Roland

There have been some measured responses and good feedback given. But there has also been wailing. You are wailing. You probably need to take a break until experimental is over since you seem not to have the temperament for it. This voluntary beta is for those who are willing to test changes and give things a fair shake and not rant or make overly dramatic sweeping and untrue statements about TFP competing against players and how they build. I can promise you that there was not one single conversation about "we gotta stop these guys from building in the way that they love to build muwahahahahahahaaaa!" No mustaches were twirled or capes flourished or damsels tied to railroad tracks. What even makes you think that the current state is the final state? The reason we don't say that people should play a certain way is because we don't believe that. You are making wild accusations and assuming the worst possible motives which tells me you're a bit emotionally compromised about this change. How about you opt out of the beta and go back to A19 until we get to about A20.4 which will be the golden age of A20 that when some future player hates a change in A21 will say, remember when things were great back in A20.4?

Well here’s the answer to all of you who are fine with the HP reduction but angry for the cost. Just earmark all the free blocks you get as poles and plates and your problem is solved.

I guess. Blocks are so cheap now in general. I’m understanding of disappointment over the change. Just a bit disbelieving of the phrase “TFP has made my base impossible!”

lol...That change to LOTL 2 was planned even before experimental dropped but there was not time to implement it. It was not added because of some complaining. It was added to the very first patch that was available after experimental released. Nice try though. So now there is a bigger chance that they will break through but has anyone tested it on a horde night? Did they die? Did they have to alternate between melee and repair? I just wonder exactly how bad it is now. If zombies never had even a chance of breaking through before but now there is a chance but it can still be managed by effective horde night management-- it might turn out to be a more thrilling affair. Or it may turn out to be a disaster. Are there any videos that can be linked? I'd like to see a horde night where the zombies possibly break through where before they never ever did. I get the upset over the poles for melee defense on horde night. How do the plates destroy your building plans exactly? What were you using them for where 10000 hp were a must and 5000 hp are game killing?

I think we should experiment a bit before declaring bases impossible. We have heard that wail of despair after almost every alpha release and within a month people are building bases that are impervious to zombies. People were building bases that NEVER got breached before and now people are worried that with the lower HP on certain blocks their bases might get breached. But I bet creative people will figure things out. Maybe all horde bases will be blocky and gross at first but then some people will start innovating and before long the shapes will be used and bases will be sexy and they will withstand the onslaught and everyone who said TFP just made things impossible again will feel foolish.

We had digging zombies first. Then they went away for a little while because the pathing didn't work well and then they came back when faatal redid the pathing. Let's get the history of it right at least. Turn off your blood moon hordes and make your tunnels deep underground and you'll likely never be bothered.

Don't talk about our game design oracles that way!!

The basis for creating the game back on Thanksgiving of 2012 was Minecraft meets Fallout meets The Walking Dead. 2012 was when the Fallout influence began. You started playing in Alpha 12. So like....3-4 years after "Fallout-like" was already firmly in the plan. There was no change of philosophy. You just didn't do your research very well and made some erroneous assumptions about what type of game it was based on placeholder unfinished features. Good luck with that. Hope to hear from you after A21 drops so I can get a new summary about how else this game is like Fallout.

loot bags open immediately upon selecting them and destroy upon looting them. They wouldn't ever end up in your inventory.

Nope. Since it's TFP, they'd do the rabbits first and once everyone had figured out good defenses for the rabbits, THEN they'd change it to gophers instead.

Good luck! If it doesn't work-- just keep playing! I'll eat some glass in your honor!! If you have to keep playing with a 1 death glass eating smear on your record so should we all!!!

The problem is that we keep trusting people who haven't actually played with LOTL 1 and just read the changelog and then proclaimed that it is impossible to create a self sustaining farm at LOTL 1. I too was guilty of repeating this claim. Turns out I was wrong. It has been proven now through gameplay that it is actually very difficult to have a farm fail (given that you start with about 10 seeds) and actually quite doable to maintain and even increase the size of your farm. It is a lot slower than it used to be and takes more seasons and due to needing a good seed base to start and be successful it probably can't be started on day 1. But the word is that all this talk about not being able to keep and maintain a farm that produces crops for food and to maintain itself unless you spend skill points all the way to LOTL 3 is just a big false belief.

If you were to say fall down between one of the corner towers and the outer wall of Trader Hugh's compound thus getting stuck in between with no way to nerdpole out then your only recourse would be to eat glass and die. With the trader closing you could simply wait to be teleported out. Just to be clear, I was not the one who fell and got stuck. I'm the one who tossed glass down to the one who was stuck precisely because the 24/7 open trader mod was active on that server and we realized she was never going to get teleported out...lol

The only way this could happen would be if every slot in your inventory was full and the one open slot on your belt was selected meaning you were punching the window with your empty hand instead of with a tool. In that case the glass would fill that one open slot on your belt and you might accidentally click it again and end up eating it. My question is, why did you use your empty hand to hit the window instead of whatever tool you had on your belt? The feature is there in case you get stuck somehow and can only get out by respawning. If you just make sure to have a tool or weapon selected to break windows and pictures you won't ever have this happen again. I've never accidentally eaten glass in 1000s of hours of play so it was really just a perfect storm of bad luck. Hope the god mode works for you. I second the suggestion of practicing it on a different save a couple times so you can do it as quickly as possible.

Was this not fun and rewarding for you? Sounds like you have a lot of pride in what you accomplished. Don't you think it will be fun to go through that process again for A20? Some people here are saying only cheese bases work but they said the same thing in A19 and you proved them wrong by refining a base design that didn't feel like cheese tactics to you. Now here they are saying again that you have to cheese the AI. Are you going to let that stand? Won't you prove them wrong again? The AI is practically the same in A20 as it was in A19, faatal admitted he did nothing beyond letting them crouch and crawl through low spaces and then there was a few fixes in experimental for places he saw them getting stuck. You say that electricity only paralyses for half the time. Are you certain that isn't a bug? Is it mentioned in the patch notes as an intended change? If so, can't you come up with ways to adapt your design given that new limitation? I'm sure you can once the initial rage wears off.

Who is stopping you from doing those things? Why not try all three activities… Spend horde night in a bedrock base, Drive around during horde night, Run around in a field during horde night, …and report back which required the least amount of skill to survive.

This is easy. The 50% mark on the bar is what represents zero for your calorie reserves. Done.

I meant after a few game days not real life days...

So those 1/4 columns are in addition to the block corners right? So an extra layer of a bit of HP. Would the zombies even go for that or would they bash at a different section of your wall that wasn't a block and a quarter in width? haha...except that Madmole loves to build using all the new shapes so you are totally off that he wouldn't want people building with them for the reason that he doesn't like playing that way himself.

Don't deer spawn mostly at night as of A19? I thought that was one of the changes in the last alpha. Small game for day and large game for night. I could be wrong about that. I think garbage cleanup happens whenever you open your UI. I'll have to try logging out and logging back in at 4am after a few days go by and see if I notice anything different.

TFP always introduce new features in a big noticeable way and then they make adjustments. I agree that the lootstage bonuses need to be balanced more. I've also mentioned to them that weather survival doesn't begin until Day 2 6am so people have a full free day of running around in snow and desert and wasteland avoiding enemies and opening containers naked as a jaybird with zero consequences. Hopefully they will fix that as well. Extreme weather in general needs to be a lot more punishing if you don't have the proper clothing. But yeah, the bonuses for loot are way too good like TFP was afraid people wouldn't notice them so they made them huge. There were no reductions. There were in fact targeted increases. They aren't going to touch these settings until they have all the entities that they are going to have populating the world. It would just cause a lot of anger for them to up the zombie counts and then have to pull them back once NPCs and bandits are added. Better for them to wait until everything is in and then they can adjust densities having the whole picture in front of them. I have the amounts increased in my game and am happy with the population of zombies around. There were some bugs with stealth--a couple of which were just fixed in today's patch and they will be working on it more for sure as time goes on. Trap rooms and attack volumes and zombies popping out of hiding places are not going to go away though. I brought up the stealth concerns and the lead level design guy said, "attack volumes are not going away. We plan to keep using them--especially in and around loot rooms and in areas we feel that it will challenge the players." Probably best to resign yourself to the idea that in this universe people turned while up in the rafters. The current POI/Dungeon level design is something they are very keen on and unlikely to change. I'm almost certain they will dial these back at some point. If it takes a few buffs to outrun them then its probably where they intend it to be. As long as you can't outrun them unbuffed I don't see the problem. All the four legged animals should be faster than the player and should only not catch them if they have a territorial behavior that turns them back if the player gets away from their territory. Zombies on nightmare speed should be faster than the player unbuffed. However, the purpose of buffs is to overcome a disadvantage. Why have those buffs if they don't temporarily boost the player's speed faster than the enemies? People should be able to choose to play in an open field buffing themselves for speed or to build a base with defenses and do it that way. Biome transitioning will be polish work. Its no wonder they haven't worked lately on the trasnsitions in biomes when they are still finalizing the biomes themselves. Weather still needs fixing and finalizing. I know for a fact that they don't want the transitions between biomes to be jarring but there are also limitations. They've experimented a lot with blending the borders and in every case it hurt performance beyond acceptable limits. I'm pretty sure you will have to come to terms with and cope with desert next to snow as I doubt they are even planning to keep those biomes apart from each other on purpose. (Snow next to desert actually does exist in Arizona, btw) So you never have to fight more than 1 zombie at a time but they're popping in around you constantly? I think there is a bit of a contradiction there...haha. I only notice zombies popping in when I am driving fast in a vehicle. On foot I haven't experienced it in a long time. Oh I know they are spawning in within about 30-40 blocks around me but I don't see them materializing right before my eyes when I am moving at foot speed. I don't remember the game ever having persistent hordes or wilderness spawns that just moved around the map and came from far away. Back when we had the minimap and radar you could see their blips popping into exisistence and then moving towards you. I remember some discussion about persistently wandering zombies and hordes and ideas about how the game could track them cheaply but that was never implemented. So I think your memory of having that in the game but then losing it for popping in zombies with a dev claim that it was just temporary is not quite right. The game has always had wilderness spawners for zombies and most likely always will. Maybe in their next game they'll implement roaming persistent enemies that are tracked and actually move around and come for us from far far away. I doubt that will ever be this game. In fact, the big feature they are looking at is a random event manager that-- you guessed it--- will spawn in encounter scenarios randomly in our projected path. I think their fix was the addition of the 33% modifier. Isn't that one the best one to pick? I remember a discussion in the dev chat about how 25% loot was pretty garbage because of how the game rounded it down so many containers ended up with nothing and so they added the 33%. But maybe that is no good either? I don't play with those settings, myself, but I agree that if they keep those settings on the options menu they better make sure they work okay when they polish this up for release.

The overall costs of upgrading seem so much cheaper to me now that its hard for me to feel any outrage over this. Especially if it is smaller specialty shapes and not the regular shapes you would use for the direct defenses vs zombies pounding. To me everything still costs the same that they did yesterday so no big deal. I guess if I end up using something as a defensive structure and it gets ripped apart in no time I'll be screwed because I can't really see myself checking every block for HP. I just wonder how big an impact this will have in actual practice on horde nights or is it just the principle of the thing that offends?

I'm a pretty basic builder. I don't even know how I would use most of the new shapes for aesthetically pleasing results. I guess a good example could really help me. Can you describe one of the shapes that has been reduced in HP and exactly how that would compromise the security of your base? Are these smaller blocks the ones that are typically even going to be within reach of the horde? For example, some of the archway pieces probably won't ever get hit if you use them would they? What's the usecase for these pieces in zombie defense where their hp actually comes into play? I mean if MechanicalLens is saying goodbye until this is fixed these must be pretty integral defensive blocks and maybe I need to learn about them better. I have the same question.

Well you got me then with your original post because it did not seem like you were talking about PVE with you and your wife at all. Sorry. I don't think I was the only one though and looking at your OP here it seems weird that if it is you and your wife surviving together in PVE then why say that "there aren't enough people who want to play multiplayer" is some kind of old argument around here against PVE play? I've never once heard anyone speak out against TFP spending time on PVE due to there not being enough people who want to play it. Historically people argued against TFP spending time on PvP at the expense of the PVE and solo games quite a bit until it seemed that all the PVP gamers gave up-- which is why I thought you were arguing for PvP since there are fewer PvPers that frequent the forums these days making their demands to have 7 Days be more Rust-like. Also your line about performance being bad is weird since for PVE play the 8 max supported player count is perfect for a team of friends who want to survive together. You and your wife are just two. Myself, my mom, and my brother play together and performance is pretty great for us. I can't imagine it being worse for the two of you. Maybe you are playing with the max 8 players with some friends and at that max number it gets pretty bad? Honestly, though the way you worded things totally sounded like you were wanting 50 players supported on a server-- which would be utterly ridiculous for PVE play. See you say "population" and that makes me think you're talking about more than 8 players and certainly more than you and your wife. I mean this is experimental and not stable yet so even the idea that this build represents TFP's commitment to multiplayer because you're having bad performance like what we have now was supposed to be the final offering is a little off. At any rate, sorry for assuming you meant large servers of 30 players going at it like Fortnight. The devs aren't going to support that but hopefully over the next few updates the game will stabilize for 8 players and less for PVE multiplayer. But I do have to say that the three of us playing PvE are having a pretty stable experience for the most part.

Yes...and now that they would be disqualified from a community contest, the rest of us have a chance...