Boidster

Broadly speaking, yes! "Random" numbers in programming are almost always pseudo-random, based on a seed value. If you know the seed value, you can determine the sequence of "random" numbers that will result. In nearly all applications where randomness is required, this is sufficient. If you: Know the seed Know the exact algorithm used to produce 'random' numbers Know the probabilities for all potential loot items in all containers you want to search Then you could deterministically work your way through a game looting exactly the right containers at exactly the right time to get the "best" loot for each search.

Deleted due to fogged glasses.

HP/AP is also in quest loot, but you're right about the buried treasure. Not used in any containers. I think in these root-level ammo groups they just need to add HP and AP ammo with a proper lootstage-scaled probability curve. Same for 7.62 and the other ammo types. <lootgroup name="group9mmSmall"> <lootgroup name="group9mmMedium"> <lootgroup name="group9mmLarge"> Unless of course they intend for HP/AP ammo to only be available through quests and crafting. Incentive to do both.

lern2fly n00b lol /s

I knew a girl in high school who would wear yogging shoes and pink thirts when I asked her to. She's in the bank IYKWIM. *stares wistfully into the distance*

Can you elaborate on the difference between the last two screenshots? The one with Hills=10 + Mountains=10, and the one which adds Random=10 into that? They look very similar, in terms of how much area is covered by mountain, how much by hills, how much by plains. I'm wondering if you select high enough values in the biomes themselves - meaning the RWG is going to pick a few of them anyway - that the Random setting doesn't really affect the overall feel of the world. Put another way, if you want "random", then you really ought to decrease - maybe even set to 0 - the biome values.

Sorry, the yellow Xs are the ceiling-mounted blade traps. Hanging upside-down to chop Demolisher heads (and not set them off). Yep. As long as a zombie is standing in the trip-wire, the dart traps fire. The electric fence lines, which are also running right through the center of the traps, hold them on the trip wire for a few seconds. I have used motion sensors in dart-trap kill corridors before, but it does consume more ammo and the sensors are vulnerable to acid damage. In A19, at least, it could be a real bear trying to get the motion sensor to see just the hallway and not zombies milling around outside. So we switched to trip wires. The wiring is much more complicated of course.

Well it's in our old 19.3 game on a dedicated server and it actually took less time to draw it than it would to fire that back up I think. The basic layout is below. Zombies enter at lower left, climbing as they jump over stuff until they reach the platform where the sledge is. Some of them get to start over at that point! The ones who get past the sledge start down the corridor where they get 2 acupuncture treatments and 3 haircuts (the floor is half-blocks, and the corridor is 3 blocks high, so blades really are designed to hit Demolisher heads only). If they survive that they turn the corner for more acupuncture. Very few zombies made it past the first set of dart traps after the corner. But we could see (from the firing position, looking down on the ramp) if any were getting close to the iron bars and we'd step over there and mow them down. If it got really hairy, we'd throw the Oh S**t switch and flush the zombies down into a pit to start over (or just bash on stuff down there). Dart traps (2 high) are red blocks. They are all fronted by arrow slits with iron bars attached to the face. Tripwires are the green 'Y' symbols (some were outside the base on the exterior wall, but base is high up so they're not in any danger). Fenceposts are the blue star symbols. It took a while to sort out the layout and the wiring, but the base was pretty solid. We always had 2 or three support pillars broken out by the end of the night, but besides one time when cop spit took out a poorly-placed switch & relay, we never really were near being overrun. We'd spend horde night concentrating fire on the big guys - Demolishers, cops, wights. The peons would be killed by the darts.

Okay, I tested same seed, Random 0 (left) vs Random 10 (right): There are minor differences in biome borders, and all of the water, mountains, and towns/roads are different. But "more random"? >shrug< I dunno. Maybe the difference is down at the POI level somehow.

This will sound flippant, because it is, but apparently you are not supposed to fight off 15 zombies at night with a 9mm and a few pipe guns. At least not without planning an exit strategy or setting up a defensible position first. 7D2D just has a harsh way of teaching this to you.

Good grief. It adds random. How much random do you want? Well, set the slider appropriately. I personally like a medium-high amount of random, so I tend to monkey bicycle dishwasher. /I'm doing a little test to see if I can suss it out. I'll be back.

As near as I can tell, yep! They just need to wrap MAX(...) around their calculation and it'll start making sense, at least as a "backpack capacity" measure.

Yeah, that is exactly the test I did. A fresh character displays 27, which is the number of unlocked/non-encumbrance backpack slots. As you unlock slots (using mods or Pack Mule), the number starts going up and exactly matches the number of 'unlocked' backpack slots. But it will keep adding to the "Carrying Capacity" stat even for unused 'unlocked' slots - those above and beyond 45. And if you get Nightstalker Vol 4, which unlocks all 45 slots at night, then all of your mods get added on top of the 45. It doesn't count toolbar and it doesn't count the paper doll slots.

I'm sure others have done the same, but here's a modlet for it. Allows full-cost bundling of ammo with no perk or book. Still need to find the books if you want to craft at reduced cost at the workstation.

Yeah, it's real. It's used for bulls**t "registrations" with companies I don't want to be bothering me later. And also for 7D2D.

We use trip wires and electric fences which run through each pair of opposing dart traps. So the trap only fires when there's a Z in front of it, and the fence will lock them into their acupuncture session for a few moments. Definitely tied to a switch or two for safety. A switch that is not susceptible to the &#$@ cop spit. Ask me how I learned that.

The carrying capacity stat is kinda broken. It adds together the following: Number of non-encumbrance backpack slots (including the Nightstalker Vol 4 bonus) Number of clothing pocket mod slots not already included in (1) Number of armor mod slots not already included in (1) Number of slots given by Pack Mule not already included in (1) It does not include any of the paper doll slots nor the toolbelt. My near-certain guess is that @PoloPoPo has Nightstalker Vol 4 and the stats were taken at night. With fully-pocketed 5 pieces of armor, he gets +15 slots, and with 3 fully-pocketed clothing items he gets +6 slots. Add a point of Pack Mule for +3. 48 from Nightstalker + 15 from armor + 6 from clothing +3 for Pack Mule = 72. They really should max it out at 45 - the size of the backpack.

I'm not arguing the balance is correct now, or that there isn't a conflict as OP said, but IMO if I'm choosing to play a go-slow-go-quietly ninja, then I would expect it to take much longer to do a clear quest. In A19 my co-op partner and I tried to do most POIs - including T5s - quietly, with bows mostly. It took forever, but we kinda saw that as the cost for trying to play stealthy. It wouldn't suck to have a tiny bump to the odds of a bag drop when you kill a zombie before it wakes up, or some other clear benefit to being quiet. We did stealth just because it was kind of fun and suspenseful, but honestly the few times we went guns blazing were also fun and there was zero difference in loot of course.

Maybe it would be better in 7D2D for farms to populate the wilderness areas, but let's not pretend there aren't farms scattered all around in heavily populated areas. This is a few miles from where I live. All of the green spaces (except one golf course) are farms. This pattern is repeated throughout the US plains and midwest. Well, sure, you might say. It's like that in the corn belt, but not in Arizona! Here's part of the Phoenix area:

Boy do I have good news for you! Dart traps do not set off Demolishers. I personally use head-height ceiling mounted blade traps + dart traps in the kill corridor walls to make short work of them (if they get past the jumping-puzzle part of the path, which is under constant fire from us up in the base). Just to be sure they didn't change things in A20, I tested a Demolisher abuse prison. Killed many of them, not a single one got activated.

Oooh, look at Mr. Fancy Pants with a "theme"! LUXURY! When I was younger* all we had to scare the crap out of us was 'SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS' *By which I mean "mid 40's"

A small nit: animal spawns aren't (yet) tied to gamestage or lootstage. Or at least there's no evidence of that at all in the XML. No probability distribution for animals - just the numbers posted above. I looked at 19.3 for the Snow biome and it's actually not all that different. It's actually a little more likely (60% vs 45%) that you'd get a successful spawn in A19. <entitygroup name="EnemyAnimalsSnow"> <entity name="invisibleAnimalEnemy" prob="40"/> (this is 55 in A20 - for "none" animals) <entity name="animalMountainLion" prob="40"/> <entity name="animalDireWolf" prob="10"/> <entity name="animalBear" prob="10"/> </entitygroup> That said, if your impressions are animals are more common in Snow in A20 vs A19, then there is something else going on. I think the spawn cap idea above - where the A19 "invisible" spawns actually contributed to the cap, but A20 "none-imals" don't?

Okay, why don't you trust the simulation? Is it that the game does not actually work the way the XML indicates it does? Or that Doc Saturn got the math wrong? What is the evidence of either? Anecdotes and gut feelings aren't a strong argument. Unless your argument is that the game doesn't work like it says on the tin, then the expected average return from 1 corn seed, at LotL 1, is 0.8 (4/5 of the raw corn you need for a seed) + 0.5 (50% chance for a whole seed) = 1.3 seeds. RNG can kill the farm, of course, but the odds are in your favor. I'm not advocating against LotL 2 by the way. Great choice to improve your farming success rate. I'm just standing up for the math.