Boidster

Until then, here you go @EVH:

But you said: It is reasonable precisely because of how the system works! That is why I carefully explained how the system works when responding to the above and asked you to describe a system which would prevent such an unreasonable result. Slightly-easier-to-find beakers wouldn't, but okay at least it's easy to do. And now you say: This is absolutely not true. As has been explained by multiple people in this very thread! It is random. And in fact the auger which you are so worked up about is gamestage-scaled whereas beakers are not. So beakers are literally easier to find early since getting an auger is impossible until approximately GS118 (loot-affecting gear/candy applies). That is, the game enforces a logical progression of better loot as you play longer. Exactly what you suggest it should be doing. See the ProbT3 probability table in loot.xml. Here is a modlet which will do what you claim you want. It absolutely will make it easier to find beakers. But it's just a small nudge (I hope, I did not playtest it through many game days) so it's quite possible you'll reach GS 118 and hit the lucky roll and still get an auger first. You can tweak it to be even more loose with beakers pretty easily. I want to be clear that I'm not arguing that vanilla beaker probabilities are correct, nor that a balancing pass isn't required for a whole range of loot. I'm trying to clarify that this seems to be a balance issue, not a "broken system" issue. And also that without serious unbalancing, in the other direction, Auger-before-Beaker will always be a possibility. Or Steel Pick-before-Beaker. Or pick the unreasonable item you get before a beaker. RNG is RNG and unless you want a deterministic loot path, there will be anomalies.

Not quite a slider, but you could play with this setting in entityclasses.xml: <property name="AIFeralSense" value="1.5"/> There is one on zombieTemplateMale which covers all humanoid zombies, then one for animalZombieBear (1.2) and one for animalZombieDog (1.6).

I tested it for fun. I spawned in a crate on top of some frames so I could clearly see the strobe on the bottom. Waited for the light & smoke to stop, then moved out of rendering distance and returned. The light never turned back on once it stopped, but I did get a few seconds of smoke every time the box came into view. I can understand the smoke stopping, but it would be nice if the strobe were persistent. Maybe all that's left post-apocalypse is generic brand AAA batteries?

I think that since the game doesn't actually model "feral" at all, it uses hearing as a rough approximation. If the idea is that zombies have some sort of extra-sensory or supernatural zombie feral sense, then being able to hear you 100m away search through a trash pile kinda sort of produces the result they're going for. Zombies have a special ability to detect you. Maybe when we reduce it to "sound level" and "line of sight" we're oversimplifying what TFP is going for. But all they have to work with in the game engine is sound and LoS so that's how the changes in the AI are documented. Think of it like the old raw meat sense they used to have, except now you are the raw meat.

Indeed. And even this solution would not prevent Auger before Beaker. It would only reduce the probability of that happening. In essence it only changes the balancing of loot tables. Which is my main point in this particular thread - OP and others are only complaining about balance, but they think they are complaining about a broken system. I'm keen to understand what a non-broken (and non "fake-random") system looks like. I'm honestly not sure how they think the game should be behaving. "It shouldn't give me an auger before giving me a beaker" is not a description of how the loot system should behave, it's only a specific complaint about a specific playthrough (or maybe several) which frustrated a particular player. Let's fix the broken system! But how, without "fake-random"?

I'm keen to hear your suggestion for a loot mechanism which does not meet Meganoth's (and my own) definition of "fake-random" and which would prevent the situation above. And just so we're crystal clear on how it works now: 1) Every possible loot item in a container is assigned a probability 2) Game produces a random number and checks against the probabilities 3) Game gives you the item indicated by the random number 4) Game does not track in any way what you have found already, what you still need, or what you want to find Okay - how could it be changed to prevent Auger before Beaker?

theFlu is correct. It's not just a 2D top-down picture, it's a 3D preview which you can fly around, like so: Controls W/A/S/D: work as expected, but forward/back act like down/up if you are looking straight down, like you are right after the generation completes Up (increase altitude): Space Down (decrease altitude): Ctrl Move map: right mouse-drag (recommend only dragging the top half of the map, otherwise it can get confusing) I was not able to get any keys - +/-, pgup/pgdn, mousewheel - to change the flying speed. If you are trying to zoom out all the way, it is pretty slow. Another option is this handy-dandy map previewer, which works with A20: https://kui.github.io/7dtd-map/. Move the Prefabs slider to 0 to get rid of all the red Xs (I already did that for this screenshot; you'll see).

Aw maaaan. I was promised "care bears" and all I got was a perfectly reasonable comment about TFP's current development priority. <kicks rock>

Don't be coy, name names. I want to read this quote and know who said it.

But...you can. <lootgroup name="groupChemistryStationLoot03"> <item name="toolBeaker" loot_prob_template="veryLow"/> <item name="chemistryStationSchematic" loot_prob_template="low"/> </lootgroup> I thought in the context of this thread it meant "random, but with rubber-banding so that <what you need> becomes more and more likely the longer you don't find it". I'm not sure what "coming off a list" has to do with "fakeness" of random results? I mean, a roulette wheel just pulls numbers off of a list. Or to use an example more fitting, a roll of two dice simply gives a result from a known list, with some results more likely than others. Game loot is truly random (setting aside that it must use a pseudo-RNG based on some seed value). The lists don't change that at all. Edit to add: unless you meant that the only non-fake system would be "every item in the game has an exactly equal chance to be found at all times from any lootable container" in which case there used to be a mod for that. Find T3 Q6 guns in trash piles at level 2! Fun!

I applaud your internally-consistent view of "cheese". You are the first person I've encountered who held this viewpoint. In my experience until now, the word "cheese" in the context of gaming was always an insult. Used to denigrate another player's playstyle just short of calling them a "cheater". In your view it seems the very core of any game where the player has an adversary - from 7D2D to CoD to PvZ - is "cheese". Take cover, cheese. Place a passive defense, cheese. Erect an active defense, cheese. Sniper rifle, cheese. The only non-cheese way to play any game is to stand face to face with your attacker or, if you both have ranged weapons, possibly facing each other across a distance with no obstacles. It is a consistent, coherent viewpoint, but it sure applies the "cheese" denigration to a very wide spectrum of players across many games. In you I think I have found the right end of the "what is cheese" bell curve. I think I am at or very near the left end, since my view - at least in a game like 7D2D - is that there is no cheese except for leveraging game bugs to gain information the virtual survivor wouldn't have. Infinite ramps? Not cheese at all - the player can observe the zombie behavior and take advantage of it. Just like I would if I were the actual survivor of an actual zombie apocalypse. Glitching through the terrain for x-ray vision? Cheese, since there's no way the survivor could actually do that. By that time "cheese" is synonymous with "cheat" I suppose. But other than that, if you survive the apocalypse by whatever means using information available to your toon, it cannot be cheese. There's a vast hump of the bell curve between us, which was part of the point you were making I think.

AKA "balance". These higher & lower probabilities for items have always been in the game - it's never been an equal chance for any item in the game. You just don't like the current balance and your opinion is "it's broken" and nobody can convince you otherwise. Others don't have any problem with the current balance and don't think anything is broken. You're not wrong, they're not wrong. Luckily, the game is fairly easily adjustable for anyone with a text editor and there are plenty of people here who will provide pretty detailed instructions if asked nicely.

Wow, this did not age well.

The game log is begun as soon as you start, and is not deleted upon crash. Look here: C::\Steam\steamapps\common\7 Days To Die\7DaysToDie_Data\ (or wherever you installed Steam). Also, you may wish to try the General Support forum. You won't want to hear this, but given that this is a brand new PC, I would suspect it's an underlying issue in the system which only manifests when its under stress, like when playing a game. Memory timing, CPU/GPU overclocking, drivers, etc. Of course "everything is working fine" is the usual response here, but the fact of the matter is that the game plays perfectly well for hundreds of us with similar specs so you'll want to be open about troubleshooting the PC itself, not wondering how 7D2D is broken. Good luck, these things can be a real PITA I know.

I absolutely agree with this and it's a good thing nobody is doing that. Also, thank you for keeping O.G. "begging the question" alive. It's an interesting position to take, that the people who who host servers of a size within the developer recommendations are not in their right mind. I presume the people who are trying to host 50-player servers, in spite of the developers specifically not recommending that, are the ones in their right mind? Does complaining to the developers that their game doesn't support the thing which they, the developers, specifically said it did not support increase or decrease the right-mindedness of these brave mavericks? A thought experiment: would a person be in his/her right mind to try to run the game on a 1.9GHz CPU with 4GB of RAM and on-board Intel graphics? Why or why not?

I'm unsure if it still works this way, especially with the addition of the "force_prob" attribute on some loot rewards, but in any case it used to be that "0.05" probability did not actually mean 5%. For example in groupChem01, you have a whole bunch of choices: <item name="resourceGlue"/> <item name="resourceOilShale" count="25,50"/> <item name="resourcePotassiumNitratePowder" count="25,50"/> <item name="resourceCoal" count="25,50"/> <item name="resourceScrapLead" count="25,50"/> <item name="drinkJarRiverWater" loot_prob_template="med"/> <item name="drinkJarBoiledWater" loot_prob_template="med"/> <item name="resourceOil" loot_prob_template="med"/> <item name="resourceAcid" loot_prob_template="low"/> <item name="resourceTestosteroneExtract" loot_prob_template="low"/> <item name="resourceSilverNugget" loot_prob_template="veryLow"/> <item name="resourceGoldNugget" loot_prob_template="veryLow"/> <item name="toolBeaker" loot_prob_template="veryLow"/> If it works the way it used to, every item without an explicit probability counts as probability 1.0. The engine then adds them all up and the true probability of any single item is its probability divided by the total. Using the above example: 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 0.5 (med) + 0.5 + 0.5 + 0.2 (low) + 0.2 + 0.05 + 0.05 + 0.05 = 7.05 So the true probability of toolBeaker - if it still works like it used to - is 0.05 / 7.05 = 0.007 (7 tenths of 1 percent).

So, you didn't confirm stamina level or surrounding threats before engaging in a fight with only a club as a weapon?

Interesting. I just started three new games using the same RWG world and I got different results from my 1st trash search in each. I spawned in different places on the map each time, but I always searched a trash pile on the road (before taking any other action besides walking/running). Got rocks the first time, and sand + cloth the second time, glue + lead weights 3rd time.

Playing devil's advocate, what if it was just a POI-level guarantee, not an always-in-this-exact-container guarantee? Maybe you'll get lucky and find it in the first loot box, maybe you'll have to go through nearly the entire POI before you find it. But you'll never know exactly where it is.

Wait, so just plain defenses are cheese to you? Good heavens.

It still upgrades from concrete -> steel.

Firstly: Secondly, it ain't even good at what its technically-correct name implies!

OP wants: Electric cookers (stoves I guess?) Electric forges (and other Tier 2 workstations) Coffee makers Drink chillers Cornmeal grinders Neon lights (and more lights in general) More zombies in the streets Higher resource consumption and/or balance (lost vegetables but gained meat?) Tier 3 stun baton Get rid of/change the spear's alternate (thrown) attack More spear mods Redo the entire armor/weapon/vehicle mod system More mod stat effects - crit chance, haste, armor penetration, etc.

This is an awesome story of using the modding hooks TFP provided to turn TFP's art into art that you like better. You're doing it exactly right, and exactly as planned! Good on ya.