meganoth

I rationalized it differently: Books or schematics are complete works of knowledge about a topic, but magazines are periodicals where often information is spread over many issues in article series. So each magazine you find is an issue from a different month and year and only has part of the information you need to build an item or many items. It also is a good explanation for getting better quality levels of weapons. You might be able to make a crude version of a weapon without having seen all issues of an article series. But then you have to guess about some parts of the fabrication and that leads to subpar items with many faults. Only when you find further magazines you find out details that make that item more durable or more reliable. As an example you might find out from some magazines how all parts of a specific weapon look like and can build it. But it often jams and is inaccurate. Only in a different part of the magazine series you can read that some part of the weapon should be built with a different alloy. With that knowledge you suddenly can built it with a large boost in reliability and accuracy

I must confess I always forget to turn down loot abundance in SP (something I really should do). Because I use melee and bows a lot I usually have a lot of ammo left for my main gun and in horde night I usually don't spray and pray. In other words, I have plenty of everything and have not much reason to economize.

Idea to limit inventory space use: You have a general repair kit that is relatively expensive to craft and can repair X amount of damage on any item. And there are special repair kits which need specific parts but can repair exactly that weapon or thing the part belongs to cheaper and for say X*3 amount of damage per kit. The general repair kit could either be the current recipe with an increase in materials, or it would also need a number of general "parts" you get by scraping the specific parts. This way the player can directly choose how much inventory space he wants to invest to save resources. Most players would probably use one inventory slot for a special repair kit for their weapon and another slot for the general repair kit to repair anything else.

Think one minute about how illocial that sounds: The devs have invested 4 years of work into changing the game from something more like your vision to what it is now, becaus they are lazy? Wouldn't a lazy dev simply have released A16 after some polishing? This look like the devs were intentionally doing this because they WANT the game to be this way. And while you feel this is just a looter/shooter, I see all elements or genres in the game that the devs promised. I still feel it has survival and sandbox in it. I personally don't like the massive perk-bonuses of the magazine system which is the reason for the miner playstyle to be more difficult, but apart from that the magazine system is fine. If you want to play A21 as a miner I would suggest to make yourself independent from crafting progression as much as possible and concentrate on the few magazine types you really need. For example by using the trader to get vehicles and also buy traps instead of crafting them. And having your looter put 2 points into lockpicking (which is still affordable even if he doesn't need anything else from INT), which ironically will make him find lots of engineering magazines to bring back to you AND help him opening safes. You can get better armor, weapons and tools either from loot or the trader as well, no need to craft them. He also should find enough farming and cooking magazines even if not specced into them so you can be farmer/cook. If necessary, he could leave magazine boxes in cities for you and you could, from time to time, make a short trip to town to loot them. Well, we can cut that short. Your suggestion is good and could be probably developed into a good game. Your draft naturally left out all the details, and only the details will determine if it eventually is a good or bad game for a specific group of players. It won't be implemented in vanilla, because the developers think they have a good game that appeals to many players as well and they have already tried out elements of your suggestions and did not like them.

Ah right, forgot that detail

Explain. I don't get it: Schematic - You find a schematic, you can suddenly craft something new Magazine - You find a number of magazines, you can suddenly craft something new

You mean RNG like schematics you find in loot? Which has been in almost all alphas of 7D2D until now. With my bad memory I can't name examples, except Arcanum, Wasteland 2/3 and Fallout 3, but schematics in loot have been in lots of games.

What is certainly correct is that the "stay home" playstyle is almost dead if you also want to craft some stuff. But if you stay home the rest of your party could still just loot whatever they want, you wouldn't be there to loot yourself and wont get your magazines anyway, right? So I'll assume you still accompany them and then YOU get your share of loot boxes and again, there is no need for an elaborate loot scheme. What you seem to forget is that crafting progression is just a part of progression and I would consider it an almost optional part. For almost everything you can craft there are the traders, trader rewards and looting as viable alternatives. Invest in better barter and daring adventurer and get whatever you want that way. Cooking and seed magazines on the other hand have a lot of special containers standing around so your friends can't avoid getting them. If your friends don't want to loot those containers anymore because they don't want the recipes then you can simply ask them if they want to continue eating charred meat for eternity, otherwise they need to loot those containers. Or if you are with the group, well then loot the containers yourself when they don't want to. Another possible low-maintenance solution, if you want to stay home and still want to craft, would be that each of your friends needs to put one point into a perk of your choice and another one at say lvl 20. So they would automatically loot recipes for you. Sure, they might not like that as well, but they sure don't need to think about it every few seconds while looting somewhere

In normal circumstances (i.e. server and network connections up to the task) lost bikes are very seldom, while logging out of the game happens a lot. You should ask yourself if replacing that bike through creative mode (if available) isn't much less fuss than doing that routine every single game day?

The devs (at TFP) are not writing the engine, they are using Unity (did you mean interface code to Unity instead ?) But even updating to newer versions of Unity (which they do regularily) does only get them bugfixes, not any advanced features because they use a legacy engine inside Unity from which there is no upgrade path to the modern engine. Official word from Faatal a few months ago was that they would have to rewrite their interface code so much that it would delay release too much. So they have no intention to do that for this game.

Either thrown away or simply kept for the next water one finds. Containers are simply not shown in the game, except to show the items themselves. A stew without a container would look like some brown mass, could as well be a wet turd. So it is shown on a plate or in a bowl. Doesn't mean you really transport it in an open bowl or on a plate, right? How could you immediately see that gas is not something to drink if it wasn't shown as an iconic red container you can identify with a single glance as a gas can? If it wasn't for that reason you would not see containers at all.

It is also scarce for groups. And at least in A21.1 it still was scarce for me in SP. So I must be a noob because I did not self-challenge myself. It is quite possible that the balance of water changed from when I started my SP game and the current minor version. Either by accident or on purpose. It is no secret that TFP balances the vanilla game to be playable by new players. It may only be one group but accept that for TFP it is a very important groups. If you now have no problem with water I am sure TFP is shedding crocodile tears but probably considers the change a success because Exactly. Most problems in 7D2D are either reaction based or can be made rather trivial by playing or looking at youtube videos. Isn't different to other games (best example: almost all Bethesda games). To say it clearly: TFP surely isn't seeing it as their task to make the game endlessly playable for experienced players. They mentioned before that mods will have to do that, not vanilla. Water and food scarcity (both are non-existent for experienced players) are clear indications for this. Our only "vanilla" hope is that TFP adds a config option for trader like they did for loot and that experienced players are intelligent enough to use those, if they don't want to mod the game.

The desert may still have actual use as a source for oil shale.

And I said before that there usually is more than just one reason for a change. Have you really missed all the talk about reasons number 2: making water scarce (... for some people. I'll add this so we don't get into an argument loop) Also you should ask yourself, how much this change is jarring for you because of its realism nerf and how much is it because you are used to the game doing it differently before and it is therefore very conspicuous to you?

Nothing to do with creative mode. Most likely explanation is that your savegame is broken. First try to delete your player data (in the directory Players in the savegame) and if that doesn't help search your logfile for errors (except shader errors)

So, would you agree that it is a balancing problem? I.e. too much water to find in loot, price of water in vending machines too low, money too easy to get?

One easy thing to change if immersion is important without much change to balance would be to remove the ability to drink from water directly. Lake water is simply toxic. Because if I understand many of you correctly the discrepancy that stands out among all the other discrepancies that were always and will always be there is that you can drink lake water but not store it and drink it later for the same effect. Balance would be affected by having no emergency source of drinking. But you could simply incorporate the damage done by drinking lake water into the debuff of being thirsty. I.e. when you are under 10% water you simply get the damage as if you drank one water from a lake. And this would be repeated in about the same time that one lake water drink would last you.

Okay okay: Alpha 22 is slated to be published some time after Alpha 21 and would be followed by either Alpha 23 or something else.

Lets go away from the details and sum up generally what we know now (or in other words state the obvious): There are some players who have no problems at all with water in early game and there are some players who have, some even so much that they make an account here to protest, and some having just problems of deciding what to craft or make into drinks or postpone. In effect this is now a balancing issue. Depending on where you loot and how much you loot you find some average of water jars per day (maybe a not so obvious point: the gas station POIs you so often get offered in the first days are often not a good place to find water). And depending on how much you craft and how much you expend stamina you have some average of water jars you need. And as we have seen both sides of the equation can be wildly different per player. Also those provide a lot of opportunities for adjustment here if TFP uses telemetry to find out what the average player does.

But what if they are actually crafting and the unusual way you do things is that you don't craft stuff when you have the opportunity? In a game that is called a something crafting something game. Not sure why you have talked so much about looting when the real question is about "to craft or not to craft". You said you simply wait for your armor to drop in loot however long that takes. What if they simply craft missing pieces when they have the time, i.e. at night ? With the potential advantage that they may survive a narrow fight without infection or death the next day. With the disadvantage that they might find exactly the same armor the next day. You know the saying "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" ? 😉

