Vedui

I would add on, that the creative commands (such as the one I show how to enable) seems to have been further restricted over the last few alphas compared to before. Not entirely sure why, or why they're locked requiring xml edit to begin with, when they are very useful to admins. If devs feel they have some danger to the save or causing bugs alright, although me and others have been using these commands for years now and I've never run across anything breaking. So I'd definitely support these (including fill options which have been removed/restricted) being made available without XML edits to give us further ADMIN/creative control over our game. I recall asking about this during a previous dev stream and the response seemed to be more along the lines of "it might be confusing for players to enable it" ... which I think should not be a factor in the decision, as if you admin your game, run it creative, there's a lot worse things you can do than this. Your game, your choice

I do agree the game has gotten to be too bright. Though I CAN see the appeal for people to make the game play "easier", it does also take a lot of the scariness away from the game. One might remember the good old days (well, nights) when it was so dark you could hardly see without a torch, so going out at night was much more oppressive. Nowadays (nowanights?) you really don't have to worry so much. It would be very nice with a setting, and I would go one further to make it a server setting, that way people playing solo could set it as they wanted, and server admins could specify for the whole server to which degree darkness would affect everyone at night. Sure, people could still bump up screen/pc brightness etc, but it'd at least baseline it for everyone equally on that particular server fitting that particular setting chosen.

All these quick fire updates are a bit painful. Just had drone corruption on the latest b328 ... logged on, drone was on the ground damaged. Repaired, and it vanished. LE no longer shows it, jd commands failing to clear, but can't deploy as reached the max number of drones... removing the drones.dat file does nothing. Will have to try removing the whole player profile, as suspect there's an invalid reference somewhere. Probably a new record to hit 4 releases in a day

I agree. I do prefer it this way, even though it takes some getting used to. People often think my organization is weird along top and sides for some games. It would be nice if the lock icon open/closed were more different, and better colour/visibility, but those are small things that can be tightened up easily.

I actually prefer the new locking system, allowing me more flexibility in how to arrange my inventory than simply row by row from the top. Though I'd have preferred having BOTH systems, but maybe hard to implement without it being messy and confusing. Still it'll take some getting used to.

Yeah it's just likely to cause more confusion with hundreds of streamers telling people "Here's a key to alpha 21!" and they're seeing 1.0 being played, and are going to wonder why we're giving away keys to an old version and not to the new version... and probably wonder if their a21 key will not cover 1.0 release, etc I mean it's a key to 7 days to die, which includes lots of nice alpha versions to play too!

The google docs form refers to Alpha 21 ... "Would you like Steam promo keys to gift Alpha 21 to your audience? *"

I think it's much of a storm in a teacup here. A22, A23, or 1.0 or 2.0 really matters less. I'm imagining that launching the same version on console pretty much necessitates (or strongly favors) calling it a 1.0 release, which is cool. It's just naming which really does not matter. The biggest thing is console players finally get to play it, and hopefully by Q4 crossplay so PC and console gamers can finally game together, which I think is really rare but a great boon to the community. However, let's also utilize commonly accepted terms. 1.0 is a gold release. You can not release into 1.0, exit early access, and still not call it a gold release. Doing so simply stretches the terminology of a gold release into nonsensical use. I'd prefer we move away from the gold release term anyhow, as we don't do CD pressing, we can easily do day 1 (or day -1) bug AND content patches ... and easily subsequently update and add features through established protocols. Me, I'd have preferred TFP saying "We're going to label it 1.0, it's not the completed game, but that's the term we'll be using as we exit early access regardless and we had to due to A B C considerations." and leave it at that. I would of course being the nosy person I am like to know ALL the backroom dealings of why, but wanting and being owed an explanation are two widely different things. Now ... end May experimental still on? Can we push it to end June when I'm back from holiday? Vedui42

I would say in many ways 7 Days to Die has "matured" and gotten into a more stable cycle. With more players than ever before, there appears to be less radical changes to gameplay and instead more refinements. This by its very nature makes for a lot less "hype", just an incrementally better game for new players. Players who've been around for a longer time might instead feel that the game while better, doesn't hold enough interest in between updates. Looking at gameplay, Alpha 18 until Alpha 21 plays very similar in my experience. Alpha 21 is a fair bit improvement across many aspects, but the core gameplay is very similar. This means that while one might've spent months exploring the game in Alpha 18, subsequent versions while better simply had insufficient new content to continue playing past a certain point. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, nor unexpected. Alpha 22 had a fair bit of hype for bandits, being a short cycle and all that, neither of which came to pass. So yes, the hype at the moment is quite dead, I hear no one talking about the game, but I invite people to check out steam charts which clearly shows the game is doing better than ever over time

He certainly will be missed! I'll always remember him as a super cool guy who would happily spend time with us to explain, answer questions, and interact with us all. My most recent memory of him was actually just about 2 months ago now, where he went back to a video I made 5 years ago now for A17 (gosh time flies!) and the (then) new buff/effect system. I thought it was so cool and a huge deal for the game and wanted to really highlight the great effort, and while it's such an old video now apparently Rob must have saved down the video and came back to view and comment on it! While memories can be painful, they also serve as the joy of remembering the good times, and definitely would like to see something in game as well for one of the heroes we lost along the way. ❤️ Tom aka Vedui42

You have to understand that most of these things are done by algorithms, and those can be tripped for really weird reasons. Even when they say they have "manually reviewed", they actually have not. I have a single video demonetized in my library. Apparently it has "excessive swearing" in it, as confirmed by YouTube's manual review. Except, it's a 30 second short, where I've gone over it with a finetooth comb, forward and backward, and there's no excessive swearing in it. There's actually no swearing in it at all (It's extremely rare to ever hear my swear, due to my kids watching them). But despite this, YouTube in their "manual" review finds excessive swearing, where there 100 % is none, nothing even close to it, no aggressive language, nothing that could remotely be taken or mistaken as rude. Now it was a Shorts video where I happened to get killed by zombies, so if they had said "violence" I could have understood it, though peculiar still as it's just a video game, and death in video games doesn't normally cause any issues. So knowing WHY a video was demonetized is super hard. I do think people will have to be more careful with the opening bits of their videos, ensure cleaner language, trying to avoid excessive violence... and hope this whole thing blows over. What I find more weird though is that "all" swearing/curse words are seen as equally bad. "@%$#" and "crap" is now a curse, which I personally would not consider it. The worrying bit is that they'll expand the vocabulary of "cursing" even more, making it very hard to actually describe something "This game runs like @%$#" caused demonetization ... so you'd be saying "This games runs sub-optimal below the acceptable range" or something else, which is dumb. But that's YT!

And that's a good change. I think many of us have seen that over the years crafting has been de-focused, to the point of obsolesce for weapons/armour/tools. However, this change likely has nothing to do with learn-by-looting, and more due to looting/buying/questing for gear the last few years was simply far superior, as you'd pretty much always have access to higher quality gear than you ever could craft. I'd definitely prefer if loot/quest/bought gear was much more rare, and inferior quality to what you can craft. What I would like to see is Q6 gear crafting restored, and removed from loot/quest/trader ... want that top quality shotgun? Better skill into it, as you'll never get it from buying or looting it. That would flip the current situation where eventually you still are better off using a looted/quested/bought Q6 piece of gear as you can only craft Q5.

Actually, most people I ran into complain because fixing the zombie pathing over arrow slits was done at the expense of using them as arrow slits. You used to be able to reach in through the gap, which was immensely useful for base building to wire your base up. Put up your trip wires, electric fences, dart traps and even restock. After the change, you have to break them every time you need to access them. I can't overstate how bad this is now, making their use extremely frustrating every single time you need access. In other words, the price for preventing "some" players from using them in "cheesy" ways, was to prevent EVERYONE from using them properly. This is probably the worst trade off the TFP has ever done, where legitimate players gets punished by TFP trying to prevent cheesy players. It's one of the "fixes" that TFP really should revert, as punishing all those of us who never use them to cheese, just to stop those who might cheese, is really an unacceptable trade. While I think fixing the lack of pathing in this case was good, if it can't be done without punishing regular use, it really shouldn't be done I think you bought the wrong game then... did you miss the part about "tower defense" elements? That's exactly how monsters behave in a TD game, so unless you want them to also change this game's sub-genre, I suggest you adapt your gameplay to it. I'm with Grue on this. Alpha 17 change over to a new AI pathing while it has benefits in POI's etc (less swiss cheese POI's), when it comes to Blood Moon Horde it's far inferior. Not only are zombies omniscient, they don't act like zombies. There are no more tower defense elements of 7dtd as a result. You used to be better off making layered defenses as zombies would come in from a direction and break down the base walls trying to get closer to the player from that direction. Now they lemming their way to their death seeking the path of least resistance and just making a kill-entrance is sufficient as you know the zombies won't go anywhere else. I think TFP should keep the omniscient pathing in POI's (the zombies lived there, so it makes sense they'd know where to go), but use a different AI for blood moon hordes, make it cheap computationally, waves of zombies storming the base, and maybe we can have a horde defense game as opposed to small squads of zombie commandos.

Is this a decision made by TFP to only allow creative access to many of these art assets? I have to say, 7 Days to Die could be the best building game in vanilla, if it allowed you to craft and/or buy all these things. There's an AMAZING amount of great assets out there that are used in POI's and it's a huge shame you need to go creative to utilize them. Of course yes, you can mod that (which I've done in my Expanded Deco modlet) but I really think it's something which would HUGELY improve the builder's enjoyment if people could decorate with these awesome assets. I mean, they're there. They've been implemented, and while there's some work to balance crafting/scrapping/buying them, that's honestly worth it.

That would be a funny (and possibly fitting) way to implement the Kickstarted goal/feature of "Be a zombie" ... would not only look awesome, but tick the box too!