Crater Creator

Always finish your Sham Chowder before visiting the forum, kids!

No, I haven’t noticed any lag from my tree farm. I planted them 10 blocks apart because they look unnatural if jammed too close together, and I wouldn’t call it a huge farm by any means - maybe 60 trees in total (all pines). They’ve spent most of their time as full grown trees, because in the end I just haven’t needed that much wood.

True enough. Case in point, I did put this together. I like games and writing about games, or I wouldn't be here. I expect there will be more instructional content in the game, in some form, once it's out of alpha and all the features are finalized.

Journal tips, loading screen tips, verbose HUD notifications, tutorial quests and buffs created solely to convey information... these are the manuals of today. And that's before we get to online resources players create for each other, like wikis, Steam guides, pinned threads, etc. Now, I loathe when people get into 'back in my day' mode, as if winning the award for Most Curmudgeonly User is some kind of prize (not that that's happened here). But I think it's accurate to say that more work goes into explaining a game to the player than in the RTFM days. Of course, the complexity of games from any era varies widely as well.

The last time I looked into this myself (which to be fair was A19), the cap was one third of their hit points, but the amount of damage short of that was an absolute number based on the distance. E.g. 30 points of damage for a given pit, which could be a smaller percentage for a tough zombie or a larger percentage for a common zombie so long as it didn't exceed 33.3...%. I made my pit just deep enough to do approximately the max damage for common zombies.

I know you're probably sharing this just as an example of how they behave, but I wanted to mention... I've used similar designs, but I often build in redundancy. Instead of one staircase/ramp leading up to the raised platform that takes zombies towards me, I'll build a staircase/ramp on three sides of a pillar (technically I use a coarse 'staircase' of full blocks, because jumping is slower). I don't play with 64 zombies, but the number that beat on my structural supports stays minimal.

I could swear that in a dev video at some point, TFP not only said they wanted to do an auto-run feature, but they actually demonstrated it working in game (or at least in Unity). Does anyone else remember that? Unfortunately I can't remember which alpha was being previewed, and there are many many hours of such videos.

They have a 'destroy area' mode which they're primarily supposed to use when they can't deduce a path to you. This is handy for example if you're on a raised platform with no way up: you must have a pillar somewhere supporting that platform, which is what they'll theoretically attack. But they don't think through the consequences of destroying blocks; they just start destroying. I understand more randomness has been introduced for the sake of making them feel more natural, and less like every zombie makes the same beeline as if they're controlled by a hive mind (they kind of are). In cases where they do have a path, I don't know the particulars of when they may start attacking instead of taking the path.

Moderators when they read that post:

Hmm. My first instinct is a knife or multitool like others are saying. But you asked about items and guns separately, and if these can work like they do in 7DtD, then that junk turret is pretty appealing. I don't know if I could come up with ammunition for a regular firearm on demand, but I'm sure I could scrounge up some scrap iron to make junk ammo. Plus, to not only use it as a man-portable gun, but also deploy it and have it cover me 24/7 without needing power... however that works, it'd be dang handy. If that's deemed cheating, then back to the knife/multitool. I'm pretty good at keeping a low profile when I want to, so I may have bigger concerns in the apocalypse than zombie combat. Hot sauce? No thank you, that's waaaaaaaay down on the priority list. I might sooner take, say, an N95 mask, if our last pandemic is any indication of how the apocalypse could be. If you ask me again in six months, I'll probably have different answers.

Technically yes, you can rotate the ladder blocks to a diagonal heading to match the diamond. But when you see that diamond shape in your 1x1 block hole, you’re seeing a full block of space partially filled in to make the diamond. In other words the diamond is inside the square, not the other way around. And the ladder’s position is relative to the whole voxel, rather than plastered onto wherever the terrain’s surface is. So while you can easily place the ladder to align with the wall of the diamond-shaped hole, it will probably be entirely swallowed up by the terrain.

I can get behind tap to power attack and hold to throw. Good idea! I agree with BFT2020 though on the point that knives and spears are separate weapon classes, so giving both the same abilities may break the mold. For example as much as I'd love to get stealth kills at spear range like I can with a knife, I can see how that'd probably be OP.

Sure. For a weapon class to be interesting and justified, it should do at least one thing better than weapons of a different class (for the same tier at least, so it's apples to apples). And spears being the superior melee weapon for range - just as the knife is the superior melee weapon for stealth, the club is the superior melee weapon for knockdowns, etc. - definitely makes sense. And poking through bars may not sound like much, but I think it would add a lot to the spear's appeal. It would support a different style of defense: survivors that fight the zombies via melee combat, but rely on their bases to protect themselves from damage rather than heavy armor or nimble movement. It would literally be more in-your-face than shooting through bars, too, which is the option we have now.

For sure. What they have now seems like a temporary version of dyeing. Note you can dye vehicles now, and it only colors certain parts instead of the whole thing. So it looks like the tech is there.

