Crater Creator

Absolutely! The devs show interest in doing random events, and one type of random event could be bandits attacking a far-off territory you control, which you have to go over and defend or else lose it. I think it would be a fun, impromptu challenge to defend a POI you never voluntarily identified as a base. Or if that's too random, the bandits could target trader POIs specifically, as those have always been designed like defensible bases. I also don't mind the prospect of running out of new POIs to conquer, and eventually controlling 100% of the territory. That would be a satisfying long-term goal to pursue, and it could encourage exploring the whole map. There should still be some types of quests you could do in POIs you control.

Now that each trader is placed in a way that they’re kind of associated with a town, the completionist in me would like to see the trader send you to each POI in that town, comprehensively. You’d do a quest in each one, and at the end the trader would reward you for taking control of the whole territory. It would be satisfying in its own right to be ‘done’ with a whole town, but one could also take the idea further. Imagine completed POIs are colorized on the map, a la Saints Row. A fence could go up around the border of the town, pre-placed but hidden in the RWG tiles (complete with signage with the town’s name). Zombie spawns within the town limits could be reduced (i.e. stop spawning any extra zombies that spawn because you’re in town). If more friendly NPCs are ever added, they could start showing up in cleared towns. All this could give the player memorable, unique feelings of rebuilding society in the apocalypse. Unlike most games, it could be done even without a rigid storyline or a static map.

Mmm. I’ve seen small POIs spawn across the road from the trader entrance, but 75% of the time it’s been a vacant lot. A very particular vacant lot I notice, with bumps in the terrain in the same spots when building there. Meanwhile, I decided the other side of the T intersection was a good place to plant a forest.

RWG has come a huge way this last alpha, but yeah, I've been curious if TFP intends for traders to always be on that same plot, or if this is transitory until more trader-supporting RWG zones are added. I have a hunch that half of all A20 bases are built on that same empty field opposite the trader.

Such builds exist internally before they're released publicly. This is a good thing.

To the extent this is an issue, I see it as one of utilization. I don't expect that all players will max out every skill, of course. If they did, it would mean there aren't interesting choices between different character builds anymore. But if people aren't even maxing out the skills under one attribute - or if, like me, they wonder if they'll even get to level 5 on more than a couple skills (across the board) before they're done with that playthrough - then I think about how much of the skill tree isn't even being seen. If a lot of players don't see much of the cooler endgame stuff, because they lose interest before they get that far, that's a shame. That'd be poor utilization of what the devs have taken the time to create. Perhaps. But I'm not criticizing the stats the player has when reaching the end of the skill tree per se. I'll reserve judgment on that (since I don't get that far, heh). Rather, working inside the box of how powerful a maxed out player already is, I question whether there are too many steps to get there. The headshot damage and dismemberment chance you get from raising a base attribute are nice, but they don't seem like game changers. Maybe those could be condensed into three levels per attribute, and then awarded as a 'set bonus' for completing one of the sub-categories for that attribute. For instance, if you max out all of the Recovery skills under Fortitude (Healing Factor, Iron Gut, and Rule 1: Cardio), you unlock 30% more headshot damage and 15% more dismemberment chance on fist and machine gun weapons. The current system encourages you to pick a specialty and stick with it, too, but this would be more like a carrot than a stick.

Good to know. I try hard not to make assumptions about how much effort it would take for someone else (usually a programmer) to execute a request. But it does seem like the artist would model the equipment/armor and some of the clothes as separate pieces regardless. This might be like Marlene's dangling eye that's meant to jiggle, where the character art is set up the way it needs to be, whether or not the feature is implemented. I'm not a dev, but the new vehicles would almost certainly appear anywhere the current sedan appears. Because all the cars in POIs are already placed as helper blocks, so the game can choose a random car color and/or destruction level at generation time. They would add these new vehicles to the list of models from which the game chooses. The only reason not to that I can think of, is if the new vehicles wouldn't physically fit in some locations.

