meganoth

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.

If I understand your mod correctly then there is a vast difference to vanilla after day 2: In vanilla you may have enough water to avoid drinking from a pond after 2 day, but you still don't have enough water for all demands and need to choose what to prioritize. Or even buy water to fiill those demands. Water still has value then, you generally won't throw away a water jar that you find. In your mod, as soon as you have the cooking pot then water is infinite. In that case I would say your mod falls short of the goals TFP probably had. Which is essentially a "this is not realistic" argument. Thus it is strange that you seem to describe the other camp you are arguing against as the realists.

Which is a theory that I can't disproove. But I believe that it is the aversity against change and the obvious highlighting a change provokes that makes the disappearance of the jar an issue while the missing gas can does not. It seems a lot of players have never noticed that the gas can has no empty version until you explain it to them, and even then they accept it better because they are used to it and in their brains the abstraction is already working flawlessly. Surely the water collecting issue is a very noticable limitation that irks many. How many? Who knows. If either of our theories is right, we couldn't even ask them simply in a poll because they don't know the actual reason for their protest themselves 😉 A wet hand you can lick from time to time should be enough.

Zematt above has explicitly mentioned that he has an issue with missing containers. And my impression is different, I also see many players specifically complain about the jars being gone, and also many that complain about both. According to Roland water jars were specifically removed to remove jars 😉. I.e. to make all jars, bottles and cups "equal". A second objective was to make water a somewhat valuable resource instead of triviallly infinite. For that they had to put a shackle on the infinite sources called lakes. Maybe there are other ways to do that, but TFP came up with this rather straightforward way. So no, they could not have kept the mechanic. With endless bottled water from lakes they would have to throw lots of complications in the processing of this water to reach similar goals.

Whoever programmed the math equation to control the current motorbike was either satisfied with the current way or did not find a perfect formula after some easy tests.

Yes, that was just a guess because of your join date. Good. Since you had noticed and don't like them either then at least your discomfort is not the "I don't like changes"-syndrom that seems to be the reason some players just can't cope well with E(early)Access games. Did removing the jars somehow make the graphics better?

I interpreted Faatals message above that Unity's code is basically not handling the physics of 2 wheel driving at all. As he said, the vehicle would simply fall if the application programmer did not add code to handle the situation: So Faatal must have added code and this code probably uses a feedback system where for example the stronger you lean to one side (when driving straight) the stronger an opposing force pushes back. Such systems tend to generate oscillation such as we see in the game. Now you can make the formula which calculates the opposing force (from some variables lile leaning, speed and turn radius) arbitrarily complicated. You could even make a complete physics simulation but that would probably cost too many cpu cycles for just the driving. So you need to find a simpler formula that still works well. And that searching and testing those formulas probably takes a lot of time. This is not about cleaning sphagetti code.

Have you considered asking the mod author about the errors?

Haven't you all read Fataals reply above? He knows about the wobble, so no need for a bug report. As he reads this thread he knows that it disturbs your sense of right and wrong 😉. Me, I don't care about the wobble. And as the head developer I am also sure he doesn't need a confirmed bug report to put time into anything. Instead you would need to convince him that his time would be well spend working on this To change the wobble he would probably need to experiment and find a better formula for the force that keeps you upright or completely change how it keeps you upright, not just change some setting.

Nobody is stuck in stone age when he plays the full game. You make it sound like using the trader is some special mode of playing. Which it isn't. Avoiding the trader (for example because of the balance problems) is the special mode. And this special mode works but you need to do some voodoo to make it work: Take only a few of the magazine-boosting perks. Take the lockpick perk instead of engineering when you want to bulld workstations (this is definitely voodoo). Non-voodoo but very effective: Hit bookshops and mailboxes etc. If you are playing co-op and read all the magazines then that is your choice, maybe even the right choice in your specific situation. But we play co-op multi-player as well and everyone in our group reads some of the magazines and this works well too.

Too bad its offtopic since you hit a very good point. That the 4x4 takes more repair kits because it has more durability is a real killer feature in the negative sense that should be corrected. This isn't just an opinion or matter of taste, this is objectively wrong. I probably would disagree with your other points about the damage being generally too high. Remember how driving the gyrocopter is a mini-game where you can easily crash. Well, driving vehicles offroad is now similar a mini game and something you can't just do while reading in a forum on the side. Drive careless and you'll need more repair kits. Want to drive with your brains off, then use the roads. I do drive with overcharger and at full speed and I seldomly hit stuff offroads when I concentrate on driving. But I also try to avoid driving under big trees and I am always ready to make last millisecond corrections to avoid suddenly popping up obstacles. And I can even drive through the wasteland this way at high speed when I concentrate on driving. But I still occaisonally (or often in the wasteland) hit something popping up that I see too late, just like you. I may have to drive through a big tree and just have to accept that I sometimes will hit something, just like you. But at least on the motorbike I can easily drive to a town 2kms away and back and have lost maybe about 50% which I consider okaish. I can't speak about the 4x4, I never used it much. Maybe for TFP the motorbike IS the offroad vehicle while the 4x4 is the vehicle for roads. If you use the 4x4 mostly offroads, wheeell, except a higher repair bill, 1% for going over some curb? That is just some value so that you have to repair your bicycle from time to time because of general wear and tear (IMHO). TFP could have also installed a timed ticking down of the durability whenver you drive but that would naturally look strange if your durability would tick down even on flat road. There is also the possibility that your hardware is slow so obstacles pop out later than usual for you. Do you have >60 FPS when driving?

It occured to me right now that I may have misunderstood the "wobbling" all the time discussing about it. I thought it was about the vehicle breaking out and driving sinuous or wiggly lines (words I got from a dictionary). I.e. in those cases I often have to stop the vehicle and it would come to halt in a totally different direction to where I had been driving. The wobbling you and maybe all the others were talking about is just some unnutural quivering of the bike. @FramFramson @Riamus@Kalex et.al.: Have I misinterpreted you here?

Fully agree with point two.

No, you don't **have to** mod. Most people notice stuff they don't like in a game, shrug, and continue. If it is too much stuff they recognize that the game isn't for them and stop playing that game. Modding is just another alternative where you can reduce stuff you don't like. It seems you have the game since 2017 at least. Has it taken you 5 years to notice that things can change and having played earlier versions makes those changes stick out 😉 ? When you buy into EA when the game is far from finished you have to expect that. By the way, did you notice the absence of empty gas cans? Empty bowls (for stews for example)? Empty pure water bottles? Empty acid bottles?

There is always the trader as an alternative to crafting the stuff yourself (especially for workstations and vehicles). And if you don't spread your points too much a single point into say vehicles may even be enough to get you vehicles in acceptable time (this would have to be tested though). Which I would not call hybrid. Using your mod or vanillla? Not getting a vehicle or waiting a long time for it is less about challenge and more about missing comfort.

I didn't have to change my telnet-using startup and stop scripts from A20 to A21. So I guess my telnet is still working as expected.

Why? Currently the crafter of a weapon can be a different person than the user. With your proposed change it would be very inefficient to do that as the crafter would need to perk into it (for the crafting) AND the user would need to perk into it (for the direct perk boni for using a weapon).

You can find the loot.xml that results from your xpath changes in your savegame in a directory called "ConfigsDump". By looking at this you can see whether everything was changed exactly as you expected it. Also by posting the changed code you make it easier for people here finding the mistake. Pictures of logfiles are useless most of the time. For example if some of your lines could not be adapted to the original loot.xml this would be shown much earlier in the logfile. Please use pastebin for the logfile and link to that.

Initially they wanted to be payed for reinstalls, but this was the first thing they dropped (or adapted) when the protests started. A lot of details are also missing, I think they just announced a general plan and wanted to see what they can get away with and work out the details later.