Hot take: is it really a melee weapon, though? The melee attack is the regular attack, with regular attack stats. With every other melee weapon I use, it's the power attack stats that really matter, because I'm using the power attack 90% of the time. I can't really do that with the spear, unless I'm 'throwing' it at enemies a foot in front of me (which is just awkward and defeating the purpose). The net result is that while the spear's stats may look competitive on paper, it's underpowered in practice since I'm using the regular attack more. Honestly I don't need a spear I can throw. A spear with a regular melee attack and power melee attack, whose specialty is excellent melee range and the ability to poke through bars, would be perfect! Hitting through iron bars was literally the only feature I wanted when they announced the spear. Or, if they flipped the attacks so that the regular attack was a throw and the power attack was a melee, I'd be happy because I'd just use the power attack 100% of the time. If it's going to be a throwing spear, we need to back up a bit and ruminate on why throwing the spear is so disruptive. It's not just losing the weapon from your inventory. It's the fact that you're literally throwing away the thing you've invested a lot into. I don't care if I lose a lot of arrows, because I can make more bow ammo cheaply. But the spear is made of rare parts and mods, at least after the early game. A solution to that is to introduce a spear launcher, or atlatl. Then the spears can be a type of ammo, which is cheap to make and stacks, while the expensive spear parts and spear mods go on the launcher.

Similar to this, on a foggy day you may not be able to see a POI in front of you. But if you turn to the side, it becomes visible. I think both of these things should be fixed. I just haven't figured out how to phrase it in a bug report, so the response that comes back isn't, 'Oh yeah, that happens because camera projection blah blah blah field of view yadda yadda yadda...' I know that's how games do things, but it doesn't mean it's not a visual error.

So... other than where you went hunting, what you were hunting, what you were hunting with, why you were hunting it, and what you walked away with, it was exactly like ivory hunting. Got it.

We don't know what that is. For clarity, the official, verified 7 Days to Die twitter account is here. https://twitter.com/7daystodie/.

What it really comes down to is if you accept or reject the premise that you're trying to survive. If you do, then the choice is clear: take the honey. I happen to think of this as a survival game, so that's how I would play. Even if you're not playing permadeath, and you would respawn and keep playing, dying would mean you lost that 'round' of trying to survive. Death is failure in a survival game, even when there's flexibility in what happens afterwards. -- So, the zombies are really unsure what to do with you at first glance, eh? While I don't exactly interpret 90% infection as meaning that you are 10% human and 90% zombie, this could be a cool feature. As you get increasingly desperate and throw caution to the wind hunting for a cure, at least the zombies are a bit less sensing of your presence at higher levels of infection. I think it's cool for a game to adjust the blend of challenges like that, instead of merely tacking more onto the baseline.

The tempered and serrated blades, at least, always seemed clear to me. If the mods were themselves separate blades you were just sticking on, then you could probably stick them on anything. The fact that these mods only work on bladed weapons suggests to me that you’re modifying the blade that’s already part of the weapon. I assume the two axe head type mods only work on axes, but I haven’t specifically verified this. I take the icon art to be representational. Meaning, that if you have a wood cutter mod on a stone axe, it’s still a stone axe, but the shape of the stone blade is modified appropriately(whatever that looks like) to be better at chopping wood.

For sure. There are wall safes which fit the bill, and last I knew they're in at least one of the bank POIs.

If you see no text (e.g. “Metal Drawer” or similar) when aiming at it, then it’s not the loot container version and there can’t be anything inside. There are some blocks, like paintings, that can be placed over a hole in the wall to hide a different, lootable block. But the metal drawers used here aren’t one of those.

You don't want it to be confusing, but you don't want to have to make an entirely new kind of UI thing either. And the game doesn't have prompts like you're describing, that I can recall. That's why I suggest e.g. colorizing the number of parts. But it could also be one of those notices on the bottom of the screen, or an informational buff, unless that's too hard to see under the crafting menu. I'm not too worried, because at least the way I play, I wouldn't go to craft something without grabbing as full a stack of each ingredient as I have in storage. I'd have to go out of my way to grab 10 pistol parts when I have 30 - it wouldn't happen by accident.

And people = testers in particular. Nothing's worse in testing than regressing on a bug someone reported that's actually from a deprecated build of the game. I second your prediction that it'll be gone (by default) when the game goes gold.

The first problem I don't think is unique to my solution. In the current game, you could just as easily craft a low-quality weapon, then upgrade the skill, and then lament that you used up your parts with no way to retrieve them beyond scrapping the item you made. I'm just putting the choice in the player's hands of what quality to build instead of forcing max quality on them. Just to spell out the idea more, if for some reason you wanted an item at lower quality than you had the parts for, you could put away some parts and leave the rest you want to use in your backpack. But I'm sure the most common use case would be players that want to craft the best quality they can with the parts they have. With that said, I would welcome higher quality items scrapping for more parts. And/or, there could be a skill that improves your ability to recover parts from scrapping. Heck, even with the system we have now, I wouldn't be as scared to craft a low-quality item, if I knew that I'd consistently only be down 25% of the parts when scrapping and rebuilding it to a higher quality. On the second problem, yes, it should be clear when you could make a higher quality if you had more parts. That's why I propose colorizing the parts seen in the crafting recipe window, with the appropriate journal entries updated to document this. I admit colorized text isn't perfect since some people are colorblind, but I'm thinking in terms of a minimalist solution that requires the least UI work: less work than repurposing the trader reward UI or adding a new widget for quality selection and re-arranging the crafting window.