Boidster

January 8, 2022

I'm tellin' ya...I'm TELLIN ya....1 perk point for every 24 hours survived. Maybe an extra perk point or two for surviving BMH. Eliminate XP entirely. This is the way. Building, looting, crafting, questing - all of it is only to support the survival goal. This would be my preferred way to play so obviously it is objectively the best option.

Oh, but then I can just get a stash of food and drink and AFK in my base for 3 days and 3 points!

Sure, why not! Is that fun for you? Do you enjoy games where you don't really interact with the game at all, you just get "levels"? Have fun, then! And frankly, finding food & water and hunkering down in a safe spot isn't the stupidest way to try to survive a zombie apocalypse. Doesn't make for a fun game IMO, but IMO is not IYO so knock yourself out.

I'd contribute to the Venmo account of a modder who built such an overhaul after the game goes gold.

January 8, 2022

1 hour ago, Rotor said:

Except this time I looted a bag that gave me a schem for a forge. I have never even sniff'd its presence before. ...

The raging debate for me, is whether to restart because I died or keep going because I have a schematic that through all my noob playing time have not seen before.

That is a sympathy cookie I gave you, not a sarcastic pat-on-the-head cookie. If you're not playing "dead is dead", then I'd keep playing that game. A forge schematic is pretty valuable, but maybe not so useful early game? I don't really think too hard about realism in games, but frankly "build a working forge capable of smelting raw ore" is a pretty advanced skill for Joe Sixpack. A bit more involved than "stack some bricks", eh?

RNG giveth and RNG taketh away. Keep the forge schematic for later, and listen to Dory:

January 8, 2022

1 hour ago, minisith said:

On 1/3/2022 at 6:39 AM, Krougal said:

*makes popcorn*

*Steals popcorn*

*Plants popcorn*

NO SEEDS? WTF!!

January 8, 2022

5 hours ago, Survior said:

I guess the main point of this post is that I think the skill system that starts at zero in everything is inherently bad design and I much more prefer something like Fallout

That second thing you said is perfectly reasonable. The first part maybe not so much. Plenty of games start you with nearly nothing. You may not prefer it and I'm not arguing that you should prefer it, but the game is balanced (needs more, admittedly!) for starting at 4 points. It's not inherently bad design to do it that way.

You're not a helpless babe - you can pick up and use any tool, weapon, armor, or workstation in the game from Day 1 and, apparently, know how to build and upgrade complex structures with a rock tied to a stick. I know many people IRL - Midwesterners* even! - for whom that would not be the case. You can pretend that you're playing one of those skilless city-folk instead of a rugged Midwesterner. Or you're a rugged Midwesterner who got amnesia'd and dumped on the road by The Duke.

That said, my Zombie Armageddon Preparedness Peen is of average length. The military taught me some things which would be useful and I'm handy around the house and garage. No longer agile or particularly stealthy; those days are past. Have to rely on wits and tricking some city-slicker** to take point.

*For the non-Americans, the "Midwest" is roughly Ohio west to Kansas, and north to the Canadian border (some people have slightly different definitions). I live in this region. The myth we tell ourselves is that we are more rugged and hardy than most of the rest of the country.

**I grew up in a city of 1M people; I have no room to talk

January 8, 2022

5 hours ago, NBornkilla said:

funny i always put lucky looter and behold i start finding stuff yes including beaker lol.

Correlation is not causation lol. It is not a big mystery - the probabilities are all right there for us to read. Lucky Looter is great. It just has nothing to do with beakers.

January 8, 2022

The XML appears to show hostiles in the Snow biome having the same max count (per area) as they do in Pine Forest and that they should respawn 1/3 as often.

The difference is that there is only a 15% chance of a successful spawn from EnemyAnimalsForest, but that jumps to a 45% chance of success for Snow biome enemy animals. So yeah, you ought to see about 3x as many spawns in the Snow biome. But they will repopulate about 1/3 as quickly so in the long term you ought to encounter approximately the same # of enemy animals per unit time, if you are hanging around the same area and killin' 'em when you see 'em. If you're traveling through the biome, then 3x as many hostile animals in Snow.

