Real guns? Uh, are they still in game? LOL. In my first playthrough in A20, I'm on a second in-game week, and... still using scrap armor (except boots as those are the only iron armor part that I found), and I'm still using pipe shotgun, pipe pistol, pipe machine gun and I have to admit, I initially hated them (mostly due to how slow they are to reload and the shotgun being one-shot only), but eventually I got used to them and I even started to like them! Not that I would have anything better at this time, but yeah, I guess it's just a matter of getting used to it that now we kinda have to go through this much slower progress, as there's no way to avoid it without cheating, but the game doesn't necessarily feel harder for this and I think it's more realistic this way, because the apocalypse obviously didn't start the day we were thrown into that world for the first time and chances to find something useful inevitably has to be thin, so it makes sense that people would have to improvise and craft and use improvised weapons a lot. Any improvised weapons TFP can put into the game, I'm all for it.
By the way, I haven't played the game for some time, so I probably forgot how it works, but I'd swear that once a quest TIER is finished, we are moved to the next TIER, but in Alpha 20, I already finished TIER I for two different traders and I still don't see TIER II, can anyone help me here, please?