It was an exhaustive list of stuff you might want to craft in early game but also not far from what I craft usually. Naturally if I find a pipe machine gun I won't craft one. If not, I will. That list was what zztong asked for, i.e. what constitutes "all demands". If a novice player is not going out at night (which would be sensible) he has all night for looking around the recipes he can craft and he will craft what seems useful. Also he surely isn't as efficient in looting as experienced players and won't have found as much stuff as zztong for example. I don't think anyone would run around in plant fiber stuff after day 1 if he doesn't need to or didn't find any of the armor crafting recipes (at least I don't). Specifically because infection chance is much higher. An experienced player will find a few pieces of armor, but half will be of the wrong type. A novice will surely wear what he finds, but he won't find all armor pieces fast enough that he might not want to craft missing set pieces. This is the short form. The long form has the word "gradually" included. What I mean by that is that while you have solved the problem in midgame you still have to get water on a regular bases (from the dew collectors and/or loot) to satisfy your needs. Which means water keeps to have a value, even though it diminishes. There is no simple switch. Compare this to your food production and you will see the similarities: Food is gradually solved as a problem when you build up your farm and eventually you will only harvest when it suits you or when you want a new stack of gumbo stew, but your farm is still useful and food ingredients and food have some small value. Another similarity: When you build up your farm you have to invest ingredients into the seed production to grow your farm and that delays how soon you can use those ingredients in actually producing food. When you build up your dew collectors you also invest 5 water in every dew collector and this sets you back compared to a player who just uses the water for drinking. So everyone who just plays without ever building dew collectors might have an easier time in early game actually, but you are probably not the target group for which TFP balances the water scarcity. Maybe it actually is a balancing problem that as a single player you can currently get along so well in the first days when you don't craft dew collectors(?). Since you mention it again: As soon as TFP posted about the new changes and the reasons for it I have been consistent in writing that water should only be a problem in the first days. But I write a lot in the forum so I am not surprised if you get confused about all the stuff I'm claiming 😉 Huh????? I don't think I ever crafted flaming or exploding arrows in early game and only those need duct tape AFAIK. Naturally I didn't include them in my list at all. You need to be able to get steel arrowheads from somewhere. Someone who can craft a useful amount of them in early game is certainly an expert player above my abilities. I couldn't (and in the case of flaming arrows wouldn't anyway). Where would I get all the gun powder from in early game when I don't have a chem station?

The thread moved along and Roland has clarified much, but I want to specifically answer the questions you posted here. Your specific playstyle, whatever you do, is more efficient than mine. When I played a SP game in A21, I got hit a a bit too often on the first day and also got infected. That alone cost me a lot of time that you seem to have used to loot houses. If everything works the game is easy. For a beginner or someone who hasn't played many action-oriented games the combat isn't trivial. I did only get one trader-quest done at the first day, not because I was artificially limiting myself, but because I needed the first day to get to the trader, make that quests, loot some more kitchens for a pot and clear a POI for staying there that night. Naturally I can only guess what the difference could be between our games, but my game happened to be one where I bought a few drinks at the trader, did quests and even though I had a dew collector, had not enough water for drinking AND glue production for the first week. Even after that it was not like I "swam" in water. I had built 4 dew collectors at the end of second or third week, but I wasn't collecting water from them every day but randomly when I remembered AND was at home. And in 4 player multiplayer it was even more pronounced. Sure, we were fast in producing dew collectors, but we also were crafting a lot and needed to increase the number of dew collectors until we were satisfied to ~14. But we tend to overproduce, especially food. Back to my single player game. Besides some of the food (blueberry pie, pumpkin pie in "late" early game) and red tea I needed water for crafting any iteration of pipe gun (2). When I found a mod recipe I could use that cost 5 glue at least (needs a workbench so that was a little later in early game). My cloth armor set needed at least 5 duct tape. The dew collectors itself needed 4 so in a way each dew collector needed 4 days to break even and 5 days (nearly a week) to actually gain me the first water!! The forge needed 3. I think I also needed to craft at least one wrench, so another 2. The clothing storage mods needed 1 each, the better one even 2. The bellows needs 5, not sure when I was able to craft that. I needed to craft a splint twice. When I could finally craft the workbench (not sure when that was) with 5 duct tape, a lot of further recipes, like the storage pocket mods became available that needed water. At around that time I also needed to craft a few repair kits. Yes, all of the above are one-time expenses. You either avoided crafting some of the above or you simply looted much faster than I did and found a lot of water. Don't expect everyone to have the same experience like you do. I can tell you that even an experienced player like me had water scarcity so I could not craft everything I wanted in the first week and maybe even further. And the game is surely balanced for a normal player or group of players less experienced than I am. One BIG difference: Even in mid and maybe even late game jars of water I found in loot were (to me) often more worth than the slot they were occupying. I.e. I considered them an item of value. Now in earlier alphas I mostly threw away murky water or empty jars because those items were less important than one single inventory space. Because when I needed water I simply made a stack of 200 at once. Yes, you need sand for that, but at least in my games the sand for the water was a negligible amount that I often got on the side when doing some digging. To sum it up: If you have no problem at all with getting water the first days, you probably are not a typical player. AND even you probably value a jar of water in loot more now than you did in A20.

It is 24 compared to 20. Still a difference that should not be ignored, and if you consider the digestion buff as well then there is no question that red tea IS what you want to drink until you can switch to pure mineral water.

Delete the contents of C:\Users\USER\AppData\Roaming/7Daystodie/Mods and try again.