That would be cool. Although we already have dismemberment* and effects specific to leg/arm shots for zombies, and I expect we'll have them for bandits, too. So I'd be totally happy with it just meaning that different bandits have different weak points. What I most want to advocate for, is that bandits (and zombies) have individual variations. No clones! * At risk of being gruesome, it's worth pointing out that one way bandits and zombies can not feel the same is that bandits should have more body integrity. When a bullet to the leg makes a zombie's leg completely disintegrate, that's fine: it's a rotting corpse. But the leg of a living virtual human shouldn't explode as easily.

And then what? They're just normal, melee-only zombies? A weaker demolisher at best? Why would you want to nerf what is (almost) the only ranged enemy in the game? Just for realism? You're entitled to your opinion, but I believe gameplay must take priority over "realism," which I put in scare quotes because we're talking about zombie abilities. I guess the cop's attack animation could be lengthened so he's shown munching on some grass before he spits. That animation is already janky - he seems to not face the direction he's spitting.

How awesome would it be, if each section of that bandit's armor was randomly present or not on each bandit? Instead of the player reacting, "Oh, this is the heavy one, I have to shoot him more," the reaction could be, "Aha, this one's right leg is unprotected! The bandits would look more irregular as an organization, rather than all carrying standardized (albeit post-apocalyptic) equipment for their combat role. They'd have more individual variety when seen in groups. The best character art still falls apart when multiple characters are inexplicable clones. My fear is we'll see the one on the left in game and be able to say, "Oh yeah, red bandana dude. That's banditSteve. He runs at the tier 3 speed, and has iron knuckles and a double-barreled shotgun, every time." That gets old after the first ten or a hundred of them. And yes, I would hope the same system (call it 'random character generation' to complement random world generation), if added, could be used for zombies.

Sure. But that's probably not coming from 7DtD, where there's no 3D representation of what's inside, and the mixer doesn't animate.

Thanks for the replies, everyone. It sounds like a lot of people get bored long before they run out of skills to get, even within an attribute. I've also read repeatedly that many players enjoy starting over, because the early phase of the progression is most enjoyable. Plus, TFP have said they're most interested in people's experience in the first few hours of playing. So this sounds weird to say, but it seems like the skill tree is just deeper than necessary. This thread has strengthened my belief that compressing all the same effects into 3 levels per skill instead of 5 would be better. Maybe the attribute bonus could even be flipped on its head. Instead of spending points in, say, Fortitude to unlock high levels of Survival and Recovery perks, it's spending the points on those individual skills that bumps up your headshot damage and dismember chance with fists and machine guns, as a side bonus for specializing in that tree. Just as another example of where I'm coming from in the current game... I had my core base set up, which uses a lot of barbed wire. After a few horde nights, I wanted to supplement the barbed wire with electric fences. But I wasn't doing an Intellect build per se, so I needed to spend 6 skill points to get that one thing I wanted. That's the kind of situation I run into: why I was keeping 5 points in reserve, and it still wasn't enough. It also sure does feel like certain tracks are skewed towards different stages of the game. Strength is most useful in the early game, when you don't have powered vehicles or motor tools yet, and stamina is a constant problem. Intellect is most useful in the late game, when you have the basics covered and can focus on things like chemistry and more advanced base defenses. P.S. I didn't mean to single out Parkour, but it's good to hear people like it. I may have to give it a shot some time.

It was changed as part of improving the graphics. Having all tufts of grass be the same size didn't look very good. I appreciate the improvements. I hope they don't get rid of the short grass, nor thin it out. I hope they can leverage it further. I'd love to see sub-biomes where only the full-height grass grows, or only the short grass, or game trails where no grass grows, which animals tend to follow (a man can dream). I do a lot of buried supply quests, and I had the same thought. I think turning off collision between shovels and grass blocks would be an effective solution. I don't foresee any negative side effects with this approach.