Ya gotta take the risk with the reward (higher lootstage).

January 8, 2022

16 hours ago, Krougal said:

While light does affect stealth, it doesn't make a difference if you are shooting them across room boundaries (which you probably typically are).

Technically, light won't affect your stealth for a sleeper volume which you aren't in. Possibly that sleeper volume does start in the next room, but there are plenty of POIs which have volumes covering many rooms. Simpler POIs might have a single volume covering the entire shack/house, including different floors. In such POIs, the visibility of the player affects every sleeper in the volume, subject to line-of-sight.

Don't think that just because that sleeping zombie is through a doorway in a different room that it isn't in the same volume you are in, or that it won't detect changes in visibility/sound.

January 8, 2022

10 minutes ago, Krougal said:

You looted a different bird nest/trash pile/pair of sedans/garbage and got the same loot as 1a?

Yessir. That lines up with my comments earlier about the worldsave seed giving 0.27, 0.93, 0.17, 0.88, 0.73 (or whatever) for the first five RNG rolls. As long as I am looting exactly the same lootgroups in exactly the same order, it doesn't matter where on the map they are.

January 7, 2022

30 minutes ago, theFlu said:

Since randomness is always* predetermined anyway

The universe knew you were going to type that.

Anywho, I'm back from testing. It seems to work consistently with the idea of a single RNG seed for looting, which is tied to the game save. You can save-scum if you are so inclined.

I created "Save 1a" and then saved off copies of it before starting. So 1b, 1c, and 1d would be "save-scumming" opportunities.

Container	Save 1a	Save 1b Same Containers Same Order	Save 1c Same Containers Different Order	Save 1d Different Containers But Same Cont. Type	Save 2 New Game Same Map
Bird Nest	6 feathers	Same	(5) 1 feather, 1 egg	Same	8 feathers
Trash Pile	32 sand	Same	(1) 1 pipe, 38 clay	Same	39 clay
Sedan	1 can, 1 yucca seed	Same	(4) 111 gas, bone, 2 lockpick	Same	2 weights
Sedan	1 pipe	Same	(2) 1 rotten meat	Same	glue 20 gunpowder
Garbage	1 bone, 15 scrap	Same	(3) 1 jar	Same	2 nails, jar

This seems to back up my comment before that you can't really have a "bad RNG seed" like we might have bad or good RWG seeds. If you change the order of searching in the tiniest way, you get different loot. I mean, Save 1c is clearly better than Save 1a. Save-scum is successful!

January 7, 2022

31 minutes ago, HighImCody said:

But just another example of how the game isn't really meant to be balanced around PvP.

A glass-half-full take is that it hasn't been balanced and polished yet. I'm sure they'll give it a pass with an eye towards tightening up PvP. Maybe they'll even add some mods specific to that playstyle.

I agree that the Cripple 'Em mod should be fixed. The Hunter Mod I can see that some magic makes you better at killin' animals and maybe not so much people. Alright. But a mod which makes walking things stop walking so well probably ought to work against people. If I were playing PvP or on someone's server, I'd ask to have "player" added to the tag check on the mod. Probably safer than adding "walker" to the Player entity because who knows what else in the game targets walkers.

January 7, 2022

4 minutes ago, HighImCody said:

If anyone PvP's I'd love to hear what you replaced your Hunter mod with. I'm between Cripple 'Em and just throwing on a Laser or Retracting Stock. 🤷‍♂️

I do not PvP, but I got some bad news I'm afraid. It looks like the Cripple 'Em mod targets entities with the "walker" tag on them:

And sadly the player entity does not have that tag. Easy fix of course - add walker here or add 'player' above.

<entity_class name="playerMale">
<property name="EntityType" value="Player"/>
<property name="Tags" value="entity,player,human"/>

Find a friend to shoot in the legs repeatedly to make sure the fix works.

January 7, 2022

16 minutes ago, theFlu said:

I probably shouldn't say anything, since I cba finding the discussion; but from A19, I remember someone complaining that they were unable to save-scum their loot containers. As in they were trying to "copy save" - "loot things" - "overwrite save with the copy" - "loot things in different order"; and they said any type of container would always produce the same results regardless of loot order. It's not a thing I care about, so I never looked into it further than that, but .. there could theoretically be a specific RNG for each loot container type, or whatever. At least the claim was that a small deviation wasn't sufficient to produce different loot.

That's a good point, I hadn't thought about a design goal to prevent save-scumming and how that would affect RNG implementation. It seems unlikely to me (though I am going to go test it right now) that TFP have somehow crafted an RNG mechanism where every container in a worldsave has its seed determined and locked before the player first opens it. Maybe when chunks are loaded the first time, not when the save is first created? I imagine all of the thousands of lootable containers the player passes by just running around town. All of them are locked down to prevent save-scumming?

Alright I'm off to do a better test. I briefly looked into this a couple of weeks back, but only using trash piles which all draw from the same lootgroup and could sort of appear to be save-scum proof. Time to try a mix of trash, vehicles, etc.

January 7, 2022

2 hours ago, GlyphGryph said:

I didn't say Penetrator was bad, I actually think its exceptionally good, I said it was gated by things the player had no control over and without those things it did nothing, which is frustrating - specifically, finding the AP ammo crafting book, or finding enough AP ammo in stores

A tangent: Penetrator also applies to Iron and Steel arrows and crossbow bolts.

January 7, 2022

2 hours ago, Kasad said:

By basic loot I don't mean cloths and water bottles. I mean acid, beakers, schematics for tools, steel parts etc.

Almost by definition, the game does not consider those to be basic loot. They are valuable loot - in high demand by the player for obvious reasons. And so they are also rare (and in the case of books/schematics, scaled based on your lootstage). All of them are available at the trader, or as quest rewards. Subject to RNG of course.

January 7, 2022

I'm no RWG expert, but if I wanted to start playing with it, I'd open rwgmixer.xml and start experimenting. For example, maybe changing the "many" value from 4 to 6 and bumping up the "mintiles" and "maxtiles" values a bit. Start small and see how it performs would be my advice.

You might also look into KingGen, but I'm not sure its current status re: A20 compatibility. I used it for A19 and it was excellent.

January 7, 2022

42 minutes ago, HighImCody said:

It appears the Hunter Mod was reworded from;
" +100% damage to living beings." to "+25% damage to Animals" since I last played (A19 iirc)

Does this mean that this mod is no longer used in PvP?

Yes. They changed the Hunter Mod to look for the "animal" tag on entities, which includes zombie animals (vultures, bears, dogs). They removed the "player" tag from the list as well.

If you are interested, I have a tiny modlet which used to "fix" A19 so the mod actually only hurt living creatures. It still does that, removing the zombie animals from the list and optionally (through a small text edit) you can add players back into the mix. If you just want to add players and not remove zombie animals, then you could use the modlet for that too.

January 7, 2022

1 hour ago, BarryTGash said:

If RNG does use a seed, it should probably be randomly generated each time the game loads (md5 timestamp?), not tied to a fixed string.

I'm unsure how doing this would change much except in very specific and unusual circumstances. Randomly randomizing the randomizer should be nearly indistinguishable from a high-level fixed seed. Assume that the RNG seed is the same as the RWG seed. That is, when you generate a map, the RNG seed is set and every playthrough using that map will have the same starting RNG seed. And so let's say that BarrysWorld RWG seed always produces these first five RNG numbers:

0.27, 0.97, 0.12, 0.84, 0.77

It may be that in your first playthrough on BarrysWorld, those numbers don't produce results you like. You search two vehicles, a trash pile, a bookcase, and a medicine cabinet in that order and you get junk in your opinion. Extend from five RNG numbers to 1,000 or 10,000 and the idea is the same. Maybe it doesn't work out and you think the RNG is bad.

But if you start a 2nd playthrough on BarrysWorld, same RNG seed, and make even a miniscule deviation in how you "used" those 5, or 1,000, or 10,000 RNG numbers, the experience would be completely different. Maybe you search the trash pile first and then the medicine cabinet. Well now 0.27 is used for the trash loot and 0.97 is used for the medicine cabinet (instead of two vehicles as in the 1st playthrough). Maybe the loot won't be much better, just different. And just as random even though the seed is identical.

There may be an instinct to treat RNG seed like we do RWG seeds. "Ooh, this seed has a nice city and 7 traders" becomes "Ooh this seed produces lots of beakers!", but the RNG doesn't work that way. The seed just determines the pseudo-random stack of numbers the game can use; they are used at run-time based on the actions of the player(s) in the game. Change the actions, change the results.

Edit to add: there's evidence that the game might use different RNG seeds for different things, too. POIs with random "helper" blocks (maybe it's a searchable cabinet, maybe it's an open/empty one) seem to get randomized at playthrough creation, if not RWG creation, and don't rely on run-time RNG checks like it used to in A19. That is, a quest location doesn't sprout new searchable cars or cabinets when you reset it like it used to. For random loot generation (which occurs when you search the container), it wouldn't matter. It'll appear random and be different between different playthroughs.

January 7, 2022

10 minutes ago, Star69 said:

the other was from an earlier air drop

The medical-type air drop has by far the best chance to give a beaker. I bet people who play with air drops on don't understand what the hubub is about. At least until TFP notices it and nerfs it a bit.

January 7, 2022

3 hours ago, NBornkilla said:

you have bad luck or not putting points in lucky looter just saying.

Lucky Looter, goggles, biome modifiers, and POI modifiers have nothing to do with finding beakers. At least not as of right now. The odds for beakers are not tied to lootstage. Is the balance right? Certainly many forum posters don't think so. The XML shows that TFP made a couple of conscious decisions to limit access to beakers so they were trying to address something. They've already said they are working on rebalancing all loot, so for now we need to deal with the quirks of this alpha release.

If you want more beakers, there is a modlet which will nudge the probabilities a bit.

January 7, 2022

You want slower loot progression? Good heavens, man, read the room!

I kid I kid. You can do what you want in a modlet pretty easily. Since biome modifiers are always active, you can just modify each biome downward by whatever factor you want. So if you want, say, a 50 percentage-point reduction in base lootstage, you would make these changes (in biomes.xml):

Pine Forest: 0 -> -0.5

Desert: 0.5 -> 0

Burnt Forest: 0.5 -> 0

Snow: 1.0 -> 0.5

Wasteland: 1.5 -> 1.0

You could also reduce the flat bonuses for each biome. And you can also easily adjust the POI bonuses - all of the factors are in a single line at the top of loot.xml.

Edit to add: I did test the negative modifier for biomes, and it worked as expected.

January 7, 2022

51 minutes ago, Roland said:

I'm 52. My first console was something that had Breakout and Pong preloaded on it. That's all you could play. There were no cartridges-- probably 1976 or 1977 if I remember correctly.

WHIPPERSNAPPER. Why I was already potty-trained when you were born! I had that same console. I think maybe we had two? One where the rotary controls were fixed to the unit ("stop bumping your sister, Boidster!") and another where they could disconnect. I might be misremembering the upgrade to the 2600 though. I also got a portable console around that time.

37 minutes ago, Roland said:

If we do get legendary gear I want it to be so rare that people come here to brag about what they found and nobody believes them and when they show a screenshot to prove it everyone accuses them of faking the pic...

I doubt TFP want to the the last of the cool kids to contribute to the glorious new future of The Blockchain. Get some NFTs up in this @%$#. Didn't need all these excess watts anyhow.

January 6, 2022

3 hours ago, 12pack said:

that was the code in a19, they have different groups and containers now..

but i do remember commenting that line out once, and it was Books, Glorious Books...

Trusting me is always a crapshoot. Too many damn 7D2D XML files open in Notepad++.

So it's interesting (and consistent with other A20 lootgroup changes) now.

<!-- *** Crackabook_Shelves -->
<lootgroup name="groupCrackabookShelves01">
    <item name="resourcePaper" count="1,5" loot_prob_template="high"/>
    <item group="booksAllScaled" loot_prob_template="low"/>
</lootgroup>

<lootgroup name="groupCrackabookShelves02">
    <item group="booksAllScaled"/>
</lootgroup>

<lootgroup name="groupCrackabookShelves" count="all">
    <item group="groupCrackabookShelves01" count="1"/>
    <item group="groupCrackabookShelves02" loot_prob_template="veryLow" force_prob="true"/>
</lootgroup>

If I read that correctly (remember - crapshoot!), here's how looting a Crack-A-Book shelf would work out. The count="all" for the parent group means, I think, that each sub-group is always rolled. However, the force_prob on the second sub-group means, I think, that the .05 probability for 'veryLow' is used. That is, normally count="all" would mean at least some loot from every sub-group would be given. In this case, though, the groupCrackabookShelves02 is forced to keep its .05 (5%) chance.

So it works out to about a 25% chance of finding a book or schematic in a Crackabook shelf (not the bookcases you find in libraries/offices/houses - the store shelves). I used the special vanilla POI 000_loot_new_test (which has like 40x every container in the game in it) to loot 40 shelves and I got 9 books/schematics. So that seems to line up pretty well.

Bookcases are different, and simpler, and more lucrative. Again we have count="all" which I think means every group is checked, but the 2nd and 3rd sub-group also have force_prob="true" so they are forced to use the 'med' and 'low' probabilities.

<!-- *** Bookcase_Loot -->
<lootgroup name="groupBookcase" count="all">
    <item name="resourcePaper" count="1,5"/>
    <item group="booksAllScaled" loot_prob_template="med" force_prob="true"/>
    <item group="booksAllScaled" loot_prob_template="low" force_prob="true"/>
</lootgroup>

Mathing on that a bit results in the chance of at least one book = 60%. I looted 40 bookcases and got 27 books (67.5% - I guess I was lucky), including 4 instances of 2 books found in one bookcase (exactly the 10% expected occurrence of that).

Setting aside all the math and the crapshoot on my reliability - just looting all the Crack-A-Book shelves vs. bookcases in the 000_loot_new_test POI showed me that if I want to find books/schematics, I should prioritize bookcases in homes & offices, not necessarily Crack-A-Book stores. The stores have the benefit of a dense group of lootables, but the bookcases are more lucrative.

42 minutes ago, Urban Blackbear said:

It seems like the loot tables have been spread out over a larger range of loot/gamestages and that completely changes progression for a solo player like myself. More gates only serve to shut people out.

In a different thread, schwanz9000 acknowledged the wobblyness of the current loot probabilities and is working on a balancing/fixing pass through them. There are leftovers from previous releases which are kind mucking things up. Alpha software, amirite?

January 6, 2022

The following mods do not appear in traders.xml. I'm sure it'll all be cleaned up in upcoming releases.

modGunBowArrowRest
modGunDrumMagazineExtender
modGunShotgunTubeExtenderMagazine
modMeleeClubMetalChain
modRoboticDroneArmorPlatingMod
modRoboticDroneCargoMod
modRoboticDroneHeadlampMod
modRoboticDroneMedicMod
modRoboticDroneMoraleBoosterMod
modVehicleExpandedSeat
modVehicleFuelSaver
modVehicleOffRoadHeadlights
modVehicleReserveFuelTank
modVehicleSuperCharger

January 5, 2022

1 hour ago, Jesternario said:

Is this a bug?

No. This is ALPHA SOFTWARE and you can't expect to have stuff and things in the game!

Sorry, I don't mean to pick. I just chuckled at your OP. It was kind of like "My car is making a loud screeching noise and is slightly on fire...is this a problem?"

January 5, 2022

31 minutes ago, Pernicious said:

I am currently an enterprise security architect

OMG I read a funny article you'd like, it's at jndi:\\lol.wat/thisis/ajoke/keke.bat

\they're backwards to double-emphasize that I'm not tryin' to hack anybody

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