Boidster

One way would be to add a tag to the perkBooks group like "duplicateAdjust=0.1" and a tweak to the RNG algorithm so that any group with that tag reads the player's stats and applies the adjustment to the otherwise equal chances on each as-yet-not-found item. So using 0.1 as the example, needed books would be adjusted upward from 1.0 (the default) to 1.1, slightly increasing their chances of being found relative to the other books. That same XML tag could be used on the schematics list. If a player wants to strengthen the "honing in" on needed books, change it to 0.2 or 0.5 or whatever. For multi-player games I'd say it only applies to the player opening the container. Otherwise it becomes much more complex. If a party attacks a Crack-A-Book, they ought to split up the bookshelves amongst the party, or if they're really cooperative let the least-well-read player loot most of 'em. The above technique can be done today, of course, for anybody wanting to keep some RNG but with a nudge towards needed books/schematics. You have to manually set the needed books to prob=1.1 (go higher for a stronger nudge). Of course you can also just comment out the already-found books, but at that point just use 'cm' and poptart whatever you need into inventory.

I intentionally put it that way, because this is a family site!

I like this idea, if it is gentle enough. Like a nudge, not a shove towards the needed books. We're level 90-ish in our co-op game and we're down to our last couple of books each. It's a paradox of the RNG system - it's "hard" to find the books we need, but at the same time it's exactly as hard as it has always been to find those specific books. We just found all of the other hard-to-find books first! :-) I appreciate your thoughtful feedback in the OP. I don't share quite the same impressions, but I like when players give reasoned feedback.

Edit: for any poor soul coming across this thread in the future - hey, how's the future? Has the world accepted science, reason, and cooperation as the sustainable way forward? No? Well at least you still have 7D2D. Ignore the blather I wrote below, for the most part. Look instead in the \GeneratedWorlds folder hiding under your Windows user folder. Something like this: C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Roaming\7DaysToDie\GeneratedWorlds\ Hmm...that ought not to matter. Wherever the client is installed, it will create a world...somewhere...which has the prefabs.xml file you're looking for. You should see the following folder structure (excluding the one BoidsHellscape world folder and also not the Prefabs Install folder): Wrong location hiding behind this spoiler. If you use the vanilla RWG to create a new custom world, it should add a folder under \Worlds \GeneratedWorlds with the name. If it's not putting it there then a) that is kind of odd and b) it must be creating the files somewhere. Maybe Ctrl-F for prefabs.xml on your drive?

So I guess this is technically true, but only by the slimmest of margins. It's not just far into the game, it only happens at the literal end of player progression. If my math is correct, anyhow. Details are in progression.xml. Max level is 300 and you start at 1, so you get 299 points through level advancement. You get 4 points for the starter quest, so 303 total points available in the game. It takes 90 points to max out all of the attributes and another 212 points to max out the perks = 302 points to get everything. Leaving you, when you finally make level 300, with 1 point you can't spend.

This is not a thing. Finding a book is 100% random from the perkBooks lootgroup in loot.xml. This is already how it is done. See the above lootgroup - there are no GS tiers associated with it. The reason why you perceive that "the last book" is so hard to find is that finding any particular book, assuming your loot roll lands on "perkBooks", is 1 in 133, or 0.75%. So when you only have a few books left to find, the odds are very much in favor of finding duplicate books instead. The game doesn't remember what you've already found - it always picks one book from the list of 133. For a roughly equivalent thought experiment, imagine you take two decks of cards, one red and one blue, and shuffle them all together thoroughly. Then you pick one card and you only "win" if you get the Four of Clubs from the red deck. That is what trying to find "the last book" is like, only it's actually a bit harder for the books.

"Roland said A20 will be released on December 3rd" coming to a thread near you in 3...2...1... <SouthParkRandyMarshExplosionMeme.jpg>

We can actually craft Survival Hordes. You know, vast armies of little mobs who go out and chop down trees and make tools and food and weapons and complain about how small and empty the world is.

It's available for any map. KingGen generates exactly the same set of files as vanilla RWG, it just does it better. My worlds are here: F:\Steam\steamapps\common\7 Days To Die\Data\Worlds\

Y U like small maps tho?

No hordes, you say? How many hordes can fit on the head of a pin? Alternatively, A horde is a horde of course of course And nobody knows the size of a horde That is of course unless the horde Is not full of many undead! /I'm old Everything except "3 POI on the same street" is down to resource constraints, yes. Optimization of the game will help, having a stronger PC will help. The 3x POI on the same street is the RWG engine. With the large # of POIs the odds are you wouldn't see 3 of the same on the same street, but it can happen. I've got two identical Pass'N'Gas POIs next to each other in one town on my map, tho I'm not sure if they're vanilla POIs or if they came from Compopack. The new RWG coming with A20 might reduce these occurrences even more, or eliminate them (within reason).

Are you using any custom POIs? The game uses lower-quality "impostors" for more distant buildings, with detail becoming visible as you get closer. Custom POI builders might not generate these impostors correctly, or if the POIs are old (not updated for A19) maybe the impostors aren't loading correctly? It looks like your overall view distance is decent, though. If you're playing at Ultra settings, then you've already got max grass & bushes. Dunno if there is any way to make it even More Ultra via a mod. Grass itself would be nearly invisible at that distance anyway, but bushes should show up like the cactus do.

We spent this weekend's play session flying around our map to the 11 traders looking for Q6 solar panels to get at least one fully-kitted solar bank to play with at the home base. We were wondering, since we mostly need the power at night, if it made the most sense to tie multiple battery banks to the solar bank so they would all charge up during the day (seems to take 6w each regardless of the quality of the batteries). Then we'd have a large store of available power over night. If one fully Q6 solar bank can charge, say, four fully Q6 battery banks in one day, then we really could run the horde base off solar+battery. It definitely has given us a reason to spend our filthy lucre.

This mod may possibly be of interest to you.

You definitely have a settings problem. The bridge noted by the arrow below is about 800m away from where I am floating. Were this in a big city area all the buildings from there to here would be visible. This is in 19.4 on a PO-TAY-TO of a computer & GPU. Radeon RX560.

idk, ru? For someone wanting to avoid "spoilers" and with apparently no defense against encountering them on the 'Tube I gotta ask, is this you posting in the spoiler thread for A20? I mean you literally tell MM that you "read the list of changes" ffs. You're just salty that some people see the game before you do; has nothing to do with "spoilers". U R knee-deep in spoilers already.

WHAR SOUTH KOREA WHAR? 한국 사람들, 뭐해?!? 빨리 와! (Edit to slightly improve my atrocious Korean grammar)

JFC man, quick! Before they come back and discover you on your PC! Tell us where you are being held and forced to watch streams against your will! We will send a rescue party no later than next Friday.

Yeah you can dump weapons for cash (a fraction of their value) and then buy stuff with that. But vendor items, IIRC, were rarely as good as random loot drops. It actually scales enemies to each player, it seems. You see enemies appropriate to your level, I see enemies appropriate to my level. I haven't quite sussed out (and don't remember; it's been a while since I played BL) how that works out if, say, we're looking at the exact same entity. Taken at face value, the scaling system would mean that you see level 40, I see level 30. Damage given and damage received is appropriate for what we each see (so your L40 enemy's bullets do 20 dmg to you, but my L30 enemy - the same guy standing right there - only do 15 to me). It used to be more 7D2D-like at least as regards level scaling (not quantity). If I as a level 20 entered your level 40 game, I'd see level 40 enemies. (And in the first game it was strictly area-dependent: this enclave was level 5-10, that hideout was level 20-30, always.) So n00bs can be overwhelmed if they stray from the highest-level character(s) or into especially dangerous areas.

"I'm here to eat pumpkin cheesecake and buy cheap solar panels...AND I'M ALL OUT OF CHEESECAKE" <points gun at Rekt>

The party thing is annoying. We usually get to the "hey share your quest" stage of the play session before I realize I never saw/responded to his party invite.

Jerry Falwell?

I agree with meganoth that what you describe - for a single player, alone not in a party, at level 7 and presumably not much past day 10 - should be impossible. I'll be back momentarily with The Math. I gots a database which calculates odds for Item X at Level Y and such as. While I get the numbers, can you check your current Gamestage? Hey, I'm back. Alright so picking just one of your loot items - the Sniper Rifle - it sure seems pretty impossible in a vanilla game for a solo Level 7 player to find one of any quality, never mind a quality 3 rifle. Here's the nauseating detail. 1) The Sniper Rifle is only available from lootgroups "groupWeaponsRangedScaled" and "groupWeaponsRangedScaledTPlus". In both cases, the probability distribution "ProbT3" is used. 2) The first bit of ProbT3 looks like this, which means between level 0 and 88, the chances of finding an item which uses this distribution are zero. Naganna happen. <lootprobtemplate name="ProbT3"> <loot level="0,88" prob="0"/> <loot level="89,91" prob="0.04"/> <loot level="92,93" prob="0.05"/> <loot level="94,96" prob="0.05"/> <loot level="97,98" prob="0.06"/> <loot level="99,100" prob="0.06"/> 3) At Level 7, your Gamestage is capped at approximately 16. Therefore, without some other extenuating circumstance not described in the OP, it's impossible for a Sniper Rifle or any other Tier 3 weapon to be found. In any loot container. Even Tier 2 weapons are unobtainable at that low GS. Edit to add: here are the ranged weapons you would expect to find at GS16 in a chest which pulls from "groupWeaponsRangedScaled": Weapon Probability Primitive Bow 0.64% Wooden Bow 0.007% Iron Crossbow 0.007% Blunderbuss 0.64% Double-Barrel Shotgun 0.014% Hunting Rifle 0.014% Pistol 0.014% AK-47 0.014%

I thought "Ally" is remembered, but "Party Member" is not. I play almost exclusively co-op on a dedicated server and I don't recall either of us ever having to re-ally. We do have to party up each time, which is kind of annoying. Could it be the dedicated server that is preserving the Ally relationship, whereas a client-hosted game doesn't do that? I also hallucinated at some point that party members were able to pick up workstations within my LCB zone. I don't quite know how old that hallucination is, though we did do some LCB testing earlier this year after we enabled 3x LCB per player in our world. I can't find any supporting evidence for the idea of party-shared LCB though and my next co-op session isn't until Saturday so let's just assume I'm completely wrong for now. I should cut back on my nightly rum ration...