As far as I know, the weather isn't affected by the map, so playing Pregen01 should make no difference... other than that it may have more or less of particular biomes, and biome does affect the weather. The patch notes say that in A20, "Weather changes more often and has more variety." In my own experience, I was getting rain or other 'bad' weather nearly every day in the forest for a long time. I found it excessive. I've been looking at the files recently, and according to biomes.xml, the chance of inclement weather (not the severity) in each biome is: forest: 7% fog, 7% rain, 3% storm desert: 0% fog, 8% rain, 5% storm snow: 8% fog, 40% snow, 8% storm wasteland: 0% fog, 15% rain, 5% storm The rest of the time, the weather is the default for that biome. What I don't know is how often the game 'rolls the dice' on these probabilities. But apparently it's more often than in A19.

There should be no restrictions on your forum account. Your posts should appear as quickly as anyone else’s. Sorry, I can’t verify why this may have occurred. Let’s hope it was a fluke.

I've been wondering how far people get in the character progression before they've had their fill of that game and start over. Do you keep playing until you have enough skill points to unlock all levels of all skills, under every attribute? Do you pick your attribute specialty, and max out that tree? And is reaching max level(s) a major milestone that affects when you are 'finished,' or is it just something that can happen along the way as you pursue other goals? For me, I can't help but hoard skill points. I fear getting into situations where I'll really want to unlock something, but I won't have the points. So I usually have quite a few in reserve. It feels like too many points to spend to actually max out skills. I don't need to spend them to survive, so it seems wasteful to spend as many points as it'd take to max out a skill. I pace myself with what's good enough, and consequently I find myself finishing a game before I've unlocked many late-game skills. For example, I get a bicycle from questing as soon as I can, but I know what I really want long term is a motorcycle. Spending points to unlock the bicycle and minibike first, then, feels like wasting skill points: just a means to an end, that doesn't benefit me beyond getting a number closer to my actual goal. There's not enough time/resources to bother using each vehicle in sequence, which is what it would take to appreciate each level of the skill. Or maybe it's really cool to jump 1 or 2 meters higher, but I'll never know, because level 1 of Parkour is too meh, and there are too many other places to spend points. I know I can crank up the XP gain. But I don't want to just make the skill points cheaper, and spend a bunch of them on incremental increases. I'd rather feel the difference with each skill point spent. I think I'd enjoy the game more if skills were compressed in most cases, to have the same effects in 3 levels instead of 5. It's not so much that I want to become more powerful sooner, as I want to get on to other interesting things I could spend skill points on sooner. Anyway, that's how I'm feeling about the skill tree. I'd like to hear how others feel.

Getting back to the OP’s concern, I think Daring Adventurer most directly addresses the quest reward options not meshing well with your character build and plans. Investing just one point gives you three options instead of two after every quest, and I find even that much significantly improves the chance of being offered something useful. Better Barter is valuable too, but as for the OP… there’s a perk for that.

You might be interested in a discussion we had over on the Steam forum about a similarly grandiose goal. To paraphrase: given a powerful enough server and a year of prep time, could a majority of a million players on the same server survive?

Unfortunately, anything with transparency can’t use the same system as regular blocks. They can’t be painted, for instance. I believe this is why windows are separate. Ladders are a selectable shape, in contrast, because while they have special functionality, they render like any other block shape.

Yes. Everyone please use the pinned thread to identify specific seeds, so that people don't have to look in multiple places to find them.

The least useful air drops for me have been... empty! No loot at all. On the one hand, it serves me right for playing on less than 100% loot. But it feels like air drops are a special thing, and should be the exception to the rule. They should never be empty, in my opinion. The plane might as well not drop anything if reaching it is a complete waste of time.

When @cheebsco says confirmed, that's a courtesy to us, to let us know that TFP testers have successfully reproduced the bug. That's the first step to getting it fixed. Since you mention it, I can confirm Galaktus's finding that the orange ring does render when using the Metal renderer, although that's not supported and has other major rendering issues.

When @cheebsco says confirmed, that's a courtesy to us, to let us know that TFP testers have successfully reproduced the bug. That's the first step to getting it fixed. Since you mention it, I can confirm Galaktus's finding that the orange ring does render when using the Metal renderer, although that's not supported and has other major rendering issues.

That's correct. TFP formally announced this would happen, back in December: