial) fall damage to all non-flying zombies when they fall into it trying to reach me. It would’ve taken forever to mine a hole that big, even with an auger. So I experimented with where to arrange the blasting holes and how many units of dynamite to use per hole to blast out the shape I wanted with maximize efficiency. I didn’t care about the resources. All that was lost in the blasting was clay soil and stone, which are everywhere.

There are already tooltips that do exactly that when you hover the cursor over an option.

Edit: never mind, corrected by Madmole below.

You mean like, 'on this lot for house_burnt_05, choose a random garage to go in this spot' and 'within this instance of cabin_09, fill this 4x3x4 volume with any pre-made bathroom interior with the right dimensions?' Because if that's what you mean, you've really pumped up my excitement for A20.

I'm thrilled to get more world details, like those newspaper vending machines, that can make urban areas feel more structured: like more than a grid of always-the-same POIs. On the other hand, it's the kind of thing I expect to only enhance the art, not the gameplay. I expect they'll function the same as mailboxes: loot them for some paper, harvest them for some metal, and that's probably it. Trader Hugh generally looks good. The work around his eyes is well done. But that low, sharp cheek line on the beard, with hairs sticking out nearly perpendicular to the surface, doesn't look convincing to me... especially in an apocalypse where he's probably shaving with half a rusty machete. It wouldn't matter on a zombie, but his face will be highly scrutinized in game as a trader.

I'd been seeing this occasionally, but was unable to reproduce it when explicitly trying to. For my test, in b114, I spawned 25 of each regular (non-feral, non-radiated) zombie type, killed them all with the dev pistol, and looted all resulting bags. That was at 100% loot setting, so now my suspicion is that the bug occurs at less than 100% loot. I'll report back if I'm able to confirm.

I noticed this too. I think at some point the game 'forgot' how the user had this preference set, and/or which way was default changed.

I guess we'll see. It seems obligatory at this point that the game will have bandits and a story before it goes gold. If they renege on those things, I'd think the fallout would be astoundingly bad. Most of the other stuff, like faction reputation, is seen as a logical outgrowth of how they'd do bandits and a story. I can't overstate how encouraged I am by the implications of that screenshot I reposted. First, on a technical level it makes my idea for these food truck-style traders more feasible. It can be built mostly on existing art and programming. Secondly, it's an example of something TFP are still massively overhauling/improving, despite fears that the game was getting too close to completion and RWG would be finalized as 'good enough'. That gives me hope that traders, too, could still get a proper revision to deal with their deeper shortcomings, and not just a balance pass.

That's certainly true. And I think it's another case where traders are the only NPCs in the game right now, therefore they have to be where Noah sends you. If we get the foundations needed to support non-trader NPCs, then the starting narrative could swiftly diverge to, say, two different non-trader personalities, each with their own headquarters, with each pulling you to visit them first.

That's well worth pointing out. But I also feel like @wizard puke has a point. Under default options, that horde is coming on the seventh day whether you prepare for it or not. Plus your survival needs, e.g. hunger and thirst, are always draining. So in that sense you are always on a timer, and you need to do things to get out ahead of the threat. Further, you hope to do things efficiently, because if you do things wastefully you'll raise your gamestage more than you raise your survivability with useful output. So there is a driving force of sorts, pressuring you to seek efficient ways to success, like getting quest rewards on top of the stuff you'd get from a POI without the quest.

It could be frustrating if a trader dies, sure. But it would be a temporary frustration, akin to when you don't reach the trader before they close, or when you can't get enough money to buy that one item before they restock. The trader can respawn the next day, creating the illusion that another truck drove in overnight. And, the easier way to implement these food truck-style traders would be to not have a walking talking human at all, but to just spawn the truck and interact with that. In that case, while the truck is technically destructible, zombies have no reason to attack vehicles. So you'd worry about the trader truck being destroyed by zombies about as much as you worry about your 4x4 being destroyed by zombies, which is to say hardly at all. I'm doing my best to understand you. I don't see how the whole 'logically zombies shouldn't destroy hard materials' argument is relevant here. Traders in trucks is a way to do traders that accepts the logic used in the rest of the game: that zombies can destroy anything that's not bedrock. I don't accept that traders need to be protected. The loose end you have to tie up if they're not protected, is what to do if they're destroyed. And traders that respawn somewhere else on a road the next day addresses that problem. You argue that roaming the apocalypse in a truck is less logical than a sedentary lifestyle with a base and a farm etc. I'd say that's highly subjective. There are whole cultures of nomadic/itinerant peoples active today, including some that make their living through trade, and such groups have survived stretching back into pre-history. I see no reason to think it wouldn't work as a strategy in this post-apocalyptic world. What's one of the easiest ways to avoid all but one type of zombie in 7DtD? Get on a vehicle and drive away. Is fuel a problem? Sure, but does it stop you from using vehicles? No. You scavenge gas from gas stations and fuel barrels, you mine a little oil shale and throw it in a chemistry station you find... it's a challenge but you deal with it. The trader can do the same. Besides which, this is all theoretical lore stuff. You don't have to see the trader dealing with the problems of acquiring fuel and avoiding obstacles on the highway. You can use your imagination for how he or she deals with those problems on their way to parking and setting up shop in the morning. But you do have to see the artificial protection the trader gets in the current implementation. You have to hear the zombies banging on the walls, making the 'no damage' sound, constantly reminding you that these traders only survive because they get to break the rules of the game. You can suspend disbelief a lot better when the trader deals with their existential threats 'off screen'. Okay, I have a plan on how to do all this, which is easier to talk about now that this screenshot of A20 RWG is public. Note how, unlike in past versions of the game, the cars, street lights, crosswalk etc. are 'aware' of the street: they're positioned and rotated correctly relative to the street. The ability to do that is very powerful, and it means you can effectively put a prefab on the road itself instead of on a lot adjacent to the road. So what you do is, you make a tiny trader prefab. Really, the only essential part is the panel truck, but you can add a barracks chair under a little awning, with a cooler... let the world builder have fun with it. As part of the random world generation, you put lots of these prefabs all over the roads: say, one every 100 blocks. And then the trick is, when the game begins, these prefabs aren't active. They're just invisible, with no collision, like a quest start node. When it's time for a trader to 'drive in', the game picks one of these precomputed nodes to 'spawn' the prefab. It's like resetting a POI for a quest: all the blocks in the small prefab override whatever blocks were already there. It doesn't pick a node that's been disturbed, so it doesn't delete your base in the middle of the road or whatever weird thing is in the way there. And this works, because it has lots and lots of nodes to choose from. It'd be practically impossible to screw up every node in the world, and if you do, fine, no trader for you. So it's all block replacement, like resetting a POI for a quest. No collisions, no spawning in air, no landmines going off, no falling, no crazy physics. And zombies attacking the truck? That's not a thing. Zombies won't target a vehicle in the road. They never have. I don't know where you got that idea. And even if they did, it would be simple to make them not do that. So the trader can spawn in any biome. Heck, maybe a trader in the wasteland offers better stuff due to the heightened risk of meeting them out there. Location, location, location. This probably has the biggest gameplay significance among the points I've seen raised. There would be two ways to lose a trader: they pack up for the night and leave, or their truck is destroyed. Packing up and leaving would be most like what we have now. We're used to the trader closing shop and being inaccessible at night, with a warning shortly before they do. It'd be the same with a traveling trader. If the trader is destroyed - which wouldn't happen often in practice, outside of PvP - then I'd say any missions with that trader would fail. This seems sensible. You see it in other games, where a mission fails if a character critical to that mission dies. I mean, I have to stress that the zombies don't target vehicles, they target players. And you wouldn't even need to raise the HP of the panel truck in the game (even though that's a 5 minute change). It already takes quite a beating at 2500 HP. What to do if the truck goes boom is almost more of a technicality, to not leave edge cases unaddressed. Also, as previously mentioned traders don't have to be the quest givers in the first place. I think they only are because, as the only NPCs, they're the only option. If the game has factions, then maybe all you have to do is turn the quest in to someone, anyone, representing